I had just finished up a short hike in the Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, which are as beautiful and even more awesome than the Sierras but with a hell of lot more bugs, and had just come out of the woods. I was standing on a mountain road in the early morning on a bright summer’s day waiting for a ride. Up the road coming my way was a newish looking car being driven by a single woman, not much chance of her stopping but I stick out my thumb anyway, to give her a chance. To my surprise she stops. I go up to her car and look in.
She's about 35, nice looking, wearing a blue skirt suit and is completely straight looking, not my usual ride. I asked her where's she going and she says, "Denver". Sounds good to me so I hop in. She pulls away and we start chatting. She's coming from Bozeman where she lives and works as an astrophysicist and she's on her way to Denver to attend a conference.
I asked her why she had stopped as I almost never get rides with younger single straight women.
She told me that she had to leave Bozeman real early this morning and was feeling bored and tired so she was glad to have someone to talk to for the rest of the drive. She told me that she usually didn't pick up hitchhikers either but that I looked all right to her.
I asked her about her work since I had never met an astrophysicist before.
She told me that it almost completely involved math. She and her colleges sat around and played with numbers all day then discussed the results. When I said that didn't sound very exciting to me, she said "Well, that's because you are not a mathematician. Most people find math tedious and boring but I and my kind love it. In fact, I was working on a problem in my head when I saw you." I asked her what it was and she told me. I did not understand one word she said so I asked her if she had figured it out yet. She smiled and said, "No, not yet, but I will." Then she asked me what I did for a living.
I told her that I worked as little as possible at whatever was available but that mostly I just hitched around the country going where ever the rides took me, as I was with her.
She asked me if I always traveled alone.
I said, "I have the I Ching as my constant companion and advisor who never fails me."
She said, "That's because you believe in it."
I asked her what she meant and she said, "It only works because you have faith in it."
I said, "That's not true, whether I believed in it or not, it would still work. Maybe I wouldn't be able to understand it but what it would say would still be true."
She said, "No, if you didn’t believe in it or understand it then you would not use it so it would have no meaning to you, in other words, it wouldn’t be true."
I said, “You’re wrong. Look 1000 years ago everybody believed that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Today we know that that is not true, that everyone back then was mistaken. They had based their beliefs on wrong assumptions."
She said, "No, you're wrong. 1000 years ago the earth was flat and the sun did revolve around it because everyone did believe it, therefore it was true at the time."
I said, "But today we have instrument that prove that the earth revolves around the sun and every knows the world is round."
She said, "But we invented those instruments after we had already come up with the theory of solar-centericism to prove that that theory was correct. I believe that we, and our clever little psyche’s, are smart enough that if we had kept the flat earth/earth centric theory, that we could have invented instruments to have proved that."
I couldn't believe someone with a college degree could be talking like this, so I said, "So are you saying that the truth is only what everyone believes.”
She looked over at me and said, "Look, 20 years ago smoking cigarettes and chopping down trees were good, now it's bad. 100 years ago slaughtering Indians and making war to expand our country was good, today it's bad. 200 years ago, it was desirable to own slaves and to treat women and children as chattel, today it's bad. 500 years ago it was all right to torture the devil out of "heretics" then burn them alive in order to save their immortal souls. Today it is horrific. 1000 years ago..."
I broke in, "But they didn't have anything to prove to them that burning heretics was right."
She said, "Yes they did. They had the Bible, the Word of God that they totally believed in. Something that was just as real to them as our scientific instruments are to us today, something that we totally believed in. You yourself should understand this. 50 years ago it was all right to smoke marijuana, today it's not. Truth and reality is simply the maximum convenience of a particular time and place which always changes. Who knows, maybe 50 years from now it could be all right for you to smoke your marijuana again."
I was quiet for a moment then said, "So you are saying that there is no absolute truth."
She looked over at me again, smiled and said, "That's right, truth like time, is only relative to the event in which it occurs." I looked skeptical so she said, "You don't believe me? Okay, name me just one absolute truth."
I said right away, "Killing other beings is always wrong."
She said, "When a lion kills a gazelle, is it right or wrong?"
I laughed and said, "Depends if you're the lion or the gazelle."
She smiled back and said, "It's the same in human society. If you are a sanctioned killer, like a soldier, policeman or executioner then your killing other human beings is not only right, it's desirable. You can even become a hero for committing murder because not only are you acting in accordance with your society’s wishes but also the enemy or bad guy even deserves it. You only get in trouble if you commit an unsanctioned killing. And even then you can get out of that if you or your advocate are clever enough to prove to the authorities or your fellow citizens that either you didn't really do it, were insane at the time or that you were justified. No, there is no absolute truth, only relative truth."
So I said, "Okay then, what about right and wrong, good and evil, are they only relative too?"
She said, "These terms are even less than relative. They are only abstract terms that a society invents to perpetuate itself and to give itself validity. They too change with time and place and hold up only as long as the power structure perpetuates them and the majority of its citizens believe in them either by force or by guile."
So I said, "But if people stop believing in them then their society would collapse."
She said, "No, they would just change into different concepts of right and wrong. The old concepts would be looked upon as the naiveté of an earlier more unenlightened time. However, some of societies more strongly held beliefs could collapse it if the majority of it's citizens stopped believing in it's laws and simply quit obeying them, as we believed what happened in Mayan society. What could a government do? What if some day everyone decided to stop paying income tax? The government could threaten, cajole, even beg it's citizens to please pay their taxes but it certainly could not jail everyone or confiscate all their property. The government would then collapse but it would certainly be replaced by something else in its place that would work within the new belief structure."
"Or what if everyone lost faith in money, another abstract, as they did during the depression? The government would have a very hard time convincing its citizens to go back to work and revitalize it's economy. What most people don't realize is that there was just as much hard currency in circulation in the economy in 1930 as there was in 1928. It was just that nobody was spending it because they had lost their faith in it. Right and wrong, good and evil are just abstract concepts that a ruling body uses to control its subjects, convincing them that they are necessary to their subjects survival when just the opposite is true. It's the ruling body who needs its subjects for it's own survival without whom it would not long survive."
I said "But without government society would collapse into chaos."
She said, "Maybe, maybe not. There are plenty of societies on earth, not only in the past but even today that have very minimal government intervention and they all seen to work just as well as the ones who try to maintain total control over their population. It is all based on the belief that it's people have been taught from birth to believe they need and are willing to accept, because belief only holds up as long as faith supports it. Then it has to change into something else or collapse, which itself is just another form of change. Our reality is based upon our belief structure which in turn is supported by our faith in it." She smiled at me and said, "Do you understand what I am saying?'
I said, "Yeah I think so. You are saying that everything we believe in; truth and justice, good and evil, right and wrong, are only true because we believe in them, and if we stop believing in them then they change into something else."
She said, "That's right."
So I said trying to get a rise out of her, "So if there is no right or wrong then it makes no difference if we ride along peacefully talking, or if we stop and make love, or if one of us kills the other one."
She looked at me then said, "That's right. It makes no difference at all, except to you and me and the people that our lives effect."
Still looking at her I said, "So what's to stop us from screwing or killing one another?"
She said, "I don't know. Maybe because the moment is not structured that way, or maybe we just choose to ride together peacefully talking instead, but for now this is the reality of this moment."
I said, "So are you saying that reality is relative to time and place too?"
"Yes." she says "Reality is only a moment in time that we perceive as an event where certain things are taking place as opposed to all the things that are not taking place. What's happening here and now is that we are riding along in a car peacefully discussing the nature of reality as opposed to the millions of other things that could be happening but are not at this particular moment in time."
I look at her and said, "Are you saying that there is no ultimate reality either?"
She said, "We believe that just as Einstein showed us that there is no absolute time, that reality is also only relative to the time and place of the observer that, yes, there is no absolute reality. Each of us is the creator of our own reality. And there is no way to prove that there is an absolute reality either because any observer trying to prove such a case would taint any evidence obtained by his or her own prejudices. In fact, there is no way to prove that reality exists at all. All this could be only a figment of our imaginations. We could be making this all up as we go along."
This totally blew my mind. Even though I had taken a lot of acid, I still believed in some form of ultimate reality and now here is this straight woman telling me that I could be making this all up, that it might only be a product of my conscienceness. I was stunned but tried to consolidate my belief in an ultimate reality by saying, "But if we make all of this up then why don't we all get exactly what we want?"
She smiled and said, "That's a typical question. It's because everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else in the universe by what Jung called the collective unconscience. We all have to participate in each other’s realities with some people’s belief structures are stronger than others. Also, we have been told since birth that we can never get all that we want so we believe that. Lastly, our own clever little psyche's would never allow it. If we all got exactly what we wanted then we might begin to suspect that something was up. We need adversity to grow as an individual."
Again, I told her that I could hardly believe, let alone understand what she was telling me.
She said, "There are only two reactions to these concepts when people first hear them. A few can accept them, but the majority flatly reject them in order to keep their belief structures and their faith intact by simply writing this off as nonsense."
I said, "I don't know if I can’t accept them either, but I am willing to listen."
She again looked at me then said, "Then consider this. Catatonics are physically in this world but mentally they are not. They're not vegetables because if they are hooked up to an EEG you will see brain activity. What is going on in their world? What is their conscience experiencing? And is it as valid to them as the world that we are now participating in is to us? Or take the natives of Papau New Guinea. The reality that they live in is totally alien to the one that we inhabit. In fact, even if you learned their language perfectly you still would not long survive in their society. Because even though you could understand their words, you still would not understand the concepts behind those words since you had been raised in a different belief structure and had faith in different things. Yet their reality is every bit as valid as our own. That's why time travel wouldn't work either. Even if you could go back in time and could even speak their lingo, you still could not understand their way of thinking or the concepts behind their words. This is why almost all the Vietnam Vets who married Vietnamese girls get divorced. It's not only because of the cultural differences which are great, but because they were both raised in totally different realities by having been brought up believing in different belief structures. They not only cannot understand each other’s actions but how the other thought and interpreted the events surrounding them. Yet again, both realities are equally valid."
I said, "Maybe the only way to see if there is an ultimate reality is by dying."
She just laughed then said, "Maybe, but then again maybe not. Maybe death is just a test of the imagination. Maybe death is only another change for the conscience where the Christians go to Heaven, Muslims go to Paradise, atheist get their Eternal Peace, Buddhist go to Nirvana and Hindus are Reincarnated. There's no way to prove any of it."
I jumped on that and said, "But what about all those near death experiences? They all sound kind of the same to me."
She said, "Those people did not truly die or they would still be dead. Clinical death and true death are not the same thing. As far as what they experienced, they were all from a western belief structure. What do Hindus or primitive people see when they have a near death experience. Even if they are the same, it proves only that every one’s bodies and conscience react the same to the stress of a near death occurrence, but as for true death no one knows or will ever know."
I said, "So you are saying that not only reality but even life and death are nothing more than a belief structure?"
She said, "Well, it is a belief structure, but it itself is based on simple faith. We have faith in our beliefs so we exist. Descartes had it not quite right with his, "I think, therefore I am". It's closer to, "I have faith, therefore I appear to be". All things begin and end with simple faith that we really are experiencing a certain event in a specific place at a particular moment in time.
"Then what about conscienceness?" I asked.
"Conscienceness" she said, "is nothing more than our self awareness that we are experiencing that certain event in that specific place at that particular time."
I tell her that never in my life have I ever had a conversation like this one that and while it is thought provoking it is also a bit frightening to think that our reality is nothing more than our faith in it that it, and we, exist.
"If you think that's frightening," she continued, "then consider this. Some of my colleges are saying that if our reality is truly based only on our faith in it, then the entire universe may be nothing more than a thought. That it only exists because it has faith in itself. Some people working at the sub-atomic level say that sometimes matter does not seem to exist. It appears or disappears on it's own accord randomly for no observable reason. It simply exists for a moment in time then it doesn't, and there is no explanation for the event. Also, we are now finding things in the universe that are inexplicable, such as; there is not enough matter in the universe to sustain it, so either, where is it or where did it go? We simply do not know. However, again this could be our clever little psyche's giving us something to think about, because if we solve all the problems that are presented to us, why then what would we do. We'd all be bored and out of a job, and we wouldn't want that now would we?"
I asked her if she ever took LSD.
She said, "No, I haven't felt the need to, but if I ever did, I’d want to do it like Dr. Lilly (John). He injects it then goes into an isolation tank for the duration of the experience so that he's not distracted by outside events. It's just him and his conscience. I would consider taking it with him."
I said, "That sounds like a pretty far out tripp. I’d like to try that myself."
She said, "But right now I find my work and the people I work with stimulating enough. Investigating the nature of the universe is pretty far out all by itself."
"And the nature of reality." I reminded her
"Yes" she said, "and reality. Could it really just be a simple act of faith." She mused then smiled then said, "I think that maybe it is."
We rode together until we got to Denver, sometimes talking about reality, sometimes just sitting in silence thinking about what had been said. She dropped me off in downtown Denver and I took a bus up to Boulder where I had some friends. It's been over 20 years since we had that conversation and I still think about it. And now I agree with it except to add, reality is a belief structure of our conscience based on our faith maintained by our will for our enjoyment.
I had this conversation with quite a number of people over the years and the reaction has been from the extreme, "If there is no right and wrong then if you do not shut up, I am going to kick your crazy ass!"
"Get out of my car! Right now!" or "As long as you spout that insane crap then I never want to see you again!" or To the more gentle, "Of course there is a real reality Tai, or we simply would not exist." or "Well, right now I'm thinking that you are a beautiful babe so don't bend over, Ha, Ha." or "Who cares about that shit, dude. Let's party!”
But I have never met anyone who would discuss it with me unemotionally and seriously with an open mind. I would sure like to talk with her again now 20 years later and see what she has to say. I bet it would be a real mind blower.