08/20/97 11:01 PM In Newtons time (Ike Newton the apple guy) it seemed okay to exclude consciousness from scientific

experiment and theory. Dont be deceived. Science is no more than the field of human curiosity. As such, from the beginning (some credit Thales with being the first scientist but it aint true - all humans are scientists) science is identical with the characteristic curiosity which is a very prominent quality of human perception. Curiosity leads people to formulate questions. Thales came up with the idea that there is a funadamental substance from which everything in the world of sense perception is composed. If we can diverge briefly lets examine what it was that Thales is said to have been interested in and what the question was that lead to his (theory) answer, that everything is made of water. It sounds ridiculous to us in 1997, after three thousand years of obsessive examination of the same question that Thales is said to have asked and answered. We know that water is not the fundamental substance from which everything else is composed. Let us try to imagine that we are living at that time and that we are Thales. Lets get inside the mutherfukkers head so to speak. I say that something came before the question. This is a consequence of my own experience with questioning and theories and answers. First comes an idea. Call it inspiration. These sort of ideas just seem to come from nowhere so we say they came from the spirit world and that we experience inspiration. What if Thales had the idea one day that everything that we experience in the world of sense perception is composed of a fundamental substance which is common to all? This might be called a vision of a probale or possible truth that a curious mind comes up with out of the blue. Such an idea would lead a curious person to ask the question were told that Thales asked. If there is a fundamental substance, what is it?

Often, an idea like the one that Thales probably had that theres a fundamental substance, can be stimulated by an observation that suggests it by likeness. An example might be that one day Thales went in to a potters work shop and saw the process by which the potter created pots and vessels of many various shapes all made from the same clay. We might be able to imagine standing in such a shop or hanging around there for a few weeks and even working as the potters apprentice so that we personally experience the whole process of creation of clay vessels. The shop would contain the potters creation in various stages. Raw clay. Raw pots. Fired clay pots. Glazed pot and finished pots after glaze firing. Potters usually fire their pots twice. The first time converts the clay to a porous, but hardened form. Glazing is necessary to make the clay impervious to water and to decorate the surfaces of the vessel. An experience like this would make the apprentice aware that while the finished pots were of many various different shapes and sized, different colors and designs - they were all infact composed of the same fundamental substance - clay. The same idea might be awakened by contemplation of sculpture. The ancient Greeks were accomplished in sculpting and in ceramin arts. They were stone masons of a high calibre as borne out by the buildings that have survived for several thousand years. forgive me for diverging - but I find it an attraction to my curiosity that the Egyptians, the Persians and other peoples of the middle east were also accomplished stone masons as demonstrated by the ancient buildings that have survived in that part of the world. We can say the same about ancient stones in the Americas, in India and in China. Stone Henge in England. Ancient buildings in Cambodia too. Hope I havent offended anyone by ommissions but I am not knowledgeable enough to list them all - but stone shaping by human beings is a very ancient art and one that seems to have been pursued by many if not all ancient cultures. Ceramic arts are also very ancient. Well have to look into this some other time because my curiosity has me

about to take off into metal arts like bronze and gold, silver and iron. The point Im trying to make is that in the time of Thales, there were many fields of endeavor that involve the creative shaping of the materials available that could have lead to the idea of a fundamental substance. This idea of Thales goes deeper though than his envisioning that all the objects of nature (rocks, streams, the ocean, sand, trees, insects, fish, animals, the air, the stars, the sun and even human beings bodies) might be made from the same fundamental substance. Thales idea is the idea of Unity brought into the physical world of the senses and nature. The idea of Unity is that everything is connected to eveything else. We know from our own experience and from human cultural history that a consciousness of unity, of oneness is a very prominent aspect of human consciousness and human perception. We might even resort to the terminology that is credited to Carl Jung and suggest that Unity is an archetype that resides in the collective unconscious - that Unity is a constituent of psyche. As far as western culture is concerned, science probably begins with the surfacing of the psyche archetype of Unity in the mind of a dude named Thales who lived on an island called Samos in the Mediterranean sea off the west coast of the land that is Turkey. The archetype named Unity or Oneness must have a very powerful effect on human curiosity. After Thales his students and his students students were all caught up in this Unity thing. And not just them. We find it other cultures that had no known way of contacting Thales and his Samian lineage. Anaximander and Anaximenes carried on the contemplation of the idea of Unity. Its said that one of them claimed that air is the fundamental substance. The there was another Samian called

Pythagoras. While he isnt given much credit by historians of science for taking up the scientific pursuit of a fundamental substance, his though and philosophy is pervaded by the archetype of Unity. Pythagoras took it to a higher level and taught that all living things are a Unity. The whole cosmic process is a Unity. Later there were two other Greeks that gave it a hurl and came up with ideas about what the fundamental substance was. Democritus is said to have proposed that all material objects are composed of atoms which he apparently envisioned as identical and small. For some reason, unknown to me, there wasnt much interest in the fundamental substance question for about two thousnad years. Other questions were asked and answers proposed. It wasnt until scientists had formulated theories that seemed to work for light and electricity that the knowledge was developed that made possible the construction of instruments that would give future scientists what they needed to look for answers to the ancient question. Isnt it interesting that after nearly three thousand years, the lineage of people we call scientists, were still inspired by the fundamental sunstance-unity-oneness idea. What seems to have been largely missed in the study of science (the science of science) are these inspirational ideas that generate questions that in turn generate theories which if true then become scientific laws or as theyve been called Laws of Nature. All the attention seems to be given to the laws that emerge in science and very little to the questions that lead to the laws or the ideas that lead to the questions. Einsteins Law of Special Relativity is a good example. It begins with an act of imagination. Einstein imagined himself travelling at the speed of light. Just as Thales did he came up with questions about what his experience would be if he could travel at the speed of light. Out of it came a new Unity. The speed of light is a Unity always the same. Oneness.