2 | What Does "Where" Mean?

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a Co-Finder of the Table Collective. 

Beginnings. Specifically: “Where and when did I begin?” Seemed like a simple question until I really looked at it.

At the end of the Prequel I said I thought this episode should explore “beginnings.”

Personal beginnings…hence the question, “where and when did I begin?”

 

Assumptions About Things and Places

The simple answer would be “Arcadia, California, on March 5, 1958” and proceed to talk about my early childhood, and in keeping with my approach on the podcast I would bring in insights from the early years of religious founders like Moses and Muhammad and Jesus and the Buddha, and include poems or songs inspired by my beginnings.

I will get there, maybe in the next episode. But the reality is that the answer to the question “where” and “when” is more complicated than a city and a date of birth. One obvious example, did I begin where and when I was born, or where and when I was conceived? And is our conception when we begin?

Turns out the simple question “where and when did I (or you, or anyone) begin”, includes at least 3 major assumptions:

“Where” assumes we know what a place is, and so what the physical world is really like.

“When” assumes ideas about time, as does the use of “did” and “begin”, which assume a clear starting point, a dividing line, that I did not existed prior to a beginning point measured on a clock.

“I”, or any pronoun for that matter, assumes ideas about “person”, or self and selves, what it means to be an “I”, a “you,” a “we,” a “they,” etc…

But here’s the thing: philosophers, scientists, religious founders and artists have, each in their various genres of expression, given us very, very different ways to see and experience these things.

Packed inside that simple question “where and when did I begin” are questions about the nature of time, the nature of the self, and the nature of physical space.

I will get back questions of time and the self in future episodes. In this episode I will focus on “where” and “place” and the nature of the physical world.  

But how to start exploring that? The fact is that where we are born and raised goes a long way to determining our culture and language, (I say a long way, not the whole way, because even when the language and culture of the home differs from that of the place where a family lives, the surrounding context affects a child in that home in powerful way…where we are raised shapes our culture and language, and culture and language go a long way in shaping what we think about the world, and so…

How I answer the question “where did I begin” is shaped to a great degree by where I began!

 

Starting Points

So where do I start, since my starting point will already have begun to influence my conclusions? 

My relationship to my starting point, and my where is even more complex than the language and cultural and contextual factors that shape me. 

One of the more unsettling discoveries in quantum physics and mathematics is that things and objects do not have properties independent of observation. The world is not dried cement, even the smallest particles making up the world as we know it change simply by the fact of being observed. Things are not what we see until we see them…or touch, smell, hear them….

What does this have to do with “where”? “Where” refers to a place, and places are a combination of things, and things consist of subatomic particles, the qualities of which change when measured and observed, which means that places are changed by the people who live there.

Which means that a place is the sum total of the experiences of all the people who have changed that place by being in it and experiencing and observing it. 

That in turn changes and affects the people living there, which changes how they experience where they are, which again changes the places, which again changes the people…

 

Entanglement

Imbedded in the question of “where” you and I began is a mysterious entanglement between myself and the things that combine to make up the places I might suggest as my answer: Phoenix (my conception)? Arcadia (birth)? Burbank, Granada Hills (early childhood), and Bakersfield (by age 5)?

I want to share a poem from my book, The Cow Behind the Barn. I wrote it decades ago, originally, and revised it for the book. I was not consciously thinking, at either point, about quantum ways of seeing “things”. 

The poem is called “Hunting” and at the center of it is an extended description of an experience of entanglement and interconnection between a hunter and their prey. The poem came to me through imagination and intuition. Re-reading it now, I am struck by the way in which, expressed in different words and arrived at by different methods, there is something suggestive, even complimentary, in how quantum physics describes reality. 

It makes me wonder if the creative way and the scientific way of seeing and experiencing and describing the world are just that: different ways of seeing and experiencing and describing, ways that can illumine each other. 

Here’ the poem:

 

Hunting

I run, gun in hand,

Behind panting hounds

That flow like floodwater through the oaks.

 

I follow, my mind full of the scene I will find

                  A snarling terror pinned against a tree

                  The dogs who will part as I raise the polished steel

                  The eyes of my prey when I take my aim.

 

I arrive.

 

There is already blood

                  On the ground and in the teeth of hounds

                                    And plastered into the fur of the cornered beast,

                                                      A hare.

 

I lower the barrel, stoop to a knee,

Touch a patch of red chalky dust,

Put a finger to my tongue

And taste the musky metallic living animal heat.

 

                                    The hair is longer up my arms

                                    Wiry on my legs

                                    Bristling down my back.

                                    I hear smell see fear flee

                                    Stumble in the dust

                                    Gasping heart

                                    Limbs burning

                                    Dart right

                                    Leap

                                    There are teeth ripping

                                    A sudden fire 

                                    Legs fail

                                    There is wood, a tree,

                                    I turn

                                    A man.

                                    He is on a knee, a finger to his lips.

 

I stand beneath the tree

Gun on the ground.

The beast is still.

Drying blood turns to flakes of rust on a fallen leaf.

  

Quantum physics describes an entangled world, the most minute particles of which are affected merely by being observed. The poem describes not only a physical but a psychological connection, an entangled consciousness, between the hunter and a rabbit.

Whatever else consciousness may be, and that is a topic we will come back to, it is a way of observing, and experiencing. My consciousness of something, animate or inanimate, or of someone, affects and changes that thing or person and changes me. 

 

Cosmic Entanglement

Everything so far has assumed a local, nearby, connection between us and things and places. I recently came across a 2022 article in Scientific American called “The Universe is not Locally Real and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It”. In it, Daniel Garisto describes how two Nobel Prize winners demonstrated that objects are not only affected by what we might call local factors, by the things we see in space and time in a “place.” Their work showed that there are influences from far further than “local” influences and observers, moving faster than the speed of light, which also affect the nature of each and every thing and object. 

It seems that it is not only places and things and persons which are near each other that are entangled…the entire universe seems entangled across vast distances of time and space. Everything potentially affected by and affecting every other thing. 

I was once driving through Nebraska with one of my daughters and I saw an old truck abandoned in the middle of a field of corn. I thought to myself, there was a day when somebody drove that truck to that spot and left it there…on purpose. There was a story there. Eventually, I wrote the story as I imagined it, in the form of a song. Here is an acoustic, home recorded version of the song, Omaha:

 

Omaha

I saw it sittin’ in a field near Omaha, Nebraska
Rust and steel, there was burning sun
There was corn and weeds they were growing though the window
Of that old truck outside Omaha Nebraska
So I stopped beside the road to hear the story that that old truck might have told

I out my hand on the truck near Omaha, Nebraska
I heard it whisper to me like an old friend
It told the story of a man who once had loved a woman
Somewhere here, somewhere near Omaha Nebraska
And I could almost here them breathe as they drove beneath the sky in a cool Nebraska breeze

Hand in hand in that truck near Omaha, Nebraska,
She’s dressed in white, she’s got flowers in her hair

He’s feeling nervous and uncertain as they pull up to the farm house and park the truck on that farm near Omaha, Nebraska
Kid’s will grow and years go by, the stars the moon and the clouds racing through the sky

We all the know the day will come, yet it finds us trying to do that last thing left undone

 The house is empty now near Omaha, Nebraska
The kids are gone, he’s in the yard
He’ kneeling down on the ground, he’s brought flowers in hand
She’s never leaving that old farm near Omaha, Nebraska
I see him get up from her side, takes the keys and takes that old truck for one last ride

He drives through the fields on the farm, near Omaha, Nebraska
Drives as far as it will go, and just leaves it there
Beneath the sun, in the weeds the wind and the weather
And there it waited just for me, near Omaha, Nebraska

 

Can a hunk of metal absorb the stories of the people whose lives intersected with it? Can a hand on an old truck unlock those stories? I don’t know, but I wonder…I mean there are objects which collect and store our thoughts…the combination of various pieces we call computers.

I wonder every day about the objects I touch, the plants I walk past, the memories of the redwood trees I see almost daily. I once asked an audience during a set of my songs to imagine the people who had sat in their chairs before them, and who will after them. How entangled is everything, really? Are there ways that we “program things”, and then ways we download and retrieve things others have programmed? 

 

What About Religious Understandings of Entanglement?

So far, we have listened to the conceptual world of quantum physics and the imaginative world of artistic imagination…But there are other ways of describing the entanglement and connection of the world, very ancient ways. I will use three examples: from the Bhagavad Gita, the teaching of the Buddha, and the Gospel of John.

 

The Gita

In chapter 13 Krishna explains to Arjuna the nature of the world of observed reality, using the concepts of prakriti, “the field” and purusha, the “Knower of the field.” 

Prakriti represents the ever-shifting canvas of creation, the totality of the natural world, from which all forms bodies, and minds arise: Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intelligence, and false versions of the self, are all ingredients of prakriti, and their various combinations account for all the material objects that make up the universe.

Purusha can be described as consciousness, even soul, though it has a lower and higher aspect…the higher is the supreme unchanging Self, pure consciousness…the lower aspect of purusha refers to the individualsoul, the knower of the field, which is entangled and changes like the rest of what makes up prakriti. 

According to the Gita every aspect of reality is some combination of these two: purusha and prakriti.  I have come across several metaphors to describe the combining: 

Prakriti and purusha as “collaborators” working together; or as two primordial lovers, who create the Universe together; or, as two dimensions in a cosmic ballet. They affect and are affected by each other.

I should note that the goal of Krishna’s teaching in the Gita is to guide us to freedom from such entanglement, a topic for another time…for now my aim is just to show that centuries ago the Gita was describing connection and entanglement…so have I in my art, and so have physicists in their way.

 

The Buddha:

One of the Buddha’s teachings is that we do not know the existence and reality of a thing “as it is”, we know our perception of the thing. There is the apparent existence of something and the actual existence of it, which may not be discoverable or describable. For example,

“…things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze.” 

And the attempt to grasp existence and non-existence of things is like “spiderwebs among spiderwebs which can never take hold of the enormous bird of reality.”

Though Buddha is skeptical about the way perception corresponds to reality, he is saying that we and things are entangled: in many ways who we think we are is the result of our experiences and perceptions of the world. Which begins to touch on Buddha’s ideas of the self, a topic for another time! 

Putting the Buddha’s insight in my own words: we DO experience something, and our experience is in some way connected to the thing, and shaped by the thing, we experience…Things become part of who we are, our experiences of all the “things” in our lives shapes who we are, or who we think we are!

The New Testament, just one example:

In the Gospel of John, chapter 1…Referring to creation, and employing a term that would be known and recognized by several audiences although each would have understood te word in very different ways: the term “logos” or “word”.

John says that all things came to be “in the word” …and that in the same “word” was and is life…According to John the whole universe  and all of life is connected …everything is entangled. In later chapters he refers to an entanglement of selves as well (I in them and they in me, and they in us and you in me…etc.). In John that entanglement is centered in a divine personal being. This is a significant difference from the Buddha’s teaching, and from some statements in the Gita, though the Gita includes verses more similar to John as well. But to repeat a refrain: more on that later. 

 

Physics, the arts, and religious heritages have in different ways, with different vocabulary, and using different metaphors described entanglement, connection, a sort of connective tissue between us and our world. And so, between us and our “where”.

As you can see, interconnection, entanglement, fascinates me. It is a frequent theme in my poetry and music. Before concluding I want to share another example. This song assumes the fact of entanglement and interconnection, but also flows from a longing for it. I haven’t released it yet though maybe by the time you are listening it will be out there streaming! It’s called “Elemental Spirits.”

 

Elemental Spirits

I’m gonna go down to the earth

I’m gonna sink my feet deep in

Gonna let it bury all of me

Let it soak into my skin

I’m in the earth, and the earth is in me

Elemental spirits, elemental spirits.

 

I’m gonna step into the wind

Open wide and breathe it in

Gonna feel it wrap around me

Let it soak into my skin

I’m in the wind, and the wind is in me

Elemental spirits, elemental spirits.

 

I’m gonna go down to the water

I’m gonna walk right in

Sink down ‘til its all around me

Let it soak into my skin

I’m in the water, and the water is in me

Elemental spirits, elemental spirits.

 

I’m gonna reach out for the fire

I’m gonna stick my hands right in in

Let the heat and burn surround me

Let it soak into my skin

I’m in the fire, and the fire is in me

Elemental spirits, elemental spirits.

 

Elemental spirits, elemental spirits.

 

A Practice

Before we close, I want to suggest an experiential experiment with entanglement and connection. This is inspired by a podcast I have been dipping into called “Sufi’s of Morocco”, the episode from January 14, 2021…after talking about the Muslim greeting, as salamu alaikum….peace be with you…the speaker continued by suggesting that such a greeting could be extended to everything…but in a unique way:

I quote…“Whenever you see something extend peace to it not by saying as salamu alaikum but by seeing the Light in it”

Not by saying words, but by seeing the light that, as he had explained elsewhere in that episode, connects everything.

So I am going to invite us all to intentionally see “the light” in the next few days…and though the quote I referenced said “not by saying” I find it helps me to “see” if I also “say.”

So, I invite us this week to speak to the things and people in our world…plants, rocks, trees, humans, animals…silently perhaps…

“I see you and I say ‘peace’ to you, I recognize the mysterious connection we have”

I am curious to know what happens…

 

Next

To close…I return to the question: “Where” did I begin? I want to allow myself to get more personal about my answers so in the next episode I will use my own beginnings as an example (music outro begin) and I will dig a little more into how the places where I began are all entangled in who I am…and hope to invite you to some discoveries of your own. Until next time…