Spinoza on Science and Stress

Author: Rose DeShaw
Tune: They Call The Wind, Moriah
HOW PTSD WORKS – You Can Handle It
(From years of personal experience)

(Tune: They Call The Wind, Moriah)
1) Horror’s picked itself a name
Though it’s been around for ages
Post Trauma Stress Disorder is
Our label for the rages
But it’s normal
It’s normal
When you understand, it’s normal

2)A crisis situation calls
For you to start reacting
When trauma comes
Emotions get
All mixed up in the action
Adrenaline
Adrenaline
Its surge, the biggest faction

3) The body does what bodies do
When they’re in stress and combat
It shoots the energy through you
To give you strength to do it
The body
The body
PTSD’s the body

4) What happens when you’re under stress
You finally learn to figure
And what events you should avoid
Because they’ll be a trigger
You’ll see them
The stressors
Understanding will get bigger

5) There is no shame in readying
To fight a major battle
When all around you, no one else
Has even heard a rattle.
No guilty
Reactions
You learn to handle surges

6) Not just soldiers home from war
But mothers, drivers, family
The beast’s inside us all but we
Can learn to tame it readily
We’re in charge
We’re in charge
Taming the beast will happen

SCOTT’S GIFT: A PHILOSOPICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

By Dick DeShaw

              Thoughts on substance. Here’s how I describe the substance of my life: The lives of human beings are like the fractals of a rocky shoreline (see Benoit Mandelbrot). The symmetrical patterns we seldom see, define the whole of what we are. Carl Jung called these patterns, ‘synchronism.” These patterns are the expression of energy (what the ancient Greeks called, ‘demonstration,’ i.e. knowledge inside us.  This is, by the way, how Spinoza described science, i.e. …”the eyes of the mind.”

            Let me demonstrate with some patterns in my life:

1) In high school I am required to take one math course. I take Geometry. It is Euclidian Geometry, stripped of all its flesh. It is boring. I skip classes to play on the golf team.  I get a D. Afterward I avoid math like the plague.

2) An abortive math attempt in pre-med at university, caused by an unavoidable math requirement. I receive an F.

3) After marrying, I return to university majoring in psychology. There’s a humanities requirement, either English or Philosophy. As a poor speller, I choose philosophy though I don’t know what it is. In that first class the heaven’s opened!  I add a second major in philosophy.

  A favorite teacher influences me towards phenomenology and American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce.

4) Apply to University of Waterloo graduate school in philosophy. Birth control method fails and I leave, taking a social worker job.

5) Return to university at York, (after three years as a social worker), running a group home with my wife and three children. I major in sociology and get an M.A.

6) Decide to pursue a PhD in Social & Political Thought to combine my sociology and philosophy background. I take a class from Brady Polka who introduces me to Baruch Spinoza. The start of the Emendation of the Intellect leaves an indelible imprint on the synapses of my brain. Especially, “…to change my plan of life …was forced to seek a remedy…like a man suffering from a fatal illness…”

7) I move to Kingston with my wife, buy a house, live upstairs and run the first floor as an out of print bookshop. I work with prisoners for a street organization till it loses its grant and teach sociology part-time for St Lawrence College while completing my dissertation long distance.

   Running into problems with the sociologists on my committee (they didn’t want KANTent), and not seeking the advice of my chairman, Brady Polka (which I should have done), I shove my completed dissertation into a shoe box and become a prison guard.

While working midnights in prison, I read Charles Sanders Peirce, who leadsme to the study of logic, mathematics and science. I write several articles on prisons using mathematical models. These are published and republished in a Russian journal of science, two textbooks, the American Journal of Corrections, The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and The Whig Standard.

9) Having the bookshop gives me first choice of all philosophy, math and science as well as the opportunity to sell books from my library, particularly all the works of Heidegger and Sartre. I had moved on from phenomenology.

  One day the Queen’s university physics department called. It concerned the library of a physics professor, H.M. Cave, who had died. He had studied in Vienna when quantum theory got its start. We were given his books. What he had was a classic collection of science and math. Among his books were the 3 volume Dover edition of Euclid’s Elements, translated and annotated by Thomas L. Heath. I put Euclid on my shelf and ignored him.

10) Reason didn’t help me cope with the stress of prison. After a prisoner stabs me, I am labeled with PTSD (Post Trauma Stress Disorder) and put on disability. I bring home the “…suffering from a fatal illness…” 

  Reading a book on quantum theory, I seek to understand the mathematical logic, topos theory. My wife goes on line and finds me four topos theorists in Siberia. They refer me to a European philosopher who has written a paper on quantum foam, topos, knots and Spinoza.

  Fascinated, I get out my Spinoza Selections, edited by John Wild. I begin to see Spinoza’s writings as a ‘how to’ deal with inadequate thinking caused by my PTSD.

11)  Reestablish my friendship with Brady Polka and ask him about more complete translations of Spinoza. He refers me to Samuel Shirley: Spinoza’s Complete Works. My daughter buys it for me at Christmas.

  For the first time I read all of the ‘Short Treatise On God, Man and His Well-Being.’  My Selections , edited by Wild, primarily dismissed this work as ‘the immature Spinoza, as many philosophers do. I find it fascinating.

12) My wife’s father is dying in Washington state. We stay with her brother who has an adopted son, Scott, with Duchane’s syndrome. While the disease has ravished his body and taken away his ability to speak, he can type with two fingers, albeit painfully, to communicate with me. I spend much of our visit with him, sharing what I am learning from Spinoza.

  The last day of our visit, a delivery truck arrives with a book for me: A Spinoza Reader, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. It is a gift from Scott which he ordered as a surprise for me, over the internet while we talked. We go to my sisters and in quiet moments, I read the Ethics. Spinoza’s work stops being a ‘how to,’ and becomes living flesh and spirit when I read: 

  “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists.” (Ethics, Prt II, Prop. 11, p. 122 in Curley’s Spinoza Reader).  I call this proposition: Scott’s Gift.  My wife’s brother gives us a ’94 jeep and we drive it back across Canada to Kingston. Shortly afterward, her father dies.

   In our discussions, mine verbal and Scott’s typed onto a computer screen with two fingers, we discussed how the universe is like a quantum computer with us as part of the programming. I told Scott that Spinoza says this programming does not stop when we die. Since computers gave Scott the continuing ability to lead his life in some fashion, he loved that thought.

  Several months after the death of my wife’s father, Scott decided to let himself go into the programming of the universe, rather than be placed on a machine which would have to do his breathing for him.

13) I get Vol I of Curley’s The Collected Works of Spinoza.  I consider Shirley more a poet of Spinoza translations and Curley the scholar.  Together they made me see that Spinoza formulated his theory of knowledge in the Emendation and the Short Treatise.  Curley especially opened up the Short Treatise for me.

  After writing these works, Spinoza, as Gilles Deleuze says, ‘expressed,’ his ideas in his later works, especially the Ethics. Spinoza never leaves the foundations of knowledge that he formulated in the Emendation and Short Treatise but he gives them flesh in ethics, hermeneutics, religion and politics.

14) Reading Spinoza, I realize that while he was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes and others, his theory was warp and woof a demonstration of Euclid’s Common Notions.  I pull down my Euclid’s Elements and begin to read it for the first time. Heath was an excellent scholar. His notes place you back in the ideas and currency of Euclid’s times. He put back on Euclid the flesh that mathematicians have stripped off.  As both Euclid and Spinoza said, the common notions of equality and ‘the whole is greater than the part,’ are the foundations of thinking. This is substance.

  Equal is the glue that holds together logic, mathematics and ethics. I suggest that Spinoza cannot be understood without seeing the influence of Euclid’s Common Notions in his thinking.  They are recurring themes.

  Finally;   ‘A point is that which has no part,’ is the essence of Spinoza’s idea of God, (Eternity = Now) and the essence of human life. Buddha discovered this as ‘Nirvana.’

  Later on I also found, in a neglected book on my shelf, that Euclid’s Common Notions were the foundations of George Boole’s, The Laws of Thought that created the mathematical language of computers.

  Euclid, Spinoza and Boole are the heroes of my thinking along with contemporary thinkers; Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe) and a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio  (Looking for Spinoza).

  I suspect my  nephew Scott smiles and approves of how I have used the gift he gave me.

    Scientists and philosophers clothe themselves in the foundations of knowledge. Historically, however, they have dressed up their ideas differently. Scientists tend to put on empiricism and study the things that exist in our universe.
    Until recently, philosophers chose the ancient fabric of metaphysics but lately have been choosing either the underwear of logical analysis or the fashion design of language and its concepts.  Bertrand Russell, a pioneer in logical analysis said most theorists start in the middle of theories because that is the easiest place but it is very difficult to start at the foundation of the theory.
  Russell had this problem as he sought the foundations of knowledge in mathematics and logic rather than things we experience in the world. However a 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who, Russell said, was “the noblest and most-loveable of the great philosophers,” began with: “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists.”
  Unfortunately Spinoza clothed his ideas in the fabric of metaphysics and his discussion of things was much misunderstood.  I have discovered that you cannot really make sense of Spinoza without relating his ideas to concepts of modern science, such as quantum theory, information theory, neuroscience and cosmology.
  However, scientists are not especially good philosophers as the absurd idea of TOE-hold (Theory of everything), indicates. So scientists need Spinoza’s ideas as much as he needs theirs. These ideas led me to the 5 E’s of existence.

 The 5 E’s of Existence are: 1) Energy 2) Entropy 3) Entanglement 4) Eternity and 5) Equality.
   Here is a rough and very cursory outline of Spinozian meditations on the foundations of things:
1) Things are an expression of the energy that generates the universe
                                                               
 2) Energy is a singularity inside all things that gives them work to do (’work to do’ is the definition of expression’)  Energy is the Alpha & Omega. A point that has no part, eternity and NOW (pages of unpacking needed).
 
3) Only things and their actions exist. (ie are in time & space).
 
4) Things inform animal brains that they  a) exist  b) are a certain kind of thing (essence) and c) are in relation with other things (equal/not equal, part/whole). This information is generated in the synapses of and stored in, the dendrites of brain neurons (memory).
 
5) The evolved human brain turned relations into mathematics/logic and language and the reflective self emerged that is distinguished by reason and feeling. Emotions are a reaction of the animal relations of the brain.
 
6) Since things in the universe are entangled (i.e. both yes & no), energy is always accompanied by entropy. This is the whole of information. Energy is conserved, i.e. always present while entropy is the dark matter that will cause all things to return to the singularity of energy. All human ignorance is caused by entropy. (pages of unpacking needed).
 
7) Things began to be seen as objects to use and not just objects to react to in order to survive. This is the blessing (energy) and curse (entropy) of human behaviour and can make us the only unnatural things in creation.
 
Human culture began. (So social scientists could have jobs).

I went to university when the liberal arts were the force, not economics. Consequently, I have a liberal mindset. In my grief at the election results I turned to Spinoza, who said our philosophical prejudices are a result of not understanding that humans are a part of nature — which made me understand that like crows attacking squirrels in spring, politics is only part of the cycle of nature.

Dick DeShaw, Kingston *Published in online edition of Toronto Star

(Orginally published as ‘Tilting At Windmills’ in Globe & Mail, June ‘97)

I met him way before he was stabbed, teaching Sunday school in a rundown church in a poor rural neighbourhood. There were a lot of kids around whose futures didn’t include reform school because of him. Big ears, skinny but sincere and always learning. I married him as soon as I was old enough and we immigrated to Toronto during the Vietnam War. The Mennonites had set up a teenage hostel through Children’s Aid. During the early seventies, if you ran away, underage from anywhere in Canada and came to Toronto, we got you until your parents or somebody anted up the fare to bring you home.

  Counselling kids in trouble with the law, prowling the back lanes behind Rochdale for runaways, learning how to handle social workers, we worked as a team.  Meanwhile, he was studying at York [University] – an M.A. doctoral studies, a disseration. After the hostel, I joined McGraw-Hill Ryerson who were bringing out Roger Caron’s award-winning book ‘ Go-Boy’[about being a con]. But Roger was still in prison, in the hole and the company needed someone to go tell him they wanted to publish only the first half of the book he’d written. [Second half later published as 'Bingo.' since first half won award but nobody knew that would happen then] My husband went down, looking like one of Jason’s Argoauts listening to the Sirens singing on the rocks. The same sort of seduction.

  That was behind our move to Kingston [Ontario] with its eight federal penitentiaries, although he went back to Children’s Aid and I opened a bookstore. “Visiting our graduates,” he called it whenever CAS sent him behind bars to see a father or mother. He taught a course for guards at the community college and he began to lean in the direction of the prisons when the wind was right. But he was still working on the dissertation. One day he came out of his study. “I quit,” he said and handed the dissertation to me, neatly wrapped up ina shoe box. “Think I’ll go down and knock on the gate. Maybe they can use another guard.”

  “Sadistic guard,” I said. “You hardly ever see the career mentioned without an adjective like that. Everybody knows what guards do. All the prison biographies say so.”

  “Not much different than being a parent,” he said, and he went off to fill out an application. Three months later he was sitting in a limestone tower with a gun, watching the sun come up over the harbour. Two guards had recently been murdered in the kitchen of his institution. Drugs poured in as though this was a pharmacy wholesaler. Brew made of fermented oranges, ketchup and sometimes potatoes was being cooked in bags all over his range. This combination of pills and stills is lethal inside.

  He was right about the CAS graduates. Two former clients and a boy we’d once had in our hostel turned up, as though the universe were offering a second crack at them. Meanwhile, staff positions were being cut back while con privileges increased. (’Con’ or ‘con game’ is what most prefer to be called). Knives were allowed in calls for crafts. Security was decreased when the prison decided to have guards do case work on computers while watching inmates, rather than hire more staff.

  He had urine thrown on him from a cell. He was Maced and regularly threatened. He found so many brews when he searched that the cons began calling him, ‘the Nose.’ One night, a spaced-out con threatened a group of guards with a knife. My husband stepped between them and deflected a blow meant for his belly with his left hand. Later that same evening, the alarm bell rang for a cell fire. With adrenalin still popping from the stabbing, he ran down the range through thick smoke and carried out the dead weight of a con, half again his size.

  He was off three months. X-rays couldn’t show the worst damage from the incident. During that time a fellow guard had half his finger bitten off. Cons phoned another guard’s home to say that their father had been killed inside. Effigies of guards were made and left hanging on the range.

  And then one day, when a concrete truck cut in front of us and he tried to run it off the raod in our little tin can of a car, I found he wasn’t reading any more, hadn’t in quite a while. There’s a technical name for it, a stress trauma discovered in Vietnam, and, as those soldiers found, the problem is in the same place.

  We run into cons all over our samll prison town. Sitting with him at an outdoor cafe, I see two men walk by who say, “Hi, boss. Buy us a coffee?” and sit down. A third comes up who has left his teeth inside, not expecting to be away from the institution very long. Others come by the bookstore sometimes, talking about trying to stay out, to stay clean.

  He’d been in great shape when he joined up. But now, even with daily workouts, his spine is permanently injured. Sometimes it paralyzes him and he falls. He’s been diagnosed with sleep apnea and sleeps on a machine. His toes are broken and rigid, requiring special shoes. His glands don’t work right anymore from all the Mace.

  The recent trouble at Prison for Women [Now closed}, spawned a group for offiers who had a need to talk about their situation. When it finished, they offered his prison the same opportunity. Eventually a group that included him, met ina basement to talk, smoke, tell war stories and at some point, things that were even more personal. There were tears. Those officers murdered in the prison kitchen looked over their shoulders. There was a video camera at the last session. Perhaps a tape might help someone else.

  Afterward, they let the wives come in. One of the questions that came up then is how it feels to wonder whether each day will be your husband's last, without the consolations of society's approval that cops get. Sometimes I think guards have inherited the contempt that used to surround the occupation of hangman, with no real understanding of what it is they do.

    "Write a summary of what came out of the group," someone [asked] him. “What did it accomplish?” – “It demonstrated that post-traumatic stress is the norm for prison guards, not the exception,” he wrote. “All of us are quite wary of  ‘therapeutic professionals.’

  [His] article [was returned] yesterday. “No, not so,” they had pencilled over ‘post-trauma.’ “Not true’ over the line about being wary. Granted the piece wouldn’t do much for recruitment of new officers. “Since the group, I have been able to step back and look at management policies with a sense of detached, quixotic bemusement instead of personal betrayal,” [his] piece concludes.

  Quixote, eh? Which makes me Sancho Panza, something I’ve suspected since we started this journey way back in the U.S. With the wisdom of that fat little sidekick, I can point out that sadistic prison guards are a Hollywood invention, necessary for filming inmate memoirs perhaps, those doctored stories from individuals we were once anxious to see behind bars.

  Guards are men and women who don’t expect good news from administration or the press. They go into prison in the dark on a daily basis, hoping to provide a little light. And the windmills are bigger now than when we started this journey. Unlike Cervante’s story, however, they are not the wrong target.

This was written by my wife, Rose DeShaw, when I still worked in prison.

My wife received an e-mail where a poet referred to Giles Deleuze who collaborated with Guattari on some of his later work. The poet didn’t know much about either man so my wife asked me to give some idea of where Delueze’s work stood in relation to Guattari. This is what I wrote and what she sent: 

“I asked Dick about Deleuze & Guattari & this is what he said:
 
 Disclaimer: There is god talk in here but only as symbol. Deleuze & Spinoza use the word ‘god’ but what Spinoza really meant was ‘nature’. What Deleuze’s belief was, when he had one, is unclear.  This is also Spinoza-prejudiced.
  
      Deleuze & Guattari – In discussing the relation of G. Deleuze to F. Guatarri, we must keep in mind that the early Deleuze who wrote, ‘Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza’ (1968), is not the Deleuze that collaborated with Guattari on ‘What is Philosophy.’ (1991)
   
     While never deviating from the position that true philosophy is expression and not logic, under the influence of Guattari, Deleuze had lost the crescendo of his early work, ‘Beatitude’ (p. 303-320)
   
     In ‘Beatitude’ Deleuze explores what Spinoza calls ‘the third kind of knowledge,’ or, as Deleuze says: “But the third kind alone relates to eternal essence, of particular essences as they are in God and as conceived by God. (p. 303)
   
 Spinoza said the second kind of knowledge was reason which was just a stepping stone to understanding, as Deleuze described it above.  We must remember that Spinoza used ‘god’ and ‘nature’ interchangeably. As Spinoza said in the ‘Theological-Political Treatise’:
     
      “But as to the question of what God the exemplar of true life, really is whether he is fire or spirit or light or thought or something else, this  is irrelevant to faith. And so likewise is the question as to why he is the exemplar of true life…” (Chp 14, p. 518 in Samuel Shirley trans).
 
    By the time he had been corrupted by Guattari, Deleuze had left his understanding of the ‘Beatitude,’ (third kind of knowledge) and all he had left was reason or the ‘concept.’ (What Is Philosophy, p. 15-34). Unlike Spinoza, Deleuze was swayed by the second kind of knowledge – or reason, which academia exalts and since this kind of knowledge could not satisfy him, he took his own life.
 
    Suicide results, Spinoza said, because we do not know Nature (the exemplar of true life) and ourselves. Deleuze says much the same thing in ‘Spinoza:; Practical Philosophy’ (1970) The Letters on Evil, pp. 30-43. He knew this but forgot it when he lost the vision of ‘Beatitude.’
 
    We owe much to Deleuze because he freed us from the rationalist interpretation of Spinoza that is often seen as the orthodox position. Deleuze opens up the ‘joy’ of the second half of Part 5 of Spinoza’s Ethics as no other philosopher did.  Deleuze, like so many academics, neglected Spinoza’s early works: ‘The Emendation of the Intellect & Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being’ and therefore apparently failed to note Spinoza’s caution towards fame (Also wealth and pleasure), that was “…like a man suffering from a fatal illness.” (Emendation of the Intellect (p. 8, 9 – Curley trans, Collected Works of Spinoza).
   
    I adore the early Deleuze but I’m not too fond of Guattari and his influence on Deleuze.  But maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh.  After all, academic is just what it is, sometimes a guide to enlightenment and at others, the trap of rationalizations and ideology. As Spinoza said, ‘CAUTE!’
 
    P.S. Deleuze’s notion of expressionism has much to say to poets, musicians and artists. His understanding of science wasn’t very adequate, in my opinion.”

            (From left to right: Gord Bishop, my son’s best friend & support, me and Louis) About 2 weeks ago, my youngest son, Louis died of natural causes. He was 41. We are of course sad but after the past 26 years, our tears were already mostly shed. There is also great relief for him. He is out of his suffering. For the past 3 years he was in and out of hospitals, trying to overdose.
 In an article on Einstein, a writer for the Ottawa Citizen said: “…everything in the universe, including us, are condensed energy, waiting to be liberated back into the universe.” 
 Louis has been liberated. He was a 41 year old in the body of a 90 year old whose brain had never evolved since adolescence, due to drug use.
 We do feel blessed in that Louis returned to us as our child, phoning 4 or 5 times a day for comfort, these last few months. Much of these past years he had been alienated from us. So we got our son back before he died.
 My wife Rose and I have fled far from the religion of our youth with good reasons. (after all, both our sons were molested by a choir master in the church). However, I think my wife’s relation to God has always been more natural than dogmatic. She finds consolation in truth.
 I on the other hand, have striven to make logical sense of the concept which the word, ‘God,’ symbolizes. I have spent much time in the wilderness of abstract thought.
 As my quote earlier suggests, I find my consolation in science and philosophy which come together in Spinoza. I am not too fond of hermeneutic apostates who blaspheme science, even though I was once one of them.
 Proposition 29 in Part 5 of Spinoza’s Ethics has been my special consolation in this time:
  “We conceive things as actual in 2 ways:  Either insofar as we conceive them to   exist in relation to a certain time and place [Spinoza knew about relativity long    before Einstein discovered its scientific expression] or insofar as we conceive    them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine    nature. But the things we conceive in this second way as true or real, we     conceive under a species of eternity and their ideas involve the eternal and    infinite essence of God.”
 Dem. P30  “Eternity is the very essence of God…”
 As I reflect about my son’s life, I realize that Democritus’’ saying: “to live badly is to spend a long time dying,” is only what Spinoza calls a “being of reason,” and to apply notions like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are only relative positions of time and place. His true or real essence was in the necessity of nature/God.
 Nature sent my wife and I affirmation of that fact. After we put Louis’ obituary in the Kingston paper, we got a card of sympathy from his kindergarten and first grade teacher, Joyce O’Shea. 
 Our memories of Louis are cluttered with much of what is relatively called, ‘bad,’ but understanding, is, as Spinoza says, “…the eyes of the mind,” which come from the truth or real under a “species of eternity.”
 While I have found consolation in science and philosophy, I have found that what I have discovered is not applicable for most people. Spinoza, who was only 5 years older than Louis when he died, wrote a book when he was about my son’s age, as an attempt to reason with the Dutch people about religion and politics.  This was after they killed their democratic leader.
 It wasn’t well-received, not even by Cartesian philosophers. (Treatise on Theology & Politics).  In it, Spinoza said, ‘common people’ do not operate by what he called, ‘the light of reason,’ but rather by stories taken from experience. Scripture, he said, was not written to enlighten the ‘common people’ but rather to call them to obedience in loving God and treating their neighbours as themselves.  (Matthew 22:31-40).
 When Spinoza wrote this, he was mad at ‘common people,’ because they killed Jan de Witt, the political leader and friend of Spinoza. He interrupted his writing of the Ethics to write the Treatise. When he returned to writing to Ethics and the negative reaction to the Treatise his method of exposition. (Deleuze calls it, ‘expression.’) – his method had changed from abstract to practical. He never got to storytelling but probably would have if he had achieved maturity.
 Spinoza’s immature and decidedly academic approach to ‘common people,’ in the Treatise was because he forgot, in his anger, the foundation of his philosophy was in Euclid’s Common Notions (axioms of thinking) of equality and the whole is greater than the part. He returned to his foundation in Part 2-5 of the Ethics.
 The common notions of equality and part/whole are the foundations of all human thinking (what the early Greeks called, ‘demonstration’), and possessed by every human, no matter how developed their intellect. Abstract thinking is not everyone’s skill but we all possess the common notions as the foundation of our understanding. The true and real stories of human experience demonstrate this fact. This is why the teachings of humankind, as Spinoza said, tell stories from experience.
 Bertrand Russell, whose method of logic I adore, labeled Spinoza a ‘mystic.’ What Russell didn’t realize, was that his faith in reason and logic was also mysticism. As finite beings, we tell stories of our fluxations in time and space out of the infinite and eternal ‘now’ that we experience.
 One more thought: It takes abstract thinking and academic hubris to ignore the common notions as the foundation of our common thinking. The history of academia?
Louis has been redeemed into the natural.

zHOW TO PLAY LIFE: UNDERSTANDING (The Chapter I could not write
while my body and spirit were in prison)
“A) Rhetorical figure transposing a term from its original concept to another and similar one.
B) In its origin, all language was metaphoric; so was poetry. “ Lionelli Venturi 1
PART ONE: THE ABSTRACT LIE
     Since we are born with it, the ultimate question for humanity is: what is life? Using a golf metaphor, the questions we ask about life can be sorted into one of three groups:
1) Abstract Lie
2) Hitting Impulse
3) Natural Swing
     What is life? This question is like a shout on the canyon rim of what we know. It returns as only an echo of what language can express. Not even modern philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze’s valiant efforts can fill in the chasm between what we know and what we express, (reason).2
 The seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza, was aware of the paradox of the gap between knowledge and expression that language creates. He said it was Nature’s work to give us, ‘true ideas’3  but some things are in our intellect and not in Nature; so these are only our own work and help us to understand things distinctly.  Among these we include all relations which have reference to different things. These we call, “beings of reason.”4
 Spinoza has been called a rationalist but this is only humanistic slander. Spinoza knew all true work was in Nature and that the work of our intellect is to understand how Nature guides our work of reason.
 Reason and the actions that follow from it are the work that energy has given us to do. As physicists know, all work is the result of energy. Reason is a staircase to understanding. 5
Understanding is a gift from Nature that unfolds in our work.
 Spinoza was the prophet of how we understand that Nature is immanent in our bodies, souls and minds, just as it is in the ‘soul’ of everything in the universe from quark to dark matter that sends and receives information.
 Using abstract words like ‘nature,’ ‘reason,’ ‘soul,’ and ‘mind,’ we fall screaming into the chasm between knowing and expression. Wittgenstein calls this: “language on holiday.”6
 Wittgenstein says meaning is the use we give words and in my paper: ‘Has Philosophy Ignored Spinoza’s Theory of Science?’ I explore Spinoza’s use of the abstract words like those above, as ‘tourist traps.’ 7
 So what do we do if all the language we use cannot transverse the gap between knowing and expression?  At its best, we can realize that language conveys metaphors that transpose expression into a like of knowing.
 In the Emendation, Short Work on God, Man and His Well-Being and the Ethics,’ Spinoza sets out a method of inquiry, cumulating in ‘intuitive science,’ which builds on the foundations of the master architect of how we live in the space we inhabit: Euclid. 8
 Because not even Spinoza can emulate the clear and distinct demonstrations of Euclid’s, which he adored, Spinoza fell into tourist traps. The chief one was ‘God.’
 A host of misunderstandings have arisen in the interpretations of Spinoza’s theories, such as seeing Part One of the Ethics as an ‘ontological argument for God’s existence.’ 9
 Spinoza, however, was more consistent in building on the foundation of Euclid than those individuals who have interpreted him. The metaphor of Euclid’s Geometry runs throughout the corpus of Spinoza’s work. We must all use metaphors which describe how and where we live, to express what we know.
 This is our work and Spinoza says, when we realize we are, “…a part of Nature…(and) follow the laws of Nature…this is divine service…” 10
 I am an old man. The condensed energy which has gathered into my body and its work will soon be liberated into what Spinoza calls, ‘mind.’ Some information scientists have called this substance; ‘It from Quibit.”11  The first and second laws of thermodynamics guide my expectation.
Since I was young, two questions have framed my work: 1) What is the meaning of life and all that? 12  2) How do I hit a golf ball?  The first question is too abstract and has misled too many people to use. Not even ‘42’ suffices, even though with a scientific inclination, I would like it to do so.
 Golf is an innocuous metaphor to those who, like Mark Twain, see golf as a good walk spoiled. I apologize for seeing it as a good walk made better.

! Ever since a friend took me to the Spokane Country Club to caddy when I was ten, I have had an epiphany of both special beauty and subsequent practical frustrations which I have never been able to reconcile.
 An example of the first part of the epiphany is standing on a links course surrounded by water as the sun rose and folded the contours of the grounds in brilliant to fading shades of purple. 

  The second, as all golfers know, is a ‘shank shot;’ the result of trying to hit the ball a mile and it travels 50 yards or so to the left or right.
 While golf is an innocuous metaphor, it is also an apt one. It is close to Nature and has the uncanny ability to display the Nature of those who play the game. A duffer is a duffer wherever you find them in life.  Look up the Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘duffer!’ 13
 Every individual who makes golf their work (professionals), have teachers who have taught them their swings and help to correct the bad habits which creep into all swings.   
 Euclid laid out the course in which we live (space) and Spinoza taught how to play that course (understanding). Of course pros have other teachers who help them fine tune their swings.  As Spinoza said, one of life’s great blessings is sharing with like-minded individuals.
 While these friends, some in books and others in daily interaction, are too numerous to mention, some are chief: George Boole developed the Laws of Mind from Euclid’s Common Notions, and brought together logic and mathematics in Boolean Algebra which underlies the language of artificial thought – the computer. 14
 Albert Einstein, through his Theory of Relativity, brought time and the curvature of space into the course of space Euclid described. 15   He is part of the revolution which helped develop non-Euclidian geometry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which, while not discarding Euclid’s original formulation, greatly enhanced it.  Einstein was also a student of Spinoza in his beliefs and in discussing social relationships.
 The neuroscientist, Antonoio Damasio, has reintroduced Spinoza’s theories of mind and body into a modern context of neuroscience and a theory of feelings which is separated from theories of emotion which had confused the two.16   Feelings, said Spinoza, are the direct manifestation of Nature’s gift of understanding (the eyes of the mind). 17   Damasio demonstrates why this is so.
 I first discovered Seth Lloyd’s work in Scientific American and open each copy expecting new discoveries from him (as I did this month). 18   I then bought Lloyd’s book, Programming the Universe, and consider it one of the most important works in the current evolution of human thinking. 19 Lloyd is an information scientist who follows George Boole in developing Euclid’s foundations on the axioms of thinking. 
 Moe Norman was a Canadian golfer and savant who brought together golf and nature. Moe taught me the failure of trying to hit a golf ball.  Gilles Deleuze, who considered Spinoza the prince of philosophers and wrote two books on him, takes reason to its limits in, ‘What Is Philosophy’ with Guatlari.19  This is a magnificent effort and understands philosophy as expression.
 Rose DeShaw, my partner in freedom of the spirit is teaching me the art of practical expression. She is the incarnation of Spinoza in my daily life.  
Now I have introduced my teachers. Let’s see what they taught me about life.
Euclid began his description of the course on which we play out our lives with these words: “A point is that which has no part.” 20  This may be the most profound statement ever uttered by a human being. It not only acknowledges the chasm between knowing and expression but jumps into it with total abandonment.
We live in eternity. The point where we appear is our tee-off in space and time. Scientists call this point a fluxation. We appear, play a few rounds in space and time and then leave the course (death), maybe to play another course in space and time. Possibly, if they exist in what scientists hypothesize as universes, in the mulitiverse.  
This popping in and out of space and time, birth and death, is fact but all the rest is pure speculation. Religious  teachers have speculated about this popping from viewpoints as varied as the resurrected individual goes to a ‘heaven’ to live with an anthropomorphic God or is extinguished as an individual and ‘absorbed into the supreme spirit in Nirvana.’ 21
Spinoza says we …

     ”feel and know by experience that we are eternal. For the mind
feels those things that it conceives in understanding no less than those it has in  memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees and observes things are the demonstrations themselves.”22