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Aaron Perry
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William (“Sandy”) Karstens shares a unique exploration of sacred geometry, esoteric wisdom, and the advanced science and mathematics of subatomic physics. Connecting the dots between Gluons and the Star of David; the Atomic Trinity of electrons, protons, and neutrons – and their relationship with the gamma/photon energy; the Trinity and the triplet Red, Blue, and Green Gluons and Quarks; the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, Baryon Decuplets, the Ten Commandments, and geometry of the Tetractys; and Meson and Baryon Octets and other mystical patterns of eight, such as the Buddhist and Taoist Eight-fold Path and the eight Christian Beatitudes attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, Sandy takes us on a tour of discovery and revelation. He walks us through the various curves found in the Conic Sections, and discusses the Golden Section and its corresponding Fibonacci Series.
Sandy also provides some historic background, discussing the work of giants like Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton (who was born in 1642, the same year Galileo died), Kepler, Copernicus, Einstein, Gelman, and others. It is within this historic context, the great human journey toward greater knowledge, that we are each invited to “carry the torch forward.” Sandy shares a sense of the sacred and sacramental – an understanding that the Divine is in all things – and likewise asserts that “Geometry pervades everything around us.” Indeed, Newton himself described “math” as an expression of Deity.
Hinting at an “invisible college” comprised of great alchemists and scientists like Newton, Sandy also reveals how the cultivation of knowledge is an inward journey in which both mysticism and morality are at work – hopefully. He asks, “What are you looking for?” and invites us each to expand our scientific understanding while also cultivating an ever deepening sense of the sacred and sacramental. Sharing and celebrating the wisdom and insights of Richard Rohr, St. Francis, Pope Francis, and others who understand the sanctity of a direct, intimate connection with the natural, living world, Sandy asks each of us to take a deeper interest in the living mysteries of Earth.
William (“Sandy”) Karstens is a Professor of Physics at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. His research areas include: Optical Properties of Solids, Einstein’s General Relativity, Particle Physics, and Cosmology. Sandy received his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Vermont, his Masters degree in Physics from Brandeis University, and his PhD in Materials Science from the University of Vermont. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, and also studies history, philosophy, and religion. Sandy has been involved in Boy Scouts for over 15 years and is in the Order of the Arrow. He is also a Freemason in the Grand Line of the Grand Lodge of Vermont where he currently serves as Grand Junior Warden, and is active in the Scottish and York Rites. He is married with two grown children and loves to canoe and camp in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York.
RESOURCES:facebook.com/william.karstens.9[email protected]
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Community podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today we’re visiting with physics professor William Carsten’s also known as Sandy. Hey, Sandy. Hey, how you doing? I’m doing great. How are you doing today?
Well, it’s good. It’s first day. We’ve got a little bit of sun after a few days of cloud and just boring drearyness. So it’s good.
Well, it might look like the photo you’ve got up on your screen behind you there. I can only wish.
William Carsten’s is a professor of physics at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. His research areas include optical properties of solids, Einstein’s general relativity, particle physics, and cosmology.
Sandy received his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Vermont, his master’s degree in physics from Brandeis University and his PhD in material science from the University of Vermont.
He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and also studies history, philosophy, and religion. Sandy has been involved in Boy Scouts for over 15 years and is in the order of the arrow. He is also a Freemason, the grand junior warden in the grandline of the grand lodge of Vermont and is active in the Scottish and York rights.
He’s married with two grown children and loves to canoe and camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Sandy, welcome. It’s such a pleasure to have the opportunity to visit with you today. And I know you’re going to be sharing a slideshow with us on physics and sacred geometry, which I imagine many of our audience are going to find very interesting and enriching.
I’ve had an opportunity a few weeks back to get a kind of sneak peek at your work. And I’m really excited to have this opportunity to share this with our Y on Earth community audience.
Good, good. Glad.
Well, what do you think? Should we just jump right into it and get to your presentation?
Yeah, what I’ll do is for the audience, I’ll be sharing a screen of a few slides that I did for a much larger talk. And I’ll do that now.
Just so we have that up.
All right. So the term sacred geometry probably is a bit of a loaded and maybe overused term.
So the things that you’ll see here may not be what you’re expecting. If it’s likely that if you hear the term sacred geometry, people will usually think of the golden mean or the golden ratio, sometimes called the letter, Greek letter fee.
And that’s also kind of conjures up images of the Fibonacci series and logarithmic spirals.
Those are kind of built into this to a degree, and I’ll make mention of it a little bit.
What I chose to go at for this particular presentation that I gave were the ideas of the Trinity threes and twos and how they generate a few other little patterns.
The goal of this really was to show that these things show up at the foundation of particle physics in the way we classify and understand particles in general.
I opened up with a nice little picture here of a Trinity three with a red, blue, and green.
This is a hinting at the colors associated with the gluons or quark properties.
But this can go much beyond that because I’m kind of convinced of the idea of a kind of a rule of three in life, but that that’s for more conversations down the line.
I had hinted at the fact that for many people mathematics is usually something to avoid.
And I think that maybe that’s that’s a bit harsh because if you look a little deeper, there’s a lot more beauty there than you think.
And on the topic of the idea of a sacred geometry, the idea of sacred really is something that conjures up a sense of sacramental as a Catholic myself.
One of the things that we learn about is that the Catholic faith is a sacramental one. So what exactly does that mean?
In the broadest sense, it means you pretty much see God and all things around you.
And I think that one definition that I kind of pulled off of fellow by any Michael Heinz, he’s a theologian at Boston College.
He says that the sacramental principle, obviously in the context somewhat more directly in terms of religion, but I think we can broaden that.
The sacramental principle, he says that which is always in everywhere the case must be noticed, accepted and celebrated somewhere some time.
And I think that’s kind of the idea here is that you look at the pictures and you look at the geometry that we show here and everything in some sense can be sacramental if it reminds you about the deeper mysteries of life of the world around you.
And I think that to me is the is the bigger draw here.
I think the picture of the conic sections, people might look at a circle and say, hey, gee, that’s a circle is not cute.
We like the symmetry and everything else, but did you know that it’s part of a broader class of other shapes, the ellipse, gravel and hyperbola.
And how does it all figure in that’s related and comes about when you talk about Newton’s laws of planetary motion.
And I found out that when you looked at an inverse square law that you would generate these different kinds of shapes for orbits, circles being one of them, ellipses being mostly the one that we’re used to for our planetary motion around the sun.
But also if you do trajectories of comments and other things around large massive objects like the sun, parabolas and hyperbolas may also be the name of the game.
Everybody really pervades everything that we see around us. And I think that’s the sacramental part of it that I want to draw your attention to more than anything else is you just kind of make an awareness.
It makes you think about things that are a little deeper than just the mundane.
This was a picture I showed to kind of start with going from a kind of a unity, if you will, into a duality.
This is a kind of a separation male female plus minus and whatever. And we’re familiar with the yin yang concept connected to this is the idea that there are antiparticles associated with every particle.
Something in Einstein proved with his equations on relativity that every particle has to have a corresponding antiparticle.
So we’ve introduced duality right off the bat.
The Trinity that I like that most people would be familiar with is what I call the atomic Trinity and this one is just a neutron proton electron.
So when you think Trinity, this is obviously not maybe the one you were thinking of father, son, holy spirit.
But this is another one. I think we’re going to find threes all around you.
And that’s sort of the idea behind the sacramental piece is you got a there’s another place where three shows up.
And the minute you do that, you suddenly go, hmm, I’m kind of on track with a much deeper thinking.
In between right in the center there is a is a gamma, which is a representative of the photon.
And that’s the electromagnetic interaction that takes place between charged particles.
Some other nice pictures that one gets.
This is a mezzan octet. This was developed ultimately by Murray-Gelman and others back in the 60s when they first put together the so called eightfold way in trying to classify all of the particles that they were confronted with.
All over the place and we’re trying to figure out what the heck they were completely ahead in front of them.
And they found a way to classify them in a way that made some sense.
And that sense was very geometric. So here you have a nice little hexagon with particles in the center.
And this is generated mathematically. So this isn’t just like hey, let’s just put them into a nice little hexagon because it looks good.
It actually has some mathematical support for doing this.
Same thing for the barrions. In this case you’ll notice the neutron and the proton up there on the top.
And a few of the other particles that they they know and love.
Not all of them would be ones that you’d be familiar with, but certainly the idea of being able to put these into these nice patterns.
Now the eightfold way conjures up some thoughts about maybe some other places where the eightfold way would show up.
And there are several of them to be certainly noted.
That is on the left is the Buddhist kind of eightfold way, if you will, and on the right.
The pictures that are associated with the Taoists and the Yin Yang in the middle.
But also remember too that in the eights, there are eight Beatitudes if you’re a Christian.
So eight shows up in that sense as well.
There’s a 10. So if you if you like to go bowling, you’ll recognize this shape.
Very on the couplet. These are full of other particles that you no doubt probably haven’t heard of either.
But nevertheless they they are classified very nicely in terms of this grouping.
They have similar sorts of properties. They they the reason they go into this is again kind of mathematical.
But ultimately the pattern is is quite beautiful.
Tens show up in other places, of course. So this is a if you want to say sacred or sacramental.
And think of well, what other tens do you know, probably the 10 commandments might come to mind.
We of course have 10 fingers and 10 toes.
So we we use the base 10 system for our numbers.
But if you’re an esotericist, you may know some other interesting little pictures for those that like to follow a little bit of the esoteric ideas of Kavala.
This is the tree of life in its sort of more modern form.
And on the two sides are different versions of the Pythagoras called the Tetractus.
So basically an arrangement of things.
And this is only a couple examples of those things just to sort of hint at that.
Quarks themselves as we dig a little deeper into the structure of matter can be arranged in the same kind of Trinity arrangement.
The quarks and any quarks that’s of the bar means up down and strange were the first three that they found.
Unfortunately or fortunately, they found a few more.
So this doesn’t really complete the picture, but it’s kind of a stepping stone for the idea of this three.
In fact, we go much better than this with the steps on this front.
This is how the quarks create those particles that we saw.
For the mezzons, they’re composed of a quark and an anti quark and for barions, three quarks themselves.
And if you put them together, this is the mezzon octet in terms of the quark structure.
And this is the barion de couplet and barion octet in terms of the quark structure.
So we understand the patterns then as being responsible from a sense of structure underlying all of this, which gets you to think a little bit more carefully about what’s going on with nature around you.
In the final analysis, we believe we are at the sort of pinnacle here as far as the generations.
There are three generations of leptons, the electron being the most familiar for everybody.
But there’s also a muon and a tau particle and they each have a corresponding neutrino.
And you might have heard about neutrinos in the news a little bit too, which be almost massless particles that are really difficult to detect, but are very important for the week interactions.
So what I like about this particular arrangement is you’ve got the trinity with the dual aspect, the twos and threes, which kind of form the foundation of evenness and oddness in everything from then on.
Same thing with the quarks, which is a nice parallel.
So if you’re talking about sacred geometry or a sacramental aspect, this is beautiful and you can’t get any more fundamental than this.
So you have the down and up, strange charmed and bottom and top quarks.
They were a little whimsical when they named these things because at the time they were not convinced they were really there.
So there’s a there’s a nice little arrangement of some geometry.
Another way to look at it is you can put them around in the hexagons again, if you like.
But it also kind of wrapped this up talks about quark properties in terms of color.
Now it’s not that they’re actually red, blue and green, but this became a convenient way to assign a quantum number, a property of the quarks.
There are three of these colors, red, blue and green.
And there are like Einstein, it said they’re corresponding anti colors.
So anti red, anti blue and anti green.
So when you put them together on our favorite little plots, you see those famous triangles again, the trinity.
One arranged in one direction, one arranged in the other direction, which if you interlock the two triangles, you get once again the idea of your hexagon.
And the interlocking triangles, of course, also conjures up the idea of your star of David.
So if you look at the the gluons, which are the carriers of the interact, the strong interaction between quarks, green, red and blue, anti green, anti blue and anti red.
Put those together and you get a nice little star of David type of deal.
And this is what we call the gluons.
So this is just a, this is just a touch.
The reason I had talked about this is this is a very foundation of particle physics and kind of nature, if you will, of where we stand today.
And I thought that that was in some sense kind of interesting to share with folks, certainly from the group that I was associated with, but as I was asked to share here.
As well.
So at that point, I think that’s all the slides that I think I want to get to for this.
The other ones, I don’t think are necessarily more illustrative, but that’s that’s kind of the beginning of some of these things.
Hey, Sandy, thank you so much.
It’s so fascinating.
It has me wondering how the heck do we know all of this?
Is this all, you know, the result of mathematics purely mathematics?
Or is this also, you know, corroborated and developed through observational techniques?
And pretty much at the bottom line with physics, you really do have to come down to the fact that ultimately it is an experimental science.
It does touch at the most deepest levels of nature and the world around us and the universe.
But if you come up with whatever cock-a-name theory you want, it’s got to still hold up the test in the lab.
So the beginning of the, at least the quark model was definitely seen as a little bit with suspicion.
And that’s why the names were given to some of these quarks because there was a sense of well, it’s convenient, but they’re not really there.
But yes, indeed, if you, most of the folks, when you look at these kind of particle physics experiments, I have to use high energies.
There’s an inverse relation to the energy that you use and the size of the particle that you have to probe.
It has to do with the wavelength of the probe.
So it’s the bigger the energy, the smaller the probe length, and that allows you to look at smaller and smaller things.
And yes, indeed, certainly for the quarks, they do see very distinct evidence for the presence of quarks in their families, that the way we showed you in terms of the flavors.
So the scattering experiments with those great, big, huge accelerators are pretty much the place where these sorts of things are experimented with.
Interesting, so interesting.
You know, it’s making me think about that time several years after Einstein published one of his theories that some observers were down in, I think, the southern hemisphere looking at an eclipse.
That was the final sort of experimental verification, if you will, of his theory. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Yeah, the idea here would be what, what general activity would predict is that there’s a kind of a distortion, not only in space, but space time, which is a little harder to kind of put your head around, because we usually see those pictures of indented sort of rubber sheets to get the idea of a kind of a spatial idea.
But we can use that as sort of the same kind of idea here in that if, if we make that equivalence between mass and energy, that’s the famous equals MC squared term.
Then when you talk about something with mass, it will behave in much the same way as something with energy. So light being a form of energy is massless, but because it’s energy will be affected the same way.
So we expect light passing near a very large gravitational object, like the sun, you would find that it should bend just like a regular particle might or a planet or what have you.
And so that was the prediction, and they had to wait for the right arrangement to try and see a star that was behind the sun with the sun being in the way, of course, it was awfully difficult to observe, but within eclipse, it allowed you to block out the effects of the sun.
So you can see the effects of the star that was presumably bending around and sure enough, the star, which was behind the sun, the light rays, bend it around the sun.
So in fact, they could see it on earth where you would expect to not have seen it because of the bending effect.
And so they did measurements and the measurements were right in keeping with the predictions of general relativity. And that was, that was it. That was kind of wow.
When you see that coming out, you realize there’s something going on here that’s just profound.
So interesting, and I’ll tell you that that occurred approximately 100 years ago, plus or minus.
Yeah.
And as you and I are chatting the other day about this history of the development of our mathematics and physics, it was so interesting to me to get a bit of a look into your purview on what has unfolded over the light.
And I wanted to ask you about Newton in particular, because not only was he doing mathematics and physics that really supports our modern approach in a lot of these scientific inquiries, but he was also engaged in an alchemy, right?
He had a lot of other interesting pursuits that here in our modern times might might seem even a little bit out there, right?
Right. Right.
I think it’s it’s interesting when you start looking at history and maybe it’s something that happens when you get older.
I know when I was a kid learning about history was just like boring is all get out. It was like, oh my god, we got history class.
And I’m sure it was the way it was taught that there was not a sense of that beautifully unification, but, but that maybe it’s just one of those things that you appreciate more as you get older and you learn more about the world around you and you make connections and you realize, oh, that’s really interesting how that all played out.
So when you look back in time and you look at the sort of era of Newton or Kepler and Copernicus and all these individuals that were kind of making these inroads toward observing the universe around us, you realize that they were immersed in in a different culture than we’re used to today.
And so the sense of the sort of spiritual magic, if you will, astrology was sort of the name of the game and understand that the term astrology was all they had.
It really meant the word of the stars and that there was no astronomy. There was just simply that was it anything to do with the stars was astrology.
And some people may use of it in terms of sense of connection with people and their actions on earth, but it was really just also just literally observing the stars and being an astronomer.
So ultimately people would make these measurements and Kepler was certainly one of them that put the lid on the geocentric model and ultimately said, okay, look, clearly Copernicus has something right.
We had to shift our viewpoint and here are the orbits. Here’s what they look like. They weren’t circles. They were actually ellipses, which when you think about the measurement capability of Copernicus to do that, to discern circles over ellipses in the orbits was an amazing measurement feat.
And ultimately it shows that what they wanted at the time, the perfection of the circle was very deep, you know, like God and not seeing that was a little bit of a disappointment, but as we’ve kind of hinted at earlier in my little pictures, the circle in the ellipse are part of a bigger, a bigger concept in there, the conic sections.
So Newton comes along and he basically ironically, as they’ve said, on more than one occasion, was in the middle of a pandemic. So he went out to the countryside. He had nothing else to do. He didn’t have the internet and he couldn’t zoom with anybody.
So he had himself to set and ponder these things in the midst of which he was very heavily involved with a number of individuals in, as you pointed out, an alchemy in trying to understand these things.
And it’s difficult to try and pinpoint where the divisions are because alchemy certainly did encompass actual things that you work with to kind of provide these understandings of how materials change and what you did, but there was that spiritual sense of it as well as it is a metaphor for something deeper.
And they have been both for him. It’s really hard to tell, but you look at the people that they interacted with and the kinds of things that they they delved into and I’m pretty sure there was a feature of both that’s in there because they were they were interested in the world around them in many ways.
So for for Newton, the alchemy was a big part of him, but also trying to get at the mathematics as a way of seeing the expression of the deity in the world around it.
So there he goes often to his into his place and has to deal with the concept of change. And so that’s where the calculus comes into play for him and develops the model that we know today is the universal law of gravitation and lo and behold, derives the conic sections for the for the orbits of planets obeying the force of gravity of the inverse square law.
And out pops these these things his equations of motion just dealing with motion in general, which also had to be folded into that.
F equals MA that some people may know is is is was was very if it took a lot of effort to put that out there because most people were very Aristotelian.
And ironically, when you kind of couple that with the alchemist concept, which usually had with in its purview the idea of earth air, fire and water that the four elements and for Aristotle, it was literal.
So in other words, things that were like fire, burn because that they had a certain fire quality, things that were light wanted to be up into the air.
So things that floated want to be up where the air was things that fell to the ground were earth like.
So that’s a more of a literal concept, but I think that the alchemist idea was a little bit deeper than that.
Nevertheless, he pushed against that as far as an understanding and way forces do what they do.
So when you think about it, it’s a kind of interesting contradiction for him because he was a definitely a practicing alchemist in some way.
But in looking at physics, he went right at it with his basic equations of motion, introducing the idea of forces directly related to what we would call an acceleration rather than a velocity.
There’s a lot tied up with that that we talked about in our usual physics classes, but it’s interesting that he didn’t make use of what was kind of the old Aristotelian way of doing it.
And once that was born, we have a very kind of deterministic universe, mechanistic one that was introduced.
I think he would be appalled at what developed because of that, because ultimately along with the enlightenment and a lot of other things, people glammed on to the idea that Newton put together.
And ultimately it seemed to sort of say, oh, well, now we can explain this and we can explain that.
And if I look at his equations of motion, all I apparently need are the initial conditions and then boom, everything is determined from then on.
Well, that doesn’t sit too well with folks that would like to think about free will and things like that.
So obviously it ran up against them detractors, but it also the mechanistic view kind of got hung on to for the science folks.
And we’ve ever kind of since somewhere in there with a transition, as I said with the enlightenment and industrialization began to kind of move away from the kind of religious aspect of things and a more science aspect of things, which as I said, I think I think Newton would be appalled at how that how that all developed.
So it’s so interesting and I want to ask you about the Royal Society and really what in the last, you know, 400 years or so was unfolding in how certain orders or networks like the Masonic order, for example, was helping to form this fabric among different thinkers and natural philosophers.
Over these last few centuries, do you have a sense of what that kind of looks like over that time period?
It’s hard. And the readings I’ve done introduced different individuals depending on who you talk to, but ultimately right into 1600 seemed to be this this sort of zeitgeist of time where people began to think a little bit more carefully about the world around them.
Obviously, this is the time when Galileo was making his observations and the church wasn’t exactly pleased with that.
Galileo died at the exact birth year of Newton and 1642. So you’re getting a lot of these sorts of things kind of happening right around that time.
The things that though there were characters that were involved in certain sort of a more of a sort of a learning aspect of things, the world getting together much of the, they were practicing alchemists, but I think the idea here was that they were going at it from a very kind of experimental sense, you know, what happens if.
And this was really kind of the dawn of what they sometimes call the invisible college is that there were some things going on behind the scenes,
because alchemy was then originally okay by by the church, because they thought, okay, there’s some neat symbolisms and things and they began to realize that maybe it wasn’t exactly what they wanted.
And so it was banned in many of the countries. So it had to be, they had to be quiet about it. In fact, there was punishable by death in some cases. So they really, really had to be quiet.
And so they would do a lot of things behind, behind closed doors with secret messages and everything else.
At the same time, folks seem to be a part of these Masonic lodges that were around whether this was, you know, there’s, there’s definite got documentation for people with lodges that were taking place in there.
The official grand lodge of England didn’t happen until 1717, but there were a lot of things that were going on before that.
And it seemed that the same people that were part of these lodges were also the same individuals that were getting together and trying to work out nature.
And that’s probably partly due to the fact that the church kind of owned education for everybody.
And a lot of people didn’t read. And so again, the church folks that read were usually in the clergy or the monastic folks.
So ultimately what you went up with is people trying to learn on their own about truths that maybe the church wasn’t as excited about.
So I think that there’s a sense of that. That’s where maybe the sense of secrecy that kind of comes into this is that there really was a time when they, when they were trying to get together to learn stuff, they had to be really, really careful about who knew about it.
Because of course the acquisition and everything else were still kind of part of the part of the name of the game. And you had people that would rad on you.
So they had to be really careful about their secrets. And when they did get together the idea of the, the, the beginnings of the college, if you well, of the royal society is ultimately testing this gets back to the experimental thing we’re talking about the particle physics.
It says some basically their, their motto is that you not don’t believe people’s word go out and test it yourself. And so they would constantly do all these different experiments.
And they were like crazy. Some of the stuff they did blood transfusions between animals and all kinds of other crazy things among many other situations trying to evacuate air to see what happens in a vacuum.
I think there’s one story and I know it was Robert Huck or one of them had tried to do it in a great big room to see what would happen if they were in it.
And of course he fainted because he didn’t have enough oxygen and they had to go in and kind of help him out.
That may be, you know, an apocryphal sort of thing, but I don’t know.
But that seems to be out there. But the point is that they did like just experimented like crazy and they would show here’s my result.
Let me try it. Let me try it. Let me try it. So there was this constant sense of trying to learn what was going on.
And really that’s that’s kind of the, you know, you can assign individuals, but I think that’s sort of the birth of the idea of a real experimental science and trying to take a look at the world around you and understand what’s going on.
So it’s so exciting. And you know, I heard the other day that around the time Einstein was doing his work.
We didn’t really know that there were so many other galaxies out there. And I was, I was just floored in the last couple of years to learn that most everything we can see in the night sky is simply from our own galaxy with perhaps one exception with with the naked eye.
And that now we know there are what millions, if not billions of other galaxies out there.
And my gosh, to have such an explosion of understanding in just one century, I’m curious, Sandy, whether we’re talking the macro or the micro.
Do you have a sense or an excitement about what you think might become revealed to us in the, you know, in the next few decades, say three, four, five decades or even century always.
And I don’t think, you know, anybody that kind of touches touches this stuff after a certain point you can’t help, but kind of think, because your imagination goes and you kind of think what if or what they would this look like.
It is interesting that you kind of mentioned the development of of how our perspective is always is starting from our own ego.
You know, we started putting the us at the center of the university earth. That was the geocentric and then all of a sudden we realized we got dethroned from that one.
But then again, we thought, okay, well, that was it. We’ve got our little solar system. Well, then you realize, no, we’re actually part of a bigger galaxy.
And then it was really kind of within that decade of Einstein in the 20s and then with Hubble that they begin to realize that not only are there galaxies, but there’s tons of them out there. We’re not even the center of the universe.
We’re just a little blip in the galaxy among billions of other galaxies. So that perspective rapidly got thrown as far as our cells being at the center of attention, if you will.
And all you have to realize is in the timeframe that that reveals that was just from that part from Einstein to now hundred, hundred years.
That’s that’s that’s a nanosecond in history of the world. And if some to imagine what it would be like in another hundred years, given the exponential growth of what we do.
A thousand years that you kind of just go, what could it possibly? What are we going to find? What’s going to be dark energy or dark matter? What’s exactly what is that? Are we going to see the unification of things and what will that look like?
So you can’t help but be in that kind of frame of mind. And I think that’s kind of the whole idea behind kind of just a sense of learning that I think people always push back against. That’s maybe one of the downfalls that we have at least in our own society is that we see education and learning as something is a means to an end.
You know, we spend our time saying, well, I got to get this certificate so I can get a job.
And I see a lot of people that seem to just sort of shut down after a while. I did, they need to learn what they do in their job, but that’s about it.
But there’s not that sense of just like wonder. It says, wow, what else is out there or what else can I learn? And to me, that’s the heart that has to happen for people.
But it’s it’s sadly not there for a lot of individuals. And that’s a that’s a real problem.
Yeah, no doubt about it. And it for me sort of evokes this question around how the modern expression of science has has sort of de sanctified a lot of our kind of secular views of the world of each other of
our lives and lifestyles. And I’m curious as we seem to be progressing in certain respects in our understanding, especially in the realm of physics and mathematics, you know, somebody like
Frijoff Capra comes to mind who we discuss the other day with his amazing seminal book, Dow a physics published, I think in the 1970s.
It’s sort of bringing back in this sense of sacred wonder, awe, reverence to the scientific discussions. And I’m curious asking a question sort of on two levels.
Among your scientific colleagues in the academic realm, do you find that there’s a deep sense of wonder on even a sense of the sacred and then the second part of this question is, do you see the trend developing in a direction where more and more of us are going to be able to sort of hold in both hands, science and this deeper sort of spiritual relating with the world.
Yeah, I kind of have no doubt.
I realize that, you know, there’s a lot of folks when you talk among your own colleagues
that you generally tend to, in the science, you tend not to touch on these other subjects
because you don’t really know where they are and there’s a story on that. But I’ll mention
before I do that is that ultimately, you know, we lost sight of the kind of unification
of the world and the joy of just learning back in the early days because, as I mentioned,
when we had astrology as a name for looking at the stars, the term for most of the folks back then
was a natural philosopher and that was applied to anybody that was really trying to understand
the world in all this myriad forms. Once we came along with the word science, which essentially
means to know or knowledge, it kind of suddenly grew a line in the sand and said, okay, we know
when you doubt kind of thing, not that that was the intent, but there was a sort of a solidification
that said, hmm, so you’re not really searching anymore, you already know. And even though that
would be, we’d get pushback from the sense of scientists thinking that, the fact is that people
pick up on that. When they enter a science class, they get the feeling like it’s all done now
and they’re just getting a bunch of facts and so on and trying to dispell them of that as usually
a quite assured as a teacher. But one of the colleagues that I work with at the College of
Bunch of Years Back, who was in the chemistry department and I had gotten a chance to talk with her
and it come to find out that she was very religious and spiritual, but you wouldn’t have known it
because in our own little milieu, you don’t really kind of talk about those things. It just sort of
is one of those, you know, you kind of get us try to see where people are and go there, but if you
don’t know otherwise, then you just don’t you don’t do it. The organization that our college is
a part of is a bunch of about 60 or so Catholic colleges and universities are part of a group called
Collegium. And what’s nice there is that when you go, it’s kind of an intellectual faith and intellectual
sort of center of trying to develop that as far as your presence on a Catholic College. You know,
what does that mean? It isn’t necessarily for Catholics. It’s for anybody that’s on the campus
as a faculty member trying to figure out what their role is on a on a campus like that. And you get
everybody from all the disciplines. And what’s a joy is to get together with people that you
already know are probably going to have a little bit of that spiritual sense talking, you do you do
discipline specific gatherings besides everybody mixed together so you can kind of talk about
many of your your issues. And this, of course, is one of the issues that comes up all the time.
You can’t you can’t talk because you’re you’re afraid that you’re going to get categorized into
something. But with everybody that’s there, you know that you’ve got that freedom and everybody
talks about all these different things. And it’s a wonderful thing. Where this goes, you know,
I’ve kind of gotten to the point where that the best thing that we can do is carry the torch
in forward with those of us who see the light on this on this front. I think spending too much
time trying to battle the people that don’t don’t buy into it or aren’t spiritual or see religion
and science as being never the twain show me. I think there’s a certain point when you know what,
I’m not going to waste energy trying to convince you. I’m just going to go with the people that
are moving forward and drag everybody into the wake because I think there’s more people that are
kind of realizing that there’s something deeper there. And I think our message has to be yes,
there is. And let’s help you find it. We don’t have to be at odds in any way, shape or form.
It’s really wonderful. And you know, one of my favorite lineages of thinkers and natural philosophers
from Kant to Gerta to Nietzsche Steiner Carl Jung right up into Joseph Campbell. And by the time
we get into these modern guys like Jung and Campbell, we don’t necessarily think of them as
scientists anymore, although Jung of course had a medical training. But many of those in that line
were Freemasons. And it’s so interesting to me that we have Joseph Campbell exploring myth
and mythology and cultures all around the world, all of these different ways of understanding and
explaining and describing and sharing story about our situation in this vast cosmos. And I’m just
curious, I know you’ve been doing some exploring of Joseph Campbell recently. What are you discovering
there that might kind of tie back into the scientific work that you’re doing? Well, I’ve kind of
discovered him in terms of actually from more of the Masonic side. And I think the impact of how
you think about yourself and about you in the world is important regardless of whether you’re
a scientist or otherwise. So I think it impacts anybody and everybody. What’s interesting is
the sense in this kind of a little bit of a sense of the Masonic background in here. I was struck
by a particular article by a Grand Master, former Grand Master from California. Because when you
look at the fraternity itself, it talks about there’s a sort of a deeper sense of these mystery
religions from way way back in the early days, the Uesinian mysteries and Mr. cults that were
really after kind of a deep spiritual development and growth. And at the same time, you also seem
to have another strain in our sort of quality, which seems to head towards being a good person.
In other words, there’s a moral sort of strain to it. And trying to reconcile those was kind of
difficult. I would see both of them and try to figure out how to make those all work. And an
interesting article, as I said by John El Cooper from, he’s a 33rd degree of Mason. And he wrote
about what he called the double helix and Freemasonry. And the double helix, he says, is both of those
things. One was Neoplatonist in its sort of beginnings and is really getting at the spiritual
growth and development, kind of looking at a sense of that deeper mystery of ourselves.
But at the other side was a more stoicism kind of thing, which headed towards the,
you know, being a good person, the citizen and moral person and integrity and all the different
terms that go with that. And that the two strains are part of the DNA helix. But of course,
so one in each, but they’re all part of one thing. What connected them was the idea of myth.
And that’s where Joseph Campbell kind of came into this and thinking about, this connection is
these myths that tell us bigger stories about ourselves, how we fit into this world and what
is the message for me. And I think that to me was, you know, reading what he had to say,
I can’t summarize it and I’m terrible at remembering what quotes people have. But ultimately, there’s
a sense that is with everything, it’s an inward journey. And more people, I think, are desperate
to do this. So whether you’re a scientist, whether you’re, you know, an English person,
history, or you’re just a mechanic, that inner journey, I think, is an important piece for all
of us to discover. And ultimately, there’s a kind of a unification that is desired. There’s a
unity here where we’re seeking a kind of reconnection, if you will, with the divine. Whatever you
want to call that, that reconnection, I think, is extremely important. And as I kind of mentioned,
when we talk about science, you know, all the stuff that’s out there, it includes, of course,
the whole breadth of biology, chemistry, physics, math, computer science, but also on that level
is ecology. And I think that one of the interesting things is to recognize that that unity reclaiming
and reconnection with the divine really includes everything. It’s yes, it’s with our fellow humans
on the earth, but it’s with all of creation. And that includes the world around us and how we take
care of it. We do a pretty crappy job of taking care of each other these days. But that doesn’t mean
that there aren’t people out there that are doing it. And that’s what I mean about kind of the
torch that has to be carried. We may not be good at fighting the ones that don’t want to listen,
but our best thing is to drag people along into the vision of where we want to go. And I think
that unity is an extremely important concept in here in everything that we do. It’s really,
it’s so, it’s so interesting. And I’m curious, I want to ask you, being in the the grand lodge
of Vermont as a free Mason, as the grand junior warden, can you tell us, you know, what does that
mean? And what is Masonry looking like right now in Vermont? And I imagine many of your students
and others in your community might come across some of these wild conspiracy stories on the internet
and so on. And I’m just curious, you know, how do you, when, when folks ask, gosh, you’re a Mason,
what, what does that mean? What do you do? What is Masonry? How do you respond to those kinds of
inquiries? It’s, I’ve gone back and forth on how to respond with a kind of an elevator speech,
and it’s what I, what I found I was, I was helped along with the reality of a question like that
is to bounce it back to the questioner and say, well, what are you looking for? Because a lot of
times you could answer the question with certain aspects of what it is you’re trying to describe
Masonry or otherwise. And you may not be answering their question. You may have completely missed
the mark. So a lot of times I’ll just bounce it back and then you can be interviewed or dialogue
with them more easily. Because the elevator speech is really, really hard. But, but in the short,
short, short answer, if you will, is the way we, we kind of operate is, as I mentioned, are,
are kind of our background is that kind of sense of, of strains, two strains of working on ourselves.
It’s a personal journey when you really think about it. It’s a fraternity, absolutely. But the way
we are, are sort of official birth is from the Grand Lodge of England, which is now the United
Grand Lodge. And that ultimately they granted charters to different lodges in different places
and then after a while that began to grow. So here in the United States, each state, for example,
and of course it’s all over the world as well. So you have countries with Grand Lodges and
there you have to be a little bit more careful because Masonry is, there’s all kinds of
Masonry out there. But for the United States, there’s sort of a standard free Mason that follows
certain sort of traditions, ancient landmarks and so on. And each of the states is its own jurisdiction
if you will. So you can think of it as like its own country. And if they’re not doing anything
really, really bad, you recognize them. And there’s kind of like a, almost like a, you know, United
Nations thing. You know, I can go to that state and they come to our state and be recognized.
But within that, each of them has an overarching Grand Lodge, which gives the charters to each
of the lodges, you know, kind of pyramid kind of concept so that they can operate in the same way.
Ultimately, the goal of free Masonry, I think in many ways, is a, and this is the, we say it’s
to make good men better, but it’s so much deeper than that. Because as I said, it’s a spiritual
journey. It does have aspects of trying to discover the inner soul of yourself, but also of being
reminded about being a good person and so on, which a lot of organizations do. But it’s
intertwined with something a lot deeper. So that’s the idea. And when we have rituals and the idea
of ritual here is to, when you go through ritual, there’s a transformation that really should be
taking place. If you look at it from the right perspective, a lot of people don’t and they,
we haven’t done a very good job of education to be honest with you. And this is something we’re
still trying to revisit because if you think about rituals just being, well, you got to memorize
this, then you miss the point. Think about somebody who memorizes a line in poetry or a sonnet from
Shakespeare. You don’t do it just because somebody told you to memorize it. You do it because it’s
something internal that you want to convey outward. And I think that’s the true meaning of the idea
of a ritual. As somebody has pointed out, when you say that you learn something by heart,
learning by memory, you learn it by heart, that means it becomes a part of you. So our ritual is
a transformation concept and a way of imbuing you with what we have to say. But really, it’s a
fertile, it’s meant to be a fertile ground for everybody to find their path. And so that’s the,
that’s the nice feature about what we are. Within the lodges, it behaves a little bit like a business.
So there’s a, there’s kind of like a top three officers that we have and then we’ve got a bunch
of other ones. We have treasures and secretaries. And then the grandline, which is just a copy of
each of the little mini lodges, the big state version of it, that’s like a being a CEO and
vice president and so on for the whole state. So there’s a business part of it. The problem is that
many lodges got to caught up in the business stuff because they, that’s something they knew,
that they kind of forgot the spiritual side of things. And so we’re running into problems
trying to attract members into the fraternity because they misunderstand what we’re about.
We do charity, we like to get together and so on. But ultimately, we’re not a charity organization.
We don’t go out and build houses for people. That doesn’t mean we don’t, but it’s not our purpose.
The idea is to foster that inner inner sense so everybody goes out and does what they feel is
the right thing for them to do in the world. So as far as conspiracies, well, it all has to do with
the fact that, you know, we do have, we’ve kept ourselves secret for a while. It’s a misunderstanding
because now we’re kind of realizing that that was not the way to go. We’re not a secret society
because, as people will say, you can find out who we are. We’re a society with some secrets. And
at the very basic level, you would say, well, that’s, you know, our words and ham shakes and all that
stuff, which is really modes of recognition. But at a deeper sense, some people will tell you,
learning about the mysteries, the deeper mysteries, there were things that were you weren’t meant to know
about yourself that you should address until you’re ready. So there’s a deeper sense of secrecy
in there that really is harder to explain unless you’re part of it. People love conspiracies. I don’t
know if you can do anything about it, but ultimately our best bet in which we’ve been trying to do
is to try and change the front-end message. England has been trying to do that with their
grand lodge. They’ve been putting out a lot of things to try and change the public message about
what they do. And the Scottish right, the Northern Masonic jurisdiction here, while in Lexington
Massachusetts, where their headquarters is, is also doing the same thing. It’s not just the
Mandamason sort of promotional campaign in trying to get people to realize, hey, we’re right here,
and this is what we stand for. This is nothing secret. In fact, if truth be told, we talk about this
among ourselves and people say they’re trying to take over the world. Well, man, if we could take
over the world, just think about what the world could be if they were actually following some of
the principles that we, you know, we profess. Yeah, you know, that reminds me of the documentary
that I saw a few months back, Tara Masonica, that gives this kind of worldwide tour of
Freemasonry in our modern times. And I was struck when they were looking at a lodge in Jerusalem,
where Muslim, Jewish and Christian men came together and meet in this, the spirit of brotherly love.
Of course, we, you know, Benjamin Franklin, one of the great founders and framers of the United
States, did so much in the Philadelphia area, which is known as the city of brotherly love.
If that’s the kind of thing that the organization can spread and propagate, why I think that’d
be pretty good for our whole planet. I would certainly think so. And in that love, that sense is
really a very sacramental concept that we’re trying to promote. And in that particular image that
you mentioned is what we’re about. Ultimately, when you look at the different people with different
from different religions coming together in brotherly love, that’s that statement. I don’t think
you’re going to find anywhere else in any other organization around the world. That says volumes
about what we really represent and what we’re trying to promote. The problem, of course, is that we’re
we’re an organization populated by humans. And so once again, it’s flawed. So do we make mistakes?
Yeah. Do we have people that have egos that get in the way? Yeah. But you can’t you can’t use that
to drag it down. You have to use the ideal, the vision of where it meant to be because ultimately that
pushes us and pulls us forward into where we should be going. Rather than worrying about the mistakes
that some humans do, which they’re going to do. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, let me take a moment to
remind our audience that this is the why on earth community podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William
Perry. And today we’re visiting with William Carstens, also known as Sandy, talking about particle
physics and sacred geometry and also learning a bit about free masonry and the history of natural
philosophy over the last several centuries. I’d like to thank our partners and supporters. Of
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with substantial grants and donations to support not only our podcast series, but also our community
mobilization work for soil regeneration, climate action, neighborhood resilience and culture of
kindness. And a huge thanks to everybody making all this happen. And it’s really, to me, Sandy,
interesting to start connecting a lot of these different dots that I imagine many of our friends
in our communities may not have thought of as being so connected previously. And I’m curious,
as an educator, the joy of learning that you seem to possess really comes through in a conversation
like this. And I can only imagine that as an educator, as a teacher, some of that joy in that
passion might be contagious, perhaps. I’m curious, when you’re teaching some of these topics and
subjects, what is that experience like working in particular with young adults?
It’s morphed over time. And it’s gotten better. Even the early times you’re still trying to figure
yourself out in the context. But over time, you begin to realize you see more of the joy of
getting past the difficult parts. Because we always bemoan at least in the physics community.
We’re not like the English folks where we can talk about some romantic novel and get into deep
discussions about it right off the bat. We have to basically confront an audience that
already is fearful of what you have to offer. Some of them have to take it. So you’ve got to,
you know, an audience that’s not exactly thrilled at being there. So you’ve, confronting that has
taken a while to kind of get through. And I think that after a certain point, when you kind of get
to the point where it’s all kind of a part of you, and you’re less worried about, you know, the details
that you were worried about before. Because you’ve come to understand that for the most part,
what most people come away with is usually only a, what do they say, 30% of what you have to say
in the whole big scheme of things and probably less when it comes to science or mathematics
unless they’re actually majors. So I kind of switched gears in terms of the way I saw it.
And not that I didn’t teach that the subject matter was still the same. This is how you
approached it and realized that I’d rather have more fun doing it than trying to battle whether they’re,
you know, mad at having to take the course or not having difficulty. And so I just, you know,
and I’m still working at that trying to change the mindset to just like we said, the joy of just
what’s fun about this is that there’s actually some cool things. So it was easier once I went down
that path to interspers in the midst of doing the stuff we had to do, things that are of interest.
You know, so I would mention, you know, did you know Newton was actually an alchemist.
And I would talk about, we do electricity and magnetism. We’ll talk about the beginnings of
the ideas of current. And I would introduce Mary Shelley because at the time, the first sort of
sense of a life force was discovered when that fork and knife went into the frog’s legs and a jump.
And so all of a sudden, you kind of, there’s fosters of story about a life force having be associated
with electricity. And lo and behold, you get the Frankenstein story. But then if you dig deeper
into that, you realize, oh, yes, but there’s also a whole lot more in the Frankenstein story. If you
know, there’s a deeper thing there about creator and what was created and so on. So you kind of
get into these conversations with the students. Plus, you’re able to kind of poke fun. I’ll do more
of, well, I know we got to do this. And yeah, here’s one of the things we got to do. And it’s kind
of part of the game. But I also give them different ways of looking at it. And just trying to
get it a sense that this is actually kind of fun. And yes, there’s some drudgery, things that you
have to kind of learn just like anything else. Really, it’s the same thing that you would have to do.
And I usually use the example playing an instrument or playing a sport, right? You got to do the A2s
to got to practice your agility with your fingers or mamba sure or whatever. It’s not necessarily fun.
You’re not playing an orchestra, you know, a symphony of some sort or a great concerto. You got to
do it. And the same thing for sports is some, you know, basic routine things you have to do. They’re
not fun necessarily, but they’re what you keep you keep you adapt. And so sometimes I’ll use that
as an example to say, yes, what we got to do is keep ourselves fresh, but here’s where it’s going.
Here’s where we kind of could be going with all of this stuff. And it becomes more fun.
After a while, it just becomes more fun as you as you make that recognition.
That is a great trend. More fun. I like that. I’m writing that down right now.
And in Santa, you’ve been kind enough to share your email address with our audience. In case anyone
would like to reach out to you, it’s W. Carstens at smcvt.edu. And we’ll share this in the show notes.
And folks can also connect with you via Facebook at William.carstens.9. That’s the number 9 at the end,
which will be in the show notes as well. And, you know, before before we sign off our discussion
for today, I want to ask you, Sandy, about Richard Roar and St. Francis, because these two
interesting fellows came up in our recent. And Richard Roar is one of the writers. I really admire
now and actually referenced him a bit in my book Why on Earth. Compliments to my wonderful editor,
Morris Stiles. But I’d like to kind of tie this whole conversation together, landing on a bit more
of a mystical spiritual note with the figure St. Francis and our contemporary Richard Roar and ask
you to riff on them of it. Yeah, as I mentioned to you, I had discovered him when I was working
with folks on the campus. We do a lent ad vent thing. And the guy that I work with had sent me an
article that was from Richard Roar. And I read it and it was like blown away with it. And it just
said, this is really interesting. And I found more about him. And now I get regular sort of weekly
meditations from him. I’ve gotten already several of his books and read through. And if some,
the sense of how really pushing the envelope here in developing and seeing the world in the,
in certainly from the Christian perspective, which is where he’s coming from. And realizing all
that you’ve been sort of reading about before was was stilted in much of the way of what it was
really meant to to promote. I can’t encapsulate that here, of course. But it really opens up the door
to a much more meditative and spiritual sense of things. And because the, he’s a Franciscan priest.
So he draws from St. Francis. And of course, who do we have as a Pope right now, who is trying to
make some changes. And I think a more positive direction. And he’s getting a hit from the conservatives
because they want things in the old ways. It’s interesting to know that, you know, you’ve got,
and this is, I don’t know if it’s Alia Delio, who’s a theologian from Villanova, who wrote the
emerging, you know, evolving Christ. And ultimately, the sense of what’s been lost in certainly
the Catholic Church seems to be something in which the society and science has moved along.
And the Catholic Church sort of pretends to stay up and they’ve got their own, you know, Vatican
astronomer and everything else. But they haven’t really changed anything from back. They’re still left
in the middle ages in the way they think about many of these things. And I think there’s,
there’s folks out there that are trying to make those changes in realizing there’s a deeper spirituality
that’s going on here, a mysticism that that is completely missed. And once you start reading a
little bit about this stuff, you realize what’s missing. And what I like about St. Francis is that
his connection with the natural world is probably the most prevalent feature about him. And as we
talked before, he would, he would talk to, he would, you know, converse with the animals with
the earth and everything else is being kind of a, it really interested in them. That sounds a
little bit funny sounding, but it was really a very serious connection. And that, that unity,
removing ourselves from, from an ego position. And this is a big part of what he, what Richard
Roer promotes. And his latest book actually is a kind of a combination of some things he’s talked
about before, a kind of order disorder reorder concept. It’s another trinity there in which you
basically dismantle the ego view of ourselves and kind of reorient ourselves into a much more
unified kind of way of seeing things. And like St. Francis, he looks at everything, including
ourselves and the world around us as being worthy of sacramentality. So when we think about taking
care of the earth, it is just as important as taking care of each other. And those are the themes
that kind of begin to come out from these discussions. And the more you read about it,
they’ve got some great pithy statements. I couldn’t begin to tell you what they are off the top
of my head, but they’re, they really get at some of these, some of these concepts. And I’d suggest
for any of your, your viewers who are interested in the sustainability concepts is, is to understand
it for themselves because really this is a transformation in the people that we have on the earth.
You’re, you can put all the technologies about how to do sustainable growing in a farm community
or whatever, but without people buying into it, it really is just some, it’s mechanical.
So I think that what ultimately has to happen is people have to be transformed. And I find in
those writers a pathway towards recognizing that and realizing that you’ve been missing something
all along. And I think people know it. They know it inside because people seek out nature. They
seek out that quiet solitude. You hear it all the time, even in the classrooms, how many
teachers do we see who practice a little bit of meditation before they start their class?
I’ve done that with some things with some groups of the church that I’ve done that the thing they
remember, they say, wow, I always thought it was a little bit kind of, you know, maybe I’m not a big
person to do it, but they were really, they responded very positively and realized that in the life
lives that we live today are so devoid of just some peace and quiet. People seem to be afraid to
be with themselves, their own thoughts. And I think that’s a pathway towards recognizing a kind of a
unity that’s there, but you have to get people out there to see it, to recognize it. And that’s why,
you know, from my own experiences in scouting and certainly from my, my own family and being taken
out into the nature, you have to recognize it and see it. And that way your connection is much more
real than some abstract person telling you that, hey, it’s good to conserve water. It’s a good
thing to, you know, do this for, you know, for our planet. If you don’t have that real connection,
it’s, I think it’s abstract. So the more we can get people to recognize this, I think is really
is a huge thing to do, I guess, however you want to say it, but that’s what needs to happen. And I
know that people, people are looking for it. They really are. But so that’s, you know, and I know I
haven’t told you much about either of those two people in any deep sense, but, you know, I know our
time is short. And perhaps we can delve into it on another, another talk down in the line, but
but I think the message would be for your, for your viewers to say, take a look at these individuals,
read some of their books. And I think you’re going to be absolutely astounded at what’s there.
And the spirituality that is associated with, we’re seeing Francis, especially given what I
presume will be your viewers. Yeah, absolutely beautiful, Sandy. And I love the idea of having
another conversation at some point down the road. That would be wonderful. I’d like to plant that
seed with you as well. And I want to thank you on behalf of the Wieners community for taking
time to visit with us today and share so much. It’s been such a gift. I’ve got pages of
news here. And we only scratched the surface. Which indeed. And yeah, thanks again. And before we
sign off, just want to invite if there’s anything else you’d like to say or share.
The last thing I’ll mention, which I know for both of us have been our members of Phi Beta Kappa.
And our basic motto, Philosophia B. Cubanadas means essentially the love of wisdom is the pilot of
life. But I like to think of it as the love of learning is the guide of life is usually the more
sort of pedestrian way of saying it. And I would say that that to me is a huge piece of what should
be a part of everybody’s motto in philosophy is to just love of learning. And I would put that out
there for everyone to make more public, I guess. So that’s my sign off. It’s really wonderful.
It’s beautiful. I’ll include that in the show notes. And thanks again, Sandy. You really appreciate
it. It was a real pleasure talking with you. And I look forward to seeing you down the line. Thank
you very much. Yep. Look forward to it. The YonEarth community stewardship and sustainability
podcast series is hosted by Aaron William Perry, author, thought leader, and executive consultant.
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