Colin states:
My life has been oriented around understanding the nature of the world and
existence. Physics provides me with the tools I need to comprehend the natural
world, which is infinitely rich in structure and beauty. Part of that beauty is
sensuous, accessible to sight and touch, and part of that beauty is abstract,
accessible to the "eyes in our head":
But the fool on the hill sees
the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning around.
Two parallel
levels of cognition - the sun moving, the world spinning.
Kabbalah provides me with the
means to understand the inner
world of my conscious experience. I find no tension between physics and kabbalah. Neither is a
definitive and finished account of the world . Even in science there are
multiple, overlapping levels of explanation (what Edward Wilson calls consilience)
and we can afford ourselves the luxury of having many metaphors, many
explanations, many frameworks. What is important is not the finished account
(which will never happen): it is the process of unceasing exploration,
and that in turn demands that we extend the boundaries of our existing
conceptualisation.
The "spiritual" dimension is important because it dignifies life.
Reason is like a piece of string that must always be tied to something solid
before one can hang anything from it. There is always a first premise, always an
assumption, even if it is squirreled away so cleverly that it is hard to spot.
The
base assumptions in moral and ethical behaviour are not (pace Kant)
derived from reason alone. They derive from millennia of experience of living in
the world. All experience is interpreted, and a legitimate part of that
experience (with an accompanying domain of interpretation) is what we call
"the spiritual". I am a monist: I do not see "the
spiritual" as a separate level of being from "the natural world".
The Hermetic Kabbalah reveals the spiritual as an act of cognitive intention, a
way of being-in-the-world that opens doors of understanding and experience that
are as important as anything gleaned with a spectrometer. And it is that
inarticulate understanding and experience that provides the solid, fixed points
on which to anchor the slender threads of reason and argument.
Photographs by Laura Cooper, 2001.
And yes, that is Colin's hair.
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Copyright © Colin Low 2001
Colin Low was born in
Scotland in 1951 and attended 14 schools in Scotland, Nyasaland and Australia.
In spite of this erratic education he studied physics
at the University of Western Australia and graduated with first class honours in
1972. He went on to study star formation at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK. His entire professional life has
revolved around computers, with four years as a consultant, 9 years as a
lecturer in Computer Science at the University of London, and 13 years as an
industrial researcher with Hewlett Packard. He has authored several academic papers and
is named as inventor on 27 patents.