Creations Here and in the Sky
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I gave four workshops this year. Mathematics and Religion featured some discussions about the existence of God, the incompleteness of mathematics, and the Beyond Principle. Stories of the Sky featured stories of the stars from around the world and SUUSI; workshop participants made their own star tales, including Rev. Edward Scott Michael's radio telescope fromt he stars of Auriga and Taurus (near a radio telescope I created out of Gemini years ago) and an angelfish swimming towards the ship Argo with the Belt of Orion for its mid-body fin rudder. I presented a technique new to SUUSI in Polyhedra Origami, the PhiZZ method, and some participants made dodecahedra, including the one at bottom center. On Friday I showed how to solve Sudoku puzzles, and on the left is a puzzle for SUUSI people to solve: each row, column, and colored region must contain the nine characters required to spell "SUUSI 2007". The SUUSI puzzle was provided to me by Laura Taalman, a professor at James Madison University, who has co-published a new book, Color Sudoku. For more details on my workshops, go to my before-SUUSI 2007 page.
I took one workshop (broken up into four workshops), that of the Theory of Everything by Ken Wilber. Mr. Wilber tries to explain everything in Quadrants, Levels, States, Lines and Types. An example of each in that order is I, Yellow (integral), subtle, aesthetic, and INTJ. To me the most helpful of these is Levels (Beck and Cowan), which explain much of what we know about the patterns by which we behave. I found the concept of Boomeruddhism (misguided Boomer Buddhism) interesting. In Buddhism, you lose self, but Boomer Buddhists have a tendency to emphasize the self. To me Everything is the same as God, so Mr. Wilber's books are really books about God. The Beyond Principle I stated in my Mathematics and Religion workshop states that you can always go beyond something, and to me that is the antithesis of Ken Wilber's Everything; i.e., I do not believe a God exists. Still I find Ken Wilber's writings interesting.