Dear Theophilus, 

In the last letter I had written that happiness is a sum of all that we desire. We tend to see happiness as consisting in getting what we want but this would make happiness a transient thing, shifting from day to day. (And isn't it true to say that most of us live in this state?) The problem here is that we equate happiness with contentment and this search for contentment brings us into conflict and causes a lot of our misery. Much of our lives are spent in watching our wants which are sometimes satisfied and others become wants that are frustrated.

Happiness can therefore, be described as something encompassing a lifetime and comes into being, in the most authentic way, when our life is over. It is as if an architect is constructing a building. We cannot say whether it is going to be a beautiful edifice until it is completed. Similarly, we cannot say whether our life is moral or not until we have lived it completely.

Our lives, as a result, are directed towards our moral obligations because it is this which brings us the happiness that we long for so much. I know that this is hard to accept because we seem to want to equate happiness with something that is enjoyable. It is very hard for us to accept happiness as something that may be intrinsically unenjoyable. This is what makes it hard for us to understand the saints and what they go through and what they strive for. As long as we set as our goal in life the attainment of contentment then we will not really live and we will not really reach that happiness which is part of our legacy as those who are created in the image of God. And we will be faced with paradoxes which are hard to explain. But, you will ask, I have seen people who have tried to be morally good and they have been amongst the most unhappy people that I have encountered. Did not Christ condemn the Pharisees for their preoccupation with legalism and morality? This is true and this brings us to the point as to why we behave morally. If we behave morally to show our superiority, then we are not doing what is good and in a very profound sense, we are living immorally. We are living in such a way as to harm ourselves. We have to be careful here. Remember something very important - the point of morality is to bring us happiness, to bring us what is good for us.

The question of morality naturally leads us to the question of freedom. This again is a term that is often misunderstood representing in general the ability to do as we wish. This for many people is the essence of freedom. In science, there has been a prominent school of thought which denies human freedom. The people who uphold this view are sometimes referred to as determinists. They see all actions in the universe, including people, as being governed by physical laws and therefore there is no room for freedom. However, with the coming of the twentieth century, this view was attacked by other scientists who introduced the ideas of probabilities into scientific laws and this seemed to open the door for human freedom. This does not really address the question because in a sense, science cannot answer the question as to whether we have freedom of will or not. Let me illustrate this with a simple example. I can extend my arm so that you can see my outstretched fingers and then I can show you my index finger curling towards me, and I would ask you to explain what you observe. In a scientific manner, you would say that the finger is curling because the muscles are contracting. The muscles are contracting because the neurons in the myoneural junction are firing and giving a command for calcium ions to be released which initiates the contraction of the muscle. Thus far, thus good. The neurons send a signal because the brain tells them through chemical transmitters. We can go on and on like this, refining our model but we will eventually reach a point which stated in the most basic way asks the following question: what really started the whole process going and what you will find is that the physical explanations reach a dead end. It is this terminus, this immaterial substance called will that initiated the whole process. And here, we come to a very important realization: the intellect and the will are immaterial things and are not subject to laws that govern the behavior of molecules and other physical things. So, to use physical laws to show that free will does not exist is not being totally honest because these laws do not apply to our intellect. This is a very important point because if we have no free will, then how can we talk about responsibility and morality? Now, it is time, I think, to look at this physical reality and try to understand it a little better. The first point that I want to make is that it is things that change in life and not events or attributes. Consider an apple picked from a tree and this apple is green. On standing it turns ripe and becomes red. It is not the greenness of the apple that becomes red - it is the apple. You are probably saying to yourself that this is so obvious that it is silly to even mention it. But there is a fundamental point that I am leading up to. In order for change to be meaningful, something must stay constant, otherwise we could not talk about the change. Just as the apple stays an apple throughout the ripening process, so do we remain our identifiable selves, in spite of the fact that most of the cells of our body change within a span of every seven years - we still remain as ourselves. Therefore, what this shows is that what is really important in defining who we really are is not locked into the physical molecules and structures but our essence, our basic identity of who we really are is stored somewhere else. Permit me to expand on this point with another example. Bromine is a reddish brown liquid at room temperature and is used in chemical reactions to make various molecules for disinfection and other purposes. We know that this liquid consists of molecules of bromine if we were to look at the simplest unit of this gas. But, and this is the interesting point, these molecules do not have any color whatsoever. So where does this reddish brown color come from? The molecules are real and so is the brown liquid that we observe but what they represent are different levels of reality. Werner Heisenberg, one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century stated that various levels of physical creation have different potentialities for being. The individual molecules of bromine have limited properties, compared to the liquid sample that we observe in the lab. Thus, if we were to say that a human being is only a collection of atoms and nothing more then we again, are not being completely honest and are misreading what the reality tells us. At their best, the physical sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology give us a knowledge of physical reality. But this reality must be enlightened by understanding which eventually leads to wisdom. Unfortunately some of us are smart, but, very few of us are wise and there is a world of difference between these two states.

From the very brief discussion we have seen above we have come to realize that there is more to a person than the physical body that we see before us and we have come to see that there are aspects to people which are beyond the physical. And here, what I would like to do is to look at the non-rational in humanity and try to make some sense of it and to see what this tells us about who we are and to learn more about ourselves.

One of the problems that we have with understanding our faith is that it needs to be translated into terms and language that are meaningful to us. We have learned a lot about what constitutes a human being and the components that go towards making a person. What our discussion above has attempted to show is that we cannot exhaust the description of a person by referring only to the physical reality that we observe. There is a much greater depth to people and if we ignore this, then we will end up in paradoxes and bewilderment.

What the discoveries in studies on man during the end of the last century and much of this one show is that there is a depth to the mind of man. We have the conscious which is what we are most familiar with but there are also other layers of our being. It is therefore difficult to bring someone to believe by mere logical proofs and arguments. Other factors have to be included which reach to the depths of our being and this is not easy. Just as an illustration we can consider the use of psychotherapy to try to change the depths of a person. This is never a short term process and takes much time and effort. Prayer also reaches to these depths in us and it may be one of its most important roles to connect and link our conscious surface existence with the depths that are there in what is sometimes called the heart.

This is the other point that I would like to make. It does take effort and persistence; things that are easily acquired are also usually easily lost. I know you have written about how difficult it is sometimes for you to follow what I have written but, on reading and re-reading, sometimes you start to get to see things a little bit more clearly and that cheers me up.

Yours, as always,

Bar-Abbas

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