Subject: [TODAY] September 5: Koestler & Ambartsumian
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From the world of Religion: ARTHUR KOESTLER
(Emphases are mine...Dwayne)

He was a writer, a thinker, a scholar with great breadth of interest, but he
also had a mystical experience while imprisoned in a Spain during the Civil
War in that country. He could have been executed, but somehow his life was
spared, resulting in the writing and publication of books on a variety of
themes. He was an activist, but most of all, he was an original thinker and
philosophical writer. The name of this Hungarian-born thinker was Arthur
Koestler (born: 5 September 1905).


In his youth he was an ardent Zionist. In the 1920s he went to Palestine as
a journalist. One of Koestler's controversial books is entitled: The
Thirteenth Tribe. In it he developed the thesis that the ancestors of most
of today's Jews "did not originate in Palestine, but from the Caucasus, from
the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe." They were from the
Khazar country which once had to choose between Christianity and Islam for
its survival. Koestler wrote, "either choice would have automatically
subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of
Baghdad." So in 740 CE, the Khazar king converted to Judaism, and, as per
his injunction, all the people of his kingdom did likewise. According to
Koestler, himself of the Judaic tradition, it is their descendents who
constitute the vast majority of the Jews of today. This is not the place to
enter into the political implications of this theory any more than the basis
of the Islamic claim on Jerusalem on the basis of a dream the prophet had
about being transported to heaven from that holy city. In any event,
Koestler may have been right when he referred to the whole situation as
arising from the "most cruel hoax history has ever perpetrated"


Noting that neither in living organisms nor in a social organizations, one
finds an entity that is independent of all others, Koestler proposed the
notion of the holon as "a unit of organization in biological and social
systems," somewhat like the field particle in physics. He went on to
hypothesize that the holonic links between organizational units enable the
emergence of complexity, both in organisms and in societies.


His first novel, "The Gladiators," was historical fiction. His "Darkness at
Noon," inspired by Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s, recounts the
psychological torture to which a (Soviet) prisoner is subjected. The book
brought him great fame, and it also marked his break from the Communist
religion of which he had been a faithful member until then. The book
infuriated French Communists. Like Bertrand Russell, Sartre, and other
intellectuals of the time, Koestler was first lured to the noble ideals of
Communism, but when he saw its actual practice, its underlying thesis became
more evident to him. He wrote: "In the social equation, the value of a
single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only
communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely
utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a
fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead
straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture
chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka."


His life was rich: He wrote several novels, had several affairs, and also
many psychic experiences. The last of these drew him to investigate strange
events. In "Roots of Coincidence" he tried to give a quantum mechanical
basis for ESP, connecting remarkable coincidences with the notion of
synchronicity, explored by Paul Kammerer and Carl Jung.


Unable to bear the excruciating pain from diseases, he ended his life in
1983 with a drug overdose, along with his loving wife Cynthia.

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