It Finally Comes Together: Law, Freedom, Reality! 


At last, the raveled sleeve of care is knitted up. I am a bubble in a sea of freedom, sailing in my own reality boat of cast light. 

Lurkers in this blog know that I fuss and fume about the tyranny of logical empiricism and the rigidity of Christian apology and their limitations for dealing with what I intuit is true about our broader reality. Against these well-formed disciplines, I strive to state an ontology and an epistemology that permits us to make sense of consciousness and God-in-our-world. Well, I may never convince you, but I do finally get it for myself. And that is the topic of this blog.

The World of Law

There is a world of law as defined in the various sciences. The world behaves in a regular way, and there are both causal and statistical regularities. Other things being equal, baseballs and human bodies both obey the law of gravitation, babies become big people following a genetic code, and drivers and departments of transportation spawn traffic patterns. Without these regularities, we could accomplish nothing. Our world of action and artifacts is built upon the regularities in the world of law.

However, none of this implies that determinism is the correct model for understanding Mind and the Universe. For one thing, all regularities are true only if initial conditions are met. Science tells us nothing about what happens if initial conditions are not met. For another, it is now stock knowledge that, at least at the level of atomic events, there is an inherent limitation to observation that renders a causal interpretation of those events inappropriate. Moreover, subsequent experiments in the Twentieth Century have shown the micro world to actually not BE a causal world, but rather a world with built-in uncertainty. Einstein, bless his heart, was wrong. God DOES play dice with the Universe, in a manner of speaking.

Taking a completely different and unscientific track, there are millions and millions of people, some of them articulate and well-written, who experience another order of reality than that described by verified causal and statistical laws. Experience regularly defies known laws of science, but the only trouble is, anecdotal evidence will never convince a died-in-the-bull skeptic. I'm speaking of all the reports of near-death experiences, remote viewing and communicating, mystical experiences, reported miracles, spontaneous healing. This range of events simply defies illumination by science, and so you pays your money and you takes your choice. Either you try to build a world picture that excludes these things, or you try to build a world picture that includes them. As long as people choose the latter (and I see no evidence that they will ever quit), there will be personal and professional theology and philosophy.

The World of Freedom

There is a world of freedom, but it is only defined by the limits of our own imagination, and circumscribed by, but not entirely reduced to the world of law. However, I can't establish this from scientific inquiry, at least not the conventional kind that tries to find regularities given initial conditions. This world of freedom is not located in space and time, not the conventional 4-dimensional matrix. Scientists are projecting models of the Universe that have 10 or 11 dimensions. Perhaps when we understand more about this, we might find some freedom there. But with our mind we create possible worlds. We choose to actualize some of them and not to actualize others. We do this through projecting meaning. The most describable vehicle for this process is language, which has function, form and content. It is perhaps underlain by, or blended with, a deeper symbolic process that may or may not be language, per se.

For those of you who want to step beyond science with me (and there will be many, perhaps most), we gain something and we loose something by embracing this mental space as a place not reducible to 4-D space. Let me state it as clearly as I can: we gain freedom, even as we cede the identity principle. In other words, science deals with a = a, and a ≠ b, how things are different, while freedom deals with a = b, or how things are similar. Science deals with everyone agreeing to see things from a single point of view, while freedom deals with everyone coming to see that multiple viewpoints are equally valid, and even creating equally real worlds.

We can understand some of this just by reflecting on cultural perspective. Most of our ethical challenges today revolve around the fact that people are so strongly wedded to their cultural and linguistic preconceptions that they simply cannot empathize with other cultural and linguistic preconceptions with which they are familiar. Muslim and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, gay and straight—are we really going to believe the preposterous claim that the one is right and the other is completely off base? Well, hopefully not, and hopefully we are learning that this is a case of conflicting versions of the world rather than right and wrong.

Let me put this a different way and then cap with a metaphor. The meaning of a statement or concept is never exhausted by the instances of that meaning, especially the already experienced instances. Wittgenstein studied this thoroughly in his analysis of a rule, and showed that somewhere along the way, our agreement will break down, and we won't know what the rule covers beyond these limits. Now the realists will try to convince you that the meaning is there, it just isn't clearly specified yet. But I'm here to proclaim to you, my friends, that not only isn't the meaning there in those cases, it hasn't even been generated yet. Just as matter is being created and annihilated in the deep void of space (we know this from the science guys and gals), so is meaning being created and annihilated in the deep void of mind.

Cheap Thrills: Combination of the Two

Forgive the irresistible allusion to the old Janis Joplin piece, but there are no cheap thrills without both freedom and law, mind and matter, properly understood and properly working together. I want to point to this state-of-affairs here, and also suggest an ontological underpinning for it.

God enters into the world in at least two places. Causal and statistical regularities are in effect God. There has to be a canvas on which free agents can paint their pictures. It is the regularities that we agree on as a culture, group, family, mated pair and individual which allow us to choose our starting points. Bridges don't just jump into existence, rockets don't just fly to the moon; transportation engineering and rocket science get them there. It is a mistake, however, to think that there is a person science, and that someday, we will build the perfect person. Unless what we build thereby has consciousness, mind, and meaning, it will not be a person. If it does have consciousness, mind and meaning, we will not have put it there, only made the conditions for its existence possible.

God enters the world also through the thoughts, feelings and activities of conscious beings. All of them. It is a different port of entry. It is definitely not a seen entry, i.e. if you mean an object of sense perception. Now I am going to make some astonishing statements. No person is reducible to another person. Each person is unique. It is ONLY in manifesting our uniqueness, that we are manifesting God. It is only in our CREATIVITY that we are manifesting God in this free way. This is true WITHOUT EXCEPTION. I realize that I am offending almost everyone here, because, to take just one tiny, but vivid example, I am saying that both the creativity in George Bush and the creativity in Osama Ben Ladin are equally manifesting God. You can look at this two ways: either God doesn't care, or God cares equally about both of these men.

We either manifest God by being a predictable object of science (in which case we are closer to an automaton than a person), or we manifest God by being a totally unpredictable subject with free will (in which case we are closer to a person than to an automaton). I have often said, "God wants us to go into our creativity, into our uniqueness. How else can God extend new free being into the world?

Here is why killing is not a good idea. Every time we kill another person, we are killing God. Every time. Not a single death is justified in Iraq, by either side. Likewise, not a single death in the World Trade Center was justified. Jesus knew this; he had no concept of killing in self-defense, at least not MY Christ. Jesus chose willingly a non-violent response to his death. He let himself be crucified. He didn't want to fight with God, and worked mightily to accept and understand the painful truth being offered to him. If you don't get this point, you don't get it. You don't get why we're here. We're here to find God, all of God, in all of the people we meet, our alleged friends and our alleged enemies alike.

Now, speaking of cheap thrills, just think. If you didn't hate anyone in the world, if you loved everyone, even were awestruck at the 7 billion or so channels of divine intervention that Universal Cable is offering to you free of charge, do you think that would be thrilling? Try going through the 10 commandments with this in mind.

Reality Soup

The world of law is the bowl and the world of freedom provides the ingredients for the floating bathtub that holds our reality soup. The only trouble is that we have to believe our babies into the bath water, and that isn't entirely or even very much under our conscious control. But we do have a tool for getting this process under control. That tool is sincere, meaningful dialog in the face of extreme variation, creativity, deviation. It is a sincere and persistent determination to see the Divine in the most shocking (and the most beautiful) constructed worlds that we encounter.

Given this determination, however, we loose something. We cede the identity principle. If we are successful, we become MORE like what we are trying to understand, and LESS like what we were before we made the attempt. Or maybe that's just the way it appears to us, and what really happens is that a relationship begins to emerge from the dialog which contains both parties and is more. We become the relationship we forge. As we practice this ability with each relationship we develop, we are beginning then to forge a relationship with God that is truly inclusive of all Divine creativeness. This kind of ability leads to an awareness that some strive for, but only a few mystics succeed in attaining. The meaning in our relationships, and then finally, the meaning in God grips us and pulls us out of our 4-Dimensional trap and into freedom. We are One with Creation. I've been meaning to tell you this for the longest time.

It is true that with God, all things are possible. Seven billion points of consciousness are here to tell you that this is true.



 

Posted: Sat - June 10, 2006 at 07:55 PM          

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