This is an important post...
But f-i-rst - one of our friends, Lachie K., is about to make a visit to Europe: going for several weeks each to Rome, Florence and Venice.
Lachie - in Florence (Firenze) there is the oldest pharmacy in the world, the Santa Maria Novella Pharmacy. Do not come back without going there!
Now, back to the normal program.
Rich kid, Lachie. This is not his house, but it is like his house. |
LOL
Whether it is in the pursuit of some scientific objective via pure research that has no certain outcome, or whether it is a deep religious conviction that drives someone farther and farther into some misty territory of the mind and of the spiritual sensitivities, ultimately one either attains a hoped-for objective, or else one dies at last in the truth, at least, of a knowledge of the error of one's path if not of one's journey.
To seek via an authentic scientific method, is never a totally wasted endeavor. Because if a final decisive truth is discovered that a certain hypothesis is definitely not true, then this is of course a scientific success not a failure at all.
When it comes to ideologies and religious matters though, one is faced with a slightly different variable, namely, that the basis of internal satisfaction is not exactly to do with (some) particular defined truth as such a thing is able to be confined in a laboratory for endless repetitions thereby establishing its veracity to the faithless mind expecting failure and defeat.
For it seems that 'Cosmic' truth or truths matter to the seeker only insofar as they can meet internal and highly personal bars of human individual feeling, not lifeless equations separate from the very human observer.
And yet, it is almost necessarily the case that here is the place where actual truth is more important, more critical -, and self-honesty completely and utterly indispensable; because there are too many ways to defraud oneself in sensory matters...
The oldest pharmacy in the world Lachlan. |
In other words, the outcome may feel right, yet it may not be right.
There are cults in Northern India, to do with Shiva, and in these cults, the standard practice is to imbibe heroin or other powerful narcotic substances. In the end, the cult practitioner may certainly feel that they are 'touching the face of god' - and nobody at an objective distance from this feeling and sensation will agree that the subject is really touching any divine living being's face.
Our good friend Lachie, whom we spoke of first here, might also go to some Florentine cathedral and feel in there a sensation of something 'sacred' and 'holy' and he would not have been imbibing anything stronger than some remnant wisps of incense and candle-wax, but still it will not mean that he is experiencing anything more unusual than the effects of particular kinds of architecture. Hitler's architect Albert Speer achieved as much with his stadiums and official government buildings.
This all circles back to this question of the Theodicy of god - why He, She, It, or They, permit the existence of evil.
Evil is a thing however, the nature of which only exists within some framework of a sufficiently advanced consciousness being involved, and is not something with any separate objective or mathematical existence apart from the feelings and thoughts of sentient beings who are able to apprehend it as the product of dynamic cause-and-effect functions where that sentience has adjudged a qualitative scale of beneficence and maleficence and the potential existence of an intangible spectrum of such polarity.
There is only one system of human thinking which provides an objective format along which pathway one is able to 'search' or to seek out, an ultimate result. This is the proposition that there are objective, virtually (or in fact really) mathematical, irreducible elements behind all of material reality, and that the dynamic interplay of those elements is what the reality of the Universe is, including that sentience itself also has irreducible (thereof) minimum core elements, the dynamic interplay of which becomes the equations or the formulae if you will, of moral and philosophical outcome (assessment by that sentience as to those things' status of qualitative 'benefit').
One of the best coffee places in Firenze, Lachlan. |
When you proceed along this path, you will end up at the stage where it becomes clear that whilst much that is sentient is able to formulate for itself, what seems good to it, individually, beneficial to it without direct reference to any other - not much at all is as readily able to 'see' itself in all or any other external units of sentience; which is why ideologies and religions that become expressed as political practices and domination-centric or also self-elimination practices that are socially enforced (the correct way to put this is 'societal-ly' enforced but there is no real English word 'societal-ly'), cause evil.
Neither can a person reach to any 'ultimate satisfying objective moral reality' without passing first through the shared multiple sentience point, yet nor can one who has gone past there and reached actual final reality, go back and 'convince' anyone who is still living as a sentient island using 'proof and evidence...'
BECAUSE ALL SUCH PROOF IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO ABSOLUTE SHARED SENTIENCE.
We have an example of such a 'thing' though, that is - we have an example in physics and material reality, of compound location.
It is found in nature in the thing known as 'time crystals.' These are not crystals like you will imagine bits of glass and gems and so on, but lattice structures that hold together, but whose atoms interchange - rotate constantly - but in exactly the same structural positions on each discrete pulse, making the whole thing 'solid' and having structural and material integrity yet possessing real internal movement and cycles.
Hannah Arendt, the German-American historian, in discussing the nature of evil, in context of Adolf Eichmann the Nazi official said this: "...an inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else."
"And the Devil took Him up to a very high place, and said: All the kingdoms of the world I will give you, for they are mine." And they are that to this day. Except the time is running short. |
And again: "His motive was to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy."
I would place a stress on the word 'diligently' in our modern times, because you will see it used over and over by academia today, by politicians, by accountants, and by promoters of the orthodoxy of society as it stands today - and you will be able to note how each of the people using that word and those kinds of ideas, are unable to see past themselves. Anyone familiar with, for one good example, the life and career of the UK top spy at MI5 for decades, Stella Rimington, will be able to detect the reflected values of this 'modern' vogue of society and how she is at pains to critique other people from out of some strata of academia, sometimes treating them positively and often negatively with the implied meaning of her own competitive worth.
'Productivity' not production; 'diligence' not success.
The self-honesty of all of these minds is literally non-existent.
The Pope is not self-honest.
Hamas is not self-honest.
And ultimately no one who cannot produce a 'god,' a 'Jehovah on the Mountain,' or a return of Isa ibn Maryam (there are many 'al Mahdi's') - is being self-honest; and yet all of them will cut your throat.
You do not need drugs to see god or to 'touch the face of God.'
All you need is to be able to live in another person's place.
This is also Florence, but it is not the same Florence, Lachlan. No, wait a minute... Might be the same Florence... Not sure... |
Granted, I myself would not live in just any other person's place...
But that is not a condition. The condition is not that 'I' need to be able to be in all of the useless derelicts of the world's sentience location (aka 'see things from their personal ego perspective').
And it is certainly not that you or I ought to be jumping into the sentience spot of deliberately selfish and self-involved people.
If you 'search' as a Protestant or a Catholic or a Muslim or a standard mainstream Hindu or a Buddhist you will come to nowhere in the end. In the existential end, you will die; you will be dead.
If you search as the Pentagon for ET Aliens you could also get a slap in the face first while you're at it on the long road to nowhere.
We often forget to observe how complicated, how immense, how teeming - the Universe actually is.
It's also a hierarchy.
It doesn't matter what Stella Rimington thinks about how 'high up' she is. Same goes for anyone at the Pentagon today.
You can lie to yourself - and people like those lie to themselves continuously - but you will still end up where most humans end up, which is dead, and buried.
Therefore step one is stop lying to yourself. ...If that's what you are doing.
You need to, absolutely do need to be able to, place yourself in others' shoes.
All the way in.
Not part the way in.
You see, here is a pay-off for you in this: if someone goes ahead, becomes super-advanced, is literally let us propose, some kind of sentient being light-years evolved into the future, for sure they will care for weaker beings, but those on the path that is a shared path with them.
And they will reach back - to you, maybe.
And pull you forward.
And the number one best way to ensure that it happens, is for you to start out doing the same kind of mind-set approach to the life all about you...
Yes life is difficult these days on this planet, in this world. But it doesn't have to be.
The 'problem of evil' literally doesn't exist for those who have advanced into the future beyond the kind of 'stage of evolution,' let's call it, of the people who characterize the human world here today. The problem of evil is a problem that is existentially true only where there are selfish entities.
All of material reality is a set of profiles, a complex pattern of sine curves, Gaussian waves; there is a 'right-hand side.' There is 'ultimately advanced sentience.' And you, you as yet still ordinary human, are not it.
There is ultimately advanced sentience because it is an existential logical necessity of material nature by the Gauss Curve. You don't need any 'evidence' - or any other evidence - for the fact. What you do need to do is live and act on the basis that since it is true, well then you'd better start complying with the frikkin' rules! Otherwise you're never going to see any Aliens. Why would they let themselves be seen?
...By spiritual criminals. Human beings are spiritual criminals. All of them.
When you go to a judge, in a court, to seek justice - you are going to a spiritual criminal who is a self-liar.
That is how come there are wars and people get killed. This is all just a place on the Gauss Curve.
So where will you search so that you will not be disappointed? Now don't lie about it.
Not some future time to come where 'all will be revealed.' Not some threat or promise beyond the now horizon.
Not some place where it feels powerful and sacred because the architecture was from a more cultured past.
Not some place where you feel a part of a group because there are a lot of other people there doing what you are doing.