Crazy conscience trip

Oh god I just had a crazy deep discussion with a friend tonight.

Just laying in bed and got on the topic of our subconscious, and how we perceive things, and how others may not perceive them, too stuck in their day to day lives. And half joked maybe we're just a bit "special", not just us two, but others in general. And then we got onto religion, and as I'm agnostic, we talked about the origin of the universe - if there is a god, where did it come from? If evolution is true (whether from atheist viewpoint, or even certain creationist viewpoint), how exactly did that start - how did the universe come into being? Beyond the big bang... there had to be a source behind that.

I felt quite overwhelmed, because these are simply incomprehensible things. I was a bit afraid I might go crazy or something. Made me think about how in the Bible there are things mankind simply was not to comprehend, things of god... blah blah. So crazy. So I got off my conscience-high and I dunno. Felt like perhaps I'm more spiritual after such a discussion. I've had them before, but tonight was like nothing else. Once I got outside for a walk I'm like ahhh, cold fresh air, birds chirping... life. I felt perhaps connected to something in some way.

One hell of a trip.

Frankly I don't want to do that again. Kinda scary.

There is an undeniable mathematical order to everything in the universe. It's just not totally understood. Even theoretical physicists agree on this. We humans contemplate this order and this universe. We deem that we have "intelligence", and it appears that indeed we do. I find it hard to believe that these things just happened spontaneously. Intelligence begets intelligence. You don't have to put a conventional religious angle on it to realize that.

Oh god I just had a crazy deep discussion with a friend tonight. Just laying in bed and got on the topic of our subconscious, and how we perceive things, and how others may not perceive them, too stuck in their day to day lives. And half joked maybe we're just a bit "special", not just us two, but others in general. And then we got onto religion, and as I'm agnostic, we talked about the origin of the universe - if there is a god, where did it come from? If evolution is true (whether from atheist viewpoint, or even certain creationist viewpoint), how exactly did that start - how did the universe come into being? Beyond the big bang... there had to be a source behind that . I felt quite overwhelmed, because these are simply incomprehensible things. I was a bit afraid I might go crazy or something. Made me think about how in the Bible there are things mankind simply was not to comprehend, things of god... blah blah. So crazy. So I got off my conscience-high and I dunno. Felt like perhaps I'm more spiritual after such a discussion. I've had them before, but tonight was like nothing else. Once I got outside for a walk I'm like ahhh, cold fresh air, birds chirping... life. I felt perhaps connected to something in some way. One hell of a trip. Frankly I don't want to do that again. Kinda scary.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

- Socrates, in Plato's Dialogues

That which is beyond measure and observation is unknowable, in the sense of the knowledge of facts. It doesn't mean it's not a worthy subject for musing, for conjecture, for dreaming, for hoping. But we will, in a very real sense, never know... and that is a burden which many cannot face, so they erect elaborate rationalizations in support of absolutist "certainties"-- whether they are the certainties of theists or atheists.

Me, I'm not for hiding my head in the hole of false certainty.

I think it was that modern guru, Craig Anderton, who once said -- and I'm afraid I must paraphrase: The universe -- an amazing place if there's a god. An amazing place if there's no god.

I'm personally content not thinking I know what I cannot know. Life and the universe are, indeed, amazing to me. A miracle, in a sense, whether there is anything beyond... or not.

My faith is simple -- but I recognize it as faith, not certainty. In my heart, in my gut, I believe this life, this universe is not just an empty joke.

Oh god I just had a crazy deep discussion with a friend tonight. Just laying in bed and got on the topic of our subconscious, and how we perceive things, and how others may not perceive them, too stuck in their day to day lives. And half joked maybe we're just a bit "special", not just us two, but others in general. And then we got onto religion, and as I'm agnostic, we talked about the origin of the universe - if there is a god, where did it come from? If evolution is true (whether from atheist viewpoint, or even certain creationist viewpoint), how exactly did that start - how did the universe come into being? Beyond the big bang... there had to be a source behind that . I felt quite overwhelmed, because these are simply incomprehensible things. I was a bit afraid I might go crazy or something. Made me think about how in the Bible there are things mankind simply was not to comprehend, things of god... blah blah. So crazy. So I got off my conscience-high and I dunno. Felt like perhaps I'm more spiritual after such a discussion. I've had them before, but tonight was like nothing else. Once I got outside for a walk I'm like ahhh, cold fresh air, birds chirping... life. I felt perhaps connected to something in some way. One hell of a trip. Frankly I don't want to do that again. Kinda scary.

I'm agnostic too. I think about this kind of stuff all the time. Really, it isn't that bad.

The key thing to remember is that being "spiritual" and being "religious" are not the same thing. One can be very spiritual while not being at all religious. I am not religious at all but I am very spiritual, and I make the distinction that I am a spirit/soul having a human experience and not the other way around.

It is good and wise to contemplate these things, and yes those who are open to the wonders of the world are different from those who are not. I am certain that we live within something bigger than our own little lives. Call it God, consciousness, source, whatever you wish. You will never see it directly. Like the wind; you don't see it, just its effects. I am comfortable not being able to understand it, yet still being able to know it.

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It is a mistake to think that we can only know with our minds or our intellect. Our Hearts can frequently know more that our minds ever will.

I'd offer that that's not so much exactly knowledge. Something else equally vital. But something different.

But, yeah.

Perhaps; but in my experience the heart knows as surely as the mind does. Its just a different kind of knowing.

Seriously, you and your "friend", probably just connected in um.... bed. Its happens.

If this thought process continues, you may want to read The Divine Matrix by Gregg Bradden and his new one, Fractal Time.

I've thought a lot about what seems to be an "order" in the universe, but the only explanation I'm able to give to it is that the limits and the structure of our cognitive system are the "order" we are observing. Measure is an abstraction coming from an activity of our mind, not a property of the "object". For us and for bacteria the dimension of an apple is not an experience that can be shared. Colors don't exist out of our cortex. They are reactions to a radiation and there is nothing that makes us think that everyone sees the same thing. We can agree because of names, which are conventional abstractions. My red could be similar to your orange but we still can agree to call different experiences coming from the same radiation with a common name, thus perpetuating the illusion that we are seeing the same color.

Abstractions, which are the tools we use to live together and to get consistency in our social relations, overcoming the subjectivity of experience, are those things commonly misinterpreted as "truth" or "metaphysical reality", while nothing is less real than them.

Recently, some MIT brainy types have suggested that yes, the Big Bang did happen, things are still expanding outwardly, and that we little humans are just part of the debris.

Why else would we have a perfect little world in which we have everything we need? Food, water, air, sunlight, etc.?

Well, it's because everything around us is also part of the debris resulting from this big explosion.

Theorists have proposed that it "seems like God" to us, simply because the process is so much bigger than us, physically.

It feels like we're "part of something", maybe even something sentient and beneficent, right? But really we're just dust in the wind, blowing out into space along with the other debris, carried along by the vast ripples of energy released by The Big Bang.

One COULD say "God has a purpose for us", but the likelier scenario is just that we're part of the expanding debris, and as such, we feel a kinship with all the seas, rocks and trees that are also exploding outwardly along with us.

What seems like "God's love" and "God's purpose" just might be a mindless geophysical process that we are inextricably bound up in, and we can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak...

All of our thoughts, dreams, activities, plans, food digestion, excretions, sexuality, our births and deaths, .... they're just chemical reactions, by-products of The Big Bang.

This is why the Chinese say, "Don't push the river". And "Go along with the flow".

And if this theory here WERE true.... what will have changed, practically speaking, for us at the human level? Nothing, really. Nothing at all.

Which part of us is experiencing all this stuff then? Which is the part that receives all this information at the end point and finally digests it?

When you say "We feel a kinship with...." what is the 'we' at the heart of us.

That is where the questioning needs to start i think.

How we are physically tumbling through space is a different matter.

My heart doesn't warm to semantic imprecision.

But I'm certainly willing to settle for different kind of knowing... since I suspect we all know what you mean. Uh...

The infinite regress of "here we are, we came from X which came from Y which came from the Big Bang which came from ????" cuts both ways.

If all existence is subject to time and causality, then the idea that time is infinite leaves no room for a god in the infinite regression of effect back to cause to effect, etc. But it feels inherently unsatisfying - that the buck seems to stop nowhere. Why is there a "where" at all?

It also can point to some transcendant level of being that somehow is outside the time sequence but can effect it somehow. Some ground of being that sets the stage for the time sequence experience. And maybe lights the fuse of the Big Bang or somesuch occurance somehow. But this feels arbitrary and unscientific.

Scientific thought runs in the channel of the infinite regression. Spiritual thought jumps out of that channel and finds....all that non-scientific stuff for better or worse.

Certainty? Two kinds - a working kind that people use in their lives, which is not absolute but runs from "almost totally certain" to "for now this is what I'm assuming". And a theoretical absolute certainty that really only makes sense in mathematics where the final certainty is self-equivalency - A is A, 1=1.

Science works with uncertainty all the time. So it's not the place to go for absolute certainty as opposed to religion, philosophy, etc. And contrary to popular belief, much religion and many religious people also operate with a large measure of uncertainty. Faith does not have to be a cheater's path to certainty. It's a gamble, a step into the darkness. Read your Pascal on that.

Most people don't sweat the things they consider the big main "proven" principles very often - scientific, ethical, religious, philosophical, whatever are their particular foundations. And no one personally proves all the points of their science or religion or philosophy on their own time. We all live in a context of authorities on whom we alternately rely and dispute. We all inherit and subscribe to Stuff Other Smart (or Holy or Reputable or Reliable) People Have Proven (We believe.) Only because we rely on them do we worry about them so much.

But most everyone finds a working method in which their little bicycle of life, as long as it keeps moving, doesn't fall over. Powered by faith and hope, relying more or less on a particular and often uncomfortable configuration of societal authorities, guided by only frail and faulty human perception, we all move down the road that way - the scientist, the athiest, the believer, the agnostic, the child.

Not to convince anyone, but just to use myself as an illustration - one of my personal foundation items is this - I had to have been about 8 or so, and my Dad gave me the Little Talk About God. Short and sweet. "Well, if we evolved from other animals, and they evolved from something else, and the earth came from the Big Bang, where did the Big Bang come from? What started the whole thing? Must have been God at some point dontcha think?"

When he said it, it wasn't as if he explained something to me that I understood for the first time. It was more like he articulated something that I'd always known anyway. It's simply always seemed self-evident to me that there has to be a Transcendant Something.

And it's not like since then I haven't read the best arguments to the contrary. I've also read the attempts at achieving total logical certainty in favor of the Transcendant Something.

Neither the pros nor the cons convince me on their logical grounds. The logical arguments just seem like waves splashing at the bottom of a cliff of self-evidence. Will the waves eventually erode the cliff? Probably not in my lifetime...

nat whilk ii

One hell of a trip. Frankly I don't want to do that again. Kinda scary.

I live there... since I can remember... a child walking in the park at night, looking out, up to the stars and looking in, searching the depths of the heart... looking for answers... looking for meaning. It gets less scary and more magical the more you visit, and you may eventually want to stay.

I still walk to think, and run (for exercise) at night but in deeper woods on trails. I reach a higher level of consciousness (subconsciousness) thinking about these things, and since I

I know what I like and I like what I know.....

I am always fascinated at how hard it is for people with a western mindset to think and talk about these things. In eastern philosophy they deal with these issues in a different way. There is an old Buddhist proverb; "the mind is an amazing servant but a terrible master."

This shows an understanding that there is something bigger than lower mind that is in charge. It is called the higher mind. In the west we have let the mind and mentation become the only valid or true lens with which to experience life. In the east they have known for thousands of years that there is more to being and knowing than mere thinking.

We are at a point in time where there is a school of thought that tries to combine the best of the east and the west into a single approach; One that honors the mental/intellectual modalities while also allowing for intuition and higher mind.

Due the age of reason and rationalism it will surely take a long time to get more people to embrace this approach, but it is happening.

A couple of facts to consider...

1) There is no 'before the big bang'. Time and space are inextricably bound together; one cannot exist without the other. Both time and space began at the big bang.

2) The 'big bang' term is a misnomer, like there was a huge explosion, then things eventually settled into what exists now. It is more like an ongoing process. The universe continues to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Every point in the universe is separating from every other point at a rate that is continually accelerating. And the farther away things are, the faster they are accelerating, relatively speaking.

Since space is continually changing it's shape, diffusing into ever increasing volumes, doesn't it seem reasonable that time also is being altered? But how do you measure this? It's like trying to use a ruler made of Play-Dough - any attempt to handle the ruler unavoidable changes it's shape. Especially if every point of the ruler is continually accelerating away from every other point in the ruler.

The universe is not just stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can imagine.

There had to be something before the big bang. It is an element, or 2 that began. From where? What exactly is nothing?

There had to be something before the big bang. It is an element, or 2 that began. From where? What exactly is nothing?

The answer is the same as for 'What do you get when you cross a rhinoceros with an elephant?'

- - elephino!

Nothing, by definition, is 'no thing'. Most of the universe is exactly that - - nothing. Here and there are tiny specs of something, but mostly its a vast collection of nothing.

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"Don't Panic"

"You can't understand the answer because you don't understand the question"

- Douglas Adams, "Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe"

The idea that the Big Bang has no causal context is just as miraculous a notion as a God-created universe. Practically equivalent.

But I'm okay with there being no "time before" the Big Bang. But something outside of time, that notion I can grok.

Also - now this is just logic talking - logically "nothing" cannot exist positively. It's only a notion we use of an imaginary opposite of "something". So there cannot be a vast collection of nothing. Every "where" is a "something" of some sort. We just have no instruments that bleep or ping or oscillate when we stick them into the space that we say has "nothing" in it.

nat whilk ii

nat whilk ii

Pogo said it best: "Some folks say there are others just like us out in the universe. And some folks say we're all alone.

"Either way, it's a mighty sobering thought."

I am working on doing a reading for an audio book, happens to be on Pantheism, something you may like Phait, or not. Anyways it's easy to listen for a while if you are bored.

The book was written by J. William Lloyd in the around 1900, he was a very interesting writer.

http://seaweedmusic.com/Dawn%20thought%20Audio%20book.htm

I think Phait is on drugs.

All I wanted was a Pepsi.

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Either way it's not based on facts, maybe a goofy attempt to impress an intellectual chick....

When you really don't know anything about it, but you talk about it,there is a hidden power game, I think....

Either way it's not based on facts, maybe a goofy attempt to impress an intellectual chick.... When you really don't know anything about it, but you talk about it,there is a hidden power game, I think....

If so, still it's no worse than psycho-analyzing people you've never met:)

nat whilk ii