Why Consciousness is Such a Big Deal - understanding the spiritual worldview
Consciousness is a hot topic these days, but most of the popular discussion misses the point. It either misunderstands the hard problem of consciousness, or sidesteps it.
One example of the sidestep is found in neuroscientist Anil Seth’s book, **Being You**. He sets aside the hard problem of “why and how consciousness is part of the universe in the first place” and instead claims to solve what he calls the “real” problem — to “explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.” https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53036979
But despite all this neuroscientific distraction from the actual hard problem; the fact is, consciousness is fatal to the philosophy of naturalism. Hard is a euphemism, it really means impossible.
It’s a logical problem, not a procedural problem. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. No advances in engineering will ever solve the square peg problem, and no advances in neuroscience can solve the hard problem of consciousness.
Consciousness is naturalism’s square peg. You can’t fit consciousness into a worldview that says natural things are the only things that exist.
This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say, but humans are attached to their worldviews and we don’t surrender them easily. The reason this simple truth isn’t recognised by everyone is that most people misunderstand what the hard problem is.
The misunderstanding is deeper than a difference of opinion over certain facts. In our modern culture, naturalism isn’t one belief that we can swap out and replace with an updated version.
Naturalism is a way of thinking, a conceptual framework we use to make sense of the world. All our other beliefs are situated within that interpretative framework.
And for many of us, this framework is invisible, like the air we breathe or the space around us. So we never question it.
**Thinking outside your own mental box**
Because naturalism is both invisible and foundational to our thought, we find it hard to understand any ideas that don’t use that framework. And conversely, ideas that are framed within naturalist concepts have intuitive plausibility.
So when it comes to understanding consciousness, most people don’t realise the extent of the hard problem and the profound implications for naturalism.
They’ll tell us that consciousness emerges from the brain, as if that were a respectable scientific answer, while genies emerging from lamps is a magical fairy story.
But both have the same amount of detail about the mechanism of this supposed emergence — no detail whatsoever. Both assume something can magically emerge from a completely different substrate.
There’s nothing about the properties of lamps that suggests they can create genies, and there’s nothing about the properties of synapses and neurons that suggests they can create consciousness.
Not only does our inability to think outside our own assumptions mean we fail to understand the hard problem, but these conceptual constraints stop us from understanding the actual solutions to the hard problem.
Seth’s book gives us a good example of this when he says, “the hard-problem-friendly intuition [is] that the conscious self is somehow apart from the rest of nature — a really-existing immaterial inner observer looking out onto a material external world…”
Notice the unquestioned assumption that there is a “material” external world we’re all looking out on. But this is only true if naturalism is true. It’s not a premise on which we can construct logical arguments for our naturalist conclusion.
And when we don’t notice the naturalist assumptions, we end with a caricature of the spiritual world view, that consciousness must be “somehow set apart from the rest of nature” and “immaterial.”
Leaving us with the spooky image that consciousness is a ghost floating inside a physical machine, looking out at an objective material world.
This caricature of the spiritual world view is created by retaining our naturalist assumptions, but the spiritual worldviews don’t share those assumptions.
Idealism is one such spiritual worldview, which recognises the primacy of consciousness. It doesn’t say the conscious self is apart from nature, nor does it say the self is observing a material external world.
But to understand what it does say, we need to first deconstruct our naturalist assumptions.
**What does idealism really say**
The irony of all this is that Seth goes on to tell us that our experience of the world is a “controlled hallucination.” This is a point many people miss.
They think naturalism respects the reality of the external world and idealism denies it.
But the price of naturalism’s objective external world is that everything you experience is an illusion, a hallucination. Naturalism’s *real* world has no sounds, colours, or tastes. Everything you experience is a brain constructed illusion, a hallucination.
By contrast, idealism provides a simple answer that respects the data of what consciousness is, and the accuracy of our experience of the world.
Idealism avoids all the problems with naturalism, while retaining all the advances of science as a method of gaining knowledge.
Idealism means our experiences of the world are veridical. The world really is as beautiful as it appears, it has sounds, colours, smells, and tastes. The world isn’t pointless, meaningless, and coldly indifferent. Reality is conscious.
**Idealism isn’t solipsism**
Most often, when you tell someone consciousness is the substance of reality, their first reaction is to think that means everything is within *my* mind.
But that’s solipsism, not idealism. Solipsism is the thesis that only my mind exists, but it’s not a thesis anyone thinks is actually true.
Solipsism isn’t a philosophical explanation, but a sceptical scenario based on noticing that the only thing we know for certain is our own consciousness. This means we can never prove the existence of anything outside our own minds.
While this raises interesting questions about what it means to know something, solipsism doesn’t explain anything about ourselves, or the world.
**Idealism isn’t panpsychism**
Another common misunderstanding is that idealism is just naturalism, but with extra properties added to physical things. But this is panpsychism, not idealism.
Panpyschism says the substance of reality is matter, which has the usual properties of dimension, mass, charge, etc, but it also has consciousness. Which means even atoms have a simple form of consciousness. When the particles of matter arrange in certain patterns, like a human brain, these simple conscious states combine to form more complex conscious states.
Panpyschism is a form of naturalism, although it requires a radical change of our understanding of matter.
But like naturalism, it says matter is primary and consciousness exists only in relation to matter. Panpsychism says consciousness is encased within the substance of matter. The universe contains consciousness like a bucket contains water.
But this is still imposing a naturalist way of thinking onto idealism. Idealism doesn’t infuse consciousness into a substance called matter. Idealism is incompatible with naturalism, because it doesn’t see matter as a substance that exists independently of consciousness.
**Turning naturalism inside out**
To understand idealism, we need to turn naturalism inside out. Instead of thinking consciousness emerges from matter, we need to think matter emerges from consciousness. Matter is a state of consciousness, it’s an idea.
When you observe matter, you’re seeing what a particular state of consciousness looks like from the outside. For the idealist, matter is a concept, an idea that makes the world intelligible to consciousness.
Matter isn’t some kind of substance that exists independently of minds. There is no other substance, there is only consciousness.
This is a subtle point, so a familiar example helps to understand it.
A hole is a thing that exists. It has dimension, occupies a position in space, it causes things. Stepping in a hole in the ground can cause a sprained ankle.
But a hole only exists in relation to something else, it’s not intelligible without the surrounding substance in which it inheres. To understand idealism, we need to think about matter in the same way we think about holes.
Matter exists, it’s real, but its existence is relative to consciousness. Like the hole, it’s only intelligible if we include the surrounding substance in our conception of the hole itself.
That surrounding substance is consciousness. The hole isn’t made of a substance that exists independently. There is no such substance as holes and there is no such substance as matter. But despite the hole not being a substance, it’s real and it exists.
**Idealism isn’t anti-realist**
Which leads us to the misunderstanding that idealism says the external world isn’t real. But idealism says there is an external world, it’s real, and it’s conscious.
The entire cosmos is fundamentally grounded in consciousness. There is only consciousness, nothing else. Everything you experience, everything you know, it’s all consciousness.
Rather than thinking of the world being in *your* mind; idealism says you, and the world, exist within a larger consciousness. Everything is part of the universal mind - the mind of God.
As finite creatures, we’re only aware of a limited part of that universal consciousness. Our awareness of reality is limited by our senses and cognitive abilities.
Consciousness isn’t produced by the brain, but rather, the brain restricts consciousness to certain limits. We have access to those parts of reality within those limits.
Under this view, the brain and body act as a kind of filter, removing certain parts of reality from our awareness. Humans can see limited wavelengths of the spectrum of light because our eyes function within those wavelengths. We can only hear a certain range of sounds, dogs can hear much higher sounds. Bats *see* in sonar.
Each individual’s experience of the external world is determined by our senses and cognitive faculties. Your experience of the world isn’t a hallucination created by your brain.
The world really does have sounds, colours and tastes, because the substance of reality is conscious experience. Your experience is an accurate perception of the world, but it’s also an incomplete or limited perception.
**A virtual reality**
If the external world consists of consciousness, a universal mind, it means the world is just like your experience of it. The world itself has colours, tastes, smells and sounds.
If we want to view it from the outside, the surface only, what does that look like?
As far as science has investigated, the foundation of the world is a non-local quantum field. A quantum field isn’t a *thing* in our usual macro-level understanding, it’s a field of probabilities.
With the act of observation (or measurement), the probabilities solidify into actualities. Within the quantum field, everything exists in potential. A potentiality is a possible thing that doesn’t yet exist, but it could.
So what turns a possible thing into an actual thing, what makes it real?
A potential thing becomes actual when a conscious agent measures it, limits it to some chosen parameters, and then brings it into consciousness (reality).
When there is input from a conscious agent, the potential becomes actual. We don’t create the substance of matter itself, the field already exists. But we create the particular form matter takes by bringing it into our awareness.
Consciousness infuses matter with a kind of kinetic energy, and matter continues in that form for as long as we pay it attention. Once we lose interest and it’s no longer the object of our awareness, its energy dissipates until it returns to potential existence, a mere possibility.
This may sound abstract when thinking about the quantum level, but on the macro level of our interactions with the world, it’s common sense.
If you want to create something, whether it’s an article on medium, a painting, a family, a holiday, or a career; you have to focus your consciousness and your available energy on making it real. All these things require a particular input from a conscious agent to create certain arrangements of matter.
The world is an ocean of possibilities which you survey. You’re like a surfer perpetually standing on the crest of a wave, moving in response to the movements of the ocean. The world is continually on the verge of actuality, a dynamic reality.
You participate in the continual creation of the world. We’re alive to the world, engaged in a cooperative dance of creation.
If we express this in the less poetic language of modal logic we’d say we exist in a world of contingency, nothing here contains the ground of its own being. Everything is perched on the edge of non-existence, continually moving to maintain its existence.
Creation ex-nihilo isn’t a cosmic event in the past like the big bang, but a continual renewal of the world. God is the necessary foundation of that continual creation and we participate to choose the form that creation takes.
To speak of God this way isn’t to contrast him with the contingent as if his necessity was somehow merely the absence of contingency, or the opposite of contingency. God as the necessary foundation of existence is the absolute. The absolute is in a class of its own.
**The Absolute and Infinite**
The absolute is the infinite. The infinite isn’t just a really, really big, powerful, finite thing. Infinity isn’t a gazillion plus one. It’s an entirely different category.
Infinity is unlimited.
Our intellect isn’t equipped to grasp the infinite. The infinite can’t be contained within the finite. But a helpful image to understand what happens when we try is a vessel which overflows.
God’s infinite existence overflows and everything else participates in that existence.
The fullness; the completeness; the unlimited nature of God’s existence means that he exists completely and makes other things exist in and through his existence.
His infinite knowledge means that he knows and makes others know. His infinite joy overflows and we participate in that joy. This participation isn’t something separate from God, everything exists *within* God.
In the modern world this understanding of God’s nature as the absolute has been forgotten. It’s buried beneath the superficiality of our naturalist worldview that reduces the world to our object.
This habitual naturalist way of thinking sees only the surface of phenomena, and this infects our understanding of God. It reduces God to a big and powerful object within nature. A finite but magical super-being who grants our wishes.
But the meaning of the word God is the absolute ground of all existence. The foundation and source of all knowledge and joy. God is he in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
**The spiritual world view**
Instead of trying to squeeze consciousness into the naturalist world view, we should construct our explanations of the world to fit the observed data. Taking consciousness seriously leads us directly to a spiritual world view.
The implications for all of us personally are profound.
Consciousness doesn’t emerge from the brain, so the death of the body isn’t the end of your existence. Reality isn’t an insentient mechanism. The world isn’t pointless and your life isn’t meaningless. Good and bad are part of reality, not merely social conventions to enhance biological survival.
You aren’t continually suffering a controlled hallucination, experiencing sounds and colours and smells that don’t exist.
You’re immersed in a wondrous and beautiful reality.
The Elegant Simplicity of Idealism
The best explanations of the world are not only the most accurate, they’re as simple as possible.
There is an elegant simplicity to Einstein’s e=mc2, and yet it encapsulates a profound truth. This principle of explanatory simplicity is called parsimony.
According to modern propaganda, naturalism is the simplest explanation of the world. It’s claimed that we know the natural world exists, so that should be our starting point. To assume there’s anything beyond nature, anything super-natural, is an unnecessary and unwarranted assumption.
But when naturalism’s claim to simplicity is critically analysed, we find the opposite is true.
Naturalism is a convoluted and extravagant explanation.
If simplicity is our criteria, then we should all be idealists, not naturalists. Idealism should be our starting point, because that’s what we observe to be true. Idealism not only *is* our starting point, it’s also our end point and all points between.
**Observing the facts**
The only thing we know are our conscious states, our experiences of the world. These states are self-evident, we don’t need any other evidence to demonstrate they exist.
Consciousness is self-luminous. If we turn on a lamp in a dark room, the light illuminates everything. We don’t need a light to see the lamp-light. In the same way, we don’t require some other confirmation to know our conscious states exist, we’re directly acquainted with them.
The existence of our consciousness is undeniable. The act of denying is a state of consciousness, which means consciousness must already exist to do the denying.
We can never get outside of consciousness or go beyond it. The conscious self is more fundamental than even knowledge of the world. Like the light source, consciousness is the source and foundation of all knowledge.
Consciousness is the necessary precondition for any knowledge whatsoever. The existence of consciousness is logically prior to any estimation of reality. It’s only by consciousness that anything can be known.
These are the observed facts. This is our starting point.
To assume there is some other stuff we call matter, which exists independently of consciousness, and causes consciousness; is an unnecessary and unwarranted assumption.
It’s also impossible to verify the truth of such a claim, we can’t get outside consciousness to know this theoretical “other” world. It’s not what we observe to be the case, and it’s not justified by logic.
**Naturalism extravagantly assumes the existence of another world**
Naturalism assumes the “real” world is something radically different from the world of our experience. This real world is the world science describes. A silent, colourless, and odourless world of particles and fields.
In this theoretical real world, apples aren’t red, roses have no scent, and rainbows aren’t colourful.
If that isn’t radical enough, naturalism goes even further. It says that this other world, which is nothing like your experience of it, exists independently of your experience, but is also the ultimate cause of those experiences.
For the naturalist, our experiences are only representations of the world, not what is *really* out there. Our experiences are inaccurate pictures of the world constructed by our brains.
What you’re aware of isn’t the world *as it is*, but instead, a hallucination constructed by the brain to represent the real world.
All the colours, smells, tastes, and sounds are imaginary qualities confined to a Cartesian movie theatre playing in your head.
Naturalism assumes an entire additional world, which is nothing like the one you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. This is a world you can never directly access, it will always remain a theoretical world.
But naturalism says this other world is the *real* world.
By contrast, idealism thinks this is unnecessary rigmarole and a denial of what is self-evidently true. Idealism accepts that your experiences of the world are accurate. The external world really does have colours, tastes, smells, and sounds.
It’s the idealist who affirms what is both self-evidently true and the simplest explanation of the observed facts about the world.
**People misunderstand idealism**
Many people don’t realise the explanatory merits of idealism because they think idealism denies the reality of an external world. They think if reality is mental, the world must be only in our minds.
But this is a misunderstanding. The idealist accepts the reality of the external world, but says the fundamental nature of the world is mental. It’s actually the naturalist who says the world of your experience is only in your mind.
According to idealism, there really is a world out there, your experience of it is accurate, and the fundamental nature of that world is mental.
Idealists accept the self-evident fact of our experience and assume the world really is like that. For the idealist, going beyond consciousness isn’t justified by logic or experience. We can’t go outside consciousness, it’s the only thing we know.
Even when we compare the merits of naturalism and idealism to see which is more likely to be true, we’re discussing competing *ideas* or concepts about the nature of the world. Nature is an idea, a state of consciousness.
Nature is a conceptual category we created to help us make sense of the world. The very act of explaining the world is to appeal to intelligibility.
Explaining the world in terms of concepts means our ontological primitives are mental. The concepts we use in thinking, are the same concepts we use in explaining the world. The idealist observes the nature of consciousness and accepts the logical consequences.
The world is fundamentally, and inescapably, grounded in mental states.
**The decadent extravagance of naturalism**
For naturalism to be true, we must also accept that the real world is radically different to the world of our experience. Not only is it radically different, it exists independently of our experience, and also causes our experience.
Naturalism proposes an entire duplicate world in addition to the one we know. This theoretical other world causes your experience of colours, sounds, and smells, but that world is colourless, silent and odourless.
Which means your experiences of the world are hallucinations. They exist only inside your head and are nothing like the *real* world.
It’s hard to think of a more extravagant, convoluted, and untidy explanation than that.
Contrast that with the simplicity of idealism. Idealism accepts that the real world has colours, sounds, smells and tastes. You’re not a ghost viewing a hallucination produced by the squishy grey matter in your skull.
You’re a conscious individual immersed in the experience of a wondrous and beautiful reality.
Simple, elegant and dignified.
Why I'm not a Naturalist
Naturalism is the cultural dogma of the modern world. It’s a story that’s repeated so often, people accept it without questioning its truth.
The naturalist story says that as scientific knowledge advances, it’s proving beyond reasonable doubt there is no God, no eternal soul, no afterlife, and we live in an insentient and purposeless universe.
Naturalists present this story as the most rational world view, but in fact it’s based on a logical mistake. It confuses a method with a metaphysics, it mistakes scientific data for philosophical facts.
Science is a method for discovering facts about the world. It intentionally restricts its explanations to a limited range of properties. Only empirical and measurable properties are included in scientific explanations.
If we intentionally restrict our view of the world, it doesn’t mean the world is like our view of it. Wearing rose coloured glasses doesn’t make the world itself rose coloured.
Yet this is the same basic mistake people make when they believe science has shown nothing supernatural exists. The reason science hasn’t found anything supernatural is because it isn’t looking for it.
Science intentionally restricts its explanations to the natural world, and the natural world is understood to mean the things that can be investigated with science.
To interpret this to mean that only natural things exist is a vicious logical circle.
Anyone who doesn’t want to base their world-view on logical circles will investigate the reasons and evidence we have to think naturalism is true.
Many people are surprised to discover that when we critically analyse naturalism as a metaphysics, we find it’s an incoherent doctrine.
Naturalism can’t define the word natural
If we’re to judge the truth of the claim that “everything is natural,” the first thing we need to ask is: What does the word natural mean?
We’re told that nature is all that exists, but the word natural has no clear definition. And we find that when we try and define it, naturalism is false or trivial.
This problem was most famously expressed by the philosopher Carl Hempel and is known as Hempel’s dilemma.
Generally, people are motivated to accept naturalism because of the success of the natural sciences. Which means the word natural can be broadly understood to mean “the phenomena studied by the natural sciences.”
If this is our definition, then to demonstrate metaphysical naturalism is true, we must reduce all phenomena to the laws of physics. Now the naturalist has a problem.
If they define natural or physical based on the current laws of physics, then naturalism is false. After all, no one thinks that current physics is complete and mental properties stand stubbornly outside the realm of physics.
If we judge on some unknown future laws of physics we find naturalism is vacuous, because no one knows what that ideal physics consists of. The unknown future physics might include souls, gods, fairies and ghosts. Which makes this definition of natural meaningless.
When the naturalist tells us that everything is natural, even they don’t know what that means.
This problem of incoherence might not seem so pronounced if naturalism were offered as a provisional belief or humble suggestion. But it’s usually delivered with such confidence that anyone who disagrees is deemed guilty of science denial and irrational wishful thinking.
We’re offered a grand thesis about the truth of the entire reality that can’t even define its central term.
This incoherence isn’t surprising if you realise that naturalism isn’t a thesis that starts by observing the world and then logically constructing its metaphysics to explain those observations. Instead, naturalism starts with a method of investigating the world and then tries to squeeze reality to fit its chosen method.
Naturalism can’t define its central term because nature isn’t an observed category in the world, but a category created as a method to investigate the world. When we try to retro-fit the world to our preferred method, the incoherence of the procedure is revealed.
Naturalism can’t explain why the universe exists
Most people think science will one day explain why the universe exists. Popular science commentary often misleadingly suggests cosmology is working on that question.
But science can never explain why nature exists, it can only explain things that already exist. Science is limited to telling us why the different arrangements of existing stuff changes over time. Science can’t tell us why that stuff exists, or why we have this stuff rather than some other kind of stuff, or even no stuff at all.
Naturalism as a philosophy is in the same situation, it can’t go outside of nature to say what caused nature to exist. It can’t admit the explanatory need to go beyond nature to explain why it exists, because that is admitting that naturalism is false.
The question of cosmic origins can’t be answered by referring to physical properties, because if something possesses physical properties, by definition, it already exists. All physical events and causes are within the history of nature. But the question being asked is about the possibility of such a history in the first place.
The only explanatory option for the naturalist is to say there is no reason the universe exists, the universe is a brute fact. Brute fact isn’t saying there is a reason but we don’t know what it is, this is saying, there is no reason.
If there is any idea we should be sceptical of, surely it’s an uncaused universe. It’s not only extremely unlikely, it’s incoherent. An existent thing that has no reason why it exists means it has no feature that distinguishes it from non-existence. There can be no reason within it’s own nature, and no reason outside itself.
But obviously there is a distinction between a universe which exists and a universe which doesn’t, so we arrive at a logical contradiction. Which means the idea there is no reason or explanation for the existence of the universe is false.
Naturalism can’t explain why there are uniform and orderly laws of nature
Just as naturalism can’t explain why nature exists, it can’t explain why our universe has these particular laws of nature. The fact that the universe is governed by uniform and orderly laws must be taken for granted.
The only explanation available to naturalism is chance. It just happened to be the case. But chance is a euphemism for not only unknown, but unanswerable.
In both instances of explaining why nature exists and why it has the properties it does, we’re offered euphemisms (brute fact and chance) to disguise the fact these questions are unanswerable within the logical boundaries naturalism allows.
All these explanatory defects are the consequence of naturalism starting with its conclusion. This is why it can’t define its central term, can’t explain why nature exists or why nature is orderly and intelligible.
Naturalism can’t confirm the truth of its doctrine because doing that would require going beyond its self-imposed boundaries. It’s a “super” natural conclusion about the entire reality that logic can never confirm as true.
Naturalism can’t explain the conscious dimensions of reality
Naturalism can’t explain personal phenomena. The hard problem of consciousness is really an impossible problem for naturalism. Mental properties like conscious experience, intentions, purposes, meaning and values can’t be reduced to natural properties. Which means naturalism is false.
Naturalism can’t explain how these immaterial properties could arise from the interactions of insentient matter. All these immaterial properties fit uncomfortably in the naturalist world view and must be reduced to an illusion or hallucination. Our experiences are reduced to a mere appearance, not the “real” world, because reality must be something physical.
This is why many naturalists deny the most fundamental truths of our experience of ourselves and the world. We’re often told we have no free will, and morality consists of nothing more than the rules that allow societies to function. Some naturalists even say consciousness itself is an illusion.
Naturalism must deny our shared experience of ourselves and the world to make the world conform to its explanation. A good explanation does the opposite, the explanation conforms to the observed nature of the world.
The impression people have that naturalism is a viable explanation relies on the confusion that science proves the philosophy. But naturalism as a philosophy goes far beyond the scientific data to make claims about the entire reality. Claims that aren’t justified by either logic or experience.
Wealth Addiction - The cost of being rich
No one ever thinks having lots of money will harm them.
We may think it will have undesirable side effects, like making us a target for thieves and scammers, or causing relationship troubles with friends and relatives.
But no one ever thinks having lots of money will diminish them as a person.
The price of homogenising value
The greatest utility of money is that it reduces everything to a common standard of value. It lets us move beyond bartering goods by creating an intermediary store of value. We can use money to exchange the things we produce, for other things we want or need.
But the utility of money comes at a cost. Because money is so useful as a method for exchanging value, we start to see the money itself as valuable. We forget that money is only the medium to acquire things of actual value.
Money is a means, not an end. We don’t want the money itself, we want the things money can buy. But because money is the intermediary, it’s always standing between us and our goals. Which makes it easy to lose sight of our actual goals and focus on accumulating money.
When we become accustomed to seeing money as the thing we want, we lose sight of the actual goal. We can’t see past the money. When we see money as the thing of value, we lose sight of our actual values.
And our values define our character. Both individually and as a society.
Money veils our value judgements
Because money is a veil between us and our values, it’s easy to hide our selfishness behind the money. Money can sanitise our value judgements, giving them a veneer of respectability.
Instead of our choices being value judgments, they become economic management.
When we say, I can’t afford it, we’re not making an economic statement, we’re making a value judgment. We’re saying that particular thing isn’t as important as some other thing. This isn’t always a problem, we have to make those kinds of choices every day.
But because the money removes the overt judgement, we can use a euphemism and say, I can’t afford that. We can talk about the money, not the value judgement.
Which makes it easier to be selfish. Because we don’t have to tell ourselves, I would rather live in a luxury mansion and own a private yacht than donate to the homeless shelter. When those priorities are clearly stated, the value judgment is clear. That choice isn’t one that will make us feel good about ourselves.
If we talk about the money, we hide the value judgment.
When I say I can’t afford it, I’ve placed a shield between my choices and my conscience. What it really means is that I give that thing less priority than other things. When we make a budget, we’re making a moral document, we’re making value judgments.
Money becomes a shield that lets us avoid confronting our value judgments, how we choose to live, and what we do with the energy at our disposal.
A budget is a moral statement
This mentality permeates our entire society, it happens on the individual level, and also in the government. A popular political euphemism is to say something isn’t “economically feasible.”
We talk about economic development and economic progress, as if the dollar value of an economy is the end goal. There is no corresponding qualitative measure of our economy, what we’ve done to create those dollars, or the social costs of producing that money.
We justify certain industries because they create jobs, but creating jobs isn’t the goal of our activities. We don’t want to create any kind of job, we don’t want people to expend energy doing harmful things.
People want occupations that are fulfilling. No one wants to exist as a mindless and repetitive cog in someone else’s money generating machine.
But we only measure the dollars, profit is the measure of success.
Our collective energy should be used to achieve the goals we have as a society. But we focus on economic development, and forget that we want a strong economy so we can achieve social development. A government budget is a moral document. It prioritizes some expenditures over less important things.
And once we talk this way for long enough, we start to lose sight of our needs. Because we see money as what we need, instead of what we need the money to achieve.
We come to believe that money is the key to satisfaction. This distracts us from our real needs, the ones money can’t buy, Instead we focus only on what money can buy. We find ourselves lonely and unfulfilled in a job we hate, surrounded by sparkly golden trinkets.
**Money as a motivator**
When money is used as a motivator, it redefines our reason to do something in terms of what will induce people to part with their money. We don’t grow and distribute food to provide the optimum nourishment to the greatest number of people, but to achieve maximum sales at maximum profit. The money becomes the goal, the nourishment is secondary.
What defines us as a person? It’s not how much we can produce, our efficiency, but rather what we choose to produce, our priorities as value judgements.
What do I use my limited energy to achieve? What are my goals in life? If money has become the goal, then that’s all we need to do, make money. By making money we’ve achieved the goal, our lives are successful. We can spend the money on anything, regardless of how trivial and selfish that thing is.
**Wealth as success**
For most other things we desire, we recognize the danger of excessive indulgence and how that can affect us as a well-functioning person. Too much food makes us overweight and unhealthy and can develop into an eating disorder, a recognized mental disease. Excessive drugs lead to addiction, compromising our free will.
We understand those kind of excessive behaviours diminish us personally. The person becomes less than they could be, their integrity is compromised.
But with money, we don’t see the ultra-wealthy as disordered individuals or lesser human beings. Most people aspire to be like them.
We see having money as having freedom and power. We forget that power corrupts. There are a number of scientific studies showing that higher social class predicts increased unethical behaviour.
**Enabling the addiction**
The fact that we associate success with money enables the behaviour of the obscenely wealthy. Because everyone aspires for wealth, it enables the mega-rich to be seen as role models, not addicts needing help.
We don’t recognize excess wealth as a disordered state. We don’t see someone who is hoarding money far in excess of what they need as a person whose value system is disordered.
We see them as the most successful among us. This is because we judge success in dollar value. This only makes sense if money is the goal, not the means to achieve the goal. Money distorts our value system, it changes our character.
The value of our character and our ideals and principles aren’t something that can be measured in dollars. We should be careful not to trade them for something inherently worthless.
The Search for Knowledge - where will it end?
All human beings search for knowledge.
What is the end of that search? Can we discover knowledge that will bring our search to its conclusion? Is there a foundational truth that explains all other things?
This is the search for the ultimate truth.
We seek the foundation of reality, the fundamental principle on which everything rests.
***The end of knowledge has a two-fold meaning***
But there is another meaning to the end of knowledge. An end is a conclusion, but it’s also a purpose. An end is a goal we strive towards.
Why do we want to know this fundamental truth?
It’s not only curiosity that motivates us. We need to know this ultimate truth before we can know the meaning of our lives.
Knowing the ultimate truth about the world means knowing why it exists.
If we know why the world exists, we also know why we exist. Only then can we know the purpose and meaning of our lives.
This is the goal of our search for knowledge. The ultimate truth about the world tells us who we are and why we’re here.
***What should we do?***
This search for ultimate truth is the question of causal origins.
Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate nature of that something? Was it created for some reason, or is it all a cosmic accident?
When we answer these questions, we know the reason for our existence.
Which means we also know the highest goal we should strive towards.
Without knowing the end goal, we can’t know which direction to move. We can’t know which actions will take us toward the goal and which actions will lead away.
We can’t know what should, or should not, be done.
This is the deeper reason for our search for the ultimate truth. Our quest for truth is our quest to discover our personal destiny.
***Science can’t answer this question***
A common misunderstanding is that science can discover why the universe exists. But this question is beyond the limits of scientific method.
Science is one part of our quest to discover the fundamental truth of all existence. Scientists search for the Theory of Everything. They want to discover a mathematical equation that describes and unifies the physics of the entire universe.
But even if scientists eventually discover this theory, it will never tell us where those laws of physics came from. It can’t tell us why the universe has these particular laws.
Science can’t tell us why the universe and its laws exist, rather than not existing at all.
Science can only describe how one existing state changes to the next existing state. Something must already exist for science to be able to describe it. Science can never tell us why those states exist.
Science’s quest should more accurately be called the Theory that Unifies Everything Physical.
***The purpose of the universe***
This misunderstanding about the limits of scientific explanation leads to another misunderstanding - that science tells us the universe has no purpose.
It’s common propaganda to be told the universe is meaningless. Scientists often tell us our lives are a cosmic accident and our existence is insignificant in the vastness of the universe. But these claims are overreach by scientists. Science tells us no such thing.
Scientists can say science has never found any purpose, but that’s vastly different to there is no purpose. The first statement is scientific, and the second is a strong philosophical claim.
If science can’t tell us the reason the universe exists, it also can’t tell us there is no reason and it’s all a cosmic accident.
Science is silent on the question of why the universe exists.
***What does it mean to know?***
Many people think the inability of science to tell us why the universe exists means we can’t know the answer.
This is the insidious dogma of scientism. It relies on assuming science is the only method we have to know things about the world.
But even once we recognise the difference between science and scientism, many people still think we don’t have enough information to know the answer.
They rely on logic to answer other questions, but stop short of following it to its inevitable end on this question.
This sceptical hesitation is based on another misunderstanding, what it means to say we know something. It’s common to think knowledge means certainty, people talk about proof. But most of the things we know, we’re not certain about.
Knowledge means something is true, and we have good reasons to believe it’s true.
Of course, it’s always possible that we’re wrong when we say we know something. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t believe anything is true.
That means we should always be ready to update our beliefs as we learn more.
***Agnostic is not an option***
When it comes to the question of cosmic origins, we can’t know the answers with certainty. We can’t even know the answer with confidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
But this is the same as most of our choices in life. And despite our inadequacies, we must choose an answer. Because these are practical questions about the best way to live.
The question of why we exist is the foundational question about how we should live. The reason for our existence provides the basis for our world view, the interpretative lens that orients us to the world.
The practical consequences of a purposeless universe are very different from the consequences of an afterlife and an eternal destination of the soul.
If God exists and there is an eternal afterlife, as most religions claim, it’s foolish not to engage in activities designed to achieve that eternal existence.
Despite our inadequacies, we must choose the answer we think is best. It requires us to have the courage to take a leap of faith. Faith in ourselves and our own estimation of ourselves and the world.
We aren’t passive bystanders in the world. We aren’t powerless. The fact that we aren’t omniscient doesn’t make us incapable of finding truth.
We effect the world constantly. Survival requires us to constantly interact with the world.
Ethics requires us to choose the terms of that interaction.
***Creation mythology***
All human cultures have asked and answered these questions about our origins. Their answers don’t usually look anything like our modern practice of ontology.
Our culture separates science from philosophy. Science discovers the mechanisms of the natural world, and philosophy is a theoretical pursuit for professional academics.
Most human cultures understand that this separation is artificial. They don’t think the important focus of our creation story is the mechanics of how physical states change from one state to the next.
They tell a story, a creation mythology.
These mythological stories take us beyond the bare facts about the world and explain the meaning and significance those facts have for our lives.
They explain what we should do about those facts. What it all means for us personally.
These narratives tease out the logical consequences of the creation in a format all humans can understand and relate to. They provide a story which guides us. It inspires us to live our best lives and achieve our full potential.
We become the heroes in the story of our lives.
In the modern world, we have unprecedented freedom to decide the answers to these questions for ourselves. We also have unprecedented access to the knowledge and answers given by the wisdom traditions throughout human history.
We’ve never been better equipped with the resources needed to follow our conscience and find our own authentic path.
***What do you think of the world?***
***What do you think of yourself?***
***What will you do about it?***
God is Love
When some people hear that God is love, it arouses the image of a benign old gentleman. An inoffensive chap who is insipidly polite and agreeably kind.
This superficial idea comes from the dogma of materialist thinking. We’re accustomed to think of love as an emotion, a feeling evoked by an object in the world.
But this is a facile and meagre conception of both love and God. Divine love isn’t an emotion at all. Love is our ultimate well-being and the foundation of our existence.
Love is truth, life and existence itself.
**Love as ontology**
Love as ontology is an idea that’s foreign to the modern mind. In the materialist worldview ethics is a dangler subject.
For the materialist, the world consists only of matter. Good and evil aren’t properties we find in materialism’s universe. Objects don’t have the properties of dimension, mass, charge and … goodness.
The materialist looks out at an insentient, uncaring and purposeless world.
It’s an artificial way of seeing the world because ethics is inseparable from our metaphysics. Ethics isn’t an optional extra, it’s the essential focus of our lives.
We can’t confine questions of right and wrong to abstract theories. Ethics is a practical discipline which can’t be avoided. Ethical truths are existential truths.
Materialism takes what’s foundational in our lives and makes it an afterthought. Good and bad become free-floating theories, uprooted from the substance of reality.
To understand the religious view that God is love, we need to put aside the peculiar ideas of materialism. We need to enter into a deeper and more holistic way of thinking.
Any philosophy worth having must fully integrate ethics with metaphysics. And once we do this, we end with love as ontology.
Love becomes the substance of reality.
**The ultimate good**
According to Plato, “What men love is simply and solely the good.” The supreme object of love is the ultimate good. We love things in varying degrees, according to how fully they participate in the good.
Eventually we reach the ultimate good, the thing “for whose sake all the other things” are loved. Later, Christianity will associate God with Plato’s ultimate good.
To understand God as the ultimate good, we first need to understand what the word God means. The superficiality of materialism has infected our ideas of God as well. Many people think of God as some kind of super-human sky daddy.
God isn’t more powerful than super-man, God is *all*-powerful. God isn’t “a being” who sits at the top of the pyramid of beings, God is “*Being itself*”.
God is the Absolute. The necessary foundation of all existence.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, self-sufficient, perfect, immutable, transcendent and immanent.
**Divine simplicity**
At the heart of this conception of God is divine simplicity. God isn’t composed of parts. There’s no distinction between *what* God is and *that* God is. In theological terms, God’s existence is identical to his essence.
Which should make it clear why God is also identified with the ultimate good. God is not only the ground on which all things stand, he’s also the end toward which all things move.
The simplicity of God means God doesn’t *possess* a will, God *is* his will. God is identical to his will, and his power, and his knowledge, and his goodness.
And so of course, God is also identical to his love.
Rather than an emotion evoked within God by an external cause, God’s love is an eternal act of will. Divine love isn’t a want or a need, something which God lacks.
God’s love is an outpouring of generosity. An overflow of benevolence and the desire for the good of the other.
**Love as creation**
This outpouring of God’s love is the act of creation. God’s love brings the world into existence and continually sustains it at every moment.
As the ultimate force of attraction, God draws us from the edge of non-existence and takes us to eternity, to the divine life.
This eternal existence is communion with God. An immersion in a universal, all-pervading, never ending love.
Mystics from many different creeds describe divine love as the fundamental cosmic fact. They speak in different languages and from different times and cultures. But they all describe the same state of being.
Our very existence – who and what we are — is a longing for God. We are by our very nature, ceaselessly drawn towards the ultimate good.
“*You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”* (Saint Augustine, Confessions)
**Love is grace**
This is why many theists identify love with grace. Grace is the divine bestowal of our very existence. Our self is an act of charity, a gift from God.
There’s nothing in our nature that qualifies us for the gift of existence. The power of grace isn’t within our grasp. There’s no arrangement we can make, no actions we can perform which can create and secure our own existence.
Grace descends. We receive. Our only choice is to embrace the gift with an open heart, or fight against it.
**The refusal of love**
With this understanding of God’s love, the wrath of God or the existence of hell, can only be a metaphor. When we reject the unquenchable ardour of God’s love, suffering and evil are the consequence.
If we refuse to open ourselves to love, it can’t move us. It can’t inspire our actions. It can’t transform us. So it can’t lift and carry us to the divine realm.
It can only outwardly burn us as it collides with our resistance. This outward burning is suffering. This is what evil consists of, resisting and moving in opposition to God’s unconditional and all-pervading love.
Evil and suffering aren’t defects in our nature, but ignorance of where to find our highest welfare. We can vividly feel our inner longing for the good. But we try to satisfy that longing with the temporary things of this world.
We ignore God. We love things other than God, thinking we can find fulfilment without him.
All those material things are destined to disappoint us. The inevitability of that disappointment isn’t a matter of opinion or preference. It’s an ontological fact.
Our schemes for finding fulfilment in this world are destined to end in failure. Because they will inevitably end. The greater the love, the greater the pain which accompanies its inevitable loss.
**The pinnacle of human thought**
This understanding of divine love shows us the depth and breadth of theistic thought. Love of God represents the pinnacle of human thought, and the most exalted goal of a human life.
It also represents the ground on which we stand. Theism integrates the deepest longings of our heart and soul with our intellectual theories about the world.
God’s love is not the insipid kindness of an agreeable old man. Divine love is the elegant and graceful dance that moves the world.
The Rational Path Leads to God
Everyone has heard the propaganda that theism is irrational.
We’re told belief in God is wishful thinking. A security blanket for people who can’t cope with the harsh realities of life.
But this patronising idea is the opposite of the truth. If we follow logic where it inevitably leads, it will take us to God.
**The Scientific Image of the World**
In the modern age the success of science is everywhere. This isn’t a theoretical belief we can doubt, it’s a solid and undeniable fact of our daily experience.
The influence of science is so pervasive we’re all conditioned to think scientifically. We see nature in the image science paints for us.
We assume nature only has the properties science describes: mass, dimension, charge etc. We no longer see the world as having inner dimensions; animistic spirits or Aristotelian essences.
Once we assume nature consists only of the properties science describes, it logically follows that there may — *or there may not* — be something more than nature. This *something more* we call the super-natural.
But notice how the super-natural is vague. It isn’t a description in its own right, but only in relation to the natural. The super-natural is anything that isn’t made of the stuff science can detect and measure.
We think of the super-natural as things like ghosts, fairies and magical creatures. But we also place God and the soul in that category.
Bracketing nature this way has practical benefits. But a side-effect we don’t notice is we’ve already assumed atheism is true.
**The leap from science to all reality**
We can all agree that looking at nature through a scientific lens is a powerful method for investigating certain aspects of the world.
But there’s a large gap between seeing nature through a scientific lens, and assuming it gives us a complete description of reality. It’s this assumption that’s never made explicit.
We don’t even notice we’re making it, because this isn’t something we’ve intentionally concluded using logic. It’s our habitual way of understanding the world in the scientific age.
We not only bracket nature as a category of thought, beyond that we bracket it as the allowable category in our explanations of the world. But we then take an unjustified leap. We assume nature describes a free-standing category of reality.
We assume nature can exist independently. That it doesn’t need anything else to bring it into existence, or to continually sustain it in existence.
It’s this assumption that gives us the logical possibility the super-natural *may not* exist. And once this logical space is available to us, atheism becomes a foregone conclusion.
But the idea nature is — *or could be* — a free-standing reality, is a strong philosophical claim. A claim most people accept on intuition, or habits of thinking. Not because they have good reasons to think it’s true.
**Facing up to the logical consequences of atheism**
There’s a difference between saying the words, I don’t believe God exists, and confronting the logical consequences of that being true. To confront the consequences we need to ask: how would the world be different if God doesn’t exist? What would the world look like?
And we intuitively assume we can remove God from our picture of reality and we are left with nature, the world described by science.
We envision an eternal universe, self-sufficient unto itself.
And once we take that leap to assume nature can exist independently, the super-natural becomes superfluous. Parsimony soon dispenses with God, because we no longer need him to explain the world.
God becomes an explanatory irrelevance.
**The meaning of the word God**
Rather than being the most rational conclusion, this way of thinking is confused on a foundational level. It assumes reality conforms to our habitual way of understanding the world. It also misunderstands the meaning of the word God.
We can’t remove God from our ontology without causing logical incoherence. God isn’t an optional extra. If we take away God, we aren’t left with a free-standing universe of natural things.
Without God, we’re left with nothing whatsoever.
God is necessary for anything at all to exist. To have an accurate understanding of the claim *God exists*, we should understand it to mean, *nature can’t exist* *on its own*.
Theism observes nature and agrees it has common properties like mass, dimension and charge. But it doesn’t ignore the fact it also has the common property of existential dependence. Everything in nature depends on something outside itself for its existence.
This means the idea of nature as a self-sufficient category of reality, a collection of things which exist independently, is logically incoherent.
It’s like pulling a universe out of a hat. It relies on distraction and sleight of hand to make anyone believe it could happen.
**God is the Absolute**
God with a capital G signifies something far more profound than a super-human being. An omnipotent God isn’t a being who is really, really powerful. Omni doesn’t mean bigger or better. Omni means *all*.
An omni God is the Absolute.
Absolute means not qualified or diminished in any way, independent. The Absolute isn’t understood in relation to other things. Everything else can only be understood in relation to the Absolute.
God as the Absolute isn’t a mathematical or theoretical concept. It’s the necessary foundation of all existence. This is why you don’t hear God referred to as “a *being*” who exists alongside various other beings. But instead, God is “*Being itself*”.
God isn’t one more thing in the collection of things which exist. He isn’t a super-human entity within the universe, or sitting outside the universe. These are both variations of the same misunderstanding.
The Absolute is in a class of its own.
The Absolute isn’t the mere negation of the relative. It transcends both the relative and its negation. God is both transcendent to, and immanent within, the entire creation.
If that sounds too abstract, think of a more familiar and concrete example.
The sun transcends both light and dark, yet is the source of both. The light is the manifestation of the sun’s energy. The darkness is the absence of light.
The sun is the ultimate cause. Both light and dark exist only in relation to the sun.
If we understand what the sun is, we also understand we can’t remove it from our ontology and think light and dark can exist independently. The sun is a necessary precondition not only of the creation of light, but to sustain light in existence from moment to moment.
This is analogous to God as the Absolute.
Absolute isn’t a characteristic God has, like someone may have intelligence or beauty. God as the Absolute is a logical designation of what God *is*.
When we hear people talk of God as an unnecessary hypothesis, we know they’re confused. God’s creation of the world isn’t concerned with an event prior in time to the big bang.
God is the logical pre-condition for anything at all to exist. Because there must be a foundation which isn’t dependent on other things.
The ground of all existence must be self-sufficient.
**The logical price of rejecting God**
So what are the consequences of rejecting God as the necessary foundation of reality? What options are available to atheism to explain the existence of the universe?
There are only two. Brute fact and infinite regress.
Infinite regress says there is an infinite causal sequence. Not only does the sequence have no end, it also has no beginning. This isn’t a theoretical infinity. It’s a claim about concrete things in the world.
In this context saying there is no first member of the causal series isn’t an explanation, it’s the endless deferral of giving an explanation.
Which is the same as giving no explanation at all.
The second option is brute fact. A brute fact is something which has no cause or reason to explain it. Let’s be clear about what this means. Brute fact isn’t saying there *is* a cause but we don’t *know* what it is. It’s saying there is *no cause*.
Saying the universe is a brute fact means there is no reason, no explanation for its existence.
Brute fact denies the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). The PSR is a logical principle that says things have reasons why they exist rather than not. The PSR is a fundamental requirement of rationality - there are reasons, or explanations, for why things exist.
The PSR is also common sense. When someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, we don’t think they’ve proved brute facts exist. We also don’t think they’ve shown that things can appear from nothing.
We know they’re deceiving us.
**God is a demand of logic**
Notice how incongruous these two explanations are with the confident proclamations atheism is the most rational position. It’s hard to even think of infinite regress or brute fact as actual explanations.
They aren’t ideas we hear and think, what a carefully thought out explanation. They’re more like unwanted leftovers we’re stuck with if we insist on rejecting God.
It’s not a coincidence that rejecting God leaves us with no explanation for why everything exists. This is exactly what theists argue. God isn’t an unnecessary hypothesis or a superfluous one.
God is a demand of logic.
If we understand what the word God signifies, we also see that theism is the option that is faithful to logic. Theism follows logic where it leads. And we also see the alternatives to God are appeals to magic. Like pulling a universe out of a hat.
The remarkable thing is how many people don’t notice the trick.
There’s no shortage of atheists telling us the universe comes from nothing, or that science is capable of explaining the cause of its existence.
The physicist Stephen Hawking tells us the universe was “spontaneously created out of nothing”. Lawrence Krauss wrote an entire book titled, *A Universe from Nothing*.
This is an astonishing level of confusion from public intellectuals.
The confusion is the result of an over-confidence in the limits of scientific explanation, and a corresponding ignorance of philosophy. These are the same scientists who declare philosophy useless.
A rationally justified atheism must face up to the logical consequences disbelief in God entails. It’s not good enough to mock caricatures of theism, or promote the misunderstanding science can explain why the universe exists. No rational and thoughtful person should take these deceptive ideas seriously.
The Practice of Yoga - Stretch your understanding
In the West, yoga is understood as a method to achieve physical and mental well-being. But yoga offers so much more. It promises us freedom from all suffering, a state of eternal bliss.
Yoga is a spiritual practice, a way to achieve higher consciousness and connect with the divine. The word yoga comes the Sanskrit word *yug*, which means to yoke, bind or join. It’s a type of spiritual union.
The method to achieve this union is to first control the mind. The objects of the senses agitate the mind. The unceasing mental chatter we’re all familiar with is like a static interference which obscures our vision of the divine.
When the vibrations of the mind are still, our vision is clear and we can perceive our true self. We direct our awareness away from the external objects of the senses and turn inward to discover the essence of our being, the divine spark within.
There are four main paths of yoga; Karma yoga (yoga of action), Bhakti yoga (yoga of devotion), Jnana yoga (yoga of knowledge), and Raja yoga (yoga of mind control). It’s only Raja Yoga which practices asana, or posture, and asana is only one step in an eight-step system called astanga yoga.
This particular system is found in the classic text, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Patanjali defines yoga as the cessations of the fluctuation of the mind (*Yogas citti, vritti nirodhah*). He outlines an eight-step path culminating in samadhi. Samadhi is a state of joining or union with the divine. This is the goal of yoga.
Asana (posture) is the third step in the process and not practiced with the goal of physical fitness, but to facilitate a meditative state. Patanjali says, The meditation posture should be steady and comfortable.
The other steps are unlikely to have popular appeal, so they aren’t widely advertised. They deal with the self-control and austerity which is necessary to succeed on the spiritual path.
We first need to practice certain restraints, avoid things which agitate the mind. Unrestrained sense indulgence excites the mind, when we regulate these activities, it helps to subdue the mind.
The first two steps are the practices of self-control, five activities we should perform and five activities we should avoid.
Step 1 — Yama, don’t do these things.
1. Don’t be violent (non-violence, *ahimsa*)
2. Don’t lie (honesty, *satya*)
3. Don’t steal (*asteya*)
4. Don’t be sexually promiscuous, practice celibacy or marital fidelity (*bramacharya*)
5. Don’t be greedy or possessive (*aparigraha*)
Step 2 — Niyama, the 5 do’s, the duties we should perform.
1. Purity, cleanliness of mind and body (*shaucha*)
2. Contentment, acceptance of one’s circumstances (*santosha*)
3. Austerity, self-discipline (*tapas*)
4. Study of the Veda and self-reflection (*svadhyaya*)
5. Commitment to the Lord (*ishvarapranidhana*)
Step 3 — Postures (asana)
It’s only after the first 2 steps that asana or posture is included. The goal of asana isn’t toned muscles, it’s intended to facilitate a meditative state.
The next 5 steps are an increase in the intensity or focus of the meditative state. This culminates in samadhi.
Step 4 — Controlling the breath (pranayama)
Focusing on the breath.
Step 5 — Withdrawal of the senses (*pratyahara*)
Drawing within of awareness, detaching the senses from external objects.
Step 6 — Concentration (*dharana*)
Dharana means concentration, introspective focus and one-pointedness of mind. The root of the word is *dhr* which means “to hold, maintain, keep”.
Step 7 — Contemplation (*dhyana*)
Dhyana is contemplating, reflecting on whatever *dharana* has focused on. Dhyana is an uninterrupted train of thought, or a flow of awareness.
Step 8 — Samadhi
The state of samadhi is oneness with the object of contemplation. This is the goal of yoga, a spiritual union.
The other paths of yoga don’t include asana in their practices. Karma yoga focuses on selfless action. By performing actions without attachment to the rewards, our mind and ego are subdued.
Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion. By surrender to God the soul achieves the goal of union with the divine.
Jnana yoga is the yoga of knowledge. The focus is on intellectual understanding and in this way we understand our true nature.
*“The mind controlled by yoga practice is tranquil, pacified by detachment from material desires. The yogi remains satisfied in the self alone, and in spiritual enlightenment tastes eternal bliss. Once established in such a position the yogi never deviates from the truth. On gaining this, they consider there is no greater gain. They are never disturbed, even in the greatest tribulation. This state of being, the freedom from all suffering, is known as yoga.”*
*Bhagavada Gita 6.20–23*
The Universe is a Spiritual Black Hole - Exposing the illusion of the material world
The term *black hole* is a misnomer. A black hole isn’t empty space, it’s the opposite. It’s a region of space so dense even light can’t escape its boundary.
When viewed from the outside the space appears to be empty, because a black hole swallows everything, even light. The eye is powerless to see without light. This is how our senses deceive us and produce the illusion of a black hole.
The same illusion frustrates our attempt to find satisfaction in the material world. We think we can find the positive fulfilment of our existence here, but this world contains only dissatisfaction masquerading as satisfaction. It’s the negative reality cloaked in the illusory appearance of the positive.
**The negative state of reality**
We often define the spiritual as immaterial. This gives matter the primary position, the spiritual is understood in relation to matter. We define the spiritual in the negative, it’s not-material.
But this way of thinking is backwards because the spiritual is the positive reality. Instead of spirit being understood as not-material, matter needs to be understood as not-spiritual.
The spiritual dimensions of life are the inner conscious dimensions of the world. Matter is an idea, a state of consciousness. Matter is our conception of the world when we exclude spirit from our view.
When we restrict our view of the world to its external appearance, ignoring the inner substance, we call that matter. This is the same illusion created by a black hole. When we view that area of space, it looks empty, devoid of any substance.
But in fact, the space actually has far more substance than the surrounding area. The matter is so dense light can’t escape the boundary of the black hole. Since we can’t see the light, it creates the illusory appearance of a hole.
Just as light is the necessary precondition for the eye to see the world, consciousness is the necessary precondition for any perception of reality. Consciousness illuminates reality like the background light of a projector illuminates images on a screen.
Consciousness is primary; its existence comes first. Consciousness must exist before we can make any estimation of reality. We can only know everything else in relation to consciousness.
This is just another way of saying consciousness is the substance of reality. The primary states of reality are experiential; they’re the inner dimensions of the world. It’s from these experiential states that the idea of matter emerges.
The materialist view is backwards. It claims that states of consciousness emerge from matter. Our awareness and experience of the world somehow magically emerge from electrical and chemical interactions in the brain. But this idea raises impossibly hard problems for the materialist.
These problems aren’t only theoretical puzzles. If consciousness is the primary or positive reality, this has major implications for our lived experience of the world and our search for a fulfilling existence.
A perpetual hunger
We all know the conscious states which comprise our various experiences, but what is the most general feature of these states? This isn’t a question about the individual states that come and go in response to our interactions with the world. This is a question about the most general and universal feature of our experience in this world.
When we consider the universal characteristic of our experience, we discover we exist in a state of perpetual hunger. Hunger is a state of dissatisfaction, a negative state of consciousness. It’s a spiritual dis-ease.
Hunger is the experience of lacking something we want or need, an awareness we require something beyond ourselves to be complete. We can’t eradicate the hunger of this world; we can only temporarily subdue it.
We all know this hunger in it’s most concrete form as our need to eat to survive. A continual intake of energy is required to sustain our existence in this world. We can only perpetuate our existence by importing sustenance. We need energy from outside ourselves to maintain our bodily system and hold entropy at bay.
This is a law of nature and the form it takes is not a coincidence. The laws of nature are the outer movement of the inner state of the world. They describe the behaviour of reality. Just as a red face is the outer form of the inner state of anger, the laws of nature are the body language of the underlying conscious substance of reality.
The shadow world
We all recognise the physical hunger that signals our need for food. This hunger is a signal we’re missing something. If we ignore the signal, we can’t sustain our existence. But this hunger can only sustain the existence of our physical body. Our spiritual hunger goes deeper.
Our spiritual hunger signals what we need to fulfil our existence. We’re all trying to make our lives inwardly complete. Something is missing from our lives, but we’re only aware of its lack. We have a vague sense of the shape of the thing we lack, we see its shadow as if veiled by a mist.
We also experience those brief moments in life when the veil lifts and we encounter a state of satisfied fullness. In those moments, we find an inner self-sufficiency that requires nothing external. This isn’t the temporary appearance of happiness or pleasure. This is an inner peace and satisfaction, a state that is content with itself.
But that state of satisfaction is also transient. It’s a fleeting glimpse of what we’re perpetually seeking. It often comes upon us with no clearly identifiable cause. We’re ignorant of how to find it again and permanently sustain it.
So we wander like ghosts through a shadow world. A state of existence that consists only of the outer shape, but lacks the inner substance we seek. The outline of that silhouette is the shape of our own self, our desires for things that are not-divine.
These material desires obstruct the light of the divine from reaching our awareness. We’ve turned away from the source of our being and have our backs toward the divine, ignoring the spiritual realm and blocking its light from illuminating our view of the world.
The temporary removal of dissatisfaction
We try to fill the void by seeking pleasure from the senses and the various distractions of the world. In response to our inner need, we accept a cheap imitation. In place of lasting satisfaction, we accept the temporary removal of a dissatisfaction.
When we indulge the senses, it creates an agitation, an excitement of the flesh to which are attached. That agitation creates a distraction from our persistent inner hunger. But the agitation is also temporary, the excitement inevitably wears off.
As the excitement dissipates, it exposes the shape of our desire, the particular texture of our dissatisfaction. This is the negative version of the satisfaction we seek. So we indulge the senses again and the dissatisfaction is subdued and quietened, temporarily muffled by the volume of the excitement.
The removal of dissatisfaction is the removal of a negative state. We experience the removal of the negative as a positive. If we hit our heads against a brick wall, it feels good when we stop. But there is no genuine satisfaction to be found in not hitting your head. It’s only when judged in relation to the pain of hitting your head that the absence of the pain feels like pleasure.
A negative only exists in relation to the positive. A hole is the absence of something; a positive substance must surround it. Without a jumper, the hole in a jumper can’t exist. The hole is the negative state, the boundary formed by the absence of the jumper.
Because dissatisfaction is a negative state, it’s limited in its capacity to produce the illusion of pleasure. It needs the hunger, or the recent memory of it for comparison.
The extent of our hunger enhances the pleasure of consuming a meal. The greater the hunger, the greater the pleasure experienced by it’s removal. Continuing to eat once there is no trace of any hunger will cause the pain of overindulgence.
This is why unrestrained sense pleasure leads to addiction. We become habituated to the excitement and can’t tolerate its absence. We inevitably enter a state of overindulgence. Without the hunger, the sensual excitement no longer has the power to create the illusion.
Untying the ropes of attachment
Eventually we see through the illusion and realise the dissatisfaction runs so deep it forms the very structure of the material world. The material universe is the negative world, a black hole within the divine reality.
The removal of dissatisfaction is only the removal of the negative state. It can never add up to more than zero. There is only the absence of dissatisfaction. But satisfaction isn’t the mere absence of dissatisfaction, satisfaction is a positive state of consciousness.
The renunciant sage understands this truth and abstains from the sense pleasures of the world. The sage recognises the futility of searching for satisfaction in this world because it can only produce the illusion of pleasure. What we call pleasure is really a dissatisfaction, an agitation that only further indulgence can remove. It’s a vicious cycle that adds up to nothing and in the end produces only frustration.
Outwardly, the sage appears to be denying pleasure, but the opposite is true. The sage is seeking genuine satisfaction. It seems as if they are giving up something desirable, when they’re really abandoning a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. They’re pursuing a permanent state of inner peace.
By renouncing the sensual pleasure, we end the agitation it produces. Removing sensual agitation produces an inner calm. When the interrupting vibrations of the mind and senses are quiet, it creates the conditions needed to look within.
Without the distracting agitation, we can perceive the substance of our own self and its positive state of being. We experience our natural state unfettered by the sensual ropes which bind us to the body.
At present, we’re only aware of that positive state of consciousness in the negative version. We perceive its shadow, a misty outline of what we seek. We see the shape of our dissatisfaction in the things of this world we’re attracted to and the particular sensual pleasures we pursue.
Renunciation is the first step on the path of self realisation, the path of the mystic. It’s a solitary quest to discover our own self and the divine substance which is the ground of our being. When we find our natural connection with that divine soil, we will flourish.
The Perfection of Free Will - surrender to divine love
The will is the power which moves everything in the conscious world.
How you choose to move and interact with the world is determined by your will. While our limited sphere of influence moves according to our will, the entire reality moves according to God’s will.
God is omnipotent, his will is all-powerful. There is no limit on an all-powerful will. God’s will is always effective, whatever he desires becomes actual.
God’s will is the underlying structure of reality. The entire cosmos moves according to God’s will. Whatever happens must ultimately have his sanction. He’s the cause of all causes, the controlling force of all.
And it’s God’s will that we are free.
God doesn’t interfere with our choices. We have inner autonomy, our conscience is the judge of what is right.
This freedom of our will means we can move in harmony with God’s will or we can move against it. When we do something God doesn’t want, we make God’s will subservient to ours.
But this isn’t the natural state of reality, so when we act against God’s will, we no longer exist within the divine realm, we exist within the material world. The material world is the place where we are free to ignore God.
To exist within the material world means reality has become our object and moves according to our command, not God’s. God’s will is hidden, replaced by the mathematical laws of action-reaction (karma).
The instrument which is responsible for God being hidden is the same instrument which can illuminate him. A misuse of our free will is the reason we’re separated from God, so free will is the only instrument that can re-connect us.
The Super-subject
In relation to matter, we are the subject and matter is our object. But in relation to God, God is the subject and we are his object. Knowledge of God isn’t in our power to take, it depends on God’s power, God’s will.
The intellect only has the power to know God in a theoretical sense, as a detached acceptance of some factual proposition. Only the will has the power to know God in an experiential sense.
To know God we must submit our will to his. You can’t know God without also knowing he is omnipotent and reality moves according to his will.
That isn’t a theoretical truth we can claim to believe and expect our lived experience won’t confirm it. Just as we can’t believe gravity causes us to fall and then jump from a cliff expecting to fly.
To be under the illusion that reality moves independently of God is to exist in the material world, a world where our will is the causal power and matter is our object. To submit to God’s will is to exist in the divine world, the world where God resides and his existence isn’t hidden.
Surrender to God’s will
To our ears, submission to God sounds like oppression. But the highest expression of surrender to God is love. If we freely submit to the will of another, we are trying to please them by fulfilling their desires. Our will becomes subservient to theirs. It’s an unselfish act, a giving of our own self to the object of our love.
In proportion to the depth of our sincerity in wanting to please God, we’ll gain knowledge of him. As the purity of our desire increases, our knowledge increases. And we can’t cheat or lie, sincerity can’t be faked. We’ll get what we really want because God has granted that power to us. It’s only when we sincerely want God that we will get him.
The catalyst for success is sincerity, and sincerity is internal, a state of our inner self. Sincerity isn’t dependent on the outer form of our actions but our motivation, the reason behind our actions. A child may offer their parents a mud pie, something that is outwardly useless, but the parent accepts the love which motivated the offering. It’s the love that pleases the parent, not the item.
Many people say they want God, but really they want some other benefit God can give them. They may want money, followers and admirers; a community of like-minded people; a salve for a guilty conscience; or comfort in times of hardship. We get whatever it is we really want.
Enforcing God’s will
Many religious people think they know God’s will and it’s their duty to enforce it on others. They say it’s God’s will we should act in a certain way and if we don’t comply God will punish us.
But that is their way, not God’s. If God wanted someone to act in a certain way, it would happen. Because God is omnipotent and his will is always effective.
God isn’t incapable of enforcing his will. For God’s will to be effective, no extra effort is required on his part. Just as we don’t need to do anything more than exert our will for our body to move and follow our commands.
God doesn’t need a self-appointed police force to impose his will on others. Someone appointing themselves as the arbiter and enforcer of God’s will has misunderstood what it means for us to have free will.
God’s will is that we are free to choose in accord with our conscience. That is what free will consists of. And if we are our own inner judge, then what is right for me may not be right for you.
The perfection of freedom
We each have different goals. Our spiritual goals are what we decide is the ultimate fulfilment of our existence. The path we follow depends on our chosen destination, as well as our starting point, abilities and resources.
To be authentic, the path must be an expression of our faith. Faith can’t be purchased second-hand, it’s not something external to ourselves but the expression of our inner nature. Faith is an act of will, a movement of the essence of who we are.
Faith expresses our highest ideals, our values, and what we consider sacred. Faith is how we choose to live. The intellect has it’s limited contribution to make in that decision, but it’s the will that must move and act.
The will takes us beyond the intellectual theory to immerse ourselves in the reality of those ideals.
It’s only when our highest ideals align with the true nature of reality that we achieve the perfect expression of our free will. The true nature of reality is that God’s will is the cause of all movement. If our will is in dissonance with God’s, we’ve made a mistake, our actions are tainted with ignorance.
Anything less than complete surrender to an all-good God falls short of perfection. And complete surrender to God is motivated by love. Love of God is the consummation of our existence, the state of being in which we find our complete fulfilment and repose.
The Problem of Evil and Suffering - Is there a solution?
The problem of evil is often called the rock of atheism. This describes its enduring power to cast doubt on the existence of a loving God. While we think of it as a logical problem, its force reaches far deeper than the intellect.
It’s a simple matter to solve the logical problem of evil and reconcile the alleged contradiction between a triple-omni God and the existence of evil in the world.
But logical proofs are like waves crashing on the immovable rock of evil. They make no impact. They are theoretically sound, but existentially deficient.
The power of the problem of evil isn’t intellectual. Evil and suffering offend us to the core of our being. They are a defilement of the soul.
Suffering is a universal problem. Regardless of our personal beliefs about God or the meaning of life, suffering is always unwanted. Evil and suffering are problems which stand between us and the fulfilment of our true potential.
This is the real problem of evil. It’s an existential problem no theoretical answer can solve. A logical proof has no effect. The evil and suffering is still there, unaffected.
The existence of evil will always cast doubt about God’s existence, benevolence and his love for us. But ultimately, although the existence of evil causes doubts about God, he is our only possible salvation. It’s only God who can provide a solution to the problem.
The Logical Problem
The logical problem is the apparent contradiction between a triple-omni God and the existence of evil in the world.
If God is omniscient, he knows the evil exists.
If God is omnipotent, he has the power to stop the evil.
If God is omni-benevolent, he would want to stop the evil.
Then why does evil exist?
The most influential theistic response is to deny God has the power to stop the evil. Even an all powerful being can’t do logically impossible things.
God can’t create married bachelors or square circles because it’s logically impossible. Square circles are a logical contradiction, words strung together to sound like actual things. But they can’t really exist, because it’s impossible for anything to be both square and circular.
The theist says the existence of free will without the existence of evil is also a logical impossibility. Creatures with free will entail the possibility they will make the morally wrong choice.
Evil is a logically necessary outcome if creatures with free will exist. Even an all powerful God can’t create a world with both free will and no evil, just as he can’t create a world which contains square circles.
The theist says the existence of free creatures is a valuable thing that justifies the evil and suffering that must also exist. Evil is an unavoidable by-product of pursuing the greater good of free will.
The Natural Problem
While the free will defence answers the logical problem, there is no shortage of evil and suffering in the world that isn’t caused by free moral choices. There are natural disasters, accidents and diseases.
What reason could God have for allowing those instances of evil and suffering to exist? They don’t seem to produce any greater good. They don’t appear to be necessary for free will.
While they may appear to be instances of gratuitous evil, we need to consider the wider context. If God exists, making morally evil choices means we are ignoring God’s will. In this material world, we are ignorant of God’s existence. We are ignoring him and focusing our consciousness elsewhere.
And for it to be possible to ignore the foundation and cause of all existence, God must be hidden. The concealment of the divine isn’t a game of hide and seek, it’s the structure of the material reality.
To say God is omnipotent isn’t a statement about the choices God makes. It’s a fact about the essential nature of reality. God’s will is the foundational cause of all movement in the world, the origin of every other cause or source of power.
Everything in existence is following God’s will. This isn’t something we can change without changing the type of thing reality is. Just as your will is the foundational cause of the movement of your body and mind, we can’t remove your will without removing the essence of what you are.
The only possible world that can have creatures who are free to ignore God is a world where God is hidden. The material world is the effect produced if God is apparently absent, just as darkness is the effect produced if light is absent.
The characteristics of this material world are what God-is-not.
Instead of an eternal reality, the material world is temporary. Everything in it degrades and eventually dies.
Instead of a conscious reality, matter appears unconscious. Its movement never deviates from mathematical laws which dictate what it will do.
Instead of a sentient world that moves by the force of love, nature appears uncaring and indifferent to our suffering.
If God is all good, then not following his will produces not-good or evil.
We live in a world which is not-God. It’s the structure necessary to allow the possibility, and the opportunity, to ignore God’s will and pursue our will independently of God.
God can’t create a world where the living beings have the freedom to ignore his will and also not suffer. It’s a logical contradiction because suffering and evil are characteristics of a world where God is absent.
The Existential Problem
The mere existence of suffering and evil is our real problem. An intellectually satisfying answer to the problem doesn’t solve it. It tells us why evil exists, but the fact it exists endures. This is the real rock on which the waves of our hopes and dreams will break.
If a loving God doesn’t exist, there is no hope of a solution to our existential problem. If God doesn’t exist, there is no better world free from evil, suffering and death.
If atheism or naturalism is true, it reduces our existence to animals that must kill to survive. We can only sustain our existence by consuming other living beings. We live in a world of horrors.
While we may be lucky enough to avoid personally experiencing the horrors, that is no solace to a caring soul. It’s like enjoying life on a battlefield surrounded by the pain and suffering of others. Others must die, so we may live.
If there is no God, we can never rise above the ethical vulgarity of such an existence.
God can be our only solace, our only hope for salvation and a dignified existence. If the evil in this world exists to facilitate a greater good, if we fight this battle in pursuit of a higher ideal, we can eventually rise above our present predicament.
Theism is a story with a happy ending, a dream and ideal worth fighting for. To find the truth and source of our existence and fulfil our potential as eternal, blissful, divine beings. To live in a world where we sustain our existence by love, not by exploitation.
The Fulfilment of Consciousness - Moving in harmony with the divine
The conscious dimensions of nature are **the substance of reality**. The conscious self within your body is the substance of what you are, and the same principle applies to the whole of reality. https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-substance-of-reality-ac42d0b3cb66
The field of spacetime is a continuous fabric on which the details of the world are embroidered. Spacetime also has inner conscious dimensions. Consciousness pervades spacetime as a unified field.
These **inner dimensions** are the divine reality. The divine isn’t something far beyond us, it’s immanent within the world. https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-inner-dimensions-of-nature-12e74f48a575
**The natural movement of consciousness**
Free will is the movement of consciousness. Whatever consciousness desires, it focuses its attention there and directs its energy toward it. That’s the movement of will or intention.
The movement of bodies within spacetime requires energy, the capacity to create an effect and change the world from one state to another. Free will also has this causal power, it can affect the world.
Consciousness moves by the power of intentions and desires. It’s always directed toward something, always focused on its chosen object.
That causal power of consciousness isn’t something distinct from the movement through space. The movement through space is the external appearance of the inner movement of consciousness. Consciousness is the foundational cause.
We can understand the movement of bodies in a limited way by describing their external movement through spacetime. But this ignores the entire conscious realm.
If we want to explain the cause of a body moving through space from the lounge to the kitchen, we can describe the physical forces involved. But there is nothing in the language of physics that can include intentions or desires.
These physical descriptions aren’t wrong, they’re incomplete. They’re accurate and useful within a limited context. But if our goal is understanding the ultimate cause of the movement, the physical description is irrelevant.
In the wider explanatory context, when we include the foundational cause, it relegates the entire physical description to an effect.
The foundational cause is the movement of the will. The cause of the body moving to the kitchen is the desire for a snack. In response to that cause, the legs move. The physical movement is the effect, the will is the cause.
The example of our own body shows us the inadequacy of physical explanations of our movement to the kitchen. It leaves out the substance, the primary cause of the movement. It leaves out the desire and intention that caused the physical movement.
**The natural direction of will**
Free will naturally moves toward a positive and fulfilled state of consciousness. The will always directs its energy toward bliss.
No one wants to suffer, everyone seeks bliss. We direct our consciousness toward whatever we think will bring us bliss. We act intending to achieve that positive state of consciousness.
This description applies at the individual level and at the universal scale. It’s a description of the inherent nature of consciousness.
The universal divine will is the movement inherent in the fabric of reality. The divine will is the foundational cause of all movement, the ultimate cause of everything that exists.
The divine will has unlimited causal power, it’s all powerful or omnipotent. An omnipotent will is always effective, whatever it desires becomes actual. The entire reality moves according to the universal will.
We are also part of reality, so when we move, it should be in harmony with the divine will. That’s the natural order of reality. But because we also have limited free will, sometimes we don’t move that way. We disregard the universal will and we move according to our selfish will.
We can understand this from the experience of our own body. Our consciousness pervades the physical body, and our will is the power that causes the body to move in certain ways. We desire a snack from the kitchen, our body moves that way.
But sometimes a part of our body doesn’t function the way it should. If our legs are paralysed, we can’t fulfil our desire. The causal power of our will is obstructed.
The same principle applies to the movement of the divine will. The universal will always moves toward bliss. Since the divine will is always effective, bliss is always the result of actions in harmony with that will. But any movement which isn’t aligned with the divine will produces the effect of not-bliss, it causes suffering.
**The inherent goodness in the structure of reality**
The divine will is the ground of ethical principles. There are facts about good and evil which are inherent in the structure of reality itself.
Ethical ideals aren’t rules humans created for harmonious social interactions, nor are they traits which evolved because they enhance survival. They may sometimes include these properties, but this isn’t the substance of what they are.
Ethical ideals are divine principles woven into the fabric of reality. We can achieve our highest welfare, and freedom from suffering, by aligning ourselves with that divine realm of existence.
Every individual can aspire to embody those ethical truths. They can freely choose to align themselves with the divine will. Our actions are the external appearance of our will, and our will is the inner movement of our consciousness. What we do is a natural expression of the type of person we are.
We intuitively know the suffering in the world is wrong. There is a problem of evil, but we are unaware of the solution. We don’t desire suffering, yet it’s unavoidable.
The natural movement of our will is obstructed, because while we can find temporary pleasure in the world, suffering is inevitable. Our natural movement is toward bliss, but we are in ignorance of where to find it. It’s this ignorance that causes suffering.
No one knowingly chooses to suffer. They choose what they believe produces bliss, but they’re mistaken. Suffering isn’t a punishment enforced for not following the commands of the divine will. There is no malice within the divine will.
Existing outside the natural flow of the divine will produces the effect of suffering. This isn’t a judgement for an ethical crime, it’s a description of a natural law, the inherent movement within reality.
This is a conception of good and evil that transcends religious doctrine and metaphysical beliefs. The intuitive rule for ethical behaviour is to act so we avoid causing suffering to others. This is the basis of all ethical principles. We find similar ideals in all religions. Recommendations of acting with charity, kindness, non-violence and love.
Understanding this general principle exposes the crude misunderstandings about the relationship between ethics and theological beliefs. Regardless of what someone believes about divinity, we either act in harmony with the divine will or not.
We may declare ourselves a servant of divinity, but act against its natural flow. We may declare the divine non-existent, but act in harmony with it.
The divine will doesn’t enforce our compliance. If the divine desired enforcement of its will over ours, it would naturally happen. No power can obstruct an omnipotent will.
Everyone has the freedom to seek the divine in their own way. **This expression of faith must be authentic to each individual.** Our actions must flow from our inner nature, not be artificially imposed by an external authority. https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-silence-of-the-cosmos-is-the-sound-of-freedom-6cfe7cedfb90
Free will is its own supreme authority. It holds absolute autonomy over itself. It’s the inner conscience and judge. When it moves in harmony with the divine and universal will, it finds its inner fulfilment and the consummation of its existence
The Insidious Cult of Scientism - the power of cultural indoctrination
We can’t avoid cultural conditioning. We absorb it through psychological osmosis. From the moment of our birth, we’re immersed in social interactions which instil the cultural values and beliefs of our society.
All human societies function through a set of shared values, beliefs, and practices. Culture is the conceptual infrastructure of a society.
These cultural values are often unquestioned because they’re often unspoken. They’re the knowledge written between the lines, the background context in which our interactions take place.
This common knowledge allows smooth social functioning, but it also makes our prejudices invisible to us.
**Cultural indoctrination**
Cultural conditioning is a type of indoctrination, and indoctrination is a sinister type of education. Education teaches people how to think, indoctrination teaches people what to think.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.
Imagine how much more difficult it would be if indoctrination presented itself as education. If it was dogma masquerading as unbiased facts. Prejudice disguised as rationality. An ideology that pretends to be the impartial conclusions of science.
It would be much more difficult to detect its assumptions. It creates a conceptual prison. The foundational assumptions aren’t questioned because they’re seen as facts, not assumptions.
Our modern secular culture is that type of insidious indoctrination. Its conceptual tentacles reach invisibly into our way of thinking and influence our ideologies, both religious and non-religious.
**Modern secular society**
A secular society is one which excludes religious concerns. This exclusion makes no judgment about the validity or truth of religion, it brackets the question as outside the jurisdiction of the state.
We promote this exclusion of religion in affairs of the state to allow religious freedom. The spiritual choices of any individual are under the authority of their own conscience, not legislated by any external power.
But secular society imposes an artificial division between religion and culture. Religion is always culturally embedded, inseparably intertwined with the culture in which it took root and flowered.
Our secular culture is no different. Although it’s not a religion, it is an ideology. It creates a way of thinking that directly affects our approach to religious questions.
**Exposing the hidden ideology**
The exclusion of religion from government is connected to the exclusion of the spiritual from science. Both are based on the idea we can neatly divide reality into the natural and the supernatural.
This way of thinking produced the ideology of scientism. It’s an ideology with less justification than many religions, but it avoids detection as an ideology by masquerading as impartial scientific knowledge, rationality, and intellectual humility.
Scientism interprets the data of science to justify two main philosophical ideas:-
Science is the only reliable method for discovering truth, or, more modestly, science is the most reliable method.
The things science studies, physical or material things, are the most fundamental things that exist.
Neither of these ideas is supported by any scientific findings. They’re philosophical claims which aren’t even well supported by rationality. Both rely on the success of science within its limited area of investigation to make sweeping and unjustified inferences about the whole of reality.
These assumptions of scientism are enduring cultural prejudices created by extending the scientific way of thinking to all areas of our lives.
From the success of science in explaining certain limited aspects of the world, we extended it to thinking those limited aspects described the entire reality. We took a useful conceptual device and imposed it on the world. We confused a way of thinking about the world, with the world itself.
**The conceptual prison**
Science intentionally excludes certain aspects of the world from its investigations. It only includes objective, measurable properties in its explanations.
This method of investigation assumes as a matter of practicality that there is an objective phenomena called nature, which exists independently of all other aspects of reality.
From that practical conceptual distinction, people came to think the category of nature described by science was, in fact, an independently existing category of reality.
And if nature was an independently existing category, there may, or may not, be something more than the scientific description of the world. The idea of naturalism as a philosophical position became a viable intellectual option.
Following logically from this idea was the further inference that if we can’t discover if there is something more than nature with science, we have no other reliable method to discover it. The existence of anything beyond nature, anything supernatural, could only be justified with faith.
Since faith is an unreliable method of gaining knowledge because it's not science, we should refrain from believing there is anything beyond nature without sufficient evidence. Evidence means scientific evidence because science is the only reliable way of discovering truth.
The vicious logical circle is complete, the conceptual prison sealed closed.
This entire chain of logical inference rests on first accepting the two basic assumptions of scientism.
**Science vs religion**
In our secular society, we often contrast religion with science. We assume they’re engaged in the same project and we can meaningfully compare them.
The idea there is a monolithic entity we can label religion, which we can compare with a monolithic entity called science, is a confusion created by the hidden assumptions of scientism.
Most religions make metaphysical claims. They outline the wider framework in which we locate all our other beliefs. Science excludes this big picture framework from its concerns. It makes no comment about anything we can’t observe or test empirically.
Science excludes questions of ultimate concerns, religion focuses on answering them. Scientism, by contrast, makes the metaphysical claim physical things are the most fundamental things which exist. If that assumption of scientism is true, then the religious claims of God and eternal souls exist are false.
The comparison only makes sense if we understand it’s between religion and scientism, not religion and science. But the ideology is always hidden, the ism always left off the word science.
Religion explains the meaning of human life and the basis of ethical behaviors. Science is silent on questions of ethics or meaning. Science isn’t answering philosophical questions, and the goal of religion isn’t to explain the workings of nature within a limited empirical context.
This confusion about the comparison of science and religion also influences our judgments about the benefits of science and religion in our societies.
We give science credit for life-saving medical treatment, global communication, production efficiencies, and the many other improvements in the quality of our lives. But atomic bombs, industrial pollution, climate change and other negative effects, we blame on the human misuse of science.
In the first instance, we think the method itself bestows the benefits, in the second, we think the method is only a tool that we use for good or evil.
Religion doesn’t aim at producing a well-functioning society or temporary improvements in our quality of life, it aims at salvation from all suffering. Its goal is personal transformation in the context of the ultimate destiny of the individual.
Once these hidden assumptions are made explicit, we see there is no meaningful comparison between religion and science. The comparison is really between scientism and religion but scientism is assumed true by default, because it’s thought science has shown it to be true.
**Spirituality refocused**
In a secular society, religion is an optional extra. Only the limited concerns of this life are considered. The continuation of life after death is irrelevant to human society. In practical terms, it assumes we can’t know the answer, so we can safely ignore the question.
We refocus the religious quest for salvation from the unavoidable suffering of our lives as a political quest, how we organize our society.
We reduce spirituality to a personal choice, something done in our spare time, not something that could improve society in the here and now. Spirituality is only concerned with what happens after death, not our eternal nature and how we should live at every moment.
A secular society focuses on minimizing suffering in this lifetime, as if that solved our predicament. It offers us palliative care with no hope of a cure. We replaced the human spiritual quest with a quest for wealth because while money can’t buy inner peace or eternal life, it can buy short-term relief from suffering. It can buy the basic human needs like food, shelter, health care and adequate leisure.
Money becomes the new spiritual currency. Instead of money being recognized as the means to remove the suffering that comes from not having basic human needs, it becomes the source of satisfaction. The more you have, the happier you will become. Hedonism is the goal, squeezing as much enjoyment out of life for the short time it lasts.
The inevitable result is greed consumes our society. Greed corrodes every political system we create. Greed creates wealth inequality with a few living in decadent luxury, while most lack the basic necessities.
Greed is a spiritual ailment, a lust we can never satisfy. Money can’t create satisfaction, its power is limited to removing dissatisfaction.
**The defamation of philosophy and religion**
This over reliance on science as a method for gaining knowledge has caused an attitude of denigration toward philosophy. There is no shortage of high-profile scientists denigrating philosophy as useless, without seeming to realize philosophy is the discipline which studies critical thinking and logic.
Philosophy’s foundational task is to question our assumptions and our cultural conditioning. To seek out and dissect these invisible conceptual predators that do so much harm to the clarity of our rational thought.
Under the influence of this widespread philosophical illiteracy, we misunderstand the rational method to be skepticism. We mistake belief for irrationality. We mistake religion for a scientific theory.
Saying we don’t know the answer is no longer an undesirable declaration of ignorance but intellectual humility.
This produces a dogmatic agnosticism where the answer to philosophical or religious question is we don’t know. No reason is given for why we don’t or can’t know, but the unspoken reason is we have no method to find out. It’s a subversive scientism, because it really means science can’t know.
Confessing our ignorance on matters of spirituality is the virtue of intellectual humility, whereas doing the same for the best current understanding of scientific questions is irresponsible.
The incomplete nature of scientific knowledge is a desirable quality, because all scientific knowledge is provisional; we improve it as we find fresh evidence. But we don’t apply the same standard to philosophical or religious knowledge.
We accept we can know the esoteric secrets of nature on a subatomic level and expect to find the theory of everything, but we’re destined to remain eternally ignorant about whether God exists or what happens after death.
All of this only makes sense if we first assume science is the only reliable method to gain truth. The foundational confusion on which the entire logical structure rests.
**Indoctrination writ large**
It’s testament to the power of this insidious form of indoctrination that so many people accept scientism world view.
They accept the universe is insentient and nature is a perpetual motion machine with no creator or designer.
They accept that consciousness magically emerges from brain secretions, death is the end of existence, and our lives are ultimately meaningless.
They accept our highest ethical ideals aren’t divine principles inherent in the world itself which we can strive to embody, but rules of social lubrication selected because they are useful for tribal group survival.
But the most striking example of the power of indoctrination into the cult of scientism is how many people will accept that science has shown we have no free will.
People will deny the most fundamental experience of who they are, an undeniable existential truth, and declare it an illusion because it doesn’t fit within the scientism paradigm.
People will accept they are meat robots because they think science has shown it’s true. They have more faith in science than in their own experience of themselves.
The fact is, science has shown none of those things to be true and it never can. They are questions outside its sphere of influence. It’s only if we first accept the assumptions of scientism are true that these other claims are true. But there is no non-circular evidence for the assumptions of scientism.
So without evidence, based only on hollow propaganda, many people accept the degradation of our self-image. They accept the powerlessness and futility of our lives that scientism’s picture of the world imposes on us.
This is the immense power of cultural indoctrination.
The ideology of scientism reduces humans to an apex predator, an animal whose highest value is an efficient harvesting of resources for group survival. If scientism is true, we pay no ultimate price for that exploitation of the world because at death we cease to exist.
To care about these things can be nothing more than a sentimental response to the reality of the brutality and meaningless of nature. It has no basis in the world itself, because scientism can give it no philosophical basis beyond human psychology.
The corrosive effects of the indoctrination of the cult of scientism, on both the individual and our society, are profound. It’s time to escape this insidious brainwashing and reclaim our freedom and our dignity.
The Silence of the Cosmos is the Sound of Freedom - The human search for meaning
Human life is an existential crisis. We do what we can to avoid it. We try to ignore it, outsource it, delegate it, divert our attention from it or deny it exists.
But they’re all feeble and futile attempts to avoid the unassailable law of our being, the essence of being human.
The crisis is created by the intersection of existential truths, things we know with certainty. Existential truths are undeniable and unavoidable. If you stop believing in them, nothing changes. The truth is unimpressed and unaffected.
**Four existential truths**
The first and foundational existential truth is the conscious self exists. I am. This is undeniable and undoubtable. We can’t doubt or deny the existence of our conscious self without encountering a contradiction. To deny or doubt, something must already exist to do the denying and the doubting.
The second thing we know is our conscious self transcends matter. We are the subject; matter is our object. If this wasn’t true, we couldn’t classify all the things we’re observing, all the things which aren’t us, in the universal category we call matter.
We couldn’t plan any action. Because to plan the future we must be able to survey the world as something distinct from ourselves. We must view it as it is now, and as it could be, and then act to bring that future into existence.
The third thing we know is we have inner autonomy, freedom of thought and will. We can say free will is an illusion, but it’s impossible to act that way. The very act of denying free will is a choice. Our free will is an undeniable existential truth.
The fourth thing we know is that death is certain, and suffering is unavoidable. We can’t find lasting happiness in this world, we can’t stay here. Eventually, the body becomes inert, the conscious self which animates the body is gone and the matter in the body decays.
Together these four truths create the human search for meaning. Knowing these four things causes us to try and discover our origins. We want to understand why we exist and our place in the universe. We want to know what happens to our conscious self when our body dies.
**The crisis**
We search for answers to these questions about the meaning of our lives. In that search we discover the next existential truth. It collides with the others and creates the crisis.
We discover we don’t have enough information to know the answers, but we must choose anyway.
None of us have any way to know the answers with certainty. We can’t even know the answer with a confidence beyond reasonable doubt. Despite the lack of information, we must choose an answer because these are practical questions about how to live. Before we do anything, we need to know the goal we’re trying to achieve. Only then can we choose the actions needed to achieve the goal.
Our choice is more difficult in modern times because we have access to a smorgasbord of answers from human cultures spanning thousands of years. There is an answer to suit every taste.
Humans are at their most creative when it comes to origin stories; suggestions about the right way to live; and confident declarations about what lies in store for us beyond the grave. There’s no shortage of answers to choose from and no shortage of people convinced their answer is the right one.
It’s popular in the modern secular society to think we can avoid the crisis by saying the answer is we can’t know. But that isn’t an answer, that’s a description of the problem. In our secular society we live as if there are no ultimate concerns, we replace them with a focus on concerns about this life.
This is often justified by the fact we have insufficient information to know the answer. But we still choose to live *as if it was true* there are no ultimate concerns. If that is true, it’s also true we cease to exist at the death of the body.
The idea there is no afterlife has the same scarcity of evidence as any other answer. In practical terms, to live a secular life is to live as if the no afterlife answer is true.
**What we can learn from the crisis**
If we follow the implications of these truths to their logical conclusion, we find our inability to know the answers is a necessary condition for humans to be truly free. If the intellect can’t give us a definitive answer, our only option is to choose what we decide is the best way to live and the meaning we give to our lives.
It’s the lack of information to confirm any answer beyond doubt that allows us the freedom to decide the ideals and values we live by. We are the judge of which values and principles are the most important.
In a sense we become the creators of our own reality. By creating the meaning of our lives, we act under the assumption some interpretative framework is true. We choose that framework, assume it is true and real, and then we act accordingly. Our choice makes it the reality under which we live our lives.
**The hero’s journey**
This crisis is also a valuable opportunity. The mythologist Joseph Campbell analysed the myths of human cultures and outlined their commonality. In modern society a myth is misunderstood as a story that isn’t true.
But mythology isn’t communicating literal objective truth, it’s a story containing existential truth. Myths are inspirational visions designed to motivate us to live our best lives. They inspire us to fulfil our highest potential.
Campbell called this common archetype of human mythology the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey begins with a problem. The hero tries to ignore or deny the problem. They refuse to act because of fear about what lies ahead, and lack of confidence in their ability to solve the problem and overcome the challenge.
The hero then meets a mentor who convinces them they must accept the challenge and solve the problem, because they are the only person who can. This inspires the hero to accept the challenge and take a leap of faith. The hero crosses the threshold of doubt and commits to the challenge.
On the journey the hero meets many tests and trials. The tests force the hero to draw upon hidden skills and inner resources. They enter into a life and death struggle. They appear to fail, but by overcoming their greatest fear or their character weakness, they finally emerge victorious.
The hero then starts the journey home, but they are irrevocably changed. Their return is a rebirth or resurrection. They encounter tests on the return journey which show the changes in their character the quest produces. Their inner self is transformed.
This recurrent plot-line of human mythology is perennially popular because this is the story of human existence. We must all make the metaphorical journey to Mt Doom.
We don’t make this journey once and then relax in eternal beatitude, our life is a continuous series of heroic journeys. Life is a succession of challenges we must overcome and which mold our character and give us strength to face even greater challenges.
A hero is someone noted for their courageous acts and nobility of character. You are the hero of your own life, the character cast into the leading role. You are free to make of it what you will.
**The inner transformation**
We can eternally debate if an afterlife exists and if it does what happens there. We can endlessly speculate about how our actions in this life affect that existence after death.
But no one really knows the answer. The intellect can’t cross the threshold. Death is an impenetrable black box.
However, we can be confident the only thing that could survive death is your inner conscious self. That thing we all know as “Me”. We know our body stays here. We know our possessions remain behind. The only asset we can take with us is the type of person we are.
That person is the character we’ve crafted throughout our life. We’ve created it with a continual series of choices we make in reaction to the world and the plot-line we’ve been cast into.
If anything is eternal, it’s the conscious self. That’s the thing which persists through time. Our self transcends the timeline of our life. We remember what we’ve done in the past and plan what we’ll do in the future. Our presence defines the present moment, we are the constant element in the relentless progress of time.
And that character is in your control, because you are free. You create your character by your choices. You choose what you will value by focusing your time and energy on the things you decide are important.
**Creation of a hero**
We create a heroic character when we choose honesty even though deception is more profitable. When we choose peace even though violence gives a tactical advantage. When we choose kindness even though exploitation is cheaper.
Being an honourable person in this world appears to come with some cost. To be authentic, honourable deeds must be their own reward. We must value them for their own sake, for their inherent value. To acquire anything of value in this world we must pay some price. Honourable deeds are no exception.
If someone’s honesty is authentic, they will choose honesty even if no one would discover their dishonesty, or there is profit in dishonesty, or a cost for honesty. They will value honesty for itself, not for some other end that honesty can produce.
**Faith is not a dirty word**
Each of us must live by faith or trust. We must trust in certain ideals and be true to them. We have no other choice. Our only choice is what we decide to have faith in. Faith isn’t an intellectual choice; it’s an existential choice.
Faith is an authentic expression of the type of person you are. Your faith is a recognition that living and acting in harmony with your chosen ideals is the ultimate fulfillment of your existence. Those ideals are your salvation.
They are the things you honor and revere by giving them the highest importance. Those ideals are the principles in which you invest your own self.
We can live as if we are nothing more than clever animals who excel at surviving. Or we can live as if we are of a higher nature, a divine nature that transcends mere existence and values the qualities of that existence. The *way* we sustain our existence is of ultimate importance.
This attitude allows us to transcend the lack of information about the afterlife. The purpose which motivates our journey becomes the focus. The destination is a continual process of the evolution of character, an endless striving for perfection.
If our journey continues after death our direction has been set and death is only the next step in the journey. If death is the end of our existence, we’ve lost nothing and we’ve elevated our mundane existence beyond a brutal competition for survival. The meaning of the cosmos may be beyond our humble knowledge, but we played the role of the hero whatever turns out to be true.
Heaven is not a Geographical Location
In the spiritual view of reality, the inner dimensions of the world are primary. The foundation of the world is consciousness. Instead of the naturalist view that consciousness is a state of matter, the idealist view is that matter is a state of consciousness.
Matter is an idea. When we limit our view of the world to its outer dimensions, we call that matter. Matter is the external public aspects of reality, but the world also has inner private dimensions.
We’re all aware of the inner conscious dimensions of our own physical body. Just as our consciousness pervades the body, consciousness pervades the entire fabric of spacetime. These **inner dimensions of nature** are the essence and foundation of reality. https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-inner-dimensions-of-nature-12e74f48a575
Wrinkles in the fabric of consciousness
Density variations cause wrinkles in the substance of spacetime. The same principle applies to the conscious dimensions of nature.
Density within the substance of consciousness creates a stupor or sleep. This stupor is a decrease in the extent of awareness, a refraction of consciousness.
This limiting of consciousness is a type of ignorance. Ignorance is a dense state of consciousness, just as matter is a dense state of spacetime.
The physical body of each living being is a density variation in the conscious field underlying reality. The body limits consciousness within spatial boundaries. The **senses and mind are a filter on the world**, shrouding our awareness of reality within physical limits. https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-substance-of-reality-ac42d0b3cb66
We’re ignorant of the aspects of reality outside the filter. We’re only aware of those aspects of the outer world which filter through our senses and mind. From the idealist perspective, matter is the covering of consciousness. It’s the outer form of reality, the external garment concealing the inner reality.
The evolution of consciousness and the tree of life
The physical body of each living being restricts consciousness within certain physical limits. Different physical forms have different senses and cognitive abilities which allow different levels of awareness. We can grade the various species on a scale of their awareness of the world.
Simple life forms like bacteria and plants are at the bottom of the scale. They’re in a dense state of consciousness. Their awareness of the world is limited to hazy, indistinct perceptions. They react to stimulus like light, heat and chemical signals.
Moving up the scale we have simple life forms like insects and fish. They have an increase of awareness corresponding to the type of senses and cognitive apparatus. These animals can perceive the world in more detail, so their reactions to the world have greater flexibility of movement.
At the higher end of the animal kingdom, we have animals with various levels of self-awareness. They show sympathy, empathy and problem-solving skills. This evolution of species isn’t a scale of physical characteristics, it’s a scale of awareness.
The details of the scale are necessarily speculative and anthropomorphic. We can’t directly access the inner world of other creatures, only the external dimensions are public. We can only infer the characteristics of their inner world from knowledge of our own consciousness and observations of their behavior and biological structure.
But this idealist scale of life forms is in harmony with our intuitions. The greater the extent of the awareness of reality and ability to interact with it, the more advanced the life form.
In the naturalist view there is no purpose in nature. The outcome of evolution by natural selection is survival of the species. Awareness is only valuable if it enhances survival. This places creatures like bacteria and cockroaches at the top of the scale. For evolution by natural selection, *how you live* is of secondary importance, *that you live* is primary.
For the idealist, awareness directed toward the perpetuation of existence, mere survival, is a lower form of consciousness. The possible modes of existence have value, some greater than others. Living with compassion, honesty and love are advanced forms of consciousness because they’re aware of dimensions of reality beyond mere physicality.
Humans are the most aware species. This awareness goes beyond sense perceptions of the world. We have added senses like a moral sense, a sense of humor and the ability for rational thought. People also report extra-sensory perception of many types, and religious experiences are common.
Humans are aware of abstract properties like beauty, justice, truth and goodness. Our awareness extends beyond the physical dimensions of the world. The human species has expanded consciousness. This means humans can become aware of the spiritual dimensions of reality.
The spiritual dimensions
The general theme of the spiritual world view is the existence of a divine reality beyond the physical world. The divine is the origin and sustenance of all existence. It’s a personal and conscious reality which pervades all things and is characterized by a unity of being.
Sometimes these higher or transcendental dimensions of reality are interpreted spatially, as if these divine realms are elevated in the sky, or outside the spatial boundary of the physical universe.
But in the idealist understanding, higher and beyond are referring to states of consciousness, not states of matter or locations in space. The divine is higher because it’s a more expansive state of consciousness, a more complete awareness of reality.
These higher dimensions are the inner dimensions, the consciousness permeating the fabric of spacetime. We know our own consciousness directly, no intermediary instrument is needed. But we aren’t directly aware of anything beyond our own consciousness.
We don’t have access to the world itself, we only have access to our experience of it. We know our own self directly and without doubt, but this is the limit of our direct knowledge.
All our other knowledge is indirect and uncertain, it’s all provisional. It consists of impressions of the world filtered through our senses, or inference about the world from our mind and intelligence.
In the spiritual viewpoint, there are dimensions of reality the senses can’t detect, the mind can only know theoretically, but they can be experienced directly.
This spiritual realm of existence transcends the death and suffering associated with the physical body. Attaining knowledge and connection with these spiritual realms is our salvation and the fulfilment of consciousness.
Reconnecting with the divine
If these spiritual realms exist, why are we unaware of them? Religions explain this disconnection with the ground of reality in many ways. Our present existence is compared to a dream state, a state which is less real in comparison to being awake. Some religions describe it as a fallen state.
These aren’t spatial descriptions. The fall isn’t a movement through spacetime, and the reality of a dream doesn’t change if we sleep in a different location. We can’t resolve our disconnection from the divine by changing our position in space or time.
The fall is a movement within consciousness. We can think of it as a decrease in awareness, a degradation of consciousness. That state is less elevated because it’s less complete, it’s ignorant of some parts of reality.
The dream analogy compares two states of consciousness, one more real than the other. But the comparison is only possible when we’re awake.
A dream is a hazy state of consciousness. While we’re dreaming it seems real, there’s no awareness of any reality beyond the dream. But because we also have experience of being awake, we can compare the two and understand dreams are ultimately illusory.
Dreams are a reflection of the real world. When we’re dreaming, we aren’t aware of the actual world and think the dream world is the entirety of reality. When we’re awake we’re aware of the dream world and the actual world, but we aren’t aware of the divine world. We think the actual world is the entirety of reality.
If this divine conscious realm is the origin of our existence, the foundation of reality, then we’re ignorant of the source of our being. We know we exist; we know this without doubt. But we don’t know what is beyond our own self.
We don’t know our origin, the ground of our being. We’re disconnected from our source and distant from our home, the place we belong.
The negative reality
Most humans feel this inner lack, a primal dis-ease of consciousness the mundane world can’t satisfy. The material pleasures are a superficial type of enjoyment, giving a temporary lift in emotions and masking the dis-ease for some time. They provide a superficial and temporary diversion, but they can’t provide the deep and abiding inner satisfaction we seek.
Our existence is this world is sustained with a perpetual hunger, a state of dissatisfaction. Removing a dissatisfaction takes away a negative, but that can only take us to zero, it doesn’t contain the substance of the positive, it isn’t satisfaction.
The pleasing sensation of a cool breeze on a sweltering day is only relief from the discomfort of excess heat. The removal of discomfort has the superficial appearance of satisfaction, but there is nothing inherently satisfying about a cool breeze. Once the discomfort of the heat is gone, the breeze doesn’t even have the illusion of satisfaction.
Religion recognizes this hunger as a problem that has a solution. That inner longing for a higher quality of existence, for something beyond the mundane, will lead us toward the source of our being.
The religious message speaks to that urge within us, assuring us there is an unseen world beyond this one. A heaven, a place of inner peace and harmony. Our eternal home.
Lifting the veil covering the divine
If reality has inner conscious dimensions which pervade all space and time, then heaven is right where you are standing. The divine is ever-present everywhere, the all-pervading inner substance of the world. The kingdom of God is within you.
The spiritual quest is developing the vision to see the divine immanent within the world. We need to dissolve the filter which shrouds our consciousness and limits our view of reality to the superficial outer world.
The spiritual quest isn’t to create an external utopia by rearranging the furniture of the world. Spirituality is a quest of inner transformation. It recommends spiritual and ethical practices designed to elevate and expand our consciousness.
It teaches us to love, to give of ourselves, to demolish the barriers we’ve built which separate us from the inner spirit of nature and from each other.
The goal of spiritual practices is to enhance our awareness and remove the ignorance of our separation. The divine can’t be known with the senses, the mind or the intellect. These are all coverings of ignorance, a filter which limits awareness and directs it outwards.
Heaven is a state of consciousness, a state of being. We don’t discover it by the death of the physical body, but the death of the selfish ego. It’s heights are reached by an evolution of consciousness.
Heaven includes the awareness that love is a superior mode of existence to hate; forgiveness a more valuable state of the heart than revenge, and charity benefits the giver more than the receiver.
No material asset can buy an entry visa to heaven and no material circumstance can deny us entry. Heaven is the wealth of our soul, our natural birthright, the fulfilment of the evolution of our consciousness.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
The Substance of Reality -Consciousness filtered through space-time
In the modern world, naturalism exerts a potent influence on our way of thinking. The exuberance produced by the success of science caused an overconfidence in its ability to explain the world.
As scientific discoveries accumulated, people assumed this trend would continue indefinitely. Eventually, science would discover the *Theory of Everything*, a complete description of the world.
This unrealistic enthusiasm should have aroused more skepticism. But inspirational stories about the godlike powers of humans are perennially popular, not for their factual content, but for their ability to motivate us to live our best life.
The modern mythology
In the past, mythology was the format we used to present these inspirational visions for humanity. But the modern narrative distinguishes itself from our ancestors based on discovering the scientific method.
According to the modern story, humanity no longer has myths, we have scientific facts. This mindset is so pervasive that in the modern world, mythology is synonymous with fiction and fairy stories.
This naturalist story relegated spiritual views of the world to proto-scientific theories. It assumed the mythologies of human civilizations were primitive attempts to explain the mechanisms of nature, without realizing the very idea that nature reduces to a mechanism was an assumption our ancestors didn’t share.
Intoxicated by our own mythological vision of humanity, people assumed not only that science was a useful tool to discover truths about nature, but that nature itself consisted only of the scientific description and nothing more. There were no souls, no gods, no forces or dimensions to reality other than the objective features included in the scientific descriptions.
People came to believe the scientific description of the world was a complete description of reality.
Naturalism’s nemesis
This enthusiastic overconfidence in science has now come full circle and forced naturalism to confront its nemesis. The confidence in science to explain everything about the world led many to assume it could also explain consciousness. In that search for a scientific explanation, naturalism met the **hard problem of consciousness**. https://medium.com/the-authentic-eclectic/the-impossibly-hard-problem-of-consciousness-121e81dda6c4
Hard problem is a euphemism suitable for modern sensibilities. It really means impossible problem. It’s a conceptual problem about the limits of the scientific method, not a problem advances in neuroscience can solve.
Some people still deny the hard problem exists, but for most people, the realization of what it means for the naturalist worldview is slowly dawning and forcing a change in mindset.
Where once many people assumed naturalism was unquestionably true, now even the most hardened naturalist must defend their views against the hard problem. It’s becoming increasingly clear science can’t explain consciousness and naturalism needs a major overhaul.
Expanding our view of nature
If the methods of science are incapable of explaining consciousness, the scientific description of the world is incomplete. The existence of consciousness is the only thing we know for certain, an undeniable fact.
If we can’t eliminate consciousness from our worldview, and we can’t explain it with scientific methods, the only option is to enlarge our conception of nature beyond the scientific description so it can accommodate consciousness.
The obvious solution is instead of thinking of nature as limited to the external and objective features of reality which science describes, **nature also has inner dimensions.** https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-inner-dimensions-of-nature-12e74f48a575
In the naturalist worldview, space and time are the fundamental properties of the world, the foundation of all matter. Everything else, including consciousness, emerges from that foundation. Matter comes first, consciousness is secondary.
If we expand our understanding of nature to include inner conscious dimensions, these inner dimensions become the deeper foundation and fabric of reality. Consciousness is first, matter is secondary.
Panpsychism
One theory which acknowledges the inner dimensions of nature is panpsychism. Under this view, all matter has inner conscious states. Even atoms have a simple form of consciousness. When matter arranges itself in certain patterns, like a human brain, these simple conscious states combine to form more complex conscious states.
The biggest problem facing this view is the combination problem. Panpsychism needs to explain how combining atoms with simple consciousness adds up to human consciousness. This combination problem is as intractable as the hard problem.
The scientific reductionist way of thinking still infects this panpsychist view. It thinks of matter as primary and then envisions consciousness in relation to matter. It imposes our conception of matter onto consciousness.
We know matter comprises micro-level phenomena which combine to form macro-level phenomena, panpsychism assumes the same applies to consciousness.
This is the same way of thinking that plagues naturalist views that consciousness emerges from brains. It assumes that given enough bits of simple consciousness, or sufficiently complex arrangements of matter like brains, it will somehow create more complex consciousness.
It assumes an increase in quantity will produce a qualitative change.
Both ideas are faulty because they impose the reductionist scientific view of the world onto consciousness. The problem consciousness poses for naturalism isn’t a procedural problem, it’s a conceptual problem.
Consciousness doesn’t fit into the scientific way of seeing the world. Consciousness requires a whole new way of thinking.
The unity of consciousness
Science takes a reductionist approach. It works on the assumption an explanation of the parts will give us an explanation of the whole. But for consciousness, this approach fails.
Consciousness is a qualitative phenomenon and one of its characteristics is its **unitary nature**. Consciousness doesn’t have parts. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-unity/
We don’t experience a visual perception distinct from an auditory and tactile perception and then add them all together. We experience the world as a seamless, unified whole.
The unified nature of consciousness naturally leads to thinking of consciousness as a field. The panpsychist view of discrete bits of matter, each having bits of consciousness attached which combine to make more consciousness, is a reductionist view.
We need to think holistically. Instead of seeing the world as composed of parts which combine to form a whole, we need to envision the entire fabric of space-time as one unified conscious field. This idealist view places consciousness as the ultimate foundation underlying all reality.
Turning naturalism inside out
This idealist view turns naturalism inside out. Physics knowledge is intact, but it’s the secondary part of the story, the superficial or extrinsic view of nature.
Science is the view of reality we create by restricting our description of nature to the external dimensions and excluding the inner substance.
This is easy to understand for our own physical body. A complete scientific description of the body’s structure and functions would only explain the external features and would say nothing about the conscious self.
It’s an accurate description of the extrinsic properties, but it leaves out the entire substance of our inner self, the essential properties which make us who we are.
This idealist view avoids the hard problem created by limiting nature to scientific descriptions. With the naturalist view, the external dimensions of space time are the fabric of reality, the causal foundation.
Which means the only option to explain the existence of consciousness is as a property which emerges from the physical foundation. The brain creates or produces consciousness, just as boiling water creates steam.
But with the idealist view, the causation proceeds in the opposite direction. Instead of seeing consciousness as something which emerges from the physical, we reverse the order and see the physical as the properties that solidify from consciousness.
This view of the world is foreign to our naturalist way of thinking. When we try to conceive of the world in this way, it seems abstract in contrast to the solidity of matter. But we can have some general idea of it from the discoveries of modern physics.
Think of the quantum field, an intangible field consisting only of probabilities. From a collapse in this incorporeal field, possibilities solidify into the actuality of a tangible particle. A particle is a part of the field which becomes limited within space and time.
We can think of the individual living beings in the same way. Each conscious living being is like a particle of the idealist conscious field. Where the field is a unified unlimited consciousness, the consciousness of each living being is the portion of the field which is limited to that physical body.
The physical body forms the external dimensions which restrict the conscious field within a spatial boundary.
Filtering out the world
In this idealist view, we can think of the body as a filter on the world. Imagine you’re looking through a keyhole into the world beyond. The keyhole limits your view of the world, it restricts your awareness of the world. The limits it imposes are the spatial dimensions of the keyhole.
The keyhole is a filter on the world, placing limits on the aspects of the world you can see or be aware of. The only part of reality you have access to is the part which can pass through the keyhole.
A keyhole is a simplified example of a filter which limits our vision of the world. For the idealist view, the physical body is analogous to the keyhole. The body and brain form a filter that imposes limits on all our sensory perceptions. They restrict our consciousness within certain physical limits.
All living beings have particular senses which provide inputs from the world. The sensory apparatus limits those inputs. As well as the senses, the cognitive apparatus of the brain and nervous system places limits on how we perceive that sensory input.
A bat sees in sonar. Humans have can only see a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Dogs hear a much wider range of sounds than the auditory range humans available to humans.
By limiting the inputs, our senses and brain act as a filter, they only allow a particular view of the world. Each physical body is a kind of filter, our keyhole to the world. It limits our perception of the world and our awareness of reality. We are only conscious of those aspects of reality that the senses and the mind allow us to access.
This idealist view of the world finds a harmonious synthesis between science and spirituality. It respectfully encompasses both and places them in context.
Just as Einstein’s relativity didn’t invalidate Newtonian physics, but recognized its accuracy within a limited context. Taking a wider view, we understand it’s correct as far as it goes, but it’s not the complete story.
The same applies to this idealist view. It accepts that scientific knowledge is a valid way of viewing the world, the mistake is in thinking it’s the complete story. It only describes the external or superficial aspects of reality, not all of reality.
The Inner Dimensions of Nature
There is a lot of debate about the characteristics of nature and the existence of the supernatural, but through it all the concept of nature is often obscure. We may use the same word, but often we’re not talking about the same thing.
For the materialist, nature consists of the objective properties studied by science and nothing more. Nature includes 3 spatial dimensions and its movement through the fourth dimension of time. Structure and function are all there is to the machinery of nature.
We impose these materialist ideas of nature on our ideas of the supernatural. The supernatural means beyond nature, something which transcends nature. And with the materialist idea of nature, the supernatural becomes something that is outside the external dimensions or outside the laws of physics.
This gives us a conception of God as a disembodied mind who exists beyond the limits of space-time, outside the universe. But outside is a spatial description, being outside space is like being north of the north pole. It’s not an intelligible concept.
The materialist idea of nature also infects our ideas of the soul. It’s been likened to a ghost in the machine. This is a view of the soul as an immaterial homunculus floating somewhere behind the eyes.
These ideas of God and the soul are implausible if we understand them with the materialist ideas of nature. This is why many people assume the existence of the supernatural is an incoherent idea. They think belief in God and the soul is irrational. They think science has shown they don’t exist.
But they don’t stop to consider it’s the materialist idea of nature that is incoherent. Our ideas about nature determine our ideas of the supernatural.
The materialist conception of nature comes from scientific descriptions of nature’s objective properties. But science is a method, a way to investigate and gain knowledge of nature. It intentionally excludes anything except the measurable objective properties. That exclusion doesn’t mean science gives us a complete description of nature, or that nature only consists of the properties science allows in its explanations.
Wearing rose-coloured glasses means we see the world in a particular way according to the filters we’ve imposed on our view of the world. But it’s a rudimentary mistake to assume this means the world itself is rose coloured. This is the same mistake materialists make when assuming nature is nothing more than the scientific description.
The spiritual view of nature
By contrast, the spiritual view doesn’t limit nature to its objective properties. Instead of thinking of the supernatural as something external to nature, the spiritual view of nature includes its inner dimensions.
*Nature is alive, it’s animated by inner forces.*
This is how God, the soul and the spiritual reality are traditionally understood. From the classical conception of theism through to the animism of indigenous cultures, the supernatural is understood as the force pervading and animating nature.
The design and order within nature; the sentience within living beings; the causal powers of nature, all have their ultimate source in the inner dimensions of the world.
*The supernatural is the living soul permeating the entire cosmos.*
This idea of the immanence of the supernatural isn’t something we need to theorize about or demand proof it exists. There’s no puzzle about what it could mean, we have direct experience of it.
We can describe our physical body in scientific terms. It has mass, height, and various structures and functions. But it also has inner dimensions which science can’t detect or describe.
Each of us knows the conscious self which animates our physical body by direct experience. Our thoughts, desires, feelings are the inner dimensions of our physical body, they animate the body and cause its movement. This inner conscious world is the spiritual aspect of our existence, this is the supernatural dimension of the world.
Why think the conscious self is supernatural?
Supernatural means beyond nature. The conscious self is beyond the body, not in a spatial sense as existing outside its external dimensions, it transcends the body as a subject transcends its object. The subject is necessarily beyond the object because the subject is a point of view, an observer.
Our conscious self observes and surveys nature from a viewpoint beyond its actuality. We can easily imagine having an out-of-body experience. Think of viewing your body from above; or below; or any position in space you choose. What we’re doing when we imagine this is taking a point of view outside our body.
That is what the conscious self is, a viewpoint from which to observe the world. It can view the world from any vantage point it chooses. This isn’t restricted to a visual encounter with the world.
It includes all the sensory perceptions and the mental dimensions. We interpret the world through the filters of our experiences, beliefs, and desires culminating in a unique vantage point on the world.
But our vantage point on the world goes beyond the world as it is. We not only view its actual state, but we can also envision the many possible states it could take. We can observe its possibilities and act to bring them into existence. We can make the potential become actual.
This is an extraordinary feat. It’s a remarkable series of powers and abilities. But it’s so ordinary we take it for granted as if there was nothing unusual happening.
Think about a simple task like baking bread. From the trip to the store, assembling the ingredients, creating suitable conditions for combining those ingredients, everything must happen in a particular order. This series of tasks needs far more than a simple perception of the world.
It requires the ability to survey the world in its actual states, but also to view its future states and know which of them are possible. We need to envision the intermediate states of the world that link the actual to the possible. We need to know how to exert forces that cause one of those possibilities to become actual.
A simple loaf of bread requires us to select the ingredients, measure correct proportions, combine them in a certain order, knead the dough, leave it to rise in a warm place, heat the oven to a particular temperature, oil the pan and cook for a certain duration of time.
All these activities require us to transcend nature, to take a viewpoint beyond the actual world. Not only do we need to take a transcendent viewpoint, but we also need the causal power to make nature move in a particular way. We transcend the laws of nature because we observe them and then use them to create future states of reality.
The soul, or the conscious self is supernatural. It’s beyond nature but also immersed within it. In theological terms, the spiritual is both transcendent and immanent in the cosmos.
Beyond the individual soul
These direct observations of the inner dimensions in our own physical bodies logically extend to all of nature. Most of the arguments against the materialist view of nature are motivated by recognition of the existence of these inner dimensions.
The **hard problem of consciousness** is the most obvious and decisive example the materialist idea of nature is wrong. The **argument from design** shows the existence of law-like regularities in nature suggests an inner intelligence. https://medium.com/the-authentic-eclectic/the-impossibly-hard-problem-of-consciousness-121e81dda6c4 https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-fingerprints-of-god-df5ad5565805
The **cosmological argument** shows the foundation of all movement, all causal power must be something that exists of necessity. Necessity is a description of the inner properties of reality, its **mode of existence**. https://medium.com/the-big-think/universes-from-nothing-414439f3195 https://medium.com/the-big-think/reality-maximization-8f492064812a
These all point to aspects of nature science is incapable of describing. Science is incapable of this because it’s a method of inquiry that intentionally excludes nature's inner dimensions.
Transcending the mechanical view of nature
This view of nature as consisting only of mechanism is a relic of the Newtonian era. Quantum mechanics superseded it over 100 years ago. With quantum theory the observer became inseparably connected with the laws of physics.
Descriptions of the quantum realm reflect our experiences at the macro level. The observer surveys a field of possibilities and their actions bring one state into existence. Quantum mechanics establishes the causal link between the observer and the physical world the mechanistic philosophy excluded.
The conflating of nature itself with the impoverished mechanical conception of it gives us a superficial and hollow view of nature. From a method that treats nature as if it was a machine to discover its function, it assumes nature actually consists only of mechanism.
This is like giving a description of the biological functions of the human body and assuming that is a complete and accurate description of what humans are. As we all know, that sort of description leaves out the essential inner qualities that define us.
The essence of nature isn’t discovered by treating it as an object we can grasp within our intellect, but as a subject with whom we share an intimate connection. Everyone has felt this connection in some form of spiritual experience regardless of their particular beliefs.
It’s an experience we discover when immersed in the natural world, or quietly staring into the vastness of the night sky. This isn’t an experience of admiration for the engineering of the machinery of nature. It’s a visceral connection to nature that speaks to the primal state of our being.
The human search for meaning is inescapable. We can try and convince our intellect the universe is meaningless, but it will always consist of nothing more than intellectual conceit.
The human search for meaning and an understanding of our place in the world is like metal moving toward a magnet. We may not be able to articulate the invisible forces which cause the attraction, but we’ll always move according to the demands of our inner nature.
The Law of Karma - Cosmic justice or natural law?
The doctrine of karma is sometimes interpreted as a system of cosmic justice. God is the chief prosecutor enforcing his laws through reward and punishment. Suffering is divine retribution for sin, and sin is disobeying God’s commands.
With this interpretation of karma, it follows logically that people deserve to suffer. Their suffering is a just punishment for unknown moral crimes they’ve committed, either in this life or a previous one.
But this interpretation is a misrepresentation of the doctrine of karma. It imposes an Abrahamic idea of God onto the dharmic conceptual framework.
Karmic reactions aren’t a system of justice. No one is being punished by God and no one deserves to suffer.
In the dharmic view suffering is an unnatural state of existence. The natural state of consciousness is bliss (ananda). Bliss is the positive expression of consciousness and suffering is the absence of bliss.
Rather than reward or punishment, karma is natural law, a description of the natural movement inherent in reality. There is no moral blame or praise involved in the operation of a natural law.
Karma as a law of nature
The word karma means action. Karma is a doctrine about the laws of causation in the mental or conscious realm. We’re all familiar with the natural laws describing the physical world. We understand that if we jump from a cliff, the force of gravity will cause us to suffer the pain of broken bones.
But we don’t think gravity is punishing us for committing a crime and we deserve the suffering. The pain and suffering come from the laws which govern the action of bodies moving through space-time. There is no punitive justice system being enforced.
If a child places their hand on the stove and suffers the pain of burns, we don’t think they deserve to suffer. Their ignorance of the laws of nature caused their action, and the operation of the natural laws caused the suffering. There is no blame or punishment being inflicted. The child hasn’t committed a crime.
Rather than seeing suffering as something wrong with us, the dharmic view is that we’re in an unnatural state, a negative state of consciousness. Consciousness is knowledge and it’s negative state is ignorance. Ignorance causes suffering. Remove the ignorance and the cause of the suffering is also removed. Once the child has the knowledge that fire causes pain, they won’t touch the stove.
The dharmic view of reality
In the dharmic framework action and reaction happen according to natural laws, no intervention by God is required. Our free actions aren’t something God judges and then enforces punishment or reward. There is only the natural reaction to our actions, cause and effect.
In Hinduism the foundation of existence is a substance known as Brahman, which is spirit. Brahman is composed of eternal, conscious, bliss (*sat, chit, ananda*). Both the soul and God are made of this substance. Brahman is the fabric of reality like space-time is the fabric of the physical world.
This spiritual substance is conscious and so it also has will. God’s will is the ultimate cause of all movement. God is omnipotent, which means his will is always effective. Everything in existence moves within the fabric of God’s will, just as in the physical world everything moves within the fabric of space-time.
The movement of our will should be in harmony with God’s will because that is the natural order of reality. But we also have free will, and sometimes we choose to move against God’s will. We disregard the universal will and move according to our selfish will.
Movement that isn’t aligned with the universal will is a distortion of the natural order. The movement is not aligned with God. God is bliss, so movement not in alignment with God’s will causes not-bliss, or suffering.
Transcending both good and bad karma
Even when we understand that karma isn’t a justice system, many people think the goal is to achieve good karma and avoid the bad karma. Good karma is action which causes material pleasure and bad karma is action which causes suffering.
While everyone wants to avoid suffering, in the dharmic framework both good and bad karma are undesirable. Both pleasure and suffering entangle us in the material world.
From the absolute perspective pleasure is a more dangerous trap than suffering, it will bind us more firmly to this world. If we experience suffering, we’re motivated to try and understand how to get free of it. No one becomes attached to suffering.
But we become attached to the source of our pleasures and our attachment binds us tightly to the world. We continually seek out material pleasures as if they were the solution to suffering.
According to dharma the only cure for suffering is transcending both good and bad karma. Both types of actions bind you to the material world. You must reincarnate to enjoy the good karma as well as the suffering of the bad karma.
Reincarnation involves the unavoidable suffering which accompanies a physical body. Birth, death, disease and old age. The goal is liberation (*moksha*), freedom from all karmic reaction and therefore all suffering.
Cause and effect in the mental realm
The karmic causal chain in the mental realm starts with a movement of thought. This is called *vritti*, which literally means “whirlpool”. These thought waves are disturbances or movements within consciousness.
Once a thought wave leaves the conscious mind it sinks to leave an impression in our subconscious. These subtle impressions are called *samskara,* which means *“*well-planned action”.
Intentional actions, where we focus our thought and will, create the strongest impressions in our psyche. When these actions and thoughts are repeated, they reinforce the mental impressions. This creates the habits and dispositions that form our psyche.
The psyche we create in turn moderates our future thoughts, perceptions and actions. This is how our karma, our physical and mental action, creates our future self. As we act, the world reacts. Our thoughts and actions cause effects, both physical and mental.
The fruits of our actions
Karma is compared to a seed. It needs certain conditions to sprout and grow and it takes time to bear its fruit. Some actions need to be repeated to create the desired effect, others are instantaneous.
If you place your hand in the fire the burn is immediate. Other actions take longer to produce their effects. If we take drugs it takes time to produce the effect of intoxication. Repeated drug taking creates a habit or addiction.
That addiction then affects our perceptions of the world and our actions. Under the influence of an addiction our freedom of action is restricted by our thoughts and desires. Addiction affects our perceptions, desires and actions. We create a type of mental prison for ourselves.
The analogy of a drug addict is a more accurate way to understand the cause of our suffering due to karma than as a punishment we deserve for moral crimes. A drug addict doesn’t deserve punishment, they’ve committed no crime.
Their situation should cause us to feel sympathy and a desire to help them, not condemnation. Their situation is caused by pursuing pleasure without understanding the repercussions. Their earlier choices have slowly entangled them in forces beyond their control.
Intentional acts created their suffering and only intentional acts can cure their disease. The solution isn’t to punish a drug addict. They need to willingly seek a cure. They’ll only do this once they understand the actions they thought would bring them pleasure, also cause suffering and degradation.
While there is some pleasure associated with the intoxication, it’s accompanied by unavoidable suffering as well. Once the addict realizes the excessive cost of that pleasure, they’ll intentionally act to regain their freedom.
Empowering our choices
This general karmic principle applies to all mental acts. Karma isn’t a fatalistic system which punishes us for unknown crimes, it’s the mechanism which empowers us to create our own destiny.
Every thought and action we take determines the type of person we become. With every thought and deed, we plant the seeds of our future self and our future perception of reality.
Rather than viewing people as victims of an opaque cosmic justice system, the doctrine of karma empowers us to create our future selves. We all face different conditions in our lives, and some of us have challenges that seem unfair.
We have limited power to change our external circumstances, sometimes it’s completely out of our control. But we always have the power to choose how we react to those circumstances. The thoughts we repeatedly focus on and the intentional actions we perform, have the power to change our future.
Our past choices of how to live and relate to the world culminate in the person we are today. The choices we make today create the person we will become.
Each thought and action, regardless of how insignificant it seems, creates its impact and leaves its impression both on us and the world. Karma is a doctrine of individual empowerment, not victim blaming.
Seeing Jesus through a Hindu Lens -A portal to the divine
Many religions gain truth about divinity through revelation. We can use logic to infer the divine exists, but inference isn’t direct knowledge. If the nature of the divine was apparent to our senses, we wouldn’t need inference.
Most of us don’t have direct access to knowledge of divinity. We need an intermediary to reveal the knowledge. The mediator connects the mundane and the divine.
**The link to the divine**
The connecting link to divinity has both static and dynamic forms. The static form is the scripture. The dynamic form is the saint or prophet. The scripture is a record of the wisdom of the saints. But the saint embodies those divine truths, animating them and bringing them to life in this world.
The divine is a living and dynamic reality. While the scripture can guide us toward it, the saints are the living embodiment of the scripture. Like a tape recording of their words and deeds, the scripture is an indirect representation of divinity.
The scripture contains the teachings of the saints and advice about how to walk in their footsteps and become saintly ourselves. Following their example and their teachings is the way to experience the divine in our own lives.
There are a variety of saints, each with their own conception and presentation of the ultimate goal. They form a continual series of intermediaries through which divine knowledge descends. Jesus, Mohammed, Vyasadeva, Buddha, Guru Nanak, Abraham and many others of varying magnitudes of illumination.
In Hinduism these luminaries are known as Sri Guru. They’re also known as rishi, which means “seer” because they’ve gained a direct sighting of divine truth. The sighting isn’t a visual perception, but an illumination of hidden dimensions of reality.
The knowledge of the rishi transcends the static theory and achieves a direct experience of divinity. But for those who don’t have this direct knowledge and are mired in the darkness of ignorance, a mediator and guide is necessary. They need someone to illuminate the path and point the way.
The message delivered by the different mediators in each religion varies, and outwardly appears to be contradictory. But the message is culturally embedded. It can only be communicated in concepts appropriate for the intended audience.
**The limitations of communicating knowledge**
Each culture speaks a unique conceptual language. The conceptual maps they use to understand the world and navigate the meaning of our lives encompass religion, ethics and ways of living.
Anyone who doesn’t have direct knowledge of divinity can only understand the message in concepts they’re familiar with. They can only understand the unknown, in terms of the known.
If someone is lost and you want to tell them how to find their way home. You can’t give them instructions in a foreign language, because they can’t access the meaning of the words. You need to use a language they understand and concepts they’re familiar with. You can’t tell them to travel north 50 paces if they don’t understand the concept of north.
And when it comes to knowledge of the divine, something unseen is explained in terms of the seen, something unknown is explained in terms of the known. Which is why the message must be embedded within the cultural and conceptual framework the recipient understands.
The same principle applies to the mediator. Even if the mediator is a fully enlightened being, the knowledge they can reveal is limited by the capacity of their audience to understand.
Communication is reciprocal, both the sender and receiver of any message must have suitable apparatus to understand each other. We can send a perfect transmission but the fidelity of the message will depend on the quality of both the transmitting and the receiving instruments.
**The distortion of the message**
In the case of divine knowledge, the message filters through a particular consciousness and awareness of the world. Everyone’s mental model is composed of things like their experience, their beliefs, their prejudices. The sum total of all these elements, their ego, has a certain disposition.
These accumulated psychic attributes are the filters which inevitably contaminate and distort any message to make it conform to something we can understand. The interpretation each person places on any transmission must be framed in concepts the mind is familiar with and has in its data banks. The mind can’t go outside the concepts it has available to construct the meaning of any information.
This is why religious experiences are also culturally embedded. When people experience a glimpse of the divine realm, they can only understand its meaning within their particular cultural maps of reality. Christians see Jesus, Muslims see Allah, Hindus see Vishnu.
The transmission is real and they’re sincere in their testimony of its existence, but they interpret its meaning through their own limited awareness of the world.
**The identity of Jesus as guru**
In the time and culture that Jesus existed, to say, *I am one with God* was considered the greatest blasphemy. To claim divinity was the worst of sins.
But the Hindu considers it the most profound truth of our existence. One of the great sayings of the Upanishads is *Tat Tvam Asi*, which means, *You are That*, *You are Brahman, You are Divine.*
This is expressing an identity, you are this type of thing. But there are many ways to understand an identity claim. If I say, You are my sunshine, it’s not intended literally. You aren’t identical to sunshine. It’s expressing a more esoteric identity. It identifies you with certain properties of the sun, like bringing light and warmth into my life.
When the Hindu says you are divine, what is the identity being expressed? Does it mean you are identical to God or share some other properties? Some monist Hindu traditions do interpret it as a strict identity, they say your sense of separate identity as an individual will ultimately turn out to be an illusion.
But the dualist or devotional traditions have a different interpretation of the identity between you and God. These devotional traditions are similar in their mood of worship to Christianity.
Love of God is accepted as the highest ideal, the ultimate fulfilment of our existence. In an exchange of love, two individuals are necessary. The identity must be one in spirit or feeling, not one in self.
This is comparable to when Jesus said, “I and the father are one”. Jesus can’t be talking about a strict identify because he also distinguishes himself from God as father. So, we have an identity claim, but the exact nature of that identity requires more explanation.
In general terms **Hindu Vedanta** and Christianity are grappling with a similar dilemma. How can we reconcile our divinity with our presently mortal nature? In answering that question, we also answer the details of our divine nature because it explains our relation to God, the source and foundation of divinity. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/the-end-of-knowledge-884e387c475b
Jesus isn’t identical to the father, but one in essence and nature. He is the way for each individual to realize their own divinity and achieve personal communion with God the father.
**Avatar — the divine descends**
In Hinduism a similar concept is avatar. Avatar literally means to descend and is generally understood as God taking a form in this world. But the type of form comes in degrees.
God descends directly in his original spiritual form once in every age or yuga. The Bhagavad Gita was spoken by God’s avatar of Krishna. He says, “Whenever there is a decline in dharma and a rise of adharma, I personally appear”.
But as well as these direct incarnations, God descends indirectly in the form of his various powers. And one of those indirect instruments is the guru. This is similar to a proprietor investing control of his enterprise in an intermediary like the managing director. The proprietor only participates indirectly in the practical operation of the project.
The guru has the power to reveal knowledge of divinity. The function of the guru is similar to the function of salvation offered by Jesus. Guru is essential as an intermediary to connect us with God. Guru isn’t identical to God himself but shares in God’s will, they are one in purpose with God.
The guru is human, but also divine. They have two apparently contradictory aspects to their existence. They have one foot in the material world and the other in the spiritual and lead souls from this world to the next. Like a portal to the divine, the guru illuminates the path and allows us to see the divine destination through him.
The disciple can see the divine through the words and actions of the guru. The guru is more than a teacher, he brings the divine to life. To the disciple, the guru is as good as God, one with God, because without that intermediary the disciple can’t connect with God.
Each person chooses their guru by faith. We place our trust in their words and follow their instructions. We adopt their teachings in our lives. We make this choice not only by placing our trust in someone, but also because that person is in harmony with our highest ideals and vision of reality.
This vision is what we consider divine because it transcends all other goals and ideals. The external appearance of contradiction between different guru’s teachings is harmonized by **religious pluralism**. https://medium.com/the-big-think/can-all-the-different-religions-be-true-652f30693a3d
**Understanding Jesus through the conceptual lens of the Hindu**
Jesus says: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.
The **Bhagavad Gita** says the same of the guru: “To attain divine knowledge you must approach a spiritual teacher with respect, inquiry and service.” https://medium.com/interfaith-now/bhagavad-gita-the-song-of-god-9a33c551850e
You must approach divinity through the guru, he is essential to make the connection. It’s not only an intellectual transaction between the disciple and the guru. The guru reveals theoretical knowledge and doctrines as well as existential truths. The disciple needs to inquire, but respect and service are also needed.
A disciple is someone who follows a discipline, they must act a certain way. This action is the dynamic form our faith in guru takes when we understand **faith as an act of will**. We can have a theoretical understanding of the benefits of charity, but we must engage in acts of charity to “be” charitable. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/reflections-on-the-nature-of-faith-aec85e355139
It’s by these living truths that the darkness of our ignorance is dispelled and the light of the divine reveals the inner nature of the world. By faithfully following the teachings of the guru, we gain our own personal sighting of the divine.
Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Advayataraka Upanishad says, “The syllable gu means darkness, the syllable ru, he who dispels them. Because of the power to dispel darkness, the guru is thus named.”
The divine is presently shrouded from our view and the guru has the power to illuminate it. Guru is the only way to achieve salvation. God and the guru are one in purpose, but many in appearance.
How to Construct a Worldview - A blueprint for building tolerance and humility
Human beings need a worldview to function. A worldview isn’t a single belief or even a collection of beliefs. It’s the widest possible view we can take of reality.
A worldview is an interpretative framework, a conceptual map containing all the various facts about the world. It orientates us to the world and informs us how we should live. C.S Lewis said,
*“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”*
Christianity, or any worldview, isn’t one belief among many. We don’t believe our worldview the same way we believe dogs and atoms exist. Our worldview is a big picture foundational belief.
It guides us on how to make sense of all those other beliefs about dogs and atoms. It helps us place those other beliefs in a wider context which tells us their significance for the meaning and purpose of our lives.
In the modern world a pervasive skepticism taints all our worldviews, like a philosophical malaise that infects our culture. We’ve lost faith in our ability to gain access to these big picture truths.
We don’t think of this skepticism as a worldview. We think skepticism is the refusal to commit to an answer, not an answer itself. But in practice, skepticism collapses into a choice of some kind, a choice which hasn’t been scrutinized. It becomes an inaction, the default setting.
For example, most of us have confronted the question of whether it’s ethical to eat meat. It’s reasonable to conclude we don’t have enough information to know what is right. But at mealtime, this intellectual indecision is useless. Our only choice is to eat meat or refuse it.
Whatever the truth of the question, we either act ethically or not when we make that choice. Our choice is in the action and we can’t abstain from choosing, because we can’t abstain from acting.
**Skepticism isn’t a practical option**
Agnosticism isn’t something we can use to decide on the correct way of acting. For questions of the meaning of our lives, and how we should act, skeptical non-commitment isn’t an option.
In circumstances where we must choose, we’re forced to decide based on the information we have available. We make the best choice we can, even if the evidence isn’t as plentiful as we’d like it to be.
There are a myriad of these kind of choices we need to make in our lives. Do we act on the assumption there is no afterlife and we cease to exist at death? Or do we assume our existence is independent of the body and our destination at death depends on our actions in this life?
Will we assume there is some eternal existence free of suffering that we can attain and then act to achieve that goal? Do we assume there is a personal God and engage in practices like prayer to try and establish a relationship?
While no one knows with any comfortable level of certainty which of these options is true, we must all live under the assumption something is true. Our only option is to choose what we judge most likely to be true, or what is in harmony with our conscience and ideals.
The skeptic tells us we shouldn’t affirm any belief unless we first know which option is true. This sounds good in theory, but in practice it often turns out to be an atheistic worldview. But this atheistic worldview is defaulted to without being tested for sufficiency of evidence itself. This is because it’s often not seen as a worldview itself, but the skeptical refusal to commit to one.
If we don’t engage in religious practices, that’s a choice, a judgement on the truth and value of religious practices. If we don’t face Mecca and pray 5 times a day, we make a choice on how we interact with the world. If we don’t attend services in a temple or Church, that’s a choice on what actions we judge most beneficial.
And without engaging in those activities, we won’t achieve the goal they’re designed to achieve. Inaction is also a choice. Yet the skeptic would advise us to not commit to religious practices, even while admitting they don’t know if it’s false.
**The correct method is an inference to the best explanation**
The skeptical method is the wrong one to use in the circumstances. No one has sufficient evidence to reach a definitive conclusion. Atheism or naturalism is no exception to that.
Atheism isn’t free of philosophical content merely by virtue of being a negative existence claim. Both atheism and naturalism entail certain things are true about the nature of reality. Those truths about reality have implications for the meaning and purpose of our lives.
We may think there is insufficient evidence to assume the existence of a soul and an afterlife, but the evidence **the conscious self arises from the physical brain** is rarely examined with the same rigor. https://medium.com/the-authentic-eclectic/the-impossibly-hard-problem-of-consciousness-121e81dda6c4
And regardless of the debate about the adequacy of the evidence for either option, we each must choose how to live, and those choices are inevitably made within the wider context of our worldview.
If there is a God and an eternal afterlife as most religions claim, it’s sheer folly to not engage in activities designed to achieve that while we wait for definitive confirmation that will never arrive.
The skeptic would have us refrain from committing to belief in a destiny that extends beyond this life due to lack of evidence. But what is the evidence our existence ends at the death of the body? What would the world need to be like for that to be true? What evidence would be adequate to consider it true?
Skeptics rarely answer any of these questions. Most often we find a disparity in the evidence the skeptic requires for their own worldview, because they don’t consider their skepticism of an afterlife or the existence of God to be a claim to truth. They see it as the refusal to accept a claim.
Rather than a skeptical non-committal being the correct procedure for deciding questions of existential importance, we should use an inference to the best explanation.
There is no proof that can definitively settle the question, but we must make a choice with the evidence we have. In those circumstances we should compare the alternatives and choose the best available option.
**Constructing a plausible story that withstands reasonable doubt**
This comparative method of constructing a worldview is analogous to how a detective solves a crime. They take the various pieces of information and evidence and construct the most plausible story.
It’s not one piece of evidence that confirms the conclusion beyond reasonable doubt, but a collection of small clues. It’s how all those small clues fit together that shows which answer is most likely to be true.
This is similar to how we construct our worldview. We take the disparate facts of our experience and construct a conceptual framework to interpret the world and our place in it. If all the pieces of evidence fit well into one story, they support the truth of the story.
With this approach we’re presented with a very different situation than the method the skeptic advises us to adopt. The skeptic relies on not having to judge the truth of naturalism or atheism and compare its plausibility with the other options available.
When we undertake this comparison of available worldviews, we discover many clues which don’t fit well into the naturalist picture of the world. We must accept **the universe has no causal explanation**. https://medium.com/the-big-think/universes-from-nothing-414439f3195
We have a universe with sufficient complexity to support the extended evolution of life that can only be explained by a **statistical miracle**. The existence of moral values must be reduced to a useful survival trait. We have a picture of human beings as meat robots in contradiction to our direct experience of our inner selves. https://medium.com/the-big-think/the-fingerprints-of-god-df5ad5565805
These are all pieces of data that can only be uncomfortably crammed into a naturalist worldview. This becomes a problem if we compare the merits of this naturalist worldview to theistic alternatives.
Naturalism is often presented as some kind of starting assumption which requires evidence before we move beyond it. But with a comparative approach, this naturalist worldview needs to be true if we’re to assume consciousness ceases to exist at death of the body.
If we can’t confirm the truth of naturalism with more confidence than the theistic alternatives, we’re free to think about our worldviews in broader terms than mere intellectual belief. In cases where the intellect can give no definitive judgement, we become free to make our final choice based on the the most fulfilling way to live.
**The effective use of skepticism**
Rather than an eternal debate about the adequacy of philosophical proofs for theism while ignoring the problems with naturalist alternatives, with a comparative approach, we’re forced to recognize every worldview is incomplete and sure to be wrong in many details.
But since we all need a worldview to function, these defects are seen in a different light. While every worldview is imperfect in the details, it provides us with a general orientation to the world and the means to align ourselves with values we judge important. It inspires us to live the best life we can.
Each worldview is constructed with the understanding everything is provisional. None of us can have excessive confidence in its truth. Now skepticism becomes a valuable tool, it keeps people questioning and gives them an openness to updating their interpretative map.
The recognition of the limitations we all face in constructing our worldview can produce humility. It gives us a curiosity to learn about the ideas found in different worldviews because we can include new ideas into our own worldview to improve it.
Knowing that everyone faces the same limitations fosters tolerance of views which differ from our own. Instead of the idea only one worldview has the truth, we can embrace a **pluralism**. https://medium.com/the-big-think/can-all-the-different-religions-be-true-652f30693a3d
The variety of worldviews reflect the variety of different ways of understanding and relating to the world. Each person paints their own picture of the world and tells their own story.
Can all the Different Religions be True? - The harmonious outlook of religious pluralism
There is a wide diversity of religious claims and practices. Conceptions of the divine range from the God of Abraham to Hinduism’s impersonal Brahman.
This diversity exists between religions and within religions. Many of the different claims seem contradictory. Some people think this means only one religion can be true and everyone else is mistaken.
But religious pluralism sees the diversity of beliefs and practices as an unsurprising outcome of the subject matter of religion.
Religious claims encompass all areas of our lives. They span ethics, the nature of reality, the meaning of our lives, the object of worship and human salvation.
While conflicting claims about how to live can co-exist, religions also make factual claims. It’s these factual claims that create a problem for religious diversity. If religions make factual claims, what are those claims about and what do they claim as true?
We can classify the factual religious claims in three broad categories:
The nature of reality
The ultimate ends of human beings
The methods to achieve those ends.
The first of these, the nature of reality, is the central claim on which the others rest. The second and third depend on the answer to the first.
When it comes to the nature of reality most religions claim there is a transcendent ground. They say this material world of the senses is a superficial appearance and the true nature of reality is beyond the ability of our senses to detect.
Most religions also claim that beyond this temporary world there is a permanent and blissful state of existence, a heaven. Achieving unity with this transcendental ground is the goal of human life. Religion tells us the methods we should practice to attain that ground.
But while religions agree on the existence of this transcendent ground and what it means for humans, the details of their answers are diverse. They disagree on the ultimate nature of the ground and the methods to achieve it.
These answers seem to contradict each other. What are the options to explain these apparent contradictions?
**The broad options for explanation**
One obvious response is all the religions are wrong, there is no transcendent divine reality. If this is true, religious diversity isn’t a problem because there is no ultimate purpose to human life, and you can live it however you choose.
But if it’s true a divine reality exists, the fact of such a wide diversity of religious claims is a problem needing explanation. A common way to categorize the answers to diversity is exclusive, inclusive and pluralism.
The exclusive option says the conflict between religious claims is real and only one religion can be right, which means everyone else is wrong. This is a simple answer to diversity, but it creates bigger problems than it solves. Because we not only find diversity between religions, but also within religions.
This diversity within religions means only one sect within one religion is true. This is usually the exclusivist’s sect, a suspiciously happy coincidence. But even if we assume that is right, the problems remain.
The religions which tend toward an exclusive view also claim our salvation depends on accurate knowledge of the divine ground and the method to reach it. But if only one sect of one religion is right, most of humanity will fail to achieve salvation. Now we have the problem of explaining why this would be the case.
And if we also say God created this world with the desire that humanity be saved, it creates the mystery of why the majority will fail. Why would God allow the conditions where only a small minority of humans’ accept the one true religion if it’s necessary for salvation?
Appealing to free will seems inadequate when most people are sincere in wanting to find the truth and truth is so difficult to discover. The fact of religious diversity increases the already high difficulty level if only one sect of one religion is a valid path to truth and salvation.
To overcome this problem, we have the inclusive option. This option says the conflict is real and every religion has some things right and other things wrong. Each religion has a partial account of the truth. This goes some way to solving the problems of exclusivity, but it doesn’t give us a lasting solution, this option collapses into the exclusive option.
If the conflict is real, a central religious doctrine like Jesus is God or Mohammed is the seal of the prophets, is either true or not. The truth of these doctrines are seen as essential to our salvation.
Which means the inclusive option collapses into the exclusive option, ruling out any religion which contradicts that claim. We are back at the problem of wondering why God would allow so many sincere souls to be lost in the jungle of religious diversity.
The third option is pluralism. This option says all the religions are right and the conflict is only apparent. The contradictions are superficial and on a deeper understanding there is no conflict.
**The transcendent ground**
This deeper understanding requires us to consider the object of religious knowledge. Religion is an attempt to grasp the ultimate ground of reality. It goes beyond the objects we can perceive with our senses and tries to lay claim to the ground on which all existence rests.
And that ground is the absolute. The absolute isn’t fully comprehensible to the intellect or definable within the limits of language. The Real transcends description, it can only be described imperfectly in a limited way. Each religion tries to describe the indescribable, place limits on the infinite, define the indefinable.
This pluralist idea says each religion gives a limited perspective of the divine. These viewpoints aren’t incorrect, but they’re necessarily incomplete because of the type of thing they describe.
The divine isn’t an object we can grasp and imprison within our intellect. It’s the absolute totality of which we are a small part. In relation to matter we are the subject and matter is our object. But in relation to the divine absolute, we are the object, and the divine is the subject.
The claims of religion are signposts which point toward the Real. They are limited descriptions of the unlimited, which is the only type of description available to the finite perspective of a human being. The descriptions can’t capture the Real in its entirety.
With this pluralist understanding, religious diversity is not only expected, but celebrated. Each religion contributes a uniquely valuable insight. Their point of view enhances our understanding. It adds a further dimension to our view of the divine giving us a more complete picture.
This means all religions have an authentic but ultimately inadequate perception of divine reality, producing a partial understanding of the universal truth. Clearly all religious traditions aren’t the same, and we shouldn’t try to amalgamate them. Instead, we celebrate their diversity because each contributes to enhancing human knowledge of the divine.
**Every religion is culturally embedded**
Whatever stories we tell, whatever things we can know and understand, are limited to the framework of our cultural conditioning. We say things like think outside the box, but the structure of our thought is the box, we can’t get outside it.
Our cultural conditioning is the lens through which we view the world. It’s the interpretative framework we use to understand the world and unify all the disparate facts into a meaningful structure. Just as we can’t remove our eyes and still expect to see, we can’t remove our cultural conditioning and still expect to understand the world. It’s a mistake to impose some other cultural framework on foreign ideas. If we change the framework, we distort the meaning.
Religion tries to understand reality at its most foundational level, and its answers have implications for the meaning of our lives. Answers to who we are and why we’re here tell us what we should do and how we should live. These type of answers are always embedded in wider cultural frameworks. Just as different cultures have different languages, different religions are the unique languages we use to describe the divine.
**The Real is infinite and personal**
Religion says the ultimate ground of reality is not only incomprehensible in its entirety, but also personal in its character.
Imagine we are trying to discover what a person is like, but we’ve never met them and have no direct knowledge. We can only learn about them from descriptions. We end up with various images of the person which we need to meld into a coherent whole. Each picture adds to our understanding and gives us a more rounded and complete view of the person.
If the divine is both personal and absolute, we exist only in relation to it. Religious diversity shows us we’re free to choose how we relate to it. The aim of salvation is to achieve union with the divine. But if the divine is a person, that union isn’t the same for everyone. A union or relationship with a person varies according to the nature of both people involved. A relationship is dynamic, interactive and responsive.
Think of a familiar example of the many ways we can know an important person like the president of a country. The president is one person, but many different people stand in relation to her. On the outer sphere there are the citizens she serves. Most of the citizens don’t know her personally. They relate to her through her policies, the way she organizes the system of which they are a part.
Moving closer to the president reveals her personal relationships. The members of her staff and work colleagues interact with her directly. They call her Madam President and relate to her in her functional role as president, the function she performs in the world rather than who she is as a person.
Then moving closer in relationship, we reach her friends, who call her by her name, not her job description. They aren’t related to her by the function she performs, but her qualities as a person. They spend time together and enjoy each other’s company. Friends relate as equals since their outer function in the world isn’t the basis of their relationship.
And we can move to even closer relationships with the president’s family. They call her by names of affection. They relate to each other with a personal equality and increased familiarity and intimacy. Her children climb on her back and expect her to give them horsey rides.
These are all relationships with the same person, but each has a view of the president that is unique and different. Each call her by a name appropriate to the relationship and act according to the intimacy of that relationship.
These diverse views of the same person outwardly conflict. But we understand that none are right or wrong, but only chosen ways of relating to the same person.
Rather than being contradictory descriptions of the president, some understandings are more intimate than others and view her from a different perspective. They know the person more completely, in more dimensions of her existence.
Each relationship has its appropriate behaviour and methods of approach. It’s inappropriate for the president’s staff or work colleagues to address her as honey-pie.
This idea of the various perspectives we can have in a relationship to a person also applies to the divine ground of reality. There are those who understand the divine as a person and those who view it as an impersonal field of consciousness.
The unlimited and absolute divine ground encompasses all those descriptions, they are all correct, but also incomplete. They are relative to a point of view and that viewpoint is necessarily a limited view of the unlimited.
But to think that only one view is right and the others wrong is a misunderstanding of the characteristics of the divine ground. Pluralism acknowledges there are many valid ways to seek divinity and meaning.
*“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” Rumi*
Reality Maximization - Anselm’s ontological argument for God
In days of yore people knew how to talk about Being with a capital B. Existence had gradations, modulations and all manner of expressions, some greater, some lesser. This was common sense to the people of the time, the natural way of thinking about Being.
But as time passed the reductionist way of thinking began to dominate. In our quest for knowledge, humanity carved reality into smaller pieces easier for the intellect to digest. Talking about something as abstract and holistic as Being became a foreign conceptual language.
Talking about Being itself was viewed as a quaint folk theory of the nature of reality. A theory which preceded the scientific view of the world where we drilled down into the specifics of its parts. Over time Being lost its subtle hues and became binary. Existence was something you either had or you didn’t. Reality became something you could stand outside of and view as a detached observer.
But in the days of **St Anselm of Canterbury** (1033–1109) people took a more holistic view. Anselm was part of the Platonic tradition which viewed reality in shades. Existence was something we participated in, a network in which we’re immersed at every moment. Everything participates in Being to a greater or lesser extent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_of_Canterbury
This is what Aristotle called the science of being. In Book 4 of **The Metaphysics** he says, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Metaphysics_(Ross,_1908)/Book_4
*“There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these others deals generally with being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attributes of this part.”*
Aristotle was concerned with investigating being in itself. Where the special sciences study things which exist, they presuppose those things exist and then give an account of some type, like a biological being or a physical being. But according to Aristotle, the task of metaphysics is to give an account of *being qua being*. Being *as* being.
This is a foreign idea to the modern mind. We think of existence as binary, white and black. For something to exist is merely for it to be instantiated in concrete form within space and time. But the fact of existence itself is presupposed, as if the question isn’t meaningful or demands an answer.
To understand why the binary view isn’t as common sense as it appears to us, we can approach the question from that point of view and see where it leads.
If we want to find out which things exist in any particular category a logical way to start is to write a list. I could list all the things which exist in my fridge. Or taking a wider view we might take a census of all the people in a country and their characteristics. Or wider still, biologists write lists of the various living beings and catalog them by genus and species.
But what if we wanted to take the widest possible view of reality and make a list of everything which exists in its most fundamental and general characteristics? When we take this widest possible view and begin to write our list we run into problems.
We should obviously include apples on the list, but what about their different properties? Does the redness and sweetness of the apple also exist? What about a green sour apple? The apple exists independently of the properties, but the existence of the properties are contingent on the existence of the apple. If existence is binary, the apple and its sweetness exist in the same sense and to the same degree.
The problem of the binary view is magnified when we consider privations, things which should exist but don’t. It’s a simple matter to add Bob’s hair to the list, but what about Tom’s baldness? The binary view is counter-intuitive. While hair is a thing we can add to the list, baldness is the absence of a thing which is difficult to accommodate in the binary view.
What about holes or darkness? If I fall into a hole while stumbling around in the dark and sprain my ankle it’s difficult to leave holes or darkness off the list because they exert casual effects. But if existence is binary, we’re adding things to our list which don’t exist, they’re only the absence of existing things.
Maybe we can tolerate that omission, but the problem becomes more pronounced when we consider negative existential claims. If I say unicorns don’t exist, for that to be meaningful, the word unicorn must pick out something in reality. But I’m also saying something true about the world. We’re faced with a puzzle of how negative existence claims can be both meaningful *and* true.
If we think of existence in gradations, with some things participating in existence more fully than others, a unicorn exists, but to a lesser degree than the mind its existence depends on. A hole exists but not as fully as the substance which surrounds it.
Once we understand why people might have thought of existence as a scale rather than binary, we can enter their conceptual framework. Which gives us the perspective we need to appreciate Anselm’s ontological argument and what it can illuminate about the significance of the word God.
It’s often said Anselm’s argument is an audacious attempt to prove the existence of God from concepts alone. But this is paradoxical when we consider the context of the argument. It appears in a work called **Proslogium** (*discourse*) which is a petitionary to God. We might wonder why in a work glorifying God, Anselm would intend to prove he exists. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-proslogium.asp
The Proslogium is an extended prayer from Anselm that God might make himself known. Rather than seeing Anselm’s focus in his Proslogium as an attempt to prove God exists, we can see it as an attempt to understand God.
Which makes Anselm’s discourse still useful to us today, when so many have forgotten the vast dimensions of the word God and its logical implications.
Anselm’s argument
We can summarize Anselm’s discourse into an argument. He starts with the meaning of the word God…
God is the greatest conceivable being. We can’t conceive of anything greater than God.
Anselm’s next premise is that….
God exists as an idea in the mind.
We have an idea or understanding of the word God. The theist says God exists, and the atheist says God doesn’t exist. So, everyone must have an idea of what the word God means.
After noting that God does exist as an idea, Anselm continues…
God might have existed in reality.
Which means it’s possible God exists not only as an idea, but also in reality. God is a possible being.
This next step is where the context of gradations of existence is important. Anselm says…
If something exists only as an idea, and might have existed in reality, then it might have been greater than it is.
For something to exist only as an idea means its existence depends on the mind, so it’s possible it could be greater and participate more fully in existence.
This is the first part of the argument. Anselm has completed his setup for one of the philosopher’s favorite tricks, a *r****eductio ad absurdum*** (*reduce to absurdity*). https://iep.utm.edu/reductio/
If we accept all these premises, we can’t deny God does exist without encountering a logical contradiction. Anselm continues…
Let us suppose God exists only as an idea.
Anselm assumes atheism is true for sake of argument. He says suppose it’s true God only exists as an idea, but not in reality. But that means...
God might have been greater than he is.
Because it’s greater to exist in reality than only as an idea.
And we encounter a logical contradiction. It can’t be true God exists only as an idea *and* be the greatest conceivable being.
How can the atheist avoid the contradiction?
Suppose the atheist wasn’t paying attention and complacently agreed to all the premises because they sounded plausible. But now they realize they need to backtrack. What can they do to deny Anselm’s conclusion?
They could deny the first premise that God is the greatest conceivable being. But this is difficult because it’s what most theists understand the word to mean, an unlimited being.
It’s also difficult to deny the next premise that God exists as an idea because this removes the foundation of their atheism. Whatever they mean when they say God doesn’t exist, it must exist as an idea for them to deny it exists in reality.
They could deny God is a possible being, but that would involve showing a contradiction in the concept of God.
The easiest target is what is known as the great making assumption — it is greater to exist in reality.
Parody arguments and Gaunilo’s perfect island
To challenge that assumption, a contemporary of Anselm, the monk Gaunilo created a parody argument. He replaced God in the argument with a perfect island. Gaunilo asks us to imagine a perfect island and then uses the same logic as Anselm to prove the existence of the island.
But notice how the parody fails if we’re thinking in terms of *being as being*. To be an island is to be *a land mass surrounded by water*. But there is nothing about existing in the mind that makes it less of *a land mass surrounded by water*, less of what it means to be an island.
This is in contrast to the conception of God as the greatest conceivable being. God is perfect in an absolute sense, not in some limited dimension or property. In this absolute sense we must include existence within our conception.
This helps us understand why God is a necessary being as shown by the conclusion of the **cosmological argument**. God can’t not exist. This is why the conception of God as maximally great and unlimited has a capital G to **distinguish God from gods** which are beings within the world. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing-2e85ce51bd0c https://medium.com/the-big-think/god-vs-gods-52775035bde7
Illuminating the full significance of the word God
God occupies a logical and metaphysical space that is unique. A logical space where existence is part of his essence, his nature. There is no sense in which God cannot be.
This isn’t an increased quantity of being, but a maximizing totality of being. The scale of existence rises to a grand crescendo in God. Rather than God being a powerful being at the apex of the scale, Anselm illuminates God as being itself.
God has Being absolutely and unconditionally. He is the ground of existence in which all beings participate. He isn’t a participant dependent for his being on things outside himself, but is the totality of Being.
Everything partakes in existence by God’s grace, an outpouring from the source. God is the necessary condition for anything at all to exist.
Universes from Nothing? - Scientific euphemisms and equivocations
The question of cosmic origins is a perennially popular question, but most theists think we have known the answer for thousands of years. God is the ultimate cause of the cosmos.
While there’s room to disagree with that theistic conclusion, there are rational limits on the valid ways to reject it. None of the outcomes of rejecting God are appealing. They’re the sort of explanatory gaps we reluctantly accept in the wider context of our philosophical commitments.
There is nothing wrong with that, no explanatory theory is perfect. But intellectual honesty demands admitting the explanatory defects rather than rejecting conclusions by promoting misleading ideas.
When it comes to cosmic origins, the most common misrepresentation is that we can reject God as a causal explanation because one day science will answer the question of why the universe exists.
Science can’t answer this question. Not now. Not ever.
Many people doubt that is true. It contradicts modern sensibilities about the omni-competence of science. **David Albert**, a professor with qualifications in both physics and philosophy, explains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Albert
*…ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff.*
*And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged.*
*The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.*
*Period. Case closed. End of story.*
The quote is from **a scathing review of physicist Lawrence Krauss’s book**, *A Universe From Nothing*. Krauss’s book gives the misleading impression it answers the question of cosmic origins. Not only the title of the book, but the subtitle is - *Why there is something rather than nothing*. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html
But it turns out there is a whole lot of redefining nothing going on. In Krauss’s terms, nothing doesn’t mean non-existent, the absence of anything, it means quantum vacuum fields. That isn’t a definition of nothing you’ll find in any dictionary, but according to Krauss that’s the more interesting question.
Which does make you stop to wonder why he would use the less interesting question as the title and subtitle of his book. But never mind the book sales, Krauss is suggesting quantum vacuum fields are so nebulous as to be close enough to nothing to establish the point.
The meaning of nothing
It should be obvious you can’t come close to nothing by talking about something regardless of how nebulous and vacuous that something is. Nothing and something are, and always will be, direct opposites and logically exclusive of one another.
Nothing isn’t something. By definition. Case Closed. End of Story.
While Krauss’s misrepresentation is blatant, there’s no shortage of more subtle examples of missing the point. Most of the popular discussion takes places within the context of this misunderstanding.
Most of it centers around the Kalam cosmological argument. But despite the premises of Kalam being based on physics, the argument is metaphysics, not physics. It’s philosophy, not science.
The **cosmological argument** has been around in one form or another for thousands of years. It has many different presentations corresponding to the many different cultural and conceptual schemes throughout history. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing-2e85ce51bd0c
The Kalam, being a modern version in a culture with a scientific mindset, uses premises which rely on physics. With those scientific premises it attempts to establish its metaphysical conclusion.
A **recent article on medium** which addresses Kalam perpetuates these misunderstandings. The author presents Kalam as arguing a “universe that came into existence from non-existence”. But this misses the point of the cosmological argument. https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/does-modern-cosmology-prove-the-existence-of-god-26c3b51cdc3d
The cosmological argument denies this can happen. Nothing can’t create things or cause things to happen. Nothing isn’t something. If nothing is the absence of anything, we must be confused to think non-existence has causal powers. That includes the power to spawn universes, or multiverses or even so much as a nebulous quantum field.
It’s precisely this logic that things can’t appear from nothing, for no reason, with no cause, that leads to the conclusion God is the first cause. Every cosmological argument concludes God is the cause, and God isn’t nothing.
God is not only the opposite of nothing because he’s something, he’s as far from nothing as it’s possible to be. God isn’t just any regular kind of something, but a unique something which exists of necessity. God’s nature is to exist independently of any other thing. He doesn’t depend on anything for his existence, everything else depends on God to exist.
Uncaused Events?
The other misunderstanding often perpetuated is what it means to say something is uncaused. This **recent article by Nick Meader** addressed what it means to say something is random in the context of Kalam. Radioactive decay is often used as an example of an uncaused event along with virtual particles. But neither of these are uncaused events, they are unpredictable events. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/what-does-it-mean-that-radioactive-decay-is-a-random-process-56d7e3750078
The particles created by radioactive decay are caused to exist by unstable atoms. If those atoms didn’t exist, neither would the particles. Virtual particles are caused to exist by the background quantum fields. If those fields didn’t exist, neither would the particles. Being unable to predict their existence other than with probabilistic methods doesn’t mean they’re uncaused.
This might seem like a pedantic point, but it turns out to be a big deal. Because it means we have no examples of anything existing without a cause. None. Not even one.
If there are no examples of uncaused events, and science can’t explain why the universe exists, what does this mean for the explanatory options available to the naturalist?
Naturalist explanations of the existence of the universe
Naturalism is the claim only natural things exist, so they must deny any supernatural cause for their metaphysical theory to be logically consistent. One option is an infinite causal regress, turtles all the way down.
But the most popular option among naturalists is to say the universe is a brute fact. A brute fact is something which has no further explanation. In other words, the naturalists answer to why the universe exists is — there is no reason, it has no cause.
It’s important to be clear about what this means. It isn’t saying the universe does have a cause but we don’t know what it is. It isn’t saying science is working on it. It isn’t, because it can’t answer this question.
It’s saying the universe exists for no reason and has no cause. That’s their answer to the question of cosmic origins.
This is why having no examples of anything uncaused is a big deal. Because we have no reason to think it can happen. We can agree it’s possible, no one can show it’s impossible. But any number of things are possible, that’s never been a good reason to think it’s actually the case.
The situation is made worse when we consider we have the strongest possible inductive case that things have causes for their existence. Every single thing we know of has a cause for its existence. Not one exception. That’s a lot of evidence for things having causes.
And it doesn’t help the naturalist to say maybe the universe is eternal. Telling us how long something has existed isn’t an explanation for why it exists rather than not.
And it doesn’t help to say while everything within the universe has a cause, maybe the universe itself doesn’t have one. The universe isn’t something over and above everything we know of, it isn’t some distinct thing. The universe is just a word to describe the collection of all the stuff we know of. All of which has causes.
Brute fact is a euphemism
If the brute fact response looks arbitrary, and you’re thinking there must be some mistake, this can’t be naturalism’s answer to cosmic origins, then you understand what brute fact means.
It really is that bad. Brute fact is a euphemism, a word used to hide an embarrassing universe sized explanatory hole. And while everyone has some holes in their explanations, let’s be clear about the extent of this hole. Let’s not misrepresent the situation to make everyone think we’re waiting on advances in science to explain it. Or worse, as Krauss does, to misrepresent that physics already has.
To understand what brute fact means should be shocking. Because it’s so incongruous with the cultural propaganda about the explanatory strengths of naturalism. We’re condescendingly told naturalism is a far more rational option than God as an explanatory theory.
But it seems to be the case that many naturalists are unaware of the expensive explanatory cost of rejecting the conclusion of the cosmological argument. They think science can explain the origin of the universe. Those that are aware of it don’t advertise it.
God of the Gaps - Engineering God in the scientific image
From both sides of the debate God of the Gaps is used as a disparaging critique of an argument. The non-theist often considers the accusation sufficient to refute the argument. The theist is keen to assure us their arguments aren’t God of the Gaps.
Which means everyone agrees to be guilty of God of the Gaps is to suffer intellectual damnation.
But an alliterative slogan isn’t a good reason to dismiss an argument, the logical mistake needs to be made explicit. If the reasoning is fallacious, what logical fallacy is being committed? God of the Gaps isn’t in the standard list of logical fallacies and judging from its name, it’s only a logical sin when it applies to God.
All this should make us suspicious we’re dealing with a rhetorical ploy rather than any substantial logical critique. The vague suggestion is we shouldn’t be inserting God into any gaps in our scientific knowledge. But gaps in our knowledge are areas of ignorance. Why would anyone object to removing ignorance?
Removing ignorance by filling gaps in our knowledge is literally how gaining knowledge works. When we propose the existence of any entity, it’s because we need it to fill an explanatory role to illuminate something shrouded in ignorance.
When we assume atoms, or dark matter, or quantum fields exist, it’s to fill gaps in our knowledge. So, it can’t be filling knowledge ignorance gaps that’s a problem. It also can’t be filling gaps with God is a problem. This would be atheism by declaration, or the logical fallacy of ***begging the question***. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
**Is it an argument from ignorance?**
Could the slogan mean we’re using God to plug a hole in our knowledge, *only* on the basis of the hole? If that was the case, it would be guilty of the logical fallacy of an ***argument from ignorance***. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
An example of this sort of argument would be - You can’t prove aliens do exist, therefore aliens don’t exist. Or the reverse version — You can’t prove aliens don’t exist, therefore aliens do exist. In both cases the argument uses ignorance as the *only* reason to think something is true.
But if we look more carefully at arguments that appear to be guilty of this fallacy, it’s rarely the case anyone argues this way. Often what we take to be an argument from ignorance is using legitimate reasoning, but it’s not made explicit.
**Ignorance isn’t unstated background knowledge**
Sometimes there’s background information we’re relying on which goes unstated because it’s common knowledge. Everyone knows the universe is vast, and if life arose from natural processes on Earth, then it’s likely to evolve in other places with similar hospitable conditions.
With this background knowledge we can reasonably say, if we have no reason to think aliens don’t exist, it’s more reasonable to think they do. This isn’t arguing from ignorance or from a gap in knowledge. It’s arguing on the basis of *what we do know* to a conclusion about the existence of aliens.
**Ignorance isn’t negative evidence**
Sometimes we mistake an argument which relies on the absence of evidence for an argument from ignorance. But negative evidence is a valid way of reasoning. We have another catchy slogan for this, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The slogan is vague, but the general idea is right. If we’ve looked for evidence of something; and we should find that evidence if we looked; but it’s clearly not there; that absence of evidence is evidence it’s false.
There is more to say about our methods of looking for the evidence, but this is a valid form of logical inference called ***modus tollens***. The logic takes the form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_tollens
If P, then Q.
Not Q.
Therefore, not P.
An example of this would be -
If Santa exists, then a toy workshop at the North Pole exists.
There is no toy workshop at the North Pole.
Therefore, Santa doesn’t exist.
Despite the popular meme saying you can’t prove a negative, it’s often a simple procedure. When you look in the fridge for milk and see none, that is evidence the milk doesn’t exist.
**Inference to the Best Explanation**
If God of the Gaps isn’t an argument from ignorance, it looks like it’s objecting to making an inference to the best explanation. But inference to the best explanation is a bedrock of scientific inquiry. It starts with an observation, and then chooses the simplest and most likely explanation for that observation.
If I go outside and observe everything is wet, I logically infer it’s rained rather than Ragnor Thorarinsdottir traveled from Iceland with his watering can. The best explanation is the simplest and the most likely to produce the observation.
Rather than being a method we should avoid, inference to the best explanation is a reliable way to fill gaps in our knowledge with the explanation most likely to be true.
**Agency explanations are legitimate**
Maybe the objection is filling gaps with intelligent agents instead of physical phenomena. But agent explanations are routine in many disciplines. No one objects to archaeologists explaining human agents as the cause of chipped flint arrow heads or the construction of the pyramids.
The **SETI** project searches for intelligent life in the cosmos by looking for phenomena nature can’t produce. But we don’t dismiss this as aliens-of-the-gaps. https://www.seti.org/
In all these cases we have an inference to the best explanation. When some phenomena is unlikely, or inexplicable on naturalist grounds, it’s rational to conclude something other than nature is the cause.
There is no reason *in principle* that cause can’t be God.
Science is full of instances that use the same kind of reasoning. Knowledge of natural laws tells us that perpetual motion machines or faster than light speed travel is impossible. Every natural law is a claim about the limitations of natural processes.
When theists make arguments about design in biology, arguments from consciousness, the fine tuning of the physical constants, arguments from miracles or cosmic origins, they appeal to the limits of natural law. These claims argue that according to our knowledge of natural law the observed phenomena are either impossible, or natural laws aren’t the best explanation.
**Limiting God to our cultural paradigm**
It’s not surprising naturalists are inclined to dismiss theist arguments with God of the Gaps slogan since they assume science will eventually explain everything. The more interesting anomaly is that theists agree the procedure is illegitimate. That’s usually a clue we’re dealing with unquestioned cultural paradigms.
The modern cultural narrative says our ancestors appealed to gods to explain natural phenomena and then we invented science. Now we know the natural causes of thunder and we have no further explanatory need for Thor. Despite being historically naive, it does make sense if the only purpose Thor served was an explanation for a natural mechanism.
But this imposes our modern paradigm on a culturally distinct mythology. The idea nature is mechanism is a modern invention. The scientific reductionist method of inquiry accepts that we can understand nature by understanding its parts and their interactions. We can investigate nature *as if* it was a machine.
And not just any type of machine, it’s a self-sustaining analog machine. This is a picture of a deist God who creates and winds up his machine. We impose our mechanistic way of thinking on God, and he becomes a scientific God, an expert engineer.
God tinkering with the machine is a revelation of his engineering incompetence.
But why isn’t God allowed to tinker and intervene in any gap he chooses? Even staying with the machine metaphor we could conceive of the machinery of nature like a musical instrument. Something which requires continual intervention to sustain its harmonious and rhythmic movement.
Why does our conception of God mean he can’t take a continual and active interest in his creative project? Or be personally invested in its outcomes and the lives of its participants?
Our conception of God is shaped by our conception of the world. We view nature as a particular type of machine, therefore the creator of the machine is an anthropomorphic reflection of our world.
We arrive at a conception of God as a detached observer of his scientific experiment. God the scientist. A God created in the scientific image.
Reflections on the Nature of Faith - Transcending the limits of the intellect
Faith is sometimes described as belief without evidence. Non-believers promote this idea, but many believers also say this is the substance of faith. If we had evidence, why would we need faith?
But this is a shallow understanding of faith. If that was the substance of faith, faith would be irrational. But the deeper understanding is that faith transcends the rational.
Faith goes beyond the intellect, not in defiance of it, or in denial of it. Faith steps out into territory the intellect cannot penetrate. It’s a method of gaining truth that is beyond the ability of the intellect to know.
Faith is a surrender at the edge of reason. A leap into the unknown. A confidence of things hoped for and the assurance of things we cannot see. But that confidence is based on evidence. Faith isn’t a blind and irrational hope.
Faith should be understood as trust or fidelity. It’s a practical commitment. The commitment isn’t an intellectual acceptance of a theoretical truth. Faith is the theory brought to life. It’s an act of will, not a belief.
A detached intellectual acceptance of God’s existence, or a belief in religious doctrine won’t inspire us into religious practices or a saintly life. We must go beyond acceptance of a theory. We can’t claim to believe in God while continuing with a materialistic life.
A familiar analogy of marriage — our life partner
We can understand this conception of faith with a familiar analogy. The initiation of a marriage is a commitment to join our lives together. A promise to act in fidelity to one another, to care for each other’s interests and welfare.
At first, we have only a verbal and theoretical commitment, a legal contract. But the heart of the contract is a promise. Actions bring the contract and promise to life. It’s only by continual actions faithful to the contract that trust between partners deepens and grows. There is no alternative to this method if our goal is to develop and maintain a relationship with another person.
Fidelity goes beyond the legal contract and fulfills the substance of it. Our actions are the substance of a marriage. A marriage is a pledge of fidelity to another person. A loyalty that persists in sickness and in health, in wealth or poverty, favorable or unfavorable circumstances. We can’t claim to believe in our marriage while having an affair.
Faith involves risk
In this living venture, we have sufficient theoretical evidence the relationship will succeed. But the undertaking is inherently risky. The outcome is beyond our control. Our commitment isn’t a guarantee. We’re necessarily vulnerable to betrayal or adverse outcomes.
This is an unavoidable consequence of trust. Trust is confidence, not proof. We should see the commitment as having faith in God, not faith that God (exists).
We can establish God’s existence with reason and the intellect. This is the project of natural theology. From our observations of the natural world we can infer the existence of God. The rational case for theism is robust enough to support a rationally justified belief God exists.
There is no unusual rational risk in believing God exists. The risk is in trusting a person we know only from theoretical deductions and the testimony of those we accept as reliable witnesses.
And on that basis, we must step out alone in untraveled territory. Doubt and skepticism can’t help us, they will paralyze us on the threshold. We can’t wait for proof, the confirmation is only available by action.
Faith as a method of knowing
Faith is the only instrument capable of connecting us with a living God. We can’t detect God with the senses or grasp and confine him within the intellect. But the heart has the power to draw him toward us with a bond of affection and trust.
If we are true to God, God will be true to us. This is the foundation of all personal relationships and no less true with God. As we approach God, he will respond accordingly.
Faith is a living dynamic path, not one on which we can become complacent and allow our faith to solidify into dogma. It requires constant searching and questioning to align ourselves with God’s will. That quest is to live in harmony with the universally benevolent will.
Love is the supreme controller - Love conquers all
Faith is the instrument with which we can realize truths of existential importance. Faith takes it as true that love is supreme and acts accordingly.
This isn’t a detached intellectual acceptance of an ideal. It’s a recognition that living and acting in harmony with that ideal constitutes the ultimate salvation and consummation of our existence. A recognition that love is ultimately victorious over any attempt to undermine it.
Faith is an orientation to life and the world. It’s a belief that at its foundation, the world is good and here for a purpose. It isn’t an uncaring and insentient reality that exists for no reason. Faith transforms the world from an object to a subject. From an it, to a thou.
Faith is an optimism and confidence in the ultimate meaning of our lives. You can’t know the truth of faith by affirming it in theory, by preaching its glories to others or by casting doubt on its virtue from the sidelines.
You must live it and experience it first-hand. Faith is both the foundational, and the ultimate expression of our free will. Its power transforms the mundane into the divine.
The Impossibly Hard Problem of Consciousness - The philosophical zombie apocalypse
In 1994 the philosopher David Chalmers raised questions about consciousness which ignited a zombie apocalypse.
These weren’t questions no one had asked before. These were questions that rattled the established orthodoxy. They challenged the complacent modern assumption that science had settled all such questions.
Many people assume it’s no longer an open question whether there is a soul separate from the body which could survive death. The **modern mythology** says science exorcised that ghost from the machine long ago. It’s assumed everything worth explaining would eventually be explained by science. https://medium.com/illumination/the-invisible-mythology-of-our-modern-world-658ec9e293df
Then Chalmers released the philosophical zombies, and the war began.
**What is a philosophical zombie?**
Rather than the blood-stained, reanimated corpse of horror films, a philosophical zombie is less frightening. It’s an explanatory nightmare.
Imagine you meet your doppelganger. Someone physically identical to you, atom for atom. The only difference is the doppelganger has no inner consciousness. They look happy or sad, they even tell you of their hopes and dreams.
But there is nothing more than physical processes moving in response to physical causes. Their lips move and sounds which are meaningful to you come out, but they experience nothing at all.
From the outside you are identical. But from the inside the zombie is a hollow imitation. That is a philosophical zombie. The physical structure, functions and behavior are identical, but there is no consciousness.
**What exactly is the missing ingredient?**
Consciousness is an ambiguous term, sometimes consciousness can mean the difference between being asleep and being awake. Or having the ability to react to information, focus attention and other similar cognitive abilities. Chalmers calls these type of brain functions the easy problems of consciousness. He contrasts these easy problems with the hard problem. He says,
*“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.” ¹*
Philosophers call this subjective experience qualia, or “*what it is like*”. Experiential states are those states there is *something* *it is like* to be in them. There is *something it is like* to taste a lemon, which is different to *what it is like* to do your income taxes, or have a toothache, listen to fingernails scraping down a blackboard, be envious, or have a memory on the tip of your tongue.
The rich and distinctive inner feel of all those experiences is very different. That inner world is so familiar, so fundamental to our existence we rarely question it or notice how extraordinary consciousness is. It’s this aspect of consciousness, the inner feel or conscious *experience*, that the zombie lacks.
**Why is it a hard problem?**
The conceptual distinction behind the easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem shows the challenge faced by a science of consciousness.
*“The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well suited for this sort of explanation and so are well suited to the easy problems of consciousness.”²*
To explain the difference between the states of asleep and awake only requires a description of brain processes responsible for the contrasting behavior. All it means for a system to be awake is for the system to be receptive to information from the environment and use this information to direct its behavior. The state we call awake is a functional state.
To explain a functional state requires specifying a mechanism that performs the function. Scientific reductionist explanations work on the principle that we can understand all phenomena by explaining their elementary parts. A description of the structure, the functions and the motion and interaction of those parts is all we need to completely explain any phenomena.
But when it comes to conscious experience, this sort of reductive explanation fails. Even if we have a complete explanation of all structure and function, there will always be a further unanswered question: Why is this function accompanied by experience? Why is there an inner feel?
No reference to mechanism can answer that question. Which means there can be no reductionist explanation.
**Isn’t it enough to explain the functions?**
All this may seem like an intellectual chimera, everyone knows zombies aren’t real so does it matter? Isn’t it enough to explain how the brain works?
It matters for the philosophy of physicalism.
For the physicalist it’s an explanatory nightmare. The stakes are high. If there can’t be a scientific explanation of conscious experience, this shows physicalism is false.
Physicalism is the claim the only type of things which exist are physical things. What physical means can be understood in different ways and there is some wiggle room available.
But generally speaking, physicalism says everything which exists can be explained by the laws of physics; or is fully reducible to things that can be explained by the laws of physics.
If science is restricted to reductive explanations, but no such explanation can include conscious experience, then science cannot explain it. Many people take it for granted that cognitive science will eventually explain consciousness. Chalmers’ distinction put the truth of that in jeopardy.
Science can explain the easy problems. Easy is an understatement, the easy problems will take many years of advanced research. But in principle there is no real difficulty. They’re all the sort of problems we expect science to solve because they deal with structure and functions.
The hard problem is different. Hard is also an understatement, it’s a euphemism. It really means impossible.
Conscious experience is a phenomena which i*n principle* science can’t explain.
**Confronting the nemesis of the scientific method — why is anyone surprised?**
When we consider what the scientific method consists of, this apocalypse is predictable.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that the scientific method creates the mind body problem. Science is a method of inquiry which intentionally excludes certain phenomena from explanations.
The excluded features are first person phenomena. Science deals only in quantitative objective properties, third-person properties. All first-person qualitative phenomena are swept out of sight, under the category of t*he mind*.
The observed nature of the world itself didn’t demand the scientific method, it was a stipulated demand, only certain aspects of the world could be included in scientific explanations.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when science confronts the fundamental properties of the mind, it finds itself incapable of breaching the divide.
Because it intentionally created the divide.
Scientific explanations create the hard problem of consciousness. Stipulating that only objective third-person features of matter are acceptable as scientific explanations, intentionally excludes first-person properties.
By describing red in objective features as wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation we’ve stipulated science must exclude the experience of seeing red from any explanation.
**The physicalist trilemma**
The mind body problem lies in the intersection of three observations, creating a **trilemma** – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma
Consciousness is non-physical.
The physical world is causally closed, all physical effects have physical causes.
Consciousness is causally effective. Mind affects body.
All three can’t be true simultaneously, so we must deny one to avoid logical contradiction.
**What is the solution?**
The physicalist must deny the first observation, they have no choice. If it’s true that consciousness is non-physical, then not everything is physical, and physicalism is false.
The physicalist must accept the second, the causal closure of the physical. If causal closure is false then not every physical effect has a physical cause, and again physicalism is false.
Denying the third means consciousness doesn’t have any causal power, despite appearances to the contrary. When you move your body to the fridge in response to a *desire* for a snack, or take medication in response to *pain*, or lock the doors due to a *fear* of burglars, there is no causal connection between those conscious states and the physical effects of your body moving.
This view isn’t fatal to the physicalist theory, but it puts it on critical life support. Our mental states cause actions which move matter constantly, giving us a lot of evidence it’s true. Any arguments those powers are illusory will need to be stronger than our confidence our conscious states cause our bodies to move.
Which is why the most popular option for the physicalist is to deny the first observation that consciousness is non-physical.
**Denying consciousness is non-physical**
Physicalists have two broad options. They can agree that consciousness has non-physical properties, but argue those properties are fully reducible to physical properties like brain processes. This results in a property dualism, consciousness is a property of brains like liquidity is a property of water.
This option avoids the immediate danger of consciousness being non-physical, but it creates more problems. Not only do they still need to confront the hard problem of showing how physical mechanisms produce non-physical properties, but they also have the problem of causal over-determination and top-down causation.
If property dualism is true, those non-physical properties have causal power. But this means we have causal over-determination. We have the physical causes (whatever physical things consciousness reduces to) *and* the non-physical properties as causes.
My fear of burglars does cause me to move my body, but fear isn’t a physical property. Even if fear is shown to be reducible to a brain state, now both the brain state *and* the experiential state of fear are causes. Our causal explanations are over-determined.
It also means the causation proceeds from the non-physical properties to the physical, from the top down. But that violates causal closure which says all physical effects have physical causes.
A second option, which is a minority view among physicalists, is to deny there is any problem to be explained. They argue that once we’ve explained all the functions and mechanisms, there is nothing left to explain. That we think there is a problem is only a result of ignorance, as was the case when it was proposed life couldn’t be explained without theorizing the existence of a vital force (*elan vital*).
However, this line of argument ignores the unique nature of consciousness. Consciousness isn’t an explanatory postulate, something like *elan vital* that we theorize exists to explain some other thing (life). Conscious experience is the thing to be explained. So it’s not possible to eliminate the phenomena in this way.
**The end of physicalism as we know it?**
Confronting the hard problem of consciousness logically leads to an expansion of physicalist ontology. Consciousness must be added to the fundamental constituents of reality like space or time.
These are fundamental properties that are elementary and basic, they aren’t themselves explained but are the explanatory framework which contains the explanations.
It isn’t our conception of consciousness that needs to change, it’s our conception of matter. The mechanistic philosophy views matter as an insentient machine.
This arose from the habit of seeing matter that way because it was practical for scientific investigation. From that way of seeing the world, many came to think the world was, in fact, like that. **A naturalist method morphed into a metaphysics.** https://medium.com/interfaith-now/naturalisms-folly-d9a9e36cde56
The new conception of the physical world found in quantum mechanics and the participatory role the conscious observer plays, has long ago superseded the mechanical conception of nature. Yet we still labor under the mechanistic paradigm from the age of Newtonian physics.
All these problems are only problems for the physicalist. Alternative metaphysics, like idealism, substance dualism or **panpsychism** all avoid the hard problem by denying causal closure. They accept the observation that consciousness is non-physical, and it’s causally effective, which means causal closure must be false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Unlike the observations of consciousness and its causal powers, causal closure isn’t based on observations of the world. It’s a metaphysical commitment. Physicalism is confronting a problem created by its philosophical commitments being in conflict with our observations of the world.
The conceptions of the world both science and philosophy have led us to, are starting to look a lot like the spiritual conceptions of our ancestors. Maybe modern humans aren’t such clever apes after all.
All quotes from **David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness** https://philpapers.org/rec/CHATCO-14
pge 5 and 2. pge 6
Introduction to Bhagavatam - India's devotional jewel
While the **Bhagavad Gita** is well known outside of India, the Bhagavata Purana, or Bhagavatam, is a hidden gem. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/bhagavad-gita-the-song-of-god-9a33c551850e
Bhagavatam means *The Book of God*. While much of the Vedic literature is esoteric and philosophical in nature, the Purana’s are intended for a general audience. The stories within the Bhagavatam are loved throughout India and have exerted an enormous influence on Indian poetry, music, drama, art and architecture.
Bhagavatam is a text that has no doubts about its own value. In its opening verses it declares it contains the supreme truth and is the mature fruit of all Vedic wisdom. It then assures us there is no need for any other literature, because hearing its message is sufficient to confine the Supreme Lord within the listeners heart.
The Bhagavatam is considered a natural commentary on the **Vedanta-sutra**. It’s accepted as a scriptural authority for all Vaishnava theology and is essential to many devotional traditions (bhakti yoga). https://medium.com/interfaith-now/the-end-of-knowledge-884e387c475b
The Bhagavatam itself claims its author was the famed **Vyasadev**, the literary incarnation of God who composed the Veda. In the first canto it tells the story of Vyasadev’s inspiration to compose the text… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyasa
One morning as Vyasadev sat in meditation, he could foresee the deterioration of humanity’s spiritual knowledge due to the degrading influence of the material world. So he contemplated how he could promote the welfare of all people.
He then divided the Veda into four and composed the great Mahabharata. This would allow even ordinary people to understand spiritual knowledge and achieve the ultimate goal of human life.
Yet even after his extensive endeavors he remained dissatisfied. He said to himself,
*“I’ve accepted all the traditional disciplines and vows. I’ve humbly chanted the Vedic hymns. I’ve worshiped the spiritual teachers and performed sacrifice without pretense.*
*I haven’t deviated from the instructions of the great spiritual teachers in my explanations within the Mahabharata, and I’ve properly explained the path of religion so that all people can understand it.*
*Although I’ve done everything required and I myself have everything necessary, I still feel that something is missing.”*
As he was contemplating the source of his dissatisfaction the sage Narada arrived at his ashram. Narada informed him that his dissatisfaction was due to neglecting to broadcast the glories of God. Narada said,
*“Vyasadev, you have perfect vision. You have appeared on this earth for the well-being of all people. Therefore, please describe the spiritual qualities and activities of the Supreme Person more clearly. Intelligent people understand that the advancement of spiritual knowledge and religious activities culminates in descriptions of the Supreme Lord, who is described with beautiful poetry.”*
Narada’s advice inspired Vyasadev to compose the Bhagavatam.
Vyasadev then taught the Bhagavatam to his son Sukadeva Goswami.
Sukadeva then recited it to King Pariksit and an assembly of sages on the bank of the sacred river Ganges.
In that assembly, the sage Suta Goswami was present and heard the message of the Bhagavatam.
Suta Goswami then recites the Bhagavatam to another assembly of sages in the sacred forest of Naimisaranya.
This labyrinth of a plot-line is characteristic of Bhagavatam. The encyclopedic work spans 18,000 verses on topics ranging from cosmology, yoga, philosophy, dharma and ethics, the process of creation and eventual dissolution of the world and liberation or salvation.
But the inner thread running through the heart of the text is the pastimes of God in his various incarnations or avatars. It’s this devotion to God in his personal form that is the focus of the text and the means of liberation for bhakti yoga traditions.
The text of Bhagavatam begins with Suta Goswami in the forest at Naimisaranya. The assembled sages offer a seat of respect to Suta Goswami. Due to his extensive qualifications they ask him to give a summation of the Vedic wisdom. He answers them succinctly,
*“The supreme occupation [dharma] for all humanity is that by which one can attain to loving devotional service to the transcendent Lord. Such devotional service must be unmotivated and uninterrupted to completely satisfy the self.”*
After announcing that the essence of all knowledge, and the highest good, consists of devotion to God, he explains how and why he heard Bhagavatam from Sukadeva Goswami.
Sukadeva recited the Bhagavatam to an assembly of sages on the bank of the sacred river Ganges. King Pariksit, the grandson of the Pandava’s, has been cursed to die by snakebite in 7 days. On receiving the news of his impending death he relinquishes his kingdom and goes to the bank of the Ganges to fast until death.
Many sages assemble there. Then the great sage Sukadeva Goswami, son of Vyasadev also arrives. King Pariksit offers him respect and asks him,
*“Would you please explain the path of perfection for all people and particularly for someone who is about to die. Please tell me what people in general should hear, remember and worship and also what they should not do.”*
Sukadeva also answers with a succinct summary,
*“ My dear King Pariksit, anyone who wishes to be free from all suffering must hear about, glorify and remember the Supreme Lord, who is the Super-soul, the supreme controller and the savior from all misery. The perfection of human life is to remember the Supreme Lord at the end of life.”*
The rest of the Bhagavatam is an extended commentary on that summation.
At the end of the text Pariksit declares he is no longer afraid of death because he has absorbed his consciousness in spiritual knowledge. Hearing the knowledge in the Bhagavatam, Pariksit and the reader, are given the means to liberation.
The text is full of blessings for the reader after the various stories...
*Anyone who hears this story of Lord Nirishima and Prahlad will certainly reach the spiritual realm and be liberated from all suffering.*
*Anyone who hears or chants this confidential story of Ajamila will not have to suffer the karmic reactions to material life.*
*The story of Lord Kapila and His mother Devahuti is the purest of narrations. Anyone who hears this will enter into the abode of the Supreme Lord.*
Included in Bhagavatam are the stories of many incarnations of God and his devotees like Prahalad and Dhruva. The stories of the famous 10 avatars of Vishnu are scattered throughout the text. Lord Vishnu descends to the world whenever dharma or religious principles are threatened. He adopts a form suitable for his mission.
The progression of avatars is often compared to the evolution of species, beginning with Matysa the fish; the Kurma the tortoise; Varaha the boar; Narasingha half man-half lion; Vamana the dwarf; Parasurama the ferocious man; Rama the perfect nobleman; Balarama the philosopher and embodiment of guru; Krishna the divine lover. The final descent is Kalki the warrior who ends evil by killing the demon Kali and so ushers in a new golden age. Then the cycle repeats.
In this progression of avatars we see the evolution of species in the outer form, but the Vedic understanding is the evolution of form arises from an inner evolution of consciousness.
For the bhakti traditions the evolution of consciousness is an evolution of devotion to God. It’s by devotion that union with God is achieved, and so the evolution culminates in the form of God as Krishna.
Krishna is the two armed human form of God where divine love brings God closest to the soul. The devotional connection with God isn’t one of power or knowledge, but of love. It produces the most intimate connection and equality with God that isn’t available by any other means.
On display in the Bhagavatam is the unique conceptions of God found in Hinduism. The ontology is seamlessly woven into the diversity of the forms of God, the destiny of the soul, and the method to achieve it.
Dharma - Linking the cosmic order to personal destiny
Dharma is a Sanskrit word which means to support and preserve. It’s the essential quality on which something rests, that quality which makes it the type of thing it is. The dharma of something defines its intrinsic nature.
Dharma can be understood in many contexts. In the broadest sense of the word, it describes the cosmic order, the natural law, the forces immanent within reality.
In a more limited sense dharma is the social order, the general principles for structuring human society. In an even more limited sense dharma applies to the individual and the right way of acting to fulfil your potential.
Dharma could be thought of as destiny, but it doesn’t mean something externally imposed on us by forces of fate. It’s an authentic expression of who we are that comes from within and shapes who we become.
The universal context — our eternal nature (sanatana dharma)
The broadest understanding is sanatana dharma. Sanatana means eternal. This is our true and unchanging nature, that which makes us what we are. Our eternal nature is a conscious soul and our natural movement is always toward bliss, the positive fulfilment of consciousness.
Our eternal dharma can also be understood in the context of our relationship to the whole of reality. The absolute, the source and foundation of all existence. In Vedanta this is known as Brahman.
Vedanta also describes the method to achieve sanatana dharma. This is moksha, liberation from suffering and death. Once we know our true nature as an eternally blissful soul, we also know our true self is something different from the physical body. Birth and death are transformations of the body, not the soul. We can achieve freedom from suffering by transcending the cycle of birth and death.
This universal context of sanatana dharma is achieved by religious or spiritual practices. The aim is to go beyond the world of the senses and the mind to the very soul of our existence. **The schools of Vedanta** give knowledge on the different views on the ultimate goal and the path to reach it. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/the-end-of-knowledge-884e387c475b
**The social context — our ethical duty (varna ashrama dharma)**
Varna-ashrama dharma describes the principles for organizing society to allow humanity to facilitate their eternal dharma. It gives us the social structure which helps us fulfil our potential in this life, so we can achieve freedom from suffering and death.
Varna means our occupation, ashrama means our stage of life. This is the Vedic social order, and the philosophical basis of the Vedic caste system. Unlike its modern form in Indian society, caste isn’t a rigid social system. It isn’t an eternal truth about who you are, but a description of your present circumstances in this world.
The social dharma gives us ethical guidelines. Religion or ultimate goals are in the background, but these principles of social dharma are compatible with a variety of religious goals.
There are four broad categories of occupations (varna), the intellectuals (brahmana), the administrators (kshatriya), the merchants (vaishya) and the laborers (shudra). Each class is determined by personal qualities. Although many people think the Indian caste system is decided by your birth, it’s ideological foundation is your qualities, your inner nature.
Our inner nature determines the type of activities we’re suited to and the occupations we naturally pursue. We’re inclined to perform actions based on our natural temperament and skills. Varna are generic categories for the functioning of human society, so everyone’s occupation and duties are appropriate to their natural inclinations. This in turn maximizes the individual and collective well-being.
Ashrama means the stage of life. There are 4 ashrams, student, householder, retired and renounced. These stages of life have different dharma or social duties. In our childhood we are students, next we enter family life, followed by retired life and finally renunciation.
Dharma in this social context is about how you should act according to your position in society and your duties toward others. The Bhagavad Gita says,
*“You should carry out your responsibilities without attachment to the results. By selflessly executing your duty, you will achieve liberation.” (3.18)*
Our social dharma guides us about the best way to live in this world, while we have our eyes on the next. Our eternal dharma is the goal, our social dharma is the next step we take toward it.
**The individual context — personal virtue or destiny.**
With an understanding of our eternal nature (sanatana dharma) and the duties of our present social circumstances (varna-ashrama), we’re equipped to make informed choices about how to live. The final choice for both spiritual goals and ethical choices is left to the integrity and intelligence of each individual.
*“It is better to engage in your own dharma with faults than to perform another’s dharma well. Even death in the course of performing your own dharma is better than engaging in someone else’s dharma, because it is perilous to follow the path of another.” (Bhagavad Gita 3.35)*
We rely on 2nd-hand knowledge for many things in our lives. We rely on our doctor for knowledge about our physical health, and our accountant for our financial health. But when it comes to spirituality, 2nd-hand knowledge will not do.
Our choices of how to live, what to value and what goals to pursue are not only personal, they define who we are as a person. Spirituality must be authentic, arising spontaneously from our inner nature. The way we act is the true expression of our nature.
If our path isn’t something which naturally arises from who we are, it’s an artifice, something artificially imposed. It produces only self-deception, it doesn’t deepen self-realization. The method then becomes only a way of cheating ourselves. A hollow spirituality, a shadow without substance.
Spirituality includes ethical choices, but also religious choices. Our spirituality is an expression of our relationship to the whole of which we are a part. What we value is what we revere. We worship those things we’re willing to make personal sacrifices to achieve.
This is the authentic spirituality and it is universal to living beings. It doesn’t correlate to belief in any religious doctrine although it may include it. All living beings are searching for positive fulfilment, for truth, for bliss. That is dharma, it upholds and preserves spirituality and ethics and in that way it sustains the welfare of all living beings.
The Presumption of Atheism on trial
It’s become fashionable to say atheism has no burden of proof. It’s said atheism is the default assumption and the onus is on the theist to prove, not on the atheist to disprove.
While this idea has the superficial gloss of rationality, under a critical cross-examination it falls apart. Rather than promoting rational methods, it achieves the opposite.
The main source of the idea is a 1976 article by the philosopher **Antony Flew**, titled *The Presumption of Atheism*. Flew says, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew
*“…the debate about the existence of God should properly begin from a presumption of atheism, that the onus of proof must lie on the theist.”*
The general idea sounds reasonable, no one disputes we should have good reasons to think something is true. We also don’t have an obligation to disprove any idea someone comes up with.
But to apply those basic rational principles to atheism in particular, requires a specific and idiosyncratic definition of atheism. As Flew says:
*“The word ‘atheism’, however, has … to be construed unusually. In this interpretation an atheist becomes: not someone who positively asserts the non-existence of God; but someone who is simply not a theist.”*
Defenders of this idea explain that atheism means lacking a belief God does exist, not having a belief God doesn’t exist.
Confused at the difference? Well as it happens, that confusion produces unfortunate mistakes about the rational method and how to assess the truth of claims. What are the problems it creates?
We lose the ability to talk about truth
The first thing to notice is, if we talk about beliefs we lack, rather than beliefs we have, we lose the ability to talk about truth. A belief is a mental state, the state of thinking something is true.
When we define theism as the belief God exists, we understand we’re talking about the factual content of the belief, not the mental state itself. The factual content is the content that can be true or false. In the case of theism, the factual content is: Reality includes a God.
No one engages in debate on theism as if the only thing at stake is whether someone has a mental state corresponding to *a belief in God*. They debate the factual content, whether it’s true that God does, in fact, exist.
This is a common-sense way of speaking, so what does this mean for our definition of atheism?
If we define atheism as the lack of a belief in theism, we have no belief, only the lack of one. If we have no belief, we have no factual content. If we have no factual content, we have no way to refer to the truth.
With Flews’ definition, atheism is no longer about the truth or a factual claim about reality, it isn’t even a mental state. It’s reduced to something with no substance, a mere shadow of rationality.
**It obscures our conceptual categories**
There are only 3 possible positions on any factual claim. The claim can be true, or false, or we can’t know if it’s true or false. The first two are about reality itself (metaphysics), the third is about what we can know about reality (epistemology).
When it comes to the claim God exists, these positions are called theism (true), atheism (false) and agnosticism (can’t know if it’s true or false).
If we define atheism as not-theism, we now have only have one word to describe both the false and can’t know positions, atheism and agnosticism. The agnostic doesn’t say theism is true, but they also don’t say it’s false. Their position logically excludes both true and false, their position is we can’t know if it’s true or false.
There are many variations on the details of any agnostic position. It can evaluate the evidence and judge it to be exactly equal with no way to decide one way or the other.
But the more substantial agnostic positions give principled reasons for our inability to know the answer. They’re about issues in epistemology and our methods of gaining knowledge about the world.
Some of the most influential philosophical positions of modern times, for example those of Hume and Kant, are agnostic positions. They give detailed reasons why we’re unable to gain knowledge on certain types of metaphysical questions and what that means for the claim of God in particular.
Understanding those claims requires us to have a clear distinction between the concepts of atheism and agnosticism. To have a clear distinction between concepts requires us to have distinct words which name those concepts.
We find that rather than clarifying our conceptual framework, this definition of atheism obscures our conceptual categories. It creates confusion by giving us only one word to describe two distinct and logically exclusive positions on truth.
**It creates confusion about how to think critically and assess truth claims**
Skepticism means to doubt. Doubt isn’t a method of finding truth, it’s a method of avoiding error. The rational method aims for truth. It judges the reasons, the evidence we have for any claim. It then apportions our belief, our estimation of what is most likely true, to the preponderance of the evidence.
Defining atheism as disbelief confuses skepticism with the rational method. This misleads us about the method to find truth. To see why, we can look at one of the popular examples atheists use to justify why non-belief has no burden of proof.
**Russell’s celestial teapot** is a china teapot claimed to be in orbit around the sun. The teapot is too small to be detected by our most powerful telescopes. Skeptics use examples like this to show the burden of proof is on those who claim the teapot exists, not on those who doubt it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
But applying the atheist method of skeptical disbelief leads us to the wrong conclusion on the truth about the teapot’s existence. If we want to know if the world includes a celestial teapot or not, discussing who made the claim or who has the burden of proof is irrelevant. The only thing of importance is what evidence we have available.
And we have a lot of evidence available to judge the truth of the claim. We know a lot about china teapots, they are human made products and fragile. To manufacture and then place such a small teapot into orbit around the sun would take substantial expertise, money and organisation.
We also know the motivations of humans and the usual purposes they would expend that amount of energy in pursuit of a goal. The verdict on the truth of the teapot claim is obvious. If we follow the presumption of non-belief method, it leads us to conclude we shouldn’t believe the teapot exists. But this is the wrong conclusion.
We should apportion our belief to the evidence and believe the teapot does not exist. We should confidently declare the claim is false. It isn’t rational to withhold judgement, to only conclude we won’t say it’s true, but also won’t commit to it being false. Framing our response to the claim as non-belief leaves open the possibility a miniature china teapot is orbiting the sun.
The same point applies to all the usual examples atheists use, Santa, fairies, invisible dragons, flying pasta…. They’re all claims we should be confident in declaring them false rather than merely lacking the belief they’re true.
**It sanctions irrationality by presuming non-belief requires no evidence**
If we frame the discussion on any topic in terms of beliefs, and then say non-belief has no obligation to disprove, we sanction anyone who doesn’t want to accept a claim the right to irrationality.
A non-believer has no rational obligation beyond expressing doubt toward the evidence. They don’t have any rational burden to justify what is most likely true.
We see this happening with climate skeptics, we see it with vaccine skeptics. The non-believers don’t need to defend any position on the truth of the matter, they only need to express doubt. Maybe the global warming has natural causes, maybe the vaccines have unknown side effects, maybe this, maybe that.
If the focus is on truth, everyone needs to talk about the reasons we have, not vaguely gesture toward the endless possibilities we don’t know about. Without a focus on truth, it’s far too easy to direct skepticism toward any idea we don’t want to accept.
Skeptics don’t need to defend climate change being false, or why the evidence only warrants agnosticism, they only need to say they lack a belief, they haven’t been convinced.
It’s no surprise we find the same thing happens with atheism. It’s not unusual to be told we have the same amount of evidence for God as we have for Santa, or fairies, or flying pasta. But these analogies not only misunderstand what **God is said to be**, the claim the available evidence is equal could only be accepted by someone who hasn’t even done a cursory investigation of the evidence for God’s existence. https://medium.com/interfaith-now/god-vs-gods-52775035bde7
Why would they investigate what God means or the evidence he exists, if they don’t have any burden to disprove? Why would they investigate if they are rational by default and deny they’re making any claims of truth?
They aren’t participants in the rational debate on truth, their contribution is reduced to a heckler who mocks from the sidelines. The commentary of the heckler diminishes rather than enriches the rational debate.
If our focus is always on the truth and the reasons and evidence, we can’t make this mistake. Even agnosticism requires reasons to support why it’s the correct conclusion.
Every position needs reasons and evidence, rational means based on reasons. The rational method is the method we use to reach our conclusion, not the conclusion we reach. To claim some particular position is rational by default is the antithesis of rationality.
The End of Knowledge - Introduction to Vedanta
Vedanta has been called the science of spirituality. It’s one of the six schools of Indian philosophy and takes its inspiration from the literature of the Upanishads. Upanishad means *to sit nearby*. It suggests the texts contain the secret knowledge of the sages. The Upanishads give the conclusions of India’s sacred Vedic literature.
Veda means knowledge and Vedanta means the end of knowledge, or the goal of knowledge. From those conclusions in the Upanishads, Vedanta gives a commentary. Vedanta isn’t only a summary of the wisdom of the Veda, it also tells us what that means for us personally.
A characteristic of Indian philosophy is its connection of theory and practice. Hinduism thinks the goal of philosophy is to find truth, and the goal of finding truth is its impact on your personal destiny. Who you are, why you are here, and what that means for how you should live are perennial human questions. In the West we separate philosophy and religion, in India they are seen as indissolubly linked.
Vedanta is based on 3 texts: the Upanishads, the Vedanta Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita. Every school of Vedanta has commentaries on these 3 texts.
The Vedanta Sutra begins with the verse: *“Now, let us inquire into Brahman”.*
Brahman is a Sanskrit word which means to grow, to expand. It gives us the idea of a conscious dynamic substance which underlies all reality and is also immanent within it. Vedanta‘s quest to understand Brahman, is a quest to understand the foundation of existence, the source of all things, the quintessence of reality.
*“Knowing which, everything else becomes known.”*
*Mundaka Upanishad 1.1.3*
The main focus of both the Upanishads and Vedanta is knowledge of Brahman or the absolute; the individual self; the material world; and the relationship between them.
Brahman in its unlimited feature has similarities with the monotheist idea of God. It is the foundation of existence, the unlimited conscious principle animating all things. It’s defined as eternal, conscious, bliss (*sat, chit, ananda*).
The Upanishads tell us that the individual soul, the *jiva* or *atman*, is also Brahman. One of the most famous aphorisms of the Veda is *Tat Tvam Asi* which means, *You Are That.*
*“Now that which is that subtle essence (the root of all), in it all that exists has its self. It is the true. It is the self and you are that.“*
*Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7*
But if we are Brahman, and Brahman is eternal bliss, then why do we suffer and die? We know our existence is temporary, death is certain. We also know suffering is unavoidable in this world.
How can we understand the Upanishad teaching we are Brahman?
The various schools of Vedanta give different answers. All the schools agree on the nature of Brahman and the soul, they agree Brahman is the absolute foundation of existence and unlimited, but they give different explanations about the relationship between Brahman or God, and the soul.
The different answers from the schools of Vedanta
Bheda-abheda — The same and different
One of the oldest schools of Vedanta is bheda-abheda which means different and non-different. There are a variety of interpretations within this school, but the general idea is that God and the soul are of the same nature, but also differ in some way.
The usual examples to explain this are a fire and its sparks or the sun and its rays. The sun isn’t complete without its rays, they are one thing, but there is also a distinction between the sun and the rays.
The most well-known traditions among the bheda-abheda schools are those established by Bhaskara, Nimbarka, Vallabha and Chaitanya. They focus on devotion to God (bhakti yoga) as the method of achieving liberation from the material world (moksha).
Advaita — non-duality
Advaita Vedanta is a monist school attributed to Shankara. It argues the self and God are exactly the same thing. Advaita literally means not two and is a non-dual or monistic interpretation of Vedanta They argue the multiplicity of our reality we inhabit is relative and an incomplete understanding.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s not an existential nihilism, but we’re in illusion when we think there are different things. All of it is Brahman and one unified thing. Brahman is said to be without attributes (nirguna) and so this school is an absolute monism.
Liberation from the material world is achieved through knowledge, jnana yoga. While worship of deities is among the religious practices, it’s understood that deities are a means to an end, not the ultimate goal in themselves.
Dvaita — duality
At the other end of the spectrum is the Dvaita school attributed to Madhva. Dvaita means two or dual. They argue that Brahman, the self and the world are fundamentally separated. There is a distinction between God and matter, God and the soul, between each soul, the soul and matter and lastly between various types of matter. Dvaita is a devotional school (bhakti yoga), ultimately liberation is achieved through worship of God.
Vishishtadvaita — qualified non-duality
Vishishtadvaita is attributed to the sage Ramanuja. This school qualifies the monism of Advaita. Ramanuja rejects that Brahman has no attributes, but instead there is God as Vishnu (all pervading) who has properties like will and power.
The soul is within God but also controlled by God. The world and the soul are like the body of God. God is the controller of his body like we are the controllers of our bodies, but they are still a part of us. This school is called qualified monism. It is the philosophy of most Vaishnava’s, worshipers of Vishnu. It is also a devotional school and we achieve liberation by the divine grace of God.
Vedanta allows for a diversity of opinion and theology, all based on interpretations of the same literature. The philosophical framework also allows for freedom of individual worship practices. Brahman is understood to have many forms, or avatars.
While there is disagreement on the ultimate form of Brahman, no one denies Brahman has many forms. The religious practices are determined by the personal preference or faith of the worshiper and their chosen goal. The appropriate method of worship arises from the desires and choices of the soul, it’s not a method imposed on the soul by God.
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