Faith in a Universe of Change

4,000 words

What follows is a chain of reflections about the context in which faith functions. Specifically they have to do with what we think we know about our changing universe, and how that situates us in the world as we see it. We tend to live oblivious to the changing nature of things. That’s a pity, because it often means that our right hand doesn’t understand what our left is doing. Both our philosophy and our religious beliefs are ours. They are tools we have developed to locate ourselves in our world. It seems to be an unnecessary self-imposed anguish, if the reality we see when we are struggling to stay alive contradicts the reality we see when we pray. You would expect two “words” that we use for the same reality might agree. The problem that lies at the root of these reflections is that for some reason, for us they don’t. We have come to view ourselves and our world in one way through our scientific understanding and its technical applications, and in an entirely different way when we think about the meaning of it all and our place in the totality. This essay is an attempt to bring these two aspects of our life back into phase.

Faith and Belief

I would like to start with a contrast offered by the Catholic/Hindu theologian Raimon Panikkar. He says “faith” is different from “beliefs”. In his usage, which we will assume here, the word “beliefs” signifies doctrine — words, concepts, creeds. “Beliefs” describe Sacred Reality, but they don’t connect us to it. “Faith”, on the other hand, means human action that goes beyond words or concepts, and is the engagement in a Sacred Relationship. The conversion of talk into action is a critically important transition in all human endeavor. Detached observation must become self-actualization. Traditional wisdom tends to support the perception that “talking” effectively must stop so a real connection — relationship — to reality can be made. If this popular imagery is more than just rhetoric, it suggests that ideation alone and its associated words may actually preempt and prevent relationship. In the context of our reflections, that means “beliefs” must become “faith”.

The great mystics have always said that Sacred Relationship is the result of “faith” and occurs in a “Dark Night”. This is a term used by John of the Cross. It does not mean depression or existential terror — though they may accompany it under particular circumstances. It refers rather to an acknowledged intellectual and emotional silence that consciously accepts conceptual suspension as the invariable circumstance of relational engagement. Others have used an even more haunting image: a “Cloud of Unknowing”. Faith, the action of trust and commitment, does not occur in the pre-emptive light of verbalized intellectual clarity. This may simply be an instance of the transition from talk to action mentioned above. But in any case the imagery of “silence” and of “darkness” is affirmed and confirmed by trustworthy witnesses of all traditions about the nature of religious experience. It will be the burden of this essay to elaborate why it might be reasonable to generalize from this universal “mystical doctrine” and say that a sustained relationship would mean this darkness is not a momentary event or temporary state but a permanent condition.

Concept and Metaphor

The perspective being sketched here contends, that if we are going to respect what the witnesses claim is a constitutive darkness, our “beliefs”, should be understood in non-conceptual terms. Historically, as we will try to show, concepts have claimed to know more than they could know. We mistakenly thought that “knowledge” accurately identifies and inerrantly grasps reality from within. But besides failing the truth, this error entails a more serious consequence. For as “beliefs”, concepts pretend to illuminate the darkness. And when they do that, they preclude faith. Non-conceptual discourse is metaphor. Metaphors are words and images that, while they point to and invite engagement in Sacred Relationship, do not claim to know. Beliefs that are metaphor do not disturb the silence in which faith comes to be.

Our doctrines about “God”, like the Trinity, or the divinity of Christ, are often complex. Many are tied to expressions that can be taken either as metaphor or as literal concept. For example, that both we and Jesus are called “the sons of God”, is taken as a metaphor when applied to us all, but in our tradition, it has been treated as a literal concept when applied to Jesus alone, the “Son” of God. As used in Scripture, however, the term “son of God” is not meant as a scientific concept. It neither asserts nor denies literally and scientifically that Jesus was God. But “divinity” had many meanings in the ancient world and the term “son of God” was open to interpretation in any number of directions, including the one taken at the Council of Nicaea. The official Church decided it had to eliminate this ambivalence once and for all, and “defined” the term at Nicaea scientifically and literally as we have inherited it — ton homoousion — “of the same substance as the Father”. I want to emphasize that the most important point in this matter is often lost. And that is that the authors of the gospels who created this terminology were not interested in specifying what Jesus literally was. Even if they believed what Nicaea claims they did, they did nothing more than suggest it. For they were concentrating on something else, something they felt was more important: Jesus’ meaning for us and our world. They were describing his significance and impact on human life. His life and teaching was God’s message for us. From that point of view he was as God for us. He was divine.

But since Nicaea chose to respond, well beyond the terms and focus of Scripture, to the demand for knowing literal scientific fact and expressing it in a scientific way, their way of understanding “Son of God” has dominated our beliefs. In these reflections we are not criticizing the motivation behind their decision, nor are we debating the truth or falsity of what they said. What we are asking here is much more fundamental. Can we know what Nicaea claims to have known? Increasingly in our times, Christians are coming to the conclusion that there is no way to determine literally and scientifically what Jesus was. In other words, many of us are saying we can’t know what Nivea claims we know. Therefore, we also feel we don’t need to know, and that seems to agree with scripture. But Nicaea happened. Without getting distracted by the details of why it actually did happen, it could happen because the Bishops of the Roman world were persuaded by the science of their times, that interior “essences” (ousía, in Greek, also translated “substances”) of things both seen and unseen, not only existed, but could be grasped objectively and inerrantly by the human mind. They believed, not by their faith but by their science, that they could know and say without the shadow of a doubt, literally and scientifically how exactly Jesus was “divine”. It was the way they understood knowledge.

But those assumptions are no longer true for us. And so Nicaea could not happen today. We may also say with the Fathers, Jesus is “divine”, but we are not so sure we can know what that means beyond what it means for us. For, on the basis of the elemental indeterminateness of observable phenomena revealed by modern scientific discoveries, philosophers and scientists today subscribe to the opinion that our knowledge is only functional and descriptive — “phenomenological”. In our world, concepts are only symbols of the realities we encounter and relate to, possibly even control or are controlled by, but they do not “comprehend” them. Knowledge does not grasp the “essences” or the “substances” of things. So to say of Jesus, “consubstantial with the Father”, is both meaningless and irrelevant for us. It’s the way we understand knowledge. Let’s examine this, briefly.

“Knowing”, Ancient and Modern

The words “idea” and “concept” come to us heavily burdened with meaning from the past where they were harnessed to a world-view of fixed essences that believed in the transparent inerrancy of the human mind. In that world, “idea” and “concept” were thought to be the result of an alleged compenetration of knower and known that transcended the boundaries of material reality. The act of knowing was considered a “spiritual” event that permitted a temporary co-inherence of interiorities. The knower became the thing known; and like an immaculate mirror, the knower’s mind captured the “essence” of the thing known in a “concept”. And so reality was infallibly “comprehended”. The concept was not a symbol of something else; the knower’s concept and the “essence” of the object known were the same in every respect except for the fact that they resided in separate individuals. From such invincible “objectivity” it was equally valid to draw conclusions either from the fact or from the idea, since the two were virtually the same. In such a world it did not defy logic to claim that the fact of God’s existence could be deduced from its idea.

The word “metaphor” was coined in ancient times specifically to contrast with “idea”. Metaphor referred to terms that were not able to comprehend the reality in question, but were considered “carried beyond” what they were supposed to mean, to what they were being used momentarily and, from a literal point of view, inappropriately to evoke. “Kate is a little devil”. In a literal sense, that statement is patently false. “Devil” directly refers to a reality other than Kate, and is applied to Kate only by being “carried beyond” its appropriate usage. But for us, in the world of human discourse, we would say it communicates, not only effectively, but efficiently as well. It is well worth a thousand literal words. “Little devil” conveys a human truth that cannot be communicated any other way. But observe, the “truth” referred to here is not of Kate’s “essence” but rather of the human phenomenon — her significance for us. Metaphor evokes an image for the listener who then takes over the process of recognition. The “proof” of the accuracy of the metaphor is provided exclusively by the relational experience of the hearer. If we never experienced Kate’s mischief, we can’t agree with the metaphor, though we may be inclined to look twice at the little angel the next time we see her. And because the metaphor is not “univocal”, it is capable of evoking meaning on many levels and in many dimensions simultaneously. Metaphor is a symbol; and symbols, unlike concepts, are not identified with, and so are not bound by, what they signify. This is the source of poetry’s variety and infinite freshness.

But, the theory of fixed essences has been abandoned, and therefore the contrast between concept and metaphor has disappeared. It is a remnant of an ancient world-view that we have left behind. There really are not two mental processes. We realize now that our thinking is and always has been irremediably metaphorical. Our belief that human ideas ever exhaustively comprehended the realities they referred to is gone. For us, there is no “epistemological” difference between concept and metaphor. From a linguistic point of view as figures of speech, they may vary in function, detail or imaginativeness, but at root metaphor and concept are both symbols. We believe symbolization is the essence of human ideation itself, not a second, inferior mental activity. It is precisely the symbol-making process by which a mental-verbal sound-picture is constructed to stand for a reality that it itself is not. Metaphor knows itself to be a symbol of something else, while the ancient “concept” fused and confused itself with the reality it claimed to comprehend. Metaphor alone, we could say, using Heidegger’s terms, “lets things be”; while the old notion of “concept” tried to impose the human mind’s impossible demand — permanence and possession — on evanescent perishing reality.

A Universe in Flux

In a world of fixed ideas, realities are unchanging and eternal; and saying that knowledge is only temporarily functional — like metaphor — is an alien perspective that cannot abide. It’s like oil and water. But that world has changed, and metaphorical discourse is the perfect tool for a universe in flux such as ours. Symbols, unlike “concepts”, remain non-defining. They set no limits on the reality which they evoke. Realities are permitted to continue their evolution into whatever they are becoming. So “meaning” for us is a provisional phenomenon wedded to the moment in time in which reality presents itself. We are now “human” and have been for some time. But were we always? What “fixed definition” would we have given Leakey’s “Lucy” the australopithecine? Or to earlier hominids whose proximate ancestral relationship to us is unmistakable, though we would hardly be inclined to call them “human”? And what about the future? If we have evolved through such vast changes in the past, why should we think that what we are today is fixed and determined? Paleo-history suggests that we will become something equally unrecognizable in the future — that is, if we survive. What is it, then, to be “human”? Modern thinking claims “human” is term for a temporary phenomenon, imperceptibly shifting even as we speak, like the seismic movement of earth’s tectonic plates under our feet. “Human” is a pointer, a symbol, a description of a current package of characteristics which serves us well enough as a functional tool for the present and foreseeable future. But there is nothing fixed or eternal about it. It is a functional model, like the Newtonian Universe which we know has been superseded by the imageless mathematics of quantum physics and relativity. We can work with it; but we know it’s only metaphor. It helps us to predict and control our reality, but it doesn’t “comprehend” it.

To say that “human” reaches to the very “essence” of what we are, is to assume as the ancients did, that we are one, unique, unchanging reality, conceived and eternally present as a creative “idea”, like a blueprint, in the mind of God. They believed that God created by concretely multiplying individual instances of that spiritual “idea” whose eternal pattern, “essence”, is infallibly reproduced in each individual. And the totality of all “essences” was a vast fixed and hierarchical structure filling the universe, a reflection of the perfection of the Deity Itself “in which we live and move and have our being”, as monolithic and impervious to time as the pyramids of the immortal Pharaohs.

To “comprehend” then, for the ancients, was to see not the individuals who passed in front of our eyes, but rather the eternal, unchanging, immaterial “ideas”, the “essences”, the “forms” which were the real reality incarnated in perishing flesh. In knowing “essences”, they were reaching permanence; ultimately they were reaching the very mind of God. In that world, the real reality was the idea, just as the only real being was God, the Idea of all ideas. The created entity was only partially real — a passing and contingent “participation” in God’s necessary reality, fatally corrupted by its unfortunate association with matter. The material individual was only the shadow of reality. In that world “time”, the measure of change, was the prison ship of those en route to oblivion. Time was considered, like change itself, the antipode to the eternity and permanence of God — and therefore hostile to our interests. Lest we lose our bearings in these theoretical musings, we should remember our ancestors’ quest was eminently practical: what they were after was nothing less than immortality itself, for what changed in time, perished.

We all abhor death. But the ancients translated that revulsion into the belief that death was unnatural, the punishment for a catastrophic mistake, an insult to God. Matter-in-Time was the contaminated carrier, the rotting flesh that bore maggot-death within it. Our “spirits” were aliens in an alien world — captives in a dungeon of dying matter. It was the curse of a fallen world.

But we look at things quite differently now. We have come to realize that time is creative, not destructive. We have discovered that species are created in time as the probative undertakings of earlier species seeking wider, deeper, more intense Life. The sequences are continuous and the differences become perceptible only in the long run. The lines of separation between sequential species blur. And then branching occurs making classification even more difficult; is it sequence or is it mutation? This is the process of a turbulent, expanding creation that we in our era have been privileged to have unveiled before our astonished eyes. It’s creation in time, not eternity. It’s creation by groping thirsty desire, not dispassionate abstract thought. It’s creation planned and carried out, not by an hypothesized “unmoved Mover”, but by the slime and creatures of the earth. Awesome! We never suspected.

Creation-in-Time shatters the world of fixed concepts and eternal realities. In our world what we experience as creation is a symphony conducted by time. Existence presents itself like a continuum of passing musical notes. The time-bound individual sings in the moments of time, and its song changes imperceptibly, instantly and continually by the time-flow in which it is borne onward. Heraclitus said, “panta rei”, everything changes. Everything is new in a new “moment”. But let’s be careful. Even fixed “moments” are themselves abstractions imposed upon what presents itself as an unpartitioned flow without divisions or discontinuities. Like time itself, moments are imaginary human constructs. There are no “moments”. There are no “plateaus”. There is only the roil and swell of changing reality. “Moments” are the last residue of the demand for permanence created in us by our tradition. Reality is time-drenched, impermanent, continuous and perishing. And the realities that exist in and bear the character of this continuous modulation, are by that fact indefinable. Reality in time is intrinsically indeterminate. It can be described but it can’t be grasped, any more than the water in a moving brook; it cannot be held, it can only be be-held, heard, related to, used, perhaps even controlled. That’s how metaphor functions. It invites us to relate to reality-in-motion. But reality-on-the-move includes us, and in itself is frightening to the fixed expectations of the traditional western mind.

Faith

The religious embrace of this flowing phenomenon is faith. Faith is a relating to reality-in-process. For faith, the world is sacred NOT because it discovers a different reality there, but because it looks at the same reality differently. We are led to look at and relate to reality in a new way by our “beliefs”, which are metaphorical constructions designed to stimulate and guide Sacred Relationship.

Sacred Relationship is wordless — silent and uncomprehending. We embrace what we do not grasp, what we cannot contain, what is at all times becoming something-it’s-not-yet-been. And that includes ourselves. Our traditional beliefs arose in the context of an ancient world of fixed entities and essential knowledge. They expressed their sense of Sacred Reality in the imagery of their times and condition. But those beliefs can be dangerous distortions for us. Their temples are set on ground that is no longer solid stone. And the edifices built on such credal sand will not protect us from the winds that howl in the night. The great “Pyramids of Immortality” are in reality nothing but cavernous tombs of the dead. Credal beliefs cannot reverse the impermanence of a reality ever-in-change, which includes us. If impermanence is what terrifies us, and we cling to an ancient “science” that denies it and ignores it, the “beliefs” based on that science will fail us. Faith does not eliminate impermanence, nor does it need to. Reality, including us, remains the same universe in flux, contrary to what our “beliefs” may seem to project. The flow remains; but faith accepts it as sacred. It embraces it. And so it loses its terror.

What can sacred impermanence mean to us who have been raised in the “belief’ that redemption is precisely, for us and our world, the conquest of impermanence, change and death? Salvation has been for our people immortality, not death, eternal happiness, not continuous alteration, and permanent self possession in the eternal permanence of God, not an unfinished indeterminate recycling, an endless evolution. We appear to have no resources here to fall back on. Our beliefs seem bound in steel to the visions of the past. But on second glance, once we stop looking at what our beliefs are and try to understand what they mean, we realize that as metaphor they speak even of our impermanence, our vanishing reality, as proceeding from a Love-Source that gives us our spinning world and our ever-changing selves as a gift. And so we may see why Restless Hungry Creative Love exudes from every pore of the universe, including our throbbing but perishing flesh.

Our changing reality is a gift of Passionate Love! That means — for those who take Love seriously — it can be trusted. It can be trusted blindly. Impermanence is still here with us as always; but where is its sting? Is it semantic sleight-of-hand to say that credal “permanence” is simply a metaphor, an allegory for the trusting embrace of im-permanence, the casting-out of fear? Hasn’t faith-in-Passionate Love, in a human sense, destroyed terrifying change? Isn’t “permanence” a perfectly human way of saying that? We can say all this because we know that literally (non-humanly) speaking, reality is impermanent. But we are not deceived into thinking that the metaphors of science, our dry “literal”, non-human ways of speaking about reality, are superior or more “true” than our human ways of speaking — the metaphors of belief that lead to faith. We can put things in their place. We may not literally know what’s in store for us, but we can trust it. We are integral to this process. Our very perishing is part of reality on the move, in search of Life. We can create our own new metaphors for the Sacred Relationship, and we can cherish the traditional symbols that our forebears devised to speak to the human heart of the matter, which is all that matters. We can forgive our ancestors for not speaking to us in the new language that is our responsibility to create. And we can forgive “God” for not loving us in ways that our tradition thought we had to be loved and taught us to expect.

But there is still one last condition imposed on this resolution: to get beyond talk. There is nothing in our new way of looking at things to prevent us from continuing to use beliefs as illusions of clarity or to avoid commitment. These old habits die hard. And even where there’s no presumption of “knowledge”, talk tends to displace the silence required for faith. Faith carries us beyond captivity to our words and beliefs, beyond the illusions of clarity, and beyond the postponements of talk. The silence, the poverty of metaphor invites us to take action, engage, personally appropriate the meaning of our beliefs and surrender to the Loving Source from which we come, “in which we live and move and have our being”. That means we trust that Source and its Process, blindly, wordlessly, — in “darkness”. And so we may lose our fear of the Wild Generous Servant Love that bursts from our own selves, welling up from the depths of what we are. It may even impel us to risk everything, as Jesus did. We tremble at such an invitation, and such companionship. We are speaking of faith as Sacred Relationship, not doctrine, not words. Trust-in-Love is not vision . . . nor is it rhetoric.

Tony Equale,

Willis, VA

February 2002

Transcendent Materialism: notes on terminology, methodology, physics and metaphysics

These are unconnected notes. They are the written-out versions of spontaneous reflective probings. Some were anticipated in my 2010 book The Mystery of Matter. They are not meant to be definitive, thorough or systematically consistent with one another. I wanted to float some new ideas past discerning and critical readers who might possibly be stimulated by the exploratory nature of these ruminations to contribute some thoughts of their own. The ultimate intent is to generate a plausible world­view that will integrate science and the human needs that until relatively recently had been met by a religion that is increasingly considered rationally discredited. 

6,400 words

matter

Transcendent Materialism, it should be emphasized at the outset, is materialism. The word “transcendent” qualifies matter; it does not imply bypassing, going beyond or adding anything internally or externally to matter. That matter is “transcendent” means simply that matter has, as an intrinsic property, the potential to exist in ever new forms through internal reconfigurations accomplished autonomously and serially in time. In effect, the term announces the central role of evolution in establishing the character of reality, and it asserts that whatever form matter assumes, it will still be all and only matter.

That means reality is homogeneous. Transcendent Materialism is a monism. It proposes that there is no other “substance” anywhere. Reality ― all of reality ― is comprised of only one “kind of thing,” matter. Matter and existence are one and the same thing. Anything that exists ― anything and everything, cause or effect ― is made of matter.

That needs to be said clearly because word “matter” comes to us with heavy historical baggage: for almost two thousand years it was universally used in the West in a dualist metaphysical worldview as the counterpart to a “second substance” called “spirit.” Because of that background, many people assume that matter refers only to its former truncated role in that binary system ― as the dead, passive, inert, unconscious, composed and mutable partner to spirit. Spirit, the “second” substance, was believed to be alive, unchanging, simple, uncomposed and either actively rational as a mind or, as an idea/essence, the product of a mind, therefore inherently teleological. Spirit implied rationality and gave purpose to a directionless matter.

Transcendent Materialism holds there is no such “second substance;” there is no spirit. Whatever qualities, dimensions, abilities, properties, energies, and destiny there are in the universe that were once explained as the products of “spirit” are, in fact, functions of matter. Mind, once assumed to be itself spirit and the generator of ideas with purpose, is a product and derivative of matter. Hence, the erstwhile a priori claim that purpose characterizes all of reality even the forms in which matter existed before the evolutionary emergence of mind, can no longer be sustained. The existence of purpose in any phenomenon, or the totality of phenomena, must be proven and its provenance explained. Until proven otherwise, it is assumed that matter has no purpose beyond being-here as itself.

Because of that and in order to avoid falling back into dualist assumptions, it would be better to use a term other than “matter” altogether. I have chosen to refer to the single substance that comprises reality as “matter’s energy” or “material energy.” Those terms are consistent with the most recent discoveries of physics. They not only reflect the current state of scientific thinking, but the inclusion of the term “energy” immediately precludes assuming the passivity, inertness and unconsciousness associated with the term “matter.”

Saying it that way, however, is not meant to add any property to the most primitive forms of matter that, in fact, are not observable. It is only meant to prevent the exclusion of a potential whose presence is suggested by the later emergence of transcendent features. Besides, the observability available at any given point in time is not an absolute determinant of presence, as the instruments that enhance the reach of perception continue to expand. Future observers may actually “see” what is now only conjectured. The only point is to deny the traditional assumptions that prejudice matter’s energy.

But the word “matter” is shorter and simpler. Therefore I often use “matter” without qualification; but unless it is clearly indicated that it is the old dualist version that is meant, it should be understood as “material energy.”

However, matter is, in fact, all and only energy. It is misleading to say “matter and energy are convertible” as if they were two distinct things. That phrase rather refers to two phenomenal forms in which energy appears to our sensory apparatus. Everything in the universe is some form of energy. The denseness and impassibility we are accustomed to associate with the word “matter” is a misleading inheritance from pre-scientific times that skews the imagery and devalues the use of the word. There is a temptation stemming from our idealist-dualist past to conflate energy with “spirit” and give “matter” the meaning it had in that pre-scientific system. This is entirely wrong. Energy is nothing but material and is appropriately classified as matter.   “Matter’s energy” and “material energy” add modifiers that are necessary to prevent matter and energy from sliding back into our age-old substance dualism.

 

existence

Since matter is all there is, it equates to existence. Existence is self-explanatory. That means, among other things, that there is no outside explanation for existence. We all know what existence means because, being matter, we exist. We know it “from the inside” as it were. Unfortunately the only way we can articulate our understanding conceptually is to contrast being with non-being, as if each were a “thing” or a state. But they have conceptual reality only.

There is no such thing as “non-being.” Explanations that have recourse to “non-being,” “nothing,” “nothingness” etc., as part of their apparent cogency are metaphorical and illustrative only. They effectively reveal existence to be a self-explanatory self-grounded dynamism not needing any further explanation. Traditional propositions used in metaphysics as points of departure like “Why is there something rather than nothing,” are meaningless except as illustrations. For the question assumes that we have an authentic knowledge of some aboriginal primordial “state” or condition called “nothing,” against which existence reveals its supersedence derivatively. That is utterly absurd. Logically speaking “nothing” cannot be known because there is nothing to know. Nothing does not exist. Non-being is a fabricated concept derived from being, not the other way around. The use of the idea of non-being derives from and emphasizes the supreme importance of being-here for us, and helps us to realize what existence is. We know existence directly and without need of any further explanation or justification. We cannot define existence in terms other than itself, and we cannot justify our claim to know it. This is ground zero.

But we have to be careful. The words existence, being and even being here are abstractions ― generalizations of our experience of real existing things. The words are not pictures of any “thing.” This denies the ancient and mediaeval conviction that being is an entity called “God” based on the Platonic belief that “ideas” or concepts were stand-alone substantial realities. The various forms of material energy that are-here (all the things and forces it comprises in the real world) actually exist. But existence is not something apart from the concrescences (knots) of material energy ― things ― that are present-in-the-world. Existence is a conceptual generalization that gathers and represents all the concrete experiences we have of actually existing things. The generalization is only as accurate as the concrete experiences it gathers. Non-being, or nothing, however, is even further removed from reality because it is not a generalization of anything. There is no “nothing” anywhere. It is a pure conceptual fantasy generated out of our immediate perception of the positive energy of matter: matter is an energy to be-here materially which we know and understand connaturally.

If something exists, it is material, and matter, for its part, bears the energy of existence as an intrinsic property and does not require the presence of anything other than itself in order to exist. Matter, in other words, is not a “principle of being” as it is in Aristotle’s system, requiring the presence of “form” (essence/idea/spirit) as a second principle in order to achieve reality. Existence is simply material energy; and matter is existential energy.  It’s clear with these premises that the reason, source and explanation of existence must be found within existence itself, and that source and explanation must itself be material energy. Matter, therefore, in some way that still remains to be fully explored and articulated, must be said to be the source of its own existence. Whatever “God” there is ― defining “God” as the source, ground and reason for the universe ― is constituted of material energy.

Prescinding from the form that matter may have assumed at any point in its trajectory through time, it has to be said that because the reason for matter is to be found within itself, matter always existed and will always exist. Since the only way that existence is, is material, and since all matter exists in time, we will therefore speak of matter/existence as being endless … but not eternal. Endless is the form that material existence takes in time; eternal, meaning something that simply exists without reference to time, is meaningless. It is an empty conceptual abstraction with no empirical ground; it is an idea that draws its static unchanging character from the nature of the human process of conceptualization, not from reality.  I use the word being-here instead of being for the same reason. Being-here connotes our active, time-governed presence-in-the-material-world, whereas being as it has come to us from the obsolete dualist worldview, imagines that our ideas of reality ― the products of human mental processes ― are themselves eternal unchangeable realities that stand on their own and add essential notes of information about the universe that would not be available otherwise. I contend this is fantasy; it is the reification of our imaginings. Being, like being-here, if it continues to be used, can only be a generalization ― a word / concept that attempts to depict the common element in all the experiences we have of things that actually are-here insofar as they are matter’s energy being-here, creating space and time. The same is true mutatis mutandi of all concepts. They are generalizations of the content of individual experiences.

 

time

That matter is endless is a corollary of its intrinsic temporality. No matter exists outside of time and there is no time where there is no matter, i.e., where nothing exists. Where there is existence there is time because existence is only matter’s energy. Physicists lately have been trying to explain time as a function of entropy. There is nothing wrong with that, except it is not the ultimate explanation. They are thinking physically and not metaphysically. Physics begins with the given universe already being-here and explains its phenomena in terms of cause and effect within what is already given ― physical phenomena are internally self-consistent. Physics does not question existence itself. Entropy is a correlate of time, and so time can be explained as a function of entropy. But because they are exact correlates, entropy can also be explained as a function of time. Physicists choose the former because time for them is a mental concept, while entropy is a physical phenomenon and that gives it a causal priority over time. Cosmo-ontologists (materialist metaphysicians), in contrast, because of their focus on existential energy (being-here) as the ground and explanation of all things, are able to discern the material existential character of time. Time is precisely the intrinsic condition of matter’s being-here because matter’s energy is a material presence-that-moves-beyond-itself-and-perdures-materially and time is the way we material humans experience that perdurance. It is the primordial manifestation of matter’s transcendence and the ground of evolution. Matter moves beyond its current configuration but it always remains matter. Time is the very way that matter is-here. To-be-here, in other words, is to be in a material process of existential conquest ― it is to exist, develop and perdure by expanding materially: i.e., proceeding forward from being-here in this particular configuration moving into where it is not and re-configuring itself in the process. Evolutionary process is not something that happens to matter’s energy as if from the outside or ex post factum. The very energy of matter’s presence is a forward motion into existentially unconquered territory ― being displacing non-being now ― moment after moment after moment.

Let me offer a metaphorical picture to explain what I mean. Think of matter, which is existence, as if it were a spotlight. Where there is matter there is existence or light, where there is no matter there is nothingness or darkness. Matter’s existential energy lights up darkness only in this “spot” we call now; it makes something to be-here where there was no “here.” To be here is what it is because it energetically overcomes and displaces not-being-here. Its energy is expansive: it moves into the darkness where it was not.

(I emphasize the metaphorical nature of this fantasy. It is not a “picture” of reality; it is offered only to illustrate the dynamism involved. There is no such thing as “non-being” or “nothingness;” and being-here is not a light. They are conceptual/verbal concoctions ― fantasy. What is real is the physical nature of existence: being-here is a material phenomenon, a time-creating self-transcending energy that is a property of matter, present, operative and observable only in the actual forms, individual and collective, that matter has assumed.)

Perhaps a better illustration is the very expansion of the universe itself, which is quite real. We have a hard time imagining the reality occurring here, because we tend to imagine “space” as pre-existing the things that fill it so we think of the universe of material energy expanding into empty space. That is not what’s happening at all. The reality is that “space” is a function of matter’s conquest of what-is-not-there; space is created (out of “nothing”) by the expansion. What do things look like at the very edge of the expansion of the universe where the things that are-here meet what-is-not-here? Do you have a hard time imagining that? So do I. We can’t imagine it because we cannot think non-being. We know there has to be such a “place,” though there is no “place” until the event ― being-here as an active conquest ― occurs now. In that ethereal “location” ― now ― where being-here creates “space,” you can intuit that it is also creating time. Well, that is precisely what’s happening everywhere, moment after moment. Both space and time are the continuous products of transcendent material energy insisting on being-here moment after moment and creating space and time as material by-products.

The “arrow of time” goes in only one direction. That is not difficult to understand for cosmo-ontology where the point of view is being-here and being-here can only continue to be-here by moving into some “place” where it was not (creating space-time as it does so). It must move from the ground it has conquered and holds as presence, onto new ground where nothing has been present before. That can only be one direction ― from this now to a now that has never been, from a “place” where it exists into what-is-no-place. Once the question is framed in terms of existence, regardless of the inability to imagine it, the thought of being-here moving to some place where it has already been is absurd. It’s very dynamism is creative: it is to move to where it was not, to overcome “non-being,” to expand, to create “space.”

It is a conundrum for physics because physics takes existence, presence, as given. All its explorations occur after that definitive conquest. That’s why it misses the forward energy of time. There is nothing in physical reality that demands that time’s arrow must only go forward. Hence physicists try to explain time’s direction and look for a physical cause. Cosmo-ontologists (materialist meta­­physicians), on the other hand, who recognize matter’s existential energy as the fundamental material dynamism giving rise to our experience of time, are not surprised to observe that matter’s energy produces a one-directional trail pushing being into non-being, and in no other way.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine material energy, being-here, and the metaphysics that describe it as a train in motion. The train is time moving in one direction because matter is driven to be-here moment after moment. Then, imagine the physical forms that matter’s energy has assumed and the physics that studies them as passengers or cargo on that train. The train is going in only one direction, but the passengers are free to move forward and backward. Physics, since it does not study the motion of the train itself (matter insofar as it creates space-time), sees the train as a static environment. Physicists can only observe and measure the motion of the entities in it (which are observed moving forward relative to the ground). They can clearly imagine the possibility of items moving toward the rear of the train, and the forward motion remains a mystery or is attributed to time’s correlate, entropy, because they do not look at being-here as a physical dynamism, they take it for granted. Entropy is conjectured as a cause when actually it is an effect of time’s direction.  Entropy measures and describes sequence in terms of the irreversible dissipation of energy between existing material things, whereas time is the human experience of the sequential motion created by matter’s energy ― existence ― expanding its presence.

An added confirmation of this way of looking at time is that is supports and helps explain the theory of the relativity of spacetime as proposed by Einstein.  Material energy, in the form that it has assumed in any particular place in the universe, is concrete and specific and our experience of its existential process (“moving” from being into non-being) is empirically generated.  We call it time.  Time is a human experience produced by a physical event.  Time is not an innate idea, an eternal background reality, or an a priori form of sensibility.  Both space and time are concretely engendered by this specific matter which we experience differently from other matter.  There is no anticipated simultaneity or pre-existing reality for either space or time, time is relative.

 

energy and entropy

All energy is a function of disequilibrium. The achievement of total equilibrium equates to the complete absence of energy. Matter’s existential energy is generated by the gradient difference between being-here-now and the nothingness it must confront and vanquish if its particular concrescence ― knot ― of material energy (this “thing”) is to continue to be-here in the following moments. Existential disequilibrium is created when the positive expansiveness of matter’s energy meets what-is-not-here; equilibrium is restored when matter’s existential energy pours itself into it, as it were, as into an empty receptacle, filling it full of existence, replacing non-being with being. (Please be aware of the metaphorical nature of that description. There is no “pouring” or “filling.”) Equilibrium is achieved in the triumphantly existent now and the energy of matter momentarily disappears in a point of existential repose (now) only to be immediately regenerated in the next moment by the disequilibrium created by the looming precipice of nothingness into which matter now peers.

Entropy is a concept proper to thermodynamics that attempts to observe, describe and measure the dissipation of energy which accompanies the reduction of disequilibrium. The energy of existence itself has never been the focus of entropic analysis and interpretation because being-here in the Platonic paradigm of “spirit/idea” was thought of as a metaphysical reality but not a physical function. Understanding being-here as a physical function proper to matter transforms metaphysics from an analysis and interpretation of ideas into cosmo-ontology, the “prequel,” the missing first chapter in the narrative of physics. It provides a wider context for the interpretation of physical concepts like entropy allowing them to be seen in a new light that reveals relationships that had perhaps been missed or unavoidably inverted. Our analysis of time was one example of that inversion affecting entropy that was due precisely to the failure to understand existence itself as a material (physical) energy.

Cosmo-ontology (the metaphysics of existence-as-matter) predicts that the ever increasing entropy created by the dissipation of energy in the universe can never reach 100% because even in a state of “heat death” predicted by the theoretical physicists ― where every possible form of disequilibrium has been eliminated ― there will still be the existential energy of endless matter superseding “non-being” and creating space-time. The measurable energy of the universe may “flat line” but the timeline of inactive matter will continue endlessly, confirming the prediction of the first law of thermodynamics that matter’s energy is neither created nor destroyed.

 

 metaphysics

Metaphysics (I offer “cosmo-ontology” as a new label for this discipline) begins with being-here as that particular aspect of all phenomena that is especially significant to human beings. And it is significant not only because we humans ― like all living organisms ― are selfishly driven to stay alive and therefore obsessive about being-here, but because we are uniquely convinced of the utter gratuity of it all. None of it has to be here. How do we know that? Frankly we have no idea how we know that. All we know is that we do, and we express our intuitive conviction by asking a question that for all its irrationality we all find compelling: “why is there something rather than nothing”? It never spontaneously occurs to us that being-here has to be-here … that there is no such thing as nothing and there never was … and that nothing will never ever exist, while matter’s energy must exist endlessly.

There is a profound circularity operating here. Since matter’s energy must be-here, and since the human organism, including its sensory and neurological systems responsible for its conscious intelligence, is entirely made of matter’s energy, it should come as no surprise that every aspect of the human organism is determined ― absolutely driven ― by the forward energy of being-here. We ARE, like all matter, the energy of being-here pushing its spotlight into the darkness of non-being. The fact that we know there is no such thing as “non-being” doesn’t stop us from speaking in those terms because they somehow express exactly our groundless connatural intuition into the positive, abundant and expansive character of being-here. When all the dross and symbolic forms of expression are burned off, we are left with this: human conscious intelligence intuits the positive character of being-here and cannot explain why it is absolutely convinced of it. It will always remain a marvel to us that there is something rather than nothing. I believe that this insuperable circularity is simply the predictable outcome of our own materiality. We ourselves are constructed of matter’s existential energy. Our being-here is not something added to our persons, something we have and can lose (which is the way we normally think). Being here materially is what we ARE. We have always been here and will always be here although not in the current human form or with the “self” we now enjoy. We are constructed of matter ― the very energy to be-here which has to be-here. It is not possible for any part of our organism not to reverberate with being-here as a connatural phenomenon wherever we encounter it, in ourselves or in any other form that material energy has taken … including the totality.

Metaphysics (cosmo-ontology), seen in this light, is the exploration of the implications of our material identity, and the possibilities and consequences of its denial. Since we humans are matter’s existential energy with a unique capability for self-embrace ― a conscious self-appropriation that goes far beyond what we see in other forms of living organisms on earth ― understanding accurately what being-here means for us is of paramount importance. It is not an optional pursuit, or entertaining exercise where the results are unimportant in comparison to the delight of the inquiry. How we understand what we are doing here, based on first understanding what being-here really is, will determine our destiny as a species, and perhaps even the destiny of all the other living species who emerged from the earth with us. Metaphysics, in this scheme of things, is not a dispassionate inquiry. It is a highly charged self-interested pursuit of the truth about being-here. Acknowledging our inescapably subjective investment in this science suggests that something similar is probably functioning beneath the surface of claimed objectivity in every science and pursuit of humankind. We are made of matter’s existential energy and being here is not only what we do, it is what we are.

There are some who will point to this subjective investment as a liability. They say it skews the inquiry fatally by placing an irresistible existential pressure on the students of the question to find answers that satisfy human aspirations and quell human fears.

Humans are able to question the meaning of being-here precisely because, alone among all other forms of living matter that have emerged from the earth, humans know they will die. Being-here, besides being the source of constant preoccupation, also becomes an intellectual obsession. The joyful pursuit of securing the means necessary for being-here is fatally enervated by the know­ledge that ultimately it is all for naught. The instinct to embrace what we are with gratitude, joy and generous creativity is not only potentially crippled by the awareness of death, but it can come to be seen as an unnecessarily cruel deception casting a pall of despair and bitterness over life. We tend to attribute social pathology and our interminable slaughter of one another to this flaw in the human species … and indeed, some in their hopelessness, have declared human life a pointless burden and respond with a selfishness that increases everyone’s suffering confirming the attribution.

But there is no necessary connection between the subjective instinct to be-here and distortion of the truth. It is just as possible that the desire to embrace life with joy will drive an inquiry past the dangerous shallows created by death and into deeper regions where navigation is open and endless. I believe that the intense motivation that may drive the metaphysician can be a source of dedication to honest and careful thinking, thorough inquiry and the disciplined exploration of implications.

Because cosmo-ontology is a materialist metaphysics it will work closely with physics which also deals exclusively with matter. But the focus on existence is what distinguishes the two and necessitates metaphysics. The claim of some logical positivists that science alone, especially physics, is sufficient for establishing origins, and that metaphysics is an exercise in fantasy is wrong, because physics does not question existence. Taking existence for granted is myopic to an extreme degree for the enquiring human being who is necessarily and uncontrollably interested in being-here. Both tools, science and philosophy, are needed to complete this pursuit. And indeed in the system offered here, the final identification of matter with the very energy of existence itself, is determinative in establishing a clear direction for human endeavor and aspiration that differs markedly from earlier directions that have been deemed failures and abandoned. A global humankind, cast adrift from its various traditional moorings by a science that was unavoidably less than holistic, is well served by a discipline that plumbs the significance of being-here as science has observed and measured it. Science provides the data, philosophy, specifically metaphysics, questions the data looking for an existential interpretation significant for humankind. And it does so because the question of existence, far from being irrelevant, corresponds to the most insistent instincts in the human species ― that derive from what we are: matter’s living, existential energy.

  

conatus

Conatus denotes the embedded instinct for self-preservation that is the observed characteristic of every known living animal organism on the face of the earth, and is projected onto plants and fungi as well. Because it is characteristic of every form of living matter regardless of diversity, difference in complexity and location on the timeline of evolutionary emergence, it is reasonably retropolated to also characterize non-living matter and, in my scheme of things, would explain the undeniable evidence of transcendent emergence before the dawn of observable life. It is another, and almost predictable expression of matter’s energy to be-here. It would hardly seem reasonable to claim what I do about the “nature” of material energy as an existential conquest and expansion if something akin to the conatus did not exist in proportionate measure in all of matter’s energy commensurate with the degree of evolutionary complexity it enjoyed. The fact that it is such a prominent, undeniable and universal feature of the biological organisms that have emerged from the earth, confirms the existential characterization of matter that I have been offering in these ruminations.

As a side note, the universality of the conatus has not stimulated an enquiry into its significance because science, even the biological sciences where the uniformity of the conatus in all the millions of species studied is the elephant in the room, do not relate to existence. So the relevance of the conatus was missed altogether. I believe this is a clear confirmation of the distinction between metaphysics and the sciences, especially physics. Existence is bracketed by the limited focus of scientific knowledge and the understanding of what it means to be here for which we all hunger is simply ignored. It is another item on the list that demands a holistic integration of the disciplines that study our world.

Once the biological conatus is plausibly considered as existing in proportionate degrees in all the forms of matter even those prior to the emergence of life, it is reasonable to suggest that the progressive integration and complexification of material energy clearly on display in the elegant table of the elements and the accumulating development of complex molecules are evidence of a proto-evolu­tion that is a precursor of the behavior of biological life. Thus I feel it is appropriate to speak of matter as a living energy at all levels of its development, with the caveat, of course that this characterization be understood analogically, i.e., proportionate to the level of autonomy achieved by evolution and accurately observed and measured by science. Use of the term living is not meant to offer any additional information to what science provides about the behavior of the various forms of inanimate matter. The sole purpose for employing this counter-intuitive description is to establish a presumption for the presence of a potentiality present in minimally perceptible form ― perhaps only at the quantum level ― and could easily be missed by the scientist who was prejudicially convinced of its impossibility. Just knowing that matter is a living dynamism opens the observer to the possibility of actually seeing evidence of it.

 

thought

We humans interface with the rest of the material universe through self-conscious thought. Thinking refers to the practice of making mental pictures of our presence-in-the-world in order to facilitate our survival as biological organisms. It is a function of the conatus ― a direct derivative of our instinct for self-preservation. Accuracy of thought is important if we are to survive, and so we attempt to include as much detail and fidelity to time, process and interaction among entities as possible. Thought or thinking is the process of making pictures, and the pro­ducts ― thoughts ― fall into various categories depending on content, origination and their applicability to the survival interests of the organism. The two principal categories in my system are knowledge and understanding.

Knowledge in my lexicon refers to a thought product that is a picture derived from an experience that at the conscious level does not relate directly and proximately to the needs of the conatus. Knowledge is characterized by an affectivity that has been called “objective” or disinterested, even though in most cases it is not. The organism may be subconsciously aware that the objects of thought in these cases have an impact on the “self” but it operates in background mode and the conscious sense is that the organism is simply “looking at what’s there.” These “cerebral” or “rational” mental pictures comprise the bulk of the thought process, and they are quite intentionally cultivated by the sciences that condition the validity their conclusions on the objectivity of knowledge.

I use understanding in contrast to knowledge to denote a thought product that is a mental picture that originated with the activation of the conatus. It is often called subjective, instinctive, reactive and self-interested. With understanding, the somatic dimension is front and center. This results in an awareness that includes the destiny of the self to one degree or another, a mental state consciously aware of the profound survival connection between the self and the object of thought and awareness. I call this resulting mental state a realization because the object of thought is seen to be existentially relevant i.e., it has a direct bearing the knower’s own being-here and it brings an affective sense of conviction that is particularly intense. “Knowing” the force of gravity is one thing, seeing a tree fall on your car pushing the roof to the floorboards gives you a new “understanding” that makes you “realize” what gravity “really” is.

Understanding, like all thought, regardless of the intensity of self-interest involved is totally dependent on observation, and observation is totally dependent on the sensory and neurological apparatus of the biological human organism. The ability, therefore, to form mental pictures of one’s presence-in-the-world, whatever qualities it may generate that appear to transcend materiality, is grounded in the matter of the human body. All concepts ― human pictures of reality ― are totally derived from and dependent upon matter. The ability to imagine something that is not there, or to conclude, for whatever reason, that some entity ― even myself ― might become other than it appears at a given point in time does not constitute a transcendence over matter. The same is true of the generalizations that we call concepts. They are all a work of the imagination. Imagination does not go beyond the ability to isolate and reconfigure the elements of empirical phenomena pictured in space and/or time for the purposes of staying alive. It is as sensory and material an operation as any that humans perform.

No matter how intense the realization, and despite its accompanying sense of conviction, all human thought is a work of the imagination. Concepts are representations of material phenomena couched in the sensory images of experience in order to facilitate our interaction-in-time with the universe of matter. There is nothing infallible or eternal about them. Even the sense impressions, immediate as they were once thought to be, in fact operate integrally in the self-interested, self-preserving dynamism of thought and are vulnerable to the re-arrang­ing which constitutes it. In fact it is difficult to achieve a detachment of the sense impressions from the self-interested thrust of human thought without the use of outside tools, like laboratory procedures and double-blind studies, specifically designed to suppress that influence and achieve accuracy.

In every instance what is occurring is a material interaction and survival is its ultimate focus.

 

self-appropriation

Self embrace is the goal and destiny of human life. This apparently solipsist conclusion corresponds to the tautological circularity that our enquiry has uncovered in our universe made of living matter. Material energy which is the constituent reality of all things bears ultimate reference to itself alone. Matter’s existential energy, exists only to exist; it is-here only to be-here. It doesn’t exist in order to become something else, go somewhere else or do something that it is not currently doing or, or that it could not, in the near or distant future, evolve out of its own components. Things are-here for only one reason: to be-here. Everything we have examined confirms this conclusion. Matter’s energy is totally focused on its own abundant expansion into all the “places” it is not. Matter’s existential energy is the living embodiment of creativity: the conquest of non-being by being. It is not an energy that matter has, it is an energy that matter is. To be-here is to be matter; to be matter is to be the energy of expansive, overabundant, endlessly conquering existence.

We’ve seen how this plays itself out in area after area of our inquiry: the irrepressible conatus, the creation of an ever expanding space-time, the evolution of pre-living forms of matter, biological evolution, human reflexive consciousness as a function of being-here featuring the inability to think or imagine or want anything but being-here, the insuppressible perception that being-here, besides being the ultimate desideratum of the human organism, is a positive, gratuitous, and altogether marvelous phenomenon, and appropriately considered the object of wonder and gratitude. The instances are multiple and consistent in this regard. When we understand the transcendence of matter, we realize what we are. In human terms that translates into creative generosity.

We could take a moral turn at this point and, using Buddhist and Christian models of personal growth and maturity, try to show how the inversion of values triggered by an incorrect interpretation of the urgings of the conatus accounts for the classic spiritual pathologies, individual and social, on which both traditions concur. Specifically, the almost unavoidable deflection of the energy of the conatus from the survival and enhancement of the totality of matter in the universe to the selfish aggrandizement and pleasuring of the individual human organism in isolation has been identified as the paradigm of “the corrupt human condition” ― selfishness. Similarly, we could show how the goals and even the practices of personal transformation in each tradition which are designed to counter selfishness are in general agreement with one another and correlate closely with the supreme value of existence-in-the-present-moment as the concrete form in which being here authentically occurs, and whose embrace simultaneously establishes a relationship of oneness with the entire universe of living matter. Oneness with the totality, the mystics’ quest, is achieved by appropriating (realizing) one’s physical / metaphysical homogeneity with all things. We are all made of the same clay. The result is a clear vision of the supreme achievement for the individual-in-community of a loving and grateful understanding of one’s “self” as a highly evolved version of matter’s energy bearing universal matter’s fundamental dynamism of expanding abundance forward into where-it-was-not. The agenda of the “self” is not ultimately for the “self” alone or even for the “self” to decide; the decision and the purpose has already been set: it is the agenda of matter’s living expanding energy. It is a realization that the human generosity exemplified and inspired by matter’s energy is not merely an optional, gratuitous and personally satisfying choice of life-style, but is the necessary emanation of the human organism’s very own constituent structure. Expansive abundance ― transcendence ― is the very nature of matter’s living energy at every level of evolutionary emergence; and as material organisms extruded by a material universe it is our nature as well.

Christianity and the Cult of Forgiveness

3,000 words

Forgiveness figures so prominently in the Western Christian vision that it can be reasonably argued that it is the centerpiece — the fulcrum around which all its doctrines and religious practices turn. Whichever way you look, the fundamental energy for Christian life through much of the two millennia of its existence, has been the imputation of universal sin, the guilt and punishment that it entails for everyone, and the mechanisms exclusively controlled by the Church available for its forgiveness. Those of us formed in this culture are so accustomed to it that, unless we spend some time immersed in other traditions, it never occurs to us that there is any other way to think about religion.

But while the other “religions of the book,” Islam and Judaism, are equally focused on obedience to “God,” they trust “God” will forgive them. Christianity is unique in that it worries over finding mechanisms for forgiveness that are guaranteed to work automatically. In contrast with Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism, which concentrate on the moral transformation of the personality in this world leading to the harmony of society, the Christian emphasis on sin and its punishment in the afterlife is so great that it gives rise to the impression that Western Christians thought of the moral code as something of a formality: a backdrop to the real drama. It was never expected that anyone would or even could comply with it, that all would necessarily sin, and that religion primarily had to do with what happens afterwards. Even Paul said the purpose of the “law” was to prove to us that we couldn’t keep it. It defined our relationship to “God” as beggars. The behavior that religion was concerned about was not basic morality, but how to act once you realized moral wholeness was no longer a possibility — how to live from day to day even though you were a moral cripple, out of sync with the Universe, alienated from God, saturated with guilt, and terrified of death because eternal punishment hung over your head like the sword of Damocles.

This emphasis on coping with the failure of moral living rather than finding ways to encourage its joyous and LIFE-expanding implementation, was given deep theological justification by Augustine of Hippo at the end of the fourth century. He claimed that the very purpose of the incarnation was to reverse the insult, guilt and effects of Original Sin — the disobedience of Adam and Eve — that hung over humankind, condemning every single human being to eternal torment, even the sinless, just for being born human.  Jesus’ death on the cross was said to be an atone­ment for that primordial sin … a “sacrifice” in the literal ancient sense of the slaughter of a victim as a symbol of submission to “God” and was believed to “please” “God” and avert his justified fury at the human race. It created an infinite pool of forgiveness, which the Church managed and parceled out to Christians in accord with their compliance with the second great code of morality: the commandments of the Church.

This interpretation of the foundational events of the Christian religion was, along with others, merely theological speculation until Augustine articulated it in the most compelling and consistent worldview that Christianity had produced to date. The fact that this all coincided roughly with the establishment of the Catholic Church as the official (and exclusive) religion of the Roman Empire, and Augustine’s personal acquaintance and collaboration with the Western emperors in their century-old efforts to recover Imperial property (churches) from the Donatists, insured that, in the West at least, his view of things would prevail. And prevail it did. It dominated Western Europe through the middle ages and, due to its influence on Reformation theology and the Papal reaction, on into modern times. Today, despite a half century of alternative thinking since Vatican II and centuries of demurral by Eastern Christians, Augustine’s vision is still considered the official view.

Augustine and Rome

Augustine’s theology was Roman and it was retrospective. It looked back after 400 years of Christian history and re-interpreted both doctrine and practice in such a way that they became a perfect counterpart to the cultural and political imperatives of the Roman Empire. The background is that well before Constantine, during the first three hundred years of mostly unrecorded Church history, Christianity had been adjusting itself little by little to the cultural and religious mindset of Rome. The difficulties in achieving accommodation made it clear that there was an unbridgeable gap between Jesus’ message and the complex master-slave economy and the associated geopolitics of conquest that defined the Imperial Project. That dawning realization, and Christians’ desire to live a normal life as part of the Empire, gave rise to what I am calling the “cult of forgiveness.” And it was Augustine who gave it a theological rationalization.

This Christian embrace of Roman values had reached such a point by the early fourth century, that it made it possible for Constantine to choose Christianity as his preferred religion, despite Christians’ open refusal to worship the gods of Rome. For by that time Christianity no longer represented a change of lifestyle, only the replacement of one set of gods with another, something that was not that different from the traditional Roman practice of allowing its conquered people to worship their own gods. Exchanging Jesus for Zeus or Apollo was no big deal (especially after Constantine certified that Jesus was the high “God” himself); but freeing all the slaves, forcing the upper classes to shoulder the burdens of common labor, restoring conquered peoples their property and political independence, and disbanding the legions was not thinkable. Eliminating the slave economy, the class system it sustained and everything necessary to keep it all going was simply not going to happen. Anyone could see that fully embracing Jesus’ message would have demanded nothing less, and there was no way that Rome would do any such thing. Christians chose to live with the contradiction.

It is my contention that by accepting the conditions prevailing in the Roman Empire as unchangeable and binding themselves to live within it, Christians subconsciously conceded that they would never be able to commit themselves to the gospel invitation, and that they were institutionalizing a permanent repudiation of the kind of human community that Jesus envisioned. By accepting Roman life as it was, they had committed themselves to be permanently alienated from the will of “God” and full human self-actualization as individuals and as a community. The Church was subconsciously aware that it had consigned itself and its members to a “state of permanent sin” that required continuous acknowledgement of guilt and a continuous plea for forgiveness.

This had a number of concomitant effects. The first was that attention came to be focused almost exclusively on the afterlife, because life in this world was dismissed as irreparably immoral. There would never be justice, and therefore peace and happiness was not possible. Second, the class character of Roman society which was diametrically opposed to Jesus’ egalitarian vision, was introduced into the Christian community itself establishing the two-tier Church of clergy and laity, priest and people that it has had ever since, and it canonized male domination by excluding women from the positions of authority that they had once occupied in the very early Church. All this was in direct opposition to the explicit teaching of Jesus about the exercise of authority. It restricted episcopal offices to the upper class alone, a practice that became standard through the middle ages. Third, the sacraments shifted from being symbolic expressions of internal dispositions to magical incantations — spells cast by elite priest-wizards — that automatically dispensed the forgiveness that had become the daily addiction of this community of sinners. Baptism, for example, came to be considered a ritual that insured an automatic forgiveness of all sin. Christians not only postponed baptism until their deathbed (as Constantine did) to ensure “salvation,” they also started baptizing their infants, abandoning any pretense that baptism was a symbol of mature commitment, because they believed baptism was magic that would automatically save their babies from an uncertain eternity should they die. All this had occurred before Constantine and Augustine. Augustine’s theology of baptism, which he elaborated in the heat of the Donatist controversy and in which he maintained that baptism had an automatic and permanent effect (ex opere operato) of forgiveness, was in large part a way of justifying what was the current Christian practice of infant baptism. Augustine argued that infants who died without baptism, despite their innocence, went to hell for all eternity to pay for Adam’s insult to God. The people, he said, were right. But it also meant the Donatists had no ground for holding onto their churches.

Augustine’s theology continued to build the case for the endemic sinfulness of the entire human race. Snippets out of the scriptures that hinted at universal sinfulness were identified, taken out of context and promulgated as “doctrine.” Lines from the psalms, for example, that complained with obvious poetic hyperbole “that no one is good, no, not even one” had been quoted by Paul in his letter to the Romans. It was reminiscent of the fable about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah where not even one just person could be found to prevent the promised punishment.

By the late middle ages, Martin Luther gave it an articulation that summed up what had been its real effect throughout Christian history: the Christian, he said, was simul justus et peccator. The Christen was justified and a sinner at one and the same time. Forgiveness, he said, did not change the sinful, immoral, alienated state of the human being who remained corrupt forever; all that happened was that “God” promised he would not punish this one guilty person, even though he reserved the right to punish anyone else because they were all equally guilty, the forgiven and the unforgiven alike. You never stopped being guilty and deserving of eternal punishment; all you had to go on was “God’s” promise that you, personally, because of your faith, would not be punished. You never really became “God’s” friend. You just stopped being the object of his wrath. Wonderful.

If there were any doubt of the thrust of Augustine’s thinking, he capped off his theories with a unique doctrine of predestination. Augustine argued that since “God” is omniscient, he knew from all eternity that Adam would sin, plunging all of humanity into the cesspool of moral impotence. “God” permitted the drama in the garden of Eden to play itself out because he had also planned from all eternity to send his Son to die for helplessly sinful humankind thus displaying his infinite mercy. Augustine reasoned God gained greater glory in forgiving a morally corrupt mankind incapable of achiev­ing salvation on its own and predetermined to create violent and oppressive societies. Thus the entire scene of selfish humankind in Augustine’s Roman Imperial mind was foreseen and predestined. Selfishness was inescapable and apotheosized: it was intentionally permitted by “God.” Augustine’s “God,” not unlike the Roman emperor, was self-absorbed in promoting his own “glory.”

The Monks in the Desert

At the same time that Augustine was elaborating his theories at the end of the fourth century , other Christians, recognizing the fatal complicity of the Christian Church with the Roman travesty, rather than abandon the promises of the gospel, walked out on the Imperial Church altogether. They found the most deserted places in the wastelands and forests that bordered on the civilized world and attempted to create their own societies dedicated to doing it right. They started as hermits and their gatherings became monasteries. They instinctively knew they had to get away from “normal life” because it was so compromised with the conquest, plunder, greed, violence, slavery and self-idolatry that was the very dynamic that Rome ran on.

It should be no surprise that these early Christian monasteries bore the greatest affinity to the religious programs of the eastern traditions, especially the Buddhist. Both groups were dedicated to “doing it right” and shared a common insight: that social transformation and individual transformation were two sides of the same coin. You could not have growth in authentic humanity and at the same time accommodate to a venal society, bound to a larcenous and violent economic system whose ultimate driving attractions were power and pleasure, without having your circuits jam. It was oil and water. Once you had opted for accommodation, the only thing “God” could do for you was forgive; “God” could no longer be understood as LIFE (the energy of moral transcendence) in this world. The pursuit of an authentic humanity focused on justice, generosity and compassion was not possible.

In all these efforts the alternative community was an essential part of the program; it was the antithesis of imperial corruption. Similarly, they were convinced of the importance of meditation, the interior awareness and confrontation with one’s own individual cravings and misperceptions — what each tradition identified as “demons,” terms that modern psychiatric treatment modalities continue to use metaphorically today — which were the antecedents of socially destructive behavior. The goal for all was individual freedom from mindless, knee-jerk, selfish, negativity — an individual freedom that bore fruit in the harmony of the community.

In the case of the early Christian monasteries, there was a stark contrast with the religiosity characteristic of the mainstream Church-in-the-world that they had separated from. For the monks there was little emphasis on the rituals of forgiveness, confession, or the mass as a conduit of “grace.” There was rather a strong reliance on understanding how the human mind and emotions worked and what was effective in changing one’s moral bearing. One of these practices of transformation, perhaps the principal one, was labor. Everyone worked. Later, in the middle ages, monks were divided into upper and lower class. That wasn’t true in the beginning. There were no class divisions or servants in the Egyptian desert.

The primary difference among the traditions was the Christian emphasis on a personal “God” who related to the immortal human soul. This tended to direct the Christian monk toward a psycho-erotic love relationship with the deity that seemed to require celibacy for its faithful fulfillment, and was consummated only after death. Early Buddhists, for their part, ignored the divine realm altogether and their doctrine of anatta or “no-self” is compatible with a cosmic materialism in which every entity, including the human organism, is only a temporary coming together of components which come apart at death and are recycled for use by other organisms. LIFE was had in belonging to the totality.

In the case of Christianity, the emphasis on the “nuptials” with “God” has tended to direct anyone thinking about personal transformation away from family-life and toward the monasteries. Perfection was thought impossible to married households and thus reinforced the inferiorization of the laity where women as reproductive agents and authority figures had a prominent role.  The pursuit of personal transformation tended to be effectively quarantined. These patterns dominated the middle ages. The resistance against them grew and eventually became part of the reform movement that divided Western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic. The family is the proper venue for Christian development.

Buddhism was also focused on the sangha, the community of practitioners, but encouraged people who were householders to put the program into practice in their work and family life. The point of Buddhism wasn’t forgiveness, it was the practice of the dharma — the basic morality that brought peace to the individual in this world and justice, harmony, generosity and compassion to the human community. The monastery was helpful but not indispensable in achieving this goal. The Indian society where Buddhism emerged had its problems with injustice and disharmony, but Buddhism did not justify it as inevitable and protect it from the influence of its transformative challenge.

The Christian displacement of religious life from social morality to forgiveness naturally tended to “normalize” the social immorality that it was impotent to change. Hence some form of slavery or another, eventually modulating into wage slavery in the modern era, has continued to characterize societies where theocratic Christianity has held sway. The acceptance of outright slavery and the effective enslavement of serfs and servants, women and children, convicts and debtors, wage workers and share croppers, is a hallmark of traditional Christianity. The rebellions within mediaeval Christendom that arose regularly against the status quo all had a revolutionary egalitarian, anti-slavery, anti-class aspect to them. They grew in number and intensity through the centuries until the established order was brought down, almost always by people who found they had to neutralize the institutional Church in order to achieve their objectives.

Theology reflects the prevailing social reality, and its rationalizations in turn serve to justify and consolidate the social order that gave them rise. There is no way that Christianity is ever going to energize anything but the institutionalized exploitation of the labor of the poor and marginalized by the rich and powerful unless its theology undergoes the kind of overhaul that this short reflection is suggesting. Christianity has to repudiate its ancient “cult of forgiveness” based on the acceptance of a thoroughly immoral social dynamic as occurred with the Roman ascendency. A new interpretation of the significance of the foundational events that launched Christianity must be elaborated and applied institutionally so that they carry beyond the lifetime of those who develop them. So long as Augustine’s vision remains the official teaching of the Church, calls for social morality for the sake of justice in the human community are meaningless and will be ignored. They make it unmistakably clear that the Church has other more important concerns: “saving the souls” of Christians after they die who while they lived were predestined to be complicit in the immorality of empire.

Christianity and the Cult of Forgiveness

3,000 words

Forgiveness figures so prominently in the Western Christian vision that it can be reasonably argued that it is the centerpiece — the fulcrum around which all its doctrines and religious practices turn. Whichever way you look, the fundamental energy for Christian life through much of the two millennia of its existence, has been the imputation of universal sin, the guilt and punishment that it entails for everyone, and the mechanisms exclusively controlled by the Church available for its forgiveness. Those of us formed in this culture are so accustomed to it that, unless we spend some time immersed in other traditions, it never occurs to us that there is any other way to think about religion.

But while the other “religions of the book,” Islam and Judaism, are equally focused on obedience to “God,” they trust “God” will forgive them. Christianity is unique in that it worries over finding mechanisms for forgiveness that are guaranteed to work automatically. In contrast with Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism, which concentrate on the moral transformation of the personality in this world leading to the harmony of society, the Christian emphasis on sin and its punishment in the afterlife is so great that it gives rise to the impression that Western Christians thought of the moral code as something of a formality: a backdrop to the real drama. It was never expected that anyone would or even could comply with it, that all would necessarily sin, and that religion primarily had to do with what happens afterwards. Even Paul said the purpose of the “law” was to prove to us that we couldn’t keep it. It defined our relationship to “God” as beggars. The behavior that religion was concerned about was not basic morality, but how to act once you realized moral wholeness was no longer a possibility — how to live from day to day even though you were a moral cripple, out of sync with the Universe, alienated from God, saturated with guilt, and terrified of death because eternal punishment hung over your head like the sword of Damocles.

This emphasis on coping with the failure of moral living rather than finding ways to encourage its joyous and LIFE-expanding implementation, was given deep theological justification by Augustine of Hippo at the end of the fourth century. He claimed that the very purpose of the incarnation was to reverse the insult, guilt and effects of Original Sin — the disobedience of Adam and Eve — that hung over humankind, condemning every single human being to eternal torment, even the sinless, just for being born human.  Jesus’ death on the cross was said to be an atone­ment for that primordial sin … a “sacrifice” in the literal ancient sense of the slaughter of a victim as a symbol of submission to “God” and was believed to “please” “God” and avert his justified fury at the human race. It created an infinite pool of forgiveness, which the Church managed and parceled out to Christians in accord with their compliance with the second great code of morality: the commandments of the Church.

This interpretation of the foundational events of the Christian religion was, along with others, merely theological speculation until Augustine articulated it in the most compelling and consistent worldview that Christianity had produced to date. The fact that this all coincided roughly with the establishment of the Catholic Church as the official (and exclusive) religion of the Roman Empire, and Augustine’s personal acquaintance and collaboration with the Western emperors in their century-old efforts to recover Imperial property (churches) from the Donatists, insured that, in the West at least, his view of things would prevail. And prevail it did. It dominated Western Europe through the middle ages and, due to its influence on Reformation theology and the Papal reaction, on into modern times. Today, despite a half century of alternative thinking since Vatican II and centuries of demurral by Eastern Christians, Augustine’s vision is still considered the official view.

Augustine and Rome

Augustine’s theology was Roman and it was retrospective. It looked back after 400 years of Christian history and re-interpreted both doctrine and practice in such a way that they became a perfect counterpart to the cultural and political imperatives of the Roman Empire. The background is that well before Constantine, during the first three hundred years of mostly unrecorded Church history, Christianity had been adjusting itself little by little to the cultural and religious mindset of Rome. The difficulties in achieving accommodation made it clear that there was an unbridgeable gap between Jesus’ message and the complex master-slave economy and the associated geopolitics of conquest that defined the Imperial Project. That dawning realization, and Christians’ desire to live a normal life as part of the Empire, gave rise to what I am calling the “cult of forgiveness.” And it was Augustine who gave it a theological rationalization.

This Christian embrace of Roman values had reached such a point by the early fourth century, that it made it possible for Constantine to choose Christianity as his preferred religion, despite Christians’ open refusal to worship the gods of Rome. For by that time Christianity no longer represented a change of lifestyle, only the replacement of one set of gods with another, something that was not that different from the traditional Roman practice of allowing its conquered people to worship their own gods. Exchanging Jesus for Zeus or Apollo was no big deal (especially after Constantine certified that Jesus was the high “God” himself); but freeing all the slaves, forcing the upper classes to shoulder the burdens of common labor, restoring conquered peoples their property and political independence, and disbanding the legions was not thinkable. Eliminating the slave economy, the class system it sustained and everything necessary to keep it all going was simply not going to happen. Anyone could see that fully embracing Jesus’ message would have demanded nothing less, and there was no way that Rome would do any such thing. Christians chose to live with the contradiction.

It is my contention that by accepting the conditions prevailing in the Roman Empire as unchangeable and binding themselves to live within it, Christians subconsciously conceded that they would never be able to commit themselves to the gospel invitation, and that they were institutionalizing a permanent repudiation of the kind of human community that Jesus envisioned. By accepting Roman life as it was, they had committed themselves to be permanently alienated from the will of “God” and full human self-actualization as individuals and as a community. The Church was subconsciously aware that it had consigned itself and its members to a “state of permanent sin” that required continuous acknowledgement of guilt and a continuous plea for forgiveness.

This had a number of concomitant effects. The first was that attention came to be focused almost exclusively on the afterlife, because life in this world was dismissed as irreparably immoral. There would never be justice, and therefore peace and happiness was not possible. Second, the class character of Roman society which was diametrically opposed to Jesus’ egalitarian vision, was introduced into the Christian community itself establishing the two-tier Church of clergy and laity, priest and people that it has had ever since, and it canonized male domination by excluding women from the positions of authority that they had once occupied in the very early Church. All this was in direct opposition to the explicit teaching of Jesus about the exercise of authority. It restricted episcopal offices to the upper class alone, a practice that became standard through the middle ages. Third, the sacraments shifted from being symbolic expressions of internal dispositions to magical incantations — spells cast by elite priest-wizards — that automatically dispensed the forgiveness that had become the daily addiction of this community of sinners. Baptism, for example, came to be considered a ritual that insured an automatic forgiveness of all sin. Christians not only postponed baptism until their deathbed (as Constantine did) to ensure “salvation,” they also started baptizing their infants, abandoning any pretense that baptism was a symbol of mature commitment, because they believed baptism was magic that would automatically save their babies from an uncertain eternity should they die. All this had occurred before Constantine and Augustine. Augustine’s theology of baptism, which he elaborated in the heat of the Donatist controversy and in which he maintained that baptism had an automatic and permanent effect (ex opere operato) of forgiveness, was in large part a way of justifying what was the current Christian practice of infant baptism. Augustine argued that infants who died without baptism, despite their innocence, went to hell for all eternity to pay for Adam’s insult to God. The people, he said, were right. But it also meant the Donatists had no ground for holding onto their churches.

Augustine’s theology continued to build the case for the endemic sinfulness of the entire human race. Snippets out of the scriptures that hinted at universal sinfulness were identified, taken out of context and promulgated as “doctrine.” Lines from the psalms, for example, that complained with obvious poetic hyperbole “that no one is good, no, not even one” had been quoted by Paul in his letter to the Romans. It was reminiscent of the fable about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah where not even one just person could be found to prevent the promised punishment.

By the late middle ages, Martin Luther gave it an articulation that summed up what had been its real effect throughout Christian history: the Christian, he said, was simul justus et peccator. The Christen was justified and a sinner at one and the same time. Forgiveness, he said, did not change the sinful, immoral, alienated state of the human being who remained corrupt forever; all that happened was that “God” promised he would not punish this one guilty person, even though he reserved the right to punish anyone else because they were all equally guilty, the forgiven and the unforgiven alike. You never stopped being guilty and deserving of eternal punishment; all you had to go on was “God’s” promise that you, personally, because of your faith, would not be punished. You never really became “God’s” friend. You just stopped being the object of his wrath. Wonderful.

If there were any doubt of the thrust of Augustine’s thinking, he capped off his theories with a unique doctrine of predestination. Augustine argued that since “God” is omniscient, he knew from all eternity that Adam would sin, plunging all of humanity into the cesspool of moral impotence. “God” permitted the drama in the garden of Eden to play itself out because he had also planned from all eternity to send his Son to die for helplessly sinful humankind thus displaying his infinite mercy. Augustine reasoned God gained greater glory in forgiving a morally corrupt mankind incapable of achiev­ing salvation on its own and predetermined to create violent and oppressive societies. Thus the entire scene of selfish humankind in Augustine’s Roman Imperial mind was foreseen and predestined. Selfishness was inescapable and apotheosized: it was intentionally permitted by “God.” Augustine’s “God,” not unlike the Roman emperor, was self-absorbed in promoting his own “glory.”

The Monks in the Desert

At the same time that Augustine was elaborating his theories at the end of the fourth century , other Christians, recognizing the fatal complicity of the Christian Church with the Roman travesty, rather than abandon the promises of the gospel, walked out on the Imperial Church altogether. They found the most deserted places in the wastelands and forests that bordered on the civilized world and attempted to create their own societies dedicated to doing it right. They started as hermits and their gatherings became monasteries. They instinctively knew they had to get away from “normal life” because it was so compromised with the conquest, plunder, greed, violence, slavery and self-idolatry that was the very dynamic that Rome ran on.

It should be no surprise that these early Christian monasteries bore the greatest affinity to the religious programs of the eastern traditions, especially the Buddhist. Both groups were dedicated to “doing it right” and shared a common insight: that social transformation and individual transformation were two sides of the same coin. You could not have growth in authentic humanity and at the same time accommodate to a venal society, bound to a larcenous and violent economic system whose ultimate driving attractions were power and pleasure, without having your circuits jam. It was oil and water. Once you had opted for accommodation, the only thing “God” could do for you was forgive; “God” could no longer be understood as LIFE (the energy of moral transcendence) in this world. The pursuit of an authentic humanity focused on justice, generosity and compassion was not possible.

In all these efforts the alternative community was an essential part of the program; it was the antithesis of imperial corruption. Similarly, they were convinced of the importance of meditation, the interior awareness and confrontation with one’s own individual cravings and misperceptions — what each tradition identified as “demons,” terms that modern psychiatric treatment modalities continue to use metaphorically today — which were the antecedents of socially destructive behavior. The goal for all was individual freedom from mindless, knee-jerk, selfish, negativity — an individual freedom that bore fruit in the harmony of the community.

In the case of the early Christian monasteries, there was a stark contrast with the religiosity characteristic of the mainstream Church-in-the-world that they had separated from. For the monks there was little emphasis on the rituals of forgiveness, confession, or the mass as a conduit of “grace.” There was rather a strong reliance on understanding how the human mind and emotions worked and what was effective in changing one’s moral bearing. One of these practices of transformation, perhaps the principal one, was labor. Everyone worked. Later, in the middle ages, monks were divided into upper and lower class. That wasn’t true in the beginning. There were no class divisions or servants in the Egyptian desert.

The primary difference among the traditions was the Christian emphasis on a personal “God” who related to the immortal human soul. This tended to direct the Christian monk toward a psycho-erotic love relationship with the deity that seemed to require celibacy for its faithful fulfillment, and was consummated only after death. Early Buddhists, for their part, ignored the divine realm altogether and their doctrine of anatta or “no-self” is compatible with a cosmic materialism in which every entity, including the human organism, is only a temporary coming together of components which come apart at death and are recycled for use by other organisms. LIFE was had in belonging to the totality.

In the case of Christianity, the emphasis on the “nuptials” with “God” has tended to direct anyone thinking about personal transformation away from family-life and toward the monasteries. Perfection was thought impossible to married households and thus reinforced the inferiorization of the laity and where women as reproductive agents and authority figures had a prominent role. The pursuit of personal transformation tended to be effectively quarantined. These patterns dominated the middle ages. The resistance against them grew and eventually became part of the reform movement that divided Western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic. The family is the proper venue for Christian development.

Buddhism was also focused on the sangha, the community of practitioners, but encouraged people who were householders to put the program into practice in their work and family life. The point of Buddhism wasn’t forgiveness, it was the practice of the dharma — the basic morality that brought peace to the individual in this world and justice, harmony, generosity and compassion to the human community. The monastery was helpful but not indispensable in achieving this goal. The Indian society where Buddhism emerged had its problems with injustice and disharmony, but Buddhism did not justify it as inevitable and protect it from the influence of its transformative challenge.

The Christian displacement of religious life from social morality to forgiveness naturally tended to “normalize” the social immorality that it was impotent to change. Hence some form of slavery or another, eventually modulating into wage slavery in the modern era, has continued to characterize societies where theocratic Christianity has held sway. The acceptance of outright slavery and the effective enslavement of serfs and servants, women and children, convicts and debtors, wage workers and share croppers, is a hallmark of traditional Christianity. The rebellions within mediaeval Christendom that arose regularly against the status quo all had a revolutionary egalitarian, anti-slavery, anti-class aspect to them. They grew in number and intensity through the centuries until the established order was brought down, almost always by people who found they had to neutralize the institutional Church in order to achieve their objectives.

Theology reflects the prevailing social reality, and its rationalizations in turn serve to justify and consolidate the social order that gave them rise. There is no way that Christianity is ever going to energize anything but the institutionalized exploitation of the labor of the poor and marginalized by the rich and powerful unless its theology undergoes the kind of overhaul that this short reflection is suggesting. Christianity has to repudiate its ancient “cult of forgiveness” based on the acceptance of a thoroughly immoral social dynamic as occurred with the Roman ascendency. A new interpretation of the significance of the foundational events that launched Christianity must be elaborated and applied institutionally so that they carry beyond the lifetime of those who develop them. So long as Augustine’s vision remains the official teaching of the Church, calls for social morality for the sake of justice in the human community are meaningless and will be ignored. They make it unmistakably clear that the Church has other more important concerns: “saving the souls” of Christians after they die who while they lived were predestined to be complicit in the immorality of empire.

Poetry and Prayer

Tony Equale

March 2017

3,000 words

 

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

   (W.B. Yeats, Under Ben Bulben)

                                 

Poetry is transporting. It’s ethereal, magical; it’s almost other-worldly, but it is not prayer. Poetry produces its effect because it activates a special dimension in us — an intelligence that sits slightly above it all, like a horseman, with a perspective you don’t get when you’re on the ground and stuck in one place. This cognitive dimension goes beyond our usual work-a-day perception which we pursue for the purposes of survival. The horseman has other interests. This “other” dimension suffuses both the object of perception and the human perceiver. It is an essential bond between them that bypasses use and need. When that dimension is described accurately — it need not be in words — it produces its characteristic effect: enlightenment. It’s as if we are seeing those things for the first time … which is to say that we never really knew them before this moment. Poetry, then, is like science in that respect: it reveals what things are … what they really are, not what we thought they were.

Often the “new” perception requires going beyond conventional uses of language, art and music to find a substitute mode of expression, which may also include silence, or cacophony, to evoke what the poet sees, and simultaneously functions as a vehicle for eliciting that same reaction in the listener. In all cases, I want to emphasize, what poetry reveals is reality. Any suggestion that a poem is some kind of superimposition that coats things with a layer of emotion, or injects them with an outside energy they do not themselves possess, is false. The emotion that results from poetry emerges authentically from the reality as it echoes in the poet. The poetry reveals what binds the reality and the seer together. It reveals that, in fact, they are one.

Poetry allows things to shine with their own interior light. The poet says clearly what is clearly seen, … and what the seer sees is himself. Poetry is a self-recog­ni­­­tion mirrored in the object seen; for what is encountered, identified and communicated is what things have in common, and what they have in common is what I am.

science

All the various levels of human perception do exactly the same thing, but with different labels for the commonality. The scientific level appropriates reality as material energy and provides the mathematical descriptions of how it displays itself universally across all the various instances of its presence. Observer and observed, not entirely unlike the poet and his vision, share a common reality — their material existence — and the quantifiable tests and instruments of measurement used are equally conformed to the material components of the thing observed and the observing material organism. Science is possible because we are one and the same thing: material energy, quantifiably comparable to each other.

In the process of surviving, matter evolves. At a certain point the measurable quantities in the evolving sequence become so incomparable that we say some “other” thing has emerged that must be measured separately. Determining exactly when something stops being merely a modification and becomes a different thing is never without controversy. And the reason is that, underneath it all, despite appearances, nothing has changed. The underlying reality is always and only matter’s energy. And matter’s energy will always evolve if it is going to convert entropy into an existence that perdures, survives … .

The perceptions characteristic of everyday life are a subset of scientific observations, simply limited to more primitive measuring instruments and common quantities that focus on the practical applications for human survival. In both cases what the objective viewpoint sees, and measures, and expresses are the equations of matter’s needy behavior: Matter, including us as material organisms, must evolve, work and struggle in order to remain itself.

philosophy

At the philosophical level, with its own conceptual tools, we do the same. We appropriate the very same reality, but now in its quality as “being” or “existence.” What Philosophy is looking at, however, is not simply an “idea;” it is the same material energy that was examined by the scientist, but now under a different rubric: material energy as existential — material energy as constitutive of reality itself; material energy as “being.” They are one and the same thing, only Philosophy does not take existence for granted as Science does but queries it in its very quality as existence, asking what does it mean, this strange phenomenon: to be?

But what gauge does the philosopher use to determine that meaning? There are those that say the question cannot be answered because you immediately have to ask “compared to what”? Since being comprises everything, the only thing that being could be contrasted with is non-being. But non-being is nothing; it does not exist. No one knows what it means “not to exist” because the only thing we can experience and have ever experienced is what exists. There is no such thing as non-being. So to ask, “what does it mean to be”? … cannot be answered without begging the question. You either know what existence is, or you don’t. Existence cannot be defined in terms other than itself because there are no other terms. We cannot look at existence from outside because there is no outside. There is no philosophical horseman on a quest riding above the grubby business of living and dying. We are material organisms; living and dying is what we do … and our eyes are hot with the desire TO BE.

Our desire to be is the key. The meaning of being cannot be articulated apart from the existential need of the enquirer. The “cold eye” of the poet, in other words, if it is valid at all, must be grounded in some other aspect of universal reality not explained by science and philosophy.

Because it occupies the wider perspective, it is Philosophy not Science that recognizes and asserts that it is the same needy material energy that is the dynamism of existence. The philosopher does not manipulate “being” as if the concept were something in itself, as Plato thought, apart from the real world of matter — an “idea” whose logical features provided a map of reality. It’s the philosophers’ task to see clearly where existence resides. That place, alas, it turns out, is in his heart, that is to say, in his own material organism. The philosopher looks for an objective viewpoint, but there is none. Matter’s lust for LIFE gets in the way and cannot be suppressed. The examiner, the philosopher, is invested in being-here for he is nothing more nor less than material energy. Life and death cannot be bypassed. There’s no way to evaluate “being” except with the eyes of desire.

The philosopher, like the scientist, confirms the poet’s vision: that all things are one. But what he has learned from his honest inclusion of himself in science’s equations is that being-here-now is a scary, threatened, struggling thing … the object of everyone’s and everything’s uncontrollable desire, the source of great fear as well as joy.

the poet

So where does the poet get his “cold eye”?  How does he look on life and death, unlike the scientist and philosopher, and pass them by? It is my contention that the poet transcends cerebral rationality and using the eyes of his body, experiences in himself and in the “thing” his eye has alighted on, a common energy that gives him a different perspective on it all. He not only sees that all things are at root the “same thing” but he feels it. They have this universal oneness because they all share the same existential dynamism, LIFE, which the poet experiences first hand as his LIFE, himself.   He experiences somatically that his LIFE also exists beyond him, and that means his LIFE is part of something much bigger … something transcendent.

To the poet, things are not just there; he sees that they are doing something … and that they are all doing the same thing. He not only sees that they are alive, he experiences them liv-ing as he is. Drawing attention to the “-ing” in that word is a clumsy effort to emphasize the active and autonomous nature of the phenomenon. LIFE, which is another word for “being,” is not some “thing,” it is a pervasive energy, a force field, that all things activate as their very own, but, by the very fact that they all activate it, is clearly beyond them all. The poet is in direct touch in himself with the living force energizing all things in the present moment. It transports him to a realm beyond living and dying, to the energy of LIFE itself. He sees what the pray-er will try to embrace.

prayer

Prayer is not an entirely different phenomenon from poetry. It is not a seeing, however; it is rather an attempt at an embrace, a union. What prayer reaches out to embrace is LIFE itself precisely as the object of desire. Prayer may follow poetry’s vision, more so than any other universal mode of perception, like science and philosophy, for while they all deal with the bond that unites all things, the poet is in touch with it as the energy of his own LIFE. The poet knows he rides on eagle’s wings because of how far he suddenly can see. But he is not ready to step off a cliff because of it. The pray-er is.

Poetry is a deep-body seeing. But prayer goes beyond seeing. The poet recognizes the living dynamism that is operative in all things as his own. His reaction is a self-embrace that incorporates the “other” because they are both LIFE. The pray-er, on the other hand, seduced by what the poet’s cold eye has discerned, wagers all on LIFE as the subject and object of desire, and reaches out to embrace it, as if it were “someone” or “something.” What suppliants historically have felt perfectly comfortable calling a “person,” I identify as LIFE itself. In my own case, I use the word “someone” reluctantly and only because without it an essential feature of what justifies prayer’s transcendence over poetry will be omitted. But I insist, LIFE is absolutely NOT a person.

I say LIFE cannot be called a “person,” because it is not an individual entity and it does not have rational intelligence. If it did, it would respond to me in conversation; it would at least acknow­ledge my presence and identify itself. It’s what “persons” do. Moreover, if it were a person, sup­plication would make sense … and “God” would become responsible for all the evil in the world because one of the burdens of being a “person” is that you are held accountable for what you do or fail to do for others. We cannot deny LIFE’s complete indifference to human suffering. LIFE does none of the things expected of a person, therefore LIFE is not a person.

LIFE is the living energy of all entities; but it is not itself an entity. How can a “non-entity” be real? That’s not a rhetorical question. It can be real the same way any force-field or pervasive energy, whose presence is on display suffused in a myriad of entities, is real without being a “thing.” LIFE is a force-field, equally active in every entity that is alive, but not found any­­where alone and by itself. LIFE is not a “thing,” an entity or an individual.

And yet, squirm as we might, we cannot suppress the acknowledgement that LIFE is a benevolent force. The deck is stacked on this question because we humans are made of matter’s living energy and we are not able to view LIFE without desire, for we are LIFE. We also see its creative generosity on unmistakable display in its universal manifestations: the intense affect that accompanies every aspect of sexual reproduction of every organism from the most primitive to the most complex without exception. The living feelings that we experience within ourselves as we participate in these processes we can see mirrored in every living organism. Despite the varied forms it takes in different species, everywhere the LIFE-force is seen, it leans out in the same direction. It is what the philosopher discovered in querying being: if it is we who define existence, it can only be defined as the object of universal desire. To us it has no other meaning. Those who move from poetry to prayer have decided to trust it and plunge headlong into the abyss. Prayer is the attempt to be one with LIFE.

Everything made of matter, everything that exists speaks so repeatedly and unequivocally of desire for LIFE as to make it a cliché. We are made of desire … we are made for desire … and bite our tongues as we may, we can hardly keep from saying: we are made BY desire. LIFE appears to us as the desire to live … in us! After all, LIFE was not my idea. How did I come to own LIFE?

The object of prayer is to possess LIFE itself. It is a function of our need to be here. Our immediate temptation is to reason backwards to a singular source. Each thing alive received its life from its parents. No pool of chemicals and proteins has yet been able to generate LIFE out of its own resources, or to concoct it out of the surrounding environment. LIFE comes only passed on by living things that reproduce. Science, moreover, has determined that everything living on planet earth is made of cells that are the living inheritors of one original proto cell. It is natural, then, to assume that LIFE, the force-field, is itself a singular entity; but that’s not the way LIFE is found in nature. LIFE suffuses all things; it is owned and deployed with equal autonomy by each living thing, eradicating any possible individuality to the field itself. In my case I can say without equivocation, LIFE is my very own. That instantaneously makes it unavailable to its own individuality.

This is the beginning of prayer: the clear perception that our own being is enfolded in LIFE, not a vague unspecified LIFE, but a LIFE defined by desire not more or less present and active in us than in any other living thing. What poetry perceives as the threads and fibers of connection, prayer takes a step further and reaches out to as intended, generous. The reality of desire in us prods the pray-er to see desire as more than metaphor.  LIFE is not only my own; LIFE desires to be owned … LIFE wants to be alive in others. “I” am what LIFE has done. LIFE “chose” to live as me. I reach full maturity, physically, psychologically, when I can give LIFE to others.

Other?

In prayer I reach out to embrace LIFE as if it were something other than myself. Indeed, the poetic perception of the commonality of LIFE shared among all living things seems at first to encourage such an objectification; LIFE is clearly more than myself. That seems to imply “other.” Throughout our history prayer has been directed to LIFE as to an independent rational humanoid entity called “God,” — the totally “other” — whom we imagined as simply a much larger version of a human person. But reality interrupts our dream. LIFE is not an entity. LIFE belongs equally to myriads of living organisms; no organism is more alive than any other. The most privileged source of the perception of LIFE — where we know it most unmistakably — is ourselves. I am LIFE but I am not all of LIFE. I am forced to assume some kind of distinction, if not separation and distance, between my individual being and LIFE — this force-field — which preceded me in the procreative cells of my parents, and which my own reproductive cells pass on with or without my conscious intention. LIFE does the same for every living thing on planet earth and perhaps everywhere in the universe. LIFE may not be rational, but you cannot deny it is generous, abundant, magnanimous, profuse, munificent, sharing, openhanded, bighearted … and transcendent. Those who are seduced by this undeniable extravagance may be forgiven.

The subsequent struggle to survive can delude me into thinking that LIFE is an achievement of mine. But I cannot forget that my “self” — my body — came formed by the unconscious processes of LIFE, namely the reproductive action of my parents. This organismic “self” — me — is the original coherence of my body; it anteceded the accretions that I have attached to my organism by the way I have consciously lived my life. My body is the product of LIFE itself. It is an open potential always ready to be activated in ways that I choose. This is the power residing in my organism that “can do” anything; it is not fatally determined by any past choices and therefore it is the source of the radical freedom every human being enjoys. This is the self that LIFE made.

I reach out for LIFE but I am already in a state of indistinguishable unity with it. Rather than thinking I have earned and own LIFE, the determining factors coming from the other side of this relationship are so preponderant that I feel compelled to express it the other way around: LIFE reached out and took possession of me … gave me itself, made me part of itself. LIFE owns me.

Prayer, then, is the conscious acknowledgement of my receptor status with LIFE. I have been enveloped by LIFE which has embraced and infused me with itself, making me inescapably one with it. Nothing is more solid or more unarguable. The LIFE I have is not mine; it was not my choice. But that means that whatever union I hoped to gain by reaching out, was already given at birth. Prayer, in the first instance, therefore, is the conscious appropriation of my real identity, LIFE … and all that it entails.

 

The Big Picture (5)

A review of Sean Carroll’s 2016 book

5

Relationship to the living source of LIFE and existence is what I mean by religion and I claim that austere as they are, the conclusions of this essay can provide a foundation for a religious view that is compatible with science and with the pyscho-social needs of the human individual. Furthermore, these conclusions can be reconciled with the basic teachings of all of our traditional religions — especially their mystical side — once they have been purged of literalist scientific pretensions and claims for direct revelation from “God.” In other words I believe the conclusions of this analysis can serve as a universal philosophical ground, finally pro­viding a solid basis for a unified understanding of the universe that reductionists like Carroll have discarded as an unnecessary addition to the physical sciences.

The religious ground envisioned by this approach differs from the traditional religions of the West which were all founded on the belief in the existence of an individual humanoid transcendent “God”-entity. While they all include a “minority report” that envisions an immanent “God,” the dominant belief system, called “theism,” imagines “God” as a human being, much smarter and more powerful than we are, who stands over against the rest of creation as an individual “person,” immortal, all-powerful, and not constrained by the limitations of time and space. “He” is like a male head of household who wants a specifically ordered behavior from humankind encoded in rules that must be obeyed. This “spirit” God will reward or punish each individual human being after death in the spirit world where he is thought to reside and where the human being will spend eternity.

In sharp contrast, the real LIFE in which we are immersed in this material universe — the only world there is — is not an individual entity. LIFE exists everywhere as a pervasive force that is fully operative simultaneously in all things, immanent in and indistinguishable from their own respective existential realities and proportionately actuated according to the level of material complexity achieved by evolution. It appears to be an emanation of the energy of material existence itself because its primary manifestation, the conatus, is exclusively focused on physical survival. As such it is responsible for the continued evolution of material forms which appear always to move anti-entropically in the direction of greater aggregation of parts and integration of complexity conditioned on the ability to exist in this material universe.

LIFE is completely immanent in the material universe; it is not distinct from the things that are alive. It is only a posteriori, in evolution, that LIFE displays its peculiar transcendence: each and every achievement of evolution has been transcended — over and over again — always plundering the entropy against which it pushes in the direction of greater depth and intensity of existential participation. Evolution has populated at least one planet with an astonishing array of living organisms of every kind imaginable and every degree of complexity filling every environmental niche where survival is possible, all made exclusively of the same material substrate, elaborated from primitive one-proton hydrogen atoms that constitute the gas clouds, stars, galaxies, black holes and other massive structures of the cosmos. The astonishing, exclusively upward anti-entropic display of ever more complex and intensely interior organisms occurring over so many billions of years and achieving such stunning results suggests that LIFE will always continue to reach out toward ever more comprehensive control of existence, horizontally establishing an ever wider beachhead of survival and vertically toward a more intense penetration into the interiority of existence, the material source of its energies.

Reductionists maintain that it is a fallacy to claim that there is an “upward” trend in evolution because they say evolution is not an “active” phenomenon — a response to learning from the environment — but rather a “passive” result emerging from random mutations that do not respond to environmental pressure. I have argued with them on that score in section 2, citing work by biologists who say genetic adaptation actually occurs at rates that are far too high for the classic theory based on random mutation to hold. Accor­ding to these scientists it appears that some learning from the environment must somehow be penetrating genomic insularity and creating genetic changes that are not random.

From the long-range perspective of cosmic history, however, the undeniable fact of the general correlation of evolutionary complexity with time, i.e., that increasingly complex and conscious organisms have emerged in the direction of time-flow, is evidence of a presumptive adaptational causality. The massive accumulation of an infinity of phenotypes all growing in complexity and consciousness as a function of time (i.e., evolution never regresses despite potential survival advantage), evokes a pro-active adaptability not explained by random mutations: evolution goes exactly as far as the currently achieved organic complexity and the environmental context will allow.  It minimally suggests an internally directed intentionality analogous to a non-rational “Will.” It is the task of scientists to identify the mechanisms that may be involved in this, but even without that help, philosophers still have to acknowledge the facts.

*

We ourselves, living material organisms of the human species, are direct inheritors and full participants in this cosmic drama. We are all and only living matter, made of the same quarks and gluons, muons and neutrinos held together by the strong force that constitute everything else in the universe … a universe so unimaginably vast and full of matter’s living energy that it jams our mental circuits. With our mysterious and marvellous intelligence we are the most penetrating of the living organisms that our material universe has evolved to date. Our interiority gives us a privileged window on the dynamism of LIFE itself for we ourselves are not only fully alive, but we can see, feel, taste, hear LIFE directly in itself because we activate it autonomously, as our very own identity, each of us, at every moment of our lives. We not only have LIFE, we are LIFE, and we understand it connaturally, intimately, as the inheritors of its powers and the victims of its yearning. We feel in the marrow of our bones the emptiness — the insatiable thirst for LIFE and existence that embodies our longing — a thirst in which we live and move and have our being. We own LIFE as ours. But LIFE is not some “thing”; it is a hunger and desire for LIFE as if we did not have it at all. We are LIFE’s “Will-to-be-here” willing ourselves to be-here … feeling the creative power of our emptiness, nailed always to the cross of our entropic wellspring: living matter.

Religion is our collective human attempt to relate to LIFE, which means to relate to what we are and simultaneously yearn for. The conatus/entropy incongruity is the heart of the human condition. The treasure we carry in vessels of clay is ourselves willing ourselves to be-here even as we drift toward an inevitable death. Religion as relationship to the LIFE-force itself involves embracing ourselves in a most profound way — a way that includes the mortality of all living things because the LIFE we share is the same.   We ourselves are the doorway to our encounter with LIFE. How do we do that? Who will guide us? For millennia we tried to relate to a “God” that pulled us aside at death one by one for judgment and punishment. Now, who will teach us how to rest in a colossal living embrace that makes us family with every other yearning thing in the universe? Instead of being held up for ridicule as guilty individuals we have been “willed” into existence as a cherished part of a cosmic totality. Our cuture has not prepared us for this.

Religion is a natural, spontaneous reaction of humankind born of the irrepressible conatus along with the sense of the sacred and the awareness of the contradiction of death that it immediately engenders. The conatus and its sense of the sacred originate in matter’s living energy and are a foundational instinct, unmediated and underived, that can be ignored but not suppressed. They appear on the planet with the emergence of humanity itself. Because of the primordial nature of this instinct it took concrete social form — religion — from the earliest moment and has evolved through the millennia molting its outward practices in tandem with the historical context, but always driven by a spontaneous and unsuppressible urge. The conatus is sufficient and necessary to explain it. The religious instinct in and of itself does not imply the personal theist “God” of the West; and indeed not only in the east but peppered across the globe, the instinct has resulted in all kinds of religious structures with “gods” that were often indistinguishable from the powers of nature represented by animals or geologic and cosmic forces personified. They are metaphors that all point toward material LIFE as it really exists; even Christianity’s emphasis on the cross points to the central contradiction: a conatus feeding on the energy of an entropic matter — LIFE springing from death.

*

How do we relate to this discovery? I turn for guidance to the great mystics — the people throughout the world who have sought personal contact with religion’s Source. Even though they come from traditions with vastly different images of the LIFE-source, the mystics agree to a remarkable degree on what relationship to it looks like. Their descriptions, as I read them, confirm for me that the relationship to “God” or Brahman or Tao of which they spoke in their time and within their cultural context conformed to what one would expect if the literal object of their gratitude and love were matter’s living energy as I am proposing, rather than an individual spirit/person entity or other transcendent “divine” presence.

For consider:

1. The mystics all agree that that encounter with [LIFE][1] is indisinguishable from an encounter with oneself. [LIFE] and the living human organism are one and the same thing.
2. In all cases any imagined life in another world is conceived as having begun and being fully present here in this life to such a degree that the future aspirations become a subset, if not superfluous. They become more important as symbols of the encounter with [LIFE] here and now.
3. Mystics share a universal conviction that [LIFE] is not a separate entity/person but an energy resident in all living things that has no will of its own aside from the endless will to live and to live endlessly in the living individual organisms. [LIFE] and the totality it enlivens are one and the same thing even as each individual living organism activates LIFE as its own and autonomously, and the LIFE force goes on to transcend current forms and evolve ever new ones.
4. They all say that the core of relationship to [LIFE] is detachment from an ersatz “self” created by a false importance assigned to the individual conatus mistakenly thought to be independent, permanent and self-subsistent. They encourage, instead, the identification with a universal “Self” — a totality that includes not only all living things, but also everything that exists. It is the totality to which the “self” belongs and to which its conatus should be subordinated.
5. They concur that while rational behavior is essential to being human, it does not provide the permanence that the conatus seeks. Paradoxically, moral achievement, like other forms of individual success, insofar as they are pursued for self-enhancement, are to be the object of detachment — a letting-go that allows the LIFE of the totality to assume the control of the human individual and direct behavior.
6. They all counsel a relationship to [LIFE] that does not presume interpersonal humanoid reciprocity. They are acutely aware of the fact that [LIFE] is not an individual entity, like a human person, because it is not the energy of a material organism. [LIFE] is the existential energy of all things activated in ways proportionate to the complexity and interiority of the organism. Therefore, the great mystics all tend to encourage relational practices to [LIFE] that transcend “conversational” — one-to-one — communication. They avoid traditional religious “petition” for a miraculous intervention to alter reality for the benefit of certain individuals so characteristic of Western Christianity.
7. They universally counsel love for all things. [LIFE] and the totality that [LIFE] enlivens are in a sense more real and more substantial than any individual.

The mystics in all cases point to a spare and indistinct conceptual structure at the foundation of their experience. As a primary exercise they are all, including western mystics, vigorously focused on the deconstruction of the literalist imagery of their respective religions. They consistently discourage the pursuit of and attachment to anything like visions, consolations, or feelings interpreted as interpersonal “contact,” emphasizing instead trust in the solidity of the LIFE we actuate. They describe the object of their quest — LIFE — as the unspoken background that increasingly becomes the object of our peripheral awareness. They are quite clear that the heights of religious experience for them have occurred when they were simply being themselves, living with the background awareness of their immersion in LIFE. They speak of a sense of contact that is not conceptually clear, but is an “unknowing” … and that the object of this awareness is more like no-thing than something.

Through exercises focused on mental attention the mystics train themselves to transform the connatural sense of emptiness and yearning into an awareness of their immersion in LIFE — possessing and being possessed by LIFE — resulting in a deep and abiding peace.

 

 [1] Brackets are used to indicate that what I am calling LIFE was called by other names by the various mystics, according to their tradition: “God,” Brahman, Tao, etc.

The Limits of Knowledge (2)

the human being — time and death

Existence is time.^[1] It’s not coincidental that time caused us to look at being-here separately from abstract “being” and ask what it otherwise would not have occurred to us to ask, why do I die, or “Why does being-here seem to end?”

My life is both temporal and temporary.  There’s a connection between the two.  It seems the very nature of the modulations of existence is to find better ways to be-here, to survive and extend survival.  The vitality displayed by matter’s energy is not a leisured aesthetic creativity, an unhurried pastime.  There is an urgency here that derives from a conatus, a drive to survive, that is integral to a developing universal entropy that results from the energy expenditure of any “thing,” whether it be the hydrogen fusing into helium in stars or the respiratory activity of the cells of the human brain.  Entropy is the exhaust from combustion — the smoke that is the sign of fire — the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to move toward a state of uniform inertia through the expenditure of energy for the performance of work.  Work is energy applied in the endeavor to survive. The aggregation and integration forged by matter’s energy is part and parcel of the “downhill” flow of the existential cataract initiated at the big-bang that drives the Universe to produce its effects — like the eddies and vortices that spin off in a raging current.  These pyramidal vortices (one vortex cumulatively building on another and another) are an anti-en­tro­pic phenomenon — they struggle against dissolution, to survive — even though they add to universal entropy as a result.

My life is the inner force of existence because it is matter’s energy.  It is driven in the direction of perdurance in an obsession to continue the dance of presence.  Time is the effluence of my own presence.  As my existence perdures from moment to moment — as each “now” molts into the next — it emanates time as the sweat of its creative labors; the vapor trail of its endless explorations.  I embrace my being-here, and so I embrace time.

The transcendence over death, not only through evolutionary integration but also with other communitarian strategies like daily alimentation and organismic reproduction, harnesses even as it recapitulates the patterns and primordial energies let loose within the first second of the big bang.  The energy that drives my hunger for existence, is the energy of matter itself.

We live in a banquet of existence.  We are not self-sufficient.  We are dependent on the entire material matrix within which we evolved.  In our lifetime, each human organism consumes in sustenance probably 40 or 50 tons of the matter’s energy — in the form of carbon — of other living things who must die in order that we might live.  Add to that another 50 tons of oxygen continuously drawn in from the atmosphere and utilized together with carbon in the cellular combustion we call metabolism.  At death we return our “stuff” to be used as food by others as part of an endless cycle of interchange within the one organism produced and energized by the cascade of existence.  Matter’s energy is a totality.

At a certain magical moment, also, the very cells of my body, by utilizing another communitarian tactic, combine with another’s to create a new identity — my daughter, my son — which is automatically granted a full allotment of time, slipping under the entropic radar of death.  How was this miracle accomplished?  The living cells are mine, but their age and accumulated karma are erased.  Death is cheated, fooled, outwitted.  The new individual with my cells, my DNA, eludes the death they were otherwise destined to endure.  Do we share this adventure in survival with love and gratitude? … Only if we understand!

But if we mis-under­stand — if we originally mis-interpreted that moment of crisis, the perception of death, as the cessation of what’s really there, we are quite capable of turning this banquet of sharing into a selfish grab-bag where the desperate “eat drink and make merry” in a display of bitter disillusionment against a morrow of imagined nothingness.  It is precisely the fact that “I” am metaphysically insignificant except as an integra­ted function of matter’s energy that opens me to a new dimension.   I realize that what is really there and really important is the matrix, the universal “stuff” of which I am made, the homogeneous substrate of which all things are made, the single organism of which we are all the leaves and branches, and which will go on in other forms endlessly.  It was with those micro-threads of existence that I was woven.  The primacy here, as always, belongs to the stuff of existence, the matter-energy of the universe.  It is material energy “congealed” in me.  And in short order, the same existence will use “me” to do something else in a constant search for survival — existence.

So time is the expression of process; it is the measure of groping and the tracks of creativity.  It marks the work in progress of evolutionary development.

endless or “eternal”

The re-cycling is endless.  Isn’t that the same as “eternal,” and doesn’t it imply transcendent, necessary, absolute etc., all those abstract, essentialist characteristics derived from the “concept of being” that we rejected in chapter 1?

No.  Endless is not “eternal” because endless is open and empty.  “Eternal” is closed, fixed and finished, full and complete; “eternal” is the absence of time.  Endless, on the other hand, is time … time without end; it contemplates development without term, a presence that is forever thirsty.  “Eternal,” is synonymous with unchanging, impassible and immutable, Pure Act, pure stasis, without a shred of unfulfilled potential — perfect.  It’s a completely foreign concept to us, pure conceptual projection.  We’ve never experienced anything the least bit like it.  For us, being-here as we know it is an endless phenomenon that throbs always with unrealized potential, with an ever perceived emptiness seeking to be filled and asking for nothing but more time.  We have never encountered existence in any other form.  Its current modality is always in the process of becoming, apparently without limit, itself — existence.

Being-here in our world, is endless becoming.  It’s all we know.  Where, then, do we get the notion of a fixed and finished “eternal”?  I believe it’s another of our fantasies based on the requirements of the imaginary ancient “concept of being.”  Existence, matter’s energy, as found in the real world, however, is a function of power — potentia as Spinoza discerned insightfully — potential; it is focused on survival and constantly ready to change tactics in order to achieve it.  Matter’s creative power is the drive to exist (survive) by extruding new forms out of itself creating time.

“Eternal” is unthinkable.  Endless is not.  We can understand endless perfectly because it’s no different from time itself.  To conceptualize “endless” requires no more insight than imagining present moments, “nows” in an open-ended flow into the future.  In our very own awareness of ourselves-exist­ing, which is the unfolding of our personal presence in time, we actually experience this pheno­menon most intimately as our own sentient selves.  We experience ourselves in a temporal flow into a potentially endless future.  To experience temporal flow is to experience that part of “endless” which will always be here — the present moment, “now,” the only part of “endless” that ever … and always, exists.  To experience one’s own presence in the here and now is to experience, in a sense, everything, because it is to experience all that reality is, or ever was, or can ever be.

We are reminded that for the 14^th century mystic Johannes Eckhart, “now” was the most sacred of all locations, the center of the universe.  It was precisely where “God,” he said, who exists in an Eternal “Now,” was actively sharing “being” with creation in an effluence of love and self-donation.  If you want to touch “God,” he said, you can only do it “now.” The fact that “now” — the present moment — is the only moment that really exists and that, at the same time, it goes almost universally unattended, may be a measure of exactly how alienated from existence we are.

Can we say that our conception corresponds to the emphasis on living in the present moment promoted by the Buddhist, Thich Nat Hanh?  The Bud­dhists insist their counsel is a discipline not a doctrine.  They don’t speak about metaphysics, “being” or existence, so we can’t say for sure.  But for the Buddhists, as for Meister Eckhart, the present moment is all there is.  We are-here only in the present moment.  To live in the present moment is to embrace the impermanence, the “emptiness” that drives reality always to the next moment, creating time.

[1] The similarity of this proposition to Heidegger’s thesis expounded in his Being and Time is only semantic. For H. time is the pulse and measure of Da-sein’s anguish of being-toward-death, which alone brings Da-sein’s authentic care to bear on the beings-in-the-world. In my conception, on the other hand, I make every effort to exclude the subjective factors. Time for me is foundationally a physical property exuded by the physical perdurance in existence of a physical entity — matter’s energy.