Friday, January 23, 2004
A long letter to a friend I've only known a short while.
Felisa,
This is terrific! I’m so excited to talk to someone who actually knows something about religions. I suffer from what I call “the great doubt,” which is to say I know that I know nothing. I think most people don’t really give the question the thought that it deserves. And don’t worry, you haven’t told me one tenth of what I want to know about Gnosticism, lol. I’m seriously interested in all of this.
Isn’t it funny that we spend all of this time apologizing for discussing our faith. I think the extremists out there have almost made religion a bad word. But then, maybe it’s our wholesale repression of religion that has created the extremists? There’s some element of conscience that’s missing from our activities at the international level. I have this personal theory that our society is just the human mind writ large. Could religion be the missing element?
I think it’s safe to say that most people believe there are serious problems in our society, in terms of the whole geopolitical thing and the exploitation of developing nations. And I think that people have a very strong sense that there is a great moral imbalance in our society. And because our society’s survival is dependent upon that moral and economic imbalance, we have to suppress our natural instinct to help our fellow man in order to keep the status quo. Since religions (at least any worth shaking a stick at) are all about being nice to people and generally trying to help everyone along, it’s no surprise that we’re squelching religion. And with that kind of mass repression happening, it’s no wonder that people are turning to extremism.
They *know* something is wrong, it’s staring them right in the face everyday. But the mainstream media can not, and will not show people the truth. Their success is dependent upon an audience that feels great about themselves, so that the advertisers can hawk their wares most effectively. So people are seeing on television images from CNN of absolute chaos and destruction, deaths by the thousands and mass hunger and strife. But then at the end of the clip, everyone is reassured that this is democracy at work, and these are people who are happy and free. And people believe what they see because they have to, because the alternative is so horrifying, so terrible that it is not to be believed. That or they believe even more horrible things that a fanatic tells them, just to escape the feeling of personal responsibility.
So no wonder we’re all messed up.
Crap, I apologize for going on about this sort of thing. I tend to get carried away by these kinds of ideas. But I’m getting the impression that you don’t mind, so I’m just going to go right ahead anyway. :-P
I had an idea just now, talking to my roommate. In physics they say there are lots more than three dimensions. Something like seventeen. And you could imagine them like sheets of paper, folded up around each other into a ball. If I were feeling more like a Buddhist I might suggest a lotus.
If you think about it, you and I--though we’re vastly separated by distance--are also co-incident at a particular point in time. So in one dimension, time, we overlap. I think that the place where we overlap is God. Whatever that is. It’s that unity that is whatever is divine in the universe.
The three dimensions that we experience, this whole world we live in, is a product of our division from the universe’s natural equilibrium. We exist in the place that is separate from God. The whole of our lives are spent struggling and searching for God, yet we are already God, whatever that is. Kinda funny.
I’m really doing a terrible job of explaining all of this. I’ve had about a million ideas about this in the last few hours, so they’re all cooking up in my brain. Right now I’ve got lots of chopped carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, and beef floating around, but it’s not quite a stew yet. So bear with me a bit as I fumble around here.
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, is always increasing in the universe. Yet at the same time, another phenomenon, evolution, is gradually increasing order in the universe. The entire universe takes the path of least resistance to the state of lowest possible energy. Except us.
By us, I mean life, this strange and bizarre collection of self-replicating chemical structures that’s led up to me typing a letter to you, a person I barely know who lives hundreds of miles away about the things most near and dear to our hearts. We go through such great lengths to be alive, to find our place in the universe. It’s such a struggle, we’re always fighting against the gradual tide of disorder that’s washing over the entire universe.
But before you go calling the suicide squad for me, consider this: What if time actually moves backwards? The direction we’re going now leads to nowhere. The gradual heat death and dissolution of the universe? Not my cup of tea.
But if time is running backwards, then all of the universe is gradually ordering itself up, and returning to the moment of its creation, which is also the moment that it disappears. The universe is returning to unity, to god.
I imagine the two forces, order and disorder like two rivers that flow into each other from opposite directions. Our lives happen in the turbulent intersection between the two streams. Our choices are the randomness, the turbulence that happens between the order and the chaos. We exist at the boundary of the two.
As living things we have the power to see things in the future and in the past, and we have the unique ability to bring things from both of those worlds into the present moment. Like this e-mail, for instance, is really nothing more than a record of my finger movements. Ideas from the future and the past are captured in language through abstraction--the one defining trait of humanity--and recorded on this computer in a virtual letter I’m sending to you.
The funny thing is that the computer itself is a metaphor. When we move a mouse or type on the keyboard, we employ a metaphor. We have to. The thing that is your computer, and the immense complexity of the device itself (Mine’s doing *BILLIONS* of calculations a second!) is far beyond the understanding of anyone who doesn’t have a computer science degree, The genius of Windows is that it allows you to use the metaphor of a desktop to control the behaviour of a vastly complex system in a simple intuitive way.
The interesting thing is that all of life is made up of these metaphors. When I say the word “jar,” I could easily point to the same thing and say “glass” (to mean the material its made out of) or “container” (a thing which holds other things,) Each of those words is equally valid to describe that object. The fact is that the whatever-you-call-it exists as all of those things at the same time. Imagine a cloud. We can all point to a cloud, and we all know that they exist, but could you ever draw a line around one? The cloud is at the same time a cloud, but also just air that happened to have a certain temperature, humidity and pressure. Clouds form, quite literally, out of thin air. But because it facilitates communication and allows us to conceive a mental picture of the world, we use the signifier “cloud” to represent the concept.
How does all of this relate back to religion? It has to do with how we define ourselves, and the matter of our own existence. I believe that we are a lot like clouds.
But, let me go back to the metaphor of the two rivers flowing against each other. Grant me that time moves backwards, which is a leap, but no more of a leap than to say that time flows forwards. It’ll be interesting.
If the natural progression of the universe is moving towards chaos and disorder, towards things un-existing. Then our struggle against that current is our struggle against unity with god. I said before, we have to struggle to stay alive, and we do. Every gulp of air could be our last. Each sip of water is necessary to keep us going. We exercise muscles constantly to breathe, and the heart is like a runner in a marathon with no finish line. Just keep going till you can’t go no more. When you can’t go more you let go, stop existing and begin flowing backwards through time again towards the single point that is complete harmony and equilibrium with the universe. Back towards God.
What I’m beginning to think now is that we should just let go of this world before our lives are over. It’s possible to just let go completely. Budhists do it through meditation, but there are other ways to get there, I’m sure. As long as your heart is pure, you are on the path. But when meditating, you can achieve the state of unbeing. Remove yourself from existence and return to the pure flow of the universe backwards through time to the moment before. When all was one, and there was no separation between the things on this earth.
All souls go only one place. All people reach enlightenment before they die. We can let go of this universe, this being, this separation from god. We can lose the entire world.
And I know you’re thinking “This guy is going to kill himself.” But that’s not at all where I’m going with this. Suicide is not releasing yourself to the flow of the universe it’s being so enraptured by your own ego that you believe you can end your own existence through force.
If I kill myself I haven’t let go of the universe, I’m actually holding on to it so tight that I think that by ending my physical existence I will end the universe.
No such luck, though. Bung it up this time and you’ve just got to go back to the beginning. It’s like a game of snakes and ladders, everyone will eventually get to the top. Suicide’s just an extra long snake that drops you back before where you started.
Okay so I’ve dropped a heavy load on you there. I would have given up reading by now I think, but you’ve made it this far (if you’re reading this) so thanks for sticking around.
I think I’m going to post this on the blog ‘cause it really sums up a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the past four or five months quite concisely. Well, concisely considering the weighty subject matter anyway.
I never did have a cottage on Peggy’s cove. It’s out on the east coast and cottaging is more of a central-canada thing, I think. My family lived outside of the country a lot, so we never bought cottage.
Oh and as far of the type of songs I write you can download two I just recorded last week:
How Can I Make This Any Clearer – http://www.awesomejumbo.com/anyclearer.mp3
Kinda Strange – http://www.awesomejumbo.com/kindastrange.mp3
They’re just made-in-my-living-room demos so they’re rough. But let me know what you think!
Okay have a good night, I hope that you’re interested by all of this and that you will share some of your insights as well. And if you see any connections in what I’m saying to any cool stuff that you’ve learned about, do tell! I’m sure you can see that I’m pretty enthusiastic about this stuff. I'm terrifically excited to have a chance to have these sorts of dialogues.
May your heart's beauty shine through all that you do,
-Trevor
(Comments take a few minutes to appear!)
This is terrific! I’m so excited to talk to someone who actually knows something about religions. I suffer from what I call “the great doubt,” which is to say I know that I know nothing. I think most people don’t really give the question the thought that it deserves. And don’t worry, you haven’t told me one tenth of what I want to know about Gnosticism, lol. I’m seriously interested in all of this.
Isn’t it funny that we spend all of this time apologizing for discussing our faith. I think the extremists out there have almost made religion a bad word. But then, maybe it’s our wholesale repression of religion that has created the extremists? There’s some element of conscience that’s missing from our activities at the international level. I have this personal theory that our society is just the human mind writ large. Could religion be the missing element?
I think it’s safe to say that most people believe there are serious problems in our society, in terms of the whole geopolitical thing and the exploitation of developing nations. And I think that people have a very strong sense that there is a great moral imbalance in our society. And because our society’s survival is dependent upon that moral and economic imbalance, we have to suppress our natural instinct to help our fellow man in order to keep the status quo. Since religions (at least any worth shaking a stick at) are all about being nice to people and generally trying to help everyone along, it’s no surprise that we’re squelching religion. And with that kind of mass repression happening, it’s no wonder that people are turning to extremism.
They *know* something is wrong, it’s staring them right in the face everyday. But the mainstream media can not, and will not show people the truth. Their success is dependent upon an audience that feels great about themselves, so that the advertisers can hawk their wares most effectively. So people are seeing on television images from CNN of absolute chaos and destruction, deaths by the thousands and mass hunger and strife. But then at the end of the clip, everyone is reassured that this is democracy at work, and these are people who are happy and free. And people believe what they see because they have to, because the alternative is so horrifying, so terrible that it is not to be believed. That or they believe even more horrible things that a fanatic tells them, just to escape the feeling of personal responsibility.
So no wonder we’re all messed up.
Crap, I apologize for going on about this sort of thing. I tend to get carried away by these kinds of ideas. But I’m getting the impression that you don’t mind, so I’m just going to go right ahead anyway. :-P
I had an idea just now, talking to my roommate. In physics they say there are lots more than three dimensions. Something like seventeen. And you could imagine them like sheets of paper, folded up around each other into a ball. If I were feeling more like a Buddhist I might suggest a lotus.
If you think about it, you and I--though we’re vastly separated by distance--are also co-incident at a particular point in time. So in one dimension, time, we overlap. I think that the place where we overlap is God. Whatever that is. It’s that unity that is whatever is divine in the universe.
The three dimensions that we experience, this whole world we live in, is a product of our division from the universe’s natural equilibrium. We exist in the place that is separate from God. The whole of our lives are spent struggling and searching for God, yet we are already God, whatever that is. Kinda funny.
I’m really doing a terrible job of explaining all of this. I’ve had about a million ideas about this in the last few hours, so they’re all cooking up in my brain. Right now I’ve got lots of chopped carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, and beef floating around, but it’s not quite a stew yet. So bear with me a bit as I fumble around here.
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, is always increasing in the universe. Yet at the same time, another phenomenon, evolution, is gradually increasing order in the universe. The entire universe takes the path of least resistance to the state of lowest possible energy. Except us.
By us, I mean life, this strange and bizarre collection of self-replicating chemical structures that’s led up to me typing a letter to you, a person I barely know who lives hundreds of miles away about the things most near and dear to our hearts. We go through such great lengths to be alive, to find our place in the universe. It’s such a struggle, we’re always fighting against the gradual tide of disorder that’s washing over the entire universe.
But before you go calling the suicide squad for me, consider this: What if time actually moves backwards? The direction we’re going now leads to nowhere. The gradual heat death and dissolution of the universe? Not my cup of tea.
But if time is running backwards, then all of the universe is gradually ordering itself up, and returning to the moment of its creation, which is also the moment that it disappears. The universe is returning to unity, to god.
I imagine the two forces, order and disorder like two rivers that flow into each other from opposite directions. Our lives happen in the turbulent intersection between the two streams. Our choices are the randomness, the turbulence that happens between the order and the chaos. We exist at the boundary of the two.
As living things we have the power to see things in the future and in the past, and we have the unique ability to bring things from both of those worlds into the present moment. Like this e-mail, for instance, is really nothing more than a record of my finger movements. Ideas from the future and the past are captured in language through abstraction--the one defining trait of humanity--and recorded on this computer in a virtual letter I’m sending to you.
The funny thing is that the computer itself is a metaphor. When we move a mouse or type on the keyboard, we employ a metaphor. We have to. The thing that is your computer, and the immense complexity of the device itself (Mine’s doing *BILLIONS* of calculations a second!) is far beyond the understanding of anyone who doesn’t have a computer science degree, The genius of Windows is that it allows you to use the metaphor of a desktop to control the behaviour of a vastly complex system in a simple intuitive way.
The interesting thing is that all of life is made up of these metaphors. When I say the word “jar,” I could easily point to the same thing and say “glass” (to mean the material its made out of) or “container” (a thing which holds other things,) Each of those words is equally valid to describe that object. The fact is that the whatever-you-call-it exists as all of those things at the same time. Imagine a cloud. We can all point to a cloud, and we all know that they exist, but could you ever draw a line around one? The cloud is at the same time a cloud, but also just air that happened to have a certain temperature, humidity and pressure. Clouds form, quite literally, out of thin air. But because it facilitates communication and allows us to conceive a mental picture of the world, we use the signifier “cloud” to represent the concept.
How does all of this relate back to religion? It has to do with how we define ourselves, and the matter of our own existence. I believe that we are a lot like clouds.
But, let me go back to the metaphor of the two rivers flowing against each other. Grant me that time moves backwards, which is a leap, but no more of a leap than to say that time flows forwards. It’ll be interesting.
If the natural progression of the universe is moving towards chaos and disorder, towards things un-existing. Then our struggle against that current is our struggle against unity with god. I said before, we have to struggle to stay alive, and we do. Every gulp of air could be our last. Each sip of water is necessary to keep us going. We exercise muscles constantly to breathe, and the heart is like a runner in a marathon with no finish line. Just keep going till you can’t go no more. When you can’t go more you let go, stop existing and begin flowing backwards through time again towards the single point that is complete harmony and equilibrium with the universe. Back towards God.
What I’m beginning to think now is that we should just let go of this world before our lives are over. It’s possible to just let go completely. Budhists do it through meditation, but there are other ways to get there, I’m sure. As long as your heart is pure, you are on the path. But when meditating, you can achieve the state of unbeing. Remove yourself from existence and return to the pure flow of the universe backwards through time to the moment before. When all was one, and there was no separation between the things on this earth.
All souls go only one place. All people reach enlightenment before they die. We can let go of this universe, this being, this separation from god. We can lose the entire world.
And I know you’re thinking “This guy is going to kill himself.” But that’s not at all where I’m going with this. Suicide is not releasing yourself to the flow of the universe it’s being so enraptured by your own ego that you believe you can end your own existence through force.
If I kill myself I haven’t let go of the universe, I’m actually holding on to it so tight that I think that by ending my physical existence I will end the universe.
No such luck, though. Bung it up this time and you’ve just got to go back to the beginning. It’s like a game of snakes and ladders, everyone will eventually get to the top. Suicide’s just an extra long snake that drops you back before where you started.
Okay so I’ve dropped a heavy load on you there. I would have given up reading by now I think, but you’ve made it this far (if you’re reading this) so thanks for sticking around.
I think I’m going to post this on the blog ‘cause it really sums up a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the past four or five months quite concisely. Well, concisely considering the weighty subject matter anyway.
I never did have a cottage on Peggy’s cove. It’s out on the east coast and cottaging is more of a central-canada thing, I think. My family lived outside of the country a lot, so we never bought cottage.
Oh and as far of the type of songs I write you can download two I just recorded last week:
How Can I Make This Any Clearer – http://www.awesomejumbo.com/anyclearer.mp3
Kinda Strange – http://www.awesomejumbo.com/kindastrange.mp3
They’re just made-in-my-living-room demos so they’re rough. But let me know what you think!
Okay have a good night, I hope that you’re interested by all of this and that you will share some of your insights as well. And if you see any connections in what I’m saying to any cool stuff that you’ve learned about, do tell! I’m sure you can see that I’m pretty enthusiastic about this stuff. I'm terrifically excited to have a chance to have these sorts of dialogues.
May your heart's beauty shine through all that you do,
-Trevor
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