Why I keep blogging these Lenten posts – Lent 2025: Day 20

Blimey! Nearly three weeks into Lent and it's occurred to me that I haven't yet explained why I'm doing this series of Lenten posts on my blog! As usual, traffic is falling off (around 71,000 pageviews/month on Ash Wednesday, down to 41,000/month now). Why am I scuppering my regular readership to go off on a spiritual journey to the exclusion of my usual content?

AI generated image. Prompt: 'Preacher with Holy Book and Loaf of Bread'

Am I trying to convert people to my way of thinking? No, not really. You either hold that there's a Divine purpose to our lives, to the Universe, or you don't. If you don't – well, that doesn't make you a bad person per se. I'm not out to turn atheists into believers. Neither do I intend to proselytise Christians or followers of other faiths to abandon them for a different spiritual outlook, one that's couched in language closer to the scientific paradigm. 

{{ Anyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. }} Since that intuition entered my consciousness one summer's night in 2021, I've made this a central tenet of my faith.

I'm writing these posts primarily for myself. So that once a year at this time I can confront my beliefs, so I can ask myself the questions that I consider fundamental to life, and that over the years I can return to these posts to see how my thinking has shifted, what new factors have influenced the way I see these spiritual matters, and most importantly – how it has become more nuanced over time. 

This is why each day there are links to the same day of Lent over the previous five years. I re-read past posts; they inspire, they suggest, they set off new thoughts and new ways of looking at old questions.

Though the posts are for a future me, they are also intended to spark thoughts and initiate discussion among readers who find this type of content interesting; if you are among them and you find some area of inquiry here worthy of comment, please do so, or drop me an email. Or mention it when we meet.

Counting pageviews is an ego thing. Reviewing my personal philosophy and approach to life on an annual basis is far more worthwhile.

Lent 2024: Day 20
Do we have Free Will? (Pt IV)

Lent 2023, Day 20
Practical uses of intuition

Lent 2022: Day 20
Free will, consciousness and determinism

Lent 2021: Day 20
No, but who are you really?

Lent 2020: Day 20
Applying Occam's Razor to your religion

Wisdom and the future – Lent 2025: Day 19

"With foresight, I should have done – " Well, what? What should you have done? Done something different, I presume. Or done nothing and left events to take their own course. But how would that have worked out? How often do we make decisions – choice of studies, choice of partner, choice of career – on the basis of incomplete data? Our inability to see into the future means that we live our lives like the driver of a car with no windscreen, steering only by what we see in the rear-view mirrors and out of the side windows. Moving forward without data as to what lies directly in our path. We can only posit the the future on the basis of the recent past.

As I grow older, I am increasingly struck by the singular lack of public intellectuals that Get Things Right about the future. Whether its in politics, economics or science, even the brightest minds tend to overshoot and exaggerate or underestimate what happens next. (Clickbaitism emphasises this effect. Videos entitled "Why [insert name of country]'s economy is about to collapse" attract more viewers than "Why [insert name of country]'s economy is about to experience a mild market correction".)

We are, said biologist Michael Levin, "self-justifying apes". We all get things wrong. And then, after the fact, the winner is not so much the person who got it least wrong, but the person with the best justification for their prediction.

Here I'd like to touch on the role of intuition in guiding us towards the future. All the intellects on earth, all the analytical powers, can sift through potential scenarios; they can work through the known knowns, the known unknowns and guess the unknown unknowns – and still get it wrong. Even aided with AI, which can scrape all the data there is and feed back from it, but it cannot feed forward. Here's Imagen 3.0 AI, when prompted to draw a cartoon about the pitfalls of trying to predict the future.

But if one is open to the power of intuition, a inspired glimpse into the future can prove as accurate as that a forecast based on pure analysis.

Given the bind that theoretical science is currently in, as the physicalist/reductionist/materialist paradigm runs out of road, it would make sense to look more deeply at the role of intuition in forecasting our future.

The key thing: don't overthink it – intuit it.

Lent 2024: Day 19
Do we have Free Will (Pt III)

Lent 2023, Day 19
Intuition and Superstition

Lent 2022: Day 19
Between Randomness and Cause

Lent 2021: Day 19
Pleasure and Self-Denial

Lent 2020: Day 19
Balancing the Spiritual with the Material

Science, spirituality and religion (Pt II) – Lent 2025: Day 18

All religions have their creation myths; their explainers about how the earth, the heavens, and we humans came about. All these myths posit the notion of some creator beings that set the whole process in motion. Religions, like genes, like memes, are subject to evolution, the survival of the fittest. Stronger religions have displaced ones less well adapted to evolving societies. Christianity has evolved and mutated into forms that the founders of the early Church wouldn't recognise. 

Out of many texts written in the first century AD about the life and times of Jesus Christ, many fell by the wayside, dismissed as apocrypha or even as heretical. A canon of 27 books (four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St Paul and the Book of Revelations) constitutes the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

The question is: how should a Christian approach the Bible (Old Testament and New) – as literally being the word of God? As a metaphor? Or viewing the texts through the prism of metaphysics?

Literal interpretation holds that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It asserts that as such, the texts should only be interpreted according to their plain meaning. This approach stresses the Bible's historical accuracy and scientific precision (the world was indeed created over the space of six days). Metaphorical or symbolic interpretations are rejected as heresies, because the Bible – being the word of God – contains no errors or contradictions. Everything is simple; read, believe – don't question.

Metaphorical interpretation sees the Bible as containing spiritual truths often expressed through metaphors, allegories or symbols. This approach focuses on the deeper religious significance of the texts, rather than their literal meaning. Biblical stories are there for us to interpret them for their moral and theological lessons. This approach allows for greater flexibility in interpreting the Bible, but it can also lead to subjective interpretations (In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the misheard saying "blessed are the cheesemakers" is "not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products". )

Metaphysical interpretation (and this is my position) is to understand the Bible (and indeed any religion's holy texts) by seeking the deeper spiritual and philosophical implications in a search for universal spiritual truths and commonalities. This approach allows the seeker to explore the nature of God, humanity and the universe by drawing on philosophical and mystical traditions to interpret holy texts. This offers profound insights into their spiritual dimensions, but may also diverge significantly from traditional interpretations. 

Many Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guides their understanding of the Bible, and that the Holy Spirit was there inspiring the original authors, and the church fathers who set the canon and edited subsequent translations and versions of the Bible over time. This notion squares with my view that intuition is of great importance in guiding one's spiritual journey.

Confronting the God of the Gaps

[Cartoon by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0. Prompt: "Confronting the God of the Gaps"]

So. As science unfolded from its cradle, more and more of the phenomena that touch our day-to-day lives became understood. Lightning, volcanism, infectious disease, one by one, these became processes explainable through testable hypotheses, proved through repeatable experiments. The scientific method pushed back the need for God as an explanation for the unexplainable. If, in 1641 Descarte uncoupled the physical world from the spiritual world, by 1882 Nietzsche had declared the spiritual world non-existent. There is nothing but matter. Matter is all, all is matter. And Darwin proved we came from the apes, rather than from Adam. 

In such an intellectual environment, taking the Bible literally is no longer a tenable position. For instance Genesis 1:1 suggests that God created grass and fruit (on the third day) before filling the heavens with stars (on the fourth day). Examples like this are enough to prove to militant atheists that all human spirituality is wrong, rather than just taking the literal approach to religious texts is wrong. Literal interpretation has been discredited by advances in scientific knowledge – human spirituality has not. As one Jewish comedian observed, Leviticus should have written: "Ye shall not eat of the swine – at least, not until ye hath invented the refrigerator".

Sticking to metaphysical interpretation of holy texts, drawing on mystical traditions, cross-referring them in the search for commonalities, common factors that unite rather than divide religions, is far more fruitful than sticking rigidly to the literal interpretations. In stating this, I draw the ire of religious fundamentalists and militant atheists.

Lent 2024: Day 18
Do we have Free Will? (Pt II)

Lent 2023, Day 18
Intuition, Consciousness and the Physical Universe

Lent 2022: Day 18
Zen in the Art of Meditation

Lent 2021: Day 18
Possibilianism

Lent 2020: Day 18
Teetering on the Edge of Chaos

Science, spirituality and religion (Pt I) – Lent 2025: Day 17

How do we explain our world? Today, we do it with science. Rationally. Reality is based on matter – matter, made of atoms, atoms that obey the laws of physics. All can be explained this way. At the base – there's physics. On top of that – chemistry. And then on top of that – biology, with us humans, at the apex. Cause and effect. All neatly packaged, everything explainable.

Yet science as we know it today might not have all the answers; reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity, or explaining dark matter and dark energy – these increasingly seem like intractable problems. The past 40 years of particle physics has yielded little more than confirming the existence of the Higgs boson. String theory has got nowhere, as have efforts to quantise gravity. And what's beyond the Standard Model? Don't know. What was before Big Bang? We don't know that either. And consciousness remains a deep mystery for science and philosophy. But will we ever know?

Here's AI's attempt to explain what was before the Big Bang. (Quite interesting, if you look closely. Multiverses? Fake universes?)

To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, there are only three scenarios for science: 1) There really is a complete unified theory of everything, which we're bound to discover in due course. 2) There is no one ultimate theory of the universe – just an infinite sequence of theories that will describe the universe ever more accurately. 3) We are destined never to know for certain.

What if it's scenario 3? 

Science has been on a roll since Newton and Leibniz began the process at the end of the 17th century, shaping a deterministic reality in which (in theory) everything can be predicted with mathematical formulae. Yet ever since the discovery of quantum mechanics, doubt has started to creep into the scientistic world view. How can the cat be dead and alive at the same time? How do we interpret wave/particle duality? How do we reconcile classic physics with the quantum world? Cosmology, too, has sown doubt in the minds of science. What is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate?  How will the universe end? In heat-death? Or a Big Crunch? Will we ever know?

Maybe we need something more than science to explain the ultimate mysteries at the heart of the existence of the universe. Could it be Consciousness? Could that consciousness be what Homo sapiens has for thousands of years called God? 

Tomorrow: the religious narratives. 

Lent 2024: Day 17
Do we have Free Will (Pt I)

Lent 2023, Day 17
Intuition, Precognition, Divination

Lent 2022: Day 17
Defining God

Lent 2021: Day 17
Karma - more than just social control?

Lent 2020: Day 17
Religion and Feeling Good

Intuition, the secret power of your consciousness – Lent 2025: Day 16

Our current scientific paradigm, based on the notion that everything in the Cosmos is based on matter,  rejects the idea of intuition as a sixth sense outside of the five connected to sensory organs – sight, hearing, taste, smell and hearing. Yet most people will to some degree accept intuition on the basis of what they have personally experienced.

Often mistaken for instinct, intuition is something different. Instinct is set of behaviours, innate and learned, that an organism carries out unconsciously in response to external conditions. Blinking, recoiling, shielding one's face, reaching out to grab – these are instincts. Watching a cat as it sit perched on the window ledge, watching the ground below. Its attention is fully focused on detecting movement in the undergrowth that could signal the presence of prey. The cat's ears swivel independently of one another; one rotates clockwise by ten degrees, the other anti-clockwise by 45 degrees, at the same time. This happened instinctively. The ears are not guided by the brain, but respond reflexively to external stimuli. 

Intuition is also different to thought or cognition. Thought is a process; intuitions come instantaneously. Intuition is a sense of knowing something without the act of reasoning. Intuition involves accessing information or insights that are not immediately apparent through logical thought. And now it's time to dive into the speculative: is intuition proof of non-local consciousness? It implies a interconnectedness of minds and potentially access to information that's not limited by space and time. And this implies magic; intending a physical effect without a physical cause. 

Now, is it something that we can tap into if we are open to it? Are some people gifted with greater intuitive powers than others? Or can we develop our intuition through practice and exercise?

Below: How Google Imagen 3.0 sees the difference... The AI must have learnt from somewhere that "hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain."

Again, I return to my analogy about laptops. It's a very useful analogy. One laptop is fully-featured, has huge processing power and a vast hard drive, but stands alone. The other has a weaker processor and little read-only memory, but unlike the first is connected to the internet via wifi. Which laptop is more useful?

And further questions... As humanity makes the leap to being a technological species, are our intuitive powers losing out to our highly trained cognitive skills? Has our intuition atrophied during our evolution from hunter-gatherers?

Lent 2024: Day 16
Do we tend to get more spiritual as we get older?

Lent 2023, Day 16
Intuition – is it magical?

Lent 2022: Day 16
The difficulties of focusing on the spiritual

Lent 2021: Day 16
This planet is my home, today and tomorrow

Lent 2020: Day 16
My metaphysical journey, as I see it

Ego's journey through human life – Lent 2025: Day 15

As I age, the flame of my ego turns down from a 7 to a 3; then on towards a 1 before it is inexorably extinguished. Yet the flame of my consciousness grows in strength from year to year, along with my understanding of reality. And with age I grow in wisdom. Whilst the ego is visible to all (boastfulness, garrulousness, displays of status symbols), consciousness is silent and unseen.

In childhood I was both they highly conscious mądry Michaś and at the same time the rather silly, ego-driven głupi Michaś. Now, while 'głupi Michaś' would occasionally do or say stupid things – głupi Michaś rarely had the upper hand. When left to his own devices, it was 'mądry Michaś' that was in charge, spending time playing, observing, reading, pondering, playing, imagining, experiencing, thinking, playing, watching the clouds – feeling what it is to be alive – again. 

In adolescence, however, that conscious, wise, self was almost entirely pushed aside by testosterone-fuelled ego. Yet the wise self clung on somehow. In adulthood, it crept back gradually, pushing away the folly of youth. Mądry Michał finally emerged triumphant, around the time I reached the age of maturity, which I now recognise as being 65. But this very statement smacks of boastfulness, which suggests that the ego is still lurking there in the mix. It is hard to shed one's ego totally. Mindfulness helps.

The human condition

Whether you are a physicalist (everything is matter) or an idealist (consciousness is fundamental), the truth is that your biological body is subject to entropy, just like everything else composed of matter. It is the ultimate destiny of all matter is to break back down into random particles. To the physicalist/materialist (I use the terms interchangeably) who considers consciousness to be a mere product of neuronal activity, the process of ageing is tragic. One's youth fades, one's strength ebbs, and all that there's to look forward to is decay, suffering and oblivion.

Yet Consciousness abides. It does! I feel certain of it. Consciousness was there at the beginning, willing there to be Something rather than Nothing. Consciousness will be there after the end of all matter. And it is present everywhere. It survives matter. It survives entropy. Grasp this, and ageing, and what comes after – death – hold no fear. 

I asked Google Gemini's Imagen 3.0 to create an illustration in the Arts & Crafts style entitled The Human Condition. Rather nice, don't you think?

And the same title, this time in Mid-Century Modern style. Isolation and materialism have taken over. "I am no longer part of a community, but I have things."

Lent 2024: Day 15
Aligning Prayer with Cosmic Purpose

Lent 2023, Day 15
Intuition and instinct

Lent 2022: Day 15

Religious belief, practice, inquiry and experience

Lent 2021: Day 15
The Afterlife - Faith and Doubt

Lent 2020: Day 15
Rites and Rituals

Ego, consciousness and Time: Lent 2024: Day 14

One analogy: your body is the car, the driver is your ego, your consciousness is the passenger, observing the journey as it unfolds. You consciousness knows where it wants to go; the driver, however, is erratic, speeding, showing off. After many wrong turns and traffic violations, the destination draws nearer, the driver has settled in and no longer feels the need to rush; the passenger is now contented and finds joy in the passing scenery.

How does Google Gemini Imagen 3.0 see ego and consciousness? An definite east-west split here!

Whilst we need to separate out the ego from consciousness, the ego is not ethically bad per se, it just has a tendency to boastfulness, cutting corners with the truth, and focused on acquisition of material goods. Some of which are needed for a comfortable life, but others, more luxurious than necessary, being used as status symbols.

The ego is an important aspect to our personalities. It's a suit-and-mask ensemble worn by the biological self. needed for establishing our place in the pecking order. It is needed for mating; it is needed for getting on financially. Ego is primarily motivated by our need for status. This is natural; we are, after all, mammals, and hierarchy is inherent in mammalian groups. 

Meanwhile, our consciousness is there in background, observing and feeling. Cringing at times at what the ego is up to. Representing nobler sentiments.

Your consciousness is the real you; your ego but an artifact you forge. It is the suit of armour your biological self dons to protect you against the buffeting you'll get from society, at school, at work, socially. Ego can lead you to acts of folly, but also to build a positive public persona. Whoever regularly speaks publicly will know that. (My ego was delighted that six people who left an opinion on our webinar today all gave five stars – and my ego is keen to share that fact with you.)

But in general, the older one gets, the need for the ego recedes. Materially comfortable, folk who are still chasing ever-greater fortunes to live in ever-greater luxury as they approach old age are the spiritually hollow. 

The maturing of the soul over this lifetime is an important aim. Yet I'd argue that one lifetime is nowhere near enough for this process to reach fruition. If you can accept the idea that our biological selves are only containers for our immortal consciousness, then it's possible to envisage the process of spiritual evolution as spanning many lifetimes (in this regard, I am more aligned in my thinking about reincarnation with Hinduism than with Buddhism). This places my view of time as traditionally linear; the arc of progress from imperfect past towards a perfect future, in incremental improvements.

And finally an intuition that came to me on a walk a few days ago:
{{  Never show off what you know. Share what you know.  }}

Lent 2024: Day 14
Emergence and Complexity vs. Entropy and Chaos: Good vs. Evil?

Lent 2023, Day 14
The appeal of mystic traditions

Lent 2022: Day 14
Between Serendipity and Proactiveness

Lent 2021: Day 14
Prayer

Lent 2020: Day 14
Choose the music for your religion

You, your consciousness and Time – Day 13

Time ticks away, marked by an increase in entropy (things breaking down, falling apart, rotting, rusting) but also by an increase in syntropy (new life coming into being, new stars and galaxies forming, awareness growing all the while).

If you accept that Consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, from which space, time, matter and energy derive, then it becomes far easier to accept that your small-c consciousness is eternal.

The theological question, then, is to define the word 'your'. Pure consciousness, untainted by ego, the driving force behind our quest for status. The pure consciousness of subjective experience, of being in the moment, unmotivated by any material plans, just being aware of existence. Your consciousness is not boastful, it seeks not status; it observes, it feels. 

The discrete units of consciousness are qualia, defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. We live them – but do we notice them? Do those moments imprint themselves upon our memory? 

Memory is our past living on in the present. Indeed, the past that exists in the present does so solely through memory. And our memory is far from perfect. Our memories of events are analogue, rather than digital. They get coloured and mutate in the retelling. The ones that evince positive responses from the listener are kept, the ones that fail to impress are forgotten. As the ego-storyteller retells the story to ever-greater effect with each retelling, the boring bits are skipped, and the focus is on the wow! moments, that tend to aggrandise the storyteller's ego. 

But qualia flashbacks are different; they remain constant. Your ego wasn't involved; you were just the conscious observer. Qualia memories – not of events but of instants of being – do not fade, do not transmute. They feel as real as they did when you originally experienced them. The memories snap you right back into the moment. They may be experienced weakly, like a déjà vu, but they're absolutely genuine. They do not change in the retelling, because they are never retold, they are refelt. 

PAFF! I felt one just now, preparing lunch – a flashback from childhood; reading Look and Learn magazine on the sitting-room floor; an advertisement for a Scalextric model car racing track. The feel of the dark-green carpet; sunlight streaming in from the window; cooking smells. Cosy, happy, engaged in my imagination. Qualia flashbacks such as this can be conjured up from memory, but more likely they're triggered by sensory inputs such as light, sound (music), smell, taste or feel.

If consciousness is syntropic, defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it would suggest that qualia memories could be eternal, borne into Cosmos – by who knows what mechanism – into the Akashic record, to be replayed within a different biological container's mind at a later date. As triggered or unbidden anomalous qualia memory flashbacks or else in dreams. 

And now onto the questions. The anomalous qualia memories that are clearly not those experienced by my current biological self. They come from another place, another time, and experienced by a different biological self – and yet feel as real as qualia memories that I can put a finger on.

The experience is real, it's genuine, I've had this since childhood, it is my quest to learn more about these anomalous qualia memories, exomnesia or xenomnesia (memories from outside, or foreign memories). Can these be scientifically explained? If so, what is the vector? Some as-yet-undiscovered field of consciousness? Or is searching for scientific explanations essentially futile – the answer being metaphysical in nature? 

Tomorrow: more about the Ego

Lent 2024: Day 13 
Aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics

Lent 2023, Day 13
High Church and Low: Religious Styles and Personality

Lent 2022: Day 13
Comfort and Luxury, Consciousness and Ego

Lent 2021: Day 13
Comfort and Luxury – knowing when to stop

Lent 2020: Day 13
Holy buildings and the sense of the mystical