What really counts

It matters little where you were born, and to whom, and how you were educated. What really counts is your awareness of being aware. Consciousness, metaconsciousness, observation; sensitivity to the sights and sounds and smells around you. Absorbing the qualia of existence. Consciously being. And being curious. Needing to know why there's something rather than nothing; what is the purpose of existence; where it's all heading – and why. The Great Unfolding that you and I are a part of. 

Live – observe – learn – seek... and testify.

Read broadly and discuss; adapt and adopt, find your own path, neither follow nor seek to lead but walk alongside your fellows, sharing observations, experience, insights and moments of awareness.

Memory, familiarity and preference – clues to consciousness before. Before this time. Can you recall the experience of emerging from the oceans onto a sunny beach? Lobefins, trilobites, dry land with giant horsetail ferns and the sky filled with dragonflies with three-foot wingspans. Walking on all fours. Eventually learning to walk upright and understanding the advantage that conferred in the Savannah. Biological evolution – its purpose, its teleology – lies in spiritual evolution, as our souls (or consciousnesses) connect ethereally with the flow of the Universe. Life after life after life.

What about the ego? Does that count, or is consciousness all? One can't dismiss the ego. If I am to be honest, my ego also plays a part in my blogging. I care about who reads my posts, and what they think of it. I'd be dishonest if I were to say that my ego has no part in my creativity.

********

Below: upon my way I came across tracks of wild boar – several individuals. I followed the tracks along the sandy farm track until they disappeared – through this gap in the chain-link fence. Evidently a long-established route for local wildlife (I daresay it's also used by hares too). But should the farmer patch up the fence, what will the boars do then? Burrow under and enlarge the hole through frequency and numbers?

Determination. Life will find a way. DNA.

This time four years ago:
Pfizered for the second time
[I didn't have a third jab. Would it have spared me from Covid, which I caught two and half years later? Or would I have had a more mild form of it – it wasn't that bad anyway, neither severe nor acute nor respiratory in nature – just long and tiresome.]

This time six years ago:
Another railway bridge over Puławska is replaced

This time 11 years ago:
Thoughts about life occasioned by the birth of kittens

This time 13 years ago:
Waiting for the footbridge on Puławska

This time 14 years ago:
Lost in the wonder of it all

This time 15 years ago:
Bicycle review

This time 16 years ago:
A Celebration of the Garden

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

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

The question of good and evil in the world has been challenging philosophers since the beginning of recorded history; how can a good God allow so much suffering? How do I understand good and evil? 

I had a go at answering this question exactly nine years ago (discovered by chance when I linked the dream-inspired short story I posted earlier today to it). I can see where my thinking on the question remains similar, and where it differs.

The death of Rysiek from cancer – a good man with a healthy lifestyle and no vices, leaving three young children, just before Christmas – clarified the way I perceive God, as I wrote late last year, 

What's changed little is that I see the Universe, and God, as a work in progress; an unfolding. Back in 2015, I wrote: "If the Universe is evolving spiritually towards perfection, it suggests that it is not, a yet, perfect; nor will it be perfect for many eons to come." I stand by that today. God is neither omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor omnipresent – but will be. The word here not only as the future tense of 'is', but in the meaning of intending something to happen. God intends to be. A teleological direction.

Also unchanged in my theology is the rejection of the idea that if there's a good God, there must also be an equal and opposite force of evil – Satan, the Devil. 

Today I am more inclined to see good and evil in terms of emergence and entropy. 

Let's start with entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy can be defined as a measure of the disorder present in a system, or how spread out and dissipated energy is in a process or system, energy that can no longer be used to do work. Organised structures break down. Leave a strawberry on your kitchen table long enough and it will turn to mush as the cells that form it break down. Leave an ice cube on your kitchen table at room temperature and it will soon melt into a pool of water that will eventually evaporate. From order to disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates an increase in entropy over time. The Universe is considered by many cosmologists to end in heat death, as one by one, the stars go out and the atoms that form matter cease of hold together. All the energy ends up homogeneously distributed; no more work can be extracted from any source. So that's entropy. It is entropy that dictates the direction of the arrow of time. That strawberry can never reconstitute itself from mush; at room temperature the water vapour that once was an ice cube will never go back to being an ice cube.

Yet despite that tendency for things to wind down, things are emerging. New life arises. New complexities evolve. After the Big Bang, we could have had a uniform Universe, with nothing in it other than randomly scattered hydrogen atoms. But no – we have an unfolding Universe of stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters; here on our planet we can see life all around us. We humans are developing ever-more complex societies; life is evolving everywhere in response to natural selection and the changing environment.

Good and evil. Consider the body of a dead Russian soldier, blown up by a shell while sent to attack well-prepared Ukrainian positions. What was once a sentient biological entity is now a collection of decomposing cells. Complexity that had emerged to live and breath and reproduce has been turned into useless matter, unable to do anything. Entropy. The man who sent this soldier to his death, to increase entropy in the system, the man who orders guided missile attacks on residential areas of Ukrainian cities, to kill, to maim – this is evil.

Consider the onset of spring (the past two days have been lovely in Jakubowizna). Warmth and sunlight, first butterflies, birdsong, tiny buds emerging on twigs, squirrels chasing each other in the high branches – emergence. Life from what had been for months cold, hard, dead earth. Emergence and complexity. Good.

Coming back to teleology – does complexity serve a purpose, or is it merely an accidental byproduct of random interactions? I intuitively believe that it does serve a purpose, and isn't random. That's for us to recognise, and be grateful for.

I wrote back in 2009 about the way our lives are forever balanced on the edge of chaos; we could consciously stay upright and keep moving on, or we could complacently put a foot wrong and tumble over the precipice. That constant dance between emergence and entropy can be seen in the inherent dynamism of existence; new complexity emerges all the time from seemingly chance interactions. And all complex life eventually succumbs to the ever-present tendency towards disorder. Our bodies die. Every living thing dies. But they leave a trace. And there's more to the Universe than biological life – there is consciousness, and there is the conscious will.

More tomorrow.

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

An Alternative Theology

The following thought occurred to me as I strolled towards Sułkowice today.

God does not exist. 

God did exist. 

God will exist. 

Let me explain...

Once upon a time, believed by scientific consensus to have been 13.8 billion years ago, God, the Cosmos, had reached the Fullness, the Apogee, the Completeness, the Finality. The Cosmos was Perfect. Everything in the Universe had been Achieved. The Total Awareness of All; God in All, All in God; the Cosmos bathed in unalloyed Love. All that there is to be Known and Understood is finally Known and Understood. There is nothing more to strive for…

…And at that precise moment …the Big Bang occurs.

The omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, loving God is no more. All that's left within the rapidly expanding ball of plasma are the beginnings of what would become a myriad particles polarised into existence - a myriad consciousnesses - all striving, once more, toward God. God, having been the Completeness, now becomes the Purpose, the Reason, the Relevance. Having picked itself up, the Cosmos knows its direction, and moves towards the Light…  

Think of God as a Work in Progress. Suffering, tragedy and evil can now be explained not by an indifferent and uncaring God, but by one that is simply - as yet - incomplete.

Having reached One, the Cosmos has been reset once more to Zero, and a new journey from Zero to One is now under way.

We are, scientifically speaking, 13.8 billion years along that road; during that time, stars and galaxies have formed; matter has coalesced into a spectrum of elements from which sentient life has come to be, absorbing and benefiting from the cosmic background consciousness that unobservably permeates the entire observable universe. This is the substrate upon which our individual consciousnesses exist and develop.

Fragments of the Unity of God are to be found across the Cosmos, each one growing once more, reaching out, gaining in understanding and wisdom, uniting, forming, reforming, amalgamating; sometimes erring, sometimes blundering, but slowly and inexorably moving onward towards that Cosmic moment of unity, of completeness, when God finally becomes omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. For the shortest fraction of a second. Indeed, for the shortest possible unit of time, the Planck time (5.4 x 10^-44 seconds, the time it takes a photon to cover one Planck length, which is 1.6 x 10^-35 metres). I feel this scientific concept needs to be woven into an integral part of our spiritual understanding - the material world of matter in spacetime, and the spiritual world of mind, consciousness, soul - are one.

The journey from Zero to One is not being supervised by a supreme deity and arbiter; we are all in the journey from Zero to One individually and together, striving to reach God-ness. Each in their own way, but each towards the one goal. Spiritual evolution, towards the perfection that is God.

The fact that I can posit and publish such a thought without fear of the Holy Inquisition shows that we are nearer to One than we once were. Over time, our thinking will become more refined, more nuanced, closer to God - but there's an eternity still to go. 

I believe in God in the same way that I believe a caterpillar will one day reach its fulfilment and become a butterfly.

This time last year:
From the Long Review of 2022, Pt IV

This time two years ago:
S2 tunnel under Ursynów opens

This time three years ago:
The first year of Covid-19

This time four years ago:
Last night in Ealing, twenty-teens
[A strangely prophetic post, suitably dream-like in quality]

This time five years ago:
The Day the World Didn't End

This time eight years ago:
Hybrid driving - the verdict

This time ten years ago:
Pitshanger Lane in the sun

This time 14 years ago:
Miserable, grey, wet London

This time 15 years ago:
Parrots in Ealing

This time 16 years ago:
Heathrow to Okęcie

How much spirituality do we need in our lives? Lent 2021, Day Seven

This is a perennial question for me, the need to balance one's life between the material and the spiritual. For many, there's no need for any deeper questioning of life's purpose, no desire to search for meaning or understanding, no desire to seek connection with the Eternal and Infinite, no longing for the Metaphysical, no spiritual quest. Life is focused on earning money and making our way in society.  Externally we may all look the same, but matters spiritual are deeply hidden. Intelligence isn't the clue here, nor is gregariousness; it is something intangible. It's about some people's strong urge to make sense of it all and to seek communion with the Eternal Sublime. How often though? How intense is that need?

Devout people may have daily rituals around prayer at set times. But how often do they genuinely feel that they have engaged in meaningful contact with the metaphysical? Some indeed will have, and do so frequently. But for others - the ritual brings comfort, rather than a genuine spiritual insight. Yet this is not about religion or being religious. Some go to church each week, but they do so because they feel that they should go, and be seen to go, rather than their church-going being an active form of seeking contact with God, regular a chance to enter a more exalted state.

Moments of true spiritual enlightenment are rare in our lives, even if we seek them through meditation or prayer. Some times, some places are more conducive to such activities than others.

The corralling of human spiritual needs into one day of the week, one day in seven - the Lord's Day, the Sabbath - is predicated by our lunar calendar. That's why it's one-seventh. The Judeo-Christian God made the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Literally? Metaphorically? Or mystically? On other planets inhabited by sentient life-forms, the calendar might look quite different, so the Biblical notion of one in seven is hardly a Universal constant. 

For me there is no set time of the week other than at the setting of the sun, and rarely (as I'm an owl rather than a lark), at its rising. The disappearance of the sun over the horizon is always a spiritual moment; it induces an awareness that I'm standing on a planet that spinning backward away from our neighbouring star. And when the moon rises into a cloudless night, and I can view it through a powerful telephoto lens, that consciousness of being an inhabitant of this particular planet awakes within me. Suddenly I am torn away from material thoughts of the everyday. And so, I seek out such moments, when the higher plane can be touched. A walk that involves setting out before sunset and returning in dusk's glow is part of my routine, especially on sunny days.

Sun melds into Earth

Today, out in Jakubowizna, augured well for such a spiritual communion, but by the late afternoon, low clouds on the horizon had robbed me of the experience. But I caught it two days earlier, on Sunday. Watching that sun go down, meditating upon that thermonuclear force.

The sun has a profound influence on my mood. In autumn, as evenings draw in, I mourn the shrinking day. Now, at this time of year, the slow but steady return of the light, conquering darkness, each day longer than the previous one, fills me with hope.

It is at this time of year that I feel a spiritual rebirth. Maybe the need to touch the metaphysical isn't consistent; maybe some seasons are more conducive than others to hearing that inner voice and to push open the door to a more spiritual state.

Spiritual evolution is crucial. It is happening, at least for those of us who actively seek growth, seeking a ever-closer connection with the Universe; it happens in tiny steps. Progress is slow and hardly tangible, and yet is there. Away from the beast, towards the angelic. It begins with getting to understand your biology and rising above it. The base instinct, the reptile brain given to unthinking furies, driven by the most primordial of motivations. A calm, clear awareness of the span of life, from birth, development to maturity - a life focused on continuous improvement. From that first moment in which one is conscious of being conscious one must wrestle against the mindless.

There is a long, long way to go. So many profound insights that need to be experienced, studied, understood instinctively and communicated. The Lenten time is one in which I focus more intently on matters spiritual, but not to the exclusion of the remaining seven-eights of the year.

Should we be spending every moment of our waking life in pursuit of spiritual goals? Probably not. Sometimes, these things come to us, an if we try too hard, they evaporate before us. Better let chance intervene and take its course. The middle way between trying too hard, and not trying at all.

In the meantime, I often feel guilt at spiritual indolence; letting things drift. Tomorrow I shall explain how I see guilt, and sin.

This time last year:
The Mechanical Engineers

This time two years ago.
Ealing in the earliest of spring

This time four years ago:
Fat Thursday: a blast against sugar

This time five years ago:
The Devil is in doubt

This time six years ago
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time eight years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time nine years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time ten years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time 12 years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time 13 years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst

Sensitivity to spiritual evolution

ASH WEDNESDAY

Just as there is biological evolution, so the spiritual nature of all around us evolves too. We grow in awareness, our consciousness becomes more fine-tuned to all that surrounds us. Much as we strive for those spiritual goals, reaching towards the sublime infinite, we are but human, easily distracted. Builders of religious buildings have striven to create spaces in which we can focus on the numinous, but often things get in the way. Other worshipers, incongruous objects, bad architecture, uninspiring music. We know we should pray, meditate, contemplate - but we do it all too rarely.

Hence those times in the spiritual calendar that impose upon us an obligation to turn towards the infinite.

And then what?

My principal belief is that human spirituality is a lifelong quest for ever-greater awareness. It should not be mere acceptance of nostrums handed down over the centuries - "there, quest no more, for all the answers are here." That approach dullens our spiritual evolution. The quest is imposed upon us by our own motivation to fulfil our human potential. To make the very most of that with which we were born.

The story of Adam and Eve is, in a way, a warning by our ancient forefathers in the Middle East not to question too much, nor to seek knowledge. Refusal to heed this warning resulted in the Fall of Man.

Now, I don't subscribe to the notion of a fall from grace, a past state of perfection in which all that was expected of Man was obedience. Rather, I see history, progress, being a slow journey from Imperfection towards Perfection, as a wrote last year, a long journey from Zero to One. From spiritual emptiness to spiritual fulfilment. 

To be open to the evolution of our spirituality, we must strive to be more sensitive to the calling. And here, I find myself on the one hand disagreeing with religious fundamentalists as much as I disagree with scientific rationalists. The voice of the infinite calls to us - you may wish to call this 'God' - but the voice is neither shrill nor obvious.

And - here I base my beliefs on observations made throughout my life - the presence of the infinite in our lives is there, but we can tap into this presence only if we seek, and listen.

It is necessary to take a balanced approach to the way we interpret that which is around us. We should neither obsessively seek out coincidences and then contrive to find meaning in them - nor should we ignore those flashes of numinous insight which befall us from time to time.

The rationalist would not stray into a world so intangible, full of that which cannot be empirically recorded and explained. Yet if we are open to a universe of possibility, our spirit - can indeed feel a heightened degree of awareness and understanding. But, for now, these moments are few and far between and their intensity limited. Enough to be noticed, and built on.

For the key question that all of us - every single human being ponders on - is the existence of our consciousness after our bodies' physical demise. My personal belief - but it is one I can challenge, question or even reject should new insight arise - is that from lifetime to lifetime, that consciousness does indeed move on from being to being, each time rising in spiritual awareness, evolving away from the beastly and towards the angelic.

How do I know this? Sensitivity to those moments that I've been recalling and reporting for many years, those flashbacks, those moments of anomalous familiarity, which I firmly believe are from beyond my lifetime, from before my birth, a sense of connection with a spiritual phenomenon larger than my mere ego. Was that 'me' in a life before? Don't know. Will there be a future 'me'? Doubt it. I am assuming spiritual evolution, and greater sensitivity to such phenomena.

As I wrote last year, the Universal Singularity is that to which I believe everything is tending towards. Billions of galaxies, billions of stars. More universes than just one? Who knows. As a species we will know more. But only if we genuinely seek, strive, and grow in spirit as we live and experience life - consciously.

This time last year:
'Peak car' - in Western Europe, at least

This time three years ago:
Pavement for Karczunkowska NOW!
[We still don't have one... I walk home in fear of my life.]

This time four years ago:
Until the Vistula freezes over

This time five year:
Of sunshine, birdsong and wet socks

This time eight years ago:
Dziadzio Tadeusz at 90