Once again alluding to the heritage of my loquacious mother, there is no practical limit to the endless detail that I could pass along in these brief messages. It is all endlessly interesting to me, of course, because it is all about me. I created this blog to isolate my blather and my egoism from sensible people everywhere. "Endless detail" is how I refer to what I perceive as the miracle of the reality that we occupy. The moss on the north side of the tree, the rhododendrons on the north side of the mountain, countless subtle and beautiful effects with deep roots in cause and effect.
The classic example of what people are willing to sacrifice from their lives is the trade-off between security and freedom. Here is a discussion of that famous quote by Benjamin Franklin: https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said. So the question we face is "what is essential security?" Franklin clearly saw it as relying on effective self-government. Just having a gun does not effectively protect anyone from the looming political forces at work around us.
When traveling in India I saw chickens everywhere I went. I never saw them, however, alongside the road when away from settlements. Chickens are eaten everywhere in large quantities but not, it seems as much as they are eaten when living alone in the wilderness. One might reasonably say that chickens long ago traded their difficult freedom for the security of being a staple of the human diet. At some point I will have more to say about the collective futures of our food animals. For now I am focused on me.
My beliefs have developed slowly over many years. I can almost remember each development year by year over a period of fifty years. In my twenties I developed an esoteric vocabulary to articulate the more attainable elements of ineffable reality. In my thirties I came to a realization of my commitment to always believe the truth, without trivializing the difficulty of that commitment. In my forties I became aware of the "two seas" and embraced a mystical view of God, while also struggling with my role as a parent. Since my fifties I have been meditating on the nature of meaning - how it is caught up in the search for the truth and how there is always a moment when it seems more precious than life itself.I Died for Beauty - Emily Dickinson
If you think that this is weird ("Run!!!" screams Dr. Who) then I am warning you to beware of what lies ahead.
Meaning is a relationship between ontology and truth. It can be either negative or positive. It can be either true or false.
ReplyDelete"Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion"
Is it "structural coupling"? Is it quantum entanglement? I would hesitate to call it either war or love, but perhaps love is the better word.
ReplyDelete“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
It would be sad if the ultimate result of devotion and bible study were a sort of obstinate ignorance, a refusal to see the truth by the only definition that matters.
ReplyDelete"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_1:1