Graham,
I think you need to go much further into the dualistic aspects of nature. For example, even the idea of a common mythology is essentially monastic, that there is one true path. Which throughout history has gone though the cycle of renewal, to conformity, to tradition, to obsession. It gets "set in stone." Literally. Then has to be broken open, again.
Consider that to culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
That's because it's the function of culture to synchronize society into one larger organism.
The reality is that sychronization is centripetal and is balanced by harmonization, which is effectively centrifugal. Thus nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields. Between black holes and black body radiation.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Ideals are not absolute and a culture founded on the principle of treating them as such, is naturally conflicted.
The opposite of the absolute is the infinite.
Consider time; As mobile organisms, this sentient interface between body and world functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our concept of time is as the present moving past to future, though the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
As present, the energy goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.
So we tend to divide reality in terms of known and unknown, order and chaos, rather than energy and form. Even though galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
Consider all the missing mass the cosmologists are looking for. What if we have it backward? That gravity is not a property of mass, but that mass is an intermediate, stable, somewhat dense stage of a centripetal dynamic, that goes from the barest bending of the light to the vortices at the center of galaxies?
We just put mass at the center of our models, because it appeals to our tactile sensibilities, like we once put earth at the center of our cosmology.
As these living beings, we are that constant tension and balance between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement.
Even our social institutions reflect this, in that government, as the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to a central nervous system, while money and banking mirror blood and the circulation system.
The relationship of which has grown seriously out of whack, as we have come to understand government is a public utility, but haven't yet learned the same principle applies to banking. Which has given financial interests the upper hand, as they are not subject to as much oversight and don't have to plan around election cycles.
Along with the fact that people, as linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, tend to see money as signal to extract and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently turning the medium into the message and now Mammon is our current god. Appetites overwhelm judgement.
So, both sides of the coin. Balance. Yin and yang, not God Almighty.
As for purpose, life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie the rest of the story together.
