Life is a cycle of expansion and consolidation. As Ram says, knowledge is information, wisdom is editing.
Which gets to the fact that our culture also worships information. It is a society of experts and specialists, while polymaths and generalists have no particular forum.
Consider that a child who is interested in everything will likely be diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated, to get their mind back into the prescribed boxes.
How are we ever going to understand how it all fits together, if we have no opportunity to figure out how the multitudes of fields and details interact? It's like the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant.
What are the patterns and processes driving this reality? The philosophers and physicists seem to have thrown up their hands and just delve deeper into the details, abstractions and combinations thereof.
In my own efforts to peel away some of the layers, I've found a few insights.
For one thing, a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the myriad details of which we are aware.
While it might be normal to assume our ideals are absolute and universal, it really is an egregious error, as ideals are aspirational, while the absolute is elemental. Consider all the ideologies and religions which teach their particular aspirations are universal, rather than unique and it describes a lot of political tensions in this world. Monoculture is a desert.
Another belief is the concept of time as the point of the present moving past to future, rather then change turning future to past.
We are mobile organisms with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, so this flow of time is who we are, but then we are extremely complex organisms in our own highly subjective world.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. As Alan Watts put it, "The wake doesn't steer the boat, the boat creates the wake."
Energy is conserved because it is the present. Its changing form creates time. As well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.
So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Think of a wave; The energy is what drives it, while the forms are the fluctuations and undulations, rising and falling, future to past, as the energy goes through.
As in a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Given consciousness goes past to future, while the patterns it expresses, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, come and go, future to past, it would seem consciousness is a form of energy.
Which gets back to the issue of youth and age.
When we are young, we are driven by our energies, emotions and desires, but as we get older, having to sort, organize, qualify and quantify these impulses, life becomes more a matter of judgement, hopefully.
So it is that dichotomy of the heart and the head. The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.
Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.
Yet the best our greatest minds can give us are atomic bombs and iphones. Somebody has to step back enough to see the bigger picture.
People are linear and goal oriented, while nature is cyclical and reciprocal. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.
