Maybe we need to get beyond our current set of constructs. Reality does seem to be cycles of expansion and consolidation, with each stage building on the next. Though occasionally flaws get incorporated, creating weaknesses for the succeeding structure. Causing it to spin out of control and a much greater reset is required.
For instance, good and bad are not some cosmic conflict, between righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. When good is assumed to be aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, as higher order nuance and subjectivity becomes polarized into simple black and white.
Which ties into the fact that 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. A basic fallacy that has come to define Western civilization, with the assumption there is some higher abstract order, than that order is itself emergent with the processes and patterns it describes. The skeleton is not the seed.
As mobile organisms, it seems logical this sequential process of perception, that has become fairly evolved in humans, is due to the need to navigate. So while we might experience reality as a sequence of perceptions and assume time is the point of the present, moving past to future, the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
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.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, not some dimensionless point between past and future. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Much as consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.
Think in terms of a wave; The energy drives it, but it is passing through, while the fluctuations rise and fall, future to past. From equilibrium, back to equilibrium.
Yet all of modern physics, since it is based on information, rather than the energy manifesting it, tries to explain and reconstruct reality from whatever information can be extracted from the energy, yet energy and information are not synonymous, since they go opposite directions of time.
Consider that not only quanta, but even waves are information, so if the outward pressure of energy is balanced by the inward curvature of form, the bending of the light isn't due to gravity, it is gravity. So mass is an effect of gravity, not the other way around. Which would mean that excess gravitational effect isn't due to some missing mass, but the contraction effects throughout the spectrum.
Three dimensions are really just a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. If you remove all physical properties from space, it has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium. Infinity, because there is nothing to bound it and equilibrium is implicit to Special Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero.
So space is the absolute and the infinite.
What fills space, this dynamic called energy and the forms it manifests, go opposite directions. Energy radiates out, toward infinity, while form coalesces in, toward equilibrium. Both entropic. Galaxies.
Given consciousness functions like an energy, always pushing the forms it manifests, growing them, or breaking them, if we were to look for alien life/consciousness, we might want to first go back and examine how other forms of life, already on this planet, function. For one thing, they are not the monoculture our social structures seem to devolve back into. Ecosystems harmonize, while organisms synchronize. When we try synchronizing everything, it builds to this high pitched feedback loop of a shriek. Much like our current financial system.
Nor do they perceive reality in terms of descrete objects, since their sense of reality hasn't been define by relationships with tactile objects.
Space is a big place. We are in far more danger of trashing our own world, through our own ignorance and hubris, than being zapped by some form of similar type of alien.
Higher order is relative. We might just be the plants way of moving seeds around, like squirrels. Evolved towards mobility, rather than networking and just barely grasping the feedback mechanisms driving reality, in our own linear, goal oriented perception of it.
