Pentience?

I think you are still looking at it through a monotheistic prism.

The fallacy of monotheism is a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. Conflating the absolute with the ideal is a useful narrative device, for instilling each generation with respect for social authority, but it also leads to cultural narcissism, as it presumes one’s culture to be universal, rather than unique.

The spirit is the light shining through, rather then the images on the film, but the light is fire and fire is appetite. It needs to be fed, or it dies.

The desires bubbling up, be it pleasure, power, curiosity… What would this banquet of life be, without an appetite?

Though we have to sort through them and that’s complicated. The mind really does just referee the emotions. Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. So there never can be some ideal morality, as it is that constant tension between desire and judgement. The heart and the head.

Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree and it is our burden to take part in deciding which are seed and which are food. We’ve taken selection from nature.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through the forms precipitating out and find the signals best suited to our desires.

As mobile organisms, with a narrative culture, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but it is change, turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

So as processes churn along, from past to future, the patterns generated rise and fall, future to past.

Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.

Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

The feedback is the patterns define and direct the process. Motor and steering.

So while we look for immortality temporally, as some extension of our particular journey, that is a narrative illusion. Immortality exists spatially, as we are all bubbles lensing the same energy and awareness.

Yet there is still the tension between expansion and consolidation. Between the absolute, toward which all form is drawn, versus the infinite, toward which all energy radiates.

So it is not so much penitence as balance. Letting the emotions scurry off where they will and ignoring them, until they come running back for the attention they really want, as well as letting those voices of judgement make all their cutting little comments and ignore them, until they shut up and try to figure out what gets the attention of the executive function.

We are funnels of potential flowing into actual, to residual. Future to past.

The energy seeking out the weak spots and judgement tamping them down, until we are a weak spot and pass on.

Somewhere between the absolute and the infinite.

Cheers.