Steve,
We are building towards some monumental denouement. Might it be time to really step back and examine the premises of our goal seeking, than to ever more frantically search for that promised land?
As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception and cognition, in order to be aware of our context, then we have to sort through and judge that environment, in order to navigate through it. Thus thought as ordering of our faunal awareness.
Yet what drives this process? Wouldn’t it be more the fact of our desire, than any particular objects of it? Of what use, or meaning is this banquet hall of life, without appetite driving us to it?
As Nietzsche also famously observed; “I was staring into the abyss, when I realized it was staring back.”
Necessarily a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any formulation or brand of it. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
That we must frame and structure this impulse in order to control and satisfy it, is a function of our humanity, or it would/will consume us as irrevocably as we consume our world and our world inevitably consumes us.
Reality is that dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Our bodies are the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort though the information precipiting out and referee the emotions and impulses bubbling up. Moter and steering.
Society is far more dominated by the energy companies and the banks, than the schools and universities. The raw power and the mechanisms to distribute it, than any human ordering of the universe.
Yet that desire still needs structure, in order not to be total chaos. Just because any form we try to apply to it, the energy pushes through the cracks and weak spots, which are then plastered over, only to spread the energy around, doesn’t mean all form is useless. As complex organisms, we are the result of that feedback between the energy pushing out, as form coalesces in.
That we grow old and die, while new forms are born and grow up, is the result of that dyamic.
Time is not so much the point of the present, narratively moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
So the process churns along, from past to future, while the patterns rise and fall, future to past.
Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.
As lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, rather than the sequence of thought.
Our left, logical, sequential, cause and effect hemisphere of the brain is a clock, while the right, emotional, intuitive, non-linear side is a thermostat and barometer. Mix them up and we have metabolism.
So the problem does go to our linear, object and goal oriented, idealist monism of a paradigm, in this cyclical, thermodynamic, feedback driven reality.
It really is more the yin and yang, than God Almighty.
