The logical fallacy of the classic western concept of God, as this “all-knowing absolute,” in the words of Pope John Paul 2, is the absolute would be a universal, undifferentiated state, while knowledge is very much a function of differentiation and comparison.

A spiritual absolute would reasonably be the essence of sentience, bubbling up through life, rather than an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it is fallen. Yet culture could not function, by simply reveling in sentience, so rather than deifying the fact that we are aware, we deify the objects of our awareness. Given that our perception is emergent from the need to navigate, we are constantly sorting and judging these perceptions. Signal from the noise. So the end result is that we distill this focus down to the abstraction of knowledge and judgement, aka, wisdom. Though as knowledge is nothing generically, we find ourselves in various cultural derivations.

The problem with that is then we assume these cultural formulations to be absolute and thus universal, rather than unique. We conflate the ideal with the absolute.

For one thing, “the good” is taken as an ideal, when in fact, good and bad are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

Since it is from this elemental sentient distinction that all the higher order emotional, social and cultural attributes evolve, such as respect, responsibility, honor, love, trust, as well as the negatives, so that by treating them as ultimate, rather than elemental, conflicts quickly become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, good versus bad. Rather than each side having some expectation the other will hold to and respect the evolved aspects of the society and potentially using such obstacles as opportunities to further develop social relations and nuances.

It is the absolute, the flatline between the ups and downs, the zero in the middle, which does make everything relative to everything else. Where it all balances out. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

The real tension in life is between the multitudes of desires bubbling up, through the individual and society as a whole, versus the need to sort and decide which hold precedence and in what order, quality and quantity. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree.

The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement. The heart and the head. Youth and age. Liberal and conservative.

As for this element of consciousness, as these mobile organisms, with a sequential thought process and a narrative based culture, we are indoctrinated to the concept of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but 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, in order to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don’t call them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought. Think metabolism.

So the process goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Like waves rising and falling, as the limits of the energy are expressed.

As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past.

Which would seem to imply that consciousness functions like an energy. Always and only present. While thoughts and feelings are how it is expressed. Thoughts possibly like a cresting wave, fully formed, yet quickly receding. While feelings are the pressure of the impulses starting to build, but not fully defined.

We are the only life form to escape the present, through narrative, but the fact remains that life is not really about the punchline at the end of the narrative arc, as it is the constant feedback and circularity of the here and now.

More the yin and yang, than God Almighty.