To turn the stone over a few more times, what is reality, other than energy and the forms it manifests?

Look at galaxies; Energy radiates out, form coalesces in.

As sentient organisms, we have a heart and gut driving us on, along with a mind to sort through all the forms precipitating out, as well as referee the emotions and desires bubbling up. Motor and steering. (no real brakes)

Society is that dichotomy of collective impulses bubbling up, versus the civil and cultural forms coalescing in. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.

Western culture, even if it rejects a literal monotheism, is still in the grasp of this monist idealism, yet the absolute and the ideal are not interchangeable.

For instance, 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 light shining through, than the images on the screen.

So good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. Society and the ethical forms it manifests are the fluctuation between desire and judgment.

So yes, we seek and need that feedback, that shows we are not just yelling into the void. Children, as much as they seek freedom, also need some guidence.

Religions try to give us answers, but they also seek feedback and support in return.

Part of the problem is that we do view this cyclical, reciprocal reality through a narrative lens. As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception and cognition, which we then apply qualitative judgements, in order to navigate our situation. Then narrate our journeys to one another and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge.

Since those stories with the most illustrative arc are the most repeated and remembered, the assumption becomes that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, either figurative, or literal, in today’s possession oriented ideology.

Yet time is not so much the present moving past to future, along a narrative dimension, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

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.

So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. All of which are essential to our emotions, biology and environment. The left, cause and effect logical hemisphere of the brain is analogous to a clock, while the right, emotional, intuitive side to a thermostat/barometer. Combine them and you have metabolism.

So these thermodynamic feedback loops are more foundational to our reality than narrative. That is more a tapestry woven of strands pulled from what was already woven.

As energy is dynamic and changing form, it goes past to future, while the events generated go future to past. Process and the patterns generated.

Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

The feedback is that the patterns steer the process.

The future is not determined, because the act of determination occurs as the input into any event is calculated, as it occurs. Potential>actual>residual.

The problem is that potential is far more populous than actual and actual is far more diverse than residual. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. So we all promote our potential and hope for the actual, but only even a fraction of that becomes residual. Some is seed, the rest fertilizer.

Yet without these ups and downs, it’s a flatline. The price we pay to feel, is that much of it is pain.

The devil is in the truths we don’t want to hear.