What if we really did peel away all the layers and didn't find what we thought was there?

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the 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. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

The absolute is elemental, while the ideal is aspirational.

When the ideal is assumed to be absolute, the effect is polytheism, not even pantheism. The many versions of one competing.

Life is far more vital as emergent, than ordained. Like flowers, we spring up, cast some seeds and return.

To the Ancients, gods were not just metaphysical beings, but their interpretation of the many ideals, ideas, memes, patterns, etc. manifesting life. Including the power of crowds, the hive mind.

Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as that was how multiculturalism was explained. Monotheism equated with monoculture, as in one people, one rule, one god.

The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being erased. Though retaining vestiges of pantheism in the Trinity. Which came from the cycle of the year gods. The son reborn in the spring, of the sky father and earth mother.

Though the Catholic church had to denature the mother and obscure the essence of regeneration, as it was the eternal institution. At least until Martin Luther tried to do what Jesus tried with Judaism, push the reset button.

When the West went back to less centered political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

Which was possible, because gnostic Christianity had been co-opted to validate a centralized political system.

While with Islam, it was the other way around, the monastic religion inspired the possibility of empire, so the state is naturally subservient.

Part of our problem of understanding is our concept of time. As these mobile organisms, our conscious experience is as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so we think of time as 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.

So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. It creates time.

As process and present, it goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, as the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form go future to past.

Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information. Signals from the noise. Therefore the tendency to think in terms of order and chaos, rather than energy and form. Even though excess signal reverts to noise.

To the extent everything is waves, they tend to either synchronize, or harmonize. Centripetal and centrifugal.

Organisms synchronize in order to be one, while ecosystems harmonize.

So this process call life has to fluctuate somewhere in the middle, as one extreme is black holes, while the other is black body radiation. The absolute and the infinite. Neither of which are hospitable to complexity, let alone life.

The problem of monotheism is that it focuses on the synchronization and assumes the harmonization.

The reality is more yin and yang, than God Almighty.