We are Souls. I mean this in the sense that our individual awareness and self-identity as human beings survives our physical deaths. I realize this truth from my own experience. As a result, I have faith that it is true for others and that it will be realized as true by and for them in due course. My faith, my appreciation of the knowledge gained, from such experience is grounded in logic. Faith for me is a logical extension of the intuition and reason that I try to apply to all my experience of Life; it does not stand in opposition to science but is intertwined with it.
For me faith is not borne of an existential need for knowledge as proof of life beyond the grave, or of devotion to the source of the Life—I am not devoid of devotion or emotion. So it breaks my heart when I watch the struggle of souls grappling with problems that I know from my own experience are essentially non-existent or have logical solutions, if they were only able to find reason and allow it to prevail.
The same intuitive sense of continuity that tells me that the ‘self’ that I perceived as me yesterday is the same ‘self’ after a good night’s sleep that I know as me today, tells me that I am the same ‘self’ that I knew over 70 years ago and that I knew in all the millions of perceptions of my ‘self’ between then and now, while awake or in the state of dreaming. This is true even as science tells us that our bodies are not the same, the material of which they are comprised constantly in flux, their cells being renewed every 7 to 10 years, which I have no reason to doubt.
What is this ‘self’, one might ask. For me, this self the logician, a self is That aspect of Life which on some telescoping, concatenated level participates in That Life experience by focusing as some ‘thing’ in the act of thinking, observing, saying, doing, interacting, intending, desiring, planning, creating, understanding, or being whatever gerund–‘ing’ or qualifier we find appropriate, as designated by () in a way that identifies That living aspect with any conceptualization starting with ‘I am ’ or ‘I am being ’. In general () is any process that predicates a conscious focus of that process as a ‘thing’, resulting in that ‘thing’ existing as separate and distinguishable from the field of That participation in Life as an instance of ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘they’ or ‘it’, etc.
As an example if the process, (*), is planting seeds, watering, growing, harvesting and all that entails, that is, (farming), That aspect of Life that focuses on and carries out what it takes to complete the process of farming identifies its part of That overall Life as an individual self in thinking ‘I am a farmer’, at least while it is involved in doing the farming. That overall Life, which can obviously differentiate and evolve within a range of constraints as necessary and sufficient for Its extant development, is One Self, One Source of Living. Of this One Self, all the differentiated aspects that become the multitude of foci of interacting responses to and initiations of changes in stress and strain within that Self are recognized as the differentiated individual selves.
A self might be as small as an amoeba, focused on trying to eat one microbe while avoiding being consumed by another. An amoeba is presumably not self-aware—it doesn’t float around in the pond thinking ‘I am an amoeba’ or ‘I am *’—but it obviously has enough sentience, enough awareness of its place in its environmental field to focus on the difference between having a meal and being one, all without thinking or saying ‘I am hungry’ or ‘They look hungrier’ in the process. If it were to enunciate any subjective response to its foraging, it would probably be closer to amoeba-ish for ‘yummm’ or ‘ouch’. Some kind of change in stress and strain as a feeling still gets satisfied or hurt, if only for an instant.
On a most fundamental level we might imagine that a basic nuclear particle self as a neutron or a proton-with-electron simply hums along, ‘hmmmm’, at a more or less uniform 1024 hertz in response to the stress and strain of ambient conditions; perhaps it goes through a changing response from ‘bzzzzz’ to ‘zzzip’ in response to interaction with a passing particle. In a hierarchy of extended structure, these quantum building blocks as individual selves—through the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions that they generate by their spinning, oscillating wave formations—assemble in a very rationally defined and defining manner into elemental nuclear–atomic, molecular, crystalline, organic, microbiologic, and ultimately bio-spheric composition necessary for the full revelation of creative intent as the Soul.
A Soul is a self that recognizes the experience of being a human, and generally assumes that they are like other humans being human. It is my purpose here to give some account of my experience along with my individual understanding of that experience.
It has taken us—the adult souls anyway, of which there are never enough— as an expression of the logic of our solar system and our planetary Logos, the true Word of God, over 4 billion years to grow this earth, along with the much needed nearby sun, to reach and maintain the ambient oxygenated, conditions for sustained reproductive lifeforms of the biosphere, to get us to the point where many more of you youngsters should now be able to matriculate and graduate, if you are able to pay attention.
For the young earth adherents among us, this earth age is around a half a million times longer than any of you have imagined, while for the physical cosmology enthusiasts, an earth age of roughly one third of the 13 plus billion years since an imagined Big Bang is a rather pedestrian notion for a cosmos that is perhaps infinite in time and space. I will address the physical cosmology in due course. Suffice it to say that infinity means exactly what it says—a system of accounting for some property that has no termination in the direction for which one is doing the counting or measuring; one can always go further in that direction, so there is no end in such chosen regard.
For many if not most of us, individual experience is the result of having successfully followed common sense—up until now at any rate. That common sense is based on traditional knowledge of a shared common experience. For many of us, our individual experience validates that traditional knowledge. When individual experience conflicts with the expectations of traditional knowledge, however, it suggests that either that experience represents a previously unknown or unrecognized and thereby uncommon truth or the common knowledge about that experience is in some sense fundamentally incomplete and for that part untruthful. When an experience of uncommon truth becomes widespread within a group, it calls into question by some degree the referenced common sense that is still held outside that group as truthful.
Everyone has an expert knowledge of their own experience but having an expert knowledge of that experience is not the same as developing and having an expert understanding based on that experience. Experience that is not understood in common can lead to a mix of known and unknown expertise on any topic of public yet uncommon knowledge, and thereby to an overall lack of certain understanding of known values—of common sense. Expert knowledge that is misunderstood can lead in public discourse to a perception that any contrary side of an argument is of amateurish knowledge—of perceived idiocy.
The resulting public view by those with some expertise, of others with some contrasting expertise, each seen as holding the uncommon values of an amateur, thereby devolves into a shared experience of a type of attitude with attendant name calling that I am referring to as ergodidiocy, a portmanteau from a technical term of relatively recent vintage used in defining thermodynamic interactions of a random deterministic nature (if you can handle the irony), ergodic, and one from the ancient Greek term for a public layperson, idios.
Expertise in the theoretical and applied sciences tends to involve attempts to create models of physical phenomena which can faithfully predict the interaction of both inanimate and sentient biological members of a population. It does this by attempting to remove as much as possible the element of conscious involvement from the modeled phenomena. In the case of modeling human behavior, this is itself a form of axiomatic idiocy, not lost on any number of scamming student test-subjects enrolled in campus clinical trials.
In the hard physical sciences, the parameter of consciousness is less obvious. The subject of ergodic theory was developed in the 1800’s to assist in testing the statistical mechanisms of thermodynamics, with positive results for the discipline. Simply put, whenever applicable in a system under investigation, ergodic theory states that given sufficient time the average of some measurable condition of the individual members that comprise the system as evaluable microstates of that system, will be equal to the population average of all the microstates at a given point in time as the corresponding system macrostate value.
Ergodicity, as the applicability of ergodic theory to any studied model, incorporates the notion of ergs as a measure for the quantification of energy as addressed in that discipline, in which physics in general is founded on the concept of the conservation of energy of the macrostate and of the invariance over time of related microstates in any respectable modeling. When we throw in the notion that human souls are gods of average intelligence and development over time, though of invariant value in the eyes of the God of Undiminishing and Undiminishable Power at any one point in time, we find that the study of human nature is best modeled not as the discipline of ergodicity but rather that of ergodidiocy.
Thus, with ergodidiocy we are likely to find the condition of two parties, as individuals or groups, with ostensible expertise in disciplines that are to each other of unfamiliar, incomplete, and possibly even non-existent knowledge, not to mention understanding, in an opaque discussion about a subject tangential to one of these chosen disciplines, utilizing their disparate arcane, technical jargon, where the opposing parties have perhaps no more than a cursory familiarity with each other or their respective disciplines, attempting to carry out a form of socially constructive intercourse. It is small wonder with respect to various contentious topics in such cases that the dialogue devolves into rank, ergodidiotic name calling involving intercourse of a different, and in fact more significant, nature.
I have yielded to respectability in avoiding the urge to use the expletive here (though I will return to it in Three Known Truths), particularly in an opening remark for which the whole purpose of the endeavor is to gain a readership of non-ergodidiotic expertise looking for a better understanding of unbiased truth. Yet proper innuendo can be more evocative of taboo imagery than crassness, and thereby does not ignore the significance of the means by which we all got here in the first place or ignore that, and the other functions located between the waist and the knees that remind us, or our bodies at least, that we are mortal. Adolescent, profane creatures, we are subject to subliminal eruptions in all manner of heckling and potty-talk of the repressed and suppressed recognition of that mortality and the established morality designed to circumvent it, culturally and in some instances unnaturally imposed. Filled with doubt about our place and purpose in the scheme of things, we talk naughty and tough by good or ill design to get the attention of the adults in the room. Adolescents, as a result of our individual placements in the divinely natural process of Life, many of us are, regardless of age; profane creatures we may be, but only if we choose to identify ourselves—or others—as such
We are divine Souls. We are all gods in the process of growing up. We need to learn to act like it and treat each other as such. We need to meet each other in the center, which is where I am and intend to remain. We need to avoid the ergodidiocy of the extremes, stuck striving yet fascinated with the opposition due to intentional maliciousness or unintended lack of understanding or subliminal desire. We need to embrace and be embraced by the Spirit of Truthful Purpose that ever flows from the Center of all Livingness, from the Center of the Cosmos, and from the Center of each of US.