The Reassuring Universe

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Trust Your Robot

TRUST YOUR ROBOT

On the question of whether robots and machines that listen and sympathize will prove adequate to comfort the human soul. The following builds on previously published concepts of the ontological nature of consciousness, Unity, and Reality. For readers lacking the earlier explanations, the first three paragraphs may be a bit perplexing. Not to worry. By paragraph four we’re independent of previous material and back to practical considerations.

In the absence of Choice there is no real consciousness.

In the absence of consciousness there is no Deep Unity. In the absence of Deep Unity there is no Deep Reality Interaction and hence no eternal Love.

Nothing substantial is projected into eternity by interface with a machine that has no Choice in its interaction. The machine’s words and responses may be the exact ones desired, but that exact perfection and accommodation will be as empty and meaningless as any lying sycophantic person seeking to ingratiate.

I recently read of a robot that is selling well, a robot that seems to listen. That such a device would become popular testifies to our desperation to communicate and be heard and be accepted.

The robot poses no threat of rejection or criticism or correction. Lordy, wouldn’t that be wonderful? I wonder if that is why writing appeals to me? I have long known my writing would be at risk of totally changing if I expected that anyone would read it in my lifetime. Do I treat the keyboard the way people treat their comforting empathy robot? No doubt my writing is driven to some degree by the need to express and communicate.

How desperately we all want to be heard! How desperately we want to make ourselves, our thoughts and ideas and feelings and experiences, a part of something bigger, a part of someone else’s thoughts and experiences.

So we talk to people who are not really listening and we pay people to listen to us and now we can buy robots programmed to trick us into believing they are listening.

All the while we just need to listen to each other.

To what degree can we or should we go to get people to listen? Isn’t what we have to say the most important thing in the universe? It certainly is the most important thing our youniverse.

So people buy listening robots and I type. The response from the machine is far more affirming and encouraging than most human responses, or lack thereof.

Desperate to be heard, we prattle on to the exclusion of ever listening, rendering mutually mute our efforts at communication. Left with bored friends, coworkers, family, and spouses, we can soon add bored robots to the list. Loathe to listen, we know our stories must be better than theirs. So the talk goes on, and robot sales go up, and tweets and blogs and Facebook pages profligately propagate.

Never has so much been said and so little heard.

We talk and type and text to everyone and everything within reach….

……..except God.

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Successful Disaster

Successful Disaster

So we muddle through our choices, in hindsight seeing how disastrous they were, in hindsight seeing how miraculously they turned out, fortunately in ways we never could have foreseen.

Worldly disasters entangled with spiritual miracles….that's about the best you can hope for in following the Spirit and Purpose. Crucifixions and resurrections is another way to put it.

Fortunately in our youth we don't see that. It is necessary to have visions of worldly success. But as failures and disasters compile we begin to notice the little details we never anticipated, a life affected, a life touched, a life saved. Our career and relationship disasters slowly are revealed as lessons and opportunities, and our grandiose plans begin to wane in submission to The Grandiose Plan.

There is relief as well as resignation in this experience. This learning process is not about giving up hope, but giving up your life to the Greater that was guiding it all along.

Worldly success is not all it's cracked up to be. Fortunately it will elude the grasp of most of us.

Another Clean Start

What's left, when every plan has failed?

What remains after every hope is dashed?

What endures when every expectation has collapsed?

The lessons.

The humility.

The clean start.

The clean slate.

The purity of nothing.

You are finally out of the way.

Now something beyond your limited imagination can unfold.

Now go forth, having come forth from the wreckage.

Hopelessness can be liberating.

Revel in your powerlessness.

A Higher Perspective

The ants flew this morning on their colony's annual matrimonial breeding flight!

Now this afternoon an alate (winged ant) lands on me as I write! What a little surprise blessing! What a marvelous and miraculous focal point of life, that shiny black body with silvery wings.

Life arising from life. We see life the way we do because of our experience of consciousness as an individual. Viewed without the lens of individual experience Life becomes a wholeness, a flowing reaction. Viewed from a distance, life is akin to a fire or a rising cumulus cloud, complex but comprehensible self-driving exothermic chemical reactions and thermo-dynamic processes.

Take away our individual awareness of pain and fear and death, and Life becomes a wondrous phenomenon to marvel at as it spreads across the planet and changes and evolves and adapts. Viewed in detachment, all the carnivorous consumption and competitive combat become academic functionalities in a localized entropy storm. .

But being part of that consumption and combat makes us look at life with other than detached academic objectivity. We know all too well what it feels like to be prey and target. Curiosity at the ability of chains of nucleic acids to self-replicate becomes our personal imperative to replicate.

A biochemical process on a singularly rare blue marble orbiting a propitiously located star has been infused with conscious awareness, and henceforth demands that it, at least the individual elements of conscious experience, i.e. humanity, be taken into account in any speculation about universal Purpose and meaning.

The little alate still sits on my shirt. Its wings are now extended out perpendicular to its body instead of held along the length of its body. I touch it. It does not move in response. Its life seems to have expired since landing on me minutes ago.

I doubt it mused about meaning or Purpose. I suspect it unambiguously, wholly, and completely knew its meaning and Purpose, and that was enough. I, on the other hand, am not so sanguine about the whole Life, death, meaning, and Purpose thing, so I keep closely watching the tiny proboscis for signs of movement and life. I watch to no avail.

Now expired, but she-he-it did fly, earlier this morning, a triumphant launch carrying the colony's hopes into the unattainable sky. The colony will never know this particular genetic package of hope lies now upside-down on a purple t-shirt.

This morning I cleaned out old files with records of students I had taught. Those students would now be in their thirties. Did my lessons help launch their lives on successful careers? How many have kids of their own? How many are under indictment? How many are dead? I will never know, just aa the ant colony cannot know the fate of its hundreds of winged messengers launched this morning.

Surely localized, individual, and personal meaning and purpose must be part and parcel of universal meaning and Purpose. But the extrapolation from this season or this semester to the eternal seems deucedly indirect, leaving us wondering, if we can ask the question must there necessarily be an answer?

My little deceased alate buddy would chuckle at my naivety. Maybe asking the question is the meaning and Purpose. Maybe that's our version of the ant-colony's' matrimonial flight. Let us launch forth in our conjectures, a triumph of this exothermic self-propogating life process, launching our questions and speculations, landing we know not where, but fulfilling, perchance even defining, even dare we say choosing, meaning and Purpose for the individual elements of conscious awareness infusing the sheen of organic material coating this exquisitely rare blue marble.

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Lessons of the Mystery

LESSONS OF THE MYSTERY

Lessons,

life lessons,

learned and taken so seriously,

lessons for the individual,

no one else.

Lessons,

life lessons,

never to be shared,

except with others who already learned them.

There is a depth of understanding, a depth of seeing and feeling and experiencing,

that is of little use to and little interest for this world.

Promise mysteries solved and people will listen.

Pronounce that all is mystery and shall so remain,

and watch the faces turn away.

Mystery, wrapped in life.

We love a mystery, but only with solution.

That’s why we dare not look too closely at life,

for then we see just how inscrutable it is.

But the looking, the looking,

is what makes us human.

The looking, that defines us as children of God,

even of a well hidden, or at least disguised, God.

Hurry, hurry,

it seems so long ago,

surely there is little time left.

This gift, this moment, is too precious,

too ripe with potential,

to let slide.

But there are no answers, at least none that any want to hear,

and none that solve the Mystery.

But they do ease the pain, don’t you think?

Listen!

Was that a hint? One has to listen to hear them, you know.

They are always whispered, and never repeated.

Always nebulous, discrete, private,

the answers to the Mysteries.

They are not to be shared,

not due to some cosmic dictate,

but because no one will listen.

Listen.

Keep listening.

Hear the sounds of speculations rattle to and fro within the Mystery.

All you will hear is the Mystery laughing…..

but it is not a scornful laugh.

It is almost playful, as if we take the Mystery much too seriously.

It is glad we explore it, welcomes our investigations and speculations,

our philosophies and theologies,

like a parent smiling at the crawling infant’s explorations

about the room.

It is healthy, a part of growth, these explorations,

this crawling and putting things in our mind.

It is serious business, this growing up.

It is playful and joyful, and fraught with dangers.

It seems so long ago,

we started exploring, started crawling, started asking,

but there is time, and there is beyond time,

so no need to fret or hurry.

The Mystery abides,

welcoming our explorations,

answers awaiting, but only once we begin to crawl.

Recognizing Beauty

RECOGNIZING BEAUTY

Homestead creek 07:02

The creek is running! Barely, but running! The surface trickle just barely makes it past the wood jam, fizzling out in less than a meter. There is no sound. The surface ripples the tiniest bit, making the sky's reflection flicker. But it's grown from yesterday!...thanks to the remarkable string of daily rains. Thank You, thank You, thank You for this symbol of the inexorable return of Life in spite of our destructiveness.

As I walked out the back door before sunrise, a coyote concert! Little family was loud and clear from the south! Upon reaching coyote point I never saw them though. Now four mornings since I saw them.

The mountains had a slow motion cloud fall silently and grayly slipping over ridges from the south, a rare alpine treat.

A couple of bucks in the valley were trying out this year's antlers with each other.

Sublime beauty. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.

Would anyone read these poor words and experience a touch of that beauty? Would anyone wish they had been there?

If so, why were more people not up there this morning and every morning? Why do I not bother describing such scenes to anyone? Does our limited ability to perceive beauty make beauty boring?

We prefer adventure and tales with conclusions. That's a problem if it keeps us from experiencing beauty. If we cannot perceive the beauty in Nature we cannot discern it in ourselves. If we cannot recognize loving Creator in Creation we will not recognize our souls as children of that Creator. The value of Nature's beauty reflects our own value, as we arise from and are integral part of the same Source fulfilling the same Purpose.

A cold indifference toward Nature inevitably is companion to a cold indifference toward humanity. One either looks for beauty and Spirit in everything or turns from beauty and Spirit in all aspects of life.

Looking for Beauty does not mean pretending it is there when it is not. It means having eyes and heart open and receptive to the living Spirit of the Source, especially when it appears in unexpected form.

Imagine seeing. Imagine wanting to see.

Pachinko Minds

Our minds rattle through their pachinko (a Japanese vertical pinball game) path of development, bouncing this way and that, sometimes literally bouncing, starting from circumstances of childhood. From that starting point the aggregate human perception evolves as inexorably as biological evolution, a progression (as distinguished from progress) dictated by a statistical mish-mosh of influences subtle and jarring. Along this path, a new philosophy, religion, or life-perspective may be as useful as tapioca to a tomato..

The fracking field worker beaten by their alcoholic father, the woman raised with a mother’s emotional denigration, these and countless victims of human parents, each and all of us, have trodden their spiritual evolutionary path to their specific point that can accept only certain forms of spiritual nourishment.

Evolutionary selection also shapes spiritual messages, incomprehensible foundational truth being filtered, distilled, and distorted to accommodate the capacity of the populace.

An accidental mutation in a random environment allows a lucky species to thrive. An eccentric teaching in a destabilized society allows a religion to take root.

Ironically the statistically random results are majestic, revealing a structure of Life embedded in the primal foundations of the universe, unveiling loving Purpose patiently waiting on the free choice of its battered and misled children.