As part of this hundred-day exploration of Christianity, I want to make sure I include perspectives from other sources that aren’t myself. I want to hear what other people have to say about life’s biggest questions and about who this Jesus Christ figure is to them. I also want to share these perspectives with you to make this process a little more exciting. For now, I am keeping all names anonymous, using simple labels to make things clear. All I have to say is that I’m very lucky to have such interesting friends and acquaintances in my life.
For each person I talk with, I have them send me over a written piece and follow it with a conversation.
Today, we begin with the words of The Philosopher:
Prefacary Interlude
All things are interconnected
In a single flux that we dualistic see as clumps
A butterfly can start a tsunami
Ideas are chemical tangible things
And as such, they can move the world
They can start a tsunami
They can move my body
Everything here is real
But exists on another plane as something else
Not an elsewhere, but here – right here
There is a plane right here, right now
That we cannot see – that is likely best described as energy
Which our limited eyes perceive as physical reality
In that reality occurred something magical
A spark called life
Which isn’t a miracle
We put life on a pedestal
But life is overrated
Not that I prefer death
I prefer life
But death is just another stage for us
Its just how we get rearranged
This mind, what I call myself
Is real so long as I exist I this form
Like footsteps last before they get washed away
We are a very fortunate assemblage in the flux
Essentially a mirror in the flux
That can see itself and be aware of it
Chapter 1
It's an accident
I’m confident life was an accident
A flame that has the ability to protect itself from being extinguished
We are a chemical reaction
A fortunate assemblage of circumstances
In an immensely vast universe over an immensely vast period of time
It was destined that the simplest life would emerge
And that simple life kept duplicating in imperfect ways
Imperfect in that each duplication was impacted by different environmental circumstances
And as it developed and formed simple bodies
And eventually one iteration of those bodies
Had the benefit of moving itself towards what it needed
A flame that moves itself towards more fuel
And a flame that moves itself away from that which extinguishes it
But there is leap in my logic here – I don’t know how this happened
I don’t know how we went from a duplicating chemical reaction
To bodies that can control themselves
But it is a leap that must have occurred
That is where my faith exists
Faith that the inanimate became animate
The in-autonomous became autonomous
Where life wasn’t merely sustained by chance
But life was sustained by choice
Through its own action
What we more elaborate bodies call preference
And so we complex bodies operate in the same way as our ancestors
Those most primitive ancestors that are mere chemicals
Life as a blade of grass
Moving towards sun and water
And away from darkness and arid soil
Merely to sustain itself, as its ancestor reactions have designed it to do
That is our design
That is our framework
At the core we are a simple flame seeking fuel to sustain itself
This preference for fuel over the absence of fuel is the basis of duality
In the moment the flame developed the ability to seek fuel
Is the moment we created duality
Jumping forward, the flame, through an unthinkable number of iterations
Developed perception
And through more iterations
Developed memory
Its emergence was accidental
And its survival was destined
As stronger iterations tend to survive
And this memory
Mere footsteps in the sand within us
Holding our perceptions of what sustains us and what does not
And it is these footsteps that we group into buckets
Giving rise to conception
The ability for the flame to categorize its remembered perceptions
And through this we have consciousness
A wildly complicated system of accessing our memories and our associations with them
That is, our preference for them
In that we maintain a mental list of what benefit us and what does not
And everything that man has done is a tool to sustain our lives
Our tools as tools, our emotions as tools, our ideas as tools
We did not ask for this
It is just in our nature
This is how we developed
A complex system designed by chance
And perpetuated by destiny
To sustain the flame for life
Chapter 2
Life is good.
Commentary:
In my hour-long conversation with The Philosopher, it was very evident this person is incredibly intelligent and thinks about life’s biggest questions often. On most things we agreed, and if this was a different time in my life I’d probably would have agreed with it all. There were, however, a few places that brought up questions for me.
In this person’s belief system:
God is the All, the great unity underlying all things. I couldn’t help but think of the Gnostics and their view of the All-Father. I, too, use similar words to describe God.
Morality is based on life’s continual desire to sustain itself. Here we disagreed on the nature of objective morality (which I will talk about in future segments).
God is the underlying reality of things, not a personal creator.
Jesus was a man with a great idea that aligned with fundamental truths about the world. His story is the greatest story ever told, but that’s were the line was drawn. The most mystical elements of the Christ story - the Son of God/Messiah/Resurrection - were all just a part of the myth/story.
What I saw in the worldview of the Philosopher was a positive, reinforcing view of reality where morality arises almost naturally, very in line with Eastern Spirituality (Taoism/Buddhism). What I also noticed, however, was a certain kind of sterility, a subtle kind of sadness. As cosmic accidents, we have no where to place our extraordinary suffering except in reason and philosophy, and they are not enough. I saw so many of my own struggles and my own fears reflected back at me.
I couldn’t help but come back to the idea of a personal relationship (with God, Jesus, etc.) Could it be possible? If possible, what could it look like? There’s a desire in me to be in union with that which made me, and I can’t deny it. When I think of an impersonal God as the underlying connectivity between all things, it feels like it’s only half the answer. I need to be able to feel the connectivity flowing through me, to feel the light and the love inside my very soul. Without that, God is too far away for me to feel anything, really, and I’m left to face the suffering of this life alone (or so it seems).
The intellect is a beautiful thing. Taking rational thinking to its limits through philosophy can be very powerful (and it makes for great conversation), but I’m still left with the question that keeps popping up, over and over again: Is there more?
Is there more than I can touch, taste, hear, smell and see? Is there more than I can experience with this body? Is there more than I can reason with this mind? If the answer is yes to these questions, how do I get there - to that place beyond self?
Without an answer, I must continue to seek.