A NEW THEORY ABOUT THE CO-EXISTENCE OF HUMAN EVIL AND GOD

(For those who believe in God, but even for atheists, this is a good logic proposal)

There has always been a problem in Judeo-Christian belief about the co-existence of an “all-good” God and the existence of human evil, suffering, and misery.

(1) Some say that there is really no problem with an all-good God coexisting with an evil world, and that the only problem is our “limitation” in understanding the cosmic wisdom of God.

(2) Some might concede that God allowing us to have free will comes at a price: allowing evil to exist. Thus, the existence of human evil is believed to be more ethical of God to allow than to create beings without free will.
(Although there is a heavy price to pay for using free will to refuse to worship and serve God…you can freely choose all you want, just be ready to burn later…at least to fundamentalist Christian doctrine…)

(3) Some say that the existence of evil is in itself “proof” of the nonexistence of God…or that if there is a God, then he is either not “all-good” or “not omnipotent”

Well…given these views, why not add one more? How about…THE HEROIC OVERRIDE?

This view follows from the conceptual belief in God’s omniscience( the knowledge of everything-that is true- that will occur past, present, and future).

As proposed, God could remain “all-good” (albeit NOT in an informational sense: knowing “what” evil is and what can be described as evil) by in a sense “cheating” his omniscient prevision of (especially) the human world (particularly all of the evil events to occur throughout human physical existence, the continuum of which that I will call: THE GRAND PRIMORDIAL NIHILISM)…by causing all of the victims of every evil act (leading to the death of the individual, at least) to be ZOMBIES…

…not the brain-eating type in the horror movies, of course.

I am referring to the philosopher’s zombie, or the conceptual being that is physically/functionally biological and has a functioning brain, but that is wholly without CONSCIOUSNESS.

For a competent explanation of zombies, read David J. Chalmer’s (Professor of Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence Studies at Arizona University and author of the book: “The Conscious Mind”) online paper: “Consciousness and it’s Place in Nature”

What if God caused every victim of every act (including acts of God and accidents) to become zombies just before the fact of death, saving them from the emotional trauma, pain, etc., but allowing the physical body to continue to “go through the motions”, causing , for instance, a murderer to believe that a victim is pleading for it’s life, when it is really just a biological automoton doing so, and the original person that inhabited the body has been “abducted” by God into a paradise?

This view is the HEROIC OVERRIDE, holding that God “edited” the GPN by using zombies to do the hard painful work, rather than to allow feeling consciousnesses to suffer murder, etc.

One could argue that if HO is true, given that consciousness is the only entitiy in the universe that cannot be perceived by the five senses even in principle (arguing further that the microcosmic world is perceivable in principle, if not in practice), the world would appear and behave just as it in fact does if HO is not true.

There’s more, but feel free to criticise or comment on this theory.

Thank you,

Jay
phenomenal_griffiti @yahoo.com

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As with most logical proofs of the nonexistence of God this is more a misunderstanding than an actual problem.

Put simply: if there weren’t evil in the world then we’d already be in heaven and as such the choice to have faith or not have faith would be meaningless.

Good… evil. Pfft.

How about ‘FREE CHOICE’ baby!?

Free choice is uncomfortable. It takes responsibilty and responsibilty is the natural enemy of the conformism and the victimization of most of us.

Oh so now it’s a choice?
You sure aren’t very consistant. What happened to it being unavoidable?

If there were such a thing as HO then it would defeat so many lessons our souls must learn. It would stagnate the human soul of growth. Good and evil I feel are two parts of one, just as everything has an opposite. Evil cannot be defeated anymore then good can. You just have to learn to find the good paths over the evil paths.
An entirely saintly person could die a horrific evil death, Why? Why should evil happen to the good? A saintly person may never have experienced true evil, how then to learn and comprehend with out experience. Perhaps evil is not evil. It could be a lesson learned. Pain can be described as an exquisite experience. Look at birthing, if we could harness all the emotions and strength women experience and have during the whole process we would be quite formidable to our enemies. How many husbands have been scared spitless by their wives during this time? Pain is considered an evil, but look what it can do. Prisoners being tortured have found an inner strength to carry them through.
We must endure the evil side and sometimes embrace it to be able to move ahead.
Those that are seemingly evil that have done nothing but bad all of their lives may at the end experience true good. Which perhaps is why criminal prisoners often give themselves over to a god and become truly religous.
It could not be possible to have a heroic override it would defeat us in the end.

edited

Hmmmm…it doesn’t seen very fair that some people have to pass through a great deal more suffering than others in order to learn these lessons. Suffering on Earth is mostly arbitrary and doesn’t seem to be justly applied. If there’s are moral lesson in it for us, why is that? Why do some people need more lessons than others?

It can, but usually only in S & M sex manuals. I think you are romanticizing real pain and suffering. For most people who experience it…it is hell. Not noble, inspiring or spiritually enlightening. Maybe you could argue that suffering were necessary for the intensification of pleasure…but so much of it, as there is on earth? And so haphazardly applied?

And yet… it’s not necessary suffer in order to be good. The more people have suffered the more likely they are to be morally damaged…criminals, outcasts and/or mentally ill.

someoneisatthedoor

Does that mean there can be no freewill in heaven, since suffering is a necessary consequence of free will? Will we be robots in heaven? Or…if there is freewill and no evil in heaven, why cant we have it on Earth?

Interesting idea. Does this “zombification” happen instantaneously, and is it complete (i.e. you’re either 0% zombie or 100% zombie)? Given that pain is experienced in varying doses, in varying forms, and for varying lengths of time, I don’t think that this zombification takes away enough of the pain in the universe to make things “nice enough” to justify the idea that [the alleged] God isn’t malevolent.

I remember reading somewhere about a philosopher who claimed to be a zombie - of course, we could never know if it was true, but it’s fascinating to imagine someone living without being conscious per se of it.

First, thanks for your responses.

The Heroic Override Theory is a speculation, but it is ultimately based on an induction of cause and effect, and fundamental substance.

In secular(atheistic) thought, at the basic level there are fundamental substances interacting in fundamental ways, that are responsible for everything in the world. There is only energy and consciousness and (presumably) there are lawful coorespondences between the two that go down to the deepest levels.

The same can be true in theistic thought. I propose a sort of THEOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM that denies conventional views of free will, and support it (conceptually) with the basic fact of existence itself: existence…is indeed itself a form of determinism…a thing exists, and cannot help that it exists, and has no choice in it’s coming into existence. Theological reductionism (a view that holds that God is a cosmic “cartoonist” and that we are his causal “cartoons” through an intricate networking relay between mental particles of nature guided and controlled by God and the other physical force/matter particles in the Standard Model at the basic level works because of this “that’s-how-it-is” principle.

I oppose what I call: ontological moralism, or a view that it is somehow RIGHT that certain conditions (such as the existence of free will) are and WRONG(such as the nonexistence of free will)that certain conditions might be.

There is no right or wrong about the nonexistence of free will (if it’s a fact)…it simply …“that’s-how-it-is-ism” at work. It’s just how the cookie of the universe (or multiverse) crumbles…

Think of the view that consciousness owes it’s existence to and is controlled by brain processes…if a certain neural function does not occur, then a certain act of will, or choice…does not occur. There is a causal dependency relation. If x does not happen, y does not occur. This is Frederick Hayek’s point in his denial of free will in the ultimate sense in his “Epistemology of Neural Evolution”.

Of course, one is free to be what I call an “epiphenomenal existentialist” or one who holds the view that consciousness exists independent of and is not controlled by brain process ( or by telekinetic mechanistic control by God, if theological reductionism is true).

But to paraphrase Bob(another member of Ilovephilosophy): “ultimately we are all blind men feeling only one side of the elephant”

To answer chimneysweep: According to the Heroic Override, God only “abducts” the consciousness from victims before they are murdered, either by other humans, themselves, or acts of God. He’s simply re-enacting his prescience of every evil event in the history of the human universe, first appearing as a very LONG vision in his head by random chance and psychical laws of nature. He responded to this vision by re-enacting it using physical matter and energy, and editing it to give a universal happy ending, and to thwart the evil beings he foresaw (whom he also created as “villianous cartoons”) by robbing them (albeit unknowingly or unbelievingly) of the suffering of their victims.

Analogy: Alan Moore was the writer of the award-winning comic book: THE WATCHMEN. He first thought up the story (God having the random prescience), decided to give his thought up story physical form (God choosing to re-enact the GPN: Grand Primordial Nihilism), but decided to edit or change aspects of his imagining of the events in the WATCHMEN in order to make it not so dark a tale at the end (God causing victims of murder,etc. to instantaneously-to answer your question-become zombies rather than to suffer the “hell” of traumatic death)

My fingers have gotten tired, but I welcome all comments on this further elaboration.

Thanks,

Jay.

phenomenal_graffiti@yahoo.com

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Hello

Since I’ve become interested in these questions, it has seemed absurd that there should be any contradiction between science and religion or faith and reason. From this perspective i “Some say that there is really no problem with an all-good God coexisting with an evil world, and that the only problem is our “limitation” in understanding the cosmic wisdom of God” [/i]makes the most sense for me.

I must confess to not seeing the logic in what you propose. What then is the purpose of Man’s life and death?

This is also the Christian Zombie or what described as the “dead” in "let the dead bury their dead.

But why go through the whole process to begin with? In Buddhism this process is called samsara. I believe in the Christian concept of re-birth. It is quite logical within the broad scale of conscious evolution. I cannot see how this abduction serves the purpose since there is no conscious realization in it but only an abduction

In contrast consider how Simone Weil describes it in the book “Gravity and Grace:”

I do believe at such times in ones life when enduring severe affliction for example, that our personalities can no longer adapt to and rationalize them so we become open to the possible conscious objective experience of them or “hit bottom.” and uncovered from our inner lies are in turn “seen” leading to grace, purification, and salvation. But this is not the same as “abduction.”

It seems logical to me that attachment to life creates a covering that denies our natural higher developing conscious human perspective. We cannot begin to see the forest from attachment to the trees. This is the human condition as I understand it. In Christianity it is called "dust"and in Buddhism, samsara. If such abduction did occur, I don’t see the sense of either dust or samsara in relation to Man.

Thanks for your response, Nick.

To answer your questions: The Heroic Override Theory is logical, as you can understand what it entails, even if you don’t agree with it.

Second, the “purpose” of the abduction is God’s determination to save a human victim from a traumatic death foreseen in him omniscient preview of the human condition. As to why God would re-enact the human condition in physical matter and energy rather than to just ignore the prevision and create some all-good world, one can argue that it is just a matter of his own choice, and higher psychological laws of nature that determine the shape of the mind and will of God.

(In the same way that it is believed that higher physical laws of nature govern the function of our neurons, and our neurons in turn govern what will will choose or will)

According to this view (based on Theological Reductionism: see my last post) the universe is a predetermined sequence of events from beginning to end, so there are really NO lessons to be learned from surviving pain, except perhaps the illusory “lesson” of our subjective thought and feeling, but even here, this is just another predetermined event.

I support this view by an appeal to what I call: Indistinguishbly Possible Worlds, or a set of conceivable worlds (theories) that all leave the same observational evidence about the world.

That is, a belief in free will, and a belief in the nonexistence of free will both yield the same observational (sensory) evidence about the world. Even if free will does not exist, individuals will still behave and believe that they have free will, even if some higher being or process is controlling them. (Following from Frederick Hayek’s observation)

Also, I deny that there is a “right” or “wrong” to an ontological condition…what is…simply is. There is no inherent “wrongness” in the absence of free will…as I have said before, if it is true, then that’s how the cookie of the universe crumbles.

Of course, if one believes that the world is an open sequence, where the future is uncertain, such that one can control one’s destiny and write whatever there is to be written on the empty chalkboard of the future, then one can “learn one’s lesson” from life’s pain and grow from it.

But if the universe is a predetermined sequence of events, like a comic book or movie pre-planned by a cartoonist or director (my view), then the future has already been written.

Both views are indistinguishable from the sensory evidence about the world, such that one can argue that EITHER ONE MIGHT BE TRUE FOR ALL WE KNOW.

In the case of predeterminism, “purpose” is simply in the causal circumstance of the situation, such that feelings of meaning, etc. are already built in by causal situation.

Anyway, hope I wasn’t too ambiguous in response.

Take care,

Jay
phenomenal_graffiti@yahoo.com

p.s. About personal responsibility: In a predeterministic universe without free will, one can argue that “personal responsibility” is a created subjective reality rather than a fundamental objective reality. That is, the forces that govern us create the “illusion” of a sense of personal responsibility, and creates a society within which the individuals all believe in p.r. despite the fact that the higher responsibility is from a cosmic force above us.

Remember, perception IS reality, in a sense…so we can think that something IS,even if in fact it IS NOT…and this, on a subjective level, becomes our reality.

But, everything said above is just an opinion.

Yur daaamn right size=75[/size]
‘Sin’ is not an optional thing. We all have to “sin” eventually, – during our times of emotional imbalance and missunderstanding.

Why does ‘God’ have such a faith fedish? What does he like so much about faith? All that faith is – is trust and belief. It is hardest to have faith in what you – deep down inside of yourself – know to be false, so faith in God isn’t easy, it’s a ‘test’…

Stop rationalizing. Crazy God crap eventually will land you in a mental institute if you over-apply it.

Bullshit! People still experiance pain and trauma – sometimes it is enough to change who they are forever and effect them for the rest of their life! (example: children who were sexually abused)
All intelligent life on earth can feel pain – due to damage. If God didn’t want us to have pain then he shouldn’t have created us with that capasity. If God didn’t want evil then he should have destroyed it – and he should not have created it.

Why do Christians always have to defend and promote God instead of God logically defending and promoting himself!? From top-to-bottom it’s all shit! Tons of people preach lies and deception everyday, with a strong faith that it is true. It’s not ok!
Say no to proofless faith and non-reason.

Nick, that might work for you but isn’t it really just the standard god moves in mysterious ways escape clause? God is not to be held to any earthly moral standard because…well, he’s God. It’s called the special plead fallacy and can be inserted whenever there is a tricky question about God. “We cant hope to understand why he allows suffering, cruelty…etc”

But…if we cant view this idea of an all-good God through our own moral sensibilities then I dont see how he can be conceived of in any meaningful sense. It means you are believing in pure authority with no moral comprehension of what that authority might mean. You might as well worship a cruel dictator who’s motives you dont understand and which are never explained. If we cant understand the “cosmic wisdom of god”, then we cant know if he is good or not. Can we…?

Hi Leda

One thing amongst several that I had a great deal of difficulty with was the idea that Man, as we are in the fallen state, is unimportant in the cosmic sense. It is our egotism that provides the imaginary impression of importance and denies the reality of its nothingness. It went against everything I was accustomed to thinking. Yet the more I read and contemplated on it, the more reasonable it became and explained much.

I believe that Creation is an act of necessity meaning that though God IS outside time and space and contains all potential within the Trinity, maintaining the quality if “isness” required the actualizing of potentials into “things” or lawful fractions of God into denser levels of materiality.

Creation then is a machine for the purpose of continually manifesting the lawful relationships that actualize God’s potential preserving its being. It does so through a continual process of material transformation. The idea that the universe eats itself is an old profound observation of this process and symbolically depicted as the Ouroboros

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

It has become quite natural for us to believe that the earth is here for the purpose of man but I’ve come to believe that this is only a view of puffed up egotism and it is more reasonable to assume that man on earth existing unconsciously but with only brief intervals of consciousness providing the illusion of consciousness, serves the same purpose that the rest of unconscious organic life serves; primarily to serve the earth and its position within the grand cosmic scheme. Like the rest of organic life, man transforms materiality through the continuation of the life processes such as eating, drinking, breathing, movement reacting to life, sex etc. Take away the grand opinions of ourselves and this is objectively what happens with human life as it adapts to earth’s conditions.

Is it cruel and evil that sardines eat plankton, mackerel eat sardines, bluefish eat mackerel, tuna eat bluefish and so on? Is it any more “evil” that accidents and atrocities occur with unconscious mankind? But this is too egotistically offensive for most to consider. How can we, convinced of our self importance, come to grips with the idea that it is not so and as such, there is nothing concerned with our every move?

But beginning to see the reality of the human condition is called “awakening” in the ancient traditions and they offer their ways by which an individual can become more through the development of their own “being” and be able to serve not just the mechanical functioning’s of the earth but cooperate with the higher cosmic function of consciousness that seeks to connect consciousness with mechanicality or “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

So for me, good is defined by more than our moral sensibilities and God’s meaning becomes relative as we grow in our capacity to begin a transition from subjective concepts of meaning to the existence of meaning in a more objective sense. I saved this excerpt on “meaning” from Dr. Nicoll a while back and will share it with you.

“Cosmic wisdom of God” cannot come down to our level permeated by our imagination as to what we are. The obvious alternative is the attempt to outgrow this restriction and grow to receive it which is the goal of the essence of religion. Here is where it becomes so difficult since this imagination has been our life and as Simone Weil suggests, we don’t want to die.

This is why help from above in the form of intermediate levels of conscious being between man and its source becomes necessary. Such opening to objective experience is beyond our ability to do so we ask for help from above

Hi there Jay

I agree that it is logical but doesn’t fit into creation as cosmological or our universe as “layered” with each layer or comsos composed of a different blend of quality of consciousness and mechanical laws. So your theory is not logical for me in the context of the variables I’m more accustomed to. I could be totally wrong.

I remember reading the story of the young seminary student who when asked by the examining Bishop why he felt God was not completely omnipotent, he said that even God cannot beat the ace of trumps with the deuce.

This means that in order for God to intervene if the desire were there to do so, it would mean changing the rules of the game or the laws of creation defeating its necessary purpose since everything is connected.

While I also believe that universal laws are predetermined consciously, their results at lower levels are not determined consciously but by interactions of mechanical laws. The fate of one type of man for example is known. However it is not known for each individual within each type. To do so would seem to me to make the process and higher experience of creation meaningless and since its value is more in the process than the result, it would render creation useless.

Nick,
I also dont believe that the Earth is here for the purpose of man, but I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you defining God as something beyond all religious descriptions? Because my original comment only applies if your view of God is of an entity which is “good” , “bad” or “particular”. If your view of God is of an incomprehensible cosmic force from no particular religion and with no particular features then there is not much to question other than whether it exists or not. Such a God may be good, bad, not concerned with morality, crazy…whatever. A featureless force. It’s only when you start to give God traits and characteristics, like good or all loving that humans can view God through a moral eye.

We may be lowly specks in the cosmos but we are still moral agents capable of understanding pain and suffering. We are not unconscious. A plankton cannot conceive of God or or ponder on the harshness of it’s own existence. If we think of ourselves as too tiny to question God and just submit to religious devotion because God is the great cosmos and we are nothing then we might as well be plankton. If for example a christian says to me “god is good” on the one hand and “he is beyond our moral understanding” on the other then I cant see how we can know he is good? But … if God is just a vague, incomprehensible force to you [or if you dont believe he exists], then yes, he can have no defined moral significance which relates to us because he has no moral features. Certainly none which we can understand. So presumably you are not claiming any for him. That is, you are not saying he is good or bad.

Well yes…but just because we might wish something to be so, it doesn’t mean it is. It may be there is no meaning…just telling yourself there is meaning because it it’s morally consoling is wishful thinking. And isn’t demanding there be ultimate maning in life just another one of those grand opinions of man and his ego?

On the one hand you seem to be claiming that we can derive great meaning and assurance from God and on the other that we are nothing more than unconscious specks in an uncaring and incomprehensible universe, materialized by a creative force which isbeyond human morality and conception.I’m not sure how meaningful that kind of meaning would be anyway, except that we may be part of some grand scheme.

Also, I dont see how confronting the idea that there may be no divine meaning in human existence can be a “terrible illness”, though it might be a disturbing thought. And can there be meaning in our lives without God? I believe so. Even if we dont believe in God we still construct meaning for ourselves in the here and now. Not having a belief in God or ultimate, divine meaning need not be as desolate as Dr. Nicoll would have us believe.

Maybe…I wouldn’t know. And lets face us, neither does Dr. Nicoll, though it sounds good. There may or may not be meaning. We cant know. All we can do is create meaning through our imagination.

Note*… I had a hell of a time typing this! whenever I pasted your quotes the text got chopped up. God knows why? Another great cosmic mystery.

Hi Leda

Yes and no. This normal idea of the personal “Christian God” is far from universally accepted in Christianity. Read how beautifully Meister Eckhart, one of the great Christian mystics describes the limitations of our comprehensions of God:

and

But man can become sensitive to the direction towards what lies beyond our intellect and it comes through the experience of qualities of emotions beyond what we normally ever experience without effort.

The purpose of objective sacred art is to create a work of art whether it be written, seen, heard, or how ever experienced like within certain architecture that has the ability through its composition to allow the experience of a higher emotion revealing the psychological inner direction of the sacred for the person open to and experiencing this art. The artist then had to have had the experience and the knowledge of his art to transmit such a quality of emotion. Where a text book on higher math for example may reveal new intellectual knowledge for the math student, sacred art is like a book revealing new emotional knowledge through direct experience for the spiritual seeker necessary for emotional discrimination. The experience of sacred art reveals a direction not limited by the moral eye and is natural for the spirit of man to be drawn to as it seeks its source and meaning Your question is not an easy one.

Not really because plankton, a tree, a dog or other forms of organic life have reached the height of their evolution and destined to follow the cycles of samsara and why Buddhism calls this suffering.

However, the ancient traditions such as Christianity and Buddhism suggest that man has the possibility to be more than just a facet of organic life that just repeats life’s cycles while imagining itself as special, entitled, or a God that surely is above such things.

If you’ve never experienced cold water, how could you be aware of hot water? Degrees of temperature necessitate discriminating between hot and cold. I believe that “Good” is the same. God, being outside time and space doesn’t exist but IS. Good becomes relative when God existing as "One"outside time and space, necessarily divided into “three” within the limitations of time and space. If you look at Genesis 1, God calls the light good in relation to darkness. This is God in existence but not God outside time and space as “One” or IS.

The objective good for man must be man’s evolution beyond the limits of unconscious organic life.

This is why I’m more Christian than Buddhist. Man’s origin is not with God the Father but at the cosmological level of the Son. Help from above is then possible for Man through its representatives. This fits into the ID discussion we were having. As I understand it, organic life exists in conceptual wholeness at the cosmological level of the Son or Sun in relation to the earth. This conceptual wholeness, by the process of “involution” (unity into diversity) manifests as the sum of its necessary parts that evolve into the varied forms of organic life. Lacking consciousness, organic life follows natural laws serving its purpose for the continual transformations of the energies and materiality that comprise the sum of its parts.

Even though the Father is like the Tao for example, Our evolution or man’s potential exists within the limits of creation and in the domain of the Son.

Even though we are nothing, we have the potential to be something beyond service to the earth. This I believe is meaningful for Man and it is normal for us to be attracted to it.

I think you may have misunderstood Dr. Nicoll. He was describing meaning as relative. If at times in ones life, only money is believed meaningful then this is their God. However there are those in whom for want of a better word, their “depression” is such that nothing provides a sense of meaning, this meaninglessness is a terrible illness.

Meaning becomes relative and the parable of the “Pearl of Great Price” illustrates how the search for meaning beyond the mundane can grow in us.

We can create meaning through our imagination but since it is imaginary it will eventually be discovered as meaningless.

To become open to meaning beyond a certain point requires becoming open to truth and its harsh raw realities. It is not for the timid. Consider how Simone Weil describes it in relation to the need for truth:

Rough stuff but I’ll give her credit as one of the minority with the need and courage to be real. A very special person.

So how do we discover real meaning? If we find meaning in God for example, how do we discern if that meaning is real or of our own construction/imaginary?

So God is something we experience through our feelings rather than our reason. Is that what you mean? I can understand that. Our feelings can deceive us though. What about emotional need, wishful thinking, longing…? Cant these emotions obscure truth? Emotions dont have the objectivity of reason. Flawed as it might be…isn’t it still the best tool with which to discover what is real and what is imaginary?

Perhaps I have, but he clearly said if there is no God there is no meaning in life. In the quote you gave me at least, he does not seem to be talking about relative meaning, which would NOT depend on there being a God. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt since I dont know a thing about him other than what you’ve shown me.

I liked the Meister Eckhart quotes. They were very creative.

Hi Leda

Normally one cannot unless a direct experience of grace for example. We have to admit that we do not know and begin at the beginning.

The better we can impartially know ourselves, the better we can discriminate since we will have experienced our repeating inner lies.

But first we must feel the need for this discrimination. Suppose a person is relatively happy in life. The person has a family,good job, kids, feels valuable in a community and so on. For many this is enough.

However, there are those that could even have all that but still the need to experience what lies behind it. Something deep in their heart that is more essentially themselves and cannot be satisfied by earthly results such as societal rewards so an emptiness remains that continually calls the person.

The first step at this stage is to become open and courageous to “know thyself.” The more one becomes open to this experience, the more one is able to discriminate between an inner truths and lies. There is a science to this.

Work on ones emotions is both difficult and rewarding. You are right to describe how they lead to self deception. They can be as necessary as they are harmful.

Apatheia in the Christian sense is not just suppressing emotions as in Stoicism but creating the void for which higher emotions or "feelings"can enter that are nothing like our usual negative reactive emotions expressing the fears and imaginations of our egotism. This is one form of work on our emotions. There are others.

But reason is also limited. It draws comparisons and its value is restricted to decisions based upon the normal apparent dualism of daily life. But our spirituality and the emotions associated with it do not compare in this way but instead reflect the quality of “now.” This is the spiritual direction. Normally we live in a dream so there is no affirmation of the moment or self awareness but just imagination filling up the void reserved for conscious affirmation. The ancient traditions call this waking “sleep” in one form or another.

All this is hard to swallow since it suggests our helplessness that we don’t want to witness. Yet it is the necessary starting point or else a person will fall victim to self deception. It is no good to put new wine into old bottles or esoteric thinking into old mindsets. Everything just spills out.

There is a science to this but it is only of use to those that need it. It gradually allows the mind, emotions, and sensations to function together as a unified whole for the purpose of the conscious experience of life’s impressions and the experience of higher meaning natural for such non-illusory openness and the help that becomes available as a result of this vulnerable need… But a person has to "need"it. Most prefer imagination and I must admit a bit of terror when I read Simone’s observation here since I see how it was once this way with me and how I kept eating the husk and discarding the corn as a convenient escape into greater imagination.