19. A new reformation
We are dealing with big things here. Agree? It is nothing new, meaning that big things happen once in a while throughout history.
What I am trying to do in this book is to patch together something broken several hundred years ago, namely the division that occurred at that time between spirit and matter.
Science ran away with matter and everything «physical», while the church got to keep the spirit, the soul, God, the angels, Jesus, Heaven and so on.
I am talking about the Reformation in the 16th century, the Enlightenment in the 18th century and later the industrial revolution, electricity, computer technology ... all that we have built our culture around in such a way that it leads right off the cliff – if I may say it.
We have a world we must rescue as soon as possible. New ideas are needed, which is what I am proposing here. My goal is to reverse the historical schism where the material world moved forward in leaps and bounds while the spirit was left abandoned in the back room where we celebrate Christmas once a year.
Spirit and matter can not remain separated – when the spirit is the water, the bath water – the ocean from which everything arises through idealistic emergence.
The Experiencer.
That's where we started.
We have so far said that the only thing that exists is a state of being. We can not say anything about this. It is impossible because it would require a look from outside everything, a perspective that does not exist.
This state of being is before all perspectives; it is that which is able to imagine and simultaneously experience a perspective, i.e. see itself, not from the outside, but through an inner mirroring.
That is pure logic, necessity.
You will find this way of thinking in philosophy and religion because it must be so – seen from our perspective inside the perception of the Experiencer.
Ok, now we should not take another round of pondering around this one Experiencer. But at the same time, this «one» is everything, including you and me.
We are the one we too.
One appears as many.
That the one universal Experiencer exists, I hold as fundamental.
Our axiom says that everything must come from and be one and the same and that this one must be mental and subjective because the only thing we experience with certainty is our subjective, mental self.
What we currently do not know is how the one great Experiencer can act as billions of living creatures, each with their own private, separate experience of existence.
How does this separation of private subjects from the one Experiencer occur?
What is the relationship of these subjects to the universal, one Experiencer after they are separated?
How does the interaction between the secreted subjects take place?
Besides, what happens after a subject ceases to exist – when a living creature dies?
Now we are making a giant and abrupt leap away from particle physics and complexity theory – and over to what we can, a little irreverently, call speculation about spirit and soul.
That is jumping from one to the other, you might think.
Maybe you get the impression that we now leave the scientific and indulge in esoteric and metaphysical mysteries.
It's not so.
Our world is idealistic.
I have to repeat it because it's so easy to forget.
We become so engrossed in everything the mental universe manages to «materialise» – all the laws, particles, forces, atoms, molecules, our bodies, everything in nature, everything alive.
There are loads of spectacular phenomena.
We forget where it all came from, that everything is notions, something thought, something we believe in, something experienced. But the content of our experiences is nothing in its own right.
The universe is conception in a universal subject, the Experiencer.
Also you are an Experiencer because that is where we, together with Descartes, started.
We are not now moving away from the scientific; we are moving towards the core, the origin, the ontological truth of what the world is in essence.
It is «the one» we are looking for.
So far, we have studied how consciousness can create the notion of something physical and the mental laws that can explain all phenomena we know.
Now we ask how the universal Experiencer can create you and everything else alive, with an experienced, private, subjective «existence».
What are you?
In the seemingly material, physicalistic everyday life most of us go through, it isn't easy to have contact with the deepest in yourself. We focus on what materialises before our eyes, what we hear, feel against the skin, smell, taste and not least, think.
Our world experience is mainly about what our five senses and thoughts convey.
To understand anything about the world, we must understand the subjective. Then we must somehow turn to our subjective self.
Do we have the senses to do this?
Are there more than the five senses?
How should we attack it?
Now we come to the part where traditional science cannot help us. We should still be able to put in some research, and there are also several alternative ways of looking at it.
We are not chanceless at all.
We will attack it in two ways, much as we have done so far to bring out a theory of emergence and the laws of complexity.
First, I want to present what I believe is a rational and logical «solution». Then I will try to make probable that it is correct.
As with everything else in this book, anyone who wants to challenge the reasoning is more than welcome to do so. I hope everything I write here can lead to an extensive and interesting discussion.
We need this conversation, all of us, both on a personal and collective level.
Let's take a slight detour and say a few words about the importance of what we are dealing with here.
