Tag Archives: sigmund freud

Integration: Duality and Flow

Featured

Posted on by

We think in terms of opposing forces and opposites. Duality flows from the boundaries created as we separate from the whole of existence—initially physically at birth, and then psychically in infancy. This schism has been expressed in many ways, often as contrasting forces: good and evil, life and death, aggressive and erotic, Me and Not-Me, extrovert and introvert. I believe the true significance of duality lies in our response to it. There is a fundamental difference in outcome between choosing between opposites and integrating them.

Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein conceived of opposing Life and Death instincts. However, a “Death” instinct seems incompatible with evolution; what purpose does it serve? More natural is Donald Winnicott’s expression of an aggressive component, born of opposition, and an erotic component, born of complementarity—both arising as an infant realizes the distinction between Me and Not-Me. Carl Jung also focused on the struggle to integrate opposing forces. Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality typing that evolved from Jung’s work, with its four dimensions: Extrovert/Introvert, Thinking/Feeling, Sensing/Intuition, and Judging/Perceiving. From the dawn of our species, we have observed the difference between light and dark, describing our very nature as good or evil. Martin Buber gives us the profound duality of the I-Thou way of being, contrasted against I-It.

“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between man’s attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connection with objects… These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constitutes the world of THOU and the latter the world of IT.” — Ronald Gregor Smith, translator of Ich und Du

It appears, then, that duality—expressed as an opposition of forces—is fundamental to our reaction to existence, woven into the very fabric of our thinking and being.

What, then, is our response? Is it passive, involving choice or balance, or is it active, requiring process and integration? Admitting polarity in all things, what should our reaction be? Do we simply choose between good and evil? Should we seek balance between different drives, aiming for a kind of dynamic equilibrium—for instance, striving to find the center point between extroversion and introversion? Is reality, in fact, a process budding eternally at the very boundary created by duality—life within Winnicott’s Transitional Space or Whitehead’s point of prehension? Or is there a further truth behind this duality, found in what arises from the unification of opposites? To paraphrase Beethoven: there cannot be loud without soft; it is from contrast that music arises.

Perhaps it is a matter of personal taste. If so, then—at least for me—the integration of duality is our purpose. It is an unceasing process because there is always a countervailing force of differentiation. There is a flow of existence driven by splitting and unification, birth and death. Duality is dynamic, not static, and the fundamental creative contrast is actually that between differentiation and integration, replacing Freud’s Life and Death instincts with forces of Integration and Differentiation. This isn’t an original thought, nor is it mine alone. It is inherent in the worldview of Eastern traditions (such as Yin and Yang) and likely our Western ancestors as well (as explored in Brian Bates’s The Wisdom of the Wyrd). It was also one of Jung’s foundational insights: “Much of Carl Jung’s writings are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity” (Anthony Storr, Jung: Selected Writings).

If we conceive of a schism-powered flow, what is its destination, and what is its fundamental motive impulse? Here we find Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the ultimate duality between the spiritual and the material—the inner and the outer. For him, the force underlying existence is Love, which powers evolution. He envisioned evolution as a process of complexification moving through the physical, chemical, and biological spheres into the realm of ideas, culminating in our consciousness of a God that is Love, encompassing all. As described by his interpreters, “There is a duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the ‘without’ and ‘within.’ He traces the development of the ‘within,’ an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas.”

In Teilhard de Chardin’s words:

“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form… Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”

People and Ideas

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Wir betreten feuertrunken..

I have always been fascinated by the way ideas travel through people. A thought begins in one mind, is taken up by another, and is carried into a new setting where it changes shape. Something is preserved, but something unexpected is added. The result is not a straight line of influence, but a web: people, books, conversations and disciplines crossing one another until a new pattern becomes visible.

I have noted elsewhere how Martin Buber’s ideas about dialogue were taken up by the physicist David Bohm. Buber’s central insight was that human beings are formed in relationship: we do not simply meet the world as detached observers, but are shaped by the encounters we enter into. It is within the “between” that meaning originates. Bohm brought this relational philosophy into conversation with modern physics and with his own concern for collective thought. At MIT, and through later dialogue groups, these ideas helped inspire new ways of thinking about systems, ecology, organisations and creativity. In this way, ideas from an Austrian mystical philosopher flowed through a small nexus of thinkers—David Bohm, Peter Senge, and Donella Meadows—to help found both the field of ecological economics and the culture of enormous learning organisations like Microsoft and Google.

What interests me in this example is not only the ideas themselves, but the role played by an individual who becomes a point of connection. Bohm acted as a kind of nexus: someone able to hold together an almost mystical philosophy of relationship, the scientific imagination of relativity and quantum theory, and the practical need for groups to think together. Through him, ideas crossed boundaries that might otherwise have remained separate.

David Bohm

Wholeness and the Implicate Order; On Dialogue

Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers another example of this same pattern. He drew from philosophy, especially Husserl’s phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialism; from psychology, especially Kurt Koffka’s Gestalt theory; from art; and from evolutionary thought, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of emergence. His work can be read as an attempt to show how meaning arises not inside a sealed individual mind, but in the living relationship between body, world and others.

Merleau-Ponty’s early book, The Structure of Behaviour, was inspired by Gestalt psychology with its insistence that a whole cannot be reduced to its separate parts. His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, developed this insight further. Perception, he argued, is not a camera-like recording of the world by a disembodied mind. It is embodied. We encounter the world through movement, touch, habit, gesture and attention. We do not stand outside the world looking in; we belong to it, and it continually shapes the way we see.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Structure of Behaviour; Phenomenology of Perception; Invisible and Invisible

This is where Merleau-Ponty comes close to Buber. For both thinkers, meaning is relational. It is not made by an isolated subject and then projected onto a passive world. It emerges in the space between: self and other, body and environment, perceiver and perceived. The scientific revolution of relativity may have helped prepare the ground for this shift, because it made it harder to imagine reality as something viewed from nowhere. Relationship, position and perspective had become central even in the hard sciences.

In his final, unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty pushed this thought further. He used the phrase “the flesh of the world” to suggest that we and the world are not two separate substances facing each other across a gap. We are made of the same fabric. To see is also to be visible; to touch is also to be touchable. In every act of perception there is a crossing-over, or what he called a chiasm: I meet the world, and the world meets me.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

Teilhard de Chardin deepens this thread through his account of evolution as emergence. Although he and Merleau-Ponty never met, Merleau-Ponty discussed evolution in his lectures at the Collège de France and quoted Teilhard’s phrase that “man came silently into the world”. Both thinkers resisted a simple split between matter and spirit. Instead, they saw meaning appearing through thresholds: the physical world giving rise to chemistry, chemistry to life, life to consciousness, and consciousness to the subsequent evolution of ideas.

The common thread, then, is relationship. Ideas do not move by abstraction alone. They move through people who are alive to more than one world and able to bring those worlds into contact. Buber, Bohm, Merleau-Ponty and Teilhard each, in different ways, point beyond the isolated individual toward a more dynamic picture: meaning arises in the space between things. It is made in encounter, in perception, in dialogue, in evolution. A person becomes a nexus when they can recognise this space between, enter it with enthusiasm, and help others see what might be born there.

…. Next post: Creative Cost (the other side of encounter)

Meaning and the Number 2

Posted on by
Reply
Waving

This is why, for me, the mystic number is 2.

The Question of Meaning

“Meaning is the essential feature of consciousness…” David Bohm

The first question for me is this: “Is there meaning?” This is, of course, just another way of phrasing “Why?” or “Is there purpose at all?” Surely this underlies all of living for each of us. Sometimes we confront it; sometimes we avoid it — but it is always there. Since we are inside existence, and have no rational external reference point, there can be no purely rational answer. Personally, though, it seems obvious to me that the answer is yes; but that is, in the end, an article of faith, albeit one underpinned by all of the extraordinary “coincidences” in physics that make life possible.

Let’s then take the existence of meaning as a truth. Where does it lie?

Meaning Beyond the Ego

“The dust inbreathed was a house, the wall, the wainscot, and the mouse” T. S. Eliot

It seems to me that purpose is not to be found in what Freud thought of as the “self” or Ego. This is entirely different from Jung’s definition of Self — which is much more interesting. “I”, that is, all of our “I”s, will dissolve as bodies die. At that point, their molecules will be taken up into infinite new forms, just as the body I currently inhabit is made up of atoms that have been part of infinite others — including all of those I have known: my mother, father, brothers, wife, and so on.

Nor do I believe that meaning lies solely within the material world. In fact, the more science uncovers of the “how” of quantum mechanics, the less concrete materiality really appears.

It seems to me that the frantic search for meaning within things — dialectical materialism — is a dead end, or at least a distraction. On the other hand, the material world must surely be a part of meaning. But part of what?

Meaning as Part of a Whole

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Part of a whole. All is one. Indeed, that is what “universe” means: one thing. Another way of looking at it could be that meaning is found in process — the flow of matter and energy. Perhaps: “the whole flow of energy and matter.” How, though, do we break that down into something we can get our arms around, or understand?

Maybe another way of looking at it is that the material is part of something else, partnered with… mind? Spirit? Antimatter?

Relation as the Site of Meaning

“The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou. The memory itself is transformed, as it plunges out of its isolation into the unity of the whole” Martin Buber

That, for me, is where Martin Buber and David Bohm come in. They each talk about meaning as lying within “relation” or “dialogue”: what lies “between”. Buber’s amazing semi-poetic meditation, I and Thou (Ich und Du), has been transformative for me. I would encourage everyone to read at least the first two pages, where he defines the “primary words” as I-It and I-Thou, as opposed to I, Thou, or It alone.

I therefore have two building blocks in my search. First: there is meaning. Second: the place to look for it is relationship.

Why Two Matters

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” William Blake

And that is where number arises for me. If meaning lies in relation, then relation requires more than undivided oneness. It requires distinction, edge, and encounter: something that can meet something other than itself.

My daughter, as a teenager, told me she thought that an incredibly important concept was “boundary”, and I have been assimilating that ever since. Without boundary, nothing can be known. You need the “other” to understand yourself.

I wrote this some years ago.

“From zero to hero, the world is born with the appearance of 1. The archetypal boundary is right there in the change from nothing to all. But one is one, and all alone, and ever more shall be so. From 1 to 2, consciousness is possible: granularity and separation. We can understand existence because we have edge: a within and a without. Quantum mechanics shows that everything exists only as a cloud of possibility — until observed. It is the act of knowing that crystallises reality out of potential. Deliberately to mix language: it is witness that causes wavefunction collapse. It is consciousness that creates reality, and that is only possible when edge is born with the advent of the number 2. Duality appears to be a fundamental property of existence. Energy is the flip side of matter (E=mc²); everything is wave and particle simultaneously. Yin is nothing without yang. Ich and Du embrace, and the world unfolds.”

That is why, for me, the “mystic number” is 2. With it comes a consciousness of existence, and the possibility of relation and dialogue, which Buber and Bohm so eloquently place at the core of meaning.

So I return to the first question: is there meaning? For me, yes. It is not found in the isolated self, nor in material things alone, but in relation. And relation becomes possible only where there is boundary, distinction, and encounter.

That is why, for me, the mystic number is 2.

Unknotting nottiness

Posted on by
Reply

I hold to one-ness, to boundary intensifying connection. I reject the primacy of ego and materialism and the loneliness and fear of death to which they condemn.

Humanity is in a blind alley. We are here because we have followed two whopping lies.

Here’s the first (courtesy of Sigmund Freud).

You are not me.

You-Me. Yes to that – there is boundary – it is the edge between us that allows us to experience each other. It’s the little word not that causes all the problems. You are not me. Distinction, separation, contrast. The birth of Freud’s concept of ego.

And this nott-iness is perculiarly modern and western. After all the Hindu – Namaste means something like “I bow to the divine in you”. Our culture – European and American – is also rooted in “community”. Together, we are one. Do our achievements in the west not stand on the foundations of all of the tribes, families, villages, congregations, parliaments, colleges, schools, classes of the past? The individuals who we remember – the Shakespeares, Napoleons, Eliots, Einsteins, Washingtons, Elizabeth Reginas – were they not the flowering and expressions of their age. They did not appear singular and without context.

And here’s the second great lie (thanks to Marx and Engels)

All is matter.

Dialectic materialism. There is no such thing as spirit; no concept of purpose or any “other”. Without a yardstick against which to measure moral compass what is there? Self-referential humanism and its close cousin narcissism.

From these two ideas – “ego” and the exclusive worship of “matter” has sprung the western “triumph” of atheism, the advance of capitalism and the fragmentation of society.

I hold to one-ness, to boundary intensifying connection. I reject the primacy of ego and materialism and the loneliness and fear of death to which they condemn.

When my body dissolves, then the molecules will become part of new patterns. So too will my other essence. My soul. The fragment of spirit that animates this collection of atoms. As Rupert Brooke puts it.. “a pulse in the eternal mind, no less”.

Or perhaps

Let us go gentle into that good light,

Old age should turn to brave the close of day;       

Courage guag’d against the flighting of its wight

Joy beyond angst?

Posted on by
2

It is politically correct to assume a materialistic existence built on a series of microscopic random events unfolding in intransitive time. We live in the ship of our ego, afloat on an ocean of materialism. No wonder we are full of loneliness and fear.

Sigmund Freud observed that the more you avoid a fear, or abyss, the unhealthier you become. All of the mechanisms of dealing with unconscious pain (projection, avoidance, repression etc) simply lead at best to neurosis, at worst to psychosis.

The big fear, the monster lurking in the deeps is existential angst. The terror of nothingness inside the tiny baby inside each of us. How, then, to deal with that? It’s worth tackling, since our insecurity is rooted right there. The more secure a person is, then the more listening, creative, compassionate, generous, talented and capable of joy they are. Insecurity spawns withdrawal, narcissism, unhappiness and disconnection. So that horizons contract to world as prison.

How then does security arise?  Where do we find an ability to live in confidence? (Con Fides; with trust)? Some simply have faith. Probably they were securely attached as children. What about the rest of us?

Science is uncovering deep meaning at the most fundamental level. Experiments on matter at the most microscopic levels shows that existence is an infinite series of possibilities, potential – until observed. It is the act of observation that, in effect, crystallises out this particular existence from the cloud of possibilities. What then is this act of becoming, of creation that we are engaged upon together? . Surely there must be an “observer” to create this particular reality. Sure enough, our species are the most efficient engines of observation, whether through science or the arts. We each of us spend our life in observation (or as some would call it – witness, some knowledge). Interestingly our gathering of knowledge is escalating in a geometric progression. (Are we approaching Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point”?)

It appears to me our purpose as humans is to be just this – engines of observation crystallising out existence; and we do this together. That puts the onus on us collectively. It is OUR task to work for “good effect” – rather than trying to live with our eyes tight closed against the fear that we float on a sea of random meaninglessness.

…and then comfort comes; and connection and joy. Atman replaces ego, and angst evaporates. Until we forget and have to realise it all over again.

The Freud Boson

Posted on by
Reply

Everything now has a field theory, explaining connecting forces. Like the electromagnetic field for instance. For each force physicists have name a “fermion” which carries the force. Electrons carry electricity, photons transmit light etc.. Lately there has even been confirmation of the Higgs Boson, which transmits gravity, also I think called a graviton.

Why not then a field describing the force of selfishness, self interest and self-centred ness. What should we name the transmitting particle (certainly negatively charged). I propose the Freud Boson, else known as the egoton…

Duality, Love and Evolution

Posted on by
1

We think in terms of opposing forces, opposites. Duality flows  from the fact of boundary created as we separate from the whole of existence – initially physically at birth, and then psychically in infancy. This schism has been expressed in many ways, often as opposing forces.For instance – good / evil ;life / death; aggressive / erotic ; Me / Not Me ; extrovert / introvert. I believe that the point of duality is in our response to it. There is a fundamental difference in outcome between choice between, and integration of – opposites.

Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein conceived of opposing Life and Death instincts. However surely a “Death” instinct is incompatible with evolution, what purpose is served by a “Death” instinct? More natural is Donald Winnicott’s expression of an Aggressive component, born of opposition and an Erotic component, born of complementarity – the birth of these components arising as an infant realises that there is a Me and a Not-Me. Carl Jung conceived of the struggle to integrate opposing forces. Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality typing that arises from Jung with its 4 dimensions –  Extrovert-Introvert; Thinking-Feeling; Sensing-Intuition; and Judging-Perceiving. From the dawn of our species we have observed the difference between Light and Dark and described our nature as Good or Evil. Martin Buber gives us the double-dual-whammy of I-Thou way of being “over against” I-It.

“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between man’s attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. ..These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constitutes the world of THOU and the latter the world of IT” Ronald Gregor Smith, translator of Ich Und Du

It appears then that fundamental to our reaction to the fact of our existence; woven into the fabric of our way of thinking and being, is duality – expressed as an opposition of forces.

What then is our response? Is it passive as in choice or balance or active – as in process or integration? Admitting polarity in all things – what should be our reaction. Do we choose – for instance between Good or Evil? Should we seek balance between different drives into a kind of dynamic equilibrium – for instance striving to be at the centre point of extroversion and introversion? Is reality in fact a process budding eternally at the very boundary that arises out of duality – life within Winnicott’s Transitional Space or Whitehead’s point of prehension? Or is it there a further truth behind this duality – the point being what arises out of unification of opposites ? After all paraphrasing Beethoven – there cannot be loud without soft, it is in contrast that music arises.

Perhaps its personal taste. If so then, at least for me, integration of duality is our purpose, and one which is unceasing because there is a counterveiling force of differentiation. There is a flow of existence which is driven by splitting and unification, birth and death. Duality is dynamic not static and the fundamental creative contrast is actually that of differentiation and integration. Freud’s Life/Death instincts replaced by Integration/Differentiation forces. This isn’t an original thought, and it’s not mine. It is inherent in the world-view of eastern tradition (Yin-Yang etc) and possibly our western ancestors (see Wisdom of the Wyrd, Brian Bates). It was  one of Carl Jung’s fundamental insights – “Much of Carl Jung’s writings are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity” (Jung: Selected Writings, Anthony Storr).

If then we conceive of a schism-powered flow, what is the destination and what is the fundamental motive impulse? Well there you have Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the fundamental duality being spirit and material – an inner and outer. For him underlying existence is the force of Love, which powers evolution. An evolution conceived as complexification through spheres of the physical, chemical, biological to that of ideas – until we become conscious of God that is Love that is all. “There is a duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the “without” and “within”. He traces the development of the “within”, an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas”.

In Teilhard de Chardin’s words:

“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”

On Composure

Posted on by
Reply

From “On kissing, tickling and being bored” Adam Phillips

The writing is a pleasure of itself; so much so that I suspect sleight of hand, the magician’s smile. Composure is proposed as a defence against and in the face of – “the cumulative trauma of development”. As Freud would have it, composure is part of the ego’s defence against the body – “a form, largely unconscious, of vigilant self-control”. Winnicot perhaps would view it as an affect of the mind, itself a defence against the uncontrolled environment that faces the infant; a form of self-reverence with the mind as substitute for mother.

Beautiful. Elegant. Revealing. What though, of the magician and his context? Is in not in the nature of an analyst to view development as a accretion of trauma; therefore to see all aspects of the psyche as defensive? This is not to blame, or take issue; simply though to point out that most writing about the mind has come from those treating mental disturbance – from Freud onward.

Instead of starting from Ruskin, “to compose, is to arrange unequal things”, where would Jung has begun? Perhaps in balancing opposites – anima and animus – and allowing for the potential of their resolution into a new state. In his language composure would perhaps have been a state evoked by integration, rather than a shield against inevitable trauma.

I would dearly love to know what Adam Phillips thought. Whatever it were, it would be a delight to read, and in itself worthwhile.

Sigmund Freud and Narcissism

Posted on by
Reply

Freud’s psychological edifice was constructed from a study of pathology, rather than the working out of the development of healthy psyches. This led him to a place of despair in assuming that psyche is fundamentally pathological.

He resisted any challenge to his father-figure authority, preferring to “break” with “children” rather than be forced by them to modify and develop his views. This included great thinkers such as Adler, Jung and Klein. The consequence was that the field fractured, which has hindered integrated development

His thinking appears to be exceptionally ego-centrric. The suspicion is that, for example, his early focus on pathologies of sexual drive  was in fact a working-out of his own issues and problems. That would be acceptable if he admitted a personal journey. As it is this has in fact coloured much of the development of the entire field – to the detriment of countless clients treated by his disciples. (Yes, disciples). He resisted the call for psychoanalysts to be analysed by others.

His rejection of religion was irrational. God as father-figure, Freud as Oedipus ? To be rejected like other challenges to the authority of his ego? The only logical place that a solely rational approach to religion can lead to is – agnosticism. All sequences of logic trace back to original assumptions. There is no provable base assumption. The only sustainable and honest approach is therefore a simple statement of belief. When rationalists claim that their pretty logic progressions prove anything else they are caught up in the beauty of their own ego’s creation. This is intellectual narcissism. The passion with which Freud attempts to tear down any belief in an alternative to his own ego is as suspicious psychologically as that of an unthinking evangelist prosyletisng any other religion. However, as a man of intellect he should know better. He shares this narcissism  with many other evangelical atheists caught up with admiration of their intellectual reflection – Dawkins and the like.

“It was a great mistake on Freud’s part to turn his back on philosophy. Not once does he criticise his premises or even the assumptions that underlie his personal outlook” Karl Jung.

Embracing evil to experience joy

Posted on by
3

What is evil?

The anti-thesis of good. Ah, but what is good? In fact are these useful constructs at all, or simply perceived positive and negative outcomes of random events?

Is it reasonable to equate good with happiness and evil with unhappiness? If so, where does happiness lie?

It is politically (but not scientifically) correct to assume a materialistic existence built on a series of microscopic random events unfolding in intransitive time. Therein lies the evil that we must embrace. In other words we focus on and believe in, like Thomas, only on what we see. We do that at least partially because we fear there is no meaning below or beyond what our sensory organs are capable of registering.

Surely one of the great lessons of the exploration of mind started by Sigmund Freud is that the more you avoid a fear, or abyss, the unhealthier you become. All of the mechanisms of dealing with unconscious pain (projection, avoidance, repression etc) simply lead at best to neurosis, at worst to psychosis.

It seems to me that the fundamental issue that haunts each of us is insecurity. That is the symptom of existential angst. How, then, to deal with that?

And it’s worth addressing.

The more secure a person is, the more creative, compassionate, generous, and capable of joy they be. Security leads to happiness and connection.(Happiness being life lived in the expectation of joy).

Conversely when we feel insecure we experience withdrawal. We become self-centred, and disconnected. Our horizons contract to a narrow unhappy world devoid of meaning. (Unhappiness broadly equating with isolation).

The thesis is then, that good is expressed through happiness and that lies in our interconnectedness. We feel able to reach out when we are secure. Conversely insecurity leads to withdrawal and unhappiness, which is nominated – evil.

Are we right to feel insecure? Are we simply minds floating on an ocean of random events and therefore at their mercy?

What does science have to say? Experiments on matter at the most microscopic levels shows that pre-existence is an infinite series of possibilities, potential – until observed. It is the act of observation that, in effect, crystallises out this particular existence that we experience from the cloud of possibilities. That raises the issue of observation. What is it? Surely there must be an “observer” to create our particular reality. Sure enough, what our species is really really good at is just that – observation, whether through science or the arts. We each of us spend our life in observation (or as some would call it – witness, some accumulation of knowledge). Interestingly our gathering of knowledge is escalating in a geometric progression. (Are we approaching Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point”? Is that the Mayan meaning to the end of time?)

It appears to me that our real individual human purpose is to be just this – engines of observation – crystallising existence from potential. (Or as our ancestors put it – we are three sisters of wyrd sitting at the foot of Ygaddrsil, the tree of life, spinning fate). That puts the onus on us collectively. We, the creators of life and goodness.

So if good and evil are the outcomes of our individual witness then what are God and the Devil?

I believe, and in my experience only, that God is expressed in the space between us, in the connection between all things. It is the smile shared between strangers that briefly connects and illuminates us. There have been those who with great discipline, have been able to sense directly the mass of loving connections underlying all things. Most of us however “see through a glass darkly”, it is in only in small moments and in our intimate circle – family, friends, community, even our pets – that we touch and feel the common good. Put another way, God is an emergent property of our connections each to each, and we feel that larger love in the individual links and bonds between us.

The Devil, then is absence of good – the opposite of shared experience. Our de-mergent selves.

There is also some evidence in science, not only that existence is cystallised by observation, but also that this can run backward in time, with reverse causality. Belief or knowledge of an outcome can cause – at least at the level of the electron/photon – history to be reshaped to create the experienced outcome.

So then, perhaps God – the personalisation of the emergent property of our observation and connections to each other – lies in our future. God is what we create together in the future, and this future God intervenes where necessary to ensure that the path of existence-formation will lead to him/her/it/us. (God, the word existing beyond time…)

Was this through the lives of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha?

Does that not change our world view? Good and evil as made by us. A secure future, which is God beyond the Omega Point. Let us accept that good and evil do exist, as outcomes of our collective path through life. When we embrace our joint task – to work for good effect around us. In that way our eyes open to our divine purpose. We no longer need to live with our eyes tight closed against the fear that we are floating on a sea of random meaninglessness. Face up to existential angst and it disappears. As the psychological defence mechanisms fall away – we’re left with the revelation of love behind all things and experienced in our connection, in the Ich-Du of Martin Buber.

It is by embracing evil that we puncture it and experience joy.