The Present

flickr photo, Light Chaos by KevinDooley

I know it's been said a million times already, and that a million people after me will say it, too. But all my past experience is concentrated into this one precise moment called the present; and all my future actions begin at this exact moment, too. Pleasure, pain; love, hate; right, wrong; bliss or damnation - everything that possibly can be exists right now, compressed into a present so infinitesimally brief that you could say it does not really exist at all. Therein lies wonder, love and freedom, for in the transitory nature of the present lies our ability and our inalienable right to choose.

Cause and Purpose in the World

I imagine myself standing alone before a room full of people, asking: Anyone who believes they have absolutely no purpose in life, raise your hand. How many would seriously do so? My guess is very few.

Intuitively most of us sense a purpose to our lives and would feel lost without that underlying influence. Most of us believe we are the result of some kind of purposeful unfolding rather than the latest state produced by an incomprehensible chain of soulless reactions or causes.

That sense of purpose lies at the heart of the first statement in my personal creed: I believe I am a manifestation of divine spirit.

Although I can only affirm that for myself, I also believe everyone else manifests the divine.

It is important for me to qualify that statement right away. I am not a foot soldier in the army of the Old Testament God. Rather, I am an expression of Intelligent Desire, the influence of divine spirit unfolding in the universe. God does not command; god wishes to know and express himself through the cycles of becoming, and I am a tiny instance of that eternal, wondrous process.

I believe!

The consequence of Evolution

I have always believed in the persuasive power of friendship and reason, and rejected the application of coercive force as a means of getting people to do my bidding. My aversion to the use of force has blinded me to just how pervasive it is as the mechanism in human affairs. Threats and intimidation in one form or another underlay the vast majority of human interactions.

Often the brute nature of our dealings are masked by a show of cordiality, but if that sham is tested it evaporates and the true nature of our relationships comes to the fore. The kindly boss, who treats his staff to an occasional tray of Tim Horton's coffee - and genuinely believes in his own congeniality - will just as quickly fire the staffer who contradicts him in a serious way or costs too much during a period of economic decline. The enlightened parent, who has smiled upon his sons and daughters in their younger years, becomes harsh and dictatorial if his children do not live up to his moral and social standards later in life.

We resort to an arsenal of punishments to get recalcitrants to do things the way we want them done. Emotional, physical and intellectual weapons are brought to bear on the target of our displeasure, and the anti is upped the longer our enemy - for that is what opponents become - refuses to do what we want the way we want it done. Unless the recalcitrant has no power or influence of his own, in which case he or she is simply ostracized - cut out of the social fabric.

I hate this brutal dynamic and have always sought interstices in the social structure that would give me genuine freedom. I resent it when people want me to participate in the hierarchy of tyranny that constitutes so much of human behaviour: the schemata of use and abuse, the quashing of daydreams. I would rather risk failure than succumb to what amounts to a betrayal of my very nature.

At what point is Free Will expressed?

Free will is concomitant with but not identical to having a choice. Humans have both free will and the freedom to choose; cats have only the freedom to choose. If we look farther down the evolutionary time line, we encounter the point where the freedom to choose begins to separate itself from pure instinct. A cat has the freedom to choose; an ant responds to stimuli immediately without any question as to the pros or cons of an action. Farther still, and we are at the point where sentience and instinct separate themselves from plant life and other non-sentient forms of being. Before that spirit must have been inherent in a form I cannot conceive of.

I have drawn out this sequence of events because it suggests Free Will is the outcome of evolution, and has only manifested in this corner of the universe in very recent times, as measured on the evolutionary scale. Philosophically that opens a portal into a huge area of discussion, which must be left for another time. But there is one crucial point that I want to consider now: Is Free Will immanent from the earliest inception of life? In other words, is life a progression toward Free Will?

Extreme caution is needed here. I am not implying that life-manifestations which express Free Will are 'above' those that don't in some sort of evolutionary chain. Rather, I want to explore the notion that the role of humans is to embody and express Free Will as part of the unfolding wonder of spirit.

The unorthodox conclusion I have arrived at is that Free Will does not exist outside of manifest spirit. As I've said elsewhere, I don't believe spirit can exist without manifesting itself in some physical form. Further, Intelligent Desire - which is the process of spirit unfolding - progresses toward Free Will, just as it progressed toward life, sentience and choice. But Free Will cannot be said to exist before it is manifest. In short, the entity many religions refer to as God has evolved, manifesting himerself in the totality of spiritual forms that presently exist, and there has been a tendency from the outset for evolution to produce beings that express Free Will.

As I consider this admittedly convoluted analysis another notion is beginning to take hold. I believe what we call God, or the World Spirit, or the Unmoved Mover is a simple force of immense power and consequence. I call that force Love and the consequence of love is Intelligent Desire.

What, then, of Hatred? Where does the tendency to nihilism come from? An important precurser to thought on this conundrum is the understanding that Free Will is meaningless unless it encompasses the ability to succeed of fail - the ability to be anything conceivable. The ability to create or destroy.

Life Cycle

Conception, Birth, Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, Death. These headings represent the human life cycle and form the basis for understanding the 'maturity' of a character. Many different attributes can be juxtaposed onto this scale. For example, the notions of Independence and Free Will. Or personal responsibility. But the life cycle has to be placed in a broader context before it's strands and stages can be described.

I believe individuals are manifestations of a universal life force. In some religions this life force is called God. Many religions - in fact, most of them - idealize God into a distinct, separate substance. He exists outside of and separate from his creation, and can be pointed to as the divine being. I do not believe in such a distinction. God is the sum total of His individual, spiritual manifestations; the individual spiritual manifestations are facets of the sum total, God.

Through the life cycle individual expressions of God emerge, realize their purpose, and are then subsumed. By 'subsumed' I mean the life force of a dying entity is conceived instantaneously in new life forms. My view is not analogous to 'reincarnation'. I do not believe the individual spirit retains any psychic memory of who or what it once was. The life force manifests in completely new, completely distinct beings that express God in their own unique ways.

There is no such thing as a God, distinct from his individual manifestations; nor is there any such thing as a living entity separate from God. And yet, the notion of God is the culminating achievement of evolution. In fact, the life cycle is God's way of becoming 'real' and 'self-aware'. Without the life cycle, and individual expressions of God's will there can be no God.

One of the most important logical consequences of my particular spiritual outlook is the denial of a personal 'life after death'. When I die my spirit re-manifests in ways I cannot be aware of, and in entities that will have no personal recollection of me. The life force is eternal, omniscient and ubiquitous; I exist for a time, have limited knowledge and am located in space. If I survive at all, it is only as a being that has made an impression - for good or ill - on the world I once inhabited: that is to say, as a memory in consciousness world that continues on after I am gone.