Month: August 2022

ARE WE WHO WE THINK WE ARE?

/ Ken Finton / Leave a comment

Are we simply our personal selves? Are we what our self-consciousness vision believes itself to be? Is this flesh and blood that compose our bodies all that we are? 

The chemicals we are made of are replenished daily and most of the cells in our bodies renew often. Obviously, we are not simply that which we call our body. Most of our perceptions are mental. We live in a dual mental and physical world. We look in the mirror and see only a portion of ourselves. Neither that self-reflected person in the mirror nor the deepest imagined self buried within us is our whole being. Our lives are the stories of our personal changes.

Once Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” 

Did Shakespeare see life as a play, a dream played out on a cosmic stage? Then who is the dreamer? Are we both the dream and the dreamer, if the universe about us is a play? Does another force dream us into being?

Hindu beliefs tell us that all is an illusion. Modern physicists will tell us of the strange quantum world where imaginary virtual electrons pop in and out of existence and only have a defined reality when measured and observed. 

For objectivity to exist, there must be a subject as well as an object. Every object must have a subject. Ultimately, if the object and the subject are the same, then neither are truly substantial. That is one reason why many people believe that we live in a world of illusion, Hindus among them.

Attempts at rationality and logic all lead to a leap of faith—then to assumptions and beliefs. Logic cannot come to our rescue. We cannot logically prove anything exists but our own thoughts and consciousness. We know that something is being observed and we call it the world. We know that something is thinking and something is recording our perceptions. We call it our brains. 

Even that is a leap of faith, as we cannot even prove that we actually do the thinking. Thoughts come and go at random as our attention refocuses. Because we perceive others with the same perceptions that we perceive ourselves, we can validate their independent existence. Only a nonphysical approach—metaphysical means above the physical—can lead to answers to the timeless questions about our own existence. 

DOES GOD GET LONELY?

/ Ken Finton / Leave a comment

When contemplating infinity and the universe, there is no way to escape the concept of God. Most cultures have had gods since the beginning of civilization. Something in us wants to give a name to that which existed before the universe came to be and will continue after the universe has ended. 

That which existed before anything and after anything, even though it be nothing or Void, is still another concept for God in the minds of many. Nothing is, of course, no thing. God is not a thing as well. There is a parallel here, but God is not nothing.

An empty void has no existence without a world in which to place it. We cannot see nothing because it is not there. If it is not there, then it logically does not exist.

We live in a universe of complementary states. We have bad and we have good. We have right, we have left. We have up, we have down. We cannot have a subject without an object. One needs the other like a child needs a mother.

Quickly, picture a place without time and space where even thought has melted into a pool of possibility–a seemingly endless ocean of events and experiences that have not yet occurred. All is still for the briefest of instants because when time stops, existence ceases and the one is no longer measured as being separate from the other. Measurement occurs in spacial dimensions, but not in primary dimensions where only points, lines, and possibilities exist.

Physical changes are what create an experience. Experience creates events. In order to have experience, we need the perception of an event. In order to perceive anything, we need awareness. It is the mental world of awareness that comes before all else. In the remote past, it was simply primal awareness, the ability to differentiate one from another.

Primal awareness could be called ‘God’ by some, but there is a great social danger in calling anything holy and above natural law. Creation is a process and an act, not an unexplained miracle. The act of creation spreads knowledge and organization across the universe.

Most of us have outgrown the God-king or God-the-Father who in his divinity imposes his will and plans upon the world. We see religious thought for what it for what it is, a pattern of social development.

We can describe the world as not only a work-in-progress, but a record of historical events and experiences where thoughts were made manifest and tangible by actions, recorded by the bricks and mortar of matter, and re-interpreted by the mind to formulate experience from contiguous entangled events.

Awareness is the cause of time and space, though it forever dwells outside of time and space. It is of another dimension that has no beginning nor end. This awareness is potentially infinite, yet responsible for the existence of the finite. It is beyond self, yet produces not only the act of consciousness but describes and brings to being a forever-changing universe of unlimited potential.

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL WORLDS

/ Ken Finton / Leave a comment

Consciousness creates the idea of time, then measures the duration as well. We should understand that the realization of our world is both a mental conception and a physical reality. The world around us has myriads of viewpoints that change as our consciousness moves through the now. The person I call myself is but a collection of memories, hereditary information, experiences, learning, emotions, and patterns of thinking. We are here in the now because this is the only place for us to be. We cannot be in the past or the future except in mental processes. The physicality of our existence changes as the mental universe changes. Being in the now is a conscious mental state.

This is quite a confusing concept for some. Many corollary dilemmas spring from accepting the mental and physical universe as two aspects of the same universal state. An entire stand-alone universe outside of my person exists and contains all these things separate from me.

Knowledge and experience form our four-dimensional viewpoints. Modern viewpoints revolve around the physical aspects of the mind. These scientific interpretations often hold that the mind is roughly identical to the brain and is reducible to physical phenomena such as the firing of neurons and the chemical encodings of memory. Yet, we did not always think in this manner.

Throughout the age of human reasoning, the mind has been connected to the psyche. The term “soul” is often used synonymously with the psyche—which includes the totality of the human mind, both the conscious and unconscious elements. The soul has long been thought to be the immortal aspect of the human condition, a ghostly spirit where the personality and moral compass resides.

Carl Jung used the words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ as they are the same word in the German language. Of this he wrote: “I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality”. (Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797).

In a universe paired with a mental aspect and a physical aspect, the dimensional realities in each pair would be different. The first dimension of the one point would be the same in both, but the second dimension of two points forming a line would be different. It is through this difference that they come to be independent entities. If one point is infinite and the other is temporal, then the world line of the second dimension would be a straight line to infinity in the mental state while the world line of the other would curve and eventually return to its own starting point, creating an orbit—a geometric figure. It would be temporal and physical because it had a beginning and an ending.


Infinity is not one thing. Even infinity must be paired with its opposite, the finite. Infinity simply has no beginning nor end. There can be many infinities in a larger infinity because small infinities, like endless numbers, take up no space at all and are not in time.

Objects exist beyond my personal awareness—such as the place I dwell, the people I know, and the universe I inhabit. They too have being in the now. They are a product of consciousness, but they cannot be of my consciousness alone. They are in the consciousness of all. We all have a similar basic vision of the world about us. A common sharing of conscious knowledge between existing entities and objects obviously occurs, though much of nature works through an unconscious mental process. Our conceptions reside in the mental state and deal directly with the infinite process of energy transformation and electrical connections. This mental state has to be of universal proportion—just as the physical state is of universal proportion.


Is this mental state of the universe God? If so, it surely is not an Abrahamic God that rules the universe. Is the physical state of the universe more valuable to us than the mental state, or are they equal? If they are both equal, are they the same?

There are always more questions than answers.