Hi again Darryl,

Thanks for a great AoM – think I have read your introductory piece a half dozen times.

I am a little uncomfortable with the pantheist concept of oneness. As mentioned I don’t like to go anywhere near the ‘who kick-started it’ question. With your goldfish analogy you write:

<<< If a goldfish could contemplate the nature of reality, we are like that creature saying, The pond is everything that is. What lies beyond our perceptive and cognitive boundaries? That is ultimately unanswerable, but we can gain a sense of things by carefully examining the boundary between the knowable and unknowable. >>>

In the goldfish analogy you try to comprehend what might be the limits of its understanding – the boundaries of its fishbowl existence. Why not look instead at the creature’s DNA. The Goldfish has 94 chromosomes compared to our 46. More to the point – what information does its DNA carry? And does it, like us, have silent DNA – ancient DNA from our species’ evolutionary past – a type of record of how the species evolved? It would seem to me, if we are looking for what the goldfish ‘was before’ and ‘will be again’ then a biological explanation will likely offer more clues than contemplating the fact that we were all once particles left over from an exploding star.

Following the goldfish analogy you say the boundaries can be made visible by contemplating what existed before the Big Bang etc.. To my way of thinking the ‘before the Big Bang’ and the ‘singularity of infinite density and zero volume’ is landing us back in the place of total unknowing. I think you are saying here that pantheism (the contemplation of a universal wholeness) can help us understand the order and energy that must have been present prior to our universe coming into existence – something most scientists will admit we have no way of ever knowing.

I am not comfortable with ‘I God’ or ‘I Universe’. I think it is okay that we are unable to comprehend our creation. To me, the ‘I God’ or ‘I Universe’; is putting the human soul on a hierarchical level one step higher than it belongs. Knowing my human fallibilities, I had better stick to being a God Gamete. That way, when I die, if the beings that created me think I have developed qualities of character worth retaining, and I am able to pair with the soul of a loved one, I might, with two copies of their DNA, be retained by the Germ-line of the Gods.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 22-Jun-19 12:48 by Robert Jameson.