GOD, MAN AND NATURE

 GOD, MAN AND NATURE 

by Kenneth Harper Finton, revised 2023

Since the dawn of time and certainly since the rise of self-awareness in the human race, people have contemplated the nature of the universe about them. The deepest thinkers among them have come up with many answers and visions from the same basic facts that underlie the material universe. The cave dwellers–writing on the walls–expressed in primitive drawings not only the facts of life that they saw about them, but their thoughts about the geometry of existence itself.

A certain unity of vision is capable of being expressed in numerous ways by simple contemplation itself. When one attempts to divide the world into its basic elements or contemplate the very nature of existence itself, thought runs smack up against the dualistic paradox of life. 

Democritus, a Greek philosopher developed the idea of an atom around 460 B.C. He asked:  “If you break a piece of matter in half, then break it in half again, how many breaks will you have to make before you can break it no farther?”  This smallest basic piece of matter he called atoms more than two thousand years ago. 

Democritus lived in a time when the earliest writing had been devised, so we knew what he thought. 

From symbols seen in cave paintings and pictographs, it would seem the cave dwellers from many thousands of years ago had already seen the symbolism of geometric shapes, as they drew them on walls and incorporated geometric patterns in their drawing and figures. 

Perhaps these geometric shapes are the foundations of existence itself, the first principles of being that existed everywhere at once–creating a quantum universe. Consciousness came upon and recognized its own beginning. It created time and space by devising an orbit. This thought is perhaps expressed on the wall of a cave many thousands of years ago. I see no reason why primitive man could not have come to a similar conclusion. Circles, points, and triangles are two dimensional representations of mathematical principles that were the first ingredient of being, thus becoming the first experiences.

Democritus tried to imagine the smallest pieces of matter, but later scientists found that atoms are broken into even smaller and smaller pieces.

Democritus’ theories were dismissed by Aristotle and were forgotten for two thousand years due to of the great stature that Aristotle held over his mimicking followers until the time of Newton.

When one attempts to contemplate the beginnings of all things and the endings of all things, paradox comes in to being. What is there before this world and this universe existed? What will there be after this world and universe ends? 

The answer, of course, is nothing. Yet, duality is an integral part of existence itself. The thought that nothing exists, shows that something exists in its very essence. [Thought and knowledge does not co-exist with the ultimate reality.] The nothing at the basis of the world about us, we discover, is of the soul of world and without essence.

Such thoughts sometimes lead us to a spiritual definition of nothingness that from even the most primitive times has been recognized as God or the Void, a unification of all that exists and a recognition that existence is, in its essence, non-material or spiritual.

As thought explodes and stills, the elusive basis of reality shines forth in the minds of those who contemplate. If nothing exists, then all is nothing and nothing is everything. If God is a spirit without form or essence, then God is present in every aspect of everything that exists. 

This is where contemplation leads us. It is how we interpret this emotionally that gives rise to our moral values and our feelings about ourselves and the world about us.

There is something in us that cannot tolerate paradox. 

If nothing exists, then that must mean that God does not exist. That leads to a denial of the spiritual essence that could forms the basis for existence itself. Such thoughts can  lead to a sense of forlorn isolation where nothing matters but the smaller self that we call our individual identity. We become the only thing that matters. These thoughts can  lead us to self-indulgence and greed. Much of the brutal history of the world was written by people who thought in this manner.

If, however, the spiritual essence of nature is accepted by the mind, then God not only exists, but everything is made of this spiritual essence and God is everywhere and in everyone. Yet, this in itself does not make existence any less problematic. Nature is not only gentle, but violent. Mythologies are constructed to explain what we see as evil and good in the essence of the world about us. Because we, as humans, name and value things, we force nature into shapes and patterns that we can comprehend and create a world of good and evil–even if all things are in essence spiritual. No wonder we live in a world of black and white with many shades of gray. We have created such a vision from placing our values on experience itself.

That the universe was formed without such human values and that experience is the true reason for existence seems a strange and perhaps irreverent idea. Many rebel against this reasoning. Many want to believe that the spiritual nature is essentially good–even divine–and something went astray in the world that produced the terrible things that we experience and see around us. That is the way we escape taking responsibility for what we see as evil in the world. 

Is there no other way to view this dichotomy? 

If we are all spirit in essence, then we would all be God and the world would be like Heaven on Earth. Yet, it is not. Does this prove that we are not all God? Does this not prove that we are not, in essence, a spirit?

When we look deeper into this, we can see that good and evil is simply another pattern of opposites that form the basis for existence and experience itself. Change is built into the world by time and space and the forming of structures that are never permanent by both design and necessity. Change imposes a beginning and an ending. Both are an illusion and temporal. Place a value on change–call it life and death, good and evil–it is still a temporal illusion.

If a spiritual essence is the basis for the universe about us and experience is the reason for this essence to be, then we are indeed one with the world about us and only our self- aware identities stand in the way of knowing the ultimate reality of all things. If the only time is now and all things are present and exist in the now, then many things we thought we knew about this world are false. 

It is not that we need deny the idea of a past, as change itself leaves traces of the previous states that were experienced by material things that are no longer existent. It is not that we cannot plan a future, as the future is created from the probabilities that are inherent in the now and have not yet been experienced.The world is still what we make it to be. 

Our thoughts are both extremely important in the experience of the now and the possibilities that we project for the future. We should start again to develop a better system of social and communal life that recognizes the essence of all things as being a unified field of being.