By Necessity Off Center

Our understanding of our condition will be always in terms of metaphors.  When thinking of the things of God, a reserve to the effect that we will never understand such things completely--for surely this is simple prudence--will produce by logical necessity the realization that all of our thoughts are metaphors.  We do not "know" reality--we can do no more than cultivate an increasingly reflexive, responsive, and yielding apprehension of the conceptual figures that impose themselves upon us.

"Reality" does not "exist."  Reality happens--one figure after another of cognition striding alone or with myriad others in a jostling parade across time.  Reality happens--one figure after another of cognition looming alone or with myriad others out of a heaving landscape across space.  This is the reality of "reality," and we know this to be so.  All attempts to ground our conceptual existence upon what can be "known" are folly.

We can claim that we are but flickerings in some giant computer simulation, but of course, as long as "computer" as a term is applied as though the entire observable universe were but some humongous quantum computer (or that the "computer" of the conjectures could be greater in scope than the universe), then the conjecture is not falsifiable.  More importantly, a brand of conceptualities have been incorporated here to the effect that the "computer" in question is but a surrogate for a clumsily described "god."

We can claim--as an example meant in contradistinction to the immense materialism just described--that we are non-corporeal point-sources of awareness.  These, then, would be our souls (if the common religious term is applied), a term which would be applied most appropriately--in the lexicon of the religious believer--to our "selves."  Unfortunately, as long as we admit (as we must) that we can forget things or that we can be affected by our unconscious as well as our conscious minds, then the "soul" conjecture is not falsifiable.  More importantly, a brand of conceptualities have been incorporated here to the effect that the "self" can be the object of self-apprehension--the self asserting itself in a clumsy determination to claim the self-assessment of a "god."  (That the self's self-accorded right to self-assessment might be humble or apparently unsparing is to tend to magnify, rather than lessen, the horror of the original unwarranted assertion.)

To repeat the present blog description--God has no edge and we have no center.  We do not know ourselves, and we do not know God.  What we might say about God will be reflected back at us by the sphere of our limitations, and what we might say about ourselves will be reflected back at us by the cloud of all-in-parts and parts-in-all that is the self we think we know--as though the vantage-point of our knowledge was not by necessity off-center.