Though I have made a stubborn lifelong commitment to the fundamental belief that Man invented God and not the other way around, I am not a nihilist.

I believe in many things, and perhaps it would be a good idea to set some of these down to exist alongside my more infamous gripes.

I believe in a fundamental interconnectedness between all things. I have expressed this before and even discussed some of my methods of meditation and practice that center on this belief. For example in the field, earlier this year:

 

If you sit for a time in nature it becomes apparent, but the fascinating thing is to see this interconnectedness in the city, amidst urbanity, between us and our buildings and machines.

The reality is, we cannot make anything that removes itself from the fundamental interconnectedness. Our atomic bombs and Higgs-Boson particle all are interconnected, too.

Secondly, since I was a teenager, I have believed what has been translated as the thought of  Lao-tse that ‘existence is beyond our capacity to define.’

Imagine yourself as a measuring device. You have ears that can hear within a certain range which we name 20 to 20,000 Hz. Yet it’s clear that there is more vibration than just this all around us because now we have invented machines that can detect it.

You can see with your eyes from Red to Indigo and we have invented machines that can pick up Infra-red and Ultra-violet, but since the invention of spectrometry we know there is more going on here as well.

You can smell to a certain point and distinguish smells to a certain point and we have developed complex and refined perfumery and cuisines that take advantage of our richness of experience for it. Yet we know there are odors we cannot detect.

You can touch things up to certain temperature before they become too hot or too cold and your skin experiences a burn.

All of these measurements are highly limited in a universe that is infinitely more complex than our constitution or even our machines can measure. This means there are things happening constantly that we cannot measure and thus existence itself will always be beyond our capacity to define.

Third, I believe in harmonious activity, statistically predictable activity and stochastic activity that results from the ever-unfolding interconnectivity. This constant harmony creates moments and experiences for us that we can deem spiritual. I believe in music and mathematics as languages to allow us access to this spirituality.

That should do it for today, because, finally, I also believe that expressing too many beliefs in one day is a terrible idea, for time is a factor and you never know what the day will bring.

After all, perhaps tomorrow you’ll change your mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MTK