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Article 12
THE SELF-EVIDENCE-BASED BELIEF IN GOD: Reflections on the language-based inheritance of culture
Stefan Hlatky
Introduction
This article was finished by Stefan Hlatky shortly before his death in 2005. In it he brings out the most salient points of his hypothesis, initially emphasising the philosophical confusion that has arisen around transcendental experience. Other major themes are the self-evident and the principle of life, which are central to his hypothesis of the original cause and meaning. The article is intended as a supplement to Understanding Reality, written in 1999 and accessible in its entirety on the website www.reality.org.uk. Some footnotes and references to the book have, therefore, been added here, with url links.
Contents
1. The self-evident vs explanation by humans, and the purpose of language
Just the thought that a self-evidence-based belief in God is possible – if only possible in theory, that is, before it is realized in practice – liberates us from the thought of the countless contradictory ideas to which humans bind themselves in their dealings with their own species. This bondage is able to occur because humans have a capacity for speech with which they gradually learn a language from their earliest childhood. Language allows humans to ‘cover’ all their experiences of life. At the same time language is the prerequisite for philosophical thinking since it also allows humans to ask questions about, and thereby to understand, the cause and meaning of the whole creation.
But it is misguided to think that the participants in creation can thereby become the causes of everything that they experience. The idea that they can rests for its part on the prior and absolutely fundamental supposition that what reigns at the bottom of everything is chaos and randomness. Even though such a situation of fundamental chaos and randomness cannot be imagined practically, chaos theory has been generally accepted theoretically since time immemorial and has been regarded, without any tenable argument, as self-evident, that is, as something that it is impossible to contradict or doubt or to prove or disprove.
Basically we have a spontaneous surface experience and a language-based science of visible living bodies and thus of our own individual life and the lives of others. At the same time we have an equally spontaneous surface experience and also a language-based science of non-living bodies (so-called objects). These non-living and living bodies – our own body included – represent the unlimited, basically integral creation that is common for all bodies. However, neither within the context of the individual and social lives of human beings, nor in relation to the totality of coexisting and interacting bodies (this integral creation), are two self-evidences that are fundamental to all human thinking ever clearly expressed.
The first is that all information for purposeful human thinking comes simultaneously not just from outside us, but also from inside us1
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The second is that it is impossible for chaos – which means non-ordered conditions – to be the starting-point either for thinking (thus for inferences and conclusions) or for intellect-based activities or procedures.
These two self-evidences are in fact known about by everyone because they are based on the so-called conscience, that is, our basically common knowledge of the whole creation2. Were these two self-evidences also to be expressed, the theory of chaos and randomness, and with it humanity’s ancient chaos theory and its various interpretations, would be seen to be untenable. The theory and its various interpretations derive from the fact that it is impossible to relate meaningfully to chaotic and random conditions; this gives rise to a typically human basic need to create and be responsible for comprehensible, meaningfully ordered conditions to which it is possible to relate. This holds as much for the way each individual leads their own life as for the coexistence that humans inescapably have with the interacting ‘everything’ (the universe).
The view of the whole of life based on chaos theory implies in practice the notion that only chaos and chance are self-evident and that nothing that Nature manifests, creates and maintains is self-evident: Nature – on this view - is only understandable on the basis of explanations offered to us by our fellow human beings.
1a. The significance of the transcendental experience and the significance of needs
This view of life – in which nothing that Nature manifests can be self-evident – must have arisen as a consequence of one human being discovering that one can temporarily be completely liberated from the impression of one’s body. This is something that can occur in the waking, day-time state and is quite distinct from the normal switch between the waking state and the sleeping state. The liberation experienced is liberation not just from the so-called objective impression of surface that comes from outside one’s body, but also from the so-called subjective feeling of and dependence on the body that comes from inside and which is inaccessible to touch.
A self-evident consequence of this liberation is that it gives rise to a fundamentally different experience of current life: the so-called transcendental experience. This experience, at one time unknown, of a visible but intangible life is categorically different from the normal experience of life. The normal experience of life – which is generally interpreted as being of the whole of life – is of the universe consisting of luminous and illuminated bodies, in which the bodies on the Earth’s surface are illuminated from the outside and are tangible. The normal experience is therefore interpreted as being of something that is existent in the real sense. The crucial contrast with the transcendental experience is that in the transcendental experience the limits shown via bodies are solely visible: the bodies cannot be experienced as tangible from the outside and thus as existent; for that, we have to leave the transcendental experience and return to the generally known, original experience of life.
For equally self-evident reasons, the temporary complete liberation in the transcendental experience from the impression of one’s own body – the basic prerequisite for experiencing transcendental bodies – also brings with it a complete loss of the sense-impression of our own sun and moon and other suns in general. It is obviously these that cause all bodies on the Earth’s surface to be illuminated from the outside every day. In the transcendental experience of life, by contrast, everything is variously luminous of itself. This has led to an idea that has received general acceptance since time immemorial, an idea that is mentally solely stimulating, but, because of its impossibility, is also emotionally purely conflict-laden. It is the idea that the self-evident, natural purpose of the human capacity for speech is that humans should illuminate, explain, for their children and for one another, everything that the sun illuminates only the surface of; or, put another way, humans should illuminate, explain everything that is beneath the surface, that is, the insides of things, that which the sun does not reveal but leaves in the dark.
As long as this idea – that the purpose of the human capacity for speech is that humans should explain everything – is generally accepted, conflict is inescapable, as is the gradual mental and emotional devastation to which the conflict leads. The conflict is due in part to the fact that there exist innumerable participants, spread over the whole Earth’s surface and uninterruptedly arriving and departing, whose task it is supposed to be to explain everything. But first and foremost the conflict is due to the fact that this interpretation excludes from human beings’ philosophical reflections on the whole of life the fact that conscious beings are steered by needs, needs which come from inside them, are common to all, exist by Nature and are inescapable. In making that exclusion, also excluded is any thought about what it is that is clearly determined for humans from the beginning as opposed to what it is that is unclear and therefore in need of explanation3.
In the transcendental experience of the whole, in which the person has turned away from the body, bodily needs are not present, for self-evident reasons. This contrasts with the experience of the whole in which the person is turned towards the body, where bodily needs dominate. The overriding problem in the transcendental state, overshadowing everything else, is the consistent experience there of absolute one-sidedness. This is because the transcendental conditions, in contrast to the earthly ones, are absolutely intangible and so cannot be influenced in a technical way. In practice this means that it is impossible to experience there to the full, that is, in an undisturbed way, either the relationship of likeness, mutuality, that arises in relation to other conscious beings or the relationship of power that is relevant to our dealings with objects.
Historically, the problem with this discovery of the ability to turn away from the body has been that the experience can occur not only as a consequence of meditative or contemplative procedures worked out for that purpose by humans and communicated via language, which is how the experience is normally spread. The problem is that it can also be triggered accidentally, though then incompletely, by unusual external circumstances, such as so-called near-death experiences. For example, following injury in a road-accident someone may from a distance see their body lying on the road and then, from their unconscious position, also see the ambulance collecting their body. In such cases, however, the experience of separation from the body is limited. It does not actually trigger the experience of the transcendental conditions themselves, mentioned above.
The separation or splitting is experienced in an even more limited way when it is triggered by alcohol- or drug-abuse. In such a state a person may temporarily become completely uninhibited, which in practice means losing all sober regard for the obvious basic requirements of their body and of life in general.
The fact that such temporary, differently limited experiences of liberation from the body can be spontaneous makes it impossible to determine historically when such experiences were discovered and who it was that discovered them and began to talk about them. Nor is it possible to determine the point in time when there arose the idea that followed from their discovery: namely, that another kind of development is possible alongside the limited development that the created body undergoes. The growth of the created body goes on uninterruptedly under Nature’s direction, though only from the newborn state to the grown-up state. And that development occurs within the framework of a meaningful closed system extending across the whole Earth’s surface, a system that both creates and maintains, that is, renews, the living, biological layer on the Earth’s surface. The new idea was that the participants themselves can develop unlimitedly.
It was only after so-called initiates started consistently achieving separation from the body through the use of various techniques that the transcendental conditions themselves and how to use the relations of cause and effect governing them were discovered. In contrast to the technical causal relations that prevail in our everyday experience and which are mentally obvious to everyone, transcendental causality is based on the possibility of a direct transmission of the will, and this works in a mystical way that we cannot understand.
It has to have been at the time of these discoveries that the idea of a belief in God based on the self-evident began to be replaced4 by the idea that it was possible to develop the newly discovered so-called magical science based on this direct transmission of will. This magical science was then misleadingly interpreted as the transmission of thought, which led to the belief in human beings as original creators. The idea was that a limitless development of basic human characteristics – seeing, hearing, feeling – would succeed over time in giving all humans complete knowledge of, and consequently complete clarity about, both the cause and the meaning of the whole creation, that is, of everything that is not revealed to the senses. This interpretation of the transcendental experience of the whole simultaneously led to the spontaneous development by the general public of the science of the causal relations that are accessible to the senses. These were referred to as the seven liberal (that is, unlimitedly developable) arts.
From what we can see from historical texts, transcripts and remnants, all those who throughout the ages have initiated new pupils into the procedures created by humans to reach the transcendental experience have always agreed, and have also very clearly imparted to their pupils, that it is impossible for total liberation, complete independence, from the body to manifest itself as a result of the will, either one’s own will or the will of anyone else. But nothing is then said about what the alternative is. Because all our wills or wishes – our positive ones as well as our negative ones – are connected with our life on the Earth’s surface, the pupils have also been told that the prerequisite for absolute liberation from everything is that they should liberate themselves from the memory and recollecting of all earthly wills or wishes. And then they should also liberate themselves from the characteristically human will or wish to be independent, free, to not need to believe in anything or relate to anything – in practice, the will to be absolutely autonomous.
It is impossible, however, as a living being to have no needs or desires or expectations or their associated wills, including either the hope or the knowledge that they can be realized, satisfied, enjoyed. It is thus impossible to experience only oneself, with no relation to anyone or anything else, or, like an object, only to be, only to exist. Being told that it is possible creates a paradox for the pupils, with the result that they feel overwhelmed in the first moment that this total liberation from all dependence on ‘problematic’ earthly conditions is actually realized. For the first moment – that is, before they have any experience of the transcendental conditions themselves – occurs quite suddenly, without any experience of a transition, and the pupils cannot prepare themselves for it. The feeling itself – indescribable, inaccessible to processing by the intellect and therefore experienced as mystical – has been talked about throughout history. Despite the fact that the feeling is always fundamentally alike, it has been associated in speech with different words: e.g. bliss, rapture, ecstasy, salvation. In the Christian tradition it is referred to by the Latin unio mystica, and is conceived of as mystical union with God and his creation. In Sanskrit it is associated with the word samadhi, where it relates to the common goal of the various methods of so-called Yoga, conceived of as the meaningful union of everything, of all experiences.
Those responsible for initiations have always exhorted their pupils not to stop at this first, quite overwhelming, experience of liberation. Pupils are encouraged rather to open themselves up to the experience of the different transcendental conditions, in order to form a mentally clear conception of them. This includes the direct transmission of the will (‘thought’), the background to which, as already mentioned, is inexplicable, hence its being experienced as mystical. But, in our view, it is only experienced as mystical because information is not given to humans as they learn language about what it is that humans have to explain over and above what Nature uninterruptedly explains to every living participant via the senses. Without this information, humans can have no other wish than as a first priority to develop one-sided power, unrestricted control, over all those concrete [MAKE A COPY OF FOOTNOTE 22 HERE] conditions which they know they at present cannot in practice either experience themselves free from or master. The goal of such development is to satisfy with security – that is, without risking unforeseen, unwanted consequences – all the inescapable needs and as many as possible of the needs created by humans. And the latter can be chosen with absolute freedom, since they are in no way inescapably, directly, that is, technically, forced on us, as natural needs are, but only indirectly, in a so-called mental or psychological way.
1c. Nature-determined needs, supplementary needs, the will, and understanding of causality
Something that all living beings must inescapably reflect on is the so-called causal connections between their needs and the satisfying of those needs. The starting-point for this reflection is, on the one side, their Nature-determined needs. On the other side, it is everything that they are familiar with, know about and also can remember; and what that is depends on the nature of their senses and on species-determined characteristics. These causal connections or relations, which the different species must then of necessity understand in order to survive, are limited for each species. They are limited both as to what it is necessary for each species to understand and as to what it is possible for each species to understand. Thus each species has to and can understand among the countless connections that exist in the sun-illuminated ‘everything’ those connections that are relevant to the satisfying of its life-preserving needs, satisfactions that shift according to conditions, are always of short duration, but which recur periodically, and which are basically common to all species, even if they may sometimes appear different on the surface.
The capacity for speech and also for writing that arises on the human level makes for the special language-based remembering of which humans are capable: the ability to recollect whatever conditions one likes whenever one likes. This makes it possible, on the one hand, for human beings to become locked into the unlimited experience of time, which is linked with the memory5.
On the other hand, it means that humans have the possibility of making unlimited choices. But there are basically only two starting-points for thinking on which to base these choices: the one is our basically common needs; the other is wills which, viewed from the outside, seem free and which we choose in an uninterruptedly ongoing way. In actual fact, we are forced to make choices – whether in relation to our common needs or our so-called ‘free’ will – because we cannot live without willing something and also because it is impossible to will everything at the same time, that is, to have one’s cake and eat it (e.g. to combine, even at a feast, all edible food into a single meal; or to have sexual intercourse with several people at the same time).
That every participant in creation has to develop its understanding of causality and transmit its insights to its offspring if the individuals of its species and the species itself are to survive, is experienced by every participant as self-evident. The typically human problem with cause and effect starts from the fact that humans can experience the speech that they are in fact inescapably compelled to learn as voluntarily learnt. So over and above learning about their inescapable needs and the supplementary needs generally accepted by their species, humans can use language experienced in this way for the purpose of inventing and trying to agree with others as many additional supplementary needs as they like. The general idea, of course, is that with each new supplementary need a person can increase life’s yield, can increase their own and other people’s so-called quality of life.
Need, will, thinking, understanding of causality, and behaviour are an inseparably connected functional unity. What in habitual thinking is easily forgotten is that every change of need involves in practice a completely new will and an understanding of the causes and effects required to realize that new will. Thus every change of need involves a completely new starting-point for thinking. The problem with all these judgements (also called ‘systems of thought’ or ‘patterns of behaviour’) developed from different wills (so-called values) is that it is impossible to join them together, either mechanically, biologically or philosophically, into some growing or complete so-called whole6.
1d. The misleading ideas of a non-living, ‘abstract’ reality and an ‘abstractly’ existent reality
In order to be able to break with the general, habitual thinking on these questions, we must for a moment also take into account, alongside misleading chaos theory, the equally misleading, indirectly conveyed, theory of the existence of a non-living reality. This theory is conveyed to all children during the first years of their life with the scientifically correct, scientifically unassailable information that everything living cannot escape dying sooner or later. But nothing is then said about death7. And, above all, nothing is said about the self-evidence that something dead cannot possibly be the cause of something. In the absence of this last information and with the invention of the microscope and the consequent theory that unlimited magnification was possible, modern science became bound to the ancient Greek theory of the existence of atoms, conceived of as small, invisible, unchangedly existent constituent parts that build up the whole creation. Around 400 BC Democritus elaborated this atomic theory into a philosophical system of thought when he combined it with the idea of an empty space and a mystical cosmic whirl. The whirl drives the atoms and unites them, dissolving and re-establishing the connections between them by means of the fact that all living atom-combinations – so-called minds, souls – strive, according to Democritus, for harmony, peace of mind (in Greek, euthymiē).
The theory that optical magnification could be developed without limit arose at the beginning of the 17th century and led to science’s irrational hypothesis that creation is not totally destructible. In contrast, science held that creation offers humans not only limited possibilities for changing things on the surface, but also unlimited possibilities for changing things from the very bottom, and therefore the possibility for original creativity. Thus Democritus’ hypothesis actualized the previously untried idea of atheism, even though atheism cannot lead in practice to any alternative to belief in God; the only thing atheism leads to is that every human being is taught from its earliest years to experience itself as an original creator.
After searching for 300 years for the unchangedly existent part without success, the whole scientific enterprise ended up, at the beginning of the 20th century, with modern energy-theory, but without anyone nowadays being minded to see either what the difference is between modern energy-theory and ancient energy-theories or what is equally non-scientific about ancient and modern explanations of reality.
What is non-scientific about all theories about human beings and their relationship to the whole creation is that, actually contrary to what we know, these theories reckon with the human being as starting at birth or with a completed sexual act (i.e. mating), rather than with fertilization. This is in spite of the fact that we know a great deal about the way fertilization, observed from the outside, occurs and how the subsequent process continues up to birth. This science has been gathered by humanity throughout the ages from fertilized eggs, by breaking the egg’s shell during incubation in order to see what is happening behind the shell before the growing young itself breaks the shell from inside. The whole of this altogether mystical process begins with the formation, for some inexplicable reason, of a small, pulsating red dot. Because this and the whole of created life can only be noted from the outside but not explained, the red dot was called the ‘salient point’ (in Latin, punctum saliens, literally ‘leaping point’ – actually the first trace of the heart in an embryo) and was regarded as the beginning of life, in contrast to death, which was regarded as the end of life.
Since the abandonment by humanity of a self-evident belief in God, all the theoretical descriptions given by humans, via language, of the relationship of the parts to one another and to the whole creation – whether those descriptions have been of a concrete relationship or an abstract one – have spontaneously been misleadingly interpreted as causal explanations. As regards the purpose, aim and goal, the causal explanations have then been unified in asserting that the creator’s purpose is, in a mystical, so-called spiritual, way, to reproduce itself8 so that it can thereby experience company, complete mutuality, what we in fact mean by the word love. No other purpose has ever been either conceived of or tested9. Because creation has always manifested itself to humans as clearly destructible and as in many respects changeable, the causal explanations have been united in thinking that not just creation but also the creator must be abstract
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, ‘abstract’ being a mysterious opposite of what can be experienced as concrete.
And yet all thinking must inescapably start from something existent, from something that consciousness – the basic quality of the living state – can experience as objectively existent
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. So the concept of a reality that is abstractly existent, limitless and intangible is unthinkable in practice. It is only language-based, thus only thinkable in a purely theoretical way, in connection with words.
Although such a thing as an abstractly existent reality cannot be, the idea that it can be can nonetheless be preserved by tradition via language. But this can only happen if people suppress from their consciousness the insight that it is impossible for the participants in creation to experience the original, unchangedly enduring, concrete, substantially existent reality other than as a theoretical hypothesis about its existence. Because this insight has been suppressed, there has been a further general acceptance, for as far back in history as we can see, that it is possible for all participants in creation, and especially for the most highly developed, humans, to gradually arrive at a concrete experience of the original reality behind the changeable created reality (which, because of its changeability, cannot itself be experienced as original).
The problem with this theory of unlimited human development is that the created reality is accessible only on the Earth’s surface. The rest of the created reality is remote and inaccessible, and thus intangible and not present; it is not open for the straightforward extraction of more knowledge in the way that the Earth’s surface is – though astronomy, which tracks the movements of the so-called heavenly bodies and the resultant changes in their reciprocal relations, along with their possible coming into being and extinction, makes a contribution in this respect. All this only bears witness to the bodily absence of the creator from its creation: it points to the impossibility of establishing the creator’s existence – the original cause of everything, of the whole creation – from the outside as objective knowledge. And even if the creator were, by means of a created body of its own, to be present in its creation as a participating outsider, this would not make the issue of what the original cause of the whole creation is any clearer.
[IMPOSSIBLE SENTENCE] The idea, learnt through language, that an unlimited development is possible, together with the ancient conception of the creator’s need for unlimited spiritual reproduction [to reproduce itself as spirits?], is the reason that the direct experience of the living state, coming to us from inside ourselves, has not been able to make itself count in the, for humans, unavoidable inquiry into the cause and meaning of life and the whole creation. It is also the case that if an unlimited development were possible, then, for self-evident reasons, any conclusive understanding of reality would be impossible.
2. The philosophical importance of needs
The understanding of creation requires a general, spontaneous insight into the eight common basic needs that are inescapable for all life. As mentioned previously, these common basic needs and all the supplementary needs created by the participants require for their fulfilment insights into technical cause and effect, that is, insights based on scientific thinking. The technical conclusions drawn must then be different for each need and cannot be joined together into ever larger units and ultimately into one whole. The fact that technical causal connections independent of each other can be developed unlimitedly is due to the fact that creation manifests itself outwardly as an endless manifold; so where causality is concerned, this manifold offers the possibility for making unlimited combinations and choices. Where this is of relevance to humans is that, alongside the eight inescapable needs, humans can create or abstain from an unlimited number of supplementary needs without any of these ever being able to become as inescapable and as fundamental as the inseparable, integrally connected eight. Thus no biological – that is, life-based – development of supplementary needs is possible, in either a limited or an unlimited sense. For the eight common basic needs and the supplementary needs are categorically separate at root: the first are absolute, the second relative; the first are inescapable, the second escapable. (What has always been confusing in this regard are the ancient sciences of medicine and psychology. These do not in fact deal with life and the problem of life directly, as it is generally thought they do. Their aim rather is to develop technical insights into ways of repairing the physical (bodily) and psychological (mental) damage done to created bodies. But this damage does not fundamentally impinge upon the human being’s original identity – consciousness . This identity survives unchanged, even though it is usually suppressed into the so-called conscience.)
2a. God conceived of as the living whole
The idea that God, conceived of as the living whole, should have an existential need for reproduction and a consequent need to pair off and mate, with the goal of experiencing kinship, is totally unreasonable, irrational. On the other hand, the integral living whole must, like us, have the need for a practically functioning experience of mutuality, kinship, alongside the relation of one-sided power it has to its parts stemming from the complete power it has over them [rewrite last phrase; it gives the wrong impression]. Seen from our side, we need only to have the insight that the whole reality must, like us, be living. So the whole and all living participants experience the absolute, basic quality of the living state: consciousness, the absolute prerequisite for all experience.
If we do not want to be confused by the fact that thinking can be developed, we should reckon that the whole, in contrast to humans, has only three qualities besides consciousness: (1) allpowerfulness, (2) unlimited love, and (3) a creativity that is absolutely adapted to its purpose (a creativity that the parts can change nothing about, but which they can only relate to, consciously or unconsciously). All the other qualities traditionally ascribed to God are derived from the human experience of countless self-imposed and generally accepted human needs. Despite the fact that these other qualities are untenable, [another word; illegitimate?] we have to try and reckon with them as long as the ancient belief survives that humans and other species are capable of unlimited development, along with its corollary that humans and other species are more or less realized creators, so-called gods, ‘in the making’, that is, on the path to perfection. The theory of unlimited development not merely hinders, but in an unconscious way directly counteracts, the actually natural self-evident belief in God based on the idea of only three qualities. This is because it provokes the problematic spirit of competition when the supplementary needs are not connected, via the capacity for speech, to the eight fundamental needs.
2b. Unlimited development: competition and urbanization
The spirit of competition is problematic in all its forms because it is based on humans fighting one another, on being better than one another or the best – in spite of the fact that there is no natural need for this within their own species. ‘Good’, ‘better’, ‘best’ spontaneously provoke the judgements ‘bad’, ‘worse’, ‘worst’. These judgements lead to supplementary needs generally being experienced as ends in themselves. Supplementary needs are then invented and developed as independent arts that can be compared with one another, arts that are often physically very demanding and in some cases even directly life-threatening, with people striving to be superior in some limited respect.
Competition to realize human beings’ supplementary needs must lead in the end to the idea of as many people as possible moving together into cities, cities being the art-works of human beings. This urbanization gives further impetus to the invention and development of supplementary human needs in order to provide for the eight fundamental needs of the urbanized, who get directed solely into commerce. This takes place against the background of a general conviction that such migration also makes it more possible for humans to experience love and the feeling of belonging together. In actual fact, urbanization has brought with it an increased disorientation as to what the prerequisite for love is and a general realization that love has hardly anything to do with moving together.
The increasingly concentrated funnelling of the growing number of the urbanized into commerce, which has accompanied the growth of cities, has given rise to a completely new view of both the market and the economy. In shopping centres of ever-increasing size both the market and the economy have become completely money-based and more and more dominated by the supplementary human needs not tied to the eight basic needs and by the accompanying competition. At the same time the general belief is that competition reduces the chances of the ancient, so-called feudal, right of ownership anchored in landed property being abused. What is not recognized, however, is that industrialism too is ultimately anchored in the land, in that it requires raw materials and different forms of energy that can only come from the land. And if we suppress our consciences and the self-evidences manifest in our consciences, the market viewed in this new way can also be abused.
2c. The untenability of materialism
The ideology of urbanization is based on non-living, need-less matter, so-called materialism. The only alternative to the non-living is the living. The only reform of urbanization that is possible, therefore, is to base it on the living, and that would be to undermine materialism and thus the whole basis of urbanization. This means that, in spite of the fact that urbanization has always been more or less unsatisfactory, it is impossible to reform it – that is, to stop it and replace it with something else – in the authoritarian way that reform is possible with forms of individual and social living based on life-based ideologies.
The impossibility of reforming urbanization is also due to the fact that materialism has failed from its very start to realize something that is actually self-evident: that it must be impossible to apply materialism before matter has been discovered.
Notwithstanding this, materialism has been employed – not only by Democritus, but also after 1600 – as the starting-point for a search for an imagined invisible quantum, that is, matter. But having sought for 300 years for indestructible atoms without getting any closer to its goal, modern science arrived instead at a modern variant of energy theory. And thereupon neither the representatives of modern science, nor any other scientific or religious institution, nor the global public, bore in mind the just mentioned self-evidence – that materialism is impossible – and thought things through afresh. Research into the smallest non-living constituent parts continued globally, with the insignificant addition to the word quantum – which means quantity, mass – of its plural form, quanta. Alongside normal technology, physics, astronomy and geometry, there appeared, at the beginning of the 20th century, quantum theory, quantum physics and quantum statistics. To these were added a stream of interpreters of the ancient life-anchored, energy-based science of the mystical, so-called transcendental or magical conditions, those that lie behind the conditions revealed technically, mechanically to the senses from the outside. Further exploration of the transcendental conditions showed, as it has in all times, that – as said earlier – in contrast to normal causality, which works through technical effect, and in contrast to the normal language-based transmission of thought, in the transcendental conditions a more direct causality holds sway. The transcendental conditions are experienced as visible but absolutely intangible, with causality reacting to our will alone and working unseen. The non-language-based transmission of thought (telepathy) is included in this.
Because the discovery of the direct transmission of will and thought did not solve humanity’s philosophical problem with the cause and meaning of the whole creation, and because humanity originally lived with the self-evident insight that something dead cannot be the cause of something purposeful, this has given rise to the problem of the so-called trinity, which has been current since time immemorial. The concept of the trinity has been an attempt to understand the relationship between (1) the invisible whole reality, thought of as fundamentally indivisible, (2) the visible, unreckonable multiplicity of what appear to be non-living celestial bodies, and (3) the unreckonable multiplicity of living, but mortal, bodies on the Earth’s surface, that is, the active participants in creation. The whole has then been thought of in different ways: either as God (or some other name for something living); or as divine Nature or the Holy Spirit; or as the living participants, divided into countless species and, within each species, into the mysterious male and equally mysterious female principles.
These speculations about the trinitarian whole and the differing resultant theories of creation, all equally indefensible, have led humanity to go beyond calculations of the future anchored in the interaction of the days and the seasons, which the other species also use. Absolutely boundless astrological calculations of the future have started to be used. These are anchored in other movements of the heavenly bodies and in constellations of the so-called zodiac, which recur periodically about every 26,000 years, the whole being divided up into twelve ages, so-called aeons. Like all calculations of the future, astrology is characterized by uncertainty: such calculations can prove to be true, but also misleading or confusing. The question is never put, however, as to what our experience of life would actually be like if the future were absolutely calculable. Would it not be something like a fundamentally dead existence not requiring any participation?
There is only one conceivable alternative to the idea of a non-living state. Not a single human being has any direct experience of a dead state. There is only the experience of countless language-based, second-hand pieces of information about such a state, all equally unverifiable. And all such reports count on every human person being informed, as they learn language, that everything living has sooner or later to stop living, but without their being informed at the same time that this is absolutely meaningful – since otherwise neither the maintenance of the species, through the daily food that is thereby provided for all individuals, nor the uninterrupted renewal of the species, through the coming into being of new members, would be possible. The meaning of the whole creation must be that the creator wants to give its living, thus conscious, parts, which are enclosed in the creator’s existence without perspective, that is, without distance, a basically non-existent, so-called illusory perspective. This perspective has to include the possibility for freedom of movement and the possibility for meaningful cooperation with other created bodies.
Then, in addition to the possibility for imitating behaviour – which humans share with other species and which basically the sun allows for by providing the light that makes the behaviour of others visible – there has to be for humans the possibility for describing to and discussing with each other their experiences of the whole creation, with the aim of understanding the creator and the creator’s purpose with creation. And central to this is the shared insight that understanding the creator’s purpose for its creation is the prerequisite for our understanding one another satisfactorily. If we do not bear this insight in mind, we will want to understand only ourselves and our own and other humans’ theoretically unlimited creativity, with all its attendant ideas and plans. A case in point is the possibility of limitless urbanization; or there are similar, equally irrational, conceptions, such as the idea that a tower could be built that would reach up to heaven.
Urbanization appears to be growing uncontrollably, both upwards and sideways. Instead, however, of trying to renew it or improve it, we ought to use all our knowledge to try and prevent the project from collapsing, as all irrational plans do. To achieve this, we need to create a widespread insight into the fact that it is not the construction itself that is at fault. The growing – lately, acceleratingly so – unforeseen, unwanted consequences of urbanization are due to the now globally prevalent belief in the existence of a non-living state. This belief is held without any other alternative being imagined than the old theistic or the old transcendental ideologies, which are themselves at loggerheads with one another. In actual fact the alternative is our immediate, non-language-based, spontaneous experience of the living state. And to this in practice there is no alternative, in the way that a learnable ideology can have an alternative, because the purpose of life must be that we should live in the immediately present reality. It cannot be that we are supposed to live divided, that is, either in the past – the rememberable – or in the future – the uncertain, the unknown, the mysterious, the non-rememberable – and then, on top of that, orientated to others’ interpretations of life or to ourselves.
3. The principle of life: the eight common basic needs
If we liberate ourselves from our adherence to the concepts of death and a fundamental chaos – concepts with deep roots that go back several thousand years – and if instead we start to think about our life-based connection to reality, it becomes easy to see and to agree that this life-based connection begins for all living participants with consciousness. We and all living participants, in categorical contrast to everything that we conceive of as objects, must inevitably experience consciousness as the absolute start of participation – where ‘absolute’ should be interpreted as ‘experienced as unchanged even during periods of sleep’, as ‘persisting as the same, always in exactly the same way’, and thus as ‘timeless’.
Following on from this insight about the common quality of consciousness, the further order or sequence in which we are connected to reality – that is, the whole principle of life – is also self-evident. From consciousness there must follow experience, knowledge. And then, in third place, comes the will, generally interpreted as needs, desires or purposes. In fourth place follows thinking, the goal of which is to realize one’s wills, needs, desires. This leads to the so-called judgement - which, as mentioned earlier, is also called system of thought or pattern of behaviour. Lastly, there is behaviour itself. It is at this point that the surroundings reflect, in so-called feedback, which of the interpretations of causality that are made are theoretically right or correct and which are mistaken or incorrect.
If we then simply continue our reflections – scientific research is not necessary here – then the background to the wills not only of animals, but also of humans, emerges as self-evident. For all living participants the wills are determined by the needs connected to the preservation of their own existence. These needs, in order, are the needs for (1) light, (2) warmth, (3) air, (4) water and (5) solid food. Then comes the need for (6) reproduction (also called propagation); this is mysterious to all participants alike, but humans can also talk about it.
Because the satisfying of every need requires some activity determined by Nature, there is then (7) the need for movement. And because all movement has to end in some (8) encounter, this can give rise to a need to make a response. In the case of (8a) a response to an object, this requires the use of one-sided power. In the case of (8b) a response to a living participant, this requires the experience of mutuality.
The creator of everything – whom we cannot encounter, but who must be thought of by us as living – must then as a self-evidence possess all power over its whole existence. This is in contrast to its parts, who can only experience differingly limited powers, and then only over the relative, changeable existence of the created, illusory reality. They can have absolutely no power over the original, unchangedly existent existence that must be the cause of creation.
In order to be able to liberate ourselves from the increasingly complex, unforeseen, unwanted consequences of urbanization and to guard at the same time against the re-emergence of the sole alternative of which the public can conceive – the ancient ideologies based on ordinary or transcendental materialism (which, at odds with one another, are equally splintered internally) – we must ground the learning and use of language in a belief in God based on the self-evident – which must have been the original basis for belief in God. The human being’s language-based consciousness of the creator’s bodily absence from its creation in practice forces us to introduce the word ‘God’ to all newly arrived humans – which preferably should be done before we teach them via language that they have to die. Then the newly arrived humans must receive information about God’s basic qualities – all-powerfulness, unlimited love and absolutely purposeful creativity – which are never talked about in a practical way. At the same time they have to be told about the human participants’ historically deep-rooted disorientation with regard to the question of belief. This disorientation lies in the fact that the development theories – which at bottom must be materialistic, objective, that is, anchored in creation rather than in the whole reality – have always ascribed to God human qualities that God cannot possibly have, and to humans supernatural, so-called divine, qualities that humans cannot possibly have.
3b. The idea of a solely living reality
Information about the human participants’ disorientation with regard to the question of cause and meaning will only be necessary, however, for as long as there survive the idea that reality is fundamentally dead and meaningless and the consequent idea that the future is mysterious and has to be researched into and planned. For the disorientation ceases the moment these thoughts are replaced by initially unusual thoughts of a reality that in its wholeness is solely living. If the idea of a solely living reality is applied and tested , it leads to the spontaneous insight that humanity, because of its language-based insight about the creator’s absence, has to introduce into its otherwise everything-covering language a name for the absent creator such as would be given to something living. This makes it possible to talk about the creator, as the one alone responsible for the whole creation. This also prevents humans from becoming confused and disorientated about their self-evident natural responsibility and, linked to that, their identity. When there is disorientation about these last two, a so-called identity split follows: human responsibility becomes divided, into one responsibility in relation to the natural conditions and a second in relation to human plans for the future. This is a split that can begin as early as the so-called age of defiance (the ‘terrible twos’); it deepens at the time of sexual maturation (so-called puberty), culminating in an irrational idea of independence.
Every adult human who has the capacity for logical thought must experience creation as whole and unlimited, because creation itself sees to it daily that they do. Humans can only doubt that creation is whole and unlimited if they allow themselves to be misled by the fact that consciousness of the unlimited whole does not reveal every detail of creation; that is, if they accept the spontaneous and uncritical belief that a knowledge of all the details of creation and, above all, a knowledge of the creator’s existence are the prerequisite for a logical understanding of the whole creation. From the point of view of this last belief, being conscious of the whole creation and understanding the whole creation are generally regarded as two different interests: the one philosophical, the other scientific. However, fundamentally – that is, by Nature – the two interests coincide to form an indivisible unit. Confusion arises when humans start regarding consciousness of the whole as inadequate by Nature; they then see human thinking as the human being’s basic quality: an original creativity independent of everything or dependent only indirectly on other human wills, the will then being declared to be free. This evaluation of the natural consciousness of the whole and of human thinking accounts for humanity’s problem with responsibility and identity, a problem that has persisted unchanged through the ages. In fact, the real question is whether or not our consciousness of the whole creation is anchored in reality. If it is not anchored in reality, we are prey to shifting identifications. Countless exchangeable areas of responsibility, delimited by humans, are then assigned to us by those whom we consider to possess consciousness of the whole, or at least greater consciousness of the whole than we ourselves possess.
3c. The natural responsibility of human beings
In actual fact it is impossible to have responsibility for something that one has not created oneself. As far as the whole creation is concerned, we also do not have any knowledge of either the cause or the meaning of what has been created, though we have to relate some way or other to what has been created. Without clarity about the cause and the meaning human beings, just like any other living species, can have responsibility solely for the preservation of their own body, which, though they experience it as their own, is in reality completely created by Nature in a purposeful way. This is a responsibility the newborn share at the beginning with those born before them; but the responsibility increases gradually for the newborn at the same rate at which it decreases for those born before them, until it becomes the responsibility that each adult has for their own body.
After language has been learnt, there begins – and here humans differ categorically from the other species – a responsibility for typically human communication through language. This is a responsibility that humans have forever found mysterious and also been disorientated about. Something that in practice has always confused the use of language is the sexual relationship – which, though everyone knows about it, is regarded as absolutely mysterious – and the human experience of love that humans have come to base on the sexual relationship. The sexual relationship is in itself neither more nor less mysterious than life itself or than, for example, the interplay of the days and the seasons from which human beings’ experience of time as divided into two, the past and the future, starts. (As mentioned earlier, time is generally interpreted as a reality in itself, rather than as a consequence of memory, of the fact that we can remember in a limited way our own earlier experiences as well as the experiences of others insofar as they recount them. This last is something of which the other species, lacking the human capacity for speech, are incapable – though such accounts are always unreliable, because any human can use language consciously or unconsciously to distort their memory-based experiences.)
The fact that consciousness of the living state (as distinct from the idea of a non-living state) is mysterious relates to the fact that the living state actualizes the idea that the creator is mysteriously present behind what all our senses corroborate: that the creator is absent bodily. Thus the living state actualizes the philosophical problem that is characteristic for humans.
The thought that the creator is absolutely absent is emotionally quite absurd because it forces humans to deny the logic, the meaningfulness, of all steering by needs. On top of that, the thought of a fundamentally non-living reality – and thus no solution to the philosophical problem – is emotionally so dreadful that humans feel forced to suppress the idea of death altogether, that is, to exclude it from their everyday consciousness of the whole of life. The spontaneous effect of this suppression is that humans become identified with, and become locked into, the maximally stimulating idea that the unlimited development of thinking is the route to solving the philosophical problem. What leads humans astray here is that thinking can in fact be developed unlimitedly. The logic of thought, however, leads to mistaken conclusions when its development is not aimed at logically defensible supplementary needs, which means supplementary needs that are connected to our eight above-mentioned inescapable basic needs. These basic needs, created by Nature, are basically determined and meaningfully coordinated as one whole by the creator, and so endure unchangingly.
3d. The need for reproduction; do we create our own children?
According to the evidence of our five senses, our own life and all life persists directly by means of the uninterrupted satisfying of periodically recurring needs – the satisfying being subjectively experienced as various pleasures – and indirectly by means of the mysterious need for reproduction, together with the equally, but differently, mysterious need for the experience of mutuality.
For humans the need for reproduction is mysterious because humans have always considered and openly said that they themselves create and are responsible for their offspring – whereas in fact humans are forced to cooperate with one another, in exactly the same way, clearly evident from Nature, that all living participants in creation are forced to cooperate with one another. The first point at which cooperation is demanded is in the realization, the consummation of the sexual relationship, which is required if fertilization is to happen. And then there are the further demands and contributions that follow from fertilization – gestation, birth, rearing of the offspring etc. The other species experience these too as self-evident; for them they can only be technically problematical, and not also, as for humans, philosophically.
The theory that we ourselves create our offspring is absurd because the only thing that we can do is to prevent fertilization; we cannot reckon with any certainty that the sexual act will lead to offspring, nor be sure whether the offspring will be a boy or a girl. Far more reasonable is the idea that it is as a consequence of Nature, which governs the whole, indivisible reality, that the foetus comes into being and grows and that the human being is born, becomes fully grown, gets old and leaves life. However, these two possible views – that we create our offspring or that Nature creates them – have never figured in the linguistic tradition with the aim of our deciding definitively and agreeing among ourselves which we should regard as the reasonable view to choose, and thus the one we should then introduce into language.
The lack of definiteness on this subject relates to the fact that realizing the sexual relationship inescapably requires the choice of only one cooperating partner of the so-called opposite sex. For humans, who are not just conscious via the body and its senses but also via language, this calls for a clear agreement as to whether the two partners have in mind solely the satisfaction involved in the intense pleasure typical of the need for reproduction or whether they also have in mind the fertilization that could follow.
It is only by forcing humans in both cases to obtain the cooperation of only one partner that Nature, which actively rules in the whole reality, can continue to counteract, albeit indirectly, the interpretation by humans of the creator’s material absence as an absolute absence and their then ascribing to themselves the identity of original cause of the whole creation – of which being the cause of their own children is the first instance. The interpretation that we ourselves create our children, in spite of the obvious universal experience that only women can be fertilized, is not contradicted by men, but nor is it clearly, unreservedly accepted by them. This is because of the original idea, accepted by the whole of humanity, that humans have unlimited creativity, an idea that men usually assert and defend. This identity, this basic quality – which implies that we ourselves can create not just our children but the whole creation – is not then challenged or contradicted by the female half of humanity.
The two other possibilities – abstaining from sexual relations or short-circuiting sexual relations by restricting them to oneself through masturbation – cannot possibly solve the human problem with the need for reproduction. They can only postpone humanity’s understanding of the creator and its purpose with the whole creation – with the typical consequence for humans that they are unable to experience unreserved love. For love presupposes the experience of mutuality, and this is only possible between those who are basically alike. It is impossible between those whose likeness is on the way but is not yet realized and is only imagined for the future.
3e. The need for the experience of mutuality
The original creator’s and humanity’s common problem with the experience of mutuality is that only the original creator has an autonomous, non-created existence. Because it has an autonomous, non-created existence, the creator can have no problem either with the preservation of its existence, or with company and love. If humans were only to have insight into this situation, instead of wanting to be the cause of everything, they would already understand the identity of the creator and the identity of the parts, as well as the creator’s purpose with its creation.
It is part of this insight that the purpose of creation cannot possibly be to divide up the creator’s existence into independent parts and to distribute the creator’s all-powerfulness among various limited, autonomous powers, in order that those parts should develop their limited powers into the same unlimited power that the creator has . The purpose of creation must be that the parts should realize that they are parts of the original living existence, so that, from the starting-point of this identity and without wishing to become anything else, they can begin to love the whole and all the other parts unreservedly and enjoy the whole creation undividedly, that is, as fundamentally solely good (and not fundamentally a mixture of good and bad).
As mentioned before, in order to introduce a self-evidence-based belief in God into language, humans have never needed to do more than to communicate to all newborn children a name that can be given to something living – for example, God – in order to make it possible to discuss an insight about something that is not present to the senses but which can be inferred, as a self-evidence, through spontaneous reflection. This is the insight that there must exist a basically indivisible and solely living , thus absolutely unchangingly existent, existence.
At the same time – that is, at the time that children are learning to talk – the adults also need to communicate to the children the other previously mentioned qualities that the absolute existence, God, has alongside consciousness; all of these, like consciousness, are self-evident:
(1) original allpowerfulness; (2) unlimited love; (3) absolutely purposeful creativity.
What is characteristic of, but at the same time problematic with, these three qualities that God has is that they cannot be imitated or copied. Nor is it possible to learn to develop them and then reproduce them or multiply them so that they can be represented by the participants as original. This is in spite of the fact that all living participants fundamentally also have these same qualities: power, love and creativity – alongside, as with God, the basic quality of consciousness. It is just that they do not have them in an absolute sense, as God does, but only in a relative sense. The unconsidered, irrational belief that human beings can represent these three basic qualities as original has created from earliest times all manner of elaborate theories of an original God endowed with human qualities, as well as theories of numerous developable human gods and goddesses, all logically indefensible.
The sole philosophical problem that humans have is that we are not connected to the absolute existence in a way that we can experience directly. We can only experience the connection to it indirectly, via a created body and by means of a capacity for everything-covering speech. This forces humans to reflect upon the identity of the whole reality and the identity of the participants, so as then to arrive at a self-evidence-based belief in God, a belief which, because it is self-evident, neither can be, nor needs to be, explained by humans.
If the inescapable information that everything living must die is not spontaneously to acquire a misleading interpretation as language is learnt, we also have to communicate to children the basic qualities that the absolute existence has. And we need to do this before they come across all the explanations based on the relative cause and effect found within creation.
This means in practice that the language-based information about death and about the problem of survival has to come from those who teach the child to talk, that is, its parents. If the information thus comes at the right time and from the right direction, children do not find it hard to interpret God’s identity in the simple way that, just as the child’s parents understand and provide everything that the child needs, God understands and provides everything that everybody needs. Such a child-belief can then easily survive the arrival of all the logically indefensible information that is purveyed about the identity of the whole reality and about the bodily identity of the human being from the starting-point of the word ‘abstract’ . Such logically indefensible information is first offered at the so-called age of resistance and then again at so-called puberty, when the whole problem with love comes to the fore. Then finally, in the coexistence with the whole creation, which humans – when a self-evidence-based belief in God is absent – organize in the illusion of freedom, there sooner or later appears, under the cloak of materialism, the denial of God’s existence: atheism.
4. Humanity’s unity on the basis of the self-evident
If a self-evidence-based, therefore common, belief in God is to be realized as early as when language is being learnt, this requires not just united parents, but also a united humanity – a fact that can also only be self-evident. The problem is that since people have stopped being conscious of the fact that a self-evidence-based belief in God is feasible, the word ‘self-evident’ has generally lost its meaning. It has come to be interpreted as ‘meaningless’, as ‘not at all evident’, even ‘contentious’ – so the opposite of what the word itself says . This implies in practice the view that there exists no original truth or validity, but only the explanations and ideologies expressed by humans via speech. These are then thought of not as relative to the Nature that rules unitarily in the whole reality, but as original. They are regarded as relative only to the views and ideologies expressed by other humans.
What has happened in the shadow of the development of modern science and what nowadays blocks any agreement about matters of self-evidence is that after two terrible world wars, which occurred within less than half a century and in which about 50 million humans were slain by their own species, it has become possible that a third world war will break out at any time. And as a direct, uninfluenceable result of the unlimited development of technology, it will be a war attended by even more terrible consequences.
If in the 1950s the institution of natural science, in place of its vague talk about interdisciplinary science and paradigms, had proposed that we must find a new life- and world-view to replace the atomic theory borrowed from Democritus in order to avoid a third world-war, it would have had a completely different reaction from the general public than the one it had. The two unclear notions of ‘interdisciplinary science’ and ‘paradigm shift’ led to the general public’s going along unreservedly with natural science’s efforts to use its new energy-based way of thinking to realize its old theory of atoms, in this case in the form of non-living quanta. The general unrealistic hope was that by suddenly conceiving of them as energies, humanity could, through the further development of solely technological thinking, succeed in making these invisible tiny atoms visible and tangible and thus open to technical manipulation; thereby we could acquire complete power over the whole creation, instead of having to deal in ‘mystical’ philosophical speculations.
4a. The philosophical solution: existence and activity are inseparable
It is impossible for us to conceive of a peaceful coexistence between humans and the other living and non-living parts of the whole creation unless humans keep in mind that the whole reality’s existence and the activity of that existence – creation – cannot, for a single moment, be separated: that is, neither the existence nor its activity can be conceived of as existing by itself. It is only purely theoretically that either can be conceived of as existing by itself , and thus only by humans – because of their obligatory capacity for speech, which allows them to cover their experience of the whole creation with words, phrases and sentences.
In the absence of a self-evidence-based belief in God, human language has no room for any experience, whether practical or theoretical, of the original reality’s existence. Any practical relation to the original reality’s existence – ‘practical’ in the sense of ‘separated by the perspective of distance’, that is, so-called objective or technical – is impossible for us as integral parts of the created, non-original reality. All we can do is what humanity has always done: inquire after the existence of the so-called absolute, the unchangingly existent, that which could be the cause of the whole creation; and do that from the starting-point of the insight, talked about since time immemorial, that the whole creation cannot be the original reality.
As far as we know, however, this enterprise of inquiry has historically never been talked about as being a matter of self-evidence arising from each human being’s own experience of the whole creation. Instead it has been said that the solution to the whole problem is tied to a theoretical solution offered by one human being. This has meant in practice that any such solution becomes tied to the more or less loosely associated, so-called religious, followers of that human being’s solution. This approach creates and spreads a general confusion as to the fundamental difference between what is practical and what is theoretical, that is, between what is knowledge and what is belief.
4b. The difference between knowledge/science and belief
In reality, knowledge or science is all mathematically calculable, practically applicable technology derived from the surrounding, sun-illuminated impression that we have of creation. Belief, on the other hand, has to do with the information, coming invisibly from inside us and mediated by life, about the natural and human-created needs. And it has to do with the counterparts to those needs in the sun-illuminated surroundings, counterparts actualized by life and which allow for the satisfaction of those needs. Because all known philosophical theories about the absolute cause’s existence hold out the prospect of the existence’s being amenable to science, that is, of its being reached technically, all known theories, regarded as forms of belief, are equally unrealistic and confusing. Modern philosophical theories have become particularly confusing since modern technology has come upon the invention of so-called digital light – which can be compared with the transcendental experience of wholeness – and, based on digital light, the inventions of data-technology and energy-driven programmed thinking (which, because it is programmed, is regarded as infallible) and the possibilities for developing these.
That we must fundamentally be perspectiveless, and therefore absolutely powerless, integral parts of the original reality’s existence is something we can only conceive theoretically. If we then conceive the original reality’s existence not, as we think of creation, as fundamentally dead, but as living, then the living existence as a whole must have a relationship to its parts that is equally distanceless, and thus without perspective, and also, as regards that relationship, without power. The living whole must experience its situation quite realistically as one involving an absolutely inescapable, inseparable relation to its parts, with no possibility of its experiencing any other relationship than to itself. As participants in the whole creation, however, with a created and therefore mortal body, we have the possibility there of experiencing the basic quality of the living state. And that state must be the same for all living participants, as well as for the original, solely theoretically conceivable, original living whole, that is, the creator: a timeless, never-ending, therefore never-started, permanent experience of consciousness, and a consequent experience of an also timeless, permanently ongoing, never-ending purpose to creation.
Translated from the Swedish (Den självklara Gudstron: reflektioner över det språkbaserade kulturarvet) by Philip Booth, Per Andersson, Gunna Mahler-Görges, Walter Mahler, Julia Morris and Åse Skeppholm.
1The significance of this has been emphasized throughout Understanding Reality: for example, Dialogue 4, Authoritarian traditions or Nature-based logic
2Cf. the Latin ‘con-’ + ‘scire’, meaning ‘together’ + ‘to know’
3This theme is returned to later, see 1b ‘But, in our view, it is only experienced as mystical because information is not given to humans as they learn language about what it is that humans have to explain over and above what Nature uninterruptedly explains to every living participant via the senses’
4Hlatky presupposes that such a belief existed prehistorically
5This will be taken up later, see section 1d: 'Humans similarly think of time...'
6This point is taken up again. See section 2: 'The technical conclusions drawn must then be different for each need and cannot be joined together into ever larger units and ultimately into one whole.'
7For elaboration of this point, see section 3f: 'This means in practice that the language-based information about death and about the problem of survival has to come from those who teach the child to talk, that is, its parents.'
8See, for example Understanding Reality Chapter 4 'The great cultures: the cause'
9More precise might be ‘No other logically defensible purpose...’, since other purposes have been proposed
10For elaboration of this point, see Dialogue 1, ‘Concrete vs abstract, existence vs activity’ also
‘Differences from theology’. See also later in this article, ‘…of the word abstract’"
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