“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the sparrows, how they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Father in heaven feeds them. Are you not more valuable than them? And can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these… But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (J.C.)

     To trust in God is not the same thing as trusting in the idea of God. To trust in God does not mean that you will have a clear explanation for your faith. It does not mean you will have an inexplicable inner confidence. Trust in God does not ensure you any tangible faith. To trust in God is to lose everything, even if that includes your own faith. Whenever we fixate on something as a handle for our faith, a way of grasping God, the faith we have is not really transcendent. All conceptualizations of reality, rational or prerational, are assertoric.

This error explains a lot about Christians. It explains why bible promises are given out like Hallmark cards or why biblical commands are bashed into people’s brains—which are both really the same act of trusting in ideas, except that one is nice and the other is angry. I’d like to point out some of Jesus’ implicit contradictions in the passage above from the Sermon on the Mount. For one, sparrows are often frightened, and lilies can’t be (as far as we know). Secondly, lilies are dressed in glory for a few weeks before the sun annihilates them, unlike birds who have feathers and nests to keep them protected from the elements. Jesus was not describing immutable realities; he was offering true insights. The fact of the matter is that yes, birds get by on scraps, and yes, human striving is outpaced by nature’s beauty. He was showing us our fears are often divorced from objective reality and we probably don’t need to be as directionlessly afraid as we are. But to suppress such fears with religious fixation avoids dealing with the underlying error of being divorced from reality (which causes the needless fear in the first place). One cannot consider such patchwork the same thing as divinity, unless your God is a collage. And if your God is a collage, you shouldn’t act like He’s a German realist painting.

     Conversely, to trust in God is also not the same thing as not having an idea of God. If God is transcendent, then faith in God is not necessarily intangible. Otherwise, God would be in competition with you, fundamentally. Rather, faith is not necessarily tangible. This is what it means for something to be transcendent. True knowledge of anything is contingent on its unnecessary tangibility.

Stories about our world have meaning, experiential reality. We know them from the inside, they help us move forward. If we didn’t use stories, we would never go anywhere or do anything. To be static is to be dead. Stories have functional reality, but in a way that is more real than a cynical pragmatism. Stories are condensed versions of the world outside, because they have their own little world: just look at politicians. They are not somehow wrong or false by their being stories, because even false narratives can lead to real results in politics. Thus the domain of ideas and the domain of events are connected to each other; the world inside and the world outside are not divorced, they are just different. The trueness of any idea is transcendental, contingent on its domain of use, and cannot be evaluated properly by exporting criteria from an outside framework committed to a faith which is not itself transcendent. Likewise, transcendence allows one’s belief system(s) to be applied outwardly without internal contradiction or reductive characterizations. This transcendency is itself the property of becoming aware of unity between the world of ideas and the world of actions.

     Once this has been understood, then we can really get to work. We can start to speak in terms of negations, under this contingency, so as to replace our formerly dogmatic application of concepts with a new form of understanding. Many of the old concepts can remain. But some of those concepts were phantasms produced by the old mindset. These must go. Eventually, we learn to use our orderings of reality transcendentally, like a river, forming them and then eroding them, even as life proceeds with no tractable beginning nor foreseeable end. It is not necessary to hold things fixed, nor is it necessary to erode things; such commitments tend to be youthful and belligerent, though they have their place. It is best to act according to the circumstances, which includes everything between raw animal instinct, trained autopilot, impulsive reflection, tempered analysis, etc. What matters is not so much how one acts or thinks, but how open one is to the circumstances in their favored course of action. The appearance of being inappropriate to another or even to oneself may be appropriate considered from a different perspective. What decides between their contradictory realities is the long-term effects of their actions. This may never be determinable.

It must here be said that there is no static ideal by which life continually falls short. There appears to exist a static ideal because idealism is a quality implicit in all our judgments, though it itself is never a concrete reality. Idealism is a property of our mental organization, driven, ultimately, by our will to survive.

     This brings us to the notion of continuums. Something can be understood as a continuum when it is composed of parts that in some way act together as a whole. We call the air around us a continuum because all the air particles are close enough together that when we swish our arm through it, the air moves around our arm so that there aren’t vacuums behind it or a compressive phase change into a liquid ahead of it. A desk is a continuum of solid molecules because when you push on it, the other side moves as well. In the upper atmosphere, however, there is so little air that it does not behave as a continuum. This particle of air is not affected by that particle of air. On the other hand, some continuums are more conceptual than actual, in that we as humans see relationships between things and ascribe them as being a continuous whole. If we walk out into a field of yellow flowers and look really closely at one or two of them, we don’t see “a field of yellow flowers.” We see this flower and that flower. But as we stand up and take a step back, the field starts to emerge. And if we climbed a tall hill nearby, we might even stop seeing “a field of yellow flowers” and start seeing “a field of yellow.” The flowers don’t stop being flowers when we got higher, but they stop appearing to us as flowers, taking on their more noticeable and basic conditions: color, luminous intensity, the shape of the field. Another way of understanding continuums is “a density of elements being sufficient to adjust our awareness from the particular qualities of any element to the general qualities of all of them together.” For instance, a young man’s upper lip hair does not become a mustache until there is enough hair to cover the gaps between the hairs. Moving closer or farther to his face does not change whether he has an accumulation of hair or a real mustache. The density of a continuum can be absolutely spatial (as with air), relatively spatial (as with the flowers), or categorical (as with the mustache).

Some categorical continuums only have a loose actuality as a whole. If we look at a patch of earth and see a bunch of weeds growing there, we might be inclined to think that this plot belongs to the weeds, that they rule over it. But that might not be true; the other plants might be growing just fine alongside them—it is just that there are enough weeds for us to feel like they are in charge. This is fallacious. A spot of dirt on the floor does not make the whole floor dirty, it makes it no longer look clean. But to us, it appears as a broken whole. A speck of dirt breaking the apparent continuum of a clean floor is insufficient justification to get mad at someone’s cleaning. Much of the anger of moral judgments comes from our disillusionment with the world of objects not matching up to our preconceived criteria of perfection. The proper justification for correcting your roommate on a dirty floor is if one’s functionality and motility are inhibited by the dirty on the floor, because, after all, a clean floor is generally considered a good thing; and this moral directive is detached from the mental disillusionment of apparent continuums. But a few drops of water on tile flooring do not need to be cleaned up—their presence is natural and does not hurt anyone. To become upset at someone for dripping water on tile illustrates how removed from objective reality one’s moral compass is.

Other continuums are even looser. The pink and orange flowers in the vase on my desk and the lava beds of Northeast California have very little relationship between each other. But I thought of them at the same time, and so they together comprise a real moment in my mental chatter. The flowers from my garden in a little glass jar and the black rocks of Modoc County are a continuum for me, marking a moment in my life by their meaningful intersection in my mind. And they, therefore, are a real continuum because no matter how much you don’t care about it you cannot change the fact that I did think of them as together. You can reject my reality, everyone can reject my reality, people can make my life miserable for it and maybe even kill me or illicit my suicide in response to being rejected, but the fact of it as a real thought of mine persists. I create reality to some extent. How powerful my reality is depends on a lot of things between me, you, everyone else, and nature. Everyone and everything cooperate to some extent in creating reality. There are things that are more real (i.e. they have more power in their reality) and less real. It is possible to incite a whole group of people into a frenzy, believing some ridiculous ideology to be true and then they act it out, bringing it to fruition. However, the world beyond their world, whether we’re talking about the world held by people who disagree with them or the facts of nature, will work against their reality, making it less and less real over time. To make a cult’s reality true, they have to enforce their reality against others’ realities. This would have to continue to the very totality of the universe. There are natural laws that tend toward or away from particular realities, which are at least produced through the interactions of elements within various worlds, but they may also be the properties of scales of worlds interacting on each other, or it is even possible their underlying properties reflect the implicit order of one or more superworlds which exist outside all scales of the universe, beyond all the worlds of physical things, that prescribes the teleology of the lesser worlds—or there could be one or more superobjects that are more powerful than all other objects and therefore inexorably determine aspects of reality for everything else. This is speculation, intended to illustrate that a cult is not guaranteed to enforce their reality forever or across all time. Only certain ways of behaving are helped by the broader conditions of nature in the long run, and universal conquest to control the laws of physics themselves may or may not be feasible under the conditions of the universe. It helps explain why imperialist industrialism is bound to fail at some point: the underlying conditions of our planet as a world in itself, as well as the implicit conditions of larger scales of reality, possibly even to a superworld encompassing all things, do not here allow for infinite energy consumption. A continuum can be more or less affine with the conditions of the worlds in which it is situated, and mental continuums are selected for or against due to the interaction among things and between worlds. Depending on how unilaterally aligned something’s nature—its form and function—is with the broader conditions of the worlds determines how real that thing is. Now it should be said there is an inflated reality and an authentic reality. Inflated reality garners power in local worlds quickly (e.g. the things and people in close association), but authentic reality garners power on the scale of more global worlds (e.g. underlying conditions of thought, behavior, culture, history, nature, cosmology, etc.). In this regard, inflated realities are destined to collapse, and so they must ceaselessly fight to continue. They tend to lose reality because they exist through the compression of scale: the hastening of time and the capturing of things in space. Authentic realities may apparently lose moment-to-moment, but they win in the eternal and the universal because they exist through the expansion of scale: moving and operating according to farther and more diverse reaches of space and longer scales of time. Inflated realities tend to ignore, disdain, or dominate other worlds by treating them as fixed and impermeable. Authentic realities tend to notice, appreciate, and coordinate with other worlds by treating them as dynamic and permeable.

These are working definitions of reality so that you can be satisfied with my meaning of “the density of a continuum.” The density of a continuum is a cosmic phenomenon. The interaction of worlds determines what makes a continuum. In the case of the flower field, the interaction between the flowers and you as an observer allows for the field of yellow flowers to be a continuum at moderate range, where the particular flowers become less real than the collection of the flowers without losing their being noticeable as flowers. We can understand these three states as worlds: the world of particular yellow flowers, the world of a yellow flower field, and the world of a yellow field. Physical proximity does not make these worlds, these realities, inflated or authentic because we cannot find a moral condition for choosing between worlds. In each case, at each scale, the world and its contents are good; there is no inherent destruction or competition between these worlds. But now suppose a friend came to you, mourning a breakup with their romantic partner of two years. If you were to give them advice based on sweeping simplifications, you would hurt them instead of giving them the companionship they wanted and needed. Thus your world of rationalization and oversimplification is morally wrong in this scenario. You are morally obliged to enter the appropriate world—the world outside your world, your friend’s world—because your rationalization here is in competition with their world. (If we are “oversimplifying” things, it is as if we are in too general a world. If we are “overthinking” things, it is as if we are in too particular a world.) Also, I’m not going to define “world,” but I will say that it has three contexts. One is world in the classical sense, consisting of everything outside of and subsuming any frame of reference. The second is the world of meaning, consisting of closely related patterns of seeing, living, and being. The third is a subcategory of the second sense: the result of worlds intersecting. In light of this, it could be that the first world, the universe, is the mere aggregate or product or of all lesser worlds interacting. To be wholly involved in the world (world in the first sense) is for something to be aligned with the eternal state of other worlds (world in the second sense), producing lasting worlds between them (world in the third sense).

     What I have said thus far is that, really, the criteria for something being a continuum are the same as the criteria for something being something. Things that last are more continuous through time. Depending on how open to other worlds something is determines how and how real it is—in what manner it behaves and how lasting it is. In the case of the flower field, the world of a particular flower becomes less real to us with increased distance because the kind of interaction that occurs between us and one flower is primarily sensory. The flower does not lose much of its reality because its world involves coordinating with the other flowers, the ground, the sun, and all the life around it. Therefore the flower does not pop out of existence by our not seeing it. It is still a thing so long as it interacts with other things, so long as it participates in shared worlds. If the flower were to somehow suddenly cease interacting with everything, including itself and all its components, it would cease to be. A flower must tend to interact with its components and its neighbors in the environment for it to be real. How much it tends to interact within and without is equivalent to saying how well it functions and to how real it is.

A thing is not a thing unless some collection of its parts somehow coordinates to make a whole. It is real whether it is conceived mentally or genetically or accidentally or purposefully. It is not real if it is merely possible. How real it is, how much power to be a thing it has, depends on how its world integrates with other worlds. It is like cells in a body. The nuclei, containing the DNA, determine the construction and operation of the cells, the forms and forms of interaction of its organelles and its membrane, even how the membrane interacts with other cells and their membranes. If the genetic information determines that the cells are to adhere together, as in adjacent skin cells, they compose a tissue. Their individual worlds connect and form a greater world which is itself a continuum, where the lesser worlds serve as elements. If a skin cell is programmed to interact with a blood cell but not to adhere with it, they have a shared world between them, but it is transient and therefore it is only continuous as an event in time or as a system (e.g. vascular), and so it makes more sense to call their shared world an event or a system than a continuum.

As the shared worlds between things become less real, the conditions of those worlds become more apparent. As we stand from the one flower, we see the collection of flowers as a field, and the specific aspects of that one flower become less apparent: its petal contours, leaf arrangements, imperfections, surface fuzz, etc. The flower field as a generality supersedes our apprehension of that flower. The concept of “yellow flower” becomes our primary experience when viewing many flowers. We don’t experience this flower or that flower so much as we experience Yellow Flower. The differences between all the flowers are too many to pay attention to in this world at standing height, so we notice more the condition of the lesser world of This Flower: namely, that it was a yellow flower. We ascribe the fact that there are a lot of yellow flowers and that it is not just the concept of a yellow flower with the word “field.” Again, as we climb the hill above the flowers, the color, luminous intensity, and shape of the yellow field become more apparent. As we move outside the range of our vision’s precision, the implicit condition of the flower field becomes more apparent: that it was yellow, bright in the sunshine, and about fifty yards across and twenty yards wide. We may have noticed these things when standing above them, just as we would have understood the flower close up as being a yellow flower; but what the elevation differentiates is that our primary attentiveness now naturally falls on the generality of the lesser scale, the conditions of the prior microcosm. This doesn’t mean we don’t understand the field as containing individual flowers—we do. But it is hard to see the flowers, and so it is to us a Yellow Field. If we went higher within this world, as if looking down from a small airplane, we would not be able to discern particular flowers at all. The idea of a flower moves from being something of apprehension, of perception, to something of comprehension, of reflection. So, as we enter larger worlds, we observe the conditions of particular appearances. What happens when we enter smaller worlds?

If we were to climb back down from the vista point, we would find that the bright yellows and greens go from being a unified colorful space to being a collection of flowers unified in their being a collection. Again, if we manage to find that first flower and stoop to look at it, we would find that the flower is an individual with most of the petals unfolded and some furled, the leaves upraised, a few aphids crawling along it, etc. The unity is in the parts comprising the flower’s structure, rather than the aggregation of individual flowers neighboring each other. This world of closer observation is governed more by the flower than by our subjective conditions from atop the hill. Of course, there is some mutualism between flowers in a field and their unity is not merely our classifying them as similar. The flowers are genetic kin, and they likely benefit each other by being near to one another; e.g. pollinators can see a group of flowers from a distance more easily than a solitary flower. So the world of the Yellow Flower Field is both subjectively real and objectively real; it is a genera with particularity in itself. The world of the Yellow Field, on the other hand, does not have much objective reality. There is little effect of its being a genera of Yellow Flower Field. The case could be made that pollinators are helped by seeing the flowers as a blob of color from far distances, but the extra distance does not characterize a new continuum among the flowers. The benefit of the added distance is with the observer, and no new continuum is made amongst the flowers; the benefit, the authentic reality of this world is in its sharing something additional with the observer—namely our basic visual tracking mechanisms. Thus the Yellow Field world exists as a system of different kinds of organisms, whereas the world of the Yellow Flower Field exists as a system of elements of the same kind, and therefore it is a continuum and the Yellow Field is not. A continuum is only a continuum if the particulars subsumed under the genera are of the same kind. In the earlier case of the volcanic rocks of Modoc County, California and the vase of flowers on my desk, these are not a continuum by their being the same kind of element on the terms of their own worlds, but by their comprising the same moment in my world.

If we were to take our particular flower and put it under a microscope, we would see something remarkably different: the tissues and cells of the flower parts. What comprised the flower is now more apparent than the flower. The flower stays close in our mind as a memory—and we are likely to notice the flower sitting on the microscope glass as we move it around—but it is less obvious to us as a whole than the little units that make it up. We also would have forgotten the flower field, unless we were sitting on the field with a microscope. It is hard to observe multiple worlds, multiple scales, at once. Under the microscope, we see the underlying structures of the flower, the objective conditions of the genera “This Flower.” If we continued to zoom in all the way down to the smallest subatomic particle phenomena, we would have long forgotten the flower and the field. As we zoom into smaller worlds, we not only notice the aspects of the flower more, we start to notice the diverse underlying parts of the flower. This is unlike zooming out, where we notice our general impressions of the flower field. There is a pattern that repeats across scales, which is that when you first gain sight of something from some scale, the thing appears simple. The cell seems simple from a low magnification. Higher magnifications reveal its deep complexity. At a subatomic level, the observation becomes not only more difficult, it becomes perplexing. The role of observer becomes a critical part of the object’s nature. The object becomes discontinuous in itself as we become a part of it. At bigger scales, the field of flowers does not really change depending on how we look at it. The object becomes continuous in itself as we become detached from it. Thus at higher scales, in the macrocosm, objective reality is insensitive to observation; but at smaller scales, in the microcosm, objective reality is observation-sensitive. (Note that the size of scale is not necessarily determined by space; it can be a categorical scale, as in how generally or specifically you consider something, like with the lovelorn friend.) What we find is that in macrocosmic phenomena the conditions of appearance appear as things in themselves and in microcosmic phenomena the environmental conditions of objects appear as subjective events. Macrocosms are where information appears as object; microcosms are where objects appear as information. The unconditioned phenomenon exists both at the limits of macrocosm and microcosm and at the threshold between them; it is that which is neither hypostatized as mere object nor unrealized as mere idea. It is the subject observing themself, the thing-in-itself, and the purely metaphysical idea. These three concepts are represented by the Buddha, Christ, and infinite nothingness, respectively.

     An objectively real world that is not subjectively real is one that we have not learned about yet or one that will remain indiscernible to us no matter what we do, unsensible to us by formidable laws of natural ineffability. This latter world is too scary for me to want to write about right now. Sufi mystics like Hafiz and science fiction writers like H.P. Lovecraft tend to have a good grasp of it, however doomed to failure grasping at the unfathomable is. The former world, the world of that which we haven’t learned yet but could, is more approachable. We aren’t guaranteed to have all the concepts for understanding things objectively; we might overlook important worlds. We are born with some innate concepts, we learn some through parenting, some through school, some through work, some through experience, some through word-of-mouth. But even this is not enough to supply us with all the wisdom we will need. We don’t need all the wisdom we might need, we need the wisdom we will need. We can’t see into other important but as-yet-unseen worlds unless we access things from a different perspective. This is where the magic of the imagination comes in. I’ve spent some time talking about the vase of pink and orange flowers on my desk and the black lava rock in Modoc county. The faculty of the imagination allows me to classify spatially and naturally different things such as these as being a shared phenomenon. Thus it is possible to unite divergent things to almost no end. We can create a new world with our souls. Memory is similarly magical. Our world is produced with meaningful associations; we don’t just experience nature and objects as they are, or even as they simply appear to us: we connect them with how we’re feeling, what we’re thinking about, why we’re there, where we’re going, what has happened to us recently, what similar things have we experienced, what music we’re listening to, who we’re with, etc. Thus in our memory we hold a world of objects scattered across time and space together in a glassy watery web, all in one moment. We have the power to unite things that were far separated through their connotation. Our feelings and impressions and associations allow us to produce new genera for particulars whether or not they are related by their own nature. We stitch diverse worlds together through our being in the world as subjects. Doing so allows us to better perceive real relationships that our innate and learned categories would overlook. This is the primary justification for promoting music, art, poetry, literature, synesthesia, drugs (this includes caffeine, alcohol, and sugar), humor, and creativity. Plus, without these things life would be a lot less interesting. Their functionality in helping us be authentic agents in the world is reinforced by their presence being fun and their absence causing drudgery.

     To approach an ideal is to be closer to death. By being closer to an ideal, one has greater access to power, but it is by the same token riskier. If we look through history, those solidifying themselves or their environments never last forever. Giant invertebrates went extinct; bugs, crustaceans, and cephalopods survived (except some of the cephalopods managed to get big again). Synapsids went extinct; mammals survived. Dinosaurs went extinct; birds survived. Why in God’s name are sponges and jellyfish and algae and worms still around? It is the meek who inherit the earth.

We vacillate between the secure and the wild, and we vacillate between civilization and wilderness. The only way to ensure our will to survive alongside our openness to the world is to create forms of intercosmic connectedness. We, being humans, have the choice to delay our certain demise as powerful organisms. And, fortunately, we are slated by the stars to do so: it is within us to congeal our inner worlds and manifest their symbiosis in the outer worlds as a solution to the moral problem of disjointed worlds in general. We are the archetypes of life on Earth. This might be arrogant, but believing it actually has the potential to benefit all life if we approach our role as sapient cosmic cocreators with authenticity. It is the transcendence of our faith that determines whether or not we can enter into such authenticity.

One more thing. People who don’t like religion or faith for the sake of their being unreal should also be inclined to reject the virtual worlds of computers and the internet, if they wish to be consistent. The real world should be preeminent for the realists. If a cynic enjoys virtual technology, their inconsistency actually reveals that life is fundamentally disjointed, that real living is discontinuous. To be continuous may actually be a greater risk than being discontinuous. If we observe this tenant with humble openness, we might actually find that we can transcend the virtual world even by our being involved in it.


March 28, 2020
San Luis Obispo