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You & I Together - Have a Purpose in Reality

From: http://www.panentheism.com/Pages/02.html

By Daniel J. Shepard from the Panentheism site.

The south has a limit and no limit, The sun is declining when it is at high noon, A creature is dying when it is born.

Hur Shi (c. 370 - 290 B.C.E)
Chinese Philosopher

Quadratic vs Linear Philosophies - Noncontradictory Contradictions

Mankind has always been faced with perplexing contradictions. Man has always been stymied by an endless array of contradictions from the earliest of recorded times to the present These same contradictions have haunted man since the beginning of mans’ earliest history. The strange thing is, that as long as we have been obsessed with these constantly recurring concepts that seem to haunt the souls of all men, and as long as we have been trying to excise them from our souls through religion and scientific dissection, we have never been able to rid our subconscious minds of these annoying thoughts and premonitions that seem to dwell in our subconscious. They just bubble to the surface of our conscious self in a seemingly never ending procession.

If water represented man’s mind and awareness was mans’ thoughts, emotions, insights, and knowledge, an analogy of this perplexing flow of recurrent universal, seemingly unprovable, contradictory yet noncontradictory ideas might easily go as follows:

Water from an underground spring bubbles to the surface from a mysterious source we cannot visually identify. The water from this spring is man’s as well as mans’ deja vu from his true beginnings into which he shall be absorbed again. This water in turn feeds a brook, which feeds a stream, which feeds a river, which feeds into an ocean. The ocean is all of mans’ pool of conscious action, thoughts, and awareness. The ocean, river, stream, and brook are never able to expunge themselves of this spring water. However, the further these entities get from the source of the spring, the more perplexing the source of the water becomes. The further one gets from the source, the more difficult it is to recognize the pattern the pieces form, since the pieces are too jumbled and the distance between them too great to put them together in a comprehensive, conscious, visible picture.

Just what persistent haunting of the soul is man constantly being exposed to? People do not have free will, but they are responsible for their actions. Things just happen but they are meant to be. Man has a purpose, but we cannot reach a consensus on the universality of that purpose as a species. There is death, but it is the beginning of life. Man was created in the image of God, but how can God have such a limited form? All men are capable of good, but not all men are good. “Bad” things happen to “good” people. Hedonism, you are your brother’s keeper, religion, predestination, morality, immorality, love, hate, joy, sorrow, all are immersed in contradictions and attempts to resolve them have gone on forever and ever it seems. Perhaps the contradictions are not contradictions at all. Perhaps we have just been thinking about the logic of them in too simplistic a manner, yet not simplistic enough. Another contradiction? Maybe not, perhaps our philosophical thinking needs to jump into another mode.

In the past, we have always thought in terms of isolated concepts and straight line thought, or what one might term in mathematics as “linear” thoughts. Equations to the first power only. Examples of linear philosophy would be: the universe is limitless and goes infinitely far in any “one” direction. Life “begins” and life “ends” or others might say you go to eternal; life. This is a “beginning” and an “end” format type of thinking often called, linear thought. Other examples are scientific in nature: light travels in a “straight line”; the universe goes on forever, .reality is physical in nature, etc.

Perhaps it is time to put our thoughts into another mode. Perhaps we need to think “quadratically”. Quadratics is a term in mathematics which simply describes curves and circles. For example circles, represented by quadratic equations, have no beginning or end. Perhaps life has no be ginning or end, just different places on a curved line composed of an infinite number of life experiences in different forms. Perhaps philosophy needs to think in terms of curves and circles rather than straight lines, quadratically instead of linearly. Nature, after all, is not composed of basically straight lines, so perhaps mans’, or for that matter man’s life experiences and purpose, would be better understood if we contemplated it in a quadratic format rather than a linear one, as we have historically done. Perhaps we need to think philosophically more in terms of circular thoughts or what one might call higher order equations.

At the same time, we might need to take concepts of individual premonitions, science, philosophy, and religion, and stop isolating them into uniquely different topics. Perhaps we need to mesh them together into a comprehensive picture.

One person contemplates the purpose of life and another analyzes the DNA structure. One person meditates upon the significance of man’s actions upon his eternal soul and another develops a code of medical morality. One man considers the source of man’s origin and another digs for the missing link. One man reflects upon reincarnation and another investigates the definition of when life begins and ends. Although these men seem to be investigating different things, perhaps they have more in common than we realize.

Perhaps, in addition to thinking quadratically, we need to also apply matrix analysis to our thinking and begin to coordinate the merging of our thoughts of science, religion, and philosophy into a universal picture. (this matrix format was addressed in the third book of this trilogy, ‘Stepping Up To The Creator’)

We are at a point in our history where we may now have the information we need to construct a basic picture, a model, of man’s and mans’ purpose for existing in the universe. (this is done in part I of this book)

With the development of the concept of quadratic philosophy versus linear philosophy in mind, part II of this book will attempt to put forward an example of quadratic philosophical thinking into a quasi-logical model that can answer many of mans’ age old questions. This process might better be described as the process of using metaphysics to build a model of what it is we believe the three - we, our universe, and God - are and how they are interrelated. In short, the process is one of applying rational thinking, philosophy, to define what we are and why we exist using the tools of faith, religion, and observation, science.

With this in mind, we can begin to examine many of mans’ discoveries. We can begin to put isolated philosophical, religious, and scientific pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and begin to view the total picture. We will begin this process in the next section “B .E.G.A.”. This section is named after four great thinkers, Bernoulli, Einstein, Grandi, and Asimov.