Elegy for Experience
Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self is a tough read. Much of the book, originally delivered as the Terry Lectures at Yale, is annoyingly academic and recondite — and my own annoyance with it made me realize how conditioned we have all become to polemic, and to the association of polemic with populism, its implicit equation with democratic virtue. If you’re not expressing yourself so Joe the Plumber can follow and get het up, you’re an elitist snob.
Well, yes. Robinson’s essays unapologetically reside at a rarefied altitude. Much of the time, reading them — with their lofty subtlety, learnéd name-dropping, and aversion to straight talk — is like walking in on the middle of an academic theological discussion hundreds of years long, still being carried on in certain sheltered venues (not unlike the remote island where a Japanese soldier was still fighting World War II 40 years after it ended) in willed unawareness that out there in the world’s center of mass, “academy” has become a dirty word.
Too bad, because if a polemicist is a street fighter, in your face with a flurry of fists, Robinson is a ninja, around behind you cutting your airway—at least if you’re Pinker, Dennett, or Dawkins — before you’re aware that anyone else is in the room. Her evident training in both the history of ideas and formal logic makes it easy for her to get the drop on these proudly ahistorical thinkers, who feed on ad hominem frontal assaults from counter-polemicists but can’t withstand the exposure of their own ideological antecedents, false assumptions, and self-contradictions. Let’s hope some of Robinson’s supply-side intellect trickles down, because otherwise the culture at large might never know how deftly the reductionist view of a material universe ruled by blind chance, and a humanity driven by selfish genes, has been eviscerated.
Robinson doesn’t prove that those two key dogmas of what she scathingly calls “parascience” are wrong. Rather, she shows that the arguments for them (when they are argued for at all, rather than merely assumed) are hopelessly shoddy, and that the smugness with which the final authority of “science” is claimed for them is unwarranted. She traces their “Now everything can be explained!” triumphalism straight to the Victorian era, with its confidence — comical in the light of what science itself was soon to discover — “that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them”:
This confidence was already firmly asserted by Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, in 1848. … ‘[M]en of science … have left no gap of any importance, except in the realm of Moral and Social phenomena. And now that man’s history has been for the first time systematically considered as a whole, and has been found to be, like all other phenomena, subject to invariable laws, the preparatory labours of modern Science are ended.’ I seriously doubt that any scientist active today, if pressed, would speak of the sufficiency of our present state of knowledge with equal assurance. Yet in literature of this [parascientific] genre, of which Comte is also an ancestor, that tone of certainty persists, an atavistic trait that defies the evolution of its notional subject.
Robinson is religious, of course — a private-conscience, social-justice Protestant in the grand line that descends from Calvin through the abolitionists, a lineage she traced in her previous book of essays, The Death of Adam — but she is not here to crusade for an Intelligent Designer. She just wants to reopen the questions — or rather, to point out that real science reopened them almost a hundred years ago, when physics rode to the rescue of metaphysics:
It is and may always be premature to attempt, let alone to assert, a closed ontology, to say we know all we need to know in order to assess and define human nature and circumstance. The voices that have said, “There is something more, knowledge to be had beyond and other than this knowledge,” have always been right. … The notion of accident does nothing to diminish mystery, nothing to diminish scale. …
“[T]he material” itself is an artifact of the scale at which we perceive. We know that we abide with quarks and constellations, in a reality unknowable by us in a degree we will never be able to calculate, but reality all the same, the stuff and the matrix of our supposedly quotidian existence. We know that within, throughout, the solid substantiality of our experience indeterminacy reigns.
Nor is Robinson, however, most interested in cosmology. She is most interested in its witness, human consciousness, that most inexplicable of cosmic creations (embodied in a brain that is “the most complex object known to exist in the universe”); and she is most alarmed, not by proclamations of the death of God, but by the endangered status of consciousness, as both a key term in the long conversation and its acknowledged ground. (The most rigorous “objectivity,” she points out, cannot be anything but the practice of a subjectivity that prizes it.)
What’s more, as befits her inward tradition, Robinson does not consider “consciousness” a general phenomenon, but one that is most marvelous and mysterious in that it is irreducibly individual. The meanness of parascience, in her view, is not only its reduction of everything to (a fantasy of) stone-dumb matter, but its determination to generalize about the motives of human beings. The exclusion of consciousness, Robinson implies, is a direct threat to individuality and individualism. That there is an intimate, chicken-and-egg interdependence between the dawning of private self-awareness and the apprehension or imagining of its Witness — between “I am” and “I AM” — is an idea central to Robinson’s book, although she barely breathes it, because she is here to fight for the inherent value of subjectivity whether you believe it has indisseverable roots in religion or not.
Man that’s deep. Where’s my Zoloft?
The ‘gifts’ of knowing, self-awareness, consciousness and the curiousness to seek are bestowed on humans from the Most High. It is something like, but not quite, a bit of a spark of Himself.
It is a gift that may grow or diminish. We get to choose that. It is also a gift that may be taken away from a person and they become ‘like unto a beast’. This is done when it becomes apparent it is the only way they will be able to know the truth.
The surest evidence of the complexity of human consciousness is the impossibility of fully describing it. Although it is our very own, right before our very eyes (as it were), its true ousia eludes us, for, as Jung observed, there is no Archimedean point outside (of ourselves) from which we could comprehend it. So we spin metaphors enlivened with the prejudices of the times.
The closest I have come to understanding is under the rubric of Hegel’s dialectic, which, unlike Marx’s mangled version, never reaches a stasis, and so it never expects a utopia of finality. The “I” is the subject of its own “object,” or, to put it more prosaically, the dog that chases its own tail.
An information theory that I forget says something like “Closed systems don’t have enough information to manage themselves”. Therefore, computers can’t successfully rewrite their operating systems. I believe it’s also why communism fails, empires fall, people don’t pull themselves out of self destructiveness and as suggested here, we can’t understand our own conscious.
Good going, Gottlieb! Makes me want to read the book carfully.
Sounds rather Barfieldian.
We feel the sun on our upturned face, but that is an illusion of consciousness. feelings don’t exist in the material world. What we “feel” is really flux of a certain wavelength and density. It strikes the molecules of our flesh, is absorbed and makes the atoms that make up the molecules move a little more energetically.
All utter nonsense. You feel the sun on your face, not a description of “lightwaves” and “molecules”. The more accurately we try to describe the material world, the less we use our five senses and the more we arrange abstractions deep in our minds. Instead of experiencing reality, we delve inwards and use words to describe other words.
Man doth usurp all space,
Stares thee, in rock, bush, river, in the face.
Never thine eyes behold a tree;
‘Tis no sea thou seest in the sea,
‘Tis but a disguised humanity.
To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan;
All that interests a man, is man.
Poem by Henry Sutton
Next time you quote someone, credit them. It’s only right.
“I hardly know anyone under 40 (and few enough over 40) who isn’t on one antidepressant or another…”
Most of our current set of friends are a bit younger than my lady friend and younger still than I. When the ladies do lunch, or a similar activity, my friend often later mentions to me how amazed she is by the knowledge (or psuedo-knowledge) of relaxochemistry her friends evince and with which they tell of experiences.
This is totally alien land to me, except, I must confess, for the various kingdoms of booze, with which these people are also familiar. But I don’t honestly know whether this is a class thing (see the more exciting meth or crack vs calming drugs with longer names) or a geographical thing (see meth, etc., again) or a combination. Or is it a lady thing? But age seems to definitely be a factor. Has this all started in school with Prozac? (But aren’t more boys on Prozac than girls?)
6. Fred Beloit
At 48, it’s not something I’m directly familiar with either.
I know of a 17 y/o girl who lost her father at 9. A year after his death, she was a socially brilliant, happy and well adjusted girl. But her mother immediately jumped onto anti-depressants for years, and she was kind of abusive to the girl. At age 15, her teenage social problems and rare hints of suicide were diagnosed to be resultant of her father’s death, and she was medicated with something that turned her into a mentally dull introvert, while adding 40lbs to her frame. Not good for a teenager. 3 years latter, she’s starting to pull out of it and slim down, but those were some very important lost years for her.
I think there’s just more money and less work in prescribing drugs than in fixing dysfunctional behaviors and relationships, both for the families and for the medical profession. People may level out quicker by blanking out what bothers them, but they don’t grow as much through their struggles. So we’re left with a generation dominated by aging adolescents. At the risk of generalize from my friend’s experience, these drugs may also be a factor on our increasingly overweight population.
That said, I know of a ridiculously beautiful young woman who while pregnant lost her husband to a diving accident. Three years later, all she could talk about was how much her son resembled the deceased love of her life and suicide. Her family couldn’t help, and her friends were losing patience with her. After blowing off two shrinks who wanted to medicate her, she took the advice of a third. Now she actually smiles, and has begun to date what appears to be an exceptionally good man. So in this case, the drugs probably save her life (and her son’s childhood.)
So from my limited indirect experience, “relaxochemistry” should only be used as a last resort.
Thanks for the interesting reply, elf.
Good article,and it was worth reading to the end. There were many chuckles; such as jung leading to narcissism, and freud spotting baby’s firsts as the cosmic ego’s birth. I am not on tranquelizers or anything, and I am over 50. You are right I only needed to be honest with one person to learn the difference between i am and I AM.
Huh?
Thank you very much, very interesting column.
The fortresses of nihilism are falling apart. In many, and unexpected, ways.
Marvelous post. Thank you for bring to us all Robinson’s excellent term “parascience” to describe the writings of scientists such as Dawkins. I’m an atheist myself, but am embarrassed when, as a retired professor, I encounter the rather adolescent arguments of scientists such as Dawkins. I’ve long lacked a good word to describe their writings, which lack any awareness of what religion and consciousness is really all about. “Parascience” will now be the word I use.
American arguers for atheism, like Dawkins, seem to be totally unaware of the analyses of mind carried out by Hegel in the early 19th century, specifically in “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Also American atheists also do not deal in their arguments with the role of transcendence in human history and never seem to wonder why humans have even conceived of transcendence.
I think one can fairly adequately explain human conciousness as electrons buzzing down connections in that substance we know as the brain.
Sight, actual seeing of things, has been stimulated in people who have lost their eyesight by stimulating the circuits of the brain that previously dealt with sight, by means other than the eye. (Electric impulses from a camera fed to the tongue.)
When we try to claim a uniqueness of our perception, the validity of the existence of “I” as a unique reference point in the universe, we are claiming something that we cannot objectively prove.
However. I do believe in the Lord Jesus for very real reasons as far as my experience has been.
I further challenge the ‘parascientist’ be they cosmologist or biologist to answer this question: Can order occur spontaneously in randomness.
(Randomness should be perfectly still. Any activity, whatsoever, is the result of difference, of potential, which implies order.)
I further challenge the ‘parascientist’ be they cosmologist or biologist to answer this question: Can order occur spontaneously in randomness.
Read Wolfram’s “new kind of science” where he shows that, essentially, randomness is a philosophical construct, not one of physics: the universe is self organising. He shows how and why this is.
One of the common arguments against evolution relies on a misapplication of the concept of randomness, and the std example involves something, say a meat grinder, where you put the parts in a dryer for a thousand years and no, the parts don’t randomly assemble into a meat grinder. Run another thousand years. No meat grinder. That disproves the randomness thing, right?
Well… in truth, that proves nothing, since we don’t expect them to. On the other hand, putting lots and lots of atoms in the same dryer will always result in organic molecules and the like, because they are attracted to each other and will join up in expected ways (expected if you know chemistry anyway.) Wolfram shows that this same expected behaviour is applicable to everything.
Now, don’t get me wrong here: I’m not devaluing philosophy; I’m pointing out that you’re asking the wrong question, or at least one that will yield an answer you may find counterintuitive or that you don’t like (physical properties vs purely theoretical ones.)
The very attraction between electrons and protons, etc, is order. The force, gravity, whatever, that caused everything to form and create potentials, is order.
Without order there is nothing.
However. You could take your line of reasoning if you wished, and say that order can come about as those potentials (overlooking their origin) simply interacted and created what we perceive as order.
In which case you would be saying that what we perceive as order is, in fact, randomness.
This, “On the other hand, putting lots and lots of atoms in the same dryer will always result in organic molecules and the like, because they are attracted to each other and will join up in expected ways (expected if you know chemistry anyway.)” is a steaming pile. But at least you gave yourself the inexplicable qualifier at the end: you can always assume NOBODY knows enough when you need a back exit.
The odds of the most basic entity comprising life has been figured to be on the order of 1 out of a number that represents more particles in the entire universe. Is it rational to BELIEVE in your miracle?
Scientists cannot reproduce life today despite all of the advances of science (not to say that it is not a continuing endeavor – I just highly suspect it will not produce the fruit that is desired); but we are expected to believe life evolved from rocks (or even life into higher orders of itself) on its own, AND as proven. This is science? But what was the point again? Oh, that’s right… to nullify all other religions, namely belief in the Biblical God. To what end? To establish a world religion based on Humanism.
Evolution is not science, it is a stinking lie.
The mention of evolution was to show that the same argument is made and fails elsewhere. I wasn’t making the case for or against evolution since it’s not something in contention — it’s a fact, like gravity. Facts don’t really require my support. They do fine on their own.
That said, think what you like; you’re still an imbecile.
Gee, couldn’t I say the same thing?
Gee, couldn’t I say the same thing?
Of course, although it’s redundant. Your posts literally scream IMBECILE and don’t really require further belabouring to make the point.
Redundant? Yes, I guess it would be afterall.
No need to get excited.
My point, again, is simply that the existence of anything, the happening of anything, any event, indicates that there is structure. Potential difference. Otherwise everything would all be the same (“without form, and void”).
For anything to exist at all implies order.
What we do when we think that randomly order happened, is we take it for granted that something existed, and then it started interacting and produced form and order.
But, again, for anything to exist at all implied and existing order.
Wow,it must be the weekend to post this sh!t.
What an a**hole you are. Go listen to Hannity; I’m sure you’ll be able to keep up with him..
Human consciousness is a process that emerges from the interaction of “awareness” and the quantum phenomenon of the material universe. As the German philosopher and neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger points out in his book “Being No One: The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity” this interaction is experienced as a “phenomenal self” by all conscious beings. Humans have evolved the capacity to not only experience this phenomenal self but to conceptualize it as an external “object” of thought. From this we derive our moral obligations (Do not do unto other “selves” as you would not want them to do unto your self) and our belief in an essential self or “soul”. It is difficult, Metzinger says impossible, for us to accept that our phenomenal self model (PSM) is merely software interacting with quantum phenomena mapped to a highly filtered simulation (the scale at which we perceive). Interestingly, 26 centuries ago the Buddha recognized this as the distinction between the apparent truth of the sensual world and the ultimate truth of awareness interacting with impermanent quantum phenomena. From his own research he discovered that one could rewire consciousness to renounce its conditioned dependence on sensual experience and momentarily perceive pure awareness alone. This moment of perception instantly eradicated all latent addiction to the sensual world stored in the mind. What remained was a boundless sense of freedom and an abiding compassion for the senseless suffering of other conscious beings. This is the object of the secular practice of Vipassana meditation; to rewire the brain through self-directed neuroplasticity and correct its evolutionary defects that result in human suffering.
Interestingly written… Thanks.
Great, just when we need objectivity and reason to think our way out of a bad economy and an ineffective foreign policy, along comes Marilynne Robinson ‘to fight for the inherent value of subjectivity’. Thank you very little.
Agreed. Basically, she’s saying “Fifty dozen old philosophers can’t be wrong.” Well, yeah, they can.
That’s “unapologetically.”
And so Starbucks was borne.
As I understand her, the point Gottlieb is making is that it is impossible to separate our perception of the world from a world that would exist without our perception of it. You cannot have a Truth without it being an observed Truth, and nothing can be observed unless there is an observer.
Two centuries ago philosophers knew that some objects were red and others were blue. They didn’t know why. They didn’t know if “red” and “blue” were properties of the objects themselves or properties that were applied to them by the senses and the mind. This may sound silly, but remember that these philosophers knew nothing about electromagnetic radiation or how the eyes and brain worked.
Then came Victorian science, and voila! All was explained with light waves. “Red” and “blue” were real properties of objects and those properties existed whether a human eye observed them or not.
Late Victorian and early modern science and philosophy didn’t really disprove this, but it made it clear that this “positivism” — the idea that our senses and our minds provide us with real information about an outside universe that would exist even if there were no senses and minds — was a mental model impressed on the universe. It was something that human minds experienced by choice or learning and it may have no relation to the “real” world.
Simplified, we can choose to live in a world made of experienced consciousness and narrative or a world of “objects” that exist outside of consciousness and narrative. Neither is more “true” than the other, but one of them is certainly more human.
Terry, I followed you to that point. What is an example of living in “a world of “objects” that exist outside of consciousness and narrative”? (FWIW, I lost patience with this article, but find the comments fascinating.)
…the psychological second-guessing that has taught us to question the simple sincerity and authority of our own thoughts and sentiments.
Well, stop that second guessing stuff. Right now !
“Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding
of a problem…All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary…’Truth is a pathless land’. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man’s thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship.”
~J. Krishnamurti
Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.
~Percy Bysse Shelley, On Political Greatness
Constantly bring to thy recollection those who have complained greatly about anything, those who have been most conspicuous by the greatest fame or misfortunes or enmities or fortunes of any kind: then think where are they all now? Smoke and ash and a tale, or not even a tale….
~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.
~Greek playwright Euripides (485-406 B.C.)
Please pardon J. Krishnamurti’s redundancy: “‘All authority of any kind,…’” You may, but I won’t.
I enjoyed your ither citations though, tans.
Truth is subjectivity SK
What is left when I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raised my arm? LW
How high that highest candle lights the dark. WS
What do you see when you turn out the lights? L & Mc
I read this post with great interest–until this: “I hardly know anyone under 40 (and few enough over 40) who isn’t on one antidepressant or another; what we considered an existential and deeply individuating ordeal, they conceptualize as a chemical imbalance.”
The incessant and ignorant dismissal of depression is absolutely nauseating. As one who has had chronic major depression for over 35 years, there is nothing even benignly existential about it.
Let me put it this way: Recall when you lost someone you dearly love. Remember the agony? The confusion? You probably couldn’t sleep, and when you did, you had nightmares. You couldn’t focus on anything at work or home. Everything that was important in your life faded into the distance because of the overwhelming sadness and pain. But eventually, bit by bit, the pain subsided, and you recovered from the loss.
With major depression, it is like that all day, every day, with no letup, and no recovery. See how long you can live like that and be content with the so-called diagnosis of an “existential dilemma.”
Antidepressants not only saved my life, but they made it possible for me to live a normal life. And they’ve lengthened my life; people with mental illness tend to live shorter lives than the average person. And no, it’s not because of suicide. It’s because of the physical drain the illness puts on the body. Depression is much more than a neurotransmitter malfunction. Depressives have multiple hormonal malfunctions, one being cortisol overproduction, which causes sleep disturbances that over time can cause a variety of illness and even heart attacks. The adrenaline response is also overactive, which causes further strain on the heart and other organs.
Depression is an illness. The pain it causes has NO meaning and NO purpose whatsoever. It is a tortuous hell on earth that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. So the next time someone makes a flippant comment about antidepressants being a method of avoiding life, think about what I’ve described here.
Thank you, Instructor – I had the same reaction to that flippant remark.
Well said. Depression, like other ‘mental’ illnesses has a biological basis and psychotherapy has the same chance of curing it as asthma, rickets, or any other physical ailment, i.e., zero. That’s not an opinion. Psychologists documented decades ago that the rate of ‘cures’ through psychotherapy is the same as spontaneous remission. In other words, the therapy accomplished nothing.
It’s amazing that so many people accept that problems are commonplace with skin, eyes, teeth, respiratory system, circulatory system, etc., yet assume that the most complex organ in the body works perfectly for nearly everyone.
You’re right in that psychotherapy is an utter failure as a mental illness treatment. However, other kinds of psychological treatments, in conjunction with medication, have had much better success rates. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and “brain-spotting” (can’t recall the technical term) are two such therapies.
I can understand being depressed. I don’t think that medicines are any more effective than introspection, but I can certainly understand being depressed. What struck me as odd about the review was Gottlieb’s assertion that she doesn’t know anyone under 40 who’s not on one anti-depressant or another. This is emphatically *not* normal. If I were in such a situation, I would certainly get to know more people. The people I encounter on a daily basis make me glad I got out of bed.
If you don’t think medicines are any more effective than introspection, then you DON’T understand depression. At all. Sorry.
Sorry for not specifying — but still, what on earth makes you think I was talking about major depression?
Do you think the majority or even a substantial minority of the millions and millions of people (including significantly adolescents) on antidepressants were suffering from major depression?
I am NOT talking about major depression. At all. Of course major depression requires medication. (Does it work, by the way? Serious question.) I’m talking about teenage angst, social shyness, adjustment disorder, normal grief. I’m talking about the human struggles that we used to seek to surmount or heal by finding their meaning.
By “Do they work?” I meant, and should have said, “For what percentage of people with major depression are antidepressants effective?” I am glad they were for you, Instructor.
“The world cannot be separated from our personal (i.e. subjective) experience of it”
“Human consciousness cannot be reduced to bodily functions and base instincts”
Thanks – I didn’t need a book, or even an article to tell me that (in a very lengthy fashion). This is why I’ll never be an academic or professional intellectual.
The world? Hell, my perception hardly has influence on my kids.
I think I’ll give it whirl. Thanks for shining a light.
Don’t think the author was making reference to the real thing. Rather, the reference was to “cosmetic” use to avoid basic existential realities or even the “normal” ups and downs of quotidian experience – failing to get into the college of one’s choice, etc.
The most reasonable explanation for the lack thereof in man’s knowledge about his own “awareness” is that Man is not self-existing. (The futility of this discussion is at hand.) To perceive the potential of existence in the face of inescapable death is to establish that life itself is set at odds to itself. This frustration is hardwired into reality, an anachronism to Nature. How do I say it is anachronistic to Nature, isn’t Nature whatever is? No. The essence of Nature is not established by describing the frustration of reality into perception, nor is an entities Nature established by comparison to other ‘things’. The definition of Nature would exclude reference to Contrasts or comparison, since that describes more than one Nature. It is far more intuitive – Nature is defined by the essence of the word itself, and that essence is described as those attributes of an entity that establish a domain. Later, we could say that an entity is normally in a relationship with its environment, and among a multiplicity of other SIMILARLY CONSTRUCTED entities, but initially Nature is based on the thing itself.
So, why is OUR Nature at odds to itself (different than the animals in that we perceive eternity and face death simultaneously – and can wrack our brains as to what to do about it)? What are we? We ARE creatures that perceive existence and eternity through a veil that is our flesh. We perceive the infinite, yet are bound to a world that empirically results in the end of all material functions, that we can test and observe directly, with no remedy (including that universe itself). If there would be an answer to the point, or mystery of life, it would necessarily be found in that which is describable, reasoned, about this eternal existence. That which we CAN grasp. Already, this suggests faith, not in eternity as True or False, but a faith in our acceptance of that which is readily discernable, though untouchable, seemingly distant, and beyond us. Do we find satisfaction in embracing eternal principles that we cannot master?
(This is where faith begins. The idea that Faith is a consideration about the very existence of divinity is a straw-man foisted on the world. It was never the question if we believe in God, but do we WANT God.)
Search for that which is self-existing. Search for the Words of the Eternal.
There is knowledge that is higher than wisdom.
Myself, I see that God’s realm is the true one, where life IS always. Death is a part of OUR world, and we are not correct to put God within our own failing paradigm. It will give false conclusions. Who is this God? Only the father knows the Son, and only the Son knows the father.
You sound certain of something, whereas I am not, other than the fact that you and I will die. Can we both live with that, preferably with some humility?
Additionally, we have this bit of terpsichory from Krishnamurti: “Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem…’”
I really don’t think Einstein would agree with this near-sighted insight. Such expressions usually gain the epithet of “nonsense”.
Einstein appreciated his stint at the patent office in light of the fact that such a (mundane) position freed his mind to wander where it might.
How do éclats of insight come about ?
In a mind that is relatively free of striving and free of strain, a mind that isn’t working a problem so hard that it misses the forest for the trees.