Re: the greatest thing about freedom is...

John Ashby <J.V.Ashby@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

boots wrote:

John Ashby <J.V.Ashby@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

So what is it that you recognise that convinces you of the existence
of God?

Process of elimination, Watson. However impossible it may seem.


On what criteria have you eliminated the alternatives?

Consistency.

I found the traditional rationalistic approach to be too filled with
inconsistencies. Random chance, statistical happenstance, there are a
lot of names for the inexplicable. A realization early-on that the
level of precision and purity required for a truly scientific analysis
of the world is physically impossible. Recognition that experiments
cannot in fact be reproduced on any but the grossest level. A
lifetime search for the general principle upon which things work. An
understanding that test-tubes are never perfectly clean and
uncontaminated and that as such one is working with imperfect
materials and thus cannot reasonably expect perfectly reproducible
results. Statistics is necessitated by the imperfection of the
materials at hand, assigning standards of deviation, discarding
obviously spurious data-points, certainly in your business you
understand what I am referring to here. I was not satisfied.

Being unsatisfied, I attempted to shrug it off and get on with life.
But life would not be shrugged off. Coincidences that were too
meaningful to be statistically insignificant continued to pile up, and
were collated by the scientific mind I was unable to discard.
Eventually the configuration of the massive mound of coincidences
began to align itself into something almost recognizable, at the very
edge of understanding, niggling where it could not be avoided, needing
only a few more data-points to become restructured into a meaningful
whole.

During this entire period I continued to search for meaning, for the
general principle that made things happen. I looked everywhere, read
everything I could lay hands on that offered even the slightest chance
for further understanding. I learned numerous techniques, such as
intentional control of portions of the autonomic nervous system,
played games with the nurse measuring my pulse and blood pressure, and
moved on. I found some clues related to man's ability to "do" that
were derived from Sufiism, some clues from this, some clues from that.
I continued to look and observe and collate.

At one point I developed the ability to observe my own thoughts, no
great achievement but I did learn to retrace my last few
mental-states, to keep a running log of my past dozen or so thoughts,
and that turned out to be a very important tool.

Those meaningful coincidences continued to mount, and I began to
recognize a correlation between their incidence and my recent thought
patterns. It is there that the realization began, the recognition
that events are never random, that they are responsive, that something
else is involved in the flow of events other than haphazardness.

Now, I cannot say with definiteness that this otherness is "God". I
can observe that it appears to be omnipotent within my own frame of
reference. It also seems to be omniscient and omnipresent within my
own frame of reference, but from that I cannot reasonably conclude
that it is actually omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient within any
larger frame of reference. I cannot say that it is external to and
separate from me, only that it seems so. It could be some deeply
hidden unconscious portion of me that I have run into. That is
unknowable, at least at present.

What I can say is that the correlations are far far beyond
statistically significant and the indication is that the cause of
things is not what I formerly believed them to be, what the scientific
world presents them as being. The facts of a situation are unchanged
but its causation is shifted entirely.

You asked why, you asked for the story, I apologize but that's my best
shot and just writing it down. In summary one could say that the
world became too much for me and I went mad, or you could say that the
world is mad and me along with it, or you could ask questions.

For me, I have to complete yesterday's task of snow shovelling, so I
may not be back online until tomorrow.

--
The sane answer, to madness, is insanity.
.

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