< Back Civilization Part II David Cowles Feb 25, 2025 “There is more to reality than civilization lets us see.” We are born into mortal bodies. Bummer! But worse, we are born into a finite universe. When we die, we leave a legacy behind or not, for good or ill or both or neither. But when the universe dies, we leave nothing behind because there is no longer anything to leave or anywhere to leave it. There is nothing to show for our having been. We are in the realm of absolute non-entity. In a recent TWS , we explored the purpose of civilization and agreed, I think, that civilization is an elaborate structure built by us to shield us from immediate awareness of our impending doom! Who has the time or the energy to think about entropy when you’re trying to scrape together the rent money? Civilization invests the details of our daily lives with what Whitehead called, “misplaced concreteness.” Thanks to the topology of spacetime itself we are born looking at the World through the wrong end of a telescope. Civilization is a powerful lens we add to that telescope; it increases the spatiotemporal distortion by at least an order of magnitude. Things that are a bit removed from us seem far, far away. As a result, we imagine ourselves functioning in a very tight space and we gladly lose ourselves in the minutia of navigating this artificial domain. “I am the Walnut.” My secretions form a ‘civilizing shell’ to protect me from the noumenal world. Likewise, human beings secrete the structural components that form ‘civilization’, a barely translucent shell that keeps us only dimly aware of what lies beyond. 97% (Derrida) of the things we do are motivated or mediated by the structures of civilization: clan, caste, class; family, nuclear and extended; economics – ‘getting and spending’ (Wordsworth); language itself; and, of course, recreation, play – first person (exercise), third person (local sports teams as totems), etc. It’s hard work being ‘me’ when ‘me’ is an avatar I’ve crafted to get by in a civilized world, “a face to meet the faces that you meet.” (Eliot) What can we say about civilization? Parmenides called it Doxa , the realm of Appearance (seeming). This is where you find ‘bright lights’; it’s downtown (Petula Clark). It’s where you go to get distracted: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to change place (motion), and to exchange bright color.” This is the Realm of Doxa , ‘the realm of distraction’. Think the Lower East Side in its day. There’s nothing wrong with life’s pyrotechnics, as long as we don’t mistake them for Aletheia , the Realm of Truth. This is the noumenal world. Here there are no ‘qualia’ (sense data), truth is not perceived but intuited. It is everything that experience conceals. This is the realm of focus, the emptying of mind (the goal of mystics), the sound of one hand clapping, bodhi . It’s exclusively uptown . Think the East 90’s. Now consider King David’s famous meditation ( Psalm 23 ): “The Lord is my shepherd…he leads me on the path of righteousness… Even though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil (for you are with me)… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” David is able to go beyond the conceptual limits of civilization. Against entropy , he proposes eternity . Against the appearance of shadow and death, he proposes eternal life and light. But that is only possible if there is more to reality than civilization lets us see. David posits a transcendent dimension and a transcendent entity ( Lord ). Accepting Parmenides’ classification of Reality into the Realm of Truth ( Aletheia ) and the Realm of Appearance ( Doxa ), the two realms share a common limit: Death, the absence of being ( Aletheia ), the absence of experience ( Doxa ). According to Parmenides, Being consists of Aletheia , and Doxa . Death falls in neither category. That’s because it is not a thing but a limit. It marks off the furthest extent of Doxa ; it is Aletheia ’s doorstep. Death throws a deep shadow over Doxa , where whatever is perishes, but it floodlights Aletheia where whatever is, is eternal. In another recent TWS , we explored the power, and the limitations, of Science. To rephrase, science can tell us anything we want to know about how the world as it appears but nothing about the world as it is. Science is stupendous…but superficial. We are told, “Seeing is believing.” The well intentioned folks who teach us this are condemning us to a life of ignorance. Not that seeing is necessarily deceptive, it’s just never the full show. For that we need to ‘escape from civilization’. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Order and Anarchy David Cowles Mar 21, 2023 “The order that emerges among self-governing entities is the only real order.” Notice the title, Order and Anarchy . Anarchy is the absence of imposed order, not the absence of order per se . In fact, no one is more invested in the emergence of order than the Anarchist. Anarchism celebrates the spontaneous emergence of order, i.e. ‘self-ordering’ aka ‘bootstrapping’. In fact, to be is to combine an element of order inherited from the Actual World with an element of spontaneous ordering (novelty); every genuine event requires both: Order + Order! Every event is both rejection of an old order and appetition for a new order. Of course, from the perspective of inherited order, emergent order appears as mere discord; and from the perspective of emergent order, inherited order appears as institutionalized resistance to novelty. Yet, every event inherits a settled past and proposes a novel future. That’s exactly what an event is. The reaction of the present (event) to the past is never mindless copying or blanket rejection. Something of the past must be conserved to serve as exoskeleton for the present and endoskeleton for the future. Rejection of inherited order is never blind or capricious. It is always done in the service of a proposition, i.e. a concrete proposal. Sidebar : Abbie Hoffmann notwithstanding, there is no such thing as a Revolution for the Hell of it …except in book(s). Where is the Youth International Party today? What happened to yesterday’s Yippies ? Did they turn into Yuppies ? A coherent critique of the 60’s radical youth movement in the US might include the observation that the radicals lacked a coherent ideology. Sure they had issues: Vietnam, Civil Rights, etc. but issues alone do not translate into a detailed political platform and, per Lenin, “There can be no revolution without a revolutionary ideology.” Something of the past must be destroyed to ‘make room’ for novelty. New order cannot simply pile-up on top of old, like levels of civilization at the site of an archeological dig. Gertrude Stein wrote that mortality is nature’s way of making room for the future. Philosophical Anarchism is the belief that all true order is sui generis , that it emerges in the course of an event, any event, and that it is conserved as the ground from which all future events emerge. True order must be organic and unconstrained. Freedom is prerequisite; imposed order, on the other hand, springs from a desire to preserve what is at the expense of what might have been and could yet be. It is a form of disorder disguised as its opposite. Think 1930’s Germany for example. Some men (sic) see things as they are and ask ‘why change’; others dream of things that are not yet and ask, ‘why bother’. Inherited order is the exoskeleton that protects embryonic order in utero , but later, as imposed order, it functions as a strait jacket. Neither is anarchy synonymous with chaos . In fact, it might be its antonym. Chaos, ab initio , appears as disorder , but upon deeper investigation chaotic systems are shown to be deterministic . Anarchy is neither! Anarchy is order, freely emergent. An-arch-ism is the belief that certain entities are capable of self-government but self-government must include the ability to enter into ordered relationships with other entities; otherwise it becomes a form of nihilism. 2025 NYC Bumper Sticker: “Socialism not Solipsism!” At the risk of repeating myself, the order that emerges among self-governing entities is the only real order. Freedom and order have a dialectical relationship. There is no freedom without order and no order without freedom. Order without freedom is tyranny while freedom without order is barbarism. Pure order and pure freedom are concepts only; neither can be realized alone, by itself, in any actual entity. Taking a page from Sartre, no event can be what was, every event must be what is not yet. Without negation of the past and appetition for the future, there are no events. An event is not the Actual World it inherited, nor is it the Superject it contributes to the future, nor is it the self-satisfaction it hopefully feels. An event is the transition per se from what was to what is not. An event is a double negative: “Not what was, not what will be, therefore I am!” Anarchism then is the gnosis and praxis of Being. Anarchy is the universe in the image and likeness of God. Likewise, Political Anarchism does not advocate the disintegration of society; it merely opposes the mirage of order known as the State . But alleged anarchist plots to blow up critical infrastructure have understandably given it a bad name. We think of order and freedom, past and present as a continuum, a spectrum ranging from the complete absence of institutional constraints on one end all the way to a full-blown police-state on the other. But even that model may be too restrictive. It would be more useful and accurate to ‘graph’ the relationship between order and freedom on a plane with order on the X-axis and freedom on the Y. Every possible non-degenerate social structure (event) includes elements of order and elements of freedom in varying proportions. What then could be our paradigm? How about a Bach concerto? It is as rigidly structured as can be, but every note is astonishing, and every performance is brand new. We understand order and freedom so poorly that we do not see that they are locked in a dialectic embrace that spans all scales and all systems. “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” (Joni Mitchell) But the very next day, green shoots appeared in the cracks and 10 years on, the lot was advertised for sale as ‘unimproved land…some litter removal required’. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. 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“…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” < Back Christology 101 David Cowles May 29, 2022 “…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. It forms the basis of a complete Theology and a complete Cosmology: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation , for in him all things were created… “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together … “He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" Can we peel back the leaves of this artichoke? What are the essential elements of Paul's Christology as reflected in Colossians and why is this Christological formulation so important in the development of Christian theology? First, the elements: He (Christ) is the (visible) image of the invisible God . God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. (He is) the first born of all creation . Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order). Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle, and order per se ( logos ). He is before all things . Christ is universal and eternal. Therefore, Christ is an element in every world from which novelty emerges. Christ conditions all things. All things were created in him, through him, and for him . Christ is the locus of whatever is (was or will be). Christ is the origin of whatever is (its efficient cause). Christ is the destiny of whatever is (its final cause). In him all things hold together Because all things (events) share a common origin and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; and because Christ is also the locus of all events, all things hold together in him. He is the beginning, the first born from the dead. Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order. Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order . Christ is the source of all order, and order per se , so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ. In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts. According to this Cosmology, without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night. There is no inherent reason why 'actual entities' should interact with one another, exhibit togetherness, mutually modify, or reconcile. Unlike 'birds of a feather,' things merely grouped together do not necessarily 'flock' together. Interactivity is needed and interactivity requires shared elements. But all things do hold together, and because they hold together, they do modify each other; and because they modify each other, they reconcile with one another, all through Christ, in Christ and for Christ. Christ, then, is the answer (the only answer?) to the ‘anti-isms’: solipsism, skepticism, nihilism. If A is an element of B and A is an element of C, then B and C are mutually interactive. Because they share an element in common (A), B and C are able to engage in a process of mutual modification and harmonization, ultimately leading to reconciliation: B and C reconcile via A. Christ (A) is an element of every entity…twice. Christ is the common origin and the common destiny, the Alpha and the Omega , of everything that is. That commonality constitutes the Solidarity of the World. But how? The origin and destiny of an event would be the same if the event were circular – if the event ended up restoring the status quo ante . In that case, however, the event in question could only be a virtual event , i.e. a ‘difference’ that makes no difference. According to Colossians , Christ is a real event and real events, by definition (Whitehead), make a difference; therefore real events cannot be circular. The World is a process of perpetual ‘advance’. You can’t step into the same river twice (Heraclitus). When an event is ‘circular’, it’s time factor (t) = 0. Therefore, it is not ‘real’ in spacetime; it’s a mathematical fiction. Like a line or a plane in geometry; it is a ‘virtual’ event. But this leaves us in a pickle: How can an event not be circular if its Alpha = its Omega ? The Christian doctrine of Incarnation provides a solution ( the solution?). Incarnation turns Being inside out. Destiny becomes origin and origin becomes destiny, yet they remain distinct. Think about a sock. You go to put it on. You try to push your foot through the mouth down to the toe. It won’t go. Someone is playing silly buggers; they’ve turned your sock inside out! The toe is where the mouth was and vice versa. The toe and the mouth have swapped places; yet they remain distinct. Also, a cacophony of protruding knots has replaced the lovely argyle patten you picked out in the shop. Now think about Kosmos . Incarnation turns the World inside out. The whole is its own quantum element. Bertrand Russell notwithstanding, this set ( Kosmos ) is an element of itself. The origin, locus, aim, and apex of the creative process enters that process directly…as an historical event. Of course, this ensures that Kosmos is non-linear and recursive; it modifies itself. Destiny ( Parousia ) is Origin (Nativity). Christ, the only begotten of the Father, not made, is the first of the living; Christ, resurrected, is the first-born of the dead. The first-born of the dead is the same, and not the same, as the first of the living. Christ is the overarching pattern of creation and salvation, outside of spacetime. Jesus reflects and reiterates, fractal like, that pattern in the historical life of a single human being. The child born in Bethlehem is the same, and not the same, as the man crucified outside Jerusalem 33 years later, who is the same and not the same as the one “through whom all things were made… (and who) is seated at the right hand of the Father.” ( Nicene Creed ) Every 'novel event' includes the Christ-event (Incarnation) as one of its elements, but the Christ-event is also the whole that includes all events. So every event, including the Christ-event, is part of the whole, but that whole is also a part of itself (Incarnation). Kosmos spirals! Necessary and/or Sufficient? Is Paul’s non-linear cosmology sufficient to account for the existence of a Kosmos like ours? We know that there is a Kosmos because we participate in it. Cogito, ergo est. The defining features of our World are Novelty, Intensity, and Solidarity. Does Paul adequately account for the existence of a Kosmos defined by these key features? If a theory does indeed account for the phenomena in question, we say that it is sufficient . Sufficiency is the first test of any model. If it isn't sufficient, "Forget about it!" But the Holy Grail of model builders is not 'sufficiency' but 'necessity.' A model is necessary if it is the only model that can account for the phenomena in question. So, what can we say about the model presented in Colossians ? Is it sufficient? Can it account for Novelty, Intensity, Solidarity? Can it pass the easy test ? According to Colossians , all things were created in, through, and for Christ - Novelty ; in him all things hold together – Solidarity - and through him all things are reconciled – Intensity . So, yes, Colossians passes the easy test , the test of sufficiency; but what about the hard test , the test of necessity? Is it the case that only Paul’s model can account for a World characterized by Novelty, Intensity, and Solidarity? Of course, I can create a different model using different words that is still sufficient , but would that new model be unique, or would it just be Colossians …re-dressed a la mode ? Put it another way, can I (or you, or anyone) come up with a model that is still sufficient to account for our target phenomena but that cannot be mapped onto the Colossians' model? If the answer is, "No," then the Colossians' model is necessary as well as sufficient, and the author of Colossians (Paul) may be said to have found the modelers' Holy Grail. So, have they? Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! 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< Back Prayer to Combat Disillusionment in Faith Hadassah Treu For when you've lost the expectation of God in your life Lord, I struggle with disillusionment in faith. I have lost my expectation for You to move in my life. I have lost my belief that You still do miracles, and that You still do the impossible. I have lost my confidence that You still deliver and still move mountains. Please expose and heal the wounds through which the disillusionment has come. Help me replace the false assumptions with your truth. Help me believe what is true about You and Your involvement in my life. I declare now that You are gracious and compassionate, and righteous in all Your ways. (Psalm 111:4, Psalm 112:4, Psalm 116:5) I trust You are actively involved and working in my life, bending Yourself to hear and respond to my pleas. (Psalm 113:5-6, Psalm 116:1) I acknowledge that Your presence is here, in all my situations, and dark places, and it is enough. (Psalm 114:7) I declare that You are my help and defense. (Psalm 115:9) I trust You remember me and will bless me. (Psalm 115:12) I choose to believe that You still have a future for me dependent only on Your grace, mercy, and power. (Romans 9:16) I declare that pain and suffering are not my new life. This is just a season of pain and grief. (Ecclesiastes 3:4) Find the cracks in the foundation of my faith and fill them with Your grace and love. Instill in me fresh hope and perspective based on Your word. Help me see every obstacle overcome. Strengthen me to believe that You can do with me, in me and through me, exceedingly above all I could ever ask and imagine. Return to your rest, my soul, for the LORD has been good to you. In Jesus' name. Amen. Hadassah Treu is an international Christian author, blogger, and poet, and the Encouraging Blogger Award Winner of 2020. She is passionate about encouraging people in their journey to faith and a deeper walk with God. Hadassah is a contributing author to several faith-based platforms and devotional and poetry anthologies. She has been featured on (In)courage, Living by Design Ministries, Thoughts About God, Today’s Christian Living (Turning Point), and other popular sites. You can connect with Hadassah at www.onthewaybg.com. Previous Next

< Back I'm Bored! David Cowles “We are co-responsible for the world. We are all always our siblings’ keepers!” What parent has not heard this cry a million times? It’s annoying, but we usually just ignore it. We do so at our peril. Boredom is more than meets the eye. As we noted in the June 21st edition of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS ), information is the difference between what is and what might have been. Therefore, ‘information happens’ whenever an event occurs. The universe consists of events and only events. If it is, it is an event, or part of an event; and if not, not. Each event springs from a unique ‘actual world.’ An event has one and only one such world, but each actual world has the potential for innumerable, mutually exclusive , events. Every ‘real event’ occurs in lieu of many other, ‘potential events.’ The difference between a real event and its potential alternatives constitutes the information content of that event. Information is interesting! We are interested in ‘what is’…to the extent that it differs from ‘what might have been.’ What is and couldn’t have been other that it is is not interesting. Of course, the converse is true as well: anything interesting must have information content. Information and interest are two axes of the same phenomenon. ‘Information’ measures an event in terms of other (potential) events. In that sense, you might say that information is the ‘objective’ element of an event. Graph that quantity on the X-axis. Interest, on the other hand, is the ‘subjective’ element; it is a measure of the ‘intensity’ of the experience (every event is an ‘experience’). Graph intensity on the Y-axis. So, an event must be informative, and it must be interesting. A universe where so-called events are predetermined by other events (and, therefore, cannot be other than they are) is neither informative nor interesting; nor is it even event full . In fact, there are no actual events in such a world and without events, there is no world at all. Boredom is a symptom of ontological breakdown. To be bored is to deny the existence of anything interesting, and if nothing is interesting, nothing is. We refer to the end of the universe as Heat Death (or Big Freeze). A good definition of Heat Death is the absence of any communication, i.e., an information vacuum; and when there is no longer anything of interest to anyone, then there will no longer be anything…or anyone. In ancient mythology, there are many examples of individuals with outsized roles in the creation and/or maintenance of the world: Atlas supports Earth on his shoulders (Greek), three norns weave the threads that determine destiny (Norse), and God says, “I am who am.” (Hebrew) In contemporary mythology, we all have an outsized role. We are co-responsible for our world. We are all always our siblings’ keepers! We are called to imitate the Clerk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales : “Gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” Chaucer’s dictum in a version of Kant’s categorical imperative. It is binding on all for the benefit of all. Imagine a world where no one wishes to teach, and no one wishes to learn. (Sounds like some schools I’ve encountered.) Such a world would not be a world at all: no interest = no information = no being. After completing work on the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, paraphrasing the Bhagavad-Gita , said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Next time a youngster complains of being bored, ask yourself, “Is this the beginning of the absence of Being?” Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Next

< Back The Eternal Present David Cowles “The Present is…a series of concentric circles, with its axis perpendicular to linear spacetime…” At first glance, our lives seem to be strings of bead-like events. No sooner have we experienced one sensation, one thought, one feeling, one action than another takes its place. We have a vague, naive sense that we can string these events along a timeline labeled, “Past, Present, Future”. But on further reflection, it is clear that this model is too restrictive. Events seem to overlap. I am all at once aware of many sensations, thoughts, feelings, and acts; it is often unclear when one stops and another begins.  Events are not points…or beads. Events have durations, and in a Euclidean cosmos, durations may overlap. But do they really? (Stay tuned!) We do not directly perceive the full richness of the natural world because the human nervous system is attuned only to ‘events’ whose durations fall within a very narrow band, i.e. from one second down to one-tenth of one second. One may think of durations as the ‘wave lengths’ of their respective events. If an event has duration of less than one-tenth of a second, we don’t consciously register it though it may still impact our behavior because of an unconscious, subliminal effect. If an event has duration of more than a second, we must either break it up into multiple events, sequentially ordered…or remain entirely unaware of it. Our naïve sense of event duration has everything to do with our cognitive apparatus and absolutely nothing to do with the nature of events themselves. There is no reason to doubt that the universe is ‘eventing’ across all 60 known orders of magnitude – from Planck scale to the Cosmic Event Horizon. To bastardize Stephen Hawking’s quip, “It’s events all the way down,” or in our case, all the way up! We can only directly perceive events within a single order of magnitude. Accordingly, we shoehorn the Heraclitean flow into relatively tiny packets of perception. This is the origin of our sense that events occur as beads strung along a timeline and it explains our felt need to categorize events as past, present or future. It’s seems to be our only way to make sense of the tidal wave of sensations pouring over us every moment of our lives. We need to ask two different questions: First, what are the ways in which events seem to relate to one another? Then, what are the ways in which events do in fact relate to one another? As soon as we contrast ‘do in fact’ with ‘seems’, we find ourselves hanging out with Parmenides in the 5th century BCE. His distinction between being (Aletheia) and seeming (Doxa) has informed philosophers from Plato to Kant to Whitehead. It seems that events can relate to each other in a number of different ways: First, obviously, they may not relate at all; they may be disjoint, in which case neither exists in the other’s universe. They may be tangent: A billiard ball rolls across the felt with a certain momentum; it impacts a second ball and imparts momentum to that ball. This is the paradigm of what we call causality. They may overlap: While listening to a particular melody, a memory occurs which lingers long after the melody has played out. Or one may be embedded in the other: While washing my car, I’m also listening to some Bach on the radio and day dreaming about the time I threw a no-hitter for the Red Sox in a World Series, or not. Euclidean Geometry allows any two events to be related in any of these four ways. For those of us with only a high school education in geometry, Euclid may seem to be the only game in town. I mean, what else could there be? a² + b² = c², right? The angles of a triangle always add up to 180°, etc. Obviously! Obviously…but not actually! It turns out that Euclidean Geometry is just one way to organize space. It is one of a family of Archimedean geometries that includes Hyperbolic, Spherical, and Projective Geometries plus geometries named after their founders, such as Riemannian and Minkowski Geometries. Suffice to say, the angles of a triangle do not always add up to 180°. How about 540°? Strange as that may seem, reality might be even weirder. All of these geometries (above) are ‘Archimedean’, meaning roughly that you can measure any distance using just Real (plus Complex) Numbers. But Archimedean Geometry is not the end of the story. Still other geometries are modeled on systems involving ‘Unreal’ Numbers (e.g. hyperreal or p-adic numbers). Non-Archimedean geometries share a common feature: if two events intersect in any way, one event must be entirely embedded in the other. No two events (A, B) can be merely tangent or overlapping. Either A is embedded in B, or B is embedded in A, or A and B are disjoint. How does our cherished ‘past-present-future’ model of time fare in a non-Archimedean universe? It doesn’t! Every event has its own duration. To be an event is to endure, i.e. to constitute an extensive Presence. That duration can be dozens of orders of magnitude less than a second…or it can span cosmic history. The duration of each event is that event’s own unique Present. These presents are not arranged sequentially on a timeline but are embedded in one another hierarchically. So the Present is not a fixed region of time. Each event is present to itself. Each event establishes its own Present. In fact, Presence is a defining characteristic of Event. Every event must be embedded in at least one other event, or it must be disjoint from all other events and therefore not part of our Universe at all. To be is to embed or be embedded. The naïve notion that the Present is a point or region of time located somewhere between Past and Future on a linear continuum turns out to be a fairy tale. It is better to understand Presence as perpendicular to linear spacetime. From any point on the past-future timeline, we can use a virtual compass to draw a series of concentric semi-circles, each including broader and broader segments of that timeline, each potentially corresponding to the Present of some event at some order of magnitude. A, B, and C are three events in a single universe. A and B can be disjoint with respect to each other but embedded with respect to C. Or A may be embedded in B which is in turn embedded in C. There are even systems that permit circularity: A is embedded in B, B is embedded in C, and C is embedded in A. The perpendicular axis appropriate to the hierarchy of embedded events (the ultra-metric) measures the duration of each event relative to the events it embeds and the events in which it is embedded: The ultra-metric does not measure an event’s sequential position relative to other events (because there is no sequence in Presence). Nor does it measure the duration of any event relative to the durations of events disjoint from it (because they are not part of its present universe). Nor does it measure gaps between such disjoint events because the concept of ‘gap’ implies a species of metric continuity that is not permitted in non-Archimedean systems. As we measure magnitude along the hierarchical axis, we subsume ever longer segments of what was once considered serial time into single events each with their own unique presents. Ultimately, the timeline itself, time itself, is embedded in an uber-Present, and this uber-Present is the event we know as Universe. What holds the universe of events together is not the weak bond of temporal succession but the ironclad bond of embeddedness. The result is an ever broadening Present. All events are present to themselves; Universe is an event; therefore, Universe is present to itself. To be present to oneself in a universe present to itself, is never not to be, never not to have been. Therefore, all events, including Universe, are eternal, because presence is atemporal. Ultimately, it is the single, common uber-Present, aka Eternity, that holds universe together and constitutes the unity of all that is. The concept of the uber-Present closely resembles the concept of logos in pre-Socratic philosophy (esp. Heraclitus) and early Christian theology (esp. the Gospel of John and the Letter to Colossians ). It refers to the fundamental ordering principle of the cosmos. Image: Dalí, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 24 cm × 33 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Accession No. 162.1934. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Previous Next

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< Back Nothing Is Everything David Cowles May 7, 2024 “We imagine that there was nothing and then there was something. Impossible!” “Nothing is everything!” – this might be the most enigmatic sentence in the English language. But it’s also an advertising slogan for Skyrizi, a prescription medication; and in that context it makes perfect sense. When symptoms disappear ( nothing ), then the drug has accomplished its purpose ( everything ). Indeed, nothing is everything - in that context! This word play is not just clever, it’s instructive. It points out that the meaning of a concept like nothing is incurably context dependent. Nothing is not a primary substance. There is no generic, naked Nothing . Literally, nothing is no-thing and no-thing is meaningful only in the context of some thing . We imagine that there was nothing and then there was something . Impossible! First, there cannot be nothing before there is something not to be . That does not mean that the cosmos has to be eternal; it can have an origin. What you can’t say (meaningfully) is that cosmos was preceded by nothing because (1) nothing is not a thing (it can’t precede anything) and (2) ‘precedence’ is a temporal concept and nothing can precede time itself. When we say ‘nothing’, most of us are thinking about void or vacuum. The very words, void and vacuum , betray the absent existence of some other . We only imagine we’re imagining non-entity. When we conceptualize nothing, we imagine ourselves standing at Finis Terra , gazing into the darkest of dark night skies; but this is no closer to nothing than Piccadilly Circus. Genesis tells us that God created the cosmos ex nihilo – out of nothing; Revelation tells us that it will return to nothing. Contemporary physicists agree: the universe sprang into being spontaneously, and it will ultimately vanish - ‘death by natural causes’. Some even say that the universe is already nothing , that it never was anything but nothing. According to this view, the energy of cosmic expansion is precisely balanced, and therefore canceled out, by the attractive force of gravity. Absent the notion of ‘God’, it is hard to see how anyone could avoid the conclusion that something is merely a manifestation of nothing . We’re facing a new Crise de Descartes . Where does my cogito fit if everything is nothing? How can I be if nothing is? If being is epiphenomenal, if it is a manifestation of nothingness, then presumably I must be virtual, epiphenomenal myself. Then where is the ergo connecting my cogito to my sum ? “Where’s the beef?” We imagine nothing as though it were Plato’s Receptacle, the womb of the world. Nope! It is sterility itself. So what? Who cares? Well, we might care. Love of nothing isn’t nothing; it can have real life consequences: suicide, for example. If everything amounts to nothing, then, in the words of Dostoevsky, “Everything is permitted,” no matter how undesirable. Nihilism places Adolph Hitler on a par with Mother Theresa. Sidebar : It is important to distinguish Nihilism from Anarchism . Anarchists do not believe in enforced order, but they generally believe that order can emerge organically. Not so nihilists! Nothing is a defense-of-convenience against all forms of gnosis or ethos . No is an acceptable and often effective response to any positive proposition. Just ask a 2 year old. In fact, No! constitutes the entire political platform of the Preschool Party that is gaining so much traction in recent UK polling. It seems that No! resonates with rapidly growing segments of the voting public, self-proclaimed Nihilists, Skeptics, and Solipsists. Of course, nothing has its bright side: “No more pencils, no more books…” Yes, nothing has a lot in common with the last day of school: “Free at last, free at last! OMG, we’re free ?” Free to do what exactly? The euphoria of summer vacation fades quickly. It’s soon replaced by the repetitive chanting of Tibetan monks: “I’m bored…I’m bored.” Still, nothing frees me to do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. Cool beans! No rules! Cloud Cuckoo Land . Now I just have to come up with something to do and a reason why I, or anyone else for that matter, would ever want to do it. So nothing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! But it turns out, we can’t live without it either. Nothing is the ‘space’ that allows something to occur. We have shown that there is no nothing without something. It is equally true that there can be no something without nothing. Suppose, just suppose, that there was only something and no nothing . That something could never move, change, or relate because it requires a not-It to move relative to, to change into, or relate to. Without nothing, something would be imperceptible to us, and therefore, per Occam, non-existent. Riffing on Gregory Bateson and Alfred North Whitehead, we say, “ Being is a difference that makes a difference”. The naked-it falls short: it differs from nothing, and it makes nothing any different. Something and nothing do not exist independently of one another. Something is the negation of nothing ; nothing is the negation of something . Neither can exist independently. Something and nothing co-evolve. But this is not some gnostic dualism! S + N > 0. S + N = S. Therefore, N = 0 and S > 0, so S > N. (John 1: 5) (Deut. 30: 19b) Algebra! I always knew it would come in handy someday. Genesis (1: 3 – 5) has light to shed here. (Get it, ‘light’?) “Then God said, ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good. Then God separated the light from the darkness…Evening came and morning followed - the first day.” The process of creating light was not complete until it had been separated from darkness. Genesis-time is measured in quanta (‘days’). Light and darkness together constituted the ‘first day’. So, nothing is nothing, again; but now something is everything. And as for Descartes, we need to stand him on his head: Est ergo sum! Keep the conversation going... 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Nietzsche and the Book of Genesis David Cowles Sep 21, 2025 “What is Value? Does it exist, is it for real? Or is it something we make up to justify our capricious behavior?” What is Value? Does it exist, is it for real? Or is it something we make up to justify our capricious behavior? After all, we do what we do. Attaching value to what we do just makes us feel better about ourselves, right? But is that so bad? Bad Faith , you bet! Bad Bad , maybe not. The concept of Value has been on the defensive in Euro-American culture ever since dear Nietzsche called it out: “…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) Value is inherently hierarchical. Values motivate us to act and empower us to evaluate our actions. To do so, values must be on a higher ontological plane than the events they regulate. Nietzsche was an ontological democrat ; he abhorred any sort of hierarchy. Therefore, being intellectually honest to the end, he rejected the concept of Value per se . But did Nietzsche go too far? Is ontological democracy really incompatible with Value? Not necessarily. For example: You don’t get your report card from another student in your class and, if you do, who cares? It has no value! Only a teacher can confer value on a report card and teachers have a hierarchical relationship with their students, right? Well, yes…and no. Teachers and students are coequal partners in a single ecosystem called school . Broadly speaking, “No teachers no pupils/No pupils no teachers!” But within that democratic ecosystem, teachers have a hierarchical relationship with their students. Hierarchy at one level may be resolved as democracy at another. Equality and hierarchy are not necessarily incompatible when they are viewed in the context of process. We can model this with the help of a simple equilateral triangle. Extrinsically, nothing could be more democratic with its equal sides and equal angles. Intrinsically, however, an equilateral triangle can model a dynamic process. Consider: A ↙ ↘ B → C Let A be Valuation, B Proposition, C Realization. Valuation stimulates and regulates the process by which what is proposed comes to be what is real. But the three phases work together to create one, indivisible event. The model of hierarchy within democracy is all around us. An all-volunteer army has a rigidly hierarchical chain of command, but it is in service of a single, ultimately democratic, enterprise: national defense. Multimillionaire athletes willingly place themselves under the authority of middle class managers in pursuit of a loftier goal, e.g. winning a World Series. This event structure and the embedding of hierarchy within democracy were detailed, possibly for the first time, in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis : “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. Evening came and morning followed – the first day.” (1: 3-5) This primordial event, creation, is the paradigm for events generally, from Big Bang to present day. According to the text, creation is a process with three distinct phases, as outlined above: Proposition , “Let there be light”; Valuation , “God saw that the light was good”; Realization , “God separated the light from the darkness.” Sidebar : It is important to note that these three phases are logically, not chronologically, sequential. The primordial event (Big Bang) occurred outside of time as will the ‘Ultimate Realization Event’, whatever that turns out to be. According to the Genesis model, Valuation oversees and empowers Proposition and Realization, although the three phases are coequal in the constitution of a single concrete event. Hierarchy exists in the service of higher level democracy. The concept of Value is rehabilitated and ontological democracy is preserved. What does it mean to ‘get real’. Drawing on Gregory Bateson, we can say that ‘realization’ occurs when ‘a difference makes a difference’. The process of creation ‘began’ within the introduction of the potential for difference, i.e. Let there be light . But that potential difference was only realized as actual difference, i.e. an event, once that difference made a difference , i.e. when the light was separated from the dark. Now the potential difference is actual; it has made a difference. It is a permanent part of the fabric of the world. Sidebar : We all yearn to ‘make a difference’; but why? Do we really care that much about the world? Sadly, no. We want to make a difference because It makes us feel real. According to Bateson, that is not an illusion. Making a difference is how you get real. Footprints in the sand, ripples on the pond! Of course, the value of those differences, if any, is another matter entirely. Not all differences are good, but all differences are real. Only now do we have a settled matter of fact, an Event (“evening came and morning followed”), and the birth of Time, the beginning of cosmic history (“the first day”). The first chapter of Genesis is incredibly dense. It condenses 14 billion years, from the Big Bang to the evolution of Homo Sapiens , into just 31 verses. Even so, the author understood that it was not possible to conflate the three phases of the creative process. They are logically disjoint, ontologically incompatible! As Genesis goes on to point out, these three phases structure, not only the primordial event (creation) but every other event as well. Perhaps surprisingly, Nietzsche accepted the logic of Genesis , though he was unable to accept its implications (e.g. Value). Still, to make his system work, he needed to replace the function of Value. In place of evaluation, Nietzsche introduced the somewhat vague concept of Fate. It is fate , not measurement ( aka evaluation), that collapses the wave function. Fate, in Nietzsche’s scheme of ontogenesis, is a so-called hidden variable . It fulfills the function of ‘the implicate order’ in David Bohm’s quantum physics. Unfortunately for Nietzsche, hidden variables have fallen into disrepute since the work of Stephen Bell (1964). But it would be myopic to think that the final word has been spoken on this matter. So far, we have been referring to Creation as the primordial event. But that, of course, is wrong. The primordial is God himself. Happily, in the Christian doctrine of Trinity, we see that the event called ‘God’ shares the same structure (above) as the event called ‘Creation’. Once again, our equilateral triangle may serve a purpose. A ↙ ↘ B → C Understand B as Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father, A ; understand C as the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father ( A ) and the Son ( B ). (Nicene Creed) So we are indebted to Nietzsche’s searing critique of the concept of Value for helping us see the deeper, tri-polar structure of events and for opening new windows into the nature of Trinity and into the ontology of Genesis . Nietzsche declared God ‘dead’ and that declaration helped us see God in new ways and in new places. (Not sure Nietzsche' would be pleased!) *** Quentin Massys’ The Moneylender and His Wife (1514) shows a moneychanger carefully weighing coins while his wife, who had been reading a devotional book, leans in to watch the transaction. The gleaming scales, coins, and rich still-life details emphasize themes of wealth, commerce, and the lure of material gain. Subtle symbols—a mirror reflecting passersby and the neglected prayer book—suggest a moral tension between spiritual devotion and worldly preoccupation. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” < Back I Seem to be a Membrane David Cowles Apr 15, 2023 “My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” In the beginning there is I and not-I…and not-not-I. ‘I’ only reveals itself in the context of not-I, and vice versa; like quarks, ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ only occur together, as a pair. Not-not-I only reveals itself in the context of both I and not-I. In the creedal language of Nicaea, we’d say, “Not-not-I proceeds from I and not-I.” In the dialectical language of Marxism, we’d say, “Synthesis proceeds from Thesis and Antithesis.” The ‘I’ aspect of reality never changes; it endures, one and the same, now and forever, throughout the vicissitudes of spacetime experience. This is the famous ‘enduring personal identity’ (‘soul’ in some terminologies) to which we all cling as if to a life raft. On one hand, there is only one ‘I’ which we all share. On the other hand, every ‘I’ reflects a specific not-I and every not-I is unique. Any two I’s are exactly the same…and totally different! (In fact, only things which are totally different can ever be the same. Comparability is the enemy of identity.) ‘I’ never changes; it’s not the sort of thing that changes. It can’t change; it’s simple (Aquinas), it’s inert, a ball bearing (Laplace), a Monad (Leibniz), Aletheia ( Parmenides ): “ …what-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete, nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous…” Not-I changes continually (Heraclitus); it’s the sort of thing that changes. It’s not simple! Every not-I is composed of every not-I, i.e., everything in heaven and earth, Horatio, except of course, ‘I’. Your not-I and my not-I likely share many (most?) elements. What distinguishes ‘yours’ from ‘mine’ is the way the elements are arranged; individuality is mostly a matter of perspective. Our worlds massively overlap, but our perspectives are unique. ‘Not-I’ is Parmenides’ Doxa : “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color.” My situation (not-I) changes, gradually. These changes create the false impression that I am changing - growing-up, growing-out, growing-old - but ‘I’ never changes. Not-I changes gradually; not-not-I turns over the money changers’ tables in the temple. In my younger days, I used to like to visit Las Vegas. Most times, I’d stay at the Bellagio . After a few trips, I learned a secret. The entire casino draws off a common wine inventory. Theoretically, every bottle of wine is available at every restaurant in the casino. Want to pair a 1982 Lafite Rothchild with a bacon cheeseburger? I can make that happen for you! IRL, however, each restaurant in the casino curates its own wine list, drawing exclusively, of course, from the casino’s master inventory. As a result, the wine list at Picasso looks nothing like the wine list at Michael Mina’s . You’d never know that they draw off a common inventory…unless I told you. Oops! The universe works the same way. The master set of overlapping not-I’s constitutes the shared inventory of elements (‘multiplicity’). Each not-I is like a restaurant-specific wine list (‘nexus’); not-not-I (‘event’) is what happens when I order a specific bottle off a particular restaurant’s curated list, taste it and pair it with steak tartar …or foie gras . ‘I’ is universal, not-I is communal, not-not-I is particular . Not-I is the intersection of ‘I’ and not-not-I, the universal and the particular. Every not-not-I is sui generis ; it’s pure novelty. Not-not-I is ‘not-I’, uniquely apprehended, experienced, and appropriated. Not-not-I becomes an element in not-I and is available to all subsequent not-not-I’s. That’s how we communicate: I share my particular ‘not-not-I’ and you share your particular ‘not-not-I’, and we both share through the medium of the common ‘not-I’. We communicate like trees! Trees sink roots into the earth. Through their root systems, Tree A and Tree X exchange fairly complex messages. Subject matter includes weather forecasts, predator alerts, disease prophylaxis, and the ‘just’ allocation of scarce resources (water, minerals, even sunlight). (We have no way to know if trees also talk about philosophical concepts; do trees believe in God?) However, this arboreal communication is never direct; it occurs through the common medium of unicellular fungi that permeate and enrich the soil that separates and links the roots. In the Western philosophical tradition, ontologies habitually fall prey to The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Whitehead). They fracture the ‘I’ and pretend to create a ‘split personality’; they talk of an ‘inner world’ and an ‘outer world’. According to various versions of conventional wisdom, my so-called ‘inner world’ may include my physical body and the cells, tissues and organs that make it up, my thoughts and feelings, my hopes and desires, my plans, my dreams, my dreads, my disappointments, and my disgusts. In fact, none of these things is part of any ‘inner world’. They are all firmly located in the ‘not-I’ on their way to becoming ‘not-not-I’ for me. My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it’s simple. It admits no change. Conventional wisdom agrees that I am a membrane, but a membrane that separates my so-called inner world ( me ) from my outer world ( not-me ). This ‘inner’ world has even been mapped - by biology (cells, tissues, organs, and organic processes), by chemistry (base pairs, amino acids, RNA), and by psychology (unconscious, pre-conscious, conscious; id, ego, superego). As usual, conventional wisdom contains a grain of truth: I am a membrane! But, no surprise, it misplaces concreteness. I am not the membrane that exists between my body and its environment. We already have a word for that; it’s called ‘skin’. I am the membrane that exists between world…and no world ! I am like Janus, the Two Faced God . ‘I’ can peer in (to my so-called body/mind) or out (to my so-called environment). Either way, it’s always the same ‘I’ that’s doing the peering and always the same ‘not-I’ that is the object of my leering. There is no inner world. I am ‘I’, remember? I am simple, I am incapable of change. Everything else changes. Heraclitus was 99.99% right: Everything flows, except me (and any other ‘I’ that might happen to be ‘eddying’ around with me). The me-membrane is not an inanimate barrier; it’s not even organic tissue. It is not a physical or material reality at all. It’s the principle of reflection, an irreducible aspect of Being per se . ‘I’ reflects the world, ‘I’ projects the world, and the world becomes what I project. The world is the collective ‘not-I’, the s uperimposition of the unique reflections and projections of each ‘I’. The world is my hodological map. It indicates to me the tasks that are to be accomplished and the tools available to me to accomplish them. Space and time are simply measures of ‘priority’ and ‘on handedness’. The world includes my whole body, my whole self - brain, brawn, and blood - and it includes your body, your whole self as well. But it does not include ‘you’. You transcend the world…just as I do. Each of us is the primary substance of our own universe. What I call ‘you’ is the in-breaking of your universe into mine. I know that I am not alone because I know ‘you’ (even if I can’t prove it). In fact, “Naught is all else to me save that thou art.” (St. Dallin re: God) I am the membrane that separates world and no-world…and so are you! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Lift Up Your Hearts! Faith Has a Future Regis Martin "More than 50 years ago, Joseph Ratzinger said that the life of the Church would be the outcome of her death, just as Easter Sunday was the outcome of Good Friday." ‘‘Think you, when the Son of Man comes, he will find faith upon the earth?’ (Luke 18:8) If the Lord were to come again — say, in the next half-hour — what would the Church look like to him? Would it resemble the one he founded more than 2,000 years ago? That is, in its basic and essential lineaments, would it still be One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic? How vibrant and convincing a faith would he find moving among the People of God? There are only two possibilities, aren’t there? Either the future will faithfully replicate the past as vouchsafed to us by Christ and his successors, the bishops, or certain adjustments having been made along the way to appease the spirit of the age, the Church will cease to be recognizable, despite the numbers that still nominally belong to her. But even that (have you noticed?) is changing. I mean, institutionally speaking, we are seeing a Church in freefall. Amid the spreading decadence of the West, the demographics are all moving in the opposite direction, in ways many of us had not foreseen even as recently as a generation or so ago. In other words, the march of decline continues unabated — indeed, in most First World places, it has become almost a gallop. Not even the mystique of synodality can arrest the spread. Not everyone back then, however, failed to notice the implosive forces underway. In a series of Christmas radio broadcasts made soon after he was appointed Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the University of Regensburg in 1969, the future Pope Benedict XVI had seen it all coming. The future of the Church, declared then-Father Josef Ratzinger, would not be onward and upward. There would be no parallels to match the usual, predictable ascent found in the corporate world. The Church will fall on hard times, he warned, losing much of her erstwhile power and prestige. “She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning,” he said, and continued: She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminish, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. What are we to deduce from all this? That institutional extinction is imminent? That despite the promises of Christ, the Church will not finally prevail against the gates of hell? Will that be the judgment of history? That like all the other religious eruptions of the past, from the Assyrians to the Zoroastrians, her time in the sun will soon be done? And so we must just deal with it? Is that the future we are to expect? Along with the sobering recognition that, from the beginning, her pretensions have always been over the top? But hold on a minute. If those are the facts and only delusional people persist in thinking otherwise, why wasn’t that the conclusion to which Father Ratzinger’s analysis drove him? Because he comes down in a very different place. By the strangest of all paradoxes, he believed that the life of the Church would be the outcome of her death, just as Easter Sunday was the outcome of Good Friday. The way up and the way down will turn out to have been the same way. Only thus will the true nature of the Church be seen once more. That in everything that stands athwart her life, in the teeth of all the forces arrayed against her, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. The springs of rejuvenating life lie very deep down, far below the findings of science and sociology, where the data are all neatly laid out like Tom Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table.” We are not to look upon the Church as though reduced to so many numbers set out on a spreadsheet. It is precisely what cannot be seen, nor measured by busy little bean counters, that finally matters. "The Church’s future," said Ratzinger, "will issue from those whose roots are deep, who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment … nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves." In a word, renewal will come from the saints, from those on whom the Church has always depended, even as they depend upon her for the grace to perdure. And when the time of trial is over, when the period of sifting ends, about which we haven’t the skill set to fix a date, real power will flow forth from her loins. Because she will then have become, says the future Pope Benedict XVI, “a more spiritualized and simplified Church.” Meanwhile, the denizens of “a totally planned world will find they themselves unspeakably lonely.” If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover her as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret. Seeing all this unfold from the vantage point of more than a half-century ago, knowing the certainty of the coming crisis and fearing the awful scale of the devastation it will bring, he nevertheless ends on a note, not just of realism, but of hope: The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is already dead … but the Church of faith … no longer the dominant social power to the extent that she was recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death. Originally published on National Catholic Register and republished with permission from the author. Image: Amédée Varin (1818-1883), “Christ Walking on Water” (photo: Public Domain) Regis Martin Regis Martin , S.T.D., is a professor of theology and a faculty associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. He podcasts at In Search Of The Still Point and his latest book, Looking for Lazarus: A Preview of the Resurrection , was released in 2021. purpose and devotion. Return to our 2024 Beach Read Previous Next

< Back Uranus Meets Erik Erikson David Cowles Oct 23, 2025 “The uber-pattern of the world is the logo that liberates us, that turns our free will into agency.” No, this is not the title of a Bevis and Butthead episode, nor is it a Wayne’s World retrospective. It is an article about the intriguing astronomical behavior of the ‘7th ice chip from the Sun’, the planet Uranus. Discovered in 1781 with the aid of a telescope, Uranus orbits the Sun once every 84 Earth years. During that ‘year’, the planet passes through all 12 signs of the Zodiac, effectively taking 7 years to transit each ‘house’. Of course, 7 is a prime number (3+4), closely related to its composite number, 12 (3 x 4). In many numerological systems, the #3 is associated with the divine and the #4 with the terrestrial, giving #7 (3 + 4) and #12 (3 x 4) their special significance. The numbers 7 and 12 have outsized importance in various human sub-cultures: The 7 days of creation The 7 day week The 7 sacraments (RCC) The Sabbath (7th day) The Sabbatical (7th year) The Jubilee, the year immediately following the 7th sabbatical year 7 fat years followed by 7 lean The 7 visible bodies in the ancient ‘solar system’ The 7 year itch A ‘natural’ (winner, winner, chicken dinner) in the game of Craps. The 12 signs of the Zodiac The 12 tribes of Israel The 12 apostles The 12 days of Christmas The 12 members of a jury A dozen eggs. The ‘Science of Astrology’ specifically studies the motions of celestial bodies relative to the signs of the Zodiac. It seeks to identify macrocosmic patterns in the behavior of those celestial bodies that harmonize with the microcosmic patterns we encounter in everyday life. The examples listed above span a gamut ranging from the large scale structure of the cosmos to familiar events in the lives of ordinary human beings. There is no claim here that one ‘causes’ the other; in my view, they don’t. As David Hume pointed out 250 years ago, causality is overrated. However, looking at phenomena on multiple scales allows us to use patterns evident on one scale to locate patterns, often less evident, operative on other scales. In this way, the Science of Astrology helps us discover scale-agnostic patterns that can enrich our understanding and appreciation of life’s experiences. In that context, the symmetries exhibited by Uranus’ orbital path help us identify patterns with similar symmetries on other scales. Let’s apply this ancient discovery to contemporary phenomena to see if patterns well identified and understood on one scale can help us identify and understand patterns on other scales. Let’s introduce the Three Wise Guys (Zoroastrian Astrologers from Persia) to Erik Erikson, a 20th century psychologist. We previously pointed out Uranus’ 7 year journeys through each of the 12 signs of the Zodiac. Erikson developed a theory of human development that identified distinct stages ‘scheduled’ to unfold at certain critical junctures over the course of Normal Life Expectancy (NLE). At first glance, the two models have little in common: While 84 years might be a valid approximation of NLE, Erikson’s model consists of just 8 stages, some as short as 18 months, others at least as long as 22 years. Worse still, Erikson’s model human ‘completes’ 5 stages in just 18 years and takes 66 years to complete the last three. Clearly, these models have nothing in common; or do they? What happens if we apply Uranus’ 12 ‘stages’, each lasting approximately 7 years, to Erikson’s theory of stages in human development? We might end up with a revised model of human development based on 12 stages of 7 years each. Would that shed any useful light on actual experience? You bet it would! Such a project would direct us to look for flex points in the development of a human being spaced by reasonably uniform 7 year intervals. Does that help elucidate reality? Let’s take a look: If there is a genuine harmony between these patterns, we’d be looking for flex points in the development of a human being that correspond to the following birthdays: 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th, 35th, 42nd, 49th, 56th, 63rd, 70th, and 77th. Wow! Can anyone fail to see the remarkable co-incidence of these specific birthdays with empirically identified developmental plateaus? Age 7 is the traditional ‘age of reason’ and the age at which immersive, structured ‘education’ often begins. Roman Catholic children are introduced to the Sacraments of Penance and Eucharist and for the first time become subject to the Laws of the Church. It marks the end of infancy. The organism (child) sacrifices some of its neuroplasticity, native curiosity, and unfettered imagination in exchange for certain perceived advantages - the status and ‘privileges’ associated with ‘growing up’. Age 14 marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence. It often corresponds with full sexual maturity and the final development of gender specific organs. A cascade of hormones often leads to reckless and rebellious behavior. Curiosity and creativity endure but they are now more likely channeled toward specific projects. Then comes the much awaited 21 st ! Ah, my first legal bone dry martini. Extra olives, please, to help me cope with the taste! By now I can drive (preferably not after drinking) and I may have completed my formal, or at least my state mandated, education. I can live on my own, I can get a job, I can enter into legally binding contracts, taking on Student Loans and Credit Card debt. I am a taxpayer now, a productive member of society. I have arrived…sort of. In reality, the 21 – 28 stage remains a period of intense development at least in modern cultures. At 21, there is still a lot of play left in life. By 28, I need to have thought seriously about such issues as marriage, children, and career. Now I am 35. Everyone expects me to be settled and on a charted life course. At 35, one may, perhaps, answer for the first time the age old question, “What will you be when you grow up?” You may wish to say, perhaps for the first time, “ This is who I am.” Terrifying! I must open a 401k and take up the game of golf. 42 now…it’s time to take stock: What’s my career (advancement) path? Am I saving enough? Will my kids ‘amount to anything’? Do I still want to be married? By 49, you’d better belong to a posh country club, sport a single digit handicap, and drive a Jaguar (if not a Lamborghini, you Loser!). By now, you should be working on your second marriage. 56, just checking-in. On course? 63, the process of aging begins in earnest. Whether it’s changing a tire or shooting b-ball with the neighborhood kids, you’re not 21 anymore, and now you know it; heck, you’re not even 40! It’s amazing! By the age of 14 most of us realize that we will eventually grow old and die. Yet when the aging process begins to affect us in perceptible ways, we’re always caught completely off-guard. Somehow we fall into the trap of believing we can age without changing. When you’re 7, you anticipate and welcome the changes promised at 14 and 21, but when you’re 63 you have no idea what’s in store for you. 63, 70, and 77 represent somewhat arbitrary breakpoints but the decline they catalogue is all too real. And it’s not a continuous process; you age in chunks. There is an enormous difference between being 63 – 70 and being 77 – 84, a difference most of us are not even slightly ready for. Of course, 77 – 84 is a lot better than what comes next! Using Uranus’ 84 year trek through the Zodiac to reconfigure Erikson’s stages of human development has suggested a pattern which has proven (above) to have significant heuristic value. This is the sense in which Astrology can be called a science and can be applied to enhance our lives and expand our horizons . Yet there is an obvious fallacy here; have you picked up on it yet? Astrological projections are typically linked with the date (and time) of one’s birth. That time is unlikely to coincide with the moment of Uranus’ transit between signs of the Zodiac. Therefore, if the stages of human development were perfectly aligned with Uranus’ itinerary, each of us would have a unique 7 year cycle. Where I am focused on my 7th and 14th birthdays, you might be looking at your 5th and 11th birthdays. Nonsensical! In my defense, I simply point out that patterns do not have to be identical to be instructive. We are only looking for congruence and the progress of Uranus forms a pattern that is congruent with the stages of human development, regardless of any one person’s DOB. The alternative, to approach life’s experiences as if they occurred chaotically would be utterly paralyzing. Free will notwithstanding, my fate would merely be the by-product of the Brownian motion around me. That changes, however, once we start to recognize congruent patterns in our world. Patterns allow us to create tools, to imagine and accomplish projects, and to measure their results. The uber-pattern of the world is the logos that liberates us, that turns our free will into agency. We should search for its reflection in everything we encounter, from a grain of sand to a drop of water, from the roar of a crowd to the smell of a bonfire, from the motion of the solar system to the structure of the cosmos itself. That’s Astrology! And we are grateful to Uranus for the lesson. *** The Copernican World by Andreas Cellarius is a 17th-century celestial illustration that beautifully presents Copernicus's heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center and planets, including Earth, orbiting around it. This work blends scientific innovation with artistic detail, reflecting the shift from geocentric to heliocentric understanding in the history of astronomy. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.