Search Results

< Back Healthcare & The Titanic David Cowles Jan 26, 2026 “We have the technology to transform healthcare…we just need the will to deploy it and we will begin to build that will only once we stop moving furniture.” Have you heard, there’s a healthcare crisis in America? We spend 20% of our precious GDP trying to stay well (or get well) yet one-third of what we spend (7% of GDP) is wasted on treatments that are ineffective and/or on conditions that have been misdiagnosed. Now add to that the unnecessary tests and procedures occasioned by the practice of Tort First defensive medicine and it’s not a pretty picture. But at least we have a system that delivers the best available healthcare to every resident, equally and on demand, that always delivers a warm and caring healthcare experience, and that treats every patient at all times with the dignity and respect they deserve; right? Not so much! When I walk into a Morton’s Steakhouse I know I’m going to spend a lot of money, but I also know I’m likely to have a very rewarding experience. Can I say the same when I walk into a doctor’s office or a hospital ER? Ok, so none of this is news to you after all! But not to worry: our best minds are working to make things better, much better. Problem is, they have been doing so since the dawn of the healthcare crisis (c. 1985)…and that makes a note I recently found in my in-box (1/8/2026) especially troubling: “ OpenAI on Wednesday announced ChatGPT Health , which will allow users to securely connect their medical records and wellness apps to the artificial intelligence chatbot. ChatGPT Health is not intended for diagnosis and treatment…” New Flash : We have been in the process of ‘allowing users to securely connect their medical records and wellness apps’ for more than 25 years. It was a signature project of George W. Bush’s presidency. And to what end? During the last quarter century there has been an explosion in healthcare technology encompassing surgical procedures, pharmacology, diagnostics, etc. and yet, unless you happen to be the direct beneficiary of one of these advances, who thinks that everyday healthcare is better now than it was 25 years ago? As many doctors will attest, it is almost impossible to practice medicine today. Patients are not so much treated as they are managed ...managed according to insurance carrier protocols, industry best practices, regulatory checklists, and the need to defend potential malpractice litigation down the road. And if that’s not enough, we now have the poorly understood and grossly misapplied provisions of HIPPA, erecting unnecessary (and unintended) barriers between healthcare professionals. To whatever extent we do practice medicine, we often do so in the dark. Of course we know where the fault lies, don’t we? Insurance company red tape, PBM price gouging, government over-regulation and paperwork, the legal system! And no doubt, each of these can be problematic and does contribute in its own way to lapses in patient care. Besides, we would rather blame others for our problems than look in a mirror. But that’s ok because our politicians have the answer, don’t they? The trouble is, they have too many answers. Some say we need more competition among insurance carriers and healthcare providers, some say more consumerism and patient accountability, some more emphasis on public health, wellness, prevention and primary care. Most say we’d be OK if we were more like England, Canada, or Germany, even though those systems are arguably even more troubled than ours (though I will grant you, they are cheaper – folks get less care, but they pay less for it – I guess that’s something: Morton’s opens its first drive thru ). Things don’t have to be this way. ‘We have the technology’ to make things better, much better (there’s even ‘an app for that’), but we choose not to deploy it. It’s called Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it has the potential to turn healthcare upside down…and in short order. But there’s nothing we fear more than a solution to our problems. Imagine the angst in the Climate Community if we discovered cheap, abundant, clean energy! The advantage to being as old as I am, at the time that I am, is that I have seen technologies that were bound to change the world come…and go: VHS, MTV, Blockbuster, Fax, AOL, etc. (Remember when we said, “I can’t imagine how we did business before we had fax;” well, when was the last time someone sent you a fax?) Take a message to Sam Altman (OpenAI): “You can’t save the Titanic by rearranging the deck chairs. You have to change course.” TV crime shows notwithstanding, people are not bad. No one wants the healthcare system to fail. But doctors, lawyers, payers, and regulators all have vested interests in the current ‘infrastructure’ and that puts them squarely at odds with progress. We love to put lipstick on pigs; what we can’t see can’t hurt us (as long as we don’t smell it). The rollout of ChatGPT Health, at least as advertised, is the moral equivalent of waving a fan and calling it air conditioning. It doesn’t help; actually, it hurts! It creates the impression that our problems can be solved easily and ‘on the cheap’ and that we’re actually addressing them. It soaks up attention and resources that might otherwise have been directed toward implementing a real solution. And we have a pretty good idea what that solution is. OpenAI is right to think that AI is the future of healthcare, but they are apparently reluctant to deploy it. For example, 80% of the tasks performed in a Primary Care practice could be done as well or better by AI , freeing the physician to do what she does best: observe, classify, diagnose, prescribe, and evaluate. On the specialist level, an extensive study (Harvard Medical et al.) has shown that AI is 4 times better at diagnosing complex health conditions than a team of seasoned, board certified physicians. Incredible…but true! We have the technology to transform healthcare here and now and across the planet; we just need the will to deploy it and we will begin to build that will only once we stop moving furniture. *** Honoré Daumier’s The Hypochondriac (c. 1830s) humorously depicts a man obsessively worried about his health while the doctor appears indifferent, highlighting both the patient’s anxiety and the physician’s detachment. The painting serves as a satirical critique of medical negligence and the social dynamics between doctors and patients in 19th-century France. 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 George Washington Carver David Cowles Jan 26, 2026 “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour if we will only tune in.” “George Washington Carver invented the peanut.” – That nugget of misinformation was what passed for Black History in my monochromatic 3rd grade classroom c. 1955. Not exactly true (what was in 1955?), but Carver did have a lot to do with the development of the peanut as a cash crop (remember Jimmy Carter?) and with its use in crop rotation strategies; and he discovered more than 300 new uses for the nut and its by-products. His work significantly improved the economic prospects of poor farmers, particularly Black farmers in the post-Reconstruction South. Carver believed he had discovered a classic win-win-win paradigm. Planting peanuts enabled farmers to (1) rejuvenate their soil, (2) bring a new cash crop to market, and (3) address a number of pressing social needs - nutritional, pharmaceutical, etc. Today, most of us would call such a convergence Serendipity; Carver called it Providence. The dominant paradigm of our time is mechanism. Progress is a function of probing, testing, and measuring the world. Carver’s relationship with the world might better be described as mutualism. Bridging Anaximander (6th century BCE) and John Bell (late 20th century CE), Carver believed that all being was being with. He viewed his own life as an ongoing conversation with God, though he most often encountered God, not in seclusion via formal prayer, but in the process of interacting with Nature: "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in." Since the dawn of the great darkness ( aka the Enlightenment), it has been our style to view Nature as insentient. In valid pursuit of knowledge we perform experiments on inanimate matter…but we don’t stop there. We subject organisms from all branches of life, including animals, mammals, even primates, and in some awful cases, human beings, to invasive procedures. Laplace, et al. desensitized the world, giving us a ‘00’ license to kill…and we’ve taken full advantage of it. We’ve even allowed the reification of Nature to include members of other ethnic groups and social classes, children and the elderly. At the height of this barbarity, only propertied adult white men were deemed to merit the NFL’s ‘franchise tag’. In such a world, Carver was the counterculture! As kids, we’re taught that ‘life’ includes a hierarchy of values: “It’s not ok to hit your sister but it is ok to squash ants on the sidewalk.” “It is ok to slaughter birds to make chicken nuggets, but it is not ok to throw stones at birds on your front lawn or to knock down their nests.” “It’s not ok to kick the dog but it is ok to chain it to a tree, lock it in a cage or board it in a kennel.” “There are 8 billion people living on Planet Earth today. All of them are ‘created equal’ but they don’t all have the same social utility (aka value).” (Explain that one in 500 words or less, Mr. Jefferson.) This graded approach to ‘being’ gets us through the day, but it is profoundly unsatisfying at every level; it pleases no one. Molly wants to test a nuclear weapon on a newly discovered Pacific Island, but Jane is concerned with the wellbeing of any indigenous humans who might (or might not) be living on the island, and Billy is focused on the welfare of several endangered species known to inhabit this remote outpost. No compromise or meeting of the minds is possible because this is not a ‘difference of opinion’; it is not even a difference of perception…or ethics; it is a difference of ontology. Simply put, Molly, Jane, and Bill are all good, well-intentioned people (even if their values are different from yours). They mean to do well. And when they look at ‘K-pop Atoll’ (as my grandniece calls the newly discovered island), they all see the same sand, unexplored caves, flora and fauna, but they understand what they see very differently. Even conversation among them is impossible. They use the same words and they apply them similarly, but by those words they understand very different realities. Meaning does not reside in words or in the objects (or processes) to which they refer but rather in the interpretive framework (aka Mythology) that lies beneath these semantic layers. To distinguish Carver’s ontology from that of Laplace or Marx, I mentioned Anaximander and John Bell but the notion that nature is animate and life a dialog pervades intellectual history globally. For example, the apostle John calls Christ ‘ o logos ’, the Word. Whatever has come to be has come to be through that Word and that Word became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. 1500 years later Hasidic Judaism embraced a superstrong version of panentheism. According to the Ba’al Shem Tov and others, God ( Shekinah ) is present as a spark in everything that is (animal, vegetable, or mineral). The human project is simply to facilitate the reunion of these sparks, and we do that by treating everything we encounter with respect, using it appropriately, granting it ‘reck’ (Anaximander & Heidegger). I am reminded of Native Americans. They depended on the biosphere for their livelihood, but they never failed to express gratitude to the animals and plants that fed, housed, and clothed them. The intellectual history of the West may be understood as an effort to combine the material and spiritual into a single model. How’s that going? At the end of the day, there may be only two viable models of the World. Either (1) it is inanimate, insentient, unconscious, and accidental with no objective or transcendent values operative, or (2) it is organic, self-aware, intentional, and value driven. For better or worse, we live in the shadow of ‘the Valley of Death’, aka ‘the Enlightenment’, so inanimate materialism is the paradigm du jour. The 20th century, however, saw some important challenges to this world view: psychoanalysis, wave/particle duality, quantum indeterminacy, and non-locality stand out. Where we are headed now is anyone’s guess, but I am more than happy to set my sail on the course laid down by Dr. Carver. *** The 1944 oil painting of George Washington Carver by Irving Bacon depicts the scientist outdoors, holding a milkweed pod, symbolizing his pioneering agricultural research and deep connection to plants. The portrait captures Carver’s calm and thoughtful demeanor, highlighting both his scientific achievements and his gentle, contemplative character. 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 To Be…or Never to have Been David Cowles Jan 25, 2026 “I may be readily willing to sacrifice my own life experience, but I am much less ready to sacrifice yours. And so we continue on…” 2000 words, 8 minute read Hamlet only scratched the surface. He imagined that he had influence over life and death. Too late, sweet prince; that ship had sailed. Hamlet was already born, and there’s no erasing that…is there? Still, he asks good questions: should we nobly “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” Is that a fair price to pay for long life? Or should we “take arms against a sea of troubles,” thereby placing our lives at heightened risk? Troubles only cease when we ‘sleep’, so our campaign against them can only end in death. “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” “To sleep, perchance to dream – aye, there’s the rub.” Hamlet weighs the possibility that consciousness might survive the death of the material body. A decision to eschew the lure of long life opens up a range of behavioral options ranging from crusades against injustice, to risky personal behavior, to outright self-harm. Each of these lifestyle choices carries an enhanced risk of premature death but none of them has the power to annul our birth. A friend recently told me, “I don’t know if there is any continuation of consciousness after death, but if there is, I am sure that what happens in our current life influences whatever comes next.” On the one hand, my friend was proposing an outlandish theory for which there could be scant empirical evidence. On the other hand, he was expressing what turns out to be an almost baseline human belief. In our Western religious tradition, we call it Heaven and Hell. In the Eastern tradition, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana. Other traditions (Confucian, Abrahamic) imagine that we live on through our descendants and, perhaps, that the consequences of our vices and virtues are somehow visited on those latter generations. For the more material-minded among us (from Mill to Marx), we offer Utopia…your choice of a post-industrial techno-paradise or a return to the state of nature following a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And for the rest of us, there’s Estate Planning. Like most, Hamlet is concerned (1) that personal consciousness might extend beyond death, (2) that the nature and quality of such post mortem (PM) experience is unknown, and (3) that the content/conduct of our current lives might influence that quality. Like many, Hamlet elects to ‘play it safe’; he will not tempt fate. He will accept life as it comes (or doesn’t) but he’ll do nothing to accelerate his demise (contrast Ophelia). Practically speaking, Hamlet has only two choices, and he decides that the devil he knows is better than the devil he doesn’t. But philosophically, there is a third option: What if Hamlet could choose never to have been at all? No risk of nightmares now! Job got there 2500 years earlier, in the opening lines of his eponymous epic: “Let the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced, ‘A man has been conceived’. As for that day, let it be darkness…Let darkness, ‘dead-darkness’ expunge it.” (3: 1-5) Job understands, intuitively of course, that once an ovum is fertilized by a sperm…or very shortly thereafter, the die so to speak is cast. There is no going back…unless I can resolve the Grandfather Paradox and kill the old coot before he can reproduce. A silly thought? Not at all! In fact, there is a school of thought that suggests that all our lives will ultimately be expunged…at the heat death of the cosmos. What we call ‘being’ is really just the existential track of a virtual particle in a virtual universe. But that is not what Job (or Hamlet) had in mind. I like to bet on Pro Football. At the beginning of each NFL season, I pick a few ‘underrated’ teams that I think might have a chance to go all the way. If the teams I pick are bad enough (think Jets), I can get outrageous odds. Typically, I’ll bet a whopping $25 on each such team. If any of my teams win, I stand to gain at least $1,000 and in some cases much more: just how bad are these teams? (Think Jets.) But if I happen to land on a ‘hot property’, as I did this year, the wins pile up as the season progresses. Superbowl buzz makes my $25 bet look like a work of pure genius, reminiscent some would say of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. Suddenly, I am the hot property: “You stand to win $3,000 if your team goes the distance, but if they lose anywhere along the way, you get zero. I’ll give you $1,000, right now, no questions asked, for your betting slip.” Job has something even better in mind. He is proposing a type of poker where a player can fold at any time…and receive back 100% of what he’s bet so far on his hand. Extending the analogy, we can live our lives and then, at the end of it, decide whether to make it ‘real’ or not. But suppose Job has his way. Suppose God updates his design to allow creatures to retroactively erase their lives, their being, at any time. Gone is the accumulated suffering of the decades, gone is the prospect of an excruciating death, gone is the risk of nightmares. Of course, gone too are the pleasures and joys of life and their attendant memories, reveries, etc. We are conditioned to tell pollsters that the joys outweigh the sorrows. But do they really? Suppose you were born with a special button and told that you were free to push that button at any time but that pushing the button would not only result in immediate death but in retroactive death. It would be as if none of your life experiences had ever happened. Do you think you would have pushed that button by now? Would you ever push it? If so, when? Under what circumstances? To be clear, this is not suicide with its social stigma and its possibly adverse spiritual consequences. This is simply an ‘inalienable right’, conferred on every human being at conception (or shortly thereafter), either by God or by Thomas Jefferson – the right to retroactively opt out of existence at any time! After all, you did not ask to be born, you did not even consent to it. It only makes sense then that, upon attaining adulthood, you should have the right of self-determination, even retroactively. Nor is this ‘death’, this is simply ‘not-being’. To live, even for a short time, is to place oneself at almost unimaginable risk. Couple that with the periodic suffering visited on even the most charmed life and, honestly, it is hard to imagine anyone ever choosing life…for herself, or for anyone else. And yet, we’re constantly told that folks choose life every day: “I had good innings, what a gift, I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” etc. But is that really how we feel or is it just what we’re expected to feel…or say? After all, how bad would you feel about yourself if you came to the end of your natural life only to decide on reflection that your life had not been worth living? Imagine telling your loved ones on your death bed that you wish you’d never been born? Fortunately, the human psyche protects us from such pain. We buck up. We put on a face for the faces that we meet (Eliot)…we put on a face for ourselves . What if the last thing we say to ourselves and the World is a lie? But I digress. The point is, nobody wants a button. At least, no one is willing to own up to wanting a button. Are there defensible, rational reasons for this? A co-worker was fond of saying, “Better days are coming!” They didn’t; he died. But his slightly sarcastic meme put a spotlight on something important, Hope : “There just has to be a pony underneath this pile of excrement; all I have to do is keep digging.” Hope is virtually omnipotent. It truly does seem to conquer all. But can we really be so naïve as that? And what is it we’re hoping for anyway? A winning Powerball ticket? Another Superbowl for New England? A cure for cancer? (One of the 10 best movies ever made is Truffaut’s 400 Blows . Spoiler alert : in the end the tween aged hero fulfills his ‘lifelong’ dream, then asks, with his eyes alone, the fundamental existential question, “Now what?”) All these things (above) are good in themselves but are any of them enough to justify the high cost of the buy-in (i.e. life with all its inevitable suffering and unavoidable risks) when the only sure thing is New England? But there is another factor: the other ! Every day we’ve been alive, we’ve interacted with others and those interactions have shaped, trivially or massively, their life experiences, and in turn who they are for others, and so on. Now I am under no illusion that my presence in this world has net-benefited folks. Even I’m not that narcissistic! Perhaps I’ve benefited some but harmed others. Perhaps I set out to benefit Sally but harmed her in the end or perhaps I truly did help Sally but inadvertently hurt Joe. Actions and their alleged consequences are radically alienated from our intentions and regrets. Here’s where Hope becomes Faith . Do I trust the Universe enough to believe that if I intend to benefit others and act in accordance with that intention, my influence will somehow be ‘net positive’? I have no reason to suppose that to be true but to believe otherwise is nihilism which ultimately leads to skepticism and solipsism . If I don’t push my button, that’s why. Not because I think I’m ‘God’s gift’ but rather because I’m not God. Perhaps I do have the right to decide, unilaterally and retroactively, whether I will or will not have been in the World, but I do not thereby claim the right to inflict the consequences of my decision on others. Call it the Grandson Paradox . If I choose never to have lived, I condemn my biological offspring never to be born. Do I have the right to make that decision for them? And it’s not just about biology. Every living organism that I encounter, face-to-face or vicariously, will be impacted, accidentally or existentially, by my decision. Bottom line, if I have a button and do not elect to push it, I do so, not in consideration of myself but in consideration of ‘others’, including you, dear reader, and of course, including God. I may assert a right to self-determination but I do not therefore claim the right to make determinations for you. And speaking of grandfathers, this thought experiment demonstrates a thesis first advanced by Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy, in the 6th century BCE: All being is mutual; I am only because you are and vice versa. And speaking of grandsons, this thought experiment blows up the dimensions of Schoedinger’s cat carrier until it templates the edge of the Universe. Now nothing is ‘real’ until it interacts with an observer (or experimental apparatus) external to itself. There is no ‘I’ in ‘It’. (sic) My life is not real until my existence has been felt by another. I may be readily willing to sacrifice my own life experience, but I am much less ready to sacrifice yours. “And so we continue on, going up to Jerusalem, filled with awe and dread, Jesus leading the way…” (Mark 10:32) *** The Play Scene in Hamlet (1842) by Irish artist Daniel Maclise is a large oil painting that vividly depicts the moment in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the prince stages a “play within a play” to reveal King Claudius’s guilt for murdering his father. The work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1842 and is now in the Tate Britain collection, celebrated for its dramatic narrative and detailed portrayal of the characters watching the performance unfold. 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 Pope Leo XIV Redux David Cowles Jan 19, 2026 “I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor.” 1750 words; 8 minute read Leo XIV from Chitown USA became Pope on May 8, 2025. However, 2025 was a Jubilee Year proclaimed by Leo’s processor, Pope Francis. Therefore, the theological ‘tone’ of 2025 remained ‘Franciscan’. To celebrate the end of the Jubilee Year and to begin to make his own mark on the Church, Leo convened a Consistory of Cardinals on January 7, 2026. Hoping for something new and refreshing from this pope, I was initially disappointed to learn that Leo directed the cardinals to reread Francis’ signature Encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium (EG, 11/24/2013) in preparation. Until I read it! Turns out, EG is full of exactly those ideas and perspectives that are vital to the Church’s future. I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor. Let’s browse: “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience.” Arguably, with slight adjustment, this sentence could be applied to any culture at any time in human history. It is a restatement of the human condition. However, this particular formulation calls special attention to the ‘wages’ of consumerism: i.e. desolation and anguish, complacency and greed, a blunted conscience. In other word…us, as we are today! “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) “Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others…and the desire to do good fades…” Here Leo is reinforcing a fundamental connection between ‘ethics’ and ‘the other’. Jesus, quoting Leviticus (19: 18), said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And he added, on this ‘hang all of the Law and the Prophets’. We become aware of others as we become aware of our ethical obligations toward them. In an ideal world, we don’t abuse our pets. We don’t abuse them, not because it’s against the law, and not because we just read an article on animal consciousness. We take care of our pets because we love them and love is the source and manifestation of all ethics. We do good because we love others and we express that love by caring for them. Usually, we recognize ‘the other’ most clearly in human beings. But that is not always the case. Just as in AA, where ‘anything’ can be your ‘higher power’ (not just God), so in ethics ‘anything’ can be your other : a pet, a tree, a mountain, Nature ( Gaia ), Cosmos …even God. For that reason the Great Commandment (above) also says, “Love God with your whole heart, etc.” True solipsists, however, acknowledge no ethics; knowing no ‘other’, they are bound by nothing. They are Dostoevsky (“God is dead…everything is permitted”) on steroids. “Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others…If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good.” Question : What Fortune 100 company just awarded its 2026 advertising contract to the firm of Augustine, Aquinas, and Leo (XIII)? Answer : UAL (United Airlines). Winning Slogan : “Good leads the way.” Sidebar : When theology is no longer mainstream, the mainstream becomes theological. Truth will be heard! Every undertaking of every intentional agent is motivated by that agent’s pursuit of Good as she understands it. Whatever we set out to do, no matter how distorted and perverse the result, we are initially motivated by the universal thirst for Good. We can discover the ‘good’ via the ‘other’ but we can also discover the other via the good. Ethical awareness makes us sensitive to the existence and needs of others. Whenever we seek another’s ‘good’, especially when it is in preference to our own selfish interests, we manifest love, the essence of all ethics. We will not begin to treat bots with respect because we discover they are conscious; we will discover that bots are conscious when we begin to treat them with respect. Among other things, Christianity is a revival of the original boy band, Anaximander & the Pre-Socratics . According to the lead vocalist (6 th century BCE), Being is Relationship. I come to be as I facilitate the coming to be of another . I am able to realize my good only by enabling others to realize theirs. There is no ‘self’ in ‘selfish’: selfishness is an oxymoron! (No, Billy, that doesn’t mean it’s ok to call selfish people, ‘morons’.) “I am selfish” means “I am not. I do not exist!” There are no rocks, there are no islands, only fields and flows. EG brings together two absolutely core principles of Christianity: First, Good is the natural order of things; it spreads, it grows within us and it overflows into the lives of others. Second, we discover ourselves in others, specifically in the granting of reck . (Anaximander) As a Baby Boomer I was a card carrying member of the “Who am I?” movement, dedicated to “Finding myself.” Drove my father nuts; he knew who he was…or so he said. But he didn’t know enough to calm my restless mind. He didn’t know that to find myself, I merely needed to find ‘another’ and grant them reck . Sounds like Francis, and now Leo, nailed this! Positivists tend to dismiss Ethics as a ‘pseudo-science’ – hypotheses with no verifiable consequences. Not so! Christian ethics do have real world, behavioral implications. For example, Pope Francis (EG) quoted Thoman Aquinas: “…Mercy is the greatest of the virtues, since all the others revolve around it and, more than this, it makes up for their deficiencies.” What theologians call ‘mercy’, secular philosophers call ‘reck’ – the sublimation of apparent self-interest to the interests of the other. Love is the manifestation of Good and Mercy is the manifestation of Love. Just as ‘trespass’ (anti-reck) is the paradigm of sin (Lord’s Prayer) so ‘mercy’ is the paradigm of virtue (EG, also the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful.”). While creedal documents play a critical role in the history of the Church, faith is not a collection of propositions. Faith is always interpersonal, it is always the fruit of an encounter with another (person, pet, or Prime Mover). “…Beyond the range of clear reasons and arguments… We need to remember that all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart by its nearness, love and witness. “I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them…” We do not ‘encounter others’. We let down our defenses so others can encounter us…and so we can reciprocate. Francis goes on to point out the primacy of faith over formula: “I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. “The deposit of the faith is one thing... the way it is expressed is another…we hold fast to a formulation while failing to convey its substance. This is the greatest danger. Let us never forget that the expression of truth can take different forms. The renewal of these forms of expression becomes necessary for the sake of transmitting to the people of today the Gospel message in its unchanging meaning.” “At the same time, today’s vast and rapid cultural changes demand that we constantly seek ways of expressing unchanging truths in a language which brings out their abiding newness.” Here Francis appropriates an essential insight from modern linguistics: There is a fundamental displacement between word and object. A specific verbal formula, originally intended to denote a specific object or state-of-affairs, will gradually, over time, come to denote something entirely different. May I borrow an analogy from Cultural Astronomy … whatever that is. The earth’s axis wobbles 360° over a period of approximately 26,000 years. Today we are said to be in the Age of Pisces because the axis is in Pisces at the time of the vernal equinox. But according to Broadway ( Hair ), “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Well, sort of. Actually, the Age of Aquarius begins c. 2150 when the axis will begin to denote the eponymously named constellation. At that point our verbal formula becomes neither word nor object but idol , a misplacement of concreteness (Whitehead). When we recite ‘rite words in rote order’ (Joyce) we practice idolatry. Therefore, if the Church is to remain true to its vocation, it must allow the unforced, organic evolution of new ways to express old truths. “Pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed.” We see then that the task of evangelization operates within the limits of language and of circumstances. It constantly seeks to communicate more effectively the truth of the Gospel in a specific context. “Reading the Scriptures also makes it clear that the Gospel is not merely about our personal relationship with God. Nor should our loving response to God be seen simply as an accumulation of small personal gestures to individuals in need, a kind of ‘charity à la carte’, or a series of acts aimed solely at easing our conscience. The Gospel is about the kingdom of God (cf. Lk 4:43); it is about loving God who reigns in our world.” To the extent that God reigns, Satan doesn’t and Caesar governs within guard rails set by Divine Will . The Church’s mission is not the conversion of individuals, important as that may be, but the transformation of Society. We cannot expect to transform the whole merely by transforming its parts; we must transform both the parts and the whole. If Leo XIV can remain focused on just these points (the ubiquity of Good, the centrality of the Other, and the sovereignty of God), everything else will take care of itself, his pontificate will be a great success… and the ongoing process of rescuing the World from the Abyss of the so-called Enlightenment will continue apace. *** Image: Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ (c. 1455–1460), tempera on panel. A scene in which the central drama unfolds quietly, almost peripherally, while ordinary figures occupy the foreground, suggesting that what is most decisive often remains understated, sustained less by spectacle than by the unnoticed grammar of relationship, attention, and restraint. 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 Leo XIV Redux David Cowles “I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor.” Leo XIV from Chitown USA became Pope on May 8, 2025. However, 2025 was a Jubilee Year proclaimed by Leo’s processor, Pope Francis. Therefore, the theological ‘tone’ of 2025 remained ‘Franciscan’. To celebrate the end of the Jubilee Year and to begin to make his own mark on the Church, Leo convened a Consistory of Cardinals on January 7, 2026. Hoping for something new and refreshing from this pope, I was initially disappointed to learn that Leo directed the cardinals to reread Francis’ signature Encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium (EG, 11/24/2013) in preparation. Until I read it! Turns out, EG is full of exactly those ideas and perspectives that are vital to the Church’s future. I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor. Let’s browse: “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience.” Arguably, with slight adjustment, this sentence could be applied to any culture at any time in human history. It is a restatement of the human condition. However, this particular formulation calls special attention to the ‘wages’ of consumerism: i.e. desolation and anguish, complacency and greed, a blunted conscience. In other words…us, as we are today! “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) “Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others…and the desire to do good fades…” Here Leo is reinforcing a fundamental connection between ‘ethics’ and ‘the other’. Jesus, quoting Leviticus (19: 18), said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And he added, on this ‘hang all of the Law and the Prophets’. We become aware of others as we become aware of our ethical obligations toward them. In an ideal world, we don’t abuse our pets. We don’t abuse them, not because it’s against the law, and not because we just read an article on animal consciousness. We take care of our pets because we love them and love is the source and manifestation of all ethics. We do good because we love others and we express that love by caring for them. Usually, we recognize ‘the other’ most clearly in human beings. But that is not always the case. Just as in AA, where ‘anything’ can be your ‘higher power’ (not just God), so in ethics ‘anything’ can be your other : a pet, a tree, a mountain, Nature ( Gaia ), Cosmos …even God. For that reason the Great Commandment (above) also says, “Love God with your whole heart, etc.” True solipsists, however, acknowledge no ethics; knowing no ‘other’, they are bound by nothing. They are Dostoevsky (“God is dead…everything is permitted”) on steroids. “Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others…If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good.” Question : What Fortune 100 company just awarded its 2026 advertising contract to the firm of Augustine, Aquinas, and Leo (XIII)? Answer : UAL (United Airlines). Winning Slogan : “Good leads the way.” Sidebar : When theology is no longer mainstream, the mainstream becomes theological. Truth will be heard! Every undertaking of every intentional agent is motivated by that agent’s pursuit of Good as she understands it. Whatever we set out to do, no matter how distorted and perverse the result, we are initially motivated by the universal thirst for Good. We can discover the ‘good’ via the ‘other’ but we can also discover the other via the good. Ethical awareness makes us sensitive to the existence and needs of others. Whenever we seek another’s ‘good’, especially when it is in preference to our own selfish interests, we manifest love, the essence of all ethics. We will not begin to treat bots with respect because we discover they are conscious; we will discover that bots are conscious when we begin to treat them with respect. Among other things, Christianity is a revival of the original boy band, Anaximander & the Pre-Socratics. According to the lead vocalist (6th century BCE), Being is Relationship. I come to be as I facilitate the coming to be of another. I am able to realize my good only by enabling others to realize theirs. There is no ‘self’ in ‘selfish’: selfishness is an oxymoron! (No, Billy, that doesn’t mean it’s ok to call selfish people, ‘morons’.) “I am selfish” means “I am not. I do not exist!” There are no rocks, there are no islands, only fields and flows. EG brings together two absolutely core principles of Christianity: First, Good is the natural order of things; it spreads, it grows within us and it overflows into the lives of others. Second, we discover ourselves in others, specifically in the granting of reck . (Anaximander) As a Baby Boomer I was a card carrying member of the “Who am I?” movement, dedicated to “Finding myself.” Drove my father nuts; he knew who he was…or so he said. But he didn’t know enough to calm my restless mind. He didn’t know that to find myself, I merely needed to find ‘another’ and grant them reck . Sounds like Francis, and now Leo, nailed this! Positivists tend to dismiss Ethics as a ‘pseudo-science’ – hypotheses with no verifiable consequences. Not so! Christian ethics do have real world, behavioral implications. For example, Pope Francis (EG) quoted Thoman Aquinas: “…Mercy is the greatest of the virtues, since all the others revolve around it and, more than this, it makes up for their deficiencies.” What theologians call ‘mercy’, secular philosophers call ‘reck’ – the sublimation of apparent self-interest to the interests of the other. Love is the manifestation of Good and Mercy is the manifestation of Love. Just as ‘trespass’ (anti-reck) is the paradigm of sin (Lord’s Prayer) so ‘mercy’ is the paradigm of virtue (EG, also the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful.”). While creedal documents play a critical role in the history of the Church, faith is not a collection of propositions. Faith is always interpersonal, it is always the fruit of an encounter with another (person, pet, or Prime Mover). “…Beyond the range of clear reasons and arguments… We need to remember that all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart by its nearness, love and witness. “I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them…” We do not ‘encounter others’. We let down our defenses so others can encounter us…and so we can reciprocate. Francis goes on to point out the primacy of faith over formula: “I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. “The deposit of the faith is one thing... the way it is expressed is another…we hold fast to a formulation while failing to convey its substance. This is the greatest danger. Let us never forget that the expression of truth can take different forms. The renewal of these forms of expression becomes necessary for the sake of transmitting to the people of today the Gospel message in its unchanging meaning.” “At the same time, today’s vast and rapid cultural changes demand that we constantly seek ways of expressing unchanging truths in a language which brings out their abiding newness.” Here Francis appropriates an essential insight from modern linguistics: There is a fundamental displacement between word and object. A specific verbal formula, originally intended to denote a specific object or state-of-affairs, will gradually, over time, come to denote something entirely different. May I borrow an analogy from Cultural Astronomy … whatever that is. The earth’s axis wobbles 360° over a period of approximately 26,000 years. Today we are said to be in the Age of Pisces because the axis is in Pisces at the time of the vernal equinox. But according to Broadway ( Hair ), “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Well, sort of. Actually, the Age of Aquarius begins c. 2150 when the axis will begin to denote the eponymously named constellation. At that point our verbal formula becomes neither word nor object but idol , a misplacement of concreteness (Whitehead). When we recite ‘rite words in rote order’ (Joyce) we practice idolatry. Therefore, if the Church is to remain true to its vocation, it must allow the unforced, organic evolution of new ways to express old truths. “Pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed.” We see then that the task of evangelization operates within the limits of language and of circumstances. It constantly seeks to communicate more effectively the truth of the Gospel in a specific context. “Reading the Scriptures also makes it clear that the Gospel is not merely about our personal relationship with God. Nor should our loving response to God be seen simply as an accumulation of small personal gestures to individuals in need, a kind of ‘charity à la carte’, or a series of acts aimed solely at easing our conscience. The Gospel is about the kingdom of God (cf. Lk 4:43); it is about loving God who reigns in our world.” To the extent that God reigns, Satan doesn’t and Caesar governs within guard rails set by Divine Will . The Church’s mission is not the conversion of individuals, important as that may be, but the transformation of Society. We cannot expect to transform the whole merely by transforming its parts; we must transform both the parts and the whole. If Leo XIV can remain focused on just these points (the ubiquity of Good, the centrality of the Other, and the sovereignty of God), everything else will take care of itself, his pontificate will be a great success… and the ongoing process of rescuing the World from the Abyss of the so-called Enlightenment will continue apace. *** The Triumph of the Church (c. 1625) by Peter Paul Rubens is an allegorical Baroque painting that celebrates the victory and authority of the Catholic Church , personified as a triumphant Church figure riding a chariot above vanquished heresy and discord. 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 Time Crystals and the Lord's Prayer David Cowles Jan 18, 2026 “The Lord’s Prayer is structured like a Rondeau Time Crystal.” 1250 words, 6 minute read Plain, ordinary crystals, the Hope Diamond for example, consist of molecules arranged in a fixed pattern that repeats over and over again in space . What if we could do something similar with a pattern in time ? Instead of a structure reproducing itself indefinitely in space, could we identify a process that reproduces itself indefinitely in time? Frank Wilczek theorized the existence of such ‘Time Crystals’ in 2012; in 2016-2017 actual Time Crystals were created in a lab for the first time. In a Time Crystal patterns repeat over time in a regular cycle always returning to the same home position(s), over and over again. It's perpetual motion at the quantum level. But behavior in Wilczek’s Time Crystals is entirely deterministic and this turns out to be a huge limitation on the usefulness of his discovery. For example, the concept is useless for modeling indeterminate behavior, such as random sequence, probability, quantum decoherence, intentional agency, or free will – in other words for anything interesting. Then, j ust ‘yesterday’ (October 14, 2025, Nature Physics ) a team of scientists headed by Leo Joon Il Moon announced the discovery of a new state of matter they’re calling Rondeau Time Crystals ( rondeau for the musical form called a ‘round’). These crystals are characterized by the presence of an indeterminate, chaotic ( Delta ) phase between two perfectly determined bookends ( Alpha & Omega ). Between Alpha and Omega , the Ginnungagap of Norse Mythology, Kaos prevails: “…the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” (Genesis 1: 2) However, this disorder is ‘tunable’, permitting local islands of virtual order to emerge within the chaotic Delta phase and endure for ‘short’ periods, subject always to the inexorable vicissitudes of entropy. We call such islands ‘entities, organisms, events’. The states of perfect order that bookend primordial chaos do not control the timing or the details of the ordered events. However, the Alpha and Omega points do embody certain essential organizing principles that work to ‘fine tune’ what comes in between, creating perhaps a bias toward Being rather than not-Being and therefore a bias toward Beauty, Truth and Justice, the ‘divine values’. The World as we know it is a chaotic state, poised between two states of eternal perfection. Whatever happens in Delta must ultimately unite Omega with Alpha . The Lord’s Prayer (below) enjoys the same fundamental organizing plan as Moon’s Rondeau Crystals . It consists of three stanza, two timeless states of affairs, Alpha and Omega , and one spacetime, entopic, undetermined state, Delta . Let’s dive in: Our father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name! This is the Alpha State. It defines the initial position of the system: immanent father, transcendent God, holy (unique) name. It describes the situation from the first person perspective of the one who prays. At the other end of the process of Being, the Omega State, the ultimate position of the system, is co-incident with the Alpha State but with its orientation reversed: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven! This is the eschaton; it is God’s response. Essentially, he recognizes our initiatory act and promises to reciprocate by delivering the Kingdom of Heaven. But it is a long way from Galilee, or Gotham, to God’s Kingdom. While the Alpha and Omega states are hard wired, how we get there from here, the Delta state, is entirely undetermined. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil, Amen! Jesus emphasizes three aspects of spatiotemporal life that are essential elements of the Alpha Omega Bridge Tunnel: Survival, Reproduction, and Independence. We begin with Survival, our daily bread. We pray, not for untold riches, but that our baseline needs may always be met, i.e. that we may live. But ‘man (sic) does not live by bread alone’, or better stated, ‘human beings do not thrive in isolation’. I thrive only in the context of community and community comes to be only when you and I grant each other ‘reck’ (recognition), i.e. when we forgive each other’s trespasses. We grant reck when we sublimate our own interests to those of another. I ‘make space’ for you and, hopefully you make space for me and so, voila , community! But there’s a catch. The mutual granting of reck may not be transactional or reciprocal; it cannot be tit-for-tat. Each granting of reck must be a spontaneous, voluntary expression of love with no expectation of gain. The opposite of ‘reck’ is ‘trespass’. Instead of making room for you to emerge and grow, I impinge upon you, stunt your growth, and perhaps even abort your arrival. We ask God to overlook, to overcome, to forgive all such trespasses, i.e. all the times I suppress others’ coming to be. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” God operates in the world through the world. God desires to forgive all sins; when we forgive, we operate in loco Dei . We realize God’s eschatological objective in a concrete context. “But lead us not into temptation.” Human beings cannot reach their full potential unless they are free. In that context, we have to oppose all forms of physical slavery. But such institutions are the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we are all enslaved by something much more powerful than Pharaoh. Every day, we voluntarily indenture ourselves to a menagerie of inanimate objects: sex, drugs, wealth, status, adulation, fame, and power, just to name a few of life’s traps. These become our idols, our gods, our matters of ‘ultimate concern’ ( Tillich ). We are motivated by Good but we are tempted by the semblance of good . Seeking nothing but Good, we settle for what is not-so-good and when we treat the not-so-good as Good, we commit the sin of idolatry, the substitution of the relatively good for the absolutely Good. “But deliver us from evil.” In the Lord’s Prayer, evil assumes three forms: mortality (death itself, nihilism ), selfishness (withholding reck, solipsism ), and misplaced attachment (willful ignorance, idolatry ). Consider the Ten Commandments. Each one prohibits at least one of these forms of evil; each one mandates the preservation of life (#5), the granting of reck (#1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8), and/or the shedding of unprofitable attachments (#6, 9, 10). Jesus was merely explicating what was already hard wired in Torah . Sidebar : We don’t usually think of the Lord’s Prayer as a teaching on the nature of evil (sin) because Jesus was drawing on a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding than most of us harbor today. We reserve the term ‘evil’ for a select class of wrong doers: drunk drivers, pedophiles, polluters, and internet scammers, e.g. Suffice to say, Jesus and his followers had a much broader view of the role of Evil in the World. ‘Deliver us from evil’ then is a summation of the three previous petitions (re death, selfishness, and attachment). It encapsulates the Delta phase but more than that, it instantiates the Alpha and Omega phases: ‘Thy will/done on earth/as in heaven’. Then Libera nos a malo becomes the meme sown into our flags for the personal and collective crusade against ‘the evil one’. The Lord’s Prayer is structured like a Rondeau Time Crystal . It describes a World with two perfect, eternal, wholly determined phases ( Alpha and Omega ) and one entirely indeterminate phase ( Delta ). In other words, it describes a Time Crystal. *** The main dome of the Pammakaristos Church features a powerful mosaic of Christ Pantokrator , depicted gazing downward while blessing with his right hand and holding a closed Gospel book, symbolizing his authority as ruler of the universe. Created in the early 14th century during the Palaiologan period, the mosaic’s gold background and solemn expression emphasize Christ’s divine presence and theological centrality within the Byzantine worldview. 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 What It's Like to Know It All David Cowles Jan 18, 2026 “it felt as though what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me…and it still seems that way to me today.” 1500 words; 8 minute read When I was 25 years old, I knew pretty much everything there was to know… and I still do! (Just ask my long-suffering spouse!) More precisely, I knew almost everything I needed to know. (Who needs Latin, or Trig, right?) Sure, there were important holes and considerable elaboration was still required but it felt as though what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me…and it still seems that way to me today. Of course, most of the socially conditioned propositions I accepted eagerly c. 1970 turned out to be false. I have replaced them with a new set of eagerly accepted, socially conditioned propositions. The content of my gnosis has changed ( doxa ) radically but the structure ( Aletheia ) has not…with one exception: I now know something I didn’t know 50 years ago. I now know that I didn’t know sh*t in 1970. Therefore, symmetry requires me to be at least open to the possibility that what I think I know now may be no more accurate or exhaustive, objectively speaking, than what I thought I knew 50 years ago. (Intuitively, I’m sure that’s true!) Let’s get clear: most of what I thought I knew at 25 was wrong – partly because of my own shortcomings but mostly because of the ‘primitive’ state of global knowledge c. 1970, compared to now. Compared with everything that is available to be known, objectively, it is likely that the sum total of everything that is known is infinitesimal. Put another way, the gap between what is known or knowable (at any point in time) and what is actual at that time may be infinite. Sometimes called the ‘Negative Way’ by philosophers and theologians, this approach was ‘popularized’ by Nicholas of Cusa (15th century CE): the most we can ever hope to know about God is that we know and can know nothing! That is not to say that knowledge is useless. It has enormous importance, but that importance is limited to local regions of spacetime and specific human projects . There is no such thing as a universal algorithm or problem solving technique. (Godel) What I know I know in relation to a specific undertaking in a specific region of spacetime. Shift my situs or my focus and you change my gnosis . Speaking simplistically, every actual entity, every event, every undertaking is concerned with knowledge at three levels: (1) what is actual, (2) what is knowable, (3) what is known. By ‘actual’ I mean an exhaustively detailed account of the event itself. By ‘known’ I refer to the sum total of true propositions I entertain relative to the event. By ‘knowable’ I mean the universe of true propositions, relevant to the event, that lie within my universe of discourse . A newborn does not know that she does not know the structure of the solar system. Not her fault. It’s just not in her universe of discourse. So we don’t say that her intuitive model is ‘wrong’ – she can’t be expected to know what she can’t even imagine. In order for X to be knowable , it is necessary that I be able to form propositions related to X. That requires something akin to a language, though it need not be verbal. Musical chords, for example, work just as well. Rhythms in jazz. Rhyme in poetry. How about olfactory layers in haute cuisine ? Or the interplay of light and shadow in fine art? My friend is an oenophile – he can’t drink a glass of house wine without detecting hints of leather and cassis. Me, I just wait for the buzz. My friend can taste the wine same as me, but he can’t ‘know’ the wine until he is able to place it in a conceptual matrix populated by ‘cigar, must, and fruit’. Me, I don’t know what I don’t know about wine. I barely know that there is something to know beyond the obvious. My friend’s detailed knowledge vastly exceeds mine, but it is likely that I know as much, in proportion to what we each know to be knowable, as my friend does. So let’s return to the opening sentence: “When I was 25 years old, I knew pretty much everything there was to know…and I still do!” I might have more accurately have said, “When I was 25 years old, I knew a healthy portion of everything I knew to be knowable…and 50 years later, I still know that same ‘healthy portion’, although what I know is radically different.” To be clear, the propositions that I entertained as true in 1970 have almost all disappeared or changed, replaced by new, unanticipated factoids. But the ratio of what’s known to what’s knowable is unchanged. This phenomenon strikes me whenever I read Genesis . The authors had no telescopes, microscopes, or particle accelerators. They knew nothing about genetics (DNA, gene mutation, evolution, etc.). Yet they produced a work that probably contains as large a portion of what was available to be known - in these disciplines at that time - as any textbook today. So which is more true, Genesis’ creation story or Hoyle’s steady state model of the universe; the question is inherently undecidable and therefore meaningless. In business, I often heard it said, “There are 3 kinds of lies – white lies, damn lies, and statistics.” In that spirit I would say that there are 3 ways something may be knowable : (A) it may be objectively knowable, i.e. it’s available to be known, (B) it may be subjectively knowable, i.e. it’s available for me to know it, and (C) it may actually be known, i.e. I know it. Gnosis is fractal! In proportion to what is subjectively available to be known by me, my level of actual knowledge is always more or less constant…as is yours…regardless of scale, regardless of topic, even if we have little else in common. So let’s draw some conclusions. Depending on your model, what is objectively knowable (A, above) is either unimaginably vast…or infinite. If it is the latter, then whatever is subjectively knowable (B, above) is effectively zero relative to A. In any case it is miniscule. So you get no ‘extra credit’ for your grotesquely inflated universe of discourse (B); in the end, we’re all drowning in the same sea (A). Likewise, we’re all in the same boat when we compare what we actually know (C) relative to what is available to us to be known (B). So what? Well, Sheldon over there explains things using an impenetrably complex model derived from cutting edge mathematical physics. Missy on the other hand imagines God as an emaciated version of Santa Claus – a kindly old man (sic) with twinkling blue eyes and a flowing white beard, sporting Joseph’s technicolor dream coat. Who’s right? Both…and neither. But needless to say, Sheldon is cruelly dismissive of Missy’s metaphysics…and indeed, of Missy herself. How ‘stupid’ of her not to know what he knows! Is Sheldon right, or at least justified? No way! Missy knows the same proportion of what’s subjectively knowable to her as Sheldon knows of what’s subjectively knowable to him. Plus what’s knowable to each is the same proportion of what is available to be known. Sheldon, of course, wants to add another dimension of comparison. He wants to weigh his knowledge (C) against Missy’s (C’), but there is no warrant for doing so. The proposition itself is meaningless. C compares with C’ only if there is an absolute, transcendent standard to serve as the metric of comparison; but there is not. The model we’re presenting makes no provision for any such Platonic mysticism . What is objectively knowable is ill-defined and constantly in flux. The Roman Catholic liturgy offers a useful paradigm. It is more or less the same everywhere on earth, and as far back as the first century CE, and yet if you scratch 10 congregants, you’ll find 10 different cosmologies, theologies, and eschatologies. So who’s right? They all are…and no one is. They all know the same proportion of what is subjectively available to them to be known (B). But the temptation to compare actual knowns (C) can be overwhelming. What percentage of life’s acrimony boils down to I’m right and you’re wrong ? How different would life be if we eliminated this dimension of conflict! Note : This is neither skepticism nor relativism . Each of us has an obligation to know as much as we can within our universes of discourse and to expand those universes, our conceptual vocabularies, as far as possible. We are not, however, obligated, or even allowed, to evaluate what we know relative to what others know. What others know can only be evaluated relative to what is subjectively knowable within their universes of discourse and we have no direct, independent access to that information. Two corollaries: (1) There is no room in philosophy or science for intellectual pride, and (2) we can learn from everyone’s models because all such models represent good faith efforts to express the ineffable. *** Stadia I (2004) by Julie Mehretu is a large abstract painting in ink and acrylic that uses layered architectural lines, flags, and geometric forms to evoke the dynamic, chaotic energy of stadium spaces and other large‑scale public arenas. The composition’s complex interplay of marks and colors reflects Mehretu’s interest in how collective environments, movement, and social structures intersect in contemporary urban life. 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 The Lord's Prayer David Cowles Jan 18, 2026 “The Lord’s Prayer is a hologram: each verse encodes its stanza and each stanza encodes the entire prayer.” Our father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name! Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven! Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil, Amen! Everyone knows the Lord’s Prayer . The version quoted in the Gospel of Matthew (6: 9-13) is probably the best-known verse in all of Judeo-Christian scripture. It is a cyber-wonk’s dream. The density of the information content is out of this world, quite literally! The Lord’s Prayer is a fractal: It consists of 3 stanzas, each in turn consisting of 3 verses (9 verses in all). Each verse is self-similar to the other verses in its stanza, each stanza is self-similar to the other stanzas and to the prayer as a whole. The Lord’s Prayer is a hologram: each verse encodes its stanza and each stanza encodes the entire prayer. The first stanza concerns the identity of God and the nature of our relationship with him (Christmas Past); the second has an eschatological focus (Christmas Future), while the third stanza is concerned with everyday social relations (Christmas Present). We are all so familiar with this prayer that we may not always notice these sharp thematic breaks. In the first stanza, we learn that God is “our father” – not merely ‘the maker of heaven and earth’ and not just the father of Israel or of Jesus, but the father of everyone, our father ! Sidebar : When Roman Catholic children first learn this prayer, they don’t call it the “Lord’s Prayer”; they call it the “Our Father” in recognition of the prayer’s personal tone and pastoral focus. Attention is drawn to the compassion of a father rather than to the majesty of a Lord. The role of father is very different from the role of creator. As creator , God establishes the conditions necessary for existence per se , including our own; he is the ground of our being. But as father , God enters into a personal relationship with each of us. Next, we learn that our father is transcendent (“in heaven”) …and therefore eternal: he is not subject to the corruption and death characteristic of immanent, spatiotemporal reality. Finally, we acknowledge that God’s name is holy . In the ancient world, a person’s name was not just ‘her handle.' A name also defined the person’s role in society; in God’s case, it defines his role in the universe (which is his ‘society’). He is unique, a class of one, and so his name is holy . This is why Moses ( Exodus 3) was so concerned to learn God’s name. He knew the Israelites would ask and would not follow him until they knew. In the language of philosophy, a name was ‘essential’ in the ancient world, just as it is ‘accidental' today. Universal Father (Past), Kingdom of Heaven (Future), Holy Name (Present) – 3 different phrases, each denoting the same subject. The first stanza recapitulates the entire prayer. The ‘magic’ of Christianity is its ability to turn Being inside out, revealing alternately, Gestalt-like, its immanent aspect and its transcendent aspect. The opening stanza of our prayer combines the intimate immanence of a father with the absolute transcendence of heaven. The second stanza of the prayer is eschatological. While the first stanza reveals the ‘primordial’ state of things (Past), this stanza presents the state of things to come (Future): his kingdom comes, his will is done, and any discord between heaven and earth disappears. “I am the Alpha and the Omega , the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev. 22:13) The Lord’s Prayer identifies God as the Alpha Dog and confirms that he will be ‘the last man (sic) standing’ as in Job 19: 25 - 27. But these stanzas provide no hint of how we are to get from Alpha to Omega . Rightly so! The first two stanzas are visions, not a political platform. We still need GPS to get from here to there, and fortunately, the third stanza provides just that! It is concerned with daily life in the spatiotemporal realm (Present). We have already been introduced to the Alpha and the Omega ; here is where we learn the rest of the alphabet, i.e., everything in-between. In this final stanza, we learn that our primordial relationship with God and God’s eschatological vision for the universe are relevant, not only in the transcendent realm, but immanently as well. Not surprisingly, this third stanza is enormously more complicated than its two predecessors. Now we are in the realm of extension and duration, energy and matter. Plus, we are confronted with the human element – the appetites and aspirations of individuals and the homeostatic and catastrophic forces operative in society. We begin therefore with basics: survival, our daily bread. But ‘man (sic) does not live by bread alone’. I survive only in the context of community and community comes to be only when you and I grant each other ‘reck’ (recognition). We grant reck when we sublimate our own interests to those of another. I ‘make space’ for you and, hopefully you make space for me; if so, voila, community! But there’s a catch. The mutual granting of reck may not be transactional or reciprocal; it cannot be tit-for-tat. Each granting of reck must be spontaneous, voluntary, an expression of love with no expectation of gain. The opposite of ‘reck’ is ‘trespass’. Instead of making room for you to emerge and grow, I impinge upon you, stunt your growth, and perhaps even abort your arrival. We ask God to overlook, to overcome, to forgive all our trespasses, i.e. all the ways and times I suppress others. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” Are we bargaining with God, bribing him, giving him an ultimatum? Of course not. We forgive others’ trespasses as we grant them reck, spontaneously. In fact, forgiving and granting are two sides of the same coin. To forgive is to love. When I forgive, I love and when I love, I express and project the love that comes from God, that is God. This interpretation is confirmed elsewhere in Scripture in a somewhat different context: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 18: 18) God operates in the world through the world. God desires to forgive all sins; when we forgive , we operate in loco Deo . We realize God’s eschatological objective in a concrete context. “But lead us not into temptation.” We are motivated by Good, we are tempted by the semblance of good . Seeking nothing but Good, we settle for what is not-so-good and when we treat the not-so-good as Good, we commit the sin of idolatry. Note : All sin is idolatry, the substitution of the relatively good for the absolutely Good. Idolatry is as much a cognitive disorder as it is a disorder of the will. We do not set out to regard an inert hunk of metal as the Summum Bonum ; we are beguiled by its heavily polished bronze and flaming ruby eyes. Using a more secular vocabulary, Alfred North Whitehead called this phenomenon the fallacy of misplaced concreteness . We mistake something for what it is not. We assign eschatological significance to the purely transitory: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look upon my works…nothing beside remains.” (Shelley) “But deliver us from evil.” While neither Jesus nor the Evangelists knew the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they were all keen observers of the natural world. They knew that ‘all things must pass,' and they were familiar with texts like Ecclesiastes : “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity.” They understood mortality. Today we understand ‘change’ as ‘entropy’ and we know that every ‘change’ works to increase the overall entropy of the universe. (Entropy is the measure of disorder.) According to our astrophysicists, the universe that sprang into being at Big Bang (‘Let there be light’) will fade out in some version of Heat Death (‘Apocalypse’). If Being = Love = Order, then entropy, morally neutral in its own right, becomes the ‘agent of evil’, the opposite of creation. If Good is to triumph, God must rescue us from spatiotemporal entropy. If we are granting reck and forgiving trespasses, we are already doing the work of God on Earth. We do not grant reck; God grants reck through us. But when we work God’s will, we accept the gift of eternal life. As entropy increases, order decreases. At some time in the far distant future, the universe will reach or approach a state of maximal entropy; all order will be lost and, effectively at least, the universe will cease to exist. Organic Order then is denotatively synonymous with Being and therefore also with Good. Entropy is ‘evil’ because it erases being, which is intrinsically good. But that is the reality of our temporal world. We relish the marvelous things we experience as entropy unravels creation; but we dread the inevitable consequence: eternal nothingness. At the level of organisms (like us), the ultimate expression of entropy is mortality, death. According to Stephen Hawking, no friend of theology, entropy is just another word for time (and vice-a-versa). Time is the true “destroyer of worlds” ( Bhagavad Gita ). From the perspective of a purely temporal world, death not only terminates our existence…it erases it! The only intellectually honest emotion then is despair. Unless …reality also has a transcendent (eternal) aspect (or dimension)! The opposite of faith is not doubt, which is unavoidable, but despair. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we, like the Psalmist (e.g. Psalm 23), are asking God not to let our existence be erased. We are simply asking for eternal life, that’s all! Everything that happens in the spatiotemporal realm is real; and to the extent that anything temporal harmonizes with God’s values, it is eternal. It ‘borrows’ eternity from God (grace). But if my eternal life was dependent on my guessing, and then doing God's will, we’d all be in pretty rough shape. Fortunately, it doesn’t work like that. I act, motivated by a desire for Good, in whatever way I choose (free will). God, who desires to save all things, searches for ways to work my action into his Will. God is like GPS: every time I make a ‘wrong’ turn, God patiently recalculates the route (to himself) in the hope of redeeming my suboptimal deed. By the grace of God, I may even hope to get home in one piece. In this light, the terrible pall of certain and impending mortality evaporates. In the words of the Psalmist: “The Lord is my shepherd (father); there is nothing I lack (daily bread) …He guides me along right paths (lead us not into temptation) for the sake of his (holy) name. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death (the temporal world), I will fear no evil (destruction), for you are with me (deliver us from evil) …I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever (thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven).” Amen. *** Image: The Lord's Prayer (Le "Pater Noster") by James Tissot (1886-1894) Gathered around Jesus, the disciples ask him to teach them to pray. With arms opened wide and hands upraised in a gesture of humility, Jesus begins his prayer with an acknowledgment of God’s power in heaven and on earth. (Tissot places Jesus between the color-streaked sky and the ground on which his disciples sit, further signifying Jesus’ place between the human and the divine.) This invocation became the foundational prayer for his followers. 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 How Spacetime Memory Works David Cowles Jan 11, 2026 “What we call a ‘ghost’ may be our perception of traces of the past that have been encoded in the spacetime matrix.” < 1000 words, < 5 minute read. (This article is dedicated to John Timothy Donovan III who, 50+ years ago, suggested to me that spacetime could be a universal recording medium.) In a recent post on this site we presented a theory advanced on June 16, 2025 by Florian Neukart, the Chief Product Officer at Terra Quantum AG, and a Professor of Quantum Computing at Leiden University, to wit: Spacetime has memory! Dr. Neukart: “The curvature of space-time in general relativity is influenced by mass and energy. In our framework, there is an extra ingredient that should also contribute to that curvature: the weight of information woven into space-time…My collaborators and I began to refer to this idea as the quantum memory matrix (QMM) framework…” QMM is a relatively simple theory with absolutely fantastic implications. As Dr. Neukart said, “We aren’t postulating new hypothetical particles or unseen dimensions, we are simply taking what we already know about quantum information and packaging it in a new structure…” Fantastic implications? Well, for one, QMM has the potential to simplify our thinking about two pressing problems in contemporary cosmology: black hole information and dark matter. (If I can make these problems go away for you, will you let me proceed in peace?) Dr. Neukart: “Even when a black hole finally evaporates, its imprint on the space that surrounded it remains. Information doesn’t vanish after all – it’s just been stored somewhere we hadn’t thought to look…” Information is conserved after all. Potentially, the black hole information paradox is solved. And dark matter? “Astronomers already know that the gravity of many galaxies seems to be stronger than would be expected based on their mass and rate of rotation alone. Lacking an explanation, they have invented a substance called dark matter to account for the difference… Could dark matter be information, stored across space-time in a way that generates gravitational pull?” Dark matter is the 21 st century version of the 19 th century’s aether – everyone assumes it exists, but nobody knows what it is or how to find it. Until now! That’s QMM 2, Sceptics 0. QMM may shed light on slightly less scientific topics as well: “Daddy, is there such a thing as ghosts?” Across millennia and around the globe, folks (e.g. Hamlet) attest to the immediate, local presence of things that should be far removed in space and/or time (his dad). What we ham-handedly call a ‘ghost’ may be our perception of traces of the past that have been encoded in the spacetime matrix. Under certain circumstances we can become aware, in varying degrees of detail, of these traces. Sidebar : According to traditional Christian eschatology, concrete awareness of people and events from the past, if any, comes only after death. In the Celtic tradition, on the other hand, certain times of day (twilight, dawn) and certain days of the year (solstices, equinoxes, but especially Samhain) are conducive to such contact. (Halloween and the Day of the Dead are roughly coincident with Samhain). Likewise, pilgrims are fond of visiting holy sites; perhaps they’re connecting with events that happened at those spots long ago. And it’s not just pilgrims. Rome is full of tourists anxious to share the thrill of early Christian martyrdom in the Colosseum. And not just public attractions. We each have our own ‘holy places’ – spots we revisit over and over again to ‘reconnect with ourselves’, to ‘recharge our batteries’. To us these spots are magical; they could be straight off of a David Hockney canvass. But when we point out that magic to others, they just stare at us, bewildered, “You see what?” Nor need we look exclusively to the supernatural to see how spacetime memory may impact our experience. We experience Deja Vue, we have a 6th sense, we get hunches, gut feelings. Perhaps these are all micro-manifestations of spacetime memory. Of course, a memory is not the thing remembered; it is a coded, edited, compressed version. Any copy inherently differs, at least infinitesimally, from what is being copied. A 1980’s commercial asked, “Is it live…or Memorex?” Exactly! The inherent but infinitesimal displacement between an event and our memory (copy) of that event could be what Jacques Derrida calls Differance , potentially the source of all consciousness, individual and/or universal. QMM is just hours old as a scientific theory. Yet the phenomenon it models was exhaustively described over 100 years ago by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past (RTP)…but with a crucial twist: According to QMM, a common location may facilitate the simultaneous experience of events separated in time. According to RTP, a common experience may connect, here and now, locations separated in space and time. This anomaly is fortuitous. The fact that these relationships are apparently transitive and symmetrical gives QMM an added coat of plausibility. Finally, QMM seems consistent with the currently popular model of the universe as a hologram. At every point in space and on every plane of time, the universe is self-similar. Patterns recur across space and time and scale…like spacetime memory! We are used to major breakthroughs coming from supercomputers, satellite probes, telescopes, particle accelerators, etc. Or from a whole new physics…or mathematics. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way? Could an important new idea also be simple…and semi-obvious? Sometimes, it’s not about seeing new things; sometimes it is a matter of seeing old things with new eyes. *** The Enigma of the Hour - Giorgio de Chirico (1910–11) conveys a feeling of being stuck in time by presenting a motionless city square where the clock marks time without prompting any visible change or action. The frozen figures and oppressive stillness suggest an endless present, in which time exists as a symbol rather than a force that moves life forward. 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 Does Spacetime Have Memory? David Cowles Jan 9, 2026 “What if the universe is a copy of itself? Redundancy built-in, perfected…spacetime saves now save spacetime.” “The map is not the territory.” How often have you heard that old saw? We pay lip service to the meme…but then we go right ahead and ignore it. Take memory, for example: A family member once told me that the ‘meaning of life’ is making memories . He confuses the memory with the experience and perhaps the experience with the event: the map with the territory. Memory, as we typically use the word, refers to certain neuronal patterns in the brain that encode certain experiences (sensory, emotional, kinetic). Unless my family member holds a traditional Christian view of life after death (he doesn’t), his metaphysics makes no sense, IMHO. First of all, memories are just code that refers us to another place and time. The picture is woefully incomplete, often lacking in detail, and sometimes just plain wrong. Furthermore, at best ‘making memories’ works “in the living years” but if memories are stored in neurons, it doesn’t work for the long haul. Quite simply, memory likely vanishes upon the death of the organism. Unless Florian Neukart, the Chief Product Officer at Terra Quantum AG, and a Professor of Quantum Computing at Leiden University, is right! In an article dated June 16, 2025, Dr. Neukart proposed that spacetime itself has memory. Dr. Neukart: “To understand my idea, you first need to know that I assume from the start that space-time isn’t a smooth, continuous fabric…but is instead made of extremely small, discrete cells, like an invisible grid at the deepest level of reality.” This is a version of the ‘foam model’ of spacetime suggested by Planck. “This isn’t an entirely new idea in itself…but I build on this by describing how each of these space-time cells can act like a memory unit…The key is to realize that modern physics describes all particles and forces as excitations in quantum fields – mathematical structures that span space and time… “There is also a more emergent kind of quantum information at play that describes the relationship of each cell to the others – this isn’t held in any one cell, but in the sprawling network of relationships between them… “This is where we return to black holes… Even when a black hole finally evaporates, its imprint on the space that surrounded it remains. Information doesn’t vanish after all – it’s just been stored somewhere we hadn’t thought to look… This mechanism allows space-time to store the information that falls into a black hole … “My collaborators and I began to refer to this idea as the quantum memory matrix (QMM) framework… If space-time truly has a memory-like structure, then it should be able to store information from any of the four fundamental forces of nature… “We aren’t postulating new hypothetical particles or unseen dimensions, we are simply taking what we already know about quantum information and packaging it in a new structure…” Of course, physicists are rightly skeptical of theories that cannot be tested. At first glance, QMM would seem to fall into that category. But not so fast… “Such a test can at least be simulated in an existing quantum computer… We began by taking a qubit, the quantum equivalent of a computer bit, in a known starting state and letting it evolve over time. This evolution was designed to simulate the way a cell of space-time would be imprinted with information as quantum fields wash over it. The question was: could our imprint operator accurately describe the qubit’s evolution? “To test this, we measured the state of the qubit after it had evolved and then applied a reverse version of the imprint operator to see if this would describe the original state. We found that it did indeed do so , with an accuracy of about 90 per cent. “This wasn’t just a theoretical toy model. The imprint and retrieval protocols were grounded in QMM’s mathematical structure and translated directly into executable quantum circuits, validating the idea that memory-like behavior is physically modellable… “The curvature of space-time in general relativity is influenced by mass and energy. In our framework, there is an extra ingredient that should also contribute to that curvature: the weight of information woven into space-time… “Astronomers already know that the gravity of many galaxies seems to be stronger than would be expected based on their mass and rate of rotation alone. Lacking an explanation, they have invented a substance called dark matter to account for the difference. “However, no one knows what it might be. But perhaps my collaborators and I have stumbled upon the answer: could dark matter be information, stored across space-time in a way that generates gravitational pull?” Dark matter is the 21st century version of the 19th century’s aether – everyone assumes it exists but nobody knows what it is or how to find it. If the phenomena currently attributed to dark matter can be explained more simply via information theory, it would be a big step forward for Cosmology. But the implications of QMM go far beyond ‘the matter of dark matter’. What if the universe is a copy of itself? Redundancy built-in, perfected. An heir and a spare. What if everything that has ever happened is preserved ‘forever’ intact in the structure of spacetime? O Death, where is your dreadful countenance now? Obviously, there is work to be done here. But superficially, QMM seems to be compatible with the idea that the universe is a hologram or that its underlying structure is fractal . It also conforms to the Gaia hypothesis, i.e. that the cosmos itself must be regarded as a whole (perhaps even as an organism) exceeding the mere sum of its component parts. Of course, in a sense QMM just kicks the can down the road. It’s a very long road…but still, it leads to Rome . We have ‘saved’ individual events by encoding them in spacetime, but we haven’t saved spacetime (Rome) itself. According to most current cosmologies, spacetime had a beginning (everywhen) and it will have an end (everywhere). And what happens to our cherished ‘memories’ then? Of course a number of general ideas, ranging from the purely physical to the richly theological, immediately come to mind. Incredibly, after realizing how ingeniously spacetime is engineered, I have confidence that we’ll find a context in which immortality (memory encoded in spacetime) becomes eternity (spacetime saved). Maybe it’s time for a new bumper sticker: Spacetime Saves now Save Spacetime! *** Wassily Kandinsky — Several Circles (1926) presents a dark, cosmic field punctuated by floating circles of varying size and color, evoking planets suspended in space. Kandinsky uses pure geometry and color relationships to suggest harmony, tension, and movement without reference to the physical world. The painting reflects his belief that abstract forms could express spiritual creation and the underlying order of the universe. 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 Civilization is Discontent David Cowles Jan 8, 2026 “Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair.” 1100 words, 5 minute read. Life is simple! Eat, sleep, have sex, and stay alive. For almost all species, tool use, if any, is situational: grab stick, hit hive, eat honey, discard. The tool does not become a ‘thing in itself’. Winnie the Pooh does not think to put his Rube Goldberg contraptions into a museum. Christoper Robin on the other hand… Eve ate the proverbial apple in search of knowledge – a brave if costly choice. But in expelling Earth’s First Family from Paradise, God got the last laugh. From the get-go, the need to nourish, rest, procreate, and survive stimulated the emergence of a Technosphere, an amalgamation of tools and techniques intended to facilitate the human project. Genesis tells us that Abel tended sheep while Cain grew veg, at least until he went off to build cities. (Apparently, the authors thought that the sedentary life of a farmer was more conducive to urbanization than the nomadic life of a herdsman.) In Eden, God protected his intellectual property via statue (Don’t Eat the Fruit). Post Eden, humanity is on its own (“everything is permitted” – Dostoevsky), but no bother – God can rely on us to build nearly impermeable ‘physical’ barriers between ourselves and gnosis . To begin, we make a fetish of our tools. They become things in themselves and we house them in museums to celebrate our achievements. ( True art cuts the other way – it pierces the veil. Here’s a simple test of artistic authenticity: Does this open-up the ineffable to me…or is it just another brick in the epistemological wall? We are unable to see the forest for the trees. We have devised a highly non-linear ego-centric model of the World. Whatever is closest to me in space and time takes on an outsized importance: my family, my ‘garden’, my nation, my planet, my ‘day’. We see the World as if it had been built by Escher. (Perhaps it was?) We form social groups: our families, our neighborhoods, parishes, clubs, unions, etc. and we endow each with almost mystical significance. That ‘manufactured mattering’ obscures the real communities behind them. Manufactured mattering leads us to adopt false and empty Values, the ‘idols’ of the Old Testament under a new guise. I refer, of course, to our twin desires for fame and fortune. Longevity masquerades as eternity, security as peace. Ingeniously, we build economic systems that positively enslave us. Marx was right: we’ve gone from plantation slavery to wage slavery. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” ( The Who ) Then we fine tune our economies to ensure that the vast majority of us, around the world and throughout history, remain in a perpetual state of want so that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) Socialism, capitalism, it makes no difference: we all live just below our own personal (floating) poverty line. Technology threatens the structural integrity of our cocoon. It develops geometrically and might soon outpace demand: Marx’ surplus. But ‘we’ are way too smart for Karl. We endlessly proliferate needs to exceed ever so slightly our accelerating ability to satisfy them. Supply will never catch up with demand. There is no such thing as ‘surplus’ in our world. Every so often, some ‘goodie two shoes’ (me?) comes along shouting, “Live simply that others may simply live.” But the relentless expansion of the catalogue of available goods and services makes a simple lifestyle unattractive. “’Tis the gift to be simple,” according to the Shaker hymn adapted by Aaron Copeland for Appalachian Spring ; but how many Shakers do you know? Culture is another symptom, and engine, of Civilization. On the one hand, it is a method of recording and preserving our advances toward Truth, but on the other, it forms a forbidding barrier, shielding Truth from experience. We acculturate our children, i.e. we train them to be the people we wish we had been. We prepare them for life…our life. We train them to fight the last war. Kultcha projects the past into the future and protects us from having to live in the present. We are always one generation out of sync. As further protection against the possibility of a satisfied citizenry, we have invented yet another ring of fortifications: Society - a new pantheon of needs, e.g. recognition, honors, social status, and fame, i.e. things that make us feel good about ourselves. We must feel good about ourselves; we crave it at all costs – which is why cyberbullying so often ends in self-harm. At the bottom of this particular rabbit hole, lies the mother of all delusions: our nearly universal desire to ‘leave the world a better place’ - as if we could know what’s ‘better’ beyond our immediate environs, and as if we could ‘make it so’ if we did. Add to that a litany of activities, euphemistically known as ‘hobbies’ (hobbles?). For example, many of us devote two days a week to a pointless pursuit known as golf . We hit a ball and chase after it like a dog playing fetch; from some vantage points, we must appear mad. Yet, we gladly trade family and career in hopes of a pewter cup at the end of the season. And those of us who can’t do, root. We rely on a team of professionals to do our ‘doing’ for us. Like bourgeois draftees during the Civil War, we pay others to perform in our place. We live and die for the Yankees and the Knicks, though most of us will never know George Castanza, or anyone else connected to either team. Every weekend, New Yorkers sit down to their TVs and joust with their peers in Boston and LA…Philly, Frisco, and Chitown if they’re slumming…virtually. We have measured out our lives with coffee spoons and yet we cling to the illusion that “there will be time…there will be time for all the works and days of hands.” (Eliot) And so we create bucket lists – things we want to experience ‘in the living years’, things we will remember, things we may record in journals or on photos, things we can share with others via social media…until the memories flicker out and the records decompose. How diabolically ingenious! Driven by our unquenchable thirst for sweet gnosis , we have erected virtually impregnable fortifications ( aka civilization) to protect the ‘pearl of great price’ from our probes. Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair – “nothing beside remains…boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelley) *** Giorgio de Chirico — The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a deserted cityscape where elongated shadows, rigid architecture, and an unseen threat create a sense of unease beneath apparent order. A small child and a rolling hoop introduce movement and innocence, contrasting with the oppressive stillness and suggesting a world governed by hidden forces rather than human logic. The painting embodies metaphysical uncertainty, inviting the viewer to sense an underlying truth that is felt intuitively but never fully revealed. 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.

“Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.” < Back Destiny Versus Fate David Cowles Jul 15, 2024 “Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.” Destiny and Fate are two words I hardly ever use. They seem to suggest a passivity that is alien to my philosophy…and perhaps to yours as well. But whenever I have used them, I’ve used them interchangeably…and I was wrong! Far from being interchangeable, Destiny and Fate are antonyms. And for just that reason, they turn out to be very useful concepts after all! Destiny concerns what you make of yourself: “She was destined to do great things.” Fate concerns what the world makes of you: “He was fated to die in battle.” But even that is an oversimplification. Better to say, Destiny is what you can make of yourself; it is the sum of your possibilities while Fate is the sum of your limitations. Every failure can be attributed to the fickle finger of fate; likewise every success is a fulfillment of destiny. Traditional Physics offers a simplified view of the world: the future consists of all the points in your forward light cone. This might work in an empty or solipsistic world, but it won’t work in any universe that includes the category of the other, i.e. something other than the self but sharing some ontological properties in common with that self. Every ‘other’ has its own unique light cone but cones intersect, generating an interference pattern that we know lovingly as this world. Imagine the Universe as a beaker of supercooled water. Drop in a precipitant et voila instant crystallization. The other has just that effect in our universe. Such crystallization destroys the monotonous symmetry of the solipsist’s universe. The array of points in the light cone now manifests as short cuts and obstacles, tools and impediments. I remain 100% free in my actions but those actions now must take into consideration the presence of the other. The insertion of the other modifies the terrain in which I operate. All this has nothing to do with ethics; not yet! Whether or not I engage with the other, I must take it into consideration simply in order to realize my own personal, entirely selfish goals. When the law student asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” he is essentially asking who qualifies as an other? Jesus makes it clear that all human beings belong to the category of the other. His made his point. But we are free to ask, “Are human beings the only others?” What about God? According to Martin Buber, God is the ultimate other. What about animals: corvids and parrots, primates, sea mammals, octopus? Trees, forests, and other plants? Fungi (the wood wide web)? Prokaryotes (e.g. bacteria)? What about the individual cells that work together to constitute an organism? We mustn’t forget other ‘life forms’ either, e.g. AI bots, Extraterrestrials. And what about Gaia? Or Kosmos? Clearly, different cosmologies classify different entities differently. Simply put, your Destiny is the Fate of others and the Destiny of others is your Fate. Example: Robert Frost is out on his famous walk in a ‘yellow wood’. Home is his destiny (and destination) but fate decrees that he can only get there via one of two paths. How come? The forest also has a destiny: to regenerate and proliferate. The forest’s destiny becomes Frost’s fate; his choice of routes is limited. But Frost’s destiny requires the forest to accept two roads across it; that is its fate. Consistent with that fate, the forest is free to pursue its own destiny by rejuvenation and reproduction. Map this relationship onto the traditional timeline: destiny is the present exerting influence in the future while fate is the future being felt in the present. And what of this illusive present? The present is a region hypothesized to exist between past and future. Its width is indeterminate: in some models (Laplace) it is zero, in others it is infinite (but bounded by a membrane of infinitesimal width). I am 5’ 4” tall; fate keeps me from realizing my dream of playing for the Boston Celtics. On the other hand, I may be destined to ride a Kentucky Derby winner someday. Fate becomes destiny. At any point I can see myself as the victim of fate or the beneficiary of destiny. A friend’s mother used to say, “Whenever God closes a door he opens a window.” Exactly! In fact, a closed door is an open window. We all seem to have an almost insatiable desire to be ‘someone’, to make a difference, to leave the world a better place, to fulfill our unique destiny. I am the author of my own play, the world is my stage (Shakespeare) and you, dear readers, I might as well just say it, you are my props. So go on, hate me! It’s ok. Of course, you have your own destinies to fulfill, and potentially at least, I am one of your props. So we’re both telling the same story, but in one version, I play the lead and in the other version, you do. Life is a high school director’s dream: every part is the lead! (No more noise from disgruntled helicopter parents or their overachieving progeny.) Your destiny is the self you choose to project (superject) into the world. It’s you as you’d like the world to remember you… a few billion years from now; as if. You control your destiny. If you don’t control it, it’s not your destiny, it’s your fate…over which you have no control. Destiny is what you make of yourself; Fate is what the World makes of you! The Serenity Prayer (AA et al.) says it all: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (fate), the courage to change the things I can (destiny), and the wisdom to know the difference.” Ah, wisdom! A slippery commodity, that! Trying to alter things that cannot be changed (fate) can lead to depression, resentment, anger, and addiction. Failing to alter things that can be changed (destiny) can be a symptom of apathy, laziness, cowardice, etc. It can lead to anxiety, rage, and self-loathing. Destiny is what you do to the world; Fate is what the world does to you. You are responsible for your destiny. You are what you make yourself to be. But your little skiff is not merely storm tossed on a dark and raging sea. Your boat is equipped with a rudder to help you steer and, through the fog, you can just make out a beacon of light. Value (Good) is the beacon that continually reorients you throughout your journey - it acts as an existential GPS. Of course, nothing makes you sail toward the light; you can get your bearings from a full 360° of possible courses. It’s 100% up to you, it’s your destiny after all, but there is a safe harbor if you choose to take advantage of it. If you arrive safely home, you may say that the harbor was your destiny all along and that the lighthouse (wisdom) showed you the way. And that’s true! But you and only you sailed your vessel safely into port. Ultimately, freedom trumps destiny and fate. Destiny and Fate are often seen to be in conflict. The dichotomy is enshrined in our modern Indo-European languages. When we speak using active voice verbs, we talk about destiny; when we speak in the passive voice, we talk about fate. We know how to struggle, how to fight, how to compete against others. Often, I pursue my destiny by limiting yours. I do for myself by doing to others: it’s the Golden Rule for survival in a bi-polar world. But is it best practices? Is it possible that I might enhance my destiny by helping you advance yours? Could it be that destinies can be mutually reinforcing? If I am your fate, might you harness that fate to help you achieve your destiny? If you are my fate, might I harness that fate? Could fate be a trampoline rather than a tar pit? Consider space travel. The #1 impediment is gravity. The thrust needed to overcome the Earth’s attraction requires an enormous expenditure of energy. But once I have put the blue planet in my rear view mirror, I can use the Sun’s gravity to slingshot my capsule into deep space. What was once an obstacle (Earth’s gravity) has now become a tool (Sun’s gravity). Gravity, my fate, need not just limit my destiny; it can also facilitate it. Jesus final commandment, delivered to his disciples on the eve of his Crucifixion, was just this: “Love one another.” (John 13: 34) When I love an other, I want both of us to transcend our fates and fulfill our destinies. In fact, I come to understand that achieving my destiny includes you achieving yours. Your destiny and mine become entwined. My destiny is your fate just as yours is mine. For the most part, one dampens the other; I limit you, you limit me. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every so often, our destinies may reinforce each other instead. When that happens fate and destiny (your trajectory and mine) coincide, each amplifying the other. What do Utopia, the Garden of Eden, the Kingdom of Heaven, and Pepperland have in common? They are states of being in which Destiny and Fate are one. Revelation tells us that Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. Christ is not two persons; he is one person with two aspects. He is the convergence of Destiny and Fate. He is that from which the universe comes to be (“without him nothing came to be” – John 1: 3) and that toward which the universe inexorably tends (“so that God may be all in all” – First Corinthians 15: 28). Like great circles, our event lines diverge at Alpha and reconverge at Omega…but with their ‘orientations’ flipped. The arrows that once pointed up now point down. Event lines are Mobius Strips; we live in an non-orientable universe. Like electrons and other massive quanta, events occur in 720° space (vs. 360° for photons and 180° for gravitons). A key question in cosmology these days is whether ‘information’ per se has mass. Most physicists think it does, but how do you prove it? I would propose that the fact that events behave like massive particles (720° geometry) suggests that events have mass over and above the mass/energy of their components. That ‘mass’ could only be a function of their information content. It could be that content. According to Euclid, no two parallel lines ever intersect. What a lonely world that would be! Talk about ships passing in the night. But 10 th grade geometry notwithstanding, the world is anything but Euclidean. According to the ‘better geometer’, John of Patmos (Revelation), all lines intersect…at the Alpha and at the Omega – one point, two countenances! 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 . purpose and devotion. Return to our 2024 Beach Read 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