I’m sure the question has come up, among some, about how I jump from one ideology to another. It may seem that my beliefs are mercurial, perhaps selected on a whim, and that I engage in a kind of philosophical sleight of hand, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.
I am a Christian. I am an atheist. I am a Pagan.
These states within me have always existed on some level. All you have to do, in order to accept them, is to remove the inhibition of time. Once you remove that, it is completely within reason to hold all of these beliefs at once, and still separately.
Just as I am young, middle aged, and old. As I am alive, and dead. All of these things are possible because the barrier of time is removed. Our minds are made of physical matter, but they are not finite though physical matter is limited.
It is like playing a game, where you have the actual in-game perspective on one side of your screen, and a running stream of code on the other side. Even as you are deeply involved in the game itself, and subject to its programming environment, you can also see the code underneath, and how its connections change the world in which we live and respond.
The code itself cannot be directly modified. We can, however, directly interface with our environment, and subtle changes of the environment can affect the overall running code. Every change in our environment represents a change in the execution of the code, as the code adapts to the new events it now has to address.
An object at rest continues to stay at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. That’s Newton’s 1st law of motion. We cannot change the law, but we can change the effects of the law by changing the properties of the object itself.
Moreso, and more effectively, it is easier to simply change the factors that cause the object to engage in whatever state it finds itself. If an object is in motion, we can remove the factors that put it there, or change their actions to cause a different result. Humans find all kinds of workarounds when the laws of nature inhibit its goals.
Of course, it’s not only humans who do these things. There are other intelligences out there which can have an effect on the environment, and how we interface with it. There’s the well known Butterfly Effect, but it’s more than just that. Beneath our feet, a network of bacteria connects us to the rest of the world, to possibly the rest of the universe. It’s the mycelial network, as coined by Dr. Paul Stamets, and it may form the very foundation of what we perceive as Gaia, our mother Earth.
Does this all sound rather fantastic and out of the realm of science? Well it isn’t, but even if it were, that would be no reason to shrug it off. The joy of science is that it can appear inside the realm of fantasy, until hard evidence comes along and shows that what was once magic is now one more law of the universe, something firm, solid, to be stood upon with confidence as we build our knowledge of the universe around us.
What does all of this have to do with my decisions, and seeming flourishes of fleeting flights of fancy and fantasy? Everything.
To belabor a tired point, I never stop thinking. My mind churns constantly, it does not cease, and will not cease until I’m undeniably and reliably dead. More than that, it’s never just one thing, but a million things, and never in sequence. More to the point, this all occurs in the background of my consciousness.
In essence, you and I could be talking about Star Trek, and in the background, underneath the topmost processes dealing with the subject of our conversation, I’m still working on a philosophical question posed to me more than 20 years prior. That is how my mind works. Like the mycelial network, you may see a single mushroom just sitting on the surface, but underneath that mushroom is a hundred thousand miles of connective fiber. It’s all processing data from millions of other sources, and coordinating it to create an overall picture of the environment around it. More importantly, change the mushroom’s default state (for example, by picking it), and that action is noted everywhere around the network instantaneously. The new state is added to the collective memory of the network.
This is how my mind functions. What may seem like a sudden change to you, has been an ongoing process for me, sometimes taking decades to reach. The reason it may seem otherwise is because I am always sharing some of the thoughts that pass through my mind, and since you are only catching glimpses, you cannot see the whole picture. It’s okay, I understand the whiplash you feel, but it’s not whiplash for me, it’s a thought finally brought to conclusion, and it is immensely satisfying.
I hope this has helped clear a few things up, though more questions are always welcome.
May the Goddess bless you.
Amaris