Jun 30, 2016
On Being
The On Being
Contents

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Main Page   ← You are here
Preface
Introduction
The Big Picture
Spiritually Significant, Empirically Studied
    Cosmology
    Biology
    Mathematics
Spiritually Significant, Nonverifiable
    What can be said
    The Event
    Resonances
Moving Forward


Preface
Offered by David Apollo

fish jumping pic
This posting continues my return to building out the ConserveLiberty resource with attention to the spiritual.

This resource is at an early stage of this process.

As time elapses, and people get more creative about studying and uncovering how The Natural World actually works, we become even better able to describe and anticipate how Creation behaves.


Introduction
vase faces
Much of humankind divides All That Is into two categories, and often considers them separately. The first category is often called "The Real World", and comprises those aspects of Creation that can be studied empirically. It can be measured, manipulated, and anticipated in its behavior as we come to know it well enough.

The second category is considered "The Spiritual World". For whatever reason, we are usually indoctrinated by culture to regard the Spiritual World as that part of Creation that cannot be studied empirically. Because it cannot be known with certainty, all sorts of imaginary rhetoric can become associated with it which can neither be proven nor disproven. Assumptions without empirical evidence can lead anywhere one's imagination wants them to lead, and can (and do) easily stray from Truth.

That humankind divides All That Is into these two categories and thinks about them in this way is an unfortunate perspective. ConserveLiberty does not make the assumption that The Real World and The Spiritual World are distinctly separate categories of All That Is. Rather, ConserveLiberty considers them one and the same. All of All That Is is all The Real World. Humans simply are not able to understand all of it at the current moment, although we do understand it more as we get more cunning and creative.

The Spiritual World is as Real as The Real World is, since they are one and the same. And, just like those aspects of our environment that can be known and studied empirically, The Spiritual World also is something we interact with and perceive by way of the Filters we have been endowed with.

As repeated many times throughout this resource, not everyone is created with the same ensemble of Filters. The influence of the Filters themselves are variable from one person to the next in terms of their contribution to the ensemble. Some are turned up and others are lightly expressing from one person to the next. Some people are going to be great musicians, others great engineers, others great athletes, and others are going to be great writers. There are Filters that impact our relationship with the spiritual aspects of Creation as well.
→ Because we are all built differently, some will be better at relating to the various aspects of the Spiritual than others. ←

The Big Picture
spiritual health
For guidance in understanding the Spiritual dimensions of All That Is, a reliance on Science as a source for Competent Truths has drawbacks. Why is this declared? To approach a harmonic relationship with all of Creation, the perspectives developed would include aspects from both the empirically and non-empirically understandable (probe-able) domains of All That Is. Science by design only addresses those aspects of Creation that are empirically testable. Thus, the non-empirically testable aspects of The Universe are not addressed by Scientific exploration. It is not that they are not real, but rather that understanding them is outside the realm of the Scientific Method.

Since it is outside the realm of the Scientific Method, it is also not possible to verify scientifically the truth of statements made concerning the non-validatable aspects of the Spiritual Domain. It's not that true statements are not made, but rather that statements made about non-validatable aspects of the Spiritual Realm, whether true or false, often cannot be verified or disproven using an empirically based scientific method.

And, as an artifact of the common misperception that the Scientific Domain excludes the Spiritual Domain, as our ability to understand more of Creation empirically expands we tend to regard our new knowledge as separate from or excluded from the Spiritual Domain. When in reality they are both of one and the same domain. (Remember, the Spiritual is simply not yet understood scientifically, and some of it may never be able to be probed empirically.)

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Our spiritual regard for Creation and its relationship with us is eroded as our understanding of the world around us becomes more secular. It is both interesting, and again unfortunate, that the spiritual perspective we retain is often one that is simply rhetorically convincing, and often desirable, even if known to be in conflict with what we actually understand to be the truth. And so people become "believers", and embrace various narratives without at all taking a concrete, rational, skeptical and fact oriented look at verifying whether or not the declarations are actually true.

Many who are moved to Competent Truth decide to avoid the unverifiable declarations regarding the spiritual realm. This creates a paradox: There are many areas important to our understanding of Truth and for participating with the world from a harmonic perspective that require a truth-oriented understanding of the Spiritual Realm. Yet because Science cannot verify those (today) we either ignore or reduce our perceived priority for the Spiritual information we receive. Truthful or not. To the extent that we avoid the factual in the spiritual domain, our harmony with Creation is then prevented.

Some of us are built with filters that have an affinity for being in harmony, even though we may not understand what harmony means. Thus, when encountering the difficulties in reaching harmony when the truthful aspects of the Spiritual Domain are ignored ... we often "redefine" what we think "harmony" is, usually to something that we perceive is within our ability to experience.

That is another unfortunate irony. Many are compelled to Harmony, and may believe they are experiencing a harmonic relationship with Creation, but unbeknown to them they are not in true harmony at all.

What does "True Harmony" look like? Well, of course that differs for each person, because each person's Filters are tuned differently. Thus, one person's perspective on how Harmony might be experienced by another may likely wind up being both irrelevant to the other and even in actuality impossible for "the other" to realize.

From ConserveLiberty's perspective, the achievement of Harmony becomes more likely when one has the Liberty to embrace Creation truthfully.


Empirically Studied Areas of Spiritual Significance
"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate."
- Thornton Wilder

There are topics within Creation that have extraordinary Spiritual significance which have been studied empirically. A few are mentioned below. It would probably be helpful to define what ConserveLiberty means when it speaks of the Spiritual since that is different than what is implied by the term "spiritual" as it is used commonly in public.

spiritual health
When ConserveLiberty speaks of the Spiritual, it is not implying a religious meaning, or an aspect of Creation that might be perceived as magical, or even a dimension where a powerful and cognizant Being operates. Rather, the Spiritual is simply that aspect of the Universe that has personal significance and is actually real. It may or may not be empirically verifiable. However, even if not empirically verifiable, it must be real. It must be True.

Those aspects of All That Is which are both not empirically verifiable and are also NOT true are NOT referred to as Spiritual within the ConserveLiberty resource. Instead, those not true are referred to as "make believe", "fictional", "not real", or "false".

The recognition of the Spiritual is dependent on each individual's make up, their Filters. However, there are going to be elements of the Spiritual that are truly real, but are not personally significant to everyone, and certainly not recognizable to everyone. Those are not indicative of limitations of that which is part of the Spiritual Domain, but rather are indicative of individual differences.

Indeed, all of All That Is, is Real, and is Spiritual.
  • Cosmology - There is probably no topic more profoundly spiritual than Cosmology - the study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe. Of course, to remain where we are most certain that truth is, we stick with what is understood experimentally, and thus studied using scientific methods leveraging confirmatory experimentation and scientific skepticism.

    ... Click here to read the entire Cosmology section ...

    Crab Nebula pic
    Restated differently and with obvious personal significance, prior to you ever coming to be, first everything you are made up of had to come to be. That didn't happen entirely at the initiating event that resulted in the creation of all matter that exists in the known universe. All that initially came to be then went through numerous transformations, resulting in the creation of all the atom types that currently exist from what was primarily hydrogen at first. Those transformations were made possible through gravitational attraction (a Fundamental Rule), which eventually resulted in nucleosynthesis in stars and in their explosions and collapses. These materials, attracted to each other, formed new stars and now solid planets from the material produced within the earlier stars. Some of these too again collapsed or exploded, repeating the cycle again.

    You, the reader, are thus the result of billions of years of star born nucleosynthesis and multiple supernova explosions, leading eventually to the formation of the Earth and the life on it. You are of stardust.

  • Biology - Per the Cosmology section above, all that is what you are made up of eventually came together as our solar system and then the Earth formed. Then, something extraordinary happened. Biology. Animated and reproductive life then formed from that which was inherently lifeless. Whether within the living or lifeless, atoms and molecules do react with each other, as they naturally are at liberty to do. Importantly, however, is that within an environment that was reactive but lifeless, "life" then came to be.

    ... Click here to read the entire Biology section ...

    cells and biology pic
    Today, all that is alive on this planet can consider itself part of a lineage of replicating processes, starting off simply but over time becoming more complex, that began perhaps 3 billion or more years ago on this Earth. Not quite everlasting living, and perhaps not likely to endure the events that may transpire as our sun burns through its fuel, but not bad. And certainly a longer amount of time than any of the individual participants themselves had participated with it.

    You, the reader, are thus a participant in an extraordinarily long and rich and varied living process, and one that will continue forward for a very, very, long time. You are thus stardust that has become part of a maintained living process that, among other things, is actually able to consider that it is made up of stardust that itself is not alive, although the process it is involved with is.

    As time moves forward, these life processes evolve.

  • Mathematics - Incredibly, what one finds as one studies cosmology, biology, and any of the other disciplines that can be examined from a scientific perspective is that ALL of them can be described and understood using mathematically based models. So far, all of them. There are areas that are examined scientifically that we don't have good mathematical models for yet. For them, it is because they are not well understood today. As we better understand them, we will also have mathematical models that work well for them.

    ... Click here to read the entire Mathematics section ...

    Einstein math pic
    It is a wonderful fact that so many spiritually influential aspects of All That Is have the extraordinary feature, perhaps even as a Fundamental Rule, that they all adhere consistently to mathematically oriented models and descriptions.

    Quite a bit that we consider personally significant, and thus quite Spiritual, is governed by the mathematical foundation that describes these through and through!


Non Verifiable Areas of Truthful Spiritual Significance
"Everything will be all right in the end. So, if it's not all right, then it is not yet the end!"
- The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

What Can Be Said:
This is a difficult section to write. It is not clear how to craft this such that it can be received as Credible Truth. I do understand that if it were written with such compelling rhetoric that you found the narrative appealing or convincing, and you perceived the author as likeable, and something entertaining was included here and there, that many would accept this section as credible and true. However, that style of delivery, and especially that style of delivery as a device for gaining the embrace of this message as Truth is not what ConserveLiberty is all about.

In fact, the audience that is primarily influenced by good rhetoric is not even the target audience for ConserveLiberty.

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Here's the thing about "non-verifiable areas of Truthful Spiritual Significance". If a statement is non-verifiable, how can it be proven, to you or others, that it is in fact actually true? By non-verifiable, ConserveLiberty means not empirically testable, which means we can't invoke it whenever desired in order to test or examine it. And why can't we do that? Because these areas of spirituality are not something that we control.

So in short, I cannot prove that any of what I might mention in this section is actually the result of something truthfully spiritual AND of the category that is non-verifiable.

... Click here to read the entire What Can Be Said section ...

Nonetheless, you may be able to perceive that something happened outside the realm of verifiable truth or verifiable science with this posting. That will be fine. If you get there, you'll get that something happened. And, if you are still with me, then you will understand that neither you nor I know what exactly happened, or why.


The Event:
This event was chosen to recount because at the time of this writing it was the most recent significantly profound example, with the most profound impact yet that I've experienced. Or, maybe not.

A while back I was riding my motorcycle. It was a very neutral ride, just coasting in neutral, no hurry, no "testosterone" action, an intended half mile coast to a friend's house. The road was quite safe, no traffic, smooth, wide, uneventful. In actuality, I can't state as a fact that this describes the situation for this specific event at all. Why? I had made this same ride hundreds of times over several years in this same exact way to this same friends house at the same time of day. So I am assuming I made this ride in the same way. But on this day, the bike went down. Since it was intended to be a very short slow ride within a gated neighborhood with very little traffic, I was not wearing a helmet. My head hit the pavement, breaking my skull in several places. The resulting loss of consciousness and trauma meant that while I certainly had the ride in my short term memory, the ability to transfer that to long term memory was now offline. Short term memory being volatile means that after a little while, the memory of what happened was lost. This is typically observed for many accidents of this type. But in my case, not only did the ability to store long term memory go offline, but several other rational, analytical, and spiritual functions that together I understand as me went offline as well. As an example, my ability to store long term memory was offline for about two weeks. Really.

... Click here to read the entire Event section ...

Jumping ahead, I was released after 3.5 weeks, and had 2 months of occupational and speech therapy at home. That ended because I was doing so well. That was not the expected result for me, however. Docs did think I would improve after returning home, because many do, and I was healthy before the accident. However, while the range of recovery for individuals is broad considering the whole group, full recovery is not expected. I had recovered nearly fully within 4 months of the accident, which caused unexpected and astounded surprise to the physicians and surgeons that had treated me. A more usual recovery period is 12-18 months, and does not result in full recovery.

There are only two people who had not been worried at any time about my making a good recovery. The first was my mother, who had seen me at my worst, days after the accident. The second was me. And for different reasons.


Resonances
Without getting overly specific, there are a number of areas having spiritual significance that have been "on-line" throughout my life. While they may seem obvious, they are not definable from an empirical perspective. Many will see some of these in play in their own lives, to more or less of a degree than they are or have been within my life. However, because these were active and real in my own life before, at the time of, and after the event I have described, I wound up recovering rather surprisingly fully from the injuries the accident inflicted.

This is not intended to imply that the empirically understood elements of my experience were not also essential to my recovery. The fast discovery, ambulance services, surgery, hospital care, etc., were most certainly important components of why I recovered well. However, the important point being made in this section is that other non-empirical aspects were also at play, and significantly so. The surgeon, for example, elated by my recovery and responding to my thanks for his skills, said (approximately) to me, "I am not responsible for why you have turned out so well. Yes, I did remove and replace broken skull fragments, and relieved the pressure on your brain allowing it to return to its normal size and positioning. And that was really important. But that's all I did. I performed no other additive or corrective surgery. All this healing you have experienced you have done on your own. And I have no idea what more I could have done to have improved your recovery more than you're experiencing. You have been very lucky. We're all feeling really grateful."

I do not know why these resonances have been so wonderfully present throughout my whole life, including at this time. Nor do I understand to what degree specifically and mechanistically they contributed to my surprisingly positive outcome. I have no idea what or whether anything that I have done or experienced in my life has enabled or encouraged their action in my own life. And, none of these are or have been at any time under my control, nor can I call upon or induce their influence through some willful act of my own. I am, however, most grateful for their existence and my participation in and harmony with them.

For reasons discussed earlier, I cannot elaborate more specifically on the meaning of these. But you are encouraged to recognize how they may be active in your own life:
    lotus pic
  • The Resonance with The Living
  • The Healing Resonance
  • The Resonance with Change and Adaptation
  • The Natural Environment Resonance
  • The Ability to Recognize and Engage with what is Fact and Truth and Known, and to distinguish factual information from Interpretation and Narrative that is not Factually Known (The Bullshit Filter)
  • The Resonance with Friendship and Family
  • The Memory Resonance
  • The Orientation to Solution




Moving Forward
There are a few primary declarations that are important to keep in mind as we think about the significance of this posting. Whether they work for you or not is dependant on you and your Filtering. However, these are the perspectives that CL approached the creation of this entry with:
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  • Harmony with That Which Is can only happen if we approach our understanding, and thus our perception, of all that we are able to interact with honestly. Truth exists. Truth is not simply whatever our imagination wants it to be, or thinks it should be. Truth is actually What It Is.

  • As organic individuals, our means for interacting with the Truth is dependant on how we are built to detect it, interpret it, and respond to it. Thus, our Filters are instrumental to our approach to a harmonic relationship with All That Is. Some are built for the harmonic relationship, and some are not.

  • Since Harmony happens only Truthfully, and a harmonic relationship with All That Is depends upon our Filtering, then it quite obviously follows that Harmony can only be achieved by organic individuals that are At Liberty to perceive and behave within their environment as their Filters, in ensemble, move them to live instinctively.

  • This resource thus advocates for the Conservation of Liberty

  • Finally, All That Is is comprised of aspects that are able to be studied and understood empirically, through the scientific method. Through these methods an understanding of the Truth of how these aspects work can be achieved via a direct, skeptical path. That path, of course, may be complex and lengthy, and it certainly isn't complete today.

    Yet, there are other aspects to All That Is that are not easily understood through empirical methods, if empirical methods can even be applied to them at all. There are truthful facts and interpretations of these non-verifiable aspects of All That Is that can be participated with.

    A truthful relationship with both the verifiable and non-verifiable aspects of All That Is is required for full Harmony to be achieved by an organic organism. Both aspects are Spiritual. Both aspects are What It Is.

It is thus so important to recognize that the non-verifiable spiritual aspects of All That Is are as much a part of "the mechanism" that generates That Which Happens as are the empirically verifiable spiritual aspects.

Many people already understand this. Where confusion is introduced is when non-truthful AND non-verifiable narratives are offered as Truthful either by people who do not know any better and simply misinterpret what it actually happening with a non-truthful perspective, or, when those who DO know better decide to pass off the untruthful as Truthful because of the advantages that may come to them due to the gullibility of the naturally faithful. The former is simply ignorant. The latter is corrupt. In either case, the gullible are misled.

The challenge to ConserveLiberty readers is, "How do we allow for non-verifiable aspects of All That Is and yet skew our attention to a higher percentage of the truthful rather than the false versions." And of course, "How do we know we are even doing that, since this dimension of the spiritual is non-verifiable?"

Perhaps a suggestion might be helpful. Of course, perhaps is might not be.

Even though the non-verifiable aspects of the spiritual are not able to be controlled or managed in a way that allows empirically oriented research, confirmation, and understanding of them ... it is also true that these "resonances" often occur more than once. Thus, even though one cannot control when the non-validatable will happen, and for how long, it may be true that these will evidence themselves at times that we cannot control. We simply need to be watching for their "signature". If we see it occurring multiple times, then it is possible we are seeing something Real even though we cannot dictate or control when we see it.

In the case of the motorcycle incident and the resultant outcome, at an abstract level this is not the only time Resonance with the Living, Resonance with Healing, and other of the resonances were encountered under circumstances that were a bit less normal or usual and were actually a bit more unusual or unexpected. On seeing this evidence itself multiple times over a significant period of time, one can eventually theorize that perhaps a resonance with a non-verifiable aspect of Creation from time to time has become apparent.

And that is what occurred to me as I progressively came back more on line, one feature after another, through the various spiritual dimensions as they reexpressed themselves. And so after a time, while still in the hospital, I found myself thinking to myself, "Is this actually a consistent result that one might expect from a Resonance with the Living that has been active with me at various times throughout my entire life? It may very well be true that I am going to get through this OK, which is why I am getting through this now. And, although I will take whatever I am given, it would be pretty cool to find that I have experienced an outstanding recovery from this."

"I suppose, then, I just need to Move Forward. Faithfully. Without a request. But with gratitude for what may turn out to be a wonderful outcome, for sure."



freedom to be pic Consider thoughtfully.











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