Idealism

I’ve recently reformed my thought on the nature of existence (helping me to further reconcile my philosophy with Christianity, etc.- as well as helping me to truly understand previously confusing concepts such as “friendship”, “love”, and “trust”.

summing up this new perspective:

I [now] believe that everything both exists and does not exist:

(1) does not exist because the identity is limited to our perception – every moment, our perception changes; thus, every moment everything in existence [that is observed by at least one entity] dies, and every moment everything that exists has just come into existence (is “born”). this is equivalent to Heraclitus’s “Everything Flows” philosophy.

(2) does exist exist because our perception makes it real. While the identity of everything changes infinitesimally, the spiritual energy held by objects (regardless of their identity) is retained.

To clarify: While our perception can only identify the finite manifestation of something, everything has infinite potential, because Spirit [and thus spiritual energy] is infinite, and exists outside perception.

Every thing’s existence is determined by three aspects: Essence, Nature, and Character.

These three things correspond to three agents of the self, each created with the purpose of serving these aspects:

The Id was created to serve ones’ Essence.

The Ego was created to serve one’s Nature.

The SuperEgo was created to serve one’s Character.

(1) Potentiality: This is the amount of spiritual energy that an object possesses- what makes it “real”. Spirit as a whole is infinite, encompassing everything (and held by everything), and thus knowing and seeing everything, and is the perfect form of God.

The Potentiality of an entity is determined by its Essence, which is served by the Id.

(2) Actuality: This is the amount of and the number of limitations placed on an object, and determines how much it can be appreciated. (How much something can be appreciated is dependent on how many standards imposed on it, because in order for any entity to be appreciated, this must be standards to separate it from something else (i.e. black could not exist without white).

Because limiting something makes it imperfect, I firmly believe that it’s impossible for anything perfect to be beautiful, as imperfection is prerequisite to beauty. If something is considered “art”, it is because one’s perception of it equates to imperfection. Actuality equates to Hegel’s Nature, and is the imperfect form of God.

The Actuality of an entity is determined by its Nature, which is served by the Ego.

*note: Hegel refers to Nature as being “Real” (reality), and and to Idea as being “Ideal”. Idea is the equivalent of what I call “Spirit“, whereas Hegel refers to “Spirit” as the human perception of the Ideal. From this perspective, the Absolute would be God, Spirit would be the imperfect manifestation of God, actualizing itself through perception.

See here: http://dictionary.babylon.com/Hegel#arts

Also of interest: http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/europ19/lect_4.html

These two first defining factors are the most important, so to clarify the relationship between them:

Actuality (Nature) is Spirit corrupting itself. For God to be self-aware and experience himself, it is a necessity that he sin against himself by imprisoning himself in material form.

Potentiality (Idea) is Absolute in its complete form (the perfect form of God), and is continually dispersed and exchanged among everything that is (what is actualized), in the form of spiritual energy.

Spiritual energy is both perfect and imperfect simultaneously:

Because it has no inherent identity, it is perfect; spiritual energy takes on the identity of the entity(s) it possesses, but because everything dies and is reborn every moment (as noted by Heraclitus), spiritual energy can perceptively be seen as perfect, because everything that spiritual energy possesses changes infinitesimally, causing spiritual energy to also change. Because it’s impossible to distinguish between these moments due to the limits of perception, spiritual energy is both finite and infinite, because every entity it possesses is an indeterminate. Thus, spiritual energy is simultaneously Nature and Idea; it serves as an intermediary between the two, synthesizing Spirit.

This resolves my misgivings that any perception we have of God is flawed due to our limited perception (and thus blasphemic) – Because Spirit is the perceived form of the Absolute (God), God [as we perceive him] is both perfect and imperfect, and both infinite and finite.

Because our identities are perpetually and constantly changing, the identity(s) of God is also constantly and perpetually changing; since each change is infinitesimal, we cannot perceive one identity from the next, so perceptively God has no identity, resolving the problem of being able to appreciate a God who is infinite (limitations are prerequisite to appreciation).

This would also imply that we are both part of God and not part of God, but I’ll have to suspend judgment on that matter for the time being.

When Idea is channeled as spiritual energy, it gives potential to the entity(s) that it possesses, and because the amount of spiritual energy possessing any given entity is limited, the potential of something is determined by the amount of spiritual energy it contains.

Thus, because spiritual energy is both finite and infinite, every thing’s potential is both finite and infinite.

So Nature (Actuality) is meaning, and Idea (Potentiality) is the power upon which meaning is built.

Potential is inherently infinite, but un-actualized potential is meaningless. Actuality on the other hand is not possible without potential, and ‘limited’ by the potential of the entity being limited. Therefore, in order for an entity to reach its potential (to actualize the greatest amount of potential possible) requires a perfect Balance. As God (Spirit) accomplishes this through Absolute Spirit, he is the only one who can be called perfect.

Perfection achieved through this Balance is also known as Love, although love as we know it is incremental – an unreachable ideal.

Finally, the third, and most sociologically important aspect:

(3) Character (Spirit): Is ultimately the meaning of life, which in turn means that God [in his imperfect manifested form] is what gives everything meaning. Because God is meaning (being Spirit), and God can only give life meaning by being imperfection, life itself only has meaning because we are sinners. This is in accord with Bohme’s cosmology (the Fall of Man was necessary for God to achieve self-awareness and have a relationship with us).

In the words of Hegel, Spirit [Character] is Idea both actualizing itself and being self-aware of itself.

While The Essence has potential, and the Nature actualizes that potential, no entity can bear meaning alone, because meaning itself is derived from the exchange of spiritual energy; specifically, it is the byproduct of this exchange.

Furthermore, since spiritual energy equates to power (which is possessed by entities in varying levels), the meaning of life is ultimately derived from the exchange of power. This being the case, the meaning of life is control, which is precisely what I realized (though at the time had very little justification for it) several months ago in my Popularity post:

In that post, I wrote the following regarding how to achieve popularity:

There are two key components of being popular:

(1) People having perceived control over you.

(2) People perceiving you as worth controlling.

Assuming that every entity in existence has an Id (Essence) and Ego (Nature):

Everything is possessed by spiritual energy; the Id exists to send and receive spiritual energy (compare to the OSI Physical Layer).

The energy is converted by the Ego into a usable form (compare to the OSI Data Link Layer)

This is where the SuperEgo comes in: The purpose of the SuperEgo is to send and receive transfer requests (just like the OSI Network Layer), to facilitate the transfer of spiritual energy.

The SuperEgo can be further divided into the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious, which would equate to the TCP/IP Model’s Link Layer and Internet Layer, respectively.

The following is very important!

*Note*: The Character (and thus its agent the SuperEgo) does not exist to transfer energy: It exists to facilitate that transfer.

You might then ask, How is it that we are able to transfer spiritual energy (i.e. communicate) if we apparently have no means to?

The answer is quite terrifying: We don’t!

How does this work? When we ‘communicate’ with other entities, we send and receive exchange requests, but instead of transferring spiritual energy, we send and receive more exchange requests instead.

Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is known as “insanity”, so why do we do that? It’s because in our mind, we have sent and received data, because we did transfer some spiritual energy to process the request to transfer the actual data.

To clarify this: Humans are extremely complicated beings– in fact, “the soul” developed as a result of our evolution. The soul is essentially a miniature version of Absolute Spirit, and as such makes for an extremely efficient spiritual energy collector. We collect so much spiritual energy in fact, that we can’t even come close to handling it. To put this into perspective, we all have enough spiritual energy stored in our soul that to say we are demi-gods may well be an underestimation.

The transfer of spiritual energy produces meaning, as explained earlier. So because we all contain such an immense amount of spiritual energy, a single transfer exchange is so *meaningful* that we are completely overwhelmed by it.

This is where the Character (and thus the SuperEgo) really comes in: The SuperEgo’s job is to filter spiritual energy enough that it’s ready for exchange.

Just like a computer network, people can choose to accept or reject transfer requests.

There are two main types of transfer requests in sociology:

(a) request to send spiritual energy

(b) request to receive spiritual energy

(1) People having perceived control over you: This refers to the communication requests to send spiritual energy.

Every time you communicate, be it through language, art, music, action,- anything you do, you are sending spiritual energy. This energy is the byproduct of your actions- your very existence, and several phenomena such as emotions, logic, and intuition form as the byproduct of that exchange. To experience these byproducts, you must accept the transfer requests, and for someone else to experience it, they must also accept it.

To accept any spiritual energy requires a degree of trust. Trust itself is the natural result of spiritual energy exchange (by means of such phenomena as the Psychological Bond), but paradoxically, such exchanges could not be completed without some trust to begin with. Therefore we must assume that although trust is required for spiritual energy, trust is ultimately built upon a more basic principle. Perhaps that principle is hardwired into our system, as an evolutionary necessity.

By accepting spiritual energy, an entity is effectively sacrificing a degree of control, and thus must value your energy enough to make that compromise. If your energy then appears to them to be not worth what they thought it was, any trust they had of you will go away, because in their eyes you deceived them.

The first element- perceived control over you, requires that you are discerning enough to give them only the best of your spiritual energy, packed into very little words– this prevents the exchange of “junk data”. Very few people like to sort through the Spam category of their email box just to find the very rare good stuff, and it would be very inconsiderate to force people to do that. So when communicating with others, be careful with your words, making them as meaningful as possible.

How you “package” the energy you try to send to others determines whether or not they will accept it, and how meaningful that data is to them determines if they will continue to accept data from you. Ideally, you would want people to find your data so valuable that they would actively seek you out and request the data from you, rather than you having to request to send.

So it could be said that, if at all possible, don’t send requests to transfer data- let people send requests to receive. In this position, you will have complete control over them, and they will enjoy that control, and effectively ask to be controlled.

This method of exchange roughly equates to potentiality. By sending a request to send spiritual energy, you are essentially putting yourself out there, saying “This is what I’ve got.” Then in step (2), a person decides if they like what you’ve got, which- if they do, they will proceed to inquire about your data.

 (2) People perceiving you as worth controlling: This refers to the spiritual requests to receive spiritual energy

If I were to keep my mouth shut and communicate solely through my acti0ns, I would probably be much more popular than I am now, simply because I am worth controlling. My abundance of knowledge and skills, gift of insight, and talent for learning new things– I am a gold mine. But most people are afraid to mine me, for fear of me caving in on them. Although I am worth controlling though, I am perceived as uncontrollable, because I overwhelm people with too much spiritual energy.

When people ask you questions, or engage in conversations with the intention of learning from you in some way, they are sending you requests to receive spiritual energy. Of the two types of exchange, this is the most safe method, as although either person can and will get rejected, there is very little risk of getting overwhelmed by spiritual energy, Because everyone involved has a good idea of what do expect (they get what they ask for).

This method of exchange roughly equates to actuality. If they like what you have to offer (your potential), they will request your data, to find out more about it.

A person is more likely to be accepted if they limit communication, because there is little risk of being rejected, as they are easy to control. But the value of such acceptance is miniscule if those that accept such a person can’t do much with the data they accept.

It’s thus very important to find that Balance between actuality and potentiality– or in this case, requests to send and receive data, to maximize the level to which you are able to influence people.

note: on the OSI model, human beings are only at the third layer (networking). We’ve still got a long way to go!