abtw777

Let me start by saying that I think, as people, we are always longing for home, but that actually we never quite reach it. Life’s a quest for home that’s never accomplished. I think that this should inform our living and our building in some way, but at the moment I’m not sure how. Should we, for instance, try to build for eternity in order to defy the contingencies that life throws at us? Or should we accept the precarity of our existence and build with only the lightest of touches on the Earth? At the moment I am leaning more towards this lightness of touch option. Our homes are the physical manifestation of who we believe ourselves to be and what is important in our lives. They are also the means by which we achieve some of the key things in our lives such as raising a family, or perhaps running a business from home or simply having a safe refuge from a busy life lived in the outside world. So, I have taken to describing this as ‘celebrating home’. Just as, hopefully, in oth...

Deep Ecologist writer Joanna Macey says that our starting point in relating to the Universe should be Gratitude. The Earth has given us life and hopefully also health. She provides our food and everything else we rely on for our continued existence. Perhaps you could stretch this and call it Providence – or even Grace. I think we can believe in Grace even without any religious affiliations. Somehow life exists and thrives despite all the odds stacked against it. Somehow too, especially when we are engaged in some creative activity (which is most of the time) – there is a strength that seems to come from beyond ourselves. I think it is not a good idea to presume to know the origin of this Grace. I think it is better if it is considered part of the Mystery of life – of which nothing can be said. However, I do believe that we can try to be the means of Grace in the world. This would be a true and pragmatic form of spirituality – not abstract and other-worldly, but rooted in the h...

From Theoria, a summary of thoughts thus far: The universe, viewed from the ‘outside’ – as a ‘thing-in-itself’ is fundamentally mysterious. It might be that the universe is no more than the sum of its parts – in which case, it might be known from the inside and knowing it from the outside is not a problem. But it may be that it’s more than the sum of its parts. ‘The One’ suggests this second alternative. From ‘the One’ there is a cascade of emergence. Order emerges from chaos – creates ‘the Many’. Part of order is quantum potential, from which particles emerge. From particles, the chemical elements. From elements, chemical compounds. From chemical compounds, life. From life, consciousness. There may be further stages of emergence, in a way leading right back to ‘the One’. It might be that all of this is within the bounds of our science – that every stage is a purely natural process. Or it may be something we choose to describe as ‘supernatural’ is going on. Or it might be th...

This essay started out as an attempt to put all the things that I’d most like to tell people into one or two pages. After many revisions, this is the final version – at least for now! It’s a very condensed version of my thinking, and I’d point readers to some of my longer works for more detail – in particular Conatus and Truth HQ. The ‘emergence’ of particles from the quantum void is sort of assumed. Even although there aren’t really particles, just flux in the energy of the void. Flux that might be localised, but can also be cosmic. So the idea of ‘quantum entanglement’ – put simply, the idea that two ‘particles’ could influence one another instantaneously – is just a quirk of our insistence on particles. There are only ‘events’ – and these can be cosmic or local in scale. This notion, perhaps rather bizarrely, takes us to agency. Our normal conception of agency involves cause and effect. But – and following on from the above – our understanding of cause and effect is like our...

All that follows is almost pure conjecture on my part, so be warned! What would it be like to view the universe from the outside? That is the first question. We might describe this as the ‘view from eternity’ or a ‘God’s eye view’. By definition, there can be only one universe, so the idea of seeing it all at once is at least conceivable. It might be that this outside view of the universe would tell us nothing that we don’t already know. We might, in other words, be able to figure out all that can be known about the universe from the ‘inside’. But it might be that the universe, considered all together as ‘the One’, is quite different from the way it seems from the inside – from our point of view amidst ‘the many’. However, we are led to the conclusion that any question we may ask about the One – if indeed it is something more than just the sum of all the parts of the universe – any question would be impossible to formulate, let alone to answer. So that is our rather uncomforta...