...ceej, to the extent that communicating our experiences to a mass audience is the intended outcome of personal revelation. Some revelations are important.

Without question, science and the scientific method can be helpful in clarifying the issues we face. But it is only part of the picture, not the whole.

I don't mean to sound esoteric, but the fact is we either believe in an all encompassing truth, or we do not. This simple, binary choice represents our godhead. Alot of perceptions and interpretations flow from the bedrock of this fundamental belief.

Notice also that it is a belief that must be taken on faith. There is no way to scientifically prove the existence of something that is omniscient like an abstract, but absolute, truth. Sensory perception won't pick up something that can not be contrasted, and formulas won't reveal anything beyond some ground state condition that may itself hold the key to the proof. And, of course, science can not disprove the existence of absolute truth, either.

The danger here is that my absolute truth can not be the same as everyone else's absolute truth because, while logically it must be the same, such an entity must be beyond anyone's belief in it. Our beliefs about truth will not impact an absolute truth one iota.

Rather than arguing for or against religion whilst we all worship our sacred cows, why don't we start listing the characteristics of an absolute truth based simply on the phenomena we find ourselves able to identify and describe with maximum precision to one another?

For example, absolute truth must somehow make all things possible in the phenomenal world. One of those things would also clearly have to be an apparent opposition to its very existence. So truth supports the presence of both those who believe in its existence and those who do not. The absolute truth could never be threatened in any way by its opposite because it has no such opposite, hypothetically speaking. There is absolute truth and then there is nothing. Unreality. Perhaps illusion or delusion, but nothing on par with absolute truth.

Alot can be revealed by thought experimenting using such a truth and comparing and contrasting what seems to follow with what shows up in our phenomenal world.

Absolute truth, if it exists, would win any and all arguments for the existence of that which is not true, even before such arguments begin. Since an absolute truth can not, by definition, change, and yet plenty of evidence exists to support the existence, if not the near ubiquity of the phenomenon of relative change, we have our first pickle. The true atheists can leave the bus, game over, we've just reasoned ourselves out of going to anyone's church on Sundays.

How quickly we forget our cognitive commitment, the application of our faith towards the actual experience of an answer to our question. How honest can a question be when we fashion the locus of the expected answer even before we begin to receive any data? The facts of my experience inform me that I can profess to believe in absolute truth until I am blue in the face, but the truth is I tend to believe what my senses tell me I should believe. The sensate experience is full of opposition, contrast and differences, and such experience denies the relevance of absolute totality multiple times in a single second. Depending on traffic.

Absolutes do not lend themselves well to causality, or spacetime continuums. If we are to consider ourselves partnered to absolute truth while at the same time experiencing it like a foreign invader, then the absolute truth must be that cause and effect collapse into the same basic entity in an absolute sense. Causes and effects are the same things since a thousand years is an instant and an instant can be a thousand years. Or a decade. Or some period of temporal experience.

And this is where the mythologies about the fall from grace start making sense to me. Time isn't a horizontal scale, it is vertical. Spacetime is something we drop into and work our way out of as who we think we are is stripped from whom we really are. Perfection projects us out from itself in order to have an experience of imperfection thereby allowing perfect totality to become aware of who and what it is without sacrificing the safety of its absolute perfection.

This model also suggests the existence of a subconscious mind that is the likely conduit of connection back to our original perfection, allowing us all to have an awareness of whom we are by allowing us to experience whom we are NOT. The source of the conscious mind rests in the subconscious; it must be the driving force behind our human experiences. Hypothetically.

I dunno. I see a whole lot more to this spirituality deal than I do with either a blind insistance on the truth of what is NOT, or the agnostic temperment that considers the issue irrelevant. I've had enough collapses of my personality over the years to believe in the direct experience of something within me that was greater than my limited conscious personality. I've had some hay-makers thrown at me that knocked me loopy. But I'm still around and that fact astounds me.

If from this model one can not see the beginnings of western religious philosophy projected back some 2,000 years, you're either sniffing glue or have your head so far engaged with your rectum that you can't see yourself rolling downhill at high speed.

So let the hole the nuns drilled into your skull heal over and you'll stop believing in magical crap and teaching your kids about the Easter Bunny. It's a little shocking at first, but it beats the hell out of someone being able to pick your head up like a bowling ball from far away and throwing you into places you wouldn't ordinarily choose to be.

Like, say, Iraq, just as an example.