Having-ness: The sense of having. Have I got it or have I got it?
“This is mine.” We can call it possession, ownership, or having-ness.
To want must come from a sense of lack. “I ain’t got it.” Do beings of different consciousness experience lack? Do plants long for the sun at night? Do animals yearn?
Hunger and thirst are obvious lacks which every mammal experiences. What of more subtle desires?
Zero is a bubble. An imaginary nothingness surrounded by the real something-ness of everything. It can pop in an instant. Its surface tension is only as strong as the imagination itself.
We explore the mystery of cause and effect. In most of our mechanical actions we can see a linear path of cause and effect. Newton described the common behavior of cause and effect. Yet with more information discrepancies appear which the old model fails to explain. Yet the engineer still uses more Newton than Quantum Mechanics.
What explains the relationship of cause and effect? In an effort to understand these forces we originally attribute them to supernatural agency. We personify the forces. We give them a face and a name. Then we treat these forces as if they were people. Animism. We pray to the storm. We ask favors from the gods. We beseech them. Much as a child might ask favors from a more powerful adult.
What causes the wind to blow or the sun to shine? Not some abstract force to be cut up and demystified with the power of formulae but a force with a Persona. Force with a face and a name.
Human beings live in the now and in our imagination. We imagine the past and the future as if they were here. We seek not just to imagine the future but to cause our vision of it to come into being. We see to mold the future and master the future. We develop our power of anticipation. We want to accurately predict the future. We plan. Oh how we plan.
Death is either our insight into the supernatural or our first inspiration to delusion. My friend was here and now he is gone. We take special effort in burying out dead. Why? Why bury our dead with tools, flowers, and other good things? Because he is dead and he is not dead. We imagine him to be alive in another place. “My friend is dead and gone.” His body might lay there, a husk. I imagine that somehow he lives. It is too much to think of him as ending. So I tell myself that he is alive. Not his body, but his soul, yes his soul. Since the body is dead then his soul must be the real him. It is insubstantial but more important than his body.
To honor his soul I will bury his body with ceremony. I will bury his tools with him. I will bury beautiful flowers with him.
This met the pinnacle with the Egyptians. What a way to go! They really took it with them. Which set the stage for the grave robber. Now a grave is a perfect place the microorganisms that do the essential decomposition work. These dis-assemblers for the great organic recycling program can be highly effective as disassembling living organic tissue as well. So began the idea of the curse. If you entered the tomb then you would die. It was not by a supernatural agency, but by an unknown and invisible agency. Microscopic decomposers that were only doing their job get read as a supernatural power from the dead.
The mystery of cause and effect, with limited data, leads to erroneous conclusions. What makes the wind blow? Is it the gods? Or is it the effect of the sun heating the earth along with the Coriolis effect.
We are now in a universe of forces with names, but no faces. Cause and effect can be traced with the proper formula.
We have stripped away the anthropomorphic layer of out understanding. Taken down the insulation and now we look upon the raw mechanical universe. It is a heartless and mindless machine, totally alien to humanity.
I am not faithful and I am not religious, I am only a little bit superstitious. So I find all of this generally unappealing.
The rapidness of change and the massive influx of information is too much for us to digest. We drown in a sea of our own creation.
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