The word "nomos" in ancient Greek means both law (and tradition, custom, mores) and musical tune--the Greeks understood that pattern was the underlying structure of the cosmos.
Paradoxically, the Incarnation is--while seemingly messy like all biological life--is perhaps the ultimate expression of the deepest ineluctable pattern of Being.
The Classical Greeks adorned their temples with images of their gods. Holes were drilled into the hands and feet of the statues of the gods, which were then fastened with pegs into place on the proscenium of the temple.
Pontius Pilate presided over the greatest epiphany of all time when he sentenced Yeshua to be nailed by his hands and feet to a cross.
The execution of Yeshua was crafted to maximise his humiliation and agony. Fatefully, his death fused the human form of Greek gods with a thousand years of mysterious Hebrew poetry prophesying the coming of a Holy One, a Son of God, the creator and Lord of the Universe.
The Romans intended to mock Yeshua as he died hanging from a cross in a parody of the way Greek and Roman gods were affixed to temples.
Unwittingly, they chose the very form of execution whose pattern actually proclaimed his death to be a cosmic revelation of the God-man - he is revealed at the precise location where Heaven and Earth meet: on the vertical and horizontal axes of the nexus of space and time.
Interesting article James. I'm just finishing writing what I hope will be a major book in this domain. It arrived at similar ideas to Levin independently but has also identified a major revolution taking place across science, finally piecing it together so we can see what it's pointing at. I too was once an atheist. And although I'm not a Christian I am a theist. I think you'll love my book (which I guess aims more at the Romanticism label)
Interesting. I feel far too stupid to grasp Levin's work here, but are there any books or articles you recommend for lay-readers? Maybe something by Pierce?
This piece gets into an area of thought that I now consider my neighborhood too. I am not a rationalist, a materialist, a scientist, nor am I a theologian or a spiritual puritan. In fact I don't have much use for epistemological or phenomenological philosophy at all. What I do believe in, which seems to be what you're describing here, is beautiful intuitions and the acceptance that our physical world is not the only world. There are forces at work that we don't understand, and if believing in those forces is useful, then you might as well just call them true. I don't really care what is literally and technically and provably "true," I care what works to build happy lives and stable, fruitful civilizations.
Believing in Greek gods, for instance, can go ahead and be called true if it leads you to live a better life in order to avoid their wrath and be grateful for their bounties. Believing a gun might be loaded is literally false most of the time but leads to a better life through more safety.
And this is also why I believe that Christianity is an objectively good decision to make, even if you can't feel Jesus in your bones. It seems to be the only moral framework that we've ever found that is
- individually practicable
- practical (like an actual recipe for good living)
- and infinitely scalable across any time and place.
The reason to believe in Christian ideals and to live a Christian-ish life is because it simply works. There's something in it that is so plainly useful, it's like magic. It's like a spell you can cast on your own life to make it beautiful.
In short, I believe in stories. May the best story, which resonates with people most deeply across time, win. Because that's ultimately what changes human behavior at scale - not rational argument.
The parts of this that I understand scientifically confirm what I have been shown holistically from my psychedelics experimentation. Everything is just different waves of energy stacked on top of each other in increasingly complex ways and it is all connected via the primordial substrate that I guess we are still calling the platonic realm . If it is true that the human brain is the most complicated machine in the universe, it's difficult for me to conclude that our sentience was simply an accident and it would seem evolution is inherently driven to produce beings capable of becoming nodes of consciousness through which the Absolute can perceive itself. The implications of all this are pretty mind boggling.
The word "nomos" in ancient Greek means both law (and tradition, custom, mores) and musical tune--the Greeks understood that pattern was the underlying structure of the cosmos.
Paradoxically, the Incarnation is--while seemingly messy like all biological life--is perhaps the ultimate expression of the deepest ineluctable pattern of Being.
The Classical Greeks adorned their temples with images of their gods. Holes were drilled into the hands and feet of the statues of the gods, which were then fastened with pegs into place on the proscenium of the temple.
Pontius Pilate presided over the greatest epiphany of all time when he sentenced Yeshua to be nailed by his hands and feet to a cross.
The execution of Yeshua was crafted to maximise his humiliation and agony. Fatefully, his death fused the human form of Greek gods with a thousand years of mysterious Hebrew poetry prophesying the coming of a Holy One, a Son of God, the creator and Lord of the Universe.
The Romans intended to mock Yeshua as he died hanging from a cross in a parody of the way Greek and Roman gods were affixed to temples.
Unwittingly, they chose the very form of execution whose pattern actually proclaimed his death to be a cosmic revelation of the God-man - he is revealed at the precise location where Heaven and Earth meet: on the vertical and horizontal axes of the nexus of space and time.
Interesting article James. I'm just finishing writing what I hope will be a major book in this domain. It arrived at similar ideas to Levin independently but has also identified a major revolution taking place across science, finally piecing it together so we can see what it's pointing at. I too was once an atheist. And although I'm not a Christian I am a theist. I think you'll love my book (which I guess aims more at the Romanticism label)
Interesting. I feel far too stupid to grasp Levin's work here, but are there any books or articles you recommend for lay-readers? Maybe something by Pierce?
This comports with Rupert Sheldrake's research.
This piece gets into an area of thought that I now consider my neighborhood too. I am not a rationalist, a materialist, a scientist, nor am I a theologian or a spiritual puritan. In fact I don't have much use for epistemological or phenomenological philosophy at all. What I do believe in, which seems to be what you're describing here, is beautiful intuitions and the acceptance that our physical world is not the only world. There are forces at work that we don't understand, and if believing in those forces is useful, then you might as well just call them true. I don't really care what is literally and technically and provably "true," I care what works to build happy lives and stable, fruitful civilizations.
Believing in Greek gods, for instance, can go ahead and be called true if it leads you to live a better life in order to avoid their wrath and be grateful for their bounties. Believing a gun might be loaded is literally false most of the time but leads to a better life through more safety.
And this is also why I believe that Christianity is an objectively good decision to make, even if you can't feel Jesus in your bones. It seems to be the only moral framework that we've ever found that is
- individually practicable
- practical (like an actual recipe for good living)
- and infinitely scalable across any time and place.
The reason to believe in Christian ideals and to live a Christian-ish life is because it simply works. There's something in it that is so plainly useful, it's like magic. It's like a spell you can cast on your own life to make it beautiful.
In short, I believe in stories. May the best story, which resonates with people most deeply across time, win. Because that's ultimately what changes human behavior at scale - not rational argument.
The parts of this that I understand scientifically confirm what I have been shown holistically from my psychedelics experimentation. Everything is just different waves of energy stacked on top of each other in increasingly complex ways and it is all connected via the primordial substrate that I guess we are still calling the platonic realm . If it is true that the human brain is the most complicated machine in the universe, it's difficult for me to conclude that our sentience was simply an accident and it would seem evolution is inherently driven to produce beings capable of becoming nodes of consciousness through which the Absolute can perceive itself. The implications of all this are pretty mind boggling.