The Way Fayer

There are many lenses through which we can view the world, many modes by which we can live our lives. These modes—religion, philosophy, science, math, politics, logic, language—are simply human adaptations to compensate for the ambiguity of the world around us. They help us organize the various parts of it so we can feel safer and more in control. Nevertheless, the world continues to ebb and flow to the beat of its own drum. It is autonomous. There is no doubt that human beings have a profound influence on the world (we are a part of it after all), but the control that it has on us is far more authoritative. We are subjugated to life and death, confined to a limited number of years that are, in many ways, out of our control.

Even coincidence and luck, in all of their seeming unpredictability, good or bad, are to be expected. They are a part of the natural order. This is particularly strange because it suggests that chaos is calculated, and it blurs the line between man-made representations of truth as each category overlaps with the next. The world is a continuum.

Continuum: a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.

How can anything truly be unnatural if it is contained and happening within the natural world? Perceptions of disorder arise because we cannot grasp what is happening around us certainly enough for it to be the case all the time. We can describe the world in our own terms, but that will always fall short of objective, absolute reality. This reality is the sword that pierces and runs through the different structures of belief, causing them to bleed into one another and proving that none of them adequately capture truth like the sword itself … even the systems that represent it.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius claims, “ … to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad.” That is because good and bad are both a part of a continuum; they are one process. Both are a part of the natural order and necessary for the refinement of the individuals aspiring to transcend the confinement of mortality through the utilization of spirit and heart. The tension created between good and evil makes us who we are, and as long as we let it guide us toward what is true, hope will not put us to shame.

The beauty of this is that it prompts us to wonder and ask questions, which is the prerequisite for growth. Additionally, it requires that we adopt fluid systems of belief that can adapt to truth as we experience it in real time.

Life is such a precious opportunity because it gives us a chance to experience. Without life, we would be nothing. It is such a wondrous gift that not to explore the depths of it seems irresponsible. Any living thing that opposes life must be Satanic or animalistic in nature, for it lacks reverence for or enough sophistication to recognize the very thing that breathes life into dust.

Given the unimaginable unlikelihood of your existence and reading of this particular text in this particular language at this particular time and place, you should be grateful for such a blessing. Even those who are suffering against the worst of opposition have a chance to make their life more meaningful by letting perseverance mold them or set an example for others.

Returning to the modes of human adaptation, religion is perhaps the most profound. This is because it prompts its followers to faithfully submit to that transcendent reality that we can’t take for ourselves. It attempts to articulate the mystery of the divine and its relationship with human affairs, stretching all the way back to the foundations of the world. The idea of God or gods implicates another realm of being, one that we cannot comprehend but through revelation. However, religion itself is not the sword. The sword is what religion tries to follow, and this makes it abundantly clear that religion can be just as dangerous as any other form of human perception (if it follows the wrong sword). This means that we must be careful to worship what is truly divine and not the structures of belief that limit its infinitude. Finally, we must be vigilant for anything that bridges the gap between man and God, and there is only one person I can think of who accomplished this in totality: Jesus Christ.

The other modes of conceptualization primarily operate within the bounds of perception, sometimes even implicating that human knowledge alone is sufficient. In other words, they try to make sense of the world from our perception of it. In Cosmos by Carl Sagan, Sagan boldly proclaims in the first sentence, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” This is a presumptuous thing to say given how much we don’t know. It also relies far too heavily on human knowledge to explain the universe, when all we are really capable of doing is describing it through our own constructions (i.e. language, technology, formulas, etc.). This is a perfect example of category error, or extrapolating information from one “category” into another where it does not belong.

Instead, morality, knowledge, and life must be seen as a continuum.

The way I see it, one end of the morality continuum is heaven and the other hell. One side encapsulates divinity and the other depravity. What is divine is characterized by the quintessential presence of good that overlaps with human consciousness but extends beyond it eternally. Meanwhile, depravity is the malignant spirit of evil that overlaps with human consciousness but extends infinitely below us. The ends of this continuum have no end. You can’t ever reach the ultimate good or evil (not in this life), meaning we can always be better or worse. Sanctification is the act of ascending into the light and desecration that of descending into the darkness.

The continuum is like a river with two currents … make sure you are on the side heading into the day and not the night. If you are positive that you are moving in the right direction, the river will take care of the rest. When you are on the right side, life will come from you and not at you.

What lies beyond? We don’t know exactly. If we knew, we wouldn’t need faith. Hope is the faith of positive expectations: optimism. Despair is the faith of negative expectations: pessimism. Don’t fall into the trap of having false hope, for even lightning can make the sky appear blue at night.

How do you know if you are moving in the right direction? The knowledge continuum relies on having an appropriate attitude. Openness and curiosity is essential because we live in an uncertain world, so without asking questions and admitting the existence of unknown variables, you will never find answers and will undermine the necessity of faith. Second, figure out what you are prioritizing. What is your life philosophy? Never prioritize something that is unstable. While it is perfectly reasonable and honorable to want something like a simple life with a loving family, when you start to glorify happiness and material success, you put yourself and your family at risk. It is not a strong enough foundation because it is not guaranteed and will buckle under the weight of the world. Therefore, it is better to have a strong foundation on which to build your family.

As you can see, this involves a delicate balance between fluidity and order. It is an adherence to the continuum—especially the part which lies beyond—that embraces its ambiguous lines. We often try to organize everything in life, resulting in a segregation of belief, status, personality, and other human characteristics. These different “lenses” attempt to compensate for uncertainty and are in place make the world seem more logical. Yet, trying to organize everything into its own category becomes confusing (sometimes dangerous) because it cannot account for the overlap, which can summon prejudices.

Logic can only take us so far. In Dune, Frank Herbert wrote, “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” This quote is profound because it accounts for the inadequacy of our adaptations. At the end of the day, objective reality must exist outside of our perceptions because our minds cannot change it. Simply because I claim that the earth is flat does not make it so. It is within this incomprehensible objective reality that God resides.

Science, much like logic, can only take us so far. It is a tool created by humans to help us better understand the world empirically. Nevertheless, empirical truth only answers half of the question.

The universe (or its Creator) will have to answer for itself. This makes faith in the unknown crucial for human sanity and survivability. It is through embracing the unknown that we become more knowledgeable.