Entropy is Not a part of evil - these are two separate problems

The problem of entropy is one that presses upon us the average mortal life perhaps more strongly than evil. 

By "entropy" I mean the universal tendency for beings to experience cumulative adverse change with time: dysfunction, degeneration, disease - and the ultimate manifestation of entropy is death. 

All of these are unavoidable, are universal. 

Traditional Christian theology usually conflates entropy with evil; indeed entropy/ death is usually subsumed within the concept and causes of evil. 

For example, the traditional interpretation of the Adam and Eve story is that they began as good and immortal beings; free from both evil and death. 

With The Fall they chose evil, and at the same time necessarily became mortal - subject to entropy and death. 

(In traditional theology) with the salvation from Jesus Christ we are allowed to return to the primal situation of Adam and Eve - saved from our self-caused punishment of both entropy and evil. 

After their fall; A & E and their descendants also needed to toil in order to live - in effect toil was needed to overcome entropy. 

Because (in effect) entropy meant that, over time, our minds and bodies and the environment are all against us: we must make efforts every day, we need to toil simply to remain alive and functional, but all such efforts are temporary palliative: will inevitably be overcome and will fail.

(In this sense, entropy is a more pervasive problem than evil.) 

And ultimately all of this bad stuff supposedly happens because of The Fall! 

Everything bad is down to an evil choice of ancestors, and its ramifications. 

This is very difficult to comprehend or believe. There seems a gross disproportion between the events described in Genesis, and thousands of years of billions of people's suffering and toil, disease and dying in fighting - and failing to defeat - entropy.   

Well, be that as it may; traditional theology regards evil as primary, entropy as a part of evil: evil is the ultimate cause of entropy. 

Therefore trad-theol has it that we overcome entropy by overcoming sin, where "sin" is understood to mean the manifestations of evil. 

That is; the repentance of evil/sins, leads also to the escape from entropy: leads to eternally healthy and vigorous - and happy - life in Heaven.

I have described elsewhere my understanding that entropy and evil can and should be distinguished, and that they have different causes. 

Entropy is intrinsic to this creation, the one we inhabit now; to the original or primary Creation by God - this creation that we are born-into. 

Heaven can be conceptualized as the answer to entropy; by a second and opt-into creation (i.e. the creation made possible by Jesus Christ) - with resurrection conceptualized as a voluntary re-making without entropy, as leaving-behind entropy. 

So, while traditional Christian theology regards entropy-death as secondary to evil - and regards Heaven as the answer to entropy-death because, in repenting moral sins and having the effect of sins removed by Jesus, we also and simultaneously eliminate entropy. 

But instead; I regard entropy and evil as ultimately distinct concepts: (in this creation) entropy is unavoidable, while evil is a choice. 

However, the confusion and conflation of entropy and evil among Christians seems to be a consequence of the fact that the answer to both entropy and evil is the same: i.e. resurrection and our "escape"/ progression-into eternal, wholly-good life in Heaven; by following Jesus Christ.

In a nutshell: entropy and evil are different problems with different causes in this-world, but both problems are cured by the same treatment: following Jesus Christ to Heaven.

And otherwise they are not cured. One who does Not follow Jesus to Heaven; has thereby chosen to continue to live with entropy and evil. 

 

Note Added: The difference is that:

Entropy is intrinsic to the nature of God's creation - the First creation. 

Evil is about a specific-Being's attitude towards creation: positive, or negative, affiliative or hostile. 

The progression of Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic evil; related to our loving-creator-personal-God, and to Jesus Christ

Christianity is not just about Jesus Christ; it is built upon several other realities:

1. We inhabit a creation - the world is created.

2. The creator is a God, i.e. a personal God (not an abstraction)

3. The creator God is loving towards all the Beings of creation (God might be otherwise, but is not)

In sum: Jesus operates in the context of reality being the creation of a loving (hence necessarily personal) God. 

Jesus is necessary because of the nature of creation: Creation takes place in the midst of primordial chaos. 

Primordial chaos is primal Beings existing without love - without coordination, without harmony; each Being a world unto Himself. 

This is why our mortal reality (termed Primary Creation) is subject to Entropy. Entropy is the spontaneous tendency of creation to revert to primordial chaos. (We experience Entropy in terms of disease, degenerative change, and the inevitability of death for all Beings)

Jesus offers the possibility of permanent and complete escape from entropy and the threat of chaos. 

Evil is the rejection of creation. 

Evil therefore came after creation. 

Evil entails the rejection of love, since love between Beings is what makes creation - creation is the harmony of Beings. 

The first evil is called Luciferic.

Luciferic evil is the assertion of a Being's selfishness ("my" self is all that matters) and the rejection of Love between oneself and other Beings. 

Luciferic evil therefore aspires to use (therefore not destroy) creation; to use creation in order to serve its own selfish will and personal gratification. 

Luciferic evil does not aspire to the damnation of other Beings (i.e. to make them reject resurrection into Heaven); it tends to be indifferent to the spiritual fate of other Beings. 

A Luciferically-evil Being, exploits ruthlessly and without love: desires that any and all other Beings will serve his personal satisfaction. 

In a sense; a Luciferic Being desires that creation will serve his will. This is why he is not against-creation as such. 

It could be said that Luciferic evil hates God (is anti-God; because God is loving), and is indifferent to Jesus.  

The second evil is Ahrimanic. 

Luciferic evil tends to develop into Ahrimanic evil; because Luciferically evil Beings band-together in mutually beneficial alliances, in order more effectively to exploit other-Beings. 

Ahrimanic evil is an alliance of the selfish. 

Ahrimanic evil is anti-God, which it inherits from Luciferic evil; and Ahrimanic evil is in addition anti-Jesus. 

Thus Luciferic = anti-God; whereas Ahrimanic = anti-God plus anti-Jesus. 

Therefore the alliance of the selfish will organize, manipulate and coerce other Beings, aiming that these other Beings will reject salvation: will reject the offer of resurrection to eternal life in Heaven.

In sum; while Luciferic evil desires the exploitation of Beings; Ahrimanic evil desires the damnation of Beings. 

Ahrimanic evil desires damnation because it is more spitefully evil than Luciferic evil. It's desires are not just for selfish gratification; but also for the immiseration of others. 

It could reasonably be said, therefore, that Ahrimanic evil is a greater evil that Luciferic; wanting not just its own satisfaction, but the stripping of satisfaction from others. 

This is why Ahrimanic evil has tended towards depersonalization via bureaucracy. 

The Ahrimanic aim of omni-surveillance and micro-control is not just a positive aspiration for domination; it is also actively directed-against the freedom and agency of other Beings. 

Yet Ahrimanic evil of-itself does not aim at the destruction of other Beings: it aims at domination, not destruction. 

It wants a universe of miserable slaves.

(Indeed; including the "enslavement" of animals, plants, earth and heavenly bodies, and indeed the "mineral" world; permanent utter domination of every-thing, rather than to kill every-thing.) 

And the Ahrimanic desire for damnation of other-Beings is a consequence of being against Freedom and Agency. Salvation is, after all, an eternal choice for resurrected Men to participate in divine creation; which absolutely entails their agency and freedom.   

The third evil is Sorathic. 

Sorathic evil is anti-creation; it aspires ultimately to reduce creation to chaos.

Sorathic evil is directed against all kinds of creation; it is against not only positive Good, but also against Luciferic and Ahrimanic evils - insofar as these seek to exploit or enslave creation. 

Sorathic evil can be considered a completion of the motivational shift from Luciferic to Ahrimanic evil, which is a shift from seeking personal gratification by using other Beings, to a type of personal gratification that enjoys the utter domination of other Beings. 

A qualitative shift from hedonism, to spitefulness. 

Sorathic evil moves on from the desire to dominate the whole of creation, to the desire to destroy all of creation - including oneself, insofar as we all are products of divine creation. 

The Sorathic can be seen as a purely negative form of evil, found in Beings that have lost all capacity for positive personal satisfaction, and can only enjoy destruction.

To summarize: Luciferic evil is pro-creation and anti-God because anti-Love. 

Ahrimanic evil is pro-creation and anti God (anti-Love) and also Jesus (anti-salvation). 

While Sorathic evil is "anti-" all manifestations of creation - including anti- all Beings (including anti-God and anti-Jesus Christ); also anti-Love, and anti-salvation. 

Sorathic evil tends to chaos; but it is not pro-chaos. 

Ultimately, Sorathic chaos is the negation of creation; the end-result of being anti-every-thing...

***

Note on Sin = Entropy and Evil; Salvation being from both Entropy and Evil 

Entropy (termed "Death") and Evil are, together, what is called Sin in the Fourth Gospel. 

Jesus came to save us from Sin - that is, to offer us the chance to reject Sin eternally; live without-sin eternally. 

Thus resurrection into eternal Heavenly Life saves us both from entropy including death (as well as disease and degenerative change); and simultaneously saves us from evil of all kinds. 

Resurrected Eternal Life in Heaven in therefore the Second Creation; which is derived from Primary Creation but operating entirely and eternally on the basis of Love, and without entropy or evil - because Sin is left-behind at resurrection. 

Evil is a subtype of Entropy, in this Pluralistic-Animistic divine creation

I have often written about the twin ultimate-problems (ineradicable insufficiencies) of this, our mortal life; under the headings of Entropy and Evil. 

My understanding of reality is that its fundamental divisions or units are eternal Beings, i.e living-Beings; such that (to modify the title of William James's book) this is an Pluralistic Animistic universe; i.e. there are many fundamental entities (not one); and these fundamental entities are alive, purposive, with agency and other attributes of Beings.  

Because things began with many Beings; God's divine creation (that we inhabit) is the primary source of cohesion: in a crude sense, by creation God imposed harmony on pre-existing and originally autonomous Beings. 

For creation to be sustained (insofar as it is sustained) there must me harmony/ cooperation/ cohesion etc between the Purposes and motives of the many Beings which constitute creation. 

Otherwise, divine creation will tend to fall apart - with different Beings pursuing different goals, or living by different values.  

It is this tendency for divine creation to fall-apart into a chaos of competing directions and behaviours that is the essential cause of the tendency named Entropy: i.e. the tendency of all life, order, organization, forms, functionality etc to decline towards chaos, with time. 

The primary source of Entropy is therefore the disharmony of Beings.

Therefore we need to stop thinking of Entropy abstractly, as if it was a branch of physics, as if it was some kind of force (or anti-force) that broke-up stuff... 

Instead, we should think of entropy as a consequence of the fact that the Beings of divine creation are imperfectly aligned in their nature and purposes. 

Our situation is that we may find ourselves loving God and experiencing profound desiring to live in harmony with divine creation; but we simply cannot do this in reality as we experience it, in this mortal life - because of our innate nature, because of the way we are (and have been) eternally.  

We may want to live in harmony with divine creation, but we cannot. 

But not all Beings want to live in harmony with divine creation, and some Beings hate God; and these are Beings that have chosen (or, at least, are currently choosing) Evil.

So, Evil can be defined as a kind of chosen Entropy; when the inevitable disharmony between our-selves and divine creation is made into the positive choice our-selves to oppose divine creation.  

From this perspective we can see that Evil is a type of Entropy - in a sense a worse type of Entropy: a positive decision to pursue negative outcomes. And worse than non-evil-Entropy; because Entropy is universal and unavoidable, whereas Evil makes the personal choice to oppose divine harmony....

Motives for Evil are various, but perhaps some kind of resentment or grudge against God and the imposed aspect of divine creation, might be the most basic motivation.  

Aims of Evil, too, are various. 

Perhaps the aim is to exploit divine harmony in pursuit of personal gratification or other selfish benefit; perhaps (more extremely) to oppose divine harmony simply from a desire to see it destroyed, taking spiteful pleasure in the destruction. 

This was the unavoidable human condition, blighted by ineradicable Entropy, and worsened by chosen Evil; and the situation for all Beings, until the advent of Jesus Christ. 

Jesus was a mortal Being, incarnated into this world of imperfect harmony between Beings - but Jesus himself loved God wholly; and was himself (at least, at the time of his ministry, after his Baptism by John) wholly-aligned with divine creation. 

Jesus was himself mortal: which is to say he was subject to Entropy. And Jesus was subject also to Evil. However; because Jesus was perfectly aligned with God and creation he knew that after death he could (and would) be remade as himself but "perfectly" - in other words, resurrected into eternal life, freed from Entropy. 

Resurrection takes our aspiration to live wholly in harmony with divine creation, and rebuilds us from that basis.

Furthermore, Jesus knew that if or when others had followed him into this eternal (because wholly-aligned, Entropy-purged) state of resurrection - which remaking process would be guided by Jesus himself - then a world of such persons would be a world without Evil.

In eliminating Entropy, resurrection also eliminates Evil, as a subsidiary effect. 

And this wholly-harmonious and wholly-God-aligned post-mortal world would be Heaven: in which the deepest and ineradicable problems of this mortal life are eliminated; and free and creative Beings live spontaneously in harmony (loving God and each-other), and from common aims and motives. 

 

Heart thinking or entropic thinking: How and why we are (literally) destroying reality

The great lesson I got from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, is that reality is co-created by consciousness - that is, by thinking. We make the world by our thinking - and the kind of world we make - or unmake, depends on the kind of thinking. 

The only thing out-there and independent of us is formless chaos - all that can be known has been created; and creation formed by consciousness, and all consciousness has this property of creative formation. 

The primary creation that we inhabit was formed by God's consciousness (God is the prime creator); but our own consciousness affects divine creation - either positively or negatively. 

As our consciousness has become detached from God - we must now choose whether again to affiliate with the living reality of primary creation through love and heart thinking; or to remain alienated, to regard reality as consisting of dead things affected by material processes - and thereby to affiliate with the entropic, parasitic, destructive cognitive processing of mainstream modern life. 

It has become very obvious that humanity is splitting into Christians and anti-Christians; into those who affiliate with God, The Good and Divine Creation - and those who oppose these. 

This split can also be seen as between heart thinking and entropic thinking. We are being compelled to choose between these. 

It is the choice between loving creation; or the subversion, deconstruction and destruction of creation. 

Entropic thinking is normal, abstract, mainstream, 'materialist' thinking - it is 'brain thinking', which is increasingly conformed to machine or computer thinking. 

Entropic describes how you are (almost certainly) thinking now; and how nearly everybody (or everybody) around you is thinking - it is how everybody in societal authority and institutional leadership are thinking. It is the processing embodied in public discourse, bureaucracy, computers, management, media, laws, regulations, procedures...  

This entropic thinking assumes the world is made of dead things, and these dead things are subject to life-less processes, energies and forces. Built-into this is the assumption that entropy rules the world - rules reality - entropy in one place can only be reversed or delayed by increasing entropy elsewhere - thus 'creation' is actually the predatory consumption of one source of order by another - and (because entropy is relentless) this predation (or parasitism) must continue until all order is consumed and formless chaos remains.

Thus, entropic thinking is the world view of the self-damned, the demonic; those who believe in Satan's conceptualization of reality: the sin-motivated war of each against all (only expediently delayed by transient mutually-exploitative demonic alliances directed against God and creation).

Heart thinking is in complete contrast and opposition to the entropic in its nature, origin and motivation. 

Heart thinking is based in love and life; it assumes a living universe of beings - and God's creation gets its origin, form, order and coherence from love. 

Thus, love and creation are polarities of the same essence - loving-creation and creative-love.  

This love - which made creation, and holds-together creation - and which is self-sustaining - is between beings. Beings are living and conscious entities - all beings are alive and conscious, but there are different degrees of aliveness and forms of consciousness.  

Heart thinking is of those beings who have first become modern and alienated; who have first assimilated into entropic thinking - where the reality of God is not entailed. Those who from that position of detached freedom have consciously chosen to recognize, embrace and align-with the reality of God and of a 'universe' consisting of beings living in a divine creation. 

Those who choose heart thinking will find that they need to recognize the greater authority, depth and truth of a thinking based in love, and operating with love - in order to reject the otherwise overwhelming powers and persuasion of entropic thinking. 

It is the terrible choice of modern Man to choose - and his choice lies between the divine work of co-creating the world, or else the demonic project of destroying creation. 

Those who think entropically will do entropy. 

By the way they conceptualize the world, they project deadness onto the living world, they project abstract forces and energies onto a creation that is actually sustained by love; and by these projections these remake their world in the image they have chosen. 

Despite the opposition (implicit and explicit) of The World; heart thinking will need to be accorded primacy again and again, as it conflicts in method and motivation with the dominant, prevalent this-worldly entropic thinking - which asserts its monopoly of objectivity and that heart thinking is childish, foolish or insane.

Entropic thinking labels heart thinking as wishful thinking; yet the truth is both heart and entropic are wishful - and the wishes become reality.  

The entropic thinker wishes entropy onto divine creation - converting that which is alive and conscious through love into a meaningless, purposeless dead universe. 

It is entropic thinking that is destroying our civilization, our humanity - and beyond that it destroys the possibility of eternal resurrected life in Heaven. Because the entropic thinker (and he is apparently most people in the world, including most self-identified Christians) is co-engaged in the progressive killing of beings, the elimination of love, the reduction of life and consciousness into 'people' who self-identify as Dead Things. 

The heart thinker instead works from the love in his heart, from actual interpersonal and inter-being love (not abstract love); he recognizes and affirms that love, and makes it the motivation for knowing reality. He regards reality as that which known by this loving thinking. 

The heart thinker regards the world from his heart - it is his love of particular beings which connects him with reality; it is his love that motivates the connection-with and knowledge-of reality. 

That which is outwith his love is not truly known - but merely hypothesized, modelled from simplified and incomplete variables, and therefore certainly false. 

Thus the primacy of the two great commandments: love of God and neighbour. In heart thinking; modern Man chooses to participate in co-creating his own reality (and potentially the reality of other heart thinkers) by rooting his knowledge in love of God. And the scope of this knowledge is defined by the scope of those other beings ('neighbours') whom he also loves. And if he wishes this active joining-with loving creation to be an eternal state - this is attained by loving and following Jesus Christ to resurrected life in Heaven. 

Note: The above analysis is indebted to a section of a lecture on Crop Circles from Stanley Messenger to the Wessex Research Group, delivered in the middle 1990s. Stanley Messenger was an expert on Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, having been a Waldorf teacher. He was also involved in, and approving of (in what I regard as an uncritical and credulous way) pretty much all of the New Age crazes of his era; and was also a proponent of the sexual revolution. He was highly intelligent and knowledgeable, and a gifted improvisatory lecturer (having been a professional actor). My eveluation is that Stanley Messenger was (much like his Master, Steiner) someone who sporadically generated some superb and vitally-important insights, which are scattered among a great deal else that I must set aside as mistaken and wrongly-motivated. Anyway; my above post was inspired by re-listening to a genuinely-intuitive, superbly truth-full section of the linked lecture which runs from about 23 minutes to 42 minutes. This section strikes me as more vivid, comprehensible, exciting and motivating than anything Steiner ever expressed (that I have come across) - while being deeply and explicitly indebted to Steiner. 

What makes Good good?

All Christians believe that God is Good and loves us. 

But what does this actually mean? 

What does it mean to be Good? 

In particular; is Good a matter of preference merely, as modern materialistic ideology would have it. Are Good and evil "relative" and interchangeable? 

What this "relativism" of values seems to mean in current Western/ Globalist culture, in an underlying and implicit way, is that what matters are peoples' feelings (or more exactly, some peoples' feelings) - especially their "hedonic status", i.e. whether they are happy or suffering. 

What counts as Good is what is believed to lead to happiness, while evil is whatever causes suffering (or is asserted to cause suffering) - and Good and evil can therefore change places according to the cause of gratification/misery in the current situation. 

It should be noted that this modern Western hedonic morality as the basis of values, is rooted in the assumption that we can objectively know, and indeed measure, the hedonic outcome of choices... 

The assumptions that we know and can quantify other-people's state of happiness; and that we understand the relationship between present action and future emotions - including in large numbers of people; and that that we can predict the major psychological consequences of material actions.

These assumptions seem to me nothing but wishful-thinking at best; and most often sheerly-obvious nonsense...

Nonetheless; these are among the assumptions upon-which modern mainstream morality and values are based.  

  

Or is there instead some objective basis to Good and evil? By "objective" I mean here to ask: is there something about the nature of reality that distinguishes Good from evil? And if there is something objective about Good - what is it? 

Traditional orthodox mainstream Christian theology has it that God is Good because God created everything from nothing, because God is "omni" in nature. 

This is the argument of monotheism, something that this type of Christian shares with Jews and Moslems, and which is rooted in an assertion that God is Good because there is nothing else. 

In other words, by this argument, God is Good because God is everything, so that it is irrational, meaningless, to believe otherwise. Because there is nothing else but God - to be evil is meaningless, futile, insane... evil (by this account) has nowhere to go, and nothing to believe-in. 

The obvious objection to the monotheistic omni-God argument; is that if God made everything, is everything, controls and knows everything - then this abolishes the difference between Good and evil. 

The trad-orthodox definition of evil is more a matter of "Good is God" than "God is Good"; because (by this account) there is ultimately nothing except God and that which is wholly made by God - and God has been defined as Good. 

Apparent differences between Good and evil can therefore only be illusory, or temporary... But, even then, it is unclear why God should make or allow such illusions. 

(Indeed, it is unclear why the omni-God should do anything at all - since everything that has happened, is happening, or could happen - is all God Himself and his own 100% God-made creation. Creation seems to change nothing essential, to have no purpose or direction; because everything always was/is/shall-be.) 

Therefore, if we regard Good as relativistic, we just get a kind of this-worldly hedonic therapy, in which anything and everything is "justified" by assertions that it will make "people" happier, or less miserable. 

Or else, by trying to make Goodness identical with an omni-God, by asserting that all-is-God and God-is-Good; we end up actually abolishing the distinction between Good and evil. 

Anyone evil is then insane by his opposition to the only actual reality... Yet even this statement does not stand, because God must have made that person the way he is - i.e. insane.

The omni-mono-God philosophy explains nothing because it explains everything!

And such a conception of God seems especially antagonistic to Christianity; which must surely have an essential place for the divine Man Jesus Christ, and his doings at some point in history; and for the necessity of (in some meaning) "following" Jesus.

For a Christian; Jesus must make a difference, and that difference must be deep, cosmic, temporally-located, crucial. 

My own views on this subject have been expounded scores of times on this blog; but I will focus on the major objection to it. 

My understanding of Good: If God is a Being (or indeed two Beings - Loving Heavenly Parents) who found-themselves among a multitude of other Beings; and if this God began creating at some point in time; and if this creation is founded upon Love...

So that creation is something like "the purposive and mutually loving relationships between Beings that were previously and otherwise mutually unloving, lacking in shared-purpose"...

Reality is therefore a growing creation in an environment of chaos...

By this "model", Good is defined as God's project of creation; and evil is some kind of opposition to this project (anything other than joining with the project of creation - is may be any kind of opposition, from trying to exploit creation for selfish reasons, or trying to destroy creation). 

In theory, there is also the alternative of opting-out from creation. 

By my understanding of Good; Beings such as ourselves find-ourselves in an ongoing divine creation; and we need to decide whether we are on the side of creation or not.  

Good is the decision to join with God's creation. 

Opting-out is the decision Not to join with creation. 

Evil is the decision to oppose creation. 

Main objections to my understanding: Some things that some people find wrong with this scheme, are that I regard God as "just" a Being (actually two Beings) among a multitude of other Beings; that God's creation had a beginning and has therefore not been eternal; that God is finite in knowledge and power...

And that Good is only one among other rational possibilities. 

By my understanding; to be evil is to oppose the project of divine creation; but that opposition need not be irrational. Evil may be short-termist, evil will be un-loving, and may be manipulative, sadistic, spiteful... 

But evil need not be irrational (evil is only irrational when it denies the reality of divine creation). 

By my understanding: There really is no compulsion to be Good, because Good is one side in the spiritual war arranged around the actually-existing reality of divine creation. 

There is indeed One God, in the sense that there happens-to-be one divine creation, and this was an is the creation of God. 

There is one creation which is that we know, and which includes all other Beings that we can know. One creation within-which we and other Beings find-themselves when they become self-aware, when we/they become "conscious" of reality and their places in it among other Beings, and having relationships with these other Beings.  

Such matters could have been otherwise, but were not otherwise: this is reality - this is the situation within-which we exist.   

To loop back to the original incoherent ideas that Good is relativist because choice is rational and real; or else that Good is objective and necessary because there is mono-omni-God creating everything; I would say instead that Good is objective because God is The Creator; but the choice of Good versus evil is also real, has consequences that may be permanent, and it is a coherent choice to choose evil - even when the reality of one divine creation is acknowledged. 

By my understanding: To choose Good is to choose to affiliate with God's objectively real project of creation, and this project is built from love, because creation is the product of love.

Any Being capable of love is capable for choosing to affiliate with creation.

But evil may be a coherent choice, because creation takes place amidst continuing chaos - and continuing chaos is termed "death" (by the Fourth Gospel" and is spiritually-analogous to the scientific-material concept of "entropy". 

Evil is not entropy, but coherent evil entails an ultimate commitment to entropy and chaos in preference to divine creation, because entropy/ chaos is all that would remain when evil has done its work...

After evil has worked through to its conclusion; there would be a world without creation, which is a world without love; and that would be the return to a pre-creation world of mutually un-conscious and unloving Beings; i.e. the end state of evil would be Beings uncomprehendingly existing in a situation that has no coherence and no direction.

Thus evil is a possible and coherent thing to desire.   

In other words, by my understanding, divine creation is incomplete and (in principle) vulnerable to evil, and to entropy; or, this would be the case without the Second Creation of Jesus Christ. 

Primary creation of God is of-itself therefore incomplete and contingent; and Jesus Christ is therefore essential to the triumph of Good. 

But the triumph of Good is not the imposition of Good across all that exists - it is a Second Creation that consists of Beings that are only and wholly Good. That situation called "Heaven". 

This is why Christianity is the only coherent religion; and why Jesus Christ is and was essential. Jesus was Not essential to the primary divine creation; but Jesus is essential to the indomitable and eternal triumph of creation - in Heaven. 

   

Note added: What makes Good good is loving-creation - but only if you agree that love is, indeed good. Otherwise not. That which is good is therefore objectively real; but what makes the real objective, is personal. 

Why entropy is inevitable in this mortal incarnate life

Why is entropy inevitable, unavoidable in this mortal incarnate life?

The answer is because, in this transitional phase between a purely-spirit pre-mortal life, and resurrected eternal incarnated life in Heaven; our bodies are made from the substance of other Beings. 

Because ultimately there are only Beings. 

Because these Beings are eternal - the materials from which our bodies are made are only "lent" us, for a while, by other Beings.

Therefore we incarnate by a contingent, always-changing, inevitably temporary, alliance of Beings.  

There are no inert "minerals" - all "chemicals" are actually parts of Beings. 

And of course there are actual Beings incorporated into our bodies - such as many individual cells, for example the phagocyte white blood cells are essentially autonomous amoebae. 

But these (and other cells) exist in a dynamic kind of symbiosis, living and reproducing in the environment provided by our blood; (temporarily) controlled by our regulatory systems, which also include other Beings and parts of Beings.  

So; the innate tendency with time, is for the allied Beings and parts of Beings to revert to the purposes of the Beings themselves.

In other words; for these other-Beings, from-whom are bodies are made, to become autonomous agents with a divine destiny; at some point they must regain that primary agency which has been temporarily suspended in forming our bodies.  

In this Primary or First Creation that we all inhabit; the ultimate identity of Beings has not changed - even when one Being 9or some part of a Being) is "being used" by another. 

This is why entropy is a part of the Primary creation - inevitable, unavoidable. 

And this is why Jesus Christ was necessary to create a form of incarnated existence without entropy, without death. 

We can understand that resurrection entails a re-creation of our incarnate selves, purely from our own Beings. 

And therefore without a tendency for the components to revert to other Beings. 

And therefore we - because of the Second Creation of Jesus Christ - may choose Life Everlasting; without the entropy and death which are intrinsic to this Primary Creation...

A creation formed by the eternal commitment of whole-Beings to live in harmony, by love. 

The Creator's POV: God, Jesus, and the overcoming of entropy

'We will come', said Imrahil; and they parted with courteous words. 

'That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,' said Legolas. 'If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising'. 

'And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,' said Gimli. 'It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.' 

'Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,' said Legolas. 'And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.' 

'And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,' said the Dwarf. 

'To that the Elves know not the answer,' said Legolas.

The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien

I have always found the above to be a particularly deep and resonant passage; and so do many others. 

At one level, the difference between short-lived, distractible but procreative Men; and the Elves and Dwarves who are (especially Elves) potentially relatively longaevus - seems to be profound. Elves and Dwarves are both capable of greater works of arts and crafts, better able to work on long 'projects' without losing interest...

Yet this is only a relative difference, and sooner or later, all the achievements - all the 'stone work' - of Middle Earth, will decay, and be destroyed. 

The rate of change can be diminished by better work, by steadier and more focused effort - but, it seems, only by a 'slowing' of existence. 

Dwarves and Elves have a longer time horizon, but this goes-with a lower rate of procreation, a lesser focus on reproduction - which stands-for and is symptomatic-of a tendency towards desiring to slow life, trying to hold-things static, attempting to prevent decay by 'crystallizing' achievement... 

But, this has a price; being bound-up with a tendency against life.  

Men, by comparison, are more alive, do more stuff (good and bad, careful and slapdash); just keep on trying different things; bounce-back after defeats and start again - have kids, rebuild the ruins, make another new civilization... 

But Men never seem to get very far with anything they attempt; and they each soon die, and their best civilizations are brief. 

So; in this mortal world, in all we know of this material universe, entropy will always win in the end - whether sooner or later; it will prevail. 

If we imaginatively identify with the perspective of God the Creator, take his Point of View (POV); then this continual dismantling of creation by entropy is unsatisfactory. 

Of course, we (as God) can keep-on creating forever and without limit; yet this is always going to be a matter of patching-together repairs and not a restoration to a pre-entropic state. We can continually compensate for the damage of entropy - a bridge collapses, so we build a new one; a Man dies and another is born - yet whatever we do, entropy accumulates. 

More familiarly for Christians, a closely analogous situation occurs with Sin (which may be understood as an aspect of entropy). God can compensate for the effect of Sin, can repair the consequences, can provide the world with help from Angels and Saints... but, nonetheless, Sin accumulates. 

The way out from this unsatisfactory situation was for God to create another and secondary world from this-one; by using this-one. 

In other words: God's creative plan was two-stage (which is why Jesus was necessary - for the second stage). 

While the first creation is mandatory; the second creation is discretionary: optional, opt-in, for those who choose it. 

The second creation is a 'world' without entropy, a world in which the tendency for destruction and sin has been left-behind. 

I am talking about Heaven, of course. 

And Heaven did not arise until after Jesus Christ.

The reason that Jesus Christ is an essential aspect of salvation; is that He was what made it possible for Heaven to exist, for Heaven to be populated... 

To put it bluntly; God the primary creator needed Jesus Christ in order to make possible the second - and final - creation that is Heaven. 

Jesus Christ came from within the prime creation, lived within the world of entropy - and died; but did so in perfect alignment with the values, aims, love, of God the prime creator. 

In other (more familiar) words; Jesus was a mortal Man who was fully divine. Mortal in body and by living in the primary creation, divine in terms of wholly Good and on the side of God; knowing and being in complete-harmony-with God's creative plans.

Thus Jesus was unique: nobody-else could have done the job (not even God the prime creator) because Jesus knew - experientially, from living fully in both worlds - 'how' to guide Men from this primary and entropic-mortal creation to the secondary and eternal-immortal creation that is Heaven.

       

Spiritual versus Physical thinking - Understanding Primary Thinking by Primary Thinking

I have been writing about Primary Thinking for several years, as the mode of Final Participation. But, via an episode of Primary Thinking, some things became clear to me yesterday. 

Hardly anybody is interested by these metaphysical posts; so for those who are I will give it more or less straight: as it came to me: 

This mortal and material world is a closed system, dominated by entropy; it is an energy-consuming world where the tendency is towards destruction, decay and death. 

By contrast the spiritual world is the opposite, being eternal and immaterial. It is the world of divine creation, where 'energy' is renewed. Creation adds; and is 'negentropic' - entropy-reducing. 

Where there is creation, there is an open system; overall increasing in value.  

Thinking can be entropic, or else creative. These are qualitatively different. 

Mundane, everyday thinking is brain-based, therefore entropic; uses energy (including electricity), is causally-determined (each step caused by a preceding step) - and therefore mundane thinking tends towards degeneration and collapse.

But Primary Thinking is immaterial, spiritual; does not depend on the physical nervous system. It is generative (not caused by preceding factors, not a consequence of what went before); contributing something extra (something for nothing!) to created-reality.

We could picture spiritual thinking breaking-in upon physical thinking, transforming it, inserting-into it; because the material is a sub-set of the spiritual (the spiritual is the whole; the physical merely part of that whole). 

Primary Thinking is a divine attribute, the divine form of creation. We can do it only because we are children of God, and share in God's divinity. 

And we can only do it somewhat, sometimes - because we dwell in mortal bodies in this material, entropic world.  

Thus, Primary Thinking changes created-reality; changes the world! - and for the better: changes it permanently, eternally. 

Primary Thinking is always a positive good and "for the better", because Primary Thinking only happens when we our-selves are in harmony with, pursuing the same creative goals as, God. 

Primary Thinking is always 'about' something, always goal-directed: it is purposive thinking, and the purposes are in-line with divine creation. 

There is no formula for 'doing' Primary Thinking; except that we need to acknowledge its importance and be aware when it happens. The occurrence is a by-product of serious and sincere effort to understand, to know; in context of love of God and chosen-affiliation to the creative work of God. 

When all such factors are lined-up; we will (temporarily) be able to overcome the entropic nature of this mortal life; take-up our divine heritage as children of God, partake of the divine way of thinking, and participate in on-going creation. 

And if we do so, we can be (and will be) confident that - by our thinking, directly and eternally - we shall have changed the world for the better.   

Note: The above insight was - somehow - triggered by listening to a November 15th 1917 lecture by Rudolf Steiner in an audio version read by Dale Brunsvold. A text version is at https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19171115p01.html. 

Dealing with the problem of entropy. Love versus Bliss - Creation versus Stasis

Mainstream Christianity (although, presumably, not what Jesus actually said and did!) has apparently always embodied a fundamental, metaphysical, incoherence  - whereby it has tried to assert two incompatible world-views and life-aspirations. 

(I assume - but cannot "prove" - that this arose as a consequence of early theologians being unwilling to give-up their Judaic assumptions and/or the Classically-derived Greek and Roman philosophy - especially Neo-Platonism; and instead fitting the simple reality of Christianity into one, the other, or both of these pre-existing moulds - thereby creating the unclarity, paradoxes and "mysteries" which have existed since.) 

Entropy - leading to our death and the death of every person and thing that we know - is an unavoidable experience and fact of life; unavoidable so long as we are aware, purposive, and/or take memory seriously. 

People have therefore dealt with entropy, tried to remove it from experience and/or from reality, by several tactics and strategies. 

One is the goal of living in a perpetual present. If Time is cut down to a present-moment in which (so far as we can tell) nothing happens; then we have apparently deleted Time. If there is no Time, there is no entropy, and no death...

The idea in practice may become manifested as life being cut-up into a sequence of disconnected "now"s; each without relation to what went before. 

To some extent, this can be seen in popular mainstream culture, and its extreme un-interest in looking at trends, or "joining the dots" between facts or experiences. "That was then, this is now"... so why bother about it? Concern about the past or future is a "downer". If I feel OK now, then that's all that matters... 

In effect: if I can say "I see no entropy now" (i.e. there is no change, no degeneration, no death) in the time-slice that is the present moment under consideration; then (it is inferred) entropy can be denied or ignored.

This "works" insofar as analysis is restricted to this present moment. 

Ultimately, this aspires to delete Time - or, if not possible, to delete any perception of Time. 

Thus life aspires to a state of stasis - preferably blissful stasis. 

The aim is contemplative, not creative.

Thus the ideal state is to "stop" or escape Time, and therefore (necessarily) to "stop" creation - more exactly, to stop creating. 

(God's creation is seen from this perspective as done and finished, completed once and for always, total and complete - a creation to which nothing can be added.)

The above analysis and purpose seems to be converged-upon by a wide range of religions and spiritualties; I think because it arises from commonly shared assumptions and practices - from a particular way of dealing-with, of escaping-from, the problem of entropy. 

The attitude aimed-at is indifference, detachment, not-feeling, not-caring; the desire is to become unaware of entropy and its consequence. 

The attitude aimed at is acceptance: don't compare, don't remember, don't plan... 

Accept whatever happens. Maybe it is all regarded as "good"... But however regarded What Is, Just Is, and should be accepted. 

(Our misery is interpreted as a consequence of failing to accept.)

But (by my understanding) what Jesus said was aimed-at those of us who choose creation as our primary goal, not contemplation. 

Those of us who choose love as our fundamental value, rather than indifference.  

Jesus dealt with entropy by accepting its inevitability in this mortal life; and offering the elimination of entropy ("life everlasting") in resurrected heavenly life - after death. 

The need for resurrection derives from the inevitability of entropy in this mortal world. From the fact that this mortal world cannot be "redeemed". 

Entropy is a part of this mortal reality - therefore there cannot be a heaven in this life or on this earth - which is why the Heaven of Jesus is in the resurrected life and in Heaven.

Jesus's teaching is linear, sequential, includes time, includes change, entails freedom and the capacity for love - and from this it promises to eliminated death - which concept included sin and corruption. 

In the Heaven made possible by Jesus; there will be love, creation, and change - but there will not be sin, corruption or death. 

Resurrection is a voluntary remaking: we desire and allow ourselves to be remade without entropy, and without sin by following Jesus - and that is the only way it can happen. 

Implicitly; Jesus dealt with entropy by love; and love is a choice - love entails freedom. 

Jesus embraced creation rather than contemplation, and invited Men to join with the work of creation (to become Sons of God). 

This is why Heaven is necessarily opt-in - because people cannot be made to love, nor to create - these come from freedom, not coercion. And this is why those who do not (from their freedom) opt-in, are thereby (self-) excluded.

And those self-identified Christians who aspire to a Heaven that is without Time, that contemplative not creative, is changeless, is experienced as a constant present... 

Well, such people are wanting something different from what Jesus actually offered. 

How Jesus Christ enabled Heaven (with its exclusion of evil)

The religion of the Ancient Egyptians - which is massively documented - provides a detailed picture of how the world of God's creation was before the work of Jesus Christ. 

Creation was made by the pushing aside of chaos; civilization was like a clearing in the wild forest; and the chaotic forest was always trying to take back the world of religion, agriculture and the domain of the creating Gods. 

Most of the Gods were Good, but the representatives of chaotic evil remained - such as Set (or Seth) who dwelt in the deserts around the fertile and civilized state of Egypt; and Apophis the primal world-serpant who, every night, attacked the ship of the sun, to try and prevent dawn. 

Thus light/ life/ goodness/ order was engaged in a continual and eternal battle to hold-back the chaos/ evil that surrounded on all sides; and which would otherwise return the world to its primal disorder. 

 

This may be taken broadly to represent the situation of divine creation on earth before the work of Jesus. And Jesus's work can be seen as the additional creation of Heaven, as a New Place to be inhabited by resurrected Men who have first been temporarily incarnated onto earth as mortals. The mortal state is that from-which each Man must choose Heaven - or Not.

 

By this understanding, Heaven is - and for the first time - a place that free men can inhabit where evil has been excluded - permanently.

By 'free men; I mean Men who are agents; operating-from their own distinctive divine selves; generating their own thoughts - mini-gods. In other words: In Heaven Men are secondary creators (operating within God's primary creation) - who can fully participate with God on the continuing creation of God's ongoing, expanding world. 

 

Jesus gave Men the possibility of resurrection to eternal life. Resurrection means eternal bodies; and bodies can only be eternal in an eternal environment - which is Heaven. In other words, Heaven in a world without death.

By contrast; this mortal life we know, here on earth, is ruled by chaos (or 'entropy', dis-order). All changes and decays, nothing lasts unchanged; there degeneration and disease are everywhere and death is the inevitable terminus. This mortal world - taken in isolation - is therefore the same as that described by the Ancient Egyptians.

However, since Jesus Christ; we have the chance to opt-into Heaven; which is an everlasting world without evil - without chaos or entropy.  

And at the same time, when resurrected into Heaven, we remain our-selves; indeed we become even more our-selves and able to participate in the ongoing work of God's creation. 

So, our mortal lives on this earth give us all lived experiences of chaos, entropy and evil; and the opportunity to learn from these experiences in order to make a final, irreversible commitment in favour of Good. 

In other words; mortal life on earth is what enables us to understand what is being offered by Jesus: eternal resurrected life in Heaven. And knowing (by contrast and implication) both sides, both possibilities... our free choice may be informed.   

 

My understanding of this new possibility of heaven; is that it is due to the possibility of each Man making a permanent commitment to Goodness, to creation, to the work of God. Because Heaven is composed only of Beings that have made this permanent commitment - then Heaven is a place without evil. 

All the inhabitants of Heaven (Men and others) are on the side of God and creation; and everything they (we) do in Heaven is in-harmony-with God and creation. Thus, In Heaven there is no tendency towards chaos, entropy, evil...

In another description; Heaven is based on the principle of love. The harmonious working of many free agents is possible by their mutual love. It is therefore love which is the principle of cohesion in creation - which 'organises' the work of many free individuals into a coherent, ongoing, creativity. 

 

The 'process' by which any mortal Man from earth was made able to be resurrected-into Heaven was made possible by Jesus Christ; and the 'method' made simple and accessible. Since Jesus; anyone who wants Heaven merely has to 'follow' Jesus, who will lead us through resurrection and into Heaven (a path which he himself has taken) as The Good Shepherd. 

It seems that (here on earth, in this mrtal life) not everyone knows-about Heaven, not everybody wants Heaven; and among those who do want to go onto Heaven, there are some who do not want to follow Jesus, or do not believe Jesus can or will lead us to Heaven. 

But we can trust that God the creator will ensure that everybody will have the fullest chance to know such things sooner or later; and before each needs to choose between a commitment to Heaven - or Not.

We are born and live as young children with a coherent world view

It is strange to a modern mind, but makes obvious sense if this is the creation of a good and loving God; that our innate understanding of the world, which we spontaneously experience as young children, often (and ideally) seems to be more coherent than any of the others which come to replace it. 

In other words; a child's experience and explanation of reality makes sense and hangs-together better than mainstream modern materialism, and also better than the complex intellectual structures of religions. 

However, a vital element of this coherence is the mind of the child - the consciousness of a child (the way he apprehends, experiences, explains the world); which is different from the minds of those who come-up with alternative explanations. 

I have come to regard the young child's understanding as innate because God-given, part of divine creation - which is why it is true; so although different, other forms of understanding (e.g. among adults, and in various societies) ought to be compatible with those of the child. 

This innate understanding relates to the pre-Christian world, the not Christian world - or what I term Primary Creation: creation without Christ. 

A loving child in a loving family knows the goodness of God; and that this world is purposive and has meaning is implicit. 

Reality is personal - a matter of beings not things. And the world works in terms of the relationships between beings - in terms of desires, motives, etc. 

I don't think young children spontaneously think about "creation"; rather, they implicitly assume that the world is created by personal intentions - the world doesn't "just happen", is not random nor mechanical.  

But the child also has an implicit understanding of both entropy (change, death) and of evil that sometimes impinges upon goodness and happiness. He realizes there are threatening beings, that want to scare and harm him. 

The child also knows that he is involved in this, that bad things happen in part because of something in himself - e.g. it is because he thinks about them or dreams about them - that monsters and other threats are attracted, and may come. (It is because he got angry that his favourite toy was smashed.) Yet he cannot stop himself from thinking/ dreaming about monsters; cannot stop himself getting angry, spiteful...

This implies a knowledge of evil in himself. 

The child also realizes also that people and "things" change, and he does and may lose things and people from forgetting, breakages, destruction, theft, removal, death etc. 

And also that when these happen, or might happen; the child will also himself have something to do with it. 

Irresistible, irrevocable change is inside himself, as well as outside. 

The child's spontaneous "answer" to these problems would seem to be a wish for invulnerability for himself and those he loves; so that the bad things of the world do not affect him or his life.

A wish, too, to be free from those bad thoughts that attract trouble and misery.  

This relates to the fascination for heroes - whether divine, demi-god, angelic, or "superhero"... what lies behind this is the idea that we may personally be transformed - while remaining our-selves - such that the bad things of life do not affect us personally, or those we love. 

If this were to happen, then we could live in the world without fear of pain, harm or loss; and this I believe is a daydream hope of young children. 

So far this is negative; but a child aspires to the positive as well. 

Especially if we recognize that a child spontaneously knows that the material is always spiritual, and nothing is neutral - all has meaning and relates to purpose. For a child; everything is personal and relational, and everything has resonance and depth and is important - nothing is mundane or trivial. 

Children's play and talk is full of fantasies, of wishful thinking and make-believe. And these are important to the child. 

It is here we should be looking to find spontaneous creativity. 

One common fantasy aspiration of childhood (which can stand for many others) is to fly - fly without wings and by will-power (again the "superhero" idea, or in the past some kind of spiritual being, were-being, demi-god or the like). 

This is a way in which a young child is creative, or proto-creative: wanting to expand his experience, especially in ways that lead to a new quality of experience. 

Hoping to do something of his own that adds to the world (adds to creation).

This lies behind the wish-fulfilling fantasies of being a superhero or a princess; of being unique, special, famous. This isn't merely trivial hedonism or conceit; because to a child such a possibility is creative, important - enlarging and changing the world for the better.   

It seems to me that - in terms of a young child's world - the meaning of what Jesus Christ made possible lies in the relationship between his understanding of everyday reality; and the world of his wishful thinking and fantasies. 

The work of Jesus impinged upon the already existing world; to offer a new possible reality; and this unique historical event may be recapitulated in the development of a child. 

Anyone who was genuinely wholly satisfied with "Primary Creation" - with the world as-is - would not be interested or attracted by Jesus's possibility of resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

What such a person wants is to become something like an invulnerable superhero - a super-man (Ubermensch) who inhabits this world as it is, but is personally invulnerable to the entropy and evils that are intrinsic to Primary Creation. 

Resurrection and Heaven are, on the other hand, attractive to those whose child-like day-dreams are of a world - that is, a Second Creation - in which there is only love and no evil in ourselves and all other beings whom we love.

A world in which all change is good: the exciting possibility of growing-up. 

What Jesus offers is that instead of only living in this world but becoming invulnerable to its bad things; we can also inhabit a world where we have become all-good, there are only loving relationships, and happy day-dreams can become reality - with our help.  

That - in a young child's terms - is approximately what Heaven offers; above and beyond the wishes or hopes of pre-Christian and non-Christian understandings. 

Negentropy = divine creation

Modern science acknowledges a single universal tendency called entropy - which is assumed to explain everything and applies everywhere and eternally (entropy never 'runs out'!); which leads to the problem of why anything exists in the first place. There is also the difficulty of explaining why reality hasn't wound down long ago.

Physics has expended ingenuity on 'explaining' such matters - but the point I am making is that the need for explaining everything in terms of undirected and degrading forces arises only because of the fixed assumption that only such entropic tendencies exist.  

Entropy crops-up in biology as natural selection - which is supposed (assumed) to explain everything; despite that it is a negative, destructive, disordering tendency. 'Teleology' - direction, tendencies towards form and function... these are excluded by assumption from modern (post 1950s) biology.


An opposite force is sometimes posited and termed negentropy - and this is hypothesised to explain why there is anything in the first place and why everything hasn't already been destroyed... But in a world dominated by entropy as its prime reality - the assumption is that any countervailing tendency is limited, and will run-out sooner-or-later.

So the most ridiculous thing in physics is to posit a 'perpetual motion' machine - because physicists 'know' (i.e assume) that all positive, form-making, movement-generating, reparative and functionally-innovative tendencies are limited, and will (soon or late) get used-up.


But if entropy is negative then negentropy is a double-negative... so what is the positive thing that negetropy is trying not to name?

The answer is: divine creation.

So, the proper name and concept of negentropy is divine creation.


(Thus we discover why only entropy is allowed by mainstream science. Science is based on the exclusion of the divine from explanations - that is what makes it useful, practical. There is nothing wrong with that assumption - so long as it is remembered that the divine has been excluded by assumption; and not because it is unreal or unimportant. However, that is exactly what scientists have forgotten, and which they now deny! Scientists excluded God by-assumption, forgot what they had done - then claimed that the fact God was not present in science, meant that God did not exist!)


It seems that Mankind was spontaneously capable of supposing divine creation as the primary reality - as an inexhaustible source of form, order, motivation and whatever else was supposed to be characteristic of creation.

The negative forces came after - as the product of evil/ demonic beings - creatures 'gone bad' - or bad in their original natures.

So entropy exists in a world of divine creation. There is ongoing creation - and there is a countervailing entropic tendency that tends towards death, destruction, disorder...


Most important, therefore, is for us to make a very different, opposed, assumption that divine creativity is inexhaustible; and therefore 'perpetual motion' is actually the primary and natural state of things as we know them!

We live, in fact, inside and part-of that perpetual motion 'machine' which is divine creation.

Our yearning for a life of continual enchantment

The "romantic" search for an escape from the mundane nature of life in this-world - that is, for enchantment - takes many, many forms; and is pursued by different people in widely varying ways. 

A very incomplete list of the themes would include by religions/ spiritualties/ ideologies; through reading, TV and movies; by personal relationships such as intense friendships and sexual relationships; through the appreciation and making of crafts and arts; by meditative, paranormal and supernatural encounters and experiences; via drink and drugs and other derangements; by holidays and travel; pursuit of personal or formal education; from performing drama and music... 

And so on - fully considered, there are only a few people who are not implicitly pursuing the enchanted life. 

All of these methods and others are at-least somewhat effective and may lead to enchantment: for some people, to some extent, and temporarily...

Because with time and the changes in our-selves, all methods and pursuits always lose effect: 

The once-enchanted becomes mundane. 

In other words, in our  failure to become and to stay enchanted; we are here dealing with the ultimate fact of entropy. 

We are up-against the inescapability of entropy in this-world we all inhabit. 

We are up-against this primary creation where all changes, loss is inevitable, and every-thing ends in its death. 

But this-world and primary creation is not all; because (by Jesus Christ) we all have the the opportunity to undergo the transformation of resurrection after death through following Jesus, and move on to the Second Creation that is Heaven: where the state of enchantment is everlasting. 

It is the state of everlasting enchantment in Heaven that Jesus is describing in the Fourth Gospel - when he uses "metaphorical" examples such as water, food and meat - and compared the inevitabilities of their incomplete, temporary, entropic nature in this-life-now; with the eternally present and gratifying fulfilment in the life-to-come:

Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat... but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven... I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever... I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. 

Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you... 

When Jesus says that he brings "life", life-everlasting, eternal-life; people nowadays wrongly interpret this as meaning an offer of (merely) continuing mundane life: the (mere) persistence-forever of life-as-we-now-know-it...

Merely the continuance of this entropic life...

But Heaven comes after resurrection, and resurrection is a transformation by-which not only evil, but also entropy, is eliminated...

Or, to put matters positively; when all the denizens of Heaven have made a permanent commitment to live forever wholly by love of God and divine creation and their fellow resurrected humans (and other resurrected Beings)...

Then this is a situation both of eternal goodness, and also of everlasting enchantment. 

Just as we can now, in this mortal life, know the desire for a wholly good world (without evil); but we cannot attain it. And Christians know that full goodness can only be attained after death and by resurrection...

So also we can know that our yearning for a life of continual and complete enchantment (without entropic change, decline, annihilation) - while impossible to achieve here and now - is attainable.

And/but attainable after our death - and by resurrection. 

Why do pre-mortal spirits - such as you and me - choose to incarnate mortally? Why don't we stay as spirit-Beings?

From the metaphysical assumptions of many religious conceptualizations, it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to incarnate as a mortal (for example, an embodied human being) - given all the intrinsic problems, as well as the possible risks? 

Why wouldn't spirits want to stay as spirits? 

Stay safe and sound?...

But if entropy is an inescapable reality in God's First Creation - then the alternative to incarnation is inevitable decay; the inexorable loss of whatever we gain in terms of memories, of learning from experiences.  

It seems that spirit Beings change more slowly than incarnated mortals; but presumably they do change - and in Primary Creation there is no escape.

So spirits are not really "safe and sound" - at least not in terms of staying "who they are".  

Spirit Beings are immortal, and divine creation will continually give life, vitality, healing, growth and so forth. But this cannot be cumulative, all created spirit Beings will continually be "losing themselves", even as they are being remade.

(Just as things are for us now, here on earth.)  

I understand incarnation to be a concentration. 

The spiritual is primary, and all the material/ physical world is spiritual - yet an embodied Being is like a concentrated-spirit, one in which things are more focused, change more rapid; and most importantly where the self is more bounded, hence more free. 

Incarnated Beings are more themselves (for better and worse) than the same Beings as a spirit - we are more differentiated from other Beings than are spirits; hence we can (in principle) understand more clearly, make personal choices, and see the basis for personal responsibility. 

So, if you are a pre-mortal spirit, you are faced with a prospect of inevitable change and loss of self; or else you can choose to take the risk and incarnate in hope that you will choose to move on to the Second Creation - to resurrected eternal life, or heaven; as described by Jesus Christ; a place and state where entropy is permanently escaped. 

(This happens, I have argued, because entropy arises from incomplete love between Beings; in the Second creation we permanently commit to live by love.) 

Tis mortal incarnated life is intrinsically an adventure, where we can succeed or fail, but where success or failure is a matter of free choice.

It seems that some people who have incarnated as mortal Men, most people perhaps; take a look at the Second Creation, think about it, and then reject it - preferring something else.

But whatever "something else" is preferred to Heaven, and whatever its advantages in the short term; it will entail continual loss-of-self. 

The Being that inhabits somewhere-other-than-Heaven will, over the long term, lose memory, lose the effects of experiences, lose its distinctive identity - will fade. 

Outwith Heaven; Beings do not die, because Beings are eternal; but they will always be tending to revert to that primal chaos of indifference - of simply "existing". 

Yet to escape this fate; to have everlasting, cumulative personal life as our-selves, entails living wholly by love; and it seems that only some people want to live forever on those terms.   

  

My answer to relativism

Modern Men are, like it or not, confronted by what is commonly called relativism; and emerges in the idea that every proposition is 'just' somebody's opinion - and that none are more valid than any other.

This is the deep implicit assumption of modernity - and leads to the totalitarianism of arbitrary (because not valid) behaviours imposed by terror, coercion and propaganda.  

Relativism is not just wrong, but incoherent - yet it is a response to the unsatisfactory nature of traditional formulations of objective knowledge. Traditional objectivity required an unthinking and automatic understanding of what-we-perceive; and when that understanding became contested and the necessary role of human consciousness in knowledge became evident; then this led first to idealism - when everything was in the mind. 

At first, because most people agreed on the nature of reality, that seemed to work; but as disagreements about reality emerged, then idealism required to be bolstered by adding a requirement for cultural or national similarity, in order that there be cohesion and a shared world.

Western Man's self-consciousness continued to increase, until relativism emerged as an individualized form of idealism - each Man creating his own reality; and order and cooperation needing to be externally imposed. 

Relativism = idealism at the individual level. Everything is mind, and ultimately everything is My mind...

The contextual universe of relativism was (is) seen as fundamentally chaotic, with creation and 'order' as temporary and superficial phenomena imposed on a situation of increasing randomness (entropy). 

Nowadays, we can only overcome relativism by explicit means; by clarifying our primary (metaphysical) assumptions and (as it were) inviting others to consider them, and choose whether or not to share them. 

My assumptions include that:

1. There is - as a matter of fact, not principle - one creation, made by one God. 

2. This creation unfolds in sequential Time - which is not reversible, so that creation is cumulative.  

This means that creation is not arbitrary, because it is motivated by one God (given purpose); and made harmonious (given meaning) by the fact of being the product of one God; and because creation cannot be undone. 

Cannot be undone because of the sequential nature of Time; which is the case because Time is intrinsic to the Beingness of God: i.e. because God is a Being. 

And to be a Being entails Life; which entails Time, change, complexity, potential for growth and development, purposiveness etc (this list is not a definition of a Being - which is here assumed to be primary aspect of reality and cannot be further subdivided - but just pointing at attributes we recognize as characteristic of a living Being). 

Thus creation is continuous, and cumulative, and can be reshaped and added to - but none of this alters historical reality. 

The continuity of creation means that creation is harmonious both 'horizontally' (here-and-now) and 'vertically' (through Time) - and that these are inseparable.

It is this quality of creation which means that relativism is false. Some things are coherent with creation, others are opposed to creation - therefore creation is objective with reference to creation primarily, and secondarily with all aspects of creation, all that has-been created (and their creations).

That by which creation coheres is Love: and objectivity reduces ultimately to Love: Love of God primarily, and love of Fellow Man (including other Beings) secondarily. 

That is, the Two Great Commandments. 

Objectivity is therefore as real as Love, and of the same nature. One who rejects, or is incapable of, Love is necessarily a relativist; which is to say he rejects God and Fellow Men, and tries to live in his own personal world...

Which is another way of describing hell. 

  

The divine "purpose" for individual persons: God gives us what we need (but Not Only what we need)

Each person's life has "meaning" - and that meaning is related to divine purpose. 

I think this is quite clear, if you know what to look for - in your own life, and the lives of those you know and love. 

I mean that people always (sooner or later) get the experience/s they most need for spiritual development. 

However, that does not mean that every individual "automatically" learns from each such experience -- Indeed, very often, it seems that people do not learn from personal experiences that could be of great personal benefit. 

Or else people learn something wrong and contrary to divine purpose, from experiences; they choose to lean a lesson contrary to God's hope and intentions. 

For instance; when some adverse experience that could be corrective if properly understood; is instead used as an excuse or rationale for doubling-down on some sin; such as fear, resentment, or despair. 

But what makes all this less obvious is that not all of life is related to divine purpose. 

It is the nature of this life and world we are currently experiencing that there is entropy/ death and there is evil. 

What this means is that things happen that are Not part of the divine purpose. 

What God the Creator can do and does; is make the best of these things. 

So that if some-thing happens to a person that is simply the result of entropy (some degenerative phenomenon or disease for example*); or a consequence of evil motivation or service to evil; then consequently God will create - such as later to enable something to be gained (or salvaged) from this adverse occurrence.   

All of this points at the need for discernment, because understanding and learning are inevitably confused and clouded by the nature of ourselves and this world; the process of discerning and learning is one requiring active participation and culminating in freedom to choose how to be, and where to go next. 

We must be able to discern which experiences are God given, and which are not. We must and inevitably do also work from our state of freedom. 

Creation is not something done-to-us. Divine purpose is that we participate in creation. 

And when an experience was not a part of divine purpose, we may need to be able to discern at what point God has (later) been able to present us with the possibility of deriving Good from evil. 

We make such discernments partly from that which is divine within-us; and partly (since the time of Jesus Christ) by guidance from the Holy Ghost... 

In other words, the capacity for true discernment is innate, and does not need to be derived from external sources - although, of course, external sources of guidance may be helpful in true discernment - just as external guidance is (here and now) more usually harmful. 

So much for this world we live-in, this mixed-world, this world that mixes divine creation and purpose with entropy and evil...

A further thing that God purposes that we learn is that this mixed world (the Primary Creation) may be escaped after death and the separation of our spirit from our incarnate form; because after death (and only after death) we may follow Jesus Christ through resurrection with eternal life; and into a Second Creation that is Heaven. 

Therefore, there will be divinely purposed experiences in this mortal life of ours (assuming we live long enough) that may be understood (if we are prepared to learn) as pointing towards the possibility of Resurrection and Heaven beyond death. 

i.e. Experiences that may (if we discern aright) be understood as pointing towards Salvation. 

Yet if, for whatever reason, we do not get such experiences during this mortal life (perhaps we die in the womb, or as infants) then such experiences as we need to be enabled to choose Heaven; will surely be provided after death. But again we are free to learn from them or not, and to choose Heaven or not. 

In sum: there is a divine purpose (or more than one purpose) for each person incarnated into this world; and this purpose is related to learning a lesson, or several lessons, during our life. 

Each person's purpose will be unique, because each person is unique - because each person had a pre-mortal spirit life before human incarnation  - which is why people are unique individuals from before birth. 

Because our purpose is unique, and because this world is a mixture of divinely created purpose with entropy and evil; discernment is required. We must recognize when we are being divinely taught; and when not...

But even when our life's happenings are due to evil Beings, or due to the innately entropic nature of this world - we should be alert to the ways in which divine creation can shape subsequent events, sooner-or-later to present us with possibilities for learning important life lessons.

Meaning and purpose are not "given": they need to be discerned...

We need to learn from them, and that is our job: we also need to learn the right (i.e. divinely intended) lessons from them.  

*Or death. The Fourth Gospel strongly suggests that death was regarded as The Number One Main Problem of life as-is-on-earth. Death is the problem that Jesus for which usually claims to be offering a solution. 

The choices of spiritual development made by all Beings

The primary reality is of Beings who, at first, existed as individuals dwelling in chaos; until God's creation arose. 

The first choice was whether to dwell in creation, whether to join-in with the God's 'project' of creation. This incarnated mortal world consists of those who made this choice. 

But some Beings who dwell in creation desire to live in harmony with God's plans, while others live in opposition to them - for example, desiring to exploit their situation at the expense of harmony. So that is the second choice - to live in harmony, or opposition, with divine creation. 

This mortal life is what might be termed 'temporary creation' and is finite; such that every incarnated Being that inhabits it will undergo entropic decline tending towards death - in which the spirit will separate from the material. 

After the point of death, there is a choice of whether to move-on to permanent creation - which is Heaven - or not. To move on to Heaven; entails that each Being makes an eternal commitment to live by Love, and to reject all that is incompatible with love (i.e. sin).  

So that is the next choice - repentance and resurrection to life everlasting (i.e. without 'entropy') in that part of creation called Heaven; or to remain out-with Heaven in some way or another.  

Of those Beings who enter Heaven (by following Jesus Christ, who is the unique guide from discarnate spirit through-to resurrection), there is a further and ongoing choice; which is how far to proceed with consciousness. 

In other words, the choice of "how conscious do I wish to become?"

This choice applies to all Beings; but all Beings are unique individuals - albeit apparently the fall into broad and continuously-varying categories; such as men, animals, plants and minerals. (All of these categories are considered to be living Beings, purposive, conscious - but in different ways and to different degrees.) 

If we focus on Men; there is a choice of how much consciousness we desire to develop the over long term of eternity. The 'top level' of consciousness is to become like God: a full creator, albeit within God's primary creation. 

Lower levels of Man's consciousness can be understood as analogous to the different developmental stages of Men... e.g. baby, young child, pre-adolescent, adult. 

But not a permanent adolescent, that is Not an option in Heaven; because that phase meant to be merely transitional - which is why the powers of purposive evil strive to make Modern man desire to remain a permanent adolescent (i.e. perpetuating this desire can only lead to rejection of the divine).

That, then, is the 'final' choice of spiritual development made by subclasses of beings: choosing to become fully-divine, and a grown-up child of God; or some lower and lesser degree of consciousness...

I say 'lower and lesser'; yet this is the destiny and desire of some Beings; whose nature is such that they do not have a fully-divine-desiring disposition. These 'natural-children' will become Beings that - to some variable extent - will passively (and less-than-fully-consciously) be 'controlled' to attain harmony with the other Beings of Heaven, in a top-down fashion by God, or God's agents. 

Such are the choices. 

How did Jesus accomplish the Second Creation (Resurrection and Heaven)?

Jesus Christ's work came naturally to him - he was not acting upon instructions. 

When he awoke to his divine creativity, Jesus knew what needed to be done - because he was a Man (as well as perfectly aligned-with God's creation); and he spontaneously realized that what Men needed to live wholly by, for and from Love; was eternal Heavenly life - that is, to be saved from evil, entropy and death. 

Jesus knew this for himself, and from himself. But partial notions of the idea were also (apparently, according to some historians) implicit in some of the ideas of his time and place; found in places such as the Hebrew, Greek and Roman religions. These may have been confirmation or a clarification, but were not the origin. 

All humans who grow up into the dawn of consciousness know implicitly what is needed for the purity and completion of our mortal lives; and so did Jesus - but Jesus knew it explicitly. 

And because Jesus was wholly-aligned with divine creation (this happened at the time of his Baptism by John), and motivated solely by love of God and fellow Men; what Jesus knew and willed, was thereby created. 

That is how divine creation works - without intermediary. 

(Indeed all true creation works that way. Once created it is directly - intuitively - available to all of good will, aside from communication.)

For Jesus; to know what is good, is to desire and make it possible.

Jesus began to teach that eternal resurrected life was now possible for Men who chose it, but to attain the perfection of Love eternally, they must die and be "born again". 

(And they must want to live by love, above all else.) 

However, it was not necessary that Men be told of resurrection in order for them to choose it. 

The soul after death had always moved to various states of Being after leaving behind the dead body (destinations such as reincarnations, or underworlds, or demonic affiliations), as hinted by the various recorded ancient religions. 

The Second Creation by Jesus now became available to the soul after death, including those who had previously died; as a new possibility - as a possible choice. 

(A choice never previously available until the work of Jesus; impossible to God the primary creator, and only possible to a mortal Man who attained complete alignment with God's Primary Creation.)

    

Resurrection to eternal Heavenly life thereby "immediately" became possible after its creative conception (without need for Jesus himself to die and be resurrected); as was shown by the resurrection of his "beloved disciple" Lazarus. 

Jesus then demonstrated how things could be, by his own resurrection and his temporary return to work among his disciples, and many other people. 

But the Second Creation was made for all the Beings of the First Creation who desired and chose it, post-mortally - not just those Beings who had heard about it, and not just human beings.  

A difference between primary thinking and 'action'

I have been so concerned to acknowledge that primary thinking of our real and divine self is real - in the sense of having an objective (knowable by others) effect on the world - that I neglected to clarify in what way it is real. And how the reality of thinking differs from that of 'action'. 

When we take an action - do something with our bodies, or by speaking/ writing; the effects are on 'this earthly mortal world'. 

These effects of actions are therefore of the nature of this-world; being evanescent - subject to entropy. And the effects of action are known by other people via perception, from 'outside' them - via their senses and perhaps unconsciously and involuntarily. 

The effect of primary thinking is different; because it does not exist in this earthly and mortal world; but instead in a divine and eternal reality - our thoughts are therefore, in some way, permanent.

But since primary thinking is not 'located' in this earthly world; its actions are not via the sensory perceptions, and do not happen-to people unconsciously or involuntarily. 

For primary thinking to affect other people (other beings) in this earthly mortal world - these persons must consciously choose to access the divine and eternal reality. And they know this divine reality not by perceptions, but by their own primary thinking.  

Therefore, the reality of primary thinking is on the one hand more eternally real and significant than our actions; but on the other hand primary thinking does not effect the perceptible things of this world; it does not move things, or make things happen, or influence other people unconsciously or against their will. 

Instead, primary thinking happens in a potentially shared world; and affects those who participate in this shared world. 

Primary thinking is a form of divine creation - as we think, we participate in divine creation and contribute to it; but that participated creation is not happening here on earth but in 'another dimension'.

That world is the same 'dimension' to which Christians go after resurrection - it is Heaven. 

In sum, our primary thinking while we are mortals on earth has its effects in Heaven.