Recent political realities have made me think a lot about good and evil. Is there an actual, universal, apolitical, areligious line is the sand? THE line. Item A is evil, and item B is on the other side of the line — on the good side of the boundary. My artist’s eye conjures up a fixed line in space, extending like a ribbon of highway for miles and miles. On one side is this creepy guy, angry and screaming across the border. On the other side …. a baby.
We all want that line the be clear and universal. It should be, right? For instance, it’s clear to see that murder is wrong. Yet when a CEO’s leadership deprives countless people of life and health, the conversation takes on a few more layers. And other recent news: one side says the debt ceiling is always good, the other side says it’s always bad, for years it’s been that way. Suddenly let’s all to switch sides to now-bad, now-good.
I just read a fantastic essay by David Brooks in today’s NYT. The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought it Would Be. The way he moves through the material to explore his experiences of faith, and how they shaped his views really resonates. He makes a solid case for the existence of that line in the sand. There is actual good; there is actual evil; and it is possible to know the difference.
So I decided to accept his argument and see how how this foundation reshapes the Unseen Architecture of my universe. (It’s a chilly Sunday morning. Why not jump down the Unseen Architecture rabbit hole.)
So … for actual good, and actual evil to exist, there has to be a recognition of the difference. There has to be awareness. For me, and I concede this is a great leap, for me this awareness is consciousness — the unified field. And the soul is an individualized expression of the whole — a drop of water individualized from the ocean.
I confess to being one of those folks who believes in the soul — the individualized piece of consciousness that lives in all of us. Perhaps in all living creatures. Perhaps in all matter, living or otherwise.
Does all matter have consciousness? Why does the carbon molecule in me get to have a soul, but the carbon in a piece of paper does not? Perhaps the question is not ‘does all matter have consciousness’, because that frames the question in a way that restricts the consideration set. The real question is this: ‘what is the nature of matter, and what is the nature of consciousness’ — moving us beyond the limitations of a binary question. A possible truth: one does not contain or not contain the other — they are the same entity. Matter is Consciousness.
Again, from the artist’s eye, the universe is an oceanic field of awareness. It neither contains, nor is devoid of matter — consciousness and matter are the same thing. If matter composes the universe, then what about dark matter. Maybe this is just the yin and the yang of reality. In this imagining, dark matter would be the opposite of consciousness. And it would inhabit the other side of the line: consciousness and non-consciousness, matter and dark matter, good and evil.
In all of this imagining about the nature of reality, my artist’s eye always brings me back to shapes, specifically the line. The final delineation between yes and no, the object and the empty space. Over the years I’ve tried to express these ideas in layers of shapes. There is great joy in creating art to express the ordering principle of my world view, a visual demonstration that the world makes sense. Even trying to wrap all the mysteries up in a pretty picture completes me, but probably ONLY me. Given reactions from viewers over time, my attempts are falling short. As one friend put it, “I think I understand what you are saying, but when I look at this, what I see is plaid.”
