as above, so below

from http://mypsiche.blogspot.com/2008/08/personalization-archmeds-healing.html

I believe that behind or within -- or really, "composing", mass, there is 'vibrating energy' as the physicists say. But I believe that composing that vibrating energy, is what you might call 'consciousness'. I normally avoid that word--it's far too fuzzy for my liking--but it's all I can use to describe this concept. To me, every mote of energy is a collection of consciousness. The more energy that is combined, the more 'awareness' begins to build, like a side-effect or property of the quantity increase. At a certain level it becomes a 'sense of identity' and then of 'individual' identity. At a next level it becomes capable of dualism, and then when yet more complex, of deception.

Awareness as it intensifies in density or intensity, reaches critical mass that shifts from 'aware' to 'self-aware' and eventually to fully 'autonomous'. But everything in our existence is composed of the same thing: motes of consciousness that combine to make up minute particles of energy that combine to make up minute particles of mass that combine to make up minute 'pieces' of our reality that combine to make up the fabric of our experience.

To be uncertain is uncomfortable; To be certain is ridiculous

What is scientific reductionism and why is it ridiculous. Let's ask an expert. James Schombert is the Director of the General Science program at U of Oregon. In his excellent essay on the Philosophy of Science he points out that the:

main purpose of science is to trace, within the chaos and flux of phenomena, a consistent structure with order and meaning. This is called the philosophy of rationalism, rational as in conforming with reason. And the purpose of scientific understanding is to coordinate our experiences and bring them into a logical system... Why? Primarily, the control of the unpredictable driven by the fear of the unknown.

Reductionism and determinism deny the possibility of free will and human agency and this negates rationalism and science itself.

Reductionism:

Reductionism is the belief that any complex set of phenomena can be defined or explained in terms of a relatively few simple or primitive ones.

For example, atomism is a form of reductionism in that it holds that everything in the Universe can be broken down into a few simple entities (elementary particles) and laws and interactions among them. Modern chemistry reduces chemical properties to ninety or so basic elements (kinds of atoms) and their rules of combination.

To a reductionist, once a set of equations or mathematical relations has been found to describe a system, then the behavior of the system is considered to be explained.

Reductionism is very similar to, and has its roots from, Occam's Razor, which states that between competing ideas, the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.

Reductionism was widely accepted due to its power in prediction and formulation. It is, at least, a good approximation of the macroscopic world (although it is completely wrong for the microscope world, see quantum physics).

Too much success is a dangerous thing since the reductionist philosophy led to a wider paradigm, the methodology of scientism, the view that everything can and should be reduced to the properties of matter (materialism) such that emotion, aesthetics and religious experience can be reduced to biological instinct, chemical imbalances in the brain, etc. The 20th century reaction against reductionism is relativism. Modern science is somewhere in between.

Determinism:

Closely associated with reductionism is determinism, the philosophy that everything has a cause, and that a particular cause leads to a unique effect. Another way of stating this is that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen.

Implicit to determinism is the fact that every event happens of necessity. It has to happen; the Universe has no choice.

Determinism also implies that everything is predictable given enough information. Since Newtonian or classical physics is rigidly determinist, both in the predictions of its equations and its foundations, then there is no room for chance, surprise and creativity. Everything is as it has to be, which gave rise to the concept of a clockwork Universe.

Chaos in the Bible.

I love the Bible! What a testament to Chaos!

In the history of our culture there is probably no other piece of literature that has been reworked by so many committees of duplicitous connivers and translated and re-translated by so many generations of scribes, each with his own cultural baggage and political agenda.

The Book is the product of a very reiterative process and what we get in the end is the result of accretion and deletion, acts both deliberate and unintentional, the secret insertion of subtexts, the adoption of local myth, cultural appropriation, acts motivated by politics, ignorance, faith or higher knowledge, perpetrated by the power hungry as well as the altruistic.

Just look at the multitude of variations of faith in the Children of Abraham, each one is the only true way and no two are alike. Multiply this by the factor that many of these people say one thing, believe another and act without regard to either.

This is because there are various, sometimes contradictory meanings, coded into the text at different scales, using self reference, foreshadowing, double entendre, symbolism, and even Kabbalistic and numerological ciphers.

The Bible is a mythical map for an ever changing cultural terrain. Maybe the lesson to be learned from studying the Bible is that many forms of Order can be derived from Chaos, but these forms are projected by the observer based on there position in space and time.