The Lens of Love

Through love life becomes infinitely interesting. Love leads to an ever greater ascent of understanding for everything. Whatever your lens whether more personal, scientific, philosophical, psychological, theological, or whatever it can be understood through love while the inverse is not true. Even within domains, love empowers the greatest understanding and enables expansion beyond the limitations of the domain. As a scientist cannot describe the origin of their hypothesis, the laws of the universe, the emergence of reality, or their subjectivity. The mathematician cannot describe the origins of their axioms (the axioms themselves being questionable), nor can the philosopher describe the origins of ethics. Seeking these answers has lead me to love. Love is the hypothesis for hypotheses, for the emergence of laws, reality, subjectivity, ethics, life and beauty. Love increases understanding within and across disciplines, satiating my hunger to understand the fundamental nature of reality.

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The Cannon of Ideas

As our modern understanding of reality has evolved through time aspects have been discovered, integrated, lost, re-discovered, and re-integrated. Great thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine of Hippo managed to integrate science and spirituality into one unified and coherent understanding. Today, our modern understanding of reality is missing the rational aspect of spirituality. We would benefit from re-integrating the scientific and spiritual into one unified ascent of reason.

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What is a Lens?

A lens reduces the infinite complexity of reality down to a conception we can understand. This reduction is necessary because the complexity of reality is far greater than our perceptive ability and our conceptive capacity. Due to this reduction no lens can gives an all encompassing conception of reality. Yet a good lens reveal glimmers of truth into conceivable parts of realities inconceivable whole. While a good lens doesn't contradict itself, various lenses may appear to contradict each-other. But these contradictions can be unified and understood through a lens that is more aligned with the deeper fundamental nature of reality.​ [add example or analogy, blind man and elephant?]

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The Modern Western Lens

The modern western lens is either scientific, spiritual or a contradictory combination of both. The scientific lens is often systematic yet not meaningful. The spiritual lens is often meaningful yet not systematic. The contradictory combination of science and spirituality within the modern western mind is further exasperated by the tendency of pulling answers from eastern spirituality rather than the more aligned western spirituality.  Further, In both cases the modern western lens is confused. For example, we confuse needs of having with being. While our needs of hunger and thirst are satisfied by having food and water, our needs of an identity, maturity, love, and intelligence are not satisfied by having opinions, a nice car, sex, and a degree. While having these things may signal their attainment, they do not satisfy each needs within ourselves. These being needs are only satisfied through the processes of cultivating and refining the identity, maturity, love, and intelligence within ourselves.

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The Shared Origins of Science and Spirituality

The origin of our modern western science and spirituality can be traced back to their unified conception within the early western philosophies of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. While these are not fully systematic theories (often by design) and contain contradiction, they show how one lens can simultaneously clarify ideas within science and spirituality - like how in Pythagoras's attempt to understand the gods he discovered the patterns of mathematics and applied these patterns to the world to discovered the octave, which he then used to tune souls with the harmony and resonance of heaven. Isn't that beautiful? or Plato's allegory of the cave and his conception of the Abstract and Ideal which give a unified lens for awakening to the truth, beauty, and love around us. From these ideas science and spirituality emerge. As such, Plato's student Aristotle created the first system of Science to bring us closer to truth and Proclus created the first system of theology to bring us closer to beauty and love. But at this point, each system began drifting apart until I find myself here wondering how to create one system that can unify the truth of science with the beauty and love of theology.

 

What is Science Missing?

Science emerged out of Platonism through Aristotelian Logic and continued developing through Newtonian Physics, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and Einstein's theory of General Relativity. While science has revealed great truth through objective study, today we are discovering the limits of a purely objective lens in the study of particle physics, dark matter, AI, and consciousness. As if the external lens of science has reached it's limits and the microscope / telescope have begun to flip back to recognize the subjectivity of the scientist within their experiment. Today, scientists are raising some of the most interesting questions of our time; such as Nima Arkani-Hamed's theory that Space-Time is not fundamental or Stephen Wolfram's work on emergence. In exploring these questions I find myself gaining insight by turning to the systematics of theology as they illuminate the fundamental underpinnings of our reality.

 

Reconnecting to the Divine

Theology emerged out of Platonism through Proclus and continued into the Neo-Platonist system developed by Dionysius, Origen, Platinus, Augustine, etc. The influence of theology reached its peak around the15th century before the enlightenment. Theology began to decline as the church stood in opposition to the progress of science and reason. Theological influence continued to decline with the influence of more scientific philosophies such as Descartes, Kant and Nietzche that ultimately replaced God with human reason as the ultimate source of truth and meaning. While human reason has continued to drive innovation and prosperity, today we are seeing the limits of replacing God with reason as it is leading society away from beauty & love and into the meaningless nihilism of our current mental health crisis.

 

Regaining Focus on Reality

As seen by recent breakthroughs in physics, systems of science and spirituality have begun drifting together. At the level of fundamental reality we will find the union of science and spirituality, the divine rhelm. Peering through this divine realm is to see through the Lens of Love and this lens brings meaning to life and progress to science. Join me in exploring this hard problem by challenging my thinking. Together lets move toward an ever greater understanding truth, beauty, and love.