Fluid ImaginationFrom Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+:
A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most.
I’m in the middle of several great conversations right now with several incredible people, and at least two of those conversations have to do with the concept of meaning — as in, what is the meaning of life.
A few weeks ago I identified myself as a demotheist. It’s kind of like an atheist, except it goes a little further; it denies the existence of God, but it asserts the existence of divinity.
This divinity is what gives life meaning, but it is a gift given to life by life. Demotheism recognizes the reality of multi-dimensional intelligences (including our own), and it accepts as given the reality of other multi-dimensional intelligences. Life has evolved from nothing thousands and millions of times, and at no time (or at least, for no significant time) has there only been one life; life has always involved the presence of others.
Our relationships with others manifest divinity. I mean this in a material sense. Some entity is created in the big bang of inter-relational energies, some third thing that is not one or the other but that shoots out over them like a firework of new meaning.
There is a trianglular relationship between divinity and the multi-dimensional intelligences that create it.
Excuse me for a moment while we compare this metaporical understanding of reality to the Holy Trinity of the Christian faith.
God is often conceived as the great Other. The relationship between God and humanity is of two multi-dimensional intelligences engaging with one another. In the covenants that govern that relationship, one can see the movement, the Holy Spirit, of that relationship, the movement through time of how that relationship has grown, sometimes closer to one another, sometimes farther away, but always with a prophet’s eye on the covenants, and judging each other accordingly.
But it required the interaction between those two multi-dimensional intelligences, God and the Son of Man, to give birth to that Holy Spirit. The colliding energies were so strong that they created a new Holy and Divine entity, both of the others and more than the others, an entity whose value, whose meaning, while different, was also supreme: the Holy Spirit.
This same experience occurs whenever two multi-dimensional intelligences (such as our own) interact. When two human beings enter into a relationship with one another, they create, between them and beyond them, something new, something of intrinsic value and worth, equal to and other than the two human beings who created it; the relationship, as a divine entity all its own, matters.
I said earlier that this relationship is triangular, but in all honesty, its pyramidical. The relationship, as a relationship, is held aloft and supported from every angle below it. And just as the elevated point of any pyramid can enter into a relationship with the elevated point of any other pyramid to form a line, so can our relationships enter into communion with other relationships to create an entire plane of reality that, in some instances, could be called “the vibe” of a room or the “spirit of the time,” and it can be truly palpable.
This is a plane of reality — a real, material plane — that certain multi-dimensional intelligences can become attuned to. It’s the thing that transcends us, the thing that reaches out in a million invisible waves (light waves, sound waves, heat waves, etc.) like the launching of a million invisible roots (each seeking something tangible to report), and the slamming into each other of all of the waves that are launched by each individual in the room raises some kind of cosmic temperature until it gives off, as heat, the divine birth of something new: “the vibe.”
The existence of “the vibe” implies the existence of meaning, the existence of purpose. A vibe doesn’t require purpose, but it makes purpose possible and it gives us a reason to exist. It’s something that one can either help keep aloft, or put down and leave behind to suffer the ravages of time.
Our relationships with each other: this is where divinity is created; this is what gives us purpose; this is what offers us meaning. We each have intrinsic value, but our relationships do as well, and it’s up to us to support them.