RE: #finishthestory Week 37: The End of the Beginning
Well done!
Your finishing the story raises an extraordinary number of questions. I have found several resistances in myself while reading and the need to let you know that you have told very well what drives people.
I feel provoked to respond to you with my very personal views and what I believe I understand in principle about human consciousness. Because I'm not quite sure if I understood you correctly.
If one understands God not as a separate higher figure, as a world builder or architect, but understands the metaphors of religion and philosophy to the extent that without the human eye the universe cannot be seen, without the human tongue language cannot be understood and spoken, without the human sense of touch, pain and joy would have no meaning. In this sense, every one is God.
Causality and linearity are of little significance, since otherwise any event could be explained backwards and the present would have to be defined as a consequence of the past. What humans tend to do. ...
But I think it is rather the other way around: man explains the past to himself exactly in every present moment. He constructs mentally out of the present what the past looked like. As a 12-year-old child, I explained connections differently to myself compared to my 22-year-old me and again quite differently to my 45-year-old me.
Therefore, what you told in the beginning speaks to me - not to be mistaken as an outer force but literally in the human sense as our senses are the only one existing with us organic beings.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Further along still, the Johannine believing community insisted:
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life--
All of it: so much dust.
Somehow it seems to me to be a godlike entity again, which you let continue to exist in Yoh, one, which still seems to have too much personality and power. I resist the idea that this direct form of intelligence and adoption could happen that way.
What appeals to me again is that the dream plays an essential role here and that one can indeed ask oneself whether we dream our life and want immortality instead of living it real.
When I set out, I didn't intend to make Yoh seem as if it were God, but that's kind of the direction the story took as I composed it. I think my best understanding of the story (not to be confused with my personal views) is that the universe is a godless place--at least in the any sense that humans might comprehend such a being.
Sure, we could take Spinoza's view of all existence as interdependent and derivative of God, or we could take the Deists' watchmaker analogy, or we could even mix in Schopenhauer's understanding of the world as we know it as an extension of will, or perhaps we could go back to Kant's understanding of the underlying thing-in-itself, which is simply inaccessible to human understanding, although we have plenty of gnoseological metaphors (as @f3nix pointed out) for trying to apprehend the thing-in-itself.
Something in that mix would help ground Ethan's universe in my rendering. The point is that when humans even graze nearby to a manifestation of the thing-in-itself, all human conceptions and comprehensions of the universe disappear, and that thing-in-itself, even if it's just the true form of a broom or crushed soda can, may as well be God. I think that if such a thing were permitted to somehow tear into the human world, it would so upend space-time to the point of irrelevancy, and all our stories, all our knowledge, all our beliefs would be so reconfigured to the point that, from our current perspective, they would be rendered meaningless.
So I guess I'm suggesting we go worship the incomprehensible depths and infinitudes of discarded brooms now? :)
HaHa, I like that!
Alan Watts once said something like "The universe consists of burned almonds".
Linguistically this is hardly to be grasped, only to be guessed by detours and metaphors. The mixture you mentioned speaks to me in any case.
Death or what may follow then is and remains a mystery, just as the living itself does not really open itself up to us in precise perfection. Lovely that you have explained to me how your story came to you. Many thanks for that.