The Universal Truths of Life

Introduction

Scientists seek to know the universe, so they seek knowledge about how the universe began, they seek to know the physical laws that direct the physical events of the universe, and they seek knowledge about its ultimate destiny.

In this book, our goal is to know consciousness, so we too seek knowledge on how consciousness began, we seek to know its ultimate destiny, and we seek to know all the complexities that govern conscious events. However, to understand conscious events, we must understand more than the structure of consciousness. Conscious minds have free will, so to understand conscious events, we must also understand the principles that guide free will choices.

Because our actions affect others, and because others feel emotions, pleasure, and pain, we could choose to inflict grave suffering on others only to be mean, or we could choose to help those in need. Free will makes it possible for us to act with selfless or malicious intent. That is, free will introduces a rightness and a wrongness to conscious events.

Because our actions have a right and wrong dimension to them, and because this moral dimension greatly impacts how conscious bodies interact with one another, we could not claim to have a comprehensive understanding of the universe until we have an understanding of this moral dimension of conscious life.

But there is another reason we must pursue an understanding of morality as a scientific discipline. Recall free agent rule #2: the universe can only be knowable when free agents exist if these free agents are knowable. The conscious mind is a free agent and the conscious mind has a moral dimension to it, so to fulfill the requirement of free agent rule #2, morality must be knowable.

A primary goal of this chapter is to gain a basic understanding of the moral principles that guide conscious events.

Science and the Universal Truths of Life

If our actions can be morally wrong, then there are actions we are not supposed to choose. But if there are actions we are not supposed to choose, then there must be other actions that we should be choosing instead. This means that there are things that we should be doing with our lives. We have a purpose.

This understanding that life has a purpose leads us to the universal questions of life.

How did we get here? Why are we here? Can we know right from wrong? Is life worth living? Is there a life after death? Will the moral choices we make ever matter?

These are some of the universal questions that conscious minds have been wrestling with since the beginning of time. Our life choices and our life direction will be dramatically impacted by the answers we accept to these universal questions of life. But are the answers we each find to these questions the correct answers?

Religions have long claimed that it is their place to inform us about our purpose in life, about morality, and about our ultimate destiny. However, we have found that faith-based religions cannot offer a valid pathway to any knowledge – we cannot expand knowledge by choosing our certainties. This finding nullifies the source that many in society rely upon for this information.

Meanwhile, science has been willing to stand aside while religions have claimed ownership over these subject matters. This combination creates a vacuum in matters of universal importance to all the living.

But there should be no vacuum. The origin, purpose, guiding principles, and ultimate destiny of conscious minds must be the same for all conscious minds everywhere and throughout time, and we know this from the universality of like entities. The universal questions of life must have universal answers, otherwise consciousness could not be knowable.

We now recall that the mission of science is to expand our knowledge of universal truths without limitation by scope or degree. In other words, our deepest questions about life fall under the umbrella of science, not religion. In this chapter, we are seeking a basic understanding of the universal truths of life. As we proceed through this chapter, we will find that the material we have already covered will offer helpful insights into this subject matter.

The Ideal of Humanity

In Chapter 11, we found that there had to be a god with free will in order to make free will possible in an otherwise determined universe. This god required full rights over the universe, and these rights made god a free agent capable of acting on the universe outside the physical laws. This meant that the universe could only be knowable if this free agent god was knowable.

Because god was beyond the reach of scientific instruments, this god could only be knowable if god was like us. From that point forward, every time we looked under the hood of divinity, we found humanity. Divinity is the ideal of humanity.

But if divinity is the ideal of humanity, then approaching the ideal of our humanity is to approach divinity. Those seeking the limits on what our humanity can offer will do as god does. In Chapter 11, we found that god is committed to the well-being of others, god is disciplined, selfless, and willing to sacrifice. But most importantly, we found that god can only know love. By imitating these qualities and traits of god, we make god present in the world that surrounds us.

In this free will paradigm, we find that because we were created by god, and we were created in the image and likeness of god, we should set out to imitate god.

God’s Empathy

The word “love” has a definition. Those who love are not indifferent to the suffering of those they love. When someone we love suffers, we suffer too. The greatest and gravest consequence of love is empathy, and the greater one’s love, the greater is their empathy.

But we found that god loves us without limits. Because we found that god’s love has no limits, god’s empathy will have no limits. That is, god will identify with us as one. God will know our joys and our sufferings exactly as we do. Whatever we experience, god will experience equally because perfect love makes empathy perfect.

Our Purpose in Life

We found that god cannot know the future where the decisions of humanons are involved. Because every possible future depends on an endless series of humanon decisions, not even god can know what future we will face with any of the paths we might choose in life. Thus, when we are choosing a path in life, each possible path will be as much a mystery to god as it is to us.

If not even god knows what future we will face with any of the paths we might choose, then we can have no god-given mission we are supposed to complete, and there can be no path we are supposed to follow. If there is no future we are destined to face, there can be no destiny we are supposed to fulfill.

However, not having a predetermined destiny in life is not the same thing as having no purpose. So what is our purpose in life?

God’s perfect love for my neighbor makes god’s empathy for my neighbor perfect. We now have a god that loves our neighbors to the point that god identifies with them as one, but this same god cannot interfere in the universe. However, these same neighbors that are beyond god’s reach are not beyond our reach. So even though god cannot interfere in the lives of our neighbors, we can.

God identifies as one with our neighbors, and our choices affect our neighbors. This one sentence reveals everything we need to know about our purpose in life. Our purpose in life is to do for our neighbors what a loving god cannot. To fulfill our purpose, we choose the path in life we think will make us most beneficial to those god loves.

However, we will be making our decisions in a universe where the future cannot be known by god or by us. So we set out in life blindfolded, but determined to make a difference. In this free will paradigm, we find that it is not, “God, show me what I should do.” Instead, our approach to life is, “God, let me show you what I can do.”

Our Relationship With God

Because god is restricted by the god-obligations from interfering with our thoughts and surroundings, there can be no direct communication from god to us. If we make the effort to communicate directly with god, there can be no response, no corrective or approving feedback, not even so much as an acknowledgment of the effort. Thus, any relationship formed with god through unidirectional communication would become whatever we imagined it to be. A relationship based on one-way communication is not. This means we can only form an indirect relationship with god. But how do we form an indirect relationship with the creator god?

The previous section has already given us the answer, god identifies as one with our neighbors. We express our love for god indirectly by showing love for our neighbors directly. If we want to talk to god, we talk to our neighbors. If we want to listen to god, we listen to our neighbors. All roads to god must pass through those with whom god identifies as one. By loving our neighbors with all their failings, we become worthy to love god in all god’s perfection.

When I view another as lesser than myself, I scorn a neighbor with whom god identifies as one, and therefore I scorn god. The strength of my love for god is measured by the love I have for the neighbor I love the least. How I treat god is measured by how I treat the neighbor I treat most harshly. The measure of my compassion is revealed by how I treat those over whom I have power. God will know me through the eyes, ears, and hearts of the least of my neighbors.

We like to think of ourselves, our schools, our people, and our countries as exceptional, that by some divine gift, we have been favored by god. But divine selection would require divine intervention, so in this free will paradigm, there can be no group of god’s select. To think that a group to which I belong has been given special standing by god is to create a bias, and biases restrict my ability to reason freely.

Therefore, this free will paradigm finds that I am better than no one and no one is better than me. And so it is with our groupings at any scale. Before god, we are equals and we must see each other as equals. Life is simple – I am you and you are me. What sets us apart is the clarity of our reason and the love in our hearts.

There can be no godly guidance to keep us safe or to steer us away from the hard times that lie ahead. We avoid them where possible and endure them when necessary. However, even though god is not available to act on our behalf by reason of the god-obligations, god has not left us abandoned. God has given us each other. We were created to accompany one another through life, and by doing this, so do we accompany god. We truly are each other’s keepers; we are neighbors.

On the Coexistence of God and Evil

When god committed to fulfilling the god-obligations, god committed to making a supreme and unrelenting sacrifice to keep the universe knowable. However, this extraordinary, selfless act leaves god powerless to intervene in the universe on behalf of those that god created out of love. This means that there can be no suffering so great, no outcome so intolerable, no verdict so unjust, no disease so terrible nor evil so extreme, that god could choose to remedy it by interfering in the universe.

God chose to keep the universe knowable despite the certainty that many of the conscious beings that god loves without limits would endure unspeakable injustices, grief, and misery. Our suffering does not reveal that god’s love for us is any less, for we cannot question the love of a god who surrenders all freedom and power to serve obediently for all time.

Instead, allowing the unspeakable suffering of those god loves without limits reveals the supreme importance of knowledge and reason in the eyes of god. This free will paradigm now finds that any act to impede the advancement of knowledge or science, from within or from without, is an act directly against the interests of god and our neighbors and is therefore immoral.

Because god has sacrificed everything to make the universe knowable, spreading falsehoods and lies is an act against both god and society. We find that we are morally obligated to seek knowledge and truth. And if this is true, then it follows that we have a moral obligation to free ourselves from all compromising biases which limit our freedom to accept as true any information that is soundly supported by observation and reason.

Our Choices Make Us Who We Are

Because we have free will, we could choose to do evil or we could choose to do good with the countless decisions we make each day. If I choose to do evil, I will become a very different person than if I choose to do good. Because god cannot know what choices we will make in the future, god learns who we are as we live our lives and make our choices.

Contrary to widespread belief, we find that god cannot know who we are from the time of our creation because our choices not only reveal our identity, our choices create our identity. God discovers who we are at the same time we do, moment by moment, choice by choice. We could choose to do good, or we could choose to do evil, but our choices are ours alone to make, and our choices will make us the person we become.

Sound Moral Determinations

How do we make sound moral determinations?

We have already found guidance on this. We begin with a finding from Chapter 2. A rational mind is always free to accept any soundly supported information as true. This will be equally as true in the moral arena as it is in every other realm of knowledge. If we are not free of rational biases, then our mind will not be open to accepting the difficult choices that could be morally necessary.

For this reason, we must work to free ourselves of all biases and pulls so that we will have complete rational freedom when it comes to making moral decisions. If the only moral choice in a given situation would mean the loss of our own life, then only complete rational freedom would make it possible for us to accept this as the only moral option. Thus, keeping ourselves free of biases is a necessary condition for remaining a good person even in the most extreme moral circumstances.

But taking a sound moral action will require more than complete rational freedom. We still require a means for determining what choices are morally sound, and we also require the driving motivation to take whatever the action is, regardless of how extreme the undesirable personal outcome might be. So what means will we use to make sound moral determinations, and where will we get the driving desire to do whatever is right.

Again, we have already covered the material that can offer guidance on this. We found that god’s love for our neighbors has no limits, to the point that god identifies with them as one. If we are to follow the example of god, then we must love our neighbors as god loves them. When we love others to the point of identifying with them as one, we will act in the best interests of all our neighbors as though we were in their place.

To make sound moral determinations, and to then act according to these determinations, we must keep ourselves free of all rational biases, and we must love others as god does. As long as an unbiased reason rules our minds and a selfless love rules our hearts, our moral judgments and our actions will be sound.

With this combination of clear reason and a universal, selfless love, sound moral actions become evident and acceptable no matter what price we may have to pay for taking the action. Extreme moral situations will test the clarity of our reason and the purity of our love.

Rejecting Heaven and Hell

Moral choices are always important – they are moral choices because they will either benefit or harm the living. In the extreme, we could choose to put our life at risk to save someone else, or we could choose actions that bring great suffering to those who fall under our control. Will there ever be consequences for the endless series of moral choices we are making every day?

Heroism makes our hearts and minds overflow with gratitude, while actions that do grave harm to the innocent bring equally intense demands for justice. But we are not only affected by extreme acts, we are also moved by the least of moral acts. A small act of kindness can change our day while a single derisive word can cloud our thinking. We cannot be indifferent to moral choices, and if we were created in the image and likeness of god, then neither could god be indifferent to our moral choices – especially considering that our moral choices directly impact those god loves.

We know that god cannot effect justice during our time here because god has committed to non-interference. However, once our mind signature loses its life supporting geometry, god will be free to make all things right. Because each moral choice is made independently, for justice to be done, every moral choice must receive its own due penalty or its own due reward.

However, the heaven and hell solution involves a final state which is binary – either a forever state of bliss or a state of eternal suffering. That is, the binary heaven and hell solution is not consistent with full justice because it does not address each moral choice independently.

Because the heaven and hell solution does not take into account each moral choice independently, we must reject the binary final solution of heaven and hell. For an eternal solution to be acceptable, it will have to independently give every moral choice its due. So how can justice be done in a way that takes every moral choice into account independently?

The Unveiled State

Upon our passing, a veil will be lifted and we will all see and know the creator god no matter the choices we made in life. At this time, we will all know the same perfect love known by god.

But the greatest and gravest consequence of perfect love is perfect empathy. With perfect empathy, we will know first hand what those at the receiving end of our actions had experienced. Perfect empathy will allow us to experience the impact our actions had on others as though we were in their place. We will see clearly and without bias the true feelings we had for our neighbors; we will know and fully experience how we treated each, and thus how we treated god.

In the end, god will not judge us, that will not be necessary. With perfect love and empathy for all, we will each be our own judge. We will look in a mirror and see ourselves for the first time. We should not fear meeting god after death, we should fear meeting ourselves.

Some of us will discover that we were never as good as we had imagined. We will know ourselves for exactly the person we chose to be. Choice by choice, day by day, we became the person we will always be because once the veil has been lifted, we will see clearly and moral choices will no longer be possible – our chance to redefine ourselves has passed. From that point forward, we will forever live with the person we chose to become.

Our lives will now be an open book for all, and those who read our pages will also do so with a perfect love and empathy for the many we affected in life, whether for the good or for the bad. No slight or good deed will go unnoticed. Perfect empathy will give us perfect knowledge of ourselves and each other. We will all experience what each has wrought with no choice to be forgotten.

In this way, every choice will carry its due weight, with each creating its own heaven or hell. We will live with the rewards and the disgraces we have earned one by one. Every moral choice was important at its own moment in time, and what we did with that moment was forever locked in history the moment the choice was made. For this reason, god cannot forgive, the word will have no meaning. That which was will always have been, for not even god can change what was. We will become who we choose to be and that is how we will always be known.

It will not matter if we had believed in this God or that God or no god at all. It will not matter if we said “I love you” to god often or not once; our honor and our disgrace will be what we did to and for our neighbors. If we allowed biases to cloud our reason and anger to extinguish our love, we may find that our lives deserve to be buried and forgotten. At that time in the future, we may find ourselves steeped in regret and trying to hide the pages of our lives.

But god will never turn away from us, for we found that god can only know love. Even if we find ourselves living the hell of knowing we threw away the opportunity of a lifetime, our earlier findings make clear that our sufferings will be equally borne by god. Where love is perfect, empathy is perfect too.

And herein lies the reason we cannot wish another to hell. There can be no joy in heaven nor suffering in hell that is not shared equally by a god that can only know perfect empathy. To wish another to hell is to wish the same on god, for whatever is suffered by any will also be suffered by god.

For this reason, even those who have done only good in their lives should not expect a heaven free of hardship and suffering. Any heaven we have earned will be a sharing in the complete life experience of a true and loving god. We will share with god the sufferings of those whose hearts grew angry and cold, and we will share with god the joys of the honorable.

Understanding Death

Recall that when our human body dies, we do not leave this universe and begin a life hereafter. As long as our mind signature remains intact, we will continue living on in this same universe and as the same individual. After the death of our human body, we will remember our life as a human primary in addition to all our other prior life experiences.

We will not move on to a life hereafter until our mind signature has been compromised. Only then will we be untethered from life in this universe.

The Rational God Pathway

Although there are significant differences between some of our findings and common religious beliefs, there are also conspicuous similarities. Ancient and current religions have believed that god took on human flesh; we found that our consciousness was made in the image and likeness of god’s. Both indicate a god that is just like us.

We found that god can only know love; religions commonly teach that god is love. Our findings led to a suffering god, and many religions also teach of a suffering god. We found that there is life after death and religions teach the same.

The list could go on, but the point is clear; what we claim to have found through reason is strikingly similar to what many religions have already been teaching through doctrine. But how can this be? Especially considering our earlier finding that doctrinal religions are an invalid pathway to knowledge of any kind. We must account for these striking similarities.

We begin by pointing out that all the findings of the three god chapters (Chapters 7, 11, and 15) came from a starting point of only two assumptions: the universe is a knowable place, and we are free to make choices. That is, all our findings on god, god’s love, our purpose, our ultimate destiny, and so on, were derived from a modest starting point, and these two simple assumptions were certainly within the reach of the rational minds from any time period.

Because our starting point was so modest, we should expect our rational findings to substantially track the rational findings of those who came before us. We will label this historically important line of reasoning the rational god pathway.

We find that today’s religious teachings must have originally come from rational minds navigating the rational god pathway. Then, at some point in history, these rational findings were downgraded to doctrine. This shift from reason to doctrine was most unfortunate for many reasons. Most importantly, the doctrinal downgrade allowed the degradation of the original rational findings because the doctrine was no longer tied to its rational foundation.

The Degradation of the Rational God Pathway

The rational god pathway leads to the unequivocal finding that god had to commit to never interfering in the universe, because if there were a god that could interfere at will, the universe could not be a knowable place. And yet, doctrinal religions have widely taught the opposite, that god does interfere in the universe.

This acceptance of an interfering god opened the door to holy books. These holy books have led to doctrinal disagreements on Gods, prophets, and moral issues that have driven wedges through families and societies alike for centuries.

Even when churches share the same holy book, instead of becoming more united over time behind their common scriptures, they do the opposite; churches continue to break apart into ever smaller groups due to irreconcilable differences on how to interpret their divine revelations.

For each doctrinal organization, their own interpretations become moral imperatives that cannot be compromised without defying their God. The existence of many organizations with their own unique moral imperatives has a direct impact on the stability of society. This becomes evident when doctrinal organizations grow in size and influence and begin writing their own moral doctrine into the laws of society, much to the consternation of those unaligned with their doctrine.

When both extremes of contentious moral issues find themselves reading from the same holy book to defend their opposite positions, we can see the futility of using divine revelations to make moral determinations. When divine revelations become the basis of right and wrong, everyone is right and everyone else is wrong. This brings us to the tragedy of doctrine.

The tragedy of doctrine through history is that it blocked the rational contributions of countless intelligent men and women over thousands of years because doctrine locks out reason. Science stands still in a doctrinal society because as we found earlier, doctrine and reason cannot coexist. Doctrine grants authority to the keepers and teachers of the doctrine, whereas reason is universal and makes everyone equal.

Again, had the findings of the rational god pathway remained tied to reason, there could be no holy books. Instead, these books would be accepted as the writings of both wise and flawed human beings that we could learn from, but they would not be seen as inspired works of Gods that are worth fighting wars over.

At the end of Chapter 7, we found that any god solution would have to comply with all the constraints of that chapter. One of those constraints was that god could not interfere in the conscious or physical universe, and this constraint eliminates any possibility of holy books. Therefore, this free will paradigm now accepts that divine revelations were neither divine nor revelations, they were writings of human origin that became divisive only upon judging them divine.

Our findings do not require that we abandon god, quite the opposite. We must accept a loving, but non-intervening god. Similarly, our finding that god cannot provide us with written moral instructions does not lead us to abandon morality, but rather, to base our morality on reason and love. Without doctrinal wedges to divide us, we can set out to create a moral framework that is not based on what we think god thinks, but instead, on what we find is reasonable for the world community we belong to and care about.

We recall the following two important findings for making moral determinations: “As long as an unbiased reason rules our minds and a selfless love rules our hearts, our moral judgments and our actions will be sound.” We also found that, “When we love others to the point of identifying with them as one, we will act in the best interests of all our neighbors as though we were in their place.”

We have found that we cannot form a direct connection with god. This finding dramatically alters our understanding of how we should live our lives. We will only find god by focusing on others. Again, “By loving our neighbors with all their failings, we become worthy to love god in all god’s perfection.”

Yes there is a god and yes this god loves us, but non-interference means that we alone will create the world and the community we live in. We are all in this together and together we are on our own. Working together, we will find out just how quickly we can turn this earth into a home that we all share as neighbors.