The Personalized Universe

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 05 May 2006

A long time ago, an Atheist acquaintance (whom I'll call "A") was rambling on about how he felt people were a bit dim about the whole God thing. "It's an ingrained need of humans," A shrugged. "People need to believe in a higher power. They need something called "God". It doesn't even matter if the alleged god is nice or cruel, loving or terrifying, male or female. It doesn't matter if it offers eternal life or demands people die. As long as it's "more powerful" in their eyes, it fills the need."

I thought about this for a long time. I was studying theology at the time--a self-study, which I'd started the year before when I was age 15. The argument seemed like a fair one, all things considered. If I were to render all my seemingly spiritual experiences as something "real yet self-created," not removing their validity but removing any objectivity, and look at the concept of God not from my experience but as a theory, "humans innately need a God" seemed a philosophy difficult to argue, if I was honest.

One day I was looking at something that related somehow to Columbus, and the conditions on ships. My mind made an idle string of 'free associations,' and I ended up thinking of scurvy, the "sailor's sickness" so many died from, before they discovered that it was a profound lack of Vitamin C, easily curable with a few foods. As I continued to stare mostly-thoughtlessly into space, an observation stepped in from the back of my mind. It went something like this:

"You don't have an innate need for a thing unless that thing is part of the components of which you are made. Vitamin C deficiency would not cause Scurvy if Vitamin C were not an innate part of the earth we live on, the bodies we inhabit. You don't pine and die for what you've never had. Humans have an ingrained need for God because God is an innate part of what comprises a human being."

I believe this is the counterpoint to the first argument and I've yet to find one that offsets it.

o0o

When people wish to use visualization for something, whether it is for health meditations or ritual magick, the one thing absolutely necessary is that whatever they are focusing on, have some sort of specific representation for them. You cannot accomplish much by simply acknowledging that somewhere or everywhere in the universe there's some fuzzy energy field holding both the dark and light, for example. If your target-----whether remote viewing or prayer or magick is involved, doesn't matter----does not have a single point of focus, something you can 'have a relationship with', then your result doesn't have any "focus" either.

It helps little to render the "polarities" concept into impersonal neutrality. "There is no good and evil," I recall spouting when I was about 16. "There is only energy. Like a thermometer, it only reflects its usage. There is no objective state of good vs. bad. Only our arbitrary judgements about that." (Funny, it seemed only a philosophy to me at the time; now I see it as a political and cultural influence on me as well. The patronizing sneer this came with, whether from me or others, is the most defining characteristic of that model.)

Being sure of nothing but that "fuzzy impersonal universe," I began to lose 'cohesion' of my god-concept. God began dissolving around the edges for me. It wasn't enough that I was already whispering To Whom it may Concern in my prayers. Now, God was not only not personal, he wasn't even knowable, because he wasn't a thing, an it, or a He. A nebulous, fuzzy cloud-of-god was simply omnipresent.

o0o

When my husband was once possessed (seriously) by a grey-translucent "energy-sucking" thing, eventually, it nearly did me in. I had no lack of available tools, focus, strength, or handy deities. I had no lack of knowledge, and even warning by some QBL studying friends, of a particularly vulnerable cycle I was in. What I had, was an inability to make my inner psychic and outer logical lives meet in the middle. The psychic part of me recognized it openly as a singular threat. Alas the other part of me had a difficult time believing such a thing could be real, dismissing the other part of me with "probably imagination," and reducing the whole concept to some fuzzy netherland of "theoretically possible but seems highly implausible" universe that intelligent people, I felt, did not personalize and get paranoid about.

You cannot focus on something if it is not a thing for you, in some regard, even if that's only a concept-model.

You can't "singlemindedly concentrate" on anything that isn't, at least in usage-as-set, singular.

You know that stand-up joke, when someone says, "...don't take it personally!" And some guy says, "How am I supposed to take it, as a group??" Well, anything with which I need to have a relationship, needs to be personalized.

That's why we concentrate on the target in remote viewing, and not "the miniscule portion of the universe which is excluded from our query."

I suppose that's why "the devil" is singularized. On the far right god-ly side, it's a spiritual being. On the far left god-less side, it's the president. One way or the other, humans still perceive and experience what they feel is evil, they still project it, hunt it, etc. but they can only do this if they're personalizing it.

Because when it's an impersonal fuzzy cloud of energy with a spiritu-political neutrality, there is no relationship; there is no motivation; nothing.

o0o

The best way to render a person helpless to fight any given thing, personal, issue, trend, or circumstance, is to convince the person that it is not a "thing" they are fighting. Humans are reduced to numbers, as if much of the circumstance of reality carries some metaphysical sheild of incorporation, and there's a whole universe of "nothing personal".

In a movie recently, a man who kidnapped a whole family, was going to kill them etc., was asked by the teenager, "Why do you hate us?" and he said, "I don't hate you. I just don't care about you." And isn't that the reality that our world has been moving toward? Not of premeditated evil, but of sheer impersonal, conscience-less unconcern. If our neighbor is homeless it isn't our problem; if someone woman outside at night is raped we aren't involved; if someone loses their job of 40 years just before retirement, it's just business. If an executive orders something that causes great harm to environment, even death to people, it's just corporate business.

I once said in a media review that it's much easier to be killed with kindness. Or even alleged impartiality. Why? Because when someone is really overtly biased, readers perceive it, and they react defensively.

The key to keeping people from reacting defensively, is to disallow the situation to be personal; is to make sure any presentation does not exceed some "range" of alleged central neutrality. It doesn't matter how wrong, injust, or outright evil something is: if it's "nothing personal," one isn't expected to bother having any real opinion about it. Like death, taxes, and destructive acts of nature, we're expected to shrug, say "Bummer!" and move on.

o0o

I believe that humans may have an innate need to personalize things. I believe that actual success in many human endeavors is directly related to the person's ability to personalize something.

In dreams, when the "large feeling of ever-growing over-whelmingly dark feeling of BAD-ness" comes in, there is no real defense for it. But when those elements are personalized into an individual, we can fight that, or we can heal that, or other "personal relationship" results that let us, in short, DEAL WITH a certain energy, issue, circumstance, etc.

I am coming to believe that the apathy and impersonalization of our culture is its biggest danger to itself.

And I am coming to believe that having revised the concept of God from a personal relationship into some Grand New Age Ball Of Fuzzy Love And Light may be one of the more destructive things to actually happen to humanity's ability to "relate to" love and divinity.

It isn't that I think 'God' is, well, the guy on the cloud as embodied in the Christianity I grew up in. I actually am far closer to that fuzzy-ball-of-light philosophy than many folks who think they believe in that. But I think that lack of conscience and lack of concern for consequences is the spiritual Scurvy our culture has developed as a result of having had insufficient 'God' in their diet. You see the pattern in other ways as well, and the dissolution of a 'personal relationship with' someone you're supposed to behave better for, has the same effect.

I think losing "personalization," rather than recognizing this as a core need, has removed a great deal of the "emotional volition" that is one of the greatest powers and strengths of humanity.

I think this concept of personalizing things ties into remote viewing as well, but I think I'll address that another time.