Tag: spirituality
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The Ball Is In God’s Court
In my previous post, I described a conclusion that took many years to reach. The metaphysical ladder I had spent so long climbing does not top out in a personal deity. Natural theology, philosophy and mysticism may lead to an ultimate reality. They may lead to the Ground of Being, the Absolute, the One or…
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The Ladder Doesn’t Reach God
For much of my adult life, I assumed that philosophy and theology ultimately pointed in the same direction. As my confidence in evangelical Christianity declined, I did what many intellectually inclined believers do: I went looking for firmer foundations. I was never persuaded by reductive materialism. Consciousness seemed too strange, existence too mysterious, and the…
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The End of My Religious FOMO
Preface The reflections below arose from a realization that several religious claims I had always treated separately may actually be connected by a single underlying assumption. The claim that believers have a personal relationship with God, the claim that scripture is a kind of divine message, and the claim that the universe itself is grounded…
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The One, the Many, and the Absence of Gods
People sometimes ask about my spiritual beliefs and I struggle to answer concisely. My views are not conventionally religious, yet neither are they atheistic in the straightforward sense. I find myself somewhere between mysticism, pantheism, symbolism, and philosophy. What makes the question difficult is that there are at least three different levels involved: metaphysics, experience,…
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Experience, Speculation, and the Space Between
There’s a tension I’ve lived with for years: the gap between the mystical experience I actually have and the metaphysical systems I enjoy constructing. They coexist, but they don’t meet. One is lived; the other is intellectual play. My spiritual experience is modest and quiet. What I actually feel is a unitive ground of being,…
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The Thin Metaphysics of the Steely Age
Triangularism For years I carried too much metaphysical weight: hiraeth, land‑mysticism, ancestral echoes, perennial philosophy, the ache for unity and eternity. All of it stirred something in me, but none of it changed how life actually works. None of it strengthened discipline, clarified duty, or stabilised a household. It enriched thought, but didn’t improve behaviour.…
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A Neutral‑Monist Metaphysics of Ground, Archetype, and Space‑Time
My metaphysical outlook begins with a neutral‑monist conviction: that the ultimate ground of reality is prior to any distinction between mind and matter. This ground is not a “layer” in any structured sense, because layers imply intelligibility, and intelligibility itself is already a differentiation. The ground is simply the condition from which intelligibility arises. What…
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Holons, the Block Universe, and the Omega Point
My metaphysical outlook rests on three complementary ideas: panpsychic nested holons, the Block Universe, and Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point. Each offers a different angle on the structure of reality; together they form a single, coherent picture. 1. Panpsychic Nested Holons At every scale, reality can be understood as a holon: a whole that is…
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A Plain‑Language Summary of My Metaphysics
At the heart of this metaphysics is a simple idea: reality has depth, and we live inside more than one layer of it at the same time. What we normally call “the world” is just the surface level — the part we can touch, measure, and describe. But beneath and within that surface are deeper…
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Can Metaphysics Make Space for a God Who Loves?
For many people, metaphysics feels too abstract to touch the deeper human longing for a God who loves — not as an impersonal force or a pattern of coherence, but as a presence that desires intimacy, cares for the individual, and grieves their wounds. Modern thought often dismisses this longing as a wish for a…
