Faith

Faith

For all my friends of faith.

For those who have known me my whole life and never once doubted me, and for those who arrived more recently and helped me align with myself.

Particularly for Matthew McKinnie and Michael Johnson, who showed me that a modern understanding of the Divine is very much possible — that faith in the design can be restored in large chunks, provided one is listening when people like this speak.

This is how the design works.

Coherence of thought, and an acceptance of purpose.

Abstract

In this essay I set out my personal philosophy of religious symbolic interpretation within my Coherent Existence framework, and I argue that the world’s faiths are fractalizations of a single image: the same design refracted through history into many self-similar renderings, each fractured in transmission and each still catching the same light. The argument runs through three convergences. I read the Golden Rule, traced across nine traditions, as the rule that follows once the other is recognized as a mirror of the self. I read the stories of a people scattered for overreach (Babel, Nimrod’s Babylon, the giants of Cholula, the asuras’ loss of speech, and the contested Sumerian passage whose preferred reading points to the gathering of tongues rather than their scattering) with time removed, as the long dispersal in which one world became many views of itself, and I place the pride in Babel in rulers’ wish for one speech. Only two of these accounts join the reach to a confusion of tongues, so I treat the shape of ego-driven reach and dispersal as the parallel that carries weight. And I read the kingdom within, with its disputed Greek, as the claim that heaven and hell are perceptions rather than places, unlocked by keys placed both within and in the neighbor. Jung’s persona, ego, and Self supply the vocabulary for how the design is translated and mistranslated between people; play, the fading affect bias, the pyramid builders’ villages, the Hubble mirror, and Ibn Khaldūn’s three generations supply the illustrations. I close on the conversation around gender as a present-day instance of scattered tongues, and on kindness, toward which the evidence on acceptance points. I read scriptures, histories, and sciences symbolically, for their meaning within the design, and where scholarship disputes a source, I say so openly.

A Note on Method

What follows is philosophy of religion, or, more exactly, my personal philosophy of how to read religious symbols. I read the scriptures, histories, and sciences gathered here symbolically, for what they mean within the design. I am not arguing them as claims of historical or scientific fact.

This essay is one piece of a larger argument. The four journals of Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence argue, as a proposal, that there is one consciousness, beyond perception and present within every subject, of which every mind is a perspective, and they call that consciousness the One. The second journal makes the theological case: read closely, the traditions describe the Divine as farther than sight and nearer than the self, and the figure in the sky is what that double claim becomes when its first half is drawn as a picture and its second half is forgotten. Here I make that case in my own voice, and I stay mostly with the nearer half: the image each of us carries, the kingdom within, the neighbor as a mirror. The farther half, and the argument for both, I leave to the journals.

Where scholarship disputes a source, I say so. More than once, you will find that the dispute itself illustrates the point: the same image, fractured in transmission, still catching the light.

I offer the notes lightly, as keys for your own research, not as walls around the text.

1 The Same Image

Faith — the fractalization of the same image, as recorded throughout history.

To me, the conviction that “my God is the one and only true God” is a natural one for those who hold a single fractalization of the Divine to be the whole of it, and I have no quarrel with it in anyone who lives by the morality their scripture asks of them.

I have set the pattern out at length in my second journal, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity. It is not hard to find once you start looking for it. Hillel, asked to teach the whole of Torah while his questioner stood on one foot, answered that what is hateful to oneself must not be done to a neighbor; the rest is commentary.¹ The Sermon on the Mount teaches that rule in the positive. The Prophet’s tradition holds that none truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself. The Mahābhārata calls it the sum of duty; the Udānavarga, the measure of hurt; the Analects, reciprocity in a single word. And beneath the rule, as I read them, sits the deeper claim that makes the rule make sense: the prayer that they may all be one; that thou art that; that humanity was created from a single soul; that Truth is one, and the wise call it by many names.² The rule is the same because the image is the same. Treat others as mirrors of ourselves, because on the view this series argues, that is what they are.

2 The Scattering

Oftentimes I wonder how we have become so scattered. My mind immediately goes to the Tower of Babel in the Bible.³ The same story, in its shape, is kept in al-Ṭabarī’s History of the Prophets and Kings, where under Nimrod, in Babylon, the one speech of mankind was confounded into many tongues; and Ibn Kathīr, commenting on the Qur’an, records the report that a building God struck at its foundations was the tower Nimrod built.⁴ The same shape appears in Durán’s account of the Great Pyramid of Cholula, where the giants built a mound toward heaven, saw it thrown down, and were scattered in every direction (scattered, though not confused in speech).⁵ It is there again in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, where the asuras lost the goddess Speech to the gods and were left crying an unintelligible word, undone.⁶ The Sumerians may have carried it too, in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which speaks of a time when the speech of mankind was, or one day will be, truly one.⁷ Leaving aside later tellings shaped by the missionaries, only Genesis and the Islamic tradition, read with its commentators, tie the reach and the scattering to a confusion of tongues. What I am after is the shape, and it recurs across them, in whole or in part: in the stories, a people reaches upward out of pride, or greed, or the wish to make a name, and is scattered for it, into places and cultures, languages, histories, and, in time, faiths.

I read Babel with time removed, the way the One would see it, taking in every age together. I do not believe it was one day when everyone’s speech was scrambled at once. To me it was a long, slow scattering: speech splitting by region into dialects, then into languages, then further by faith and development and every circumstance the world over, the way one light breaks into many colors and is still the same light. The evidence I trust points that way too. Languages split gradually, from dialects into whole families, over thousands of years,⁸ and humankind spread out of Africa in a long chain of small separations.⁹

Some of the tellings were reshaped along the way; the Cholula story seems to have picked up its confusion of tongues from the missionaries. Christoph Uehlinger argues that the Genesis story’s “one speech” echoes Sargon II of Assyria, who boasted of making the peoples he conquered “have one mouth” while he built his new capital;¹⁰ I would call that a king’s ego written into the story, and that is where I put the pride it speaks of. If Uehlinger is right, the Genesis teller set that ambition in the tower and left it unfinished. If the more common reading is right instead, the tower is Etemenanki, the temple-tower Babylon’s kings built and rebuilt. Either way, it is a ruler’s building. On the reading the Oxford corpus follows, the Sumerian poem voices that wish for one speech too, from a royal court. To me, evolution is creation, over time,¹¹ and Babel is that same story told from inside, by the people it scattered.

3 The Design and Its Designer

In my view, the idea of a “grand design” or “unified field” leaves room for a designer or Creator: a source with intent, from which every standing image of faith has come, and mathematics and science as well. To me, this is the most sensible reading of our existence, though it is a step past what this series argues. We create, because we were created; the pattern within the design remains the same. The ruler we hold to measure meaning comes in different shapes, but it always does the same thing.

Tests the design. Measures our faith. Explains why things are the way they are.

You could argue that scripture, mathematics, and science are all one and the same ruler, and that the only difference between them is placement in time, language, and understanding.

From where, then, comes the direction of the moral compass?

The pattern of coherence oscillation travels in all directions. The direction comes from the facing: from which way each of us chooses to turn within it.

I know that “God is always watching” can sound like a figure in the sky keeping score. That is not the picture I mean. I like to think instead about the gift we have been given: the chance to live in the design of life (or what some might call “playing in the field”).

4 Persona, Ego, and Self

Karma, too, is part of that field, and to me it makes complete sense when you remove the personal identity that has been assigned to the higher power by mortals over the years. Oftentimes, this parallels the personal identity we assign ourselves, which is the exact thing that becomes a barrier to transferring the language of the Divine to one another.

This is where I find Jung most useful, read symbolically. The persona is the mask an individual wears for the world, voluntarily or not: the accumulation of everything a person thinks makes them who they are. The ego is the small center that mistakes itself for the whole. The Self is the whole, center and circumference at once, the piece of the image each of us carries.¹² When the persona speaks, the Divine is translated twice before it ever leaves the mouth. When the Self speaks, nothing needs translating.

5 The Game of Life

My children tell me all the time: life is like a video game. This, to me, makes more sense than almost anything. The video games that last tend to hold some deeper moral or understanding of existence. Successful games become lasting, whereas money-grabs aimed toward quick success without adjustment tend to become memories. A historian of culture would not be surprised; play has always been one of the doors through which meaning enters the world.¹³ Nor would Tolkien, who wrote that “we make still by the law in which we’re made.”¹⁴ Game designers build worlds with rules, consequences, and meaning, because that is the shape of the world that built them.

What, then, of the “game of life”?

You may be a villain in this story and pay the consequences; you may be an NPC, a non-player character, and help the heroes (or, sadly, the villains, if bad karma is something you have not quite figured out yet); or you may be a hero. A hero in your own story, and in the stories of others.

This is my thought on phase coherence, in a nutshell: the role you play is, in the end, chosen by how you face what you are dealt, and suffering can be defined as lessons or tests of character, however you want to look at it. It helps that the sting of painful memories fades faster than the glow of joyful ones.¹⁵ Sometimes our interpretations of these things vary, but remember again Babel, and ask what “feels” right in every moment.

The idea of living in the moment is the idea of allowing coherence at every pass. Treat the other person in every interaction as an equal, and the knowledge of the design can pass between you unadulterated.

The moment the ego stands at the gate, the interaction becomes incoherent, the moment passes, and time moves.

This would mean that time is relative in the mind’s sense, much as it is in the physicist’s (two different things, though they rhyme),¹⁶ and it would explain why fleeting moments of joy are just that, and lingering hours of sadness seem like “hell” inside our minds.

6 The Kingdom Within, and the Other Place

Consider the various texts explaining that the kingdom is within.¹⁷ Luke’s Greek, entos hymōn, has been argued for centuries: “within you,” or “in your midst”? I hold that the design allows both at once. The kingdom is within, and it is unlocked with the keys placed without: in the neighbor, in the moment, in the field.¹⁸ Consider also that, on the framework’s view, “hell” may be within as well, inflicted on us by our own thoughts.¹⁹

Our thoughts about ourselves, about material things, and about others.

This would explain why there are also keys placed within. Because some doors are within. The rooms we seek to escape in our minds are, most certainly, within.

So what of suffering, and those who cause it? It is written that they know not what they do,²⁰ but I confess my mind cannot comprehend why a Creator would allow these images within the framework, unless it is to test our resolve and to limit our outward projection of internal opinion. Several of the traditions, as I read them in the second journal, place two inclinations, toward good and toward evil, within each person, and place the choice there with them.²¹ The fourth journal goes further than I go here. With Jung, it holds that light and shadow both lie within the One, as they lie within each of us, while the One’s intent faces the light. For the suffering no one chose, the earthquake and the flood, it offers a hypothesis: the One does not override the world’s motion, its purpose in what happens may lie beyond our understanding, and the One undergoes that suffering from within.²² That changes the question. It does not answer it.

The keys for personal peace are found both internally and externally. Some are cut in solitude; some are handed to us by a neighbor. The design puts them in both, which is why neither the hermit nor the crowd holds the whole ring.

Finding the keys would redefine the word “change,” and the inherent desire to achieve it can sometimes stand in the way, for as soon as the desire is wrapped in ego once again, the separation from the Self shows. This can lead either to an “evil overlord” archetype or to a “messiah complex” archetype within the design. Jung had a word for this: inflation, the ego swelling to fill a space that belongs to the Self alone, mistaking godlikeness for God.²³ Neither archetype is healthy. Neither is speaking the actual language of the Divine when it shares knowledge.

On the view this series proposes, the one consciousness takes in time whole, every path at once, though each of us walks one path at a time. This might be hard to grasp, but the moral sum of how our Intent faces (do unto others) determines destinations (“heaven or hell,” as it stands). A destination here is only your place at this point in time. It is forever changing. You can always turn, and your perception turns with you.

Where death begins, I suggest, legacy starts.

How do you want your legacy to travel through time, whether a Creator is actually watching or not? Herein lies the entire argument of morality between believers and nonbelievers, pastors and physicists.

But the quiet truth, as I see it, is that being a kind and just person brings success in any number of ways. Kindness tends to repay itself with kindness.²⁴ The legible Traces we leave in time impact others in ways we cannot ever see, whether we are still walking this planet to witness their outcomes or not.

I would argue that this is what timelessness means for a life. Science would reply that there is no measure for it; theology, I think, would say much what I have said here.

You may be a lesson to others through your mistakes, or you may be a hero in the eyes of everyone around you.

I would consider that the Creator is just enough to understand this. This, in turn, says again that heaven and hell are not places but perceptions of the world.

7 What Coherence Builds and Ego Breaks

History plays this in perfect tune, in both directions. Consider first what coherence builds. The pyramids at Giza were not raised by whips; the archaeology of the workers’ villages tells of organized crews, fed, housed, honored, and rotated: thousands of individuals moving in phase toward a single point in the sky.²⁵ Whatever you make of the pharaohs’ theology, I read the stones themselves as a record of coherence: a sign that when the keys for success are found within a people and passed hand to hand between them, the conditions without matter far less than we suppose.

Then consider the other direction. You need only look at the times in history when unity was thrown away because ego stepped in the way, when accumulation of mortal goods replaced the shared point in the sky. I call this the Hubble effect. When the Hubble Space Telescope first opened its eye, its great mirror had been ground wrong by a fraction of the width of a human hair; one microscopic error at the source, and the entire cosmos arrived blurred.²⁶ The instrument was magnificent. The view was false. So it goes with the ego: a flaw too small to see, standing exactly at the point where all the light must pass. Rome learned this; so, long before Rome, did Egypt itself, fragmenting after the very coherence that built the pyramids drained away.²⁷ Ibn Khaldūn watched the pattern from inside history and gave it a name: ʿaṣabiyya, the group feeling that raises a dynasty in hardship and, as a rule, dissolves in luxury within three generations.²⁸ I suspect these empires were brought down in the field because of an altered goal in time.

Hold that, and look at today.

The definition of “success” will vary depending on the standing of an individual and the alignment of their moral compass. This is very much the persona at work, to use Jung’s word, skewing the viewpoint of the individual.

So where do we stand with this knowledge we as humans already have? I have poured thirty years of independent study, begun with library books when I was young, onto paper, only to have a blind eye turned to it by those who view it as pretentious, or perhaps as a means to an end.

We share the end; the means is their decision, not mine.

I hope those who read my work find their keys in it. This is all we were meant to do: guide, not force. This also echoes in the hymn of Divinity, all through time. The scriptures agree on this far and wide: there is no compulsion in religion; to you your way, and to me mine; shake the dust from the feet and move on; test the teaching for oneself, as the Kālāmas were told; reflect on this fully, then do as you wish.²⁹ These are not the only voices in their traditions; every tradition has had its texts of compulsion, and its readers of them.

8 Scattered Tongues, Today

Today I see incoherence most clearly in the conversation around gender.

First, I want the reader to consider deeply what I have said: anything we discuss is within the construct of life as it currently stands. It is part of the “design.”

Second, I would like the reader to hold this: gender ideology and gender dysphoria are two very different things. By gender ideology I mean a public position, a set of claims about sex, identity, and how law and society should treat them, that people argue for or against. By gender dysphoria I mean a clinical diagnosis a person can receive.³⁰ The first is an argument; the second is a condition, and anyone can carry it. Nor is the diagnosis the same thing as being transgender: the American Psychiatric Association itself notes that not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria.³¹ There are devout, God-fearing Christians who live with gender dysphoria,³² and I believe there are transgender people whose understanding of the Divine is as whole and as joyful as anyone’s.

Consider that the “darkness” wears a different persona than the one we are expected to see. I always ask myself: What is the intent of the persona telling me something is evil? Whose empire does the division serve? Often, I think, the answer is an ego incoherent with the Self, an ego that leads in the end to its own demise. I turn that question on my own certainties too, knowing that how a conviction arose does not decide whether it is true.

Scattered tongues are useful to somebody; they always have been. Division, I would add to Ibn Khaldūn’s account, is cheap fuel for a dynasty whose ʿaṣabiyya is spent. The scriptures ask the same question from the other side: judge not; find the beam in one’s own eye before naming the mote in a neighbor’s; remember that mortals look on the outward appearance while the Divine looks on the heart.³³ Harm aimed at a neighbor who is healthy, happy, and harming no one is almost never born of knowledge. It is born of misunderstanding, the persona mistaking its own discomfort for the voice of the Divine.

Then I want the reader to remember what I said above. Under the concept of “one consciousness interconnected,” when you look at another person you are looking at a differently fragmented version of the Creator (that is, a mirror), or truly at yourself. Genesis puts it plainly: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”³⁴ We were made in that image, so who am I to question the Designer’s design? I picture the Creator standing to us the way an author stands to the characters of a book. The characters are the author’s own creation, fragments of the author’s perception of the world, of the same substrate as the one who imagines them. They cannot see the author unless the author writes himself into the story, and the author’s world is beyond their understanding. Because the author made the book’s world and everyone in it, the author knows the beginning, the middle, and the end, and not only one end: every ending the characters could reach is already there in the author’s mind, and the choosing is theirs. The picture breaks where the second journal says it breaks, since characters on a page do not feel their story and we do;³⁵ but it is the nearest picture I have of how the Creator can be beyond us and still be what we are made of. If there are many worlds, as some physicists hold, then every version of the story has already been written, and, as I read it, which one we live is settled by how we choose to face it. No one simply chooses to be successful, but someone who is kind, and coherent with the people and the world around them, will arguably succeed by more than one meaning of the word.

The old instruction to turn the other cheek runs through many of the traditions.³⁶ Confucius pushed back most directly. Repay injury not with kindness, he said, but with uprightness.³⁷ I will not make Confucius say what he refused to say. What I take from him is uprightness without hate. Repaying harm with kindness and justly removing the one who harmed you from your life can each lead to the same peace within. Uprightness and justness are an understanding of a neighbor’s incoherence, and the desire to guide them must never be voiced in words of evil or hate, only in the guiding words of the Self, the One, the Divine.

Sometimes I think turning the other cheek just means allowing other individuals to live uninhibited within the design. Who am I to say a person is “sinful” when they have “found God” in their own right? I am a simple man, a father, a husband, and a philosopher. I have no business in the field judging the person next to me.

Especially if the construct of their beliefs misaligns with mine.

Coherence is gained through understanding, and I am grateful to the hundreds of people who have explained their own “meaning of life” to me.

9 The Meaning of Life

The meaning of life? Ask me directly now, after all this writing, and the answer is this.

Coherence alone is not the meaning of life; negativity can cohere too. The meaning, within the framework, is to cohere positively, and to cohere positively is to be happy. To show others how to be happy.

With the fruits of the design, and not to reach for anything more. This could be shelter; this could be food; this could be medicine; this could be knowledge.

This could be as simple as looking at a neighbor, and asking why they have been disregarded so.

We are, I hold, truly all one, and karma is perceivable when you stand in the right spot and look in the right direction.

I am not asking anyone to stand there. I am not asking anyone to see. You need only listen. Not to me — to a neighbor.

Forgive them for being different, and listen to what they are saying. They speak only of the things they need to be happy.

I believe that to be true most of the time.

Be kind, and the design will, far more often than not, be kind in return.

Notes

1. b. Shabbat 31a. The rule of reciprocity recurs across the nine traditions listed here in closely related forms: Lev. 19:18; Matt. 7:12 and Luke 6:31; al-Nawawī, Forty Hadith, no. 13; Mahābhārata (crit. ed.) 13.113.8 (the reference some interfaith lists give as “5:1517” uses an older numbering that does not match the critical edition; it points to the Udyoga Parva, Book 5, where Vidura states a similar rule, and is not used here); Bernhard, Udānavarga 5.18; Confucius, Analects 15.24 (15.23 in Legge’s numbering), on shu, reciprocity; the Tai Shang Gan Ying Pian, which counsels regarding a neighbor’s gain and loss as one’s own; the Zoroastrian Dādistān-ī Dīnīk 94.5 (West, Pahlavi Texts, pt. 2); and Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, LXVI, on laying on no soul a load one would not wish laid on oneself. On the history of the rule, see Wattles, Golden Rule.

2. John 17:21; Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7 (tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” repeated as a great saying of Ātman–Brahman unity); Qur’an 4:1 and 21:92; the Ik Onkar opening the Guru Granth Sahib; Ṛgveda 1.164.46 (ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti).

3. Gen. 11:1–9. “Babel” plays on the Hebrew balal, to confuse.

4. Al-Ṭabarī, Prophets and Patriarchs: under Nimrod, in Babylon, the one Syriac speech was confounded into eighteen, eighteen, and thirty-six languages, which the translator totals at seventy-two, “the supposed number of languages spoken in the world.” On Qur’an 16:26 (the building struck at its foundations), Ibn Kathīr, Tafsir Ibn Kathir, records Ibn ʿAbbās’s report that the verse “refers to Namrud (Nimrod), who built the tower”; others read the verse as a general parable of arrogant designs collapsing from beneath. The association is symbolic, and is offered here as such.

5. Durán, History of the Indies: the giants build the great mound toward the sky, and the inhabitants of heaven overthrow it and the builders scatter over the earth. Frazer, who gathered the story with Babel in Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. 1, pt. 1, chap. 5, notes that the confusion of tongues does not seem to have been part of Durán’s Cholula legend and was probably learned from the missionaries; a language element does appear in the separate Xelhua tradition and in Ixtlilxóchitl’s Toltec account. A Babel story whose own transmission was confused in translation is a living example of the scattering.

6. Eggeling, Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa, pt. 2, 3.2.1.23–24: the gods win Speech from the asuras, who are left crying he ’lavaḥ and are undone. The passage has no tower or altar; the reach is the rivalry with the gods, and the loss is of speech rather than its splitting.

7. “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” the “Spell of Nudimmud” (ETCSL t.1.8.2.3; Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings). The passage has two scholarly readings that run in opposite directions: on one (Kramer, “‘Babel of Tongues’”), Enki confounded a once-unified human speech; on the other (Alster, “Aspect of ‘Enmerkar’”; Vanstiphout), the incantation looks forward to the day all speech is made one, and this reading now carries the field. I make no attempt to collapse the question. Both meanings, the memory of unity and the promise of it, stand in the text at once, and the reader may take the meaning they need. That the oldest candidate for a Babel story we possess can be read both ways, as language scattered or as language waiting to be gathered, seems to me exactly the point.

8. Gray and Atkinson, “Language-Tree Divergence Times,” which dates the first split of the Indo-European family to between 7,800 and 9,800 years ago; Bouckaert et al., “Mapping the Origins,” which dates the start of its expansion to between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago. The dates and the homeland are still argued; the gradual splitting is not.

9. Ramachandran et al., “Support from the Relationship of Genetic and Geographic Distance,” which finds genetic distance between human populations growing with the geographic distance between them, and genetic diversity falling with distance from East Africa, the pattern a serial founder effect out of Africa leaves.

10. Uehlinger, Weltreich und “eine Rede”; van der Kooij, “City of Babel and Assyrian Imperialism,” on Sargon’s claim to have caused nations “to have one mouth.” The reading is one of several, and not the most common; the story is more often set against Babylon’s own temple-tower, Etemenanki, “the building generally thought to have inspired the myth” (George, “Tower of Babel”). On the Sumerian poem as royal ideology, see Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings.

11. The thought has a theological history. Aubrey Moore wrote that Darwinism, “under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend” (Moore, “Christian Doctrine of God”), and Arthur Peacocke speaks of God as “the Immanent Creator creating in and through the processes of the natural order” (Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 105).

12. The loci for the reader’s own study: the persona in Two Essays (CW 7); ego and Self in Aion (CW 9ii) and Psychological Types (CW 6); the Self as center and circumference in Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12), par. 44; the Self as imago Dei in Aion and Psychology and Religion (CW 11). The use made of Jung here is my own symbolic interpretation, not a claim about clinical doctrine.

13. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, on play as a primary meaning-making activity of culture.

14. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia” (written 1931): the human maker as sub-creator, who makes by the same law that made him, because he is made in the image of a Maker.

15. The psychology of memory calls this the fading affect bias: the emotional intensity of negative autobiographical memories fades faster than that of positive ones. Walker, Vogl, and Thompson, “Autobiographical Memory”; Walker and Skowronski, “Fading Affect Bias.” The bias concerns the fading of feeling, not of recall: the memory remains after the sting has gone. That the lesson remains with it is my reading, not the studies’ finding.

16. Physical relativity (time dilation across reference frames) and psychological time (emotional states stretching or compressing perceived duration) are distinct phenomena; the parallel drawn here is symbolic. Two rulers, different shapes, each measuring how far the time one lives can part from another’s clock.

17. Luke 17:21. The Greek entos hymōn is disputed: “within you” (King James Version; defended in Hart, New Testament, whose note holds that entos properly means “within,” and that Luke’s phrase for “in your midst” is en mesōi hymōn) or “in your midst” (most modern versions). Parallels: Gospel of Thomas 3 (the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you) and 113; Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.1.1 (the small space within the lotus of the heart); Dhammapada 1–2 (mind precedes all states); Qur’an 50:16 (nearer than the jugular vein); Deut. 30:14 (the word very near, in the mouth and in the heart).

18. A beloved saying transmitted in al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (that neither heaven nor earth contains the Divine, but the heart of the faithful servant does) carries no authenticated chain; al-ʿIrāqī, who traced the sources of the Iḥyāʾ, found none for it, and it should be called a Sufi saying rather than a hadith. Yet it persists, I would suggest, because its meaning coheres with what is authenticated: the first hadith of both al-Bukhārī’s and al-Nawawī’s collections, that actions are judged by intentions (innamā al-aʿmālu bi-n-niyyāt). Transmission can break where Intent still carries: the letter scattered at Babel, the meaning arriving anyway. The saying and the hadith survive side by side, I think, because the design measures the heart before the chain.

19. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.254–255: the mind as its own place, able to make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. The speaker is Satan, who later admits he carries hell with him wherever he flies (4.75); the poem grants the mechanism and treats the boast as self-deception.

20. Luke 23:34, King James Version.

21. Johnson, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity, “The Recurring Instruction: Quieting the Mind.”

22. Johnson, Alignment, the Triad, and the Architecture of Shared Mind, “What Would Make It Wrong: Limits, Falsifiability, and Where to Look,” on the fifth objection, evil, and the suffering no one chose.

23. Jung’s account of psychic inflation and “godlikeness” (Two Essays, CW 7): the ego identifying with the Self it was only meant to serve. Again, the application is my own.

24. On indirect reciprocity, in which help given earns help from others who see it: Nowak and Sigmund, “Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity.” The second journal sets this beside the help no one will ever learn of, which reputation explains less easily: Johnson, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity, “Conclusion: Divinity as Resonance.”

25. Excavations of the workers’ settlement and cemetery at Giza (Lehner and Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids) indicate organized, provisioned, rotating labor crews, with bakeries, breweries, medical care, and honored burials near the monument, rather than the enslaved masses of legend.

26. Hubble’s primary mirror was ground too flat at its edge by 2.2 micrometers (about one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair, in NASA’s own comparison), producing spherical aberration that blurred every observation until corrective optics were installed on Servicing Mission 1 (STS-61) in December 1993. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “The Hubble Program—Servicing Missions—SM1.”

27. Rome’s decline is read by modern historians as multicausal (fiscal strain, plague, climate, external pressure) and Egypt’s First Intermediate Period as political fragmentation. The moral reading here stands in the older interpretive tradition of Gibbon and Ibn Khaldūn, and is offered as philosophy, not as history.

28. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, bk. 1, chap. 3: dynasties rise on ʿaṣabiyya, group feeling forged in hardship, and as a rule last no longer than three generations, as the luxury that follows dissolves it (chap. 3, sec. 12).

29. Qur’an 2:256 (“no compulsion in religion”), 109:6, 18:29; Matt. 10:14; 1 Pet. 3:15 (giving a reason for one’s hope with meekness); the Kālāma Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.65 in Bodhi’s numbering); Aśoka’s Rock Edict XII, honoring the sects of others; Bhagavad Gītā 18.63; the Jain doctrine of anekāntavāda, the many-sidedness of truth; Tao Te Ching, chaps. 2 and 43, the teaching without words.

30. “Gender dysphoria” is the clinical term (American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5-TR): clinically significant distress or impairment arising from marked incongruence between experienced and assigned gender. “Gender ideology” is itself a contested term, used mostly by those who oppose what it is taken to name; I use it only in the sense defined in the text.

31. American Psychiatric Association, “Gender Dysphoria”: “The term ‘transgender’ is not a psychiatric diagnosis,” and “Not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria and that distinction is important to keep in mind.”

32. Yarhouse and Carrs, “MTF Transgender Christians’ Experiences,” a qualitative study of thirty-two male-to-female transgender Christians on gender identity and faith; Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria.

33. Matt. 7:1–5 (judge not; the beam and the mote); 1 Sam. 16:7 (mortals look on the outward appearance; the Divine looks on the heart). Jung named the mechanism projection: the shadow one refuses to see in oneself becomes the “evil” one discovers in a neighbor (Jung, Aion). And one measurable fact, offered to both sides of the line: LGBTQ+ young people, transgender youth among them, met with acceptance and support show markedly lower rates of depression and suicidality than those met with little acceptance (Ryan et al., “Family Acceptance in Adolescence,” a cross-sectional study of 245 young adults; Trevor Project, 2025 U.S. National Survey, a cross-sectional survey of more than 16,000 LGBTQ+ respondents aged thirteen to twenty-four, which reports that accepting spaces and communities can significantly lower the odds of considering and attempting suicide). Kindness is not a position in the debate; in these studies, acceptance is consistently tied to better outcomes.

34. Gen. 1:26–27.

35. Johnson, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity, “Beyond Perception and Within.”

36. Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:29; anticipated in Lam. 3:30 and Isa. 50:6; paralleled in Tao Te Ching, chap. 63 (repay injury with virtue), Dhammapada 3–5 (hatred never ceases by hatred), the parable of the saw (Majjhima Nikāya 21), and Qur’an 41:34 (repel evil with what is better, and the enemy becomes a devoted friend).

37. Confucius, Analects 14.34. Asked whether to repay injury with kindness, Confucius answers: Then with what would one repay kindness? Repay injury with uprightness (zhi), and kindness with kindness.

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