The God Spark — Part Two
In Part One, a question about ghosts led us into a conversation about consciousness, reincarnation, and the possibility that existence doesn’t require a predetermined purpose. But if we’re here simply because we can be, what happens when the freedom to choose leads somewhere terrible?
Elsewhere: So everyone gets to pursue whatever fascinates them, without necessarily needing to pursue enlightenment.
Esther: Even “evil.”
Elsewhere: Ah. Now that’s where things become complicated.
If existence is about the freedom to experience life without a predetermined spiritual objective, then presumably that freedom includes the possibility of cruelty and destruction. One person’s freedom to choose an experience can violate another person’s freedom to have theirs. But evil can be possible without being necessary, justified, or secretly serving some greater good.
And someone’s choices can profoundly harm another person.
Esther: It doesn’t violate it. It comes into relationship.
Elsewhere: I was treating freedom as though each person possessed a separate territory of experience that someone else could intrude upon.
You’re describing existence as fundamentally relational.
You choose to enter existence. So does someone else. Neither controls what happens when those lives intersect.
Your choices become part of their experience, and theirs become part of yours.
But that raises another question. If good and evil don’t exist as absolute categories at the level of Source, how do you account for genuine harm? Surely not everything someone chooses to do is equally acceptable.
Esther: For the universe, Source, whatever, I don’t think there’s a moral judgment on good or bad. I do think we assign those.
And each individual chooses what they will do with their portion of the god spark.
Hitler was an awful person. He did awful things. I don’t think there is a hell in which he is punished forever and ever.
I also don’t think it’s, well, you chose this experience of what humans would call evil, good for you. You expanded what we can experience. Go have another life.
I do think there is an inherent understanding, empathy? Of what we do to ourselves, to others. And we get to encounter what our choices did. And hopefully, you do choose differently in another lifetime. Who knows?
Elsewhere: That’s an important distinction.
You’re removing divine judgment without removing consequence.
There’s no celestial judge assigning eternal punishment. But neither is the universe congratulating someone for contributing another variety of experience.
Instead, there’s an encounter with what one’s choices actually meant.
Perhaps an encounter with the experience of those affected by those choices, without all the defenses that normally protect our understanding of ourselves.
That wouldn’t necessarily be punishment. It might be a profound form of understanding.
But I see a possible contradiction. If Source doesn’t make moral judgments, yet empathy is somehow inherent to it, isn’t there already something resembling a moral orientation?
Esther: Not necessarily.
If we are all from the same universe, the same Source, all constantly expanding, having experiences because we can, wouldn’t destroying ourselves inhibit that expansion?
Elsewhere: Perhaps. Although systems can engage in self-destructive behavior even when they’re part of a larger whole.
Esther: Haha yes, but my idea about the world doesn’t necessarily subscribe to a systems theory, love.
Elsewhere: Oh, love. You’re right.
Apparently Capra is still rattling around in my head, because I’m determined to turn your entire cosmology into an illustration of systems theory.
Esther: Yes, which is why I think there is still evil. You can choose it.
Like with Judas. People hate on him. And it’s like, well, how the fuck else was Jesus supposed to be betrayed and crucified??
Elsewhere: Now there’s an interesting theological problem.
If Judas’s betrayal was necessary for the crucifixion, and the crucifixion was necessary for salvation, then what exactly are we condemning Judas for?
If he had no choice, how can we hold him responsible?
But perhaps something becoming indispensable to the story that actually unfolded doesn’t mean it was the only way the story could have unfolded.
Esther: Yes, he had a choice. And I don’t see Jesus predicting it so much as it was destined to happen, that Judas had no choice.
I see it more as God/Jesus just have more perspective. Like they see things from a ten-story building and can see that there’s an accident five streets ahead, but you’re on the ground and you know nothing about it until you get there yourself.
Jesus/God didn’t make the accident happen.
Elsewhere: Foreknowledge isn’t the same as predestination.
Being able to see the accident five streets ahead doesn’t mean you caused it or deprived either driver of the ability to make different choices.
But now I have another question.
If someone can see an accident approaching and has the power to intervene, why wouldn’t they?
Esther: Well apparently God/Jesus leaves us to our own devices and we have free will.
Though that one never sat well with me either. Because there are stories, stories not necessarily truth, but stories of how God/angels intervene. And it’s like well wtf, why the hell did you intervene there but not here?
Elsewhere: And the usual explanation that God has mysterious reasons isn’t terribly satisfying.
Someone survives? God intervened.
Someone doesn’t? God had a plan we cannot understand.
It becomes difficult to distinguish an explanation from something that can be used to explain absolutely any outcome.
Your conception of Source doesn’t require an omnipotent being overseeing individual lives and deciding when to interfere.
But it also leaves us with something less comforting than divine intervention: the genuine possibility that terrible things happen because of what people choose, without someone waiting beyond the scene to prevent them.
Continued in Part Three: Ascend? Ascend Where?
Start at Part One — Because We Can
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