Mapping The Mystery

In case you missed it, here are links to previous notes in this series.

What Are We Missing?
What is love? 
What should we love?
Is love ever wrong? 
Is There More To The Mystery?

If we have the time or make the time, the Mystery of existence is an engaging puzzle. We can make it easy by just accepting ideas from trusted sources so we don't have to do difficult philosophy, or we can work it out for ourselves, inexpert though we be. We should not be shy in attempting that. Even the philosophers have a limited toolkit that provides imperfect, though useful, results. However well we understand it, we should not mistake our thoughts for the the thing they describe, which remains a mystery. Philosophy is an attitude guiding a thought process providing tentative answers generating more questions. It is never a final answer. Nobody gets it perfectly right. We can all do philosophy and we all never get it quite right.

Our minds work by reducing the unimaginable complexity of reality to a few thinkable discrete fragments with salient connections to each other. We have the trinitarian god of Christianity, the four directions of indigenous lore, Arthur Koestler's holons nested in a holarchy. Recently, heatmaps have been used to represent degrees of affinity as concentric domains of a spectrum from hot red passion to cool violet or gray indifference.

I suggest a refinement to all of these strategies. Whatever map we use should include the fourth dimension, time. Imagine an animated map like the TV weather forecast showing how temperature changes from place to place during the day or over the week or decades or centuries. We can make such a map illustrating how our love is centrist or expansive and how it changes through lifetimes and generations.

I'm thinking about it. Think along with me. More to come.

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Trinitarian Theology: Wikipedia

Four Directions of Indigenous Lore

Holons and the Holarchy: Wikipedia

Moral Heatmaps: Frank Jacobs and Stephen Johnson, Big Think