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All things need renewal. This is a renewal. A renewal of the purpose of this exploration.
The man on this exploration is a seeker. What is he seeking?
Video: I was praying the other day: God, reveal your face to me. And I remembered that I wrote this quote on the front of my journal: Time spent in God's creation reveals the face of God. Upon seeing that, I knew I needed to leave for a while. To bug out. That's what here is today - a bug out.
He is seeking God. Always has been. Hopefully, always will be. Something in him knows that's why he poured energy into competitive robotics. Into building racecars. But he got wrapped around an axle. An axle - or should we say, axis - he's still trying to unwrap from. It's not a bad axis. It's just orthogonal.
Worldliness. Here in the wilderness, in small towns of Maine, in front of a beautiful waterfall, there is still worldliness when these things are taken for their own sake. For the cheap material thrills.
Video:
- Exhibiting a piece of plywood: "This is the world as we know it through our senses and rationality. The material world."
- Pointing at a hole in the board: "But we know... there's an incompleteness. A discrepancy. It's the same hole that Godel points to in his incompleteness theorem; it's the infinite abyss that Pascal speaks of.
- Grabbing a piece of metal and fitting it into the hole: "That hole is begging for something higher to fill it. The fact of the matter, though, is that it is not filled - but transcended."
If you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know how Robert Pirsig wrestles with this. His Phaedrus finds that there's something beyond the mind-matter dualism that he just can't define, but he knows is real, although it isn't in the system. He sees the hole. More importantly, he's been wrapt up in its transcendence. He knows there's things he can't define. He knows that there's patterns and forms of things in the world - but that these patterns are not bounded by the world, cannot be contained in it. Even in the simple act of extracting a screw from an engine, there is Quality to be had. Quality. Virtue. Excellence.
Excellence. That's what he's after. He met it a few times. Once with a FIRST Lego League robot. Simple design. Servicable. Looked elegant. Explainable and justifiable top to bottom. Even the 'hack' of taking the computer out and putting it in a different chassis to accomplish a different task was excellent - it was, even there, a gesturing towards transcendence. Excellent. That boy thought he captured lightning in a bottle.
Excellence. That's what he felt when he walked into the Divine Liturgy for the first time. When he does back to confession. When he puts new gas shocks on the laser cutter. When his student finally understands a concept. He wants everything to have this excellence, because it's just so... excellent.
"I came so that they might have life, and have it abundantly." Not just life but excellence.
What is it?
Pirsig is right. You can't define it. But you, man, have sense for it when you see it. And if you are more attune, you can sense where it will be.
What are you to be attune to, though? Examples, motions, machines, learning, books, spreadsheets, rational analysis? We will fully understand the laws of this universe and with enough computation we will solve all of the problems and shift off this mortal coil!
No.
That's a failure to transcend. At best it's just shuffling material. At worst, it's making machines that take up tasks that you do and fill up room in this material plane. Freeing yourself up for something alright - extinction; death; and your replacement by purely material things.
Okay, what are we to be attune to, then?
The Agio Pneuma. The Holy Spirit. God's gentle breath from his face. Ruah. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. Only He can bring us upwards, and He wishes so desperately to do so - if we will only cultivate the eye for it, he will bring it over into the world.
Upon hearing these words I think there can be a faulty insistence to literally lay down everything and go be a hermit and do nothing but meditate. To push really hard - which is a physical activity - and just slip into pure "enlightened consciousness". I get it. But here's the rub. Every man is called to be priest, prophet, and king.
Those are high professions. And what do each of these do? They are a conduit - a link - of the transcendent into this world. God wants all grafted into Him, and he has picked you, man, capable of the universe - to do so. As Christ has done, go forth and do likewise.
Technologists are special kinds of priests, prophets, and kings. We are here not to "make sure the tech doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy" or something like that.
GOD made man the steward of creation. That's what we're here to do with technology - part of creation. Steward it. Bring it into relationship with God, not by imbuing it with consciousness or transcendence (things we do not have authority to gift), but through our very selves.
If you are a technologist, you are to bring technology into relationship with Him through your self; to establish a relationship between technology and God so that He may be glorified on earth. Not to capture God in a box - to set up this relationship with the Father, as Christ has done for us, we do likewise.