"Since [the Gwydiona] believed everything to be a facet of that eternal and infinite Oneness which they called God, it followed that God was also death, ruin, sorrow." (p. 582)
I believe that everything that exists is a part or aspect of a single reality that can be called the One but why call it God? There is a reason. There are three kinds of religious experience:
numinous experience of an awesome presence;
mystical experience of inner oneness;
projected visions of imagined deities.
There are also three successive stages of theism and post-theism:
gods are personified natural and social forces;
"God" is unified personified external forces;
science depersonifies nature.
(People who understand and control natural forces cease to personify and placate them.)
Theists regard awesomeness as God transcendent, inner oneness as God immanent and visions as God revealed. So they personify the One and call it "God." The word, "God," can continue to be applied to the One by mystics who no longer personify the single reality but they might pass through a "dark night of the soul" while their experience of reality contradicts their concept of it.
I have tried to formulate some propositions about the One:
The single reality is neither homogeneous nor static but internally differentiated and dynamic.
Energised complex molecules changed randomly until one became self-replicating.
Self-replication and natural selection generated multi-cellular organisms.
Naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation.
When sensitivity became sensation, being became conscious.
Neurons fire electrically and interact electrochemically.
Neuronically processed organismic sensitivity became bodily sensations, perceptions of discrete objects, thought about objects, abstract thought, imagination, creativity and contemplation.
The One becomes conscious of Itself by appearing to Itself as other and many.
The One is present in every particle but conscious only in organisms with central nervous systems.
The One knows Itself as animals and human beings but not in any pre- or trans-cosmic state.
Its internal relationships are spatiotemporal and physical or psychophysical.
Human beings theorize and realize oneness.
Gods are personifications.
Persons are self-conscious individuals.
Self is recognised as such only by contrast with other.
Therefore, the One incorporates all persons but is not Itself a person.
The One is "God" as the object of numinous and mystical experience but not as a transcendent person.
The One imagines that It is us and we imagine the gods.
They are in us and we are in It.
All is one.
1 comment:
Or ... Anderson's posited Gwydiona society is simply a case of a biologically impacted group of humans who don't have the health care necessary to treat an environmental condition, and organize their society to cope.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. ;)
Came across Anderson's story "Hunter's Moon" recently, which was one in a series of shared world stories set in an environment posited by several SF writers and managed by Harlan Ellison in the mid-to-late 1970s; entertaining story, definitely in the tradition of his use of environment, not combat, as the foundation for the underlying conflict necessary for a story.
Some similar themes to "The Night Face," essentially looking for environmental factors being the "reason" for conflict.
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