Sorry--that was a plug for my cousin's rock and roll band.

The natural world is filled with many strange agents and activities we often call "forces", although that is a very misleading term. You know a few, "gravity", "electromagnetism", and there are others as well who may be called other things, like "entropy" or "radiation". Essentially, all of these involve matter and energy interacting in space and time. No doubt there are things like this going on we haven't discovered yet. This is why we look for the Higgs and talk about String Theory and Dark Matter.

But these are all impersonal forces. They are properties of nature. Although we may be affected by these "forces", they are not out to get us, or help us. They just are, and they don't know we are here, in fact, they don't know anything. They don't exist for our benefit or punishment (although they often do exactly that).

Mysticism is about "forces" too, but these forces are all about us. Mysticism is always about our fate, our karma, about our life after death. I find mysticism to always be connected with us, its a me, me, me thing. As if the universe really gave a shit about us. I don't believe the universe knows we are here at all. In fact, I don't think it knows anything. And I don't think we really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

I believe the only consciousness, the only intelligence, the only known self- or other-awareness in the entire universe is in our own skulls. Perhaps there are other thinking beings in the universe, and perhaps some day we will be able to make sentient machines. But for the time being, we are it. There is no god, or mystery, or providence, or karma out there looking out for us, rewarding us when we are good, and punishing us when we are not. And when we die, we die. Oblivion. Period.

Do I know this for an absolute fact? Of course not. I may be totally wrong about it all. But neither do I have even the slightest bit of a hint of any mystic forces at all. It looks to me like wishful thinking, a natural desire by humans that if all else fails, there is always one more chance to go to heaven. That seems like its too good to be true, and too easy to be right. Until I am convinced otherwise, I'm just going to say "no".

Human beings once knew instinctively they were a part of the universe. But they viewed that universe in human-centered terms, it was filled with gods and "forces" which could be lobbied and bribed into doing favors for us, and which had to be kept happy lest they punish us. Its like everything existed for our benefit, and could be manipulated if we knew the right tricks and had the right mystic friends. The origin of all mysticism is the very human desire to get some outside help, to have a friend in the front office, to get on the good side of the neighborhood bully.

About 2500 years ago the ancient Greeks invented Nature. The Ionian philosphers, for the first time in human history, saw the world in terms of a a set of things and rules that had nothing to do with us, or the gods. We had to follow these rules, even the gods had to follow them. There was an impersonal external reality that had nothing to do with our world of dreams and thoughts, that existed independently of them. But we could learn about this world, we could understand those rules, and we could take advantage of them and protect ourselves from them. The universe could be understood, through reason and observation. It made sense.

This does not contradict the ideas I proposed in my earlier posts, that we all live in alternative universes peculiar to ourselves. There is only one external universe, one nature, the nature of atoms and gravity and physical forces. But each of us lives in a personal universe dominated by those parts of the external reality that most affect us, or that we perceive most readily. We all live in the same universe, but we perceive only a little bit of it, and we each interpret it differently. So subjectively, we live in very different realities. We do not have access to an objective reality, we have to deal with the one we have assembled in our minds with the limited tools we have available to us.

Those ancient Greek ideas eventually evolved into what we today call science. I have faith (but not certainty) that this is how the world works. It is the only faith I have.