Certainty has a certain value. It helps us get through the day by keeping us from constant doubt about ourselves and our personal interactions with people, things, and processes. We like reliability, and assumptions make life psychologically easy by providing stable platforms for ideas and behaviors. Axioms are the ultimate assumptions, the self-evident truths of Euclidean geometry.
In whatever way you want to refer to them, axioms underlie your thought, so you expect them to be reliable and stable. When axioms fail, everything built on them teeters and eventually falls, a Leaning Tower of Pisa leaning too much to save. You assume your grounds for thought will support your complex thinking, and you are troubled whenever the thoughts you construct begin to lean on a weak foundation.
Unfortunately, only a few assumptions seem to be stable. General Relativity, for example. Nothing built on it has leaned and fallen. The Uncertainty Principle? Maybe another stable base. Search your mind for some others.
What about spirituality? Anything (Sorry for the word choice) there? An ultimate and stable ground?
More on this later. And after that. And so on. Thousands of years and uncounted attempts to find the underlying stable spiritual axiom on which we all can build some permanent structure have not given us a universal. So, we’ll go on, and on, and on: Debates aplenty in efforts to tie the physical world to the spiritual one—or to untie them. Debates that endlessly stop where they start. And all sorts of New Age attempts to do what the nineteenth-century Romantic poets and artists wanted to do: Identify some natural spirituality or spiritual nature on which we can understand the relationship between the physical and nonphysical worlds.
Certainly, you have some horse in this race, some reliance on some axiom or set of axioms you believe to be universal. Euclid had five axioms. Mathematician David Hilbert had five sets of axioms. How many do you have?
In whatever way you want to refer to them, axioms underlie your thought, so you expect them to be reliable and stable. When axioms fail, everything built on them teeters and eventually falls, a Leaning Tower of Pisa leaning too much to save. You assume your grounds for thought will support your complex thinking, and you are troubled whenever the thoughts you construct begin to lean on a weak foundation.
Unfortunately, only a few assumptions seem to be stable. General Relativity, for example. Nothing built on it has leaned and fallen. The Uncertainty Principle? Maybe another stable base. Search your mind for some others.
What about spirituality? Anything (Sorry for the word choice) there? An ultimate and stable ground?
More on this later. And after that. And so on. Thousands of years and uncounted attempts to find the underlying stable spiritual axiom on which we all can build some permanent structure have not given us a universal. So, we’ll go on, and on, and on: Debates aplenty in efforts to tie the physical world to the spiritual one—or to untie them. Debates that endlessly stop where they start. And all sorts of New Age attempts to do what the nineteenth-century Romantic poets and artists wanted to do: Identify some natural spirituality or spiritual nature on which we can understand the relationship between the physical and nonphysical worlds.
Certainly, you have some horse in this race, some reliance on some axiom or set of axioms you believe to be universal. Euclid had five axioms. Mathematician David Hilbert had five sets of axioms. How many do you have?
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