What is Trust?

In nature invisible forces are in play without which the entire physical world ceases to exist. These largely mysterious forces act collectively to create the scaffolding upon which all matter, including you and me, is formed. Why these forces , and the laws governing them, exist is a matter of consternation for any thinking person, since without the laws, the forces either do not exist, or do not behave consistently and predictably enough to become the foundation for the entire cosmos. Conversely, without the forces, the laws remain invisible and unknown.

Nature's inorganic constituents are governed by the laws of nature and the forces those laws control. A rock perched atop a large hill will, when its footings are sufficiently eroded, obeys gravity's call and rolls down the hill, trussed and directed by an assemblage of physical laws. Likewise the moon obediently idles its way around the Earth day after day, age after age, never once contemplating a move to Venus's orbit. Nope. Around and around the Earth it goes, and will continue to do so until some other force dislodges it.

In the organic world - land of the living- things change considerably, especially as one ascends the pyramid of animal complexity. Simple protozoa can certainly react to stimuli in their environment, but it doesn't involve thought; just an off the rack operating system that aids in keeping the thing viable. Insects make 'decisions' as to which way to respond to a physical stimulus, (move toward it, move away from it). Birds and mammals must evaluate an array of stimuli in order to eat, reproduce, shelter and survive. But these stimuli all have one thing in common: they are without deceit. Light is light, dark is dark, movement is movement, water is wet, snow is cold, and so forth. The world which confronts life forms from amoebas to zebras is eerily simple, more of a 'face value' proposition, despite the myriad of difficulties inherent in their fight for survival.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the apex of the complexity pyramid. For there we are, iconic in our conspicuous place at the top, all of creation beneath our feet forged into some sort of organic pedestal upon which we resolutely bask in the glory of our free will and opposable thumb. From our vantage point, we witness the dullness of the amoeba, the creepiness of the arachnid and the silliness of the chimpanzee. We dissect them, grow them, study them, entrap and confine them. We make every creature subject to our collective will, either directly or indirectly as we seek to influence their survivability and ours. And they let us do it! It is nothing short of astounding. With scarcely a dissenting outcry, we subjugate every kingdom taxonomists have divined with little fear of revolt. It is but one facet of our free will on display - the desire to rule over the natural world - a desire that goes horribly wrong in the absence of an inner moral compass.

Any discussion of free will would have to be lengthy. But painting in broad strokes, we can illustrate it as the difference between merely walking across a deposit of limestone beneath the soil in blissful ignorance, versus quarrying that limestone and harnessing the laws of physics to turn it into cities. It is the force that has allowed civilizations to flourish and add layer upon layer of comfort and luxury to our existence.

On an intangible level we see that the entire domain of civilization owes its existence to a pair of linked intangibles existing only within the aura of free will: Trust and trustworthiness. The whole of human progress can be summed up as the effect of the promise, whether it be Pharaoh's promise of death to slacker slaves building his kingdom, or the promise of financial remuneration to architects, engineers, laborers and bond purchasers in exchange for raising a city. Since the majority of the actions required for civilization to come into existence are predicated upon promises, the critical element in the ascent of human civilization has been, and continues to be, trust. Trust comes into play because free will is in play. And where the free will of human beings is in motion, all bets are off, precisely because humans can -and do - choose to either reveal or obfuscate known truths. Unlike the environments of the rest of the animal kingdom, human interactions deal with words, spoken and written, which convey information that will force others to make a decision. It boils down to information being offered up as fact, or at the very least, theory with a probable outcome, and those encountering the information deciding to act on it by either believing it, or not.

Duplicity is the dark shadow cast by the corruption of man's free will. One need only scan the history books or the morning newspaper to come to terms with the ramifications of broken promises, blurred truths and outright lies. Duplicity is known by other names: deceit; guile; fraud; deception; hypocrisy; and trickery. Duplicity is the intent to deceive, and is always practiced as a means of self-gratification. It is the intentional abuse of trust through the issuance of a false promise. In this manner we find the world of lower animals to be less nuanced and more mechanistic than that of humans. A tree squirrel, for instance, leaves its nest and encounters a world comprised of finding nuts, remembering where he hid the nuts, and chasing girl squirrels up and down the nut tree. Squirrel society is overt and far less duplicitous than human society, simply because the desire to deceive is not wired into the squirrel and its environment. The human environment is a construct of intangible, interrelated relationships which ride the rails of truth and deception, sometimes intersecting with powerfully destructive outcomes. So if the promise is the currency, and thus ultimately the wealth of human society, duplicity is its cancer, and the arbiter of its demise.

Trust cannot be seen, touched, smelled, heard or tasted (and therefore, according to science, cannot exist.) No one will ever study a sample of trust in a Petri dish or under an electron scanning microscope. What then, is trust, this non-existent non-entity powerful enough to create the civilized world? What does it share in common with the invisible laws of nature and the forces those mysterious, supposedly self-existent laws create?

Maybe it is this: the things that ultimately make life possible, and rich and wonderful, invisible 'things' such as trust, love, compassion, and mercy, will never be identified by science and its narrowly focused searchlight of inquiry. (Pity that this has become the anointed alter upon which all truth is divined and bestowed upon the people.) But these invisible qualities ceaselessly resonate within us, invisible fingers strumming the strings of our heart or tapping across the keyboard of our soul, deep calling to deep, beckoning that we incline an ear of a different sort toward the melodious murmuring playing within.

It is a whisper we can trust.

Left vs Right: A Common Denominator

A Facebook friend recently reposted an image from the Facebook page of a group called The Christian Left. Their mission statement reads, in part: "See, it wasn’t just Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection that matter. It was his life too! The life he lived is a huge part of the deal, and he asked us to do a few things if you look at his words. Not only is what Jesus said the Word of God, but what Jesus DID is also the Word of God. Looking at the life of Jesus we see that Jesus made room for those cut off from the rest of society. Jesus put a name and a face on all who had been forgotten or pushed aside, even the dead. Jesus called us to carry our cross daily and follow him. That’s what Social Justice means."

I do not disagree with the above, in fact it's all good - at least until that last little statement on Social Justice. Here's why: Social Justice is an ideology conceived and advanced by man. Inherently it seeks to externally force society to behave in a certain manner, i.e. to compel all of society to manifest the social justice ideology (which at any rate would seem to be forcing to society to embrace tenants of a religious belief, but that is for another time). Jesus, on the other hand, makes it quite clear that the first cause of society's ills lies inherently in the heart of man, in his sin nature. This sin nature will result in eternal separation from God if not redeemed by a personal belief in Christ as the only atonement before God for our own sin. To foist Social Justice upon a society is to blind members of that society to their inherent personal need of Christ's redemptive work, and falsely encourage a salvation by works attitude.

Adherents of the Christian Left/Social Justice ideology are no less hateful toward their detractors as the those claiming to be of the Christian Right are towards them. That is how we know an individual member or an entire 'faith group' has lost its moorings in God and joined the political fray: the love of power obscures the light of love. All of politics is but a field of battle upon which the illnesses and indiscretions of the human heart are laid bare. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9

The cinematic productions of J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series cast a superlative portrayal of the darkness - and its effects - that inhabits the heart of man. Our God-given free will, imprisoned by sin, continually aspires to elevate self will, refusing to take a knee of submission before the throne of God.

"So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members." Romans 7:21-23

Paul finally asks, " Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

When we remedy the first cause - the heart of man - society will be just.

But honestly, that whole 'first cause' issue doesn't seem to be very high on any priority list, Left or Right. Perhaps because it involves something far more difficult than simply taking a stand against what ails society. It is coming to terms with a deeply personal defect of a non-material nature, the latter of which we have been re-educated to believe does not even exist.

What is Reality?

If you were to ask random people on the street, 'What is reality?', what answers might you expect?  It is instructive to mull over these expectations, to get your thoughts geared up for  the reality track.

Now, for some sort of baseline, let's go to the dictionary.  Dictionary.com defines reality, in its philosophical context, as:   

(Philosophy)   
a. something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
b. something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
6.   something that is real.
7.  something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent

Now it is likely that, if you actually were to follow through and do random street interviews, a high percentage of the responses would not be a, b or number 7.  Good chance that number 6, 'something that is real', could surface with some frequency.  Another possible frequent response might be, "does it matter?".  Time will tell.

For me, the real question seems to be, "Is reality real, or is it just a perception that has been formulated, predicted and subsequently projected for retrospective interpretation based upon the combination of inputs from our sensory and neuro-chemical apparati?"  Is Reality an objective or a subjective entity? My premise is that it cannot be both, or contradictions would arise.

In our everyday life, we tend to make use  of some common, generic parameters with which we triangulate a reality. For instance, someone might describe their immediate reality as:  "I am married, have 2 children, a career at Apex industries, college fund started, yearly family summer vacation, member of the garden club and actively engaged in a church family.  I am surrounded by a small  circle of close friends, which is ringed by a larger more distant  set of friendships. My spouse and I plan on raising our kids to become responsible citizens equipped to make good moral choices. They will probably attend college, get married, and at some point we will have some healthy grandchildren to spoil."  

Inherent and unstated elements of reality are, "I live on planet Earth, a small planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of several hundred billion galaxies known to exist in the universe. Earth is, so far, unique in its ability to support life, and as a higher life form, I am able to contemplate questions such as, 'What is reality?' "  

The scenario outlined above is sort of a middle class American template, and certainly the specifics will deviate from those named above, but probably some similar benchmarks will be entered into the equation defining  our construct of reality. 

When we scrutinize our reality construct, though, we notice some things.  What we attribute as framework in our reality are some very plastic, dynamic elements and characters. This reality is largely defined by and highly dependent upon, relationships.  There is nothing static or fixed about the reality matrix we grow attached to, and yet we begin to embrace it and meld with it as though it is overtly reliable.

And so we strive and labor and pour ourselves into creating a reality that we find decent and nice and secure. We start believing that we can, in fact, generate a reality for ourselves and our loved ones. 

And then we are totally, utterly shocked and derailed when the phone call comes. "Mr. Smith? County Sheriff's Department.... there's been an accident. Can you get to the hospital to identify the body?"  Or when the husband comes home from work one evening and announces to his wife, "I just don't love you anymore. I am moving out. I want a divorce."  Or when the once happy child enters the doldrums of adolescence and finds his salvation in drugs, alcohol, and dismally dark music, until finally he quits  school, happy to mooch off of his parents for food and shelter, but otherwise consumed with disdain for them while  simultaneously engrossed with his own,  rarefied view of reality, and his very significant role in it.  And of course there's always that ridiculous projection of the collective mood of human beings around the globe: the stock market. Who hasn't seen their college fund decimated lately?

So, is reality real? Shouldn't something with as grandiose sounding a name as REALITY be a little more reliable, a little more rock solid and enduring,  underpinned by something other than the capricious moods and whims of both chance and man?    

The first definition from Dictionary.com under the philosophy heading is "something that exists independently of ideas concerning it." So back to our example, the happy marriage, the two children, the college fund and the successful launching of the children into independence suddenly become mere myth, a simple projection of what we desire. Because as we've seen, the happy marriage was in transition, the happy children were in transition, the stock market was in transition. Even money is not real in the sense of possessing any inherent power implied by the number stamped on its face. The practical, inherent value of currency is better assessed by the heat it releases when burned on a cold winter's night.When our reality triangulations predict outcomes which then fail to materialize, disappointment ensues. We are very prone to living our whole lives in the future tense, as though all that we do is an investment in some future outcome which we can make into a reality if we practice due diligence. And yet every single element of what we tend to esteem as reality is hinged upon frail, finite carbon-based life forms possessed of limited knowledge and free will, and eager to execute the latter. 
To recap: Because we believe we can guide our ship toward the shores of particular outcomes, we tend to think of reality in terms of compass points, time and rate of travel. We believe that what we have constructed around us is real, firmly anchored to some unseen bedrock reality, existing with a high probability of persistence, owing in part to our own due diligence. As building blocks of this construct, we point to any of our collection of 'real' things and 'real' relationships, and deploy them into our reality equation.

We have only one assurance in life if this is our view of reality: we are assured of disappointment. We are guaranteed a good measure of dissatisfaction, a hearty meal of sadness, and a life lived in the future tense. We are certain to become entrenched in a lifestyle that precludes us from even inquiring about existential reality because we are laboring in vain to create one of our own design. We weave together a tapestry with threads of fragile hopes and ephemeral dreams, and determine to live our lives upon it. But we are completely unaware that our tapestry is but a flimsy mat of dried grasses and chopped straw, set adrift on the great expanse of sea that is the real Reality, the unchangeable and fixed Reality, whose powerful, unseen impulses and upheavals jar us from time to time, calling to us through the mists of our ignorance, imploring us to lift up our eyes from our frail and fading tapestry and behold the one true vibrant Reality, the Creator, who has said,

“For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s;
on them he has set the world. (1 Samuel 2:8)

And again,

"My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together." (Isaiah 48:13)

That same Creator, the  true Reality, has also said,  

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8) Further He declares:

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”   Deut 31:6

Now there's a Reality to carry the ages. An eternal Reality, a guaranteed outcome, the product of the grace of the God of the universe, who has known those hundreds of billions of galaxies since their inception. And while God has known the galaxies since their inception, He has loved you since the beginning of time itself.

But God didn't stop at just making the promise. He guaranteed it, sealed it with the blood of Christ, who chose to serve humanity, to suffer and die for the sins that would otherwise separate us eternally from God's presence.  Christ's resurrection dealt an absolute defeat to Satan's unmitigated death pillaging.  

Christ says to us, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life."  John 5:24

Reality 1.0.  The first, the last, the one true Reality.

And yes, Reality really does matter.

Change the world

Some say our world today is running short of certain things, such as courage, compassion and conviction. We who agree that the world would benefit from an increase in these qualities must commit to being a source for them.

That is, of course, a far larger dilemma.

An American Cause: The Violence in Mexico

Do you deplore the violence in Mexico and on the border? Hopefully not a single drug user will dare to answer that question with a 'Yes'.

The raging violence and systemic corruption in Mexico, the murders of innocent citizens on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, is the product of the American drug user. Each and every drug user, from the homeless junkie to the elites in Hollywood and corporate America, can hold their hands before their eyes and see the blood of the border war trickling down. The corruption and violence that exist in Mexico are the products of the American drug users' ravenous cravings to feel good. It turns out that the price of drug use is measured not in dollars, but in human lives and the suffering experienced by surviving family members of those who bear the title 'casualty' in the overall equation of making rich Americans 'feel good'. (And for the record, if you can afford to purchase drugs, a non-essential luxury item, that is the new definition of rich.)

The darkness and emptiness of America's soul craves filling. A gnawing sense of hunger and want, misguided and unchecked, has morphed into a sensuous craving for euphoria, for heaven on earth. Seeking a utopia where hardship, suffering and despair are shoved to the furthermost recess of our collective mind. For all our wealth (now being revealed as the illusion that it has always been), Americans are restless, dissatisfied, always on the prowl for 'more', be it possessions, food, luxuries, or just plain pleasure, we are relentless in our hunger. But because we are seeking to fuel a dying fire not with oxygen and timbers, but with water, the craving only grows.

Wealth and status do not impact drug use; emptiness does. The advantage of opulence, prestige and materialism is insufficient to prop up even the icons of the privileged world. The root of drug use and euphoria is selfishness: it is extreme preoccupation with self and the pleasuring of self. It is narcissistic and toxic, as evidenced by the unchecked hunger for drugs in this country in spite of the desperate consequences it has for those in an economically underdeveloped country. The impact of drug- affiliated corruption on poverty levels in Mexico is simply the compounded interest of the destructive investment made by drug using Americans bent on retreating from the real canvas of life into a make believe world of amusement and pleasure. And so they flee into a cave of neurons and synapses and there they suckle the nectar of self-indulgence, momentarily escaping the reality that stands ready to confront them when they dare leave the honey cave.

Americans are long on possessions, on fluff and bling and other perishable 'assets', but far too short on spiritual vision and substance. Bankrupt comes to mind. Principles, values and virtues are vanishing from the life accounts of Americans, and America the Nation can be no greater than Americans, the human beings of the nation. A nation comprised of soulless, selfish people cannot through some strange alchemy become a Nation of stalwart fortitude and a beacon of hope for the huddled masses across the globe. Afterall, what can the cowering lost offer to the one who has learned through hardship and trial that intangible principles and abiding faith are the foundation upon which a life, a meaningful life, is built.

Time

TIME is more precious than gold, so spend it wisely, and invest for the long haul.