A prudent caveat: a perfect world will never be completely within our reach; however, we must embrace this fact and pursue a world at peace with fidelity as if a perfect world is achievable, even if it is not.
A perfect world will never be achievable because our “internal world” of a conscious, wandering mind will continually contemplate both good or evil human action. This duality of good and evil is an apodictic fact. Nature made it that way. It is an important duality: without evil how would we recognize good; and without good how would we recognize evil. For thinking to be critical and rational, the deciphering of all possibilities must be explored by the mind; it will always include evil along with moral alternatives for human action. However, it will be human action directed toward the outer world of material pursuit, which will most likely dictate an outcome of evil over good.
In paraphrasing Ludwig von Mises: Human action, if successful, attains the end sought. Human action produces the outcomes. This production of outcomes is not an act of creation; it does not bring about something that did not exist before. It is a transformation of given elements through arrangement and combination. [Thought brought to its fruition produces outcomes.] The producer is not a creator. Man is creative only in thinking and in the realm of imagination. In the world of external phenomena, he is only a transformer. All that he can accomplish is to combine the means available in such a way that according to the laws of nature the result aimed at is bound to emerge. (1)
Unfortunately, the means available include this innate duality of good and evil. From a material and object point of view, everything has a beginning and an ending; there is nothing before or after. In the materialist mindset, life has a beginning and an ending with nothing existing before, nothing existing after and that in their afterlife their sins will be forgiven, and they will have the blessing of heaven. This mindset produces a material world of money chasers: money, power, greed, the pursuit of Middle Eastern oil, a large home, and new car are what make the “world go around.” Gathering as many material goods as one can become their passion. “You only go this way once” is their mantra. Most materialist believe in tabula rasa, the unformed at birth, featureless mind in the philosophy of John Locke, a Randian objectivist view of consciousness. An empty mind at nascency is fictional. It is an existential ontic view gleaned from tacit observation of our outer world realities.
These qualities of good and evil are not existentially learned; they are there in existence before any human birth. We inherited these qualities, qualities that are “part and parcel” of our consciousness: a consciousness that has existed since the very first seeds of our existence – at the genesis of all life. In our contemporary world, our human action either is directed at moral and good endeavors, or evil endeavors, based on how our conscious mind has experienced, perceived, and interpreted the external world of material and object values.
Human action that pursues outer world material or object values will more than likely produce undesirable outcomes with no benefit to our world.
There has to be a new way of thinking, for in the world of internal phenomena (recognition of human consciousness is a phenomenon) we are also transformers of an innate, internal noumenon that has existed ever since the genesis of the human species, and in the words of Peter Russell, “the inability of science to account for the existence of consciousness suggests we need a new paradigm, or superparadigm.” (2)
In addition, Peter Russell states: “The foundation stone of the emerging superparadigm is the distinction between the phenomenon, the reality generated in the mind, and the unknowable reality, or noumenon, that underlies it. When this distinction is clear, many anomalies and apparently intractable problems across a broad spectrum of human endeavor either dissolve or take on an entirely different nature.” “I believe it will eventually lead us to a new understanding of God.” (3)
No one should assume that a new way of thinking, a superparadigm, means that we should become ascetics. We will still need to comb our hair and brush our teeth. A new way of thinking does not mean deprivation. It does not mean an abandonment of material and object values.
Material value in the form of money is important as a means of exchange for the acquisition of life’s necessities. Material values such as food, shelter, mobility, and health are important human needs.
Object value is a measure of immediate desire for an object. Object values distinguish one thing from another thing. Object value distinguishes men from women, and identifies the different stages in the processes of aging. These values give humans absolute individual forms of identity that in their entireties never duplicate: fat or skinny; tall or short; brown, black, red or blond hair; yellow, brown, white, or black skinned; eye shapes and eye color differences; different nose shapes; facial qualities that differ; and other phenotypes, and physiological differences in human physical appearance from individual to individual. These values provide identity through our language and ethnicity, as well. These variations are so subtle that we can identify another from any visual perception.
In our life’s particular dimension, material and object values are not meant to be used as targets for our bigotry or reasons for our superiority over others; they are not to define a person’s character. Material and object values benefit and provide identity in our lives.
Superparadigm thought puts into equilibrium outer world material and object values with inner world absolute values of mind and consciousness – our soul.
So, this is the crux of my position: all people of benevolent character who wish to live in a world at peace must provide leadership to attain that end. When we understand the distinct differences between phenomenon and noumenon, the distinction between the outer world of material and object reality and the subjective absolute reality of our inner world, bringing this duality into balance with an understanding that in the dimension of the absolute, we will come to an understanding that we are all equal. Human action taken within the superparadigm mindset will bring solutions to war and we will evolve into a world at peace. Our perceived material and object differences concerning nationalism, patriotism, religionism, and our differences in political view, economics, social agenda, and in civil rights, brings about the violence and incivility we inflict on each other. Religious intolerance to life, chasing money for its seemingly material benefit, and the obsession we have for material possessions (including a perceived need to control other human beings as if they are possessions) can be traced as a source of religious fanaticism, and avarice that threatens the world today. Since these are innate conditions that will always be a condition of human life choice in the taking of human action they will always exist, but within a new superparadigm they can be marginalized.
The meaning of life on earth is our evolution. In the absolute, the realities of life are the ongoing evolutionary processes that are invisible to us. Just as the seasons of each year come and go, the subtleties of their changes, those micro changes invisible to us, are not apparent until that day we experience winter, spring, summer, and fall. Moreover, each subsequent change of season is not an identical copy of the last, even though from all appearances it is the same: “one can never step into the same stream twice.”
Within the context of the superparadigm a world at peace is attainable, but a perfect world is not.
