The Everlasting Gospel -- William Blake's preferred version

This is the closest to a final version there is, as judged by W.B. Yeats.

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,

Is my vision's greatest enemy.

Thine has a long, hook nose like thine,

Mine has a snub nose like mine.

Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,

Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.

Thine loves the same world that mine hates,

Thy heaven-doors are my hell-gates.

Socrates taught what Melitus

Loathed as a nation's bitterest curse.

And Caiaphas was, in his own mind,

A benefactor to mankind.

Doth read the Bible day and night,

But thou readest black where I read white.

Was Jesus humble, or did He
Give any proofs of humility;
Boast of high things with a humble tone,
And give with charity a stone?
When but a child He ran away,
And left His parents in dismay.
When they had wandered three days long,
This was the word upon His tongue:
"No, earthly parents, I confess
I am doing My Father's business.
When the rich learned Pharisee
Came to consult Him secretly,
Upon his heart with iron pen
He wrote, " Ye must be born again." 
He was too proud to take a bribe;
He spoke with authority, not like a scribe. 
He says, with most consummate art, 
" Follow me : I am meek and lowly of heart," 
As that is the only way to escape 
The miser's net and the glutton's trap. 
He who loves his enemies hates his friends. 
This surely was not what Jesus intends, 
But the sneaking pride of heroic schools, 
And the scribes and Pharisees' virtuous rules ; 
But He acts with honest triumphant pride,
And this is the cause that Jesus died.
He did not die with Christian ease, 
Asking pardon of His enemies. 
If He had, Caiaphas would forgive: 
Sneaking submission can always live. 
He had only to say that God was the Devil, 
And the Devil was God, like a Christian civil.

Mild Christian regrets to the Devil confess 
For affronting him thrice in the wilderness
Like to Priestley, and Bacon, and Newton,
Poor spiritual knowledge is not worth a button.
But thus the Gospel of St. Isaac confutes, 
"God can only be known by His attributes." 
He had soon been bloody Caesar's elf, 
And at last he would have been Cresar himself. 
And as for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, 
Or Christ and His Father, it's all a boast, 
Or pride and fallacy of the imagination, 
That disdains to follow this world's fashion. 
To teach doubt and experiment, 
Certainly was not what Christ meant.

What was He doing all that time, 
From ten years old to manly prime ? 
Was He then idle, or the less, 
About His father's business ? 
Or was His wisdom held in scorn, 
Before His wrath began to burn, 
In miracles throughout the land, 
That quite unnerved the (?) seraph hand ? 
If He had been Antichrist — creeping Jesus — 
He'd have done anything to please us: 
Gone sneaking into synagogues, 
And not used the elders and priests like dogs, 
But humble as a lamb or ass, 
Obeyed Himself to Caiaphas. 
God wants not man to humble himself. 
That is the trick of the ancient elf. 
This is the race that Jesus ran : 
Humble to God, haughty to man. 
Cursing the rulers before the people, 
Even to the temple's highest steeple.

And when He humbled Himself to God, 
Then descended the cruel rod.
If thou humblest thyself thou humblest Me. 
Thou also dwellest in eternity. 
Thou art a man. God is no more. 
Thy own humanity learn to adore ; 
For that is my spirit of life. 
Awake, arise to spiritual strife, 
And thy revenge abroad display, 
In terrors at the last judgment day. 
God's mercy and long suffering 
Are but the sinner to justice to bring. 
Thou on the cross for them shall pray, 
And take revenge at the last day. 
Jesus replied in thunders hurled, 
" I never will pray for the world ; 
Once I did so when I prayed in the garden. 
I wished to take with me a bodily pardon. 
Can that which was of women born, 
In the absence of the morn, 
When the soul fell into sleep, 
And archangels round it weep, 
Shooting out against the light, 
Fibres of a deadly night, 
Reasoning upon its own dark fiction, 
In doubt, which is self-contradiction ? 
Humility is only doubt, 
And does the sun and moon blot out, 
Roofing over with thorns and stems 
The buried soul and all its gems. 
This life's five windows of the soul 
Distort the heavens from pole to pole, 
And leads you to believe a lie, 
When you see with not through the eye, 
Which was born in a night to perish in a night, 
When the soul slept in beams of light."
Was Jesus chaste, or did he

Give any lessons in chastity ?

The Morning blushed fiery red.

Mary was found in adulterous bed.

Earth groaned beneath, and Heaven above

Trembled at discovery of love.

Jesus was sitting in Moses' chair.

They brought the trembling woman there.

Moses commands she be stoned to death.

What was the sound of Jesus' breath ?

He laid his hand on Moses' law.

The ancient heavens in silent awe,

Writ with curses from pole to pole,

All away began to roll.

The Earth trembling and naked lay

In secret bed of mortal clay.

On Sinai fell the hand Divine,

Putting back the bloody shrine,

And she heard the breath of God

As she heard by Eden's flood.

" Good and evil are no more ;

Sinai's trumpets cease to roar.

Cease, finger of God, to write ;

The heavens are not clean in thy sight.

Thou art good, and thou alone ;

Nor may the sinner cast one stone.

To be good only, is to be

As God or else a Pharisee.

Thou Angel of the Presence Divine,

That didst create this body of mine,

Wherefore hast thou writ these laws

And created Hell's dark jaws ?

My presence I will take from thee.

A cold leper thou shalt be,

Though thou wast so pure and bright

That Heaven was not clean in thy sight;

Though thy oath turned Heaven pale,

Though thy covenant built Hell's jail,

Though thou dost all to chaos roll

With the serpent for its soul.

Still the breath Divine does move,

And the breath Divine is love.

Mary, fear not. Let me see

The seven devils that torment thee.

Hide not from my sight thy sin,

That forgiveness thou mayst win.

Has no man condemned thee?"

"No man, Lord." "Then what is he

Who shall accuse thee? Come ye forth,

Fallen fiends of Heavenly birth

That have forgot your ancient love

And driven away my trembling dove.

You shall bow before her feet;

You shall lick the dust for meet,

And though you cannot love, but hate,

You shall be beggars at love's gate.

What was thy love? Let me see it.

Was it love, or dark deceit?"

"Love too long from me has fled.

'Twas dark deceit to earn my bread.

'Twas covet, or 'twas custom, or

Some trifle not worth caring for

That they may call a shame and sin;

Love's temple that God dwelleth in,

And hide in secret hidden shrine

The naked human form divine

And render that a lawless thing

On which the soul expands her wing.
But this, O Lord, this was my sin,

When first I let the devils in,

In dark pretence to chastity,

Blaspheming love, blaspheming Thee.

Thence rose secret adulteries,

And thence did covet also rise.

My sin thou hast forgiven me.

Canst thou forgive my blasphemy?

Canst thou return to this dark hell,

And in my burning bosom dwell?

And canst thou die that I may live

And canst thou pity and forgive? "

Then rolled the shadowy Man away

From the limbs of Jesus to make them his prey,

An ever-devouring appetite

Glistering with festering venoms bright,

Saying, — " Crucify this cause of distress,

Who don't keep the secret of holiness!

The mental powers by disease we bind,

But he heals the deaf, the dumb, the blind,

Whom God hath alHicted for secret ends.

He comforts and heals and calls them friends,

But when Jesus was crucified

Then was perfected his galling pride.

In three days he devoured his prey,

And still devours this body of clay.

For dust and clay is the serpent's meat

That never was meant for man to eat."

Why does God have to sacrifice Himself?

In a conversation with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, philosopher Slavoj Zizek says the following:

“Why does God have to sacrifice himself? People usually answer me, there was sin, and sins have to be paid. No! This idea that above God there is some kind of sense of cosmic justice, that even God has to pay, is a Pagan idea. The other popular idea was that God makes a deal with the Devil.” - https://youtu.be/NEEBYNNpX9o

“Deal with the Devil” is far from a specific answer, but two excerpts from the poet William Blake offer insight to how this deal could be viewed.

“Nail his neck to the cross : nail it with a nail. / Nail his neck to the cross : ye all have power over his tail."

“What can be done with those desperate fools / Who follow after the heathen schools? / I was standing by when Jesus died. / What they called humility I called pride."

Analyzing these segments, W.B. Yeats said:

“Christ's two natures impelled Him to crucifixion. [Christ] went to ‘humble Himself to God,’ and also to proudly destroy the serpent in himself; his own spectre, or Satan. This Satan is the false (view of) Christ worshipped still.” - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_works_of_William_Blake,_poetic,_symbolic_and_critical/2/The_Everlasting_Gospel

Yeats can write better than myself so I will quote him at length describing William Blake's reworking of Christian theology:

“Jehovah, in the persons of the Elohim, and by the agency of the Angel of the Divine Presence, created this dark world as an act of mercy and of cruelty. It is of mercy because it enables the weak emotions to look through symbols upon prophecy, and also because it passes away, being under Time. It is of cruelty because it cuts off joys of mind and adds on pains of mind — of that lower and shrunken part called body. It is also Satanic, because it is the region where the Accuser triumphs by means of the law which is 'the strength of sin,' as the lesson in the Anglican burial service reminds us. Satan is the Accuser. Accusation is the great mental sin. Other sin is merely physical, and belongs to the things of Time that pass. Accusation is not the only mental sin. Denial is equally deadly. Satan is not only the moral accuser but the denier of Imaginative truth, for he would have Reason and Memory only considered to be intellectual attributes. With these he builds the dark fiction of error — a belief in that delusive Goddess Nature, who is the mother of physical morality, and of mental immorality. She is Mary, the pure, and Rahab the Harlot. She is Rahab because she binds the red cord of blood in the eyes, the windows of the soul. She is Mary, because it is of that cord the red robe of flesh is made that was put on by Christ at the incarnation. Thus Mary is the greater Rahab. Rahab's harlotry is typical of mental mixture of convictions. It may be found in the physically pure. She is therefore called the Harlot-Virgin.

"The Image of God in which man was made is the form of the Imagination. This is common to all men and will end by becoming One Form. It will unite all. It will survive all... In a word it saves them from Satan, God of this world. Reason and memory tend also to unite men's personalities into one great Temporary Delusion. This is the great Satan, opposite of the great Saviour... [The great Satan] coheres by the water of death; fleshly instinct. It is bound by the fire of vegetation; fleshly growth and decay. At the incarnation Christ put on this water and this fire. The one burned the other. He ended by putting them both off. His mother was Law and Nature. His body was Satan. When crucified he was his own destroyer, destroying the Serpent in Himself. This Serpent, Satan, was what was nailed to the tree. This body was destroyed or devoured in three days. This devouring is the meaning of the serpent with his tail in his mouth. Christ's self-sacrifice (or suicide) was the thrusting into death of Satan, and who had become Himself as a result of the Incarnation. It was the eternal putting-off of Reason and Memory and Morality as delusions, that Imagination, Eternal Present, and Forgiveness might survive."

For Blake, Satan represents Error, not Sin. “Sin is to be forgiven, Error is not.”

Blake believes that we have re-created the same hypocritical system as the Pharisees that Jesus rebelled against, and, as with then, the hypocritical system is the primary source of Satan’s delusion today. Unlike in Jesus’s time, however, hypocrisy is as likely to be found in scientism as in moralism:

“I am your Rational Power O Albion & that Human Form / You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long / That creeps forth in a night & is dried in the morning sun…
So spoke the Spectre to Albion. He is the Great Selfhood / Satan: Worshipd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth” - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Jerusalem._The_Emanation_of_the_Giant_Albion/Plate_33a

In short, Christ's "deal with the devil" was that rather than following the Divine order to preserve life made in the image of God, Christ acts through a healthy bodily-Satanic pride, which is of a lower order than Mind and imagination. Now, return to Blake's verse: “What can be done with those desperate fools / Who follow alter the heathen schools? / I was standing by when Jesus died. / What they called humility I called pride."

The "desperate fools" believe that Christ humbled himself before men. Blake utterly rejects this type of humility. Yeats explains: "Humility is forbidden and sinful as modesty is (which blasphemes the Symbol of God, the naked body). Humility is forbidden because it is doubt, not faith, and doubts the Godhead in ourselves, His chosen Temple... Death and Error are Reason when confined to the experience of the five senses, proud of its humility, its limits and arguments.""

The correct interpretation is that Christ humbled himself only to God, not to men. In accepting Crucifixion, Jesus was not moralistically accepting the judgment of Pilot and the pharisees. Rather, he was employing Satanic-bodily pride, parallel to the pride in his claim "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me" (John 12:32).  Yeats explains in the higher order, 'pride' is "Elation of joy and delight in Vision," but "Healthy Satanic pride in the energy of that lower part of mind called body, has also a right to its elation because 'everything that lives is Holy'."
Christ's pride in crucifixion is Satanic because it is of his bodily, human existence, not directly related to divine Imagination.

Those who take pride in moralism and scientism are in error, because this type of pride (connected to abstract systems as opposed to Imagination or Body) necessarily leads to hypocrisy--the valuing of rules over belief.  "Death and Error are Reason when confined to the experience of the five senses, proud of its humility, its limits and arguments."

Is Jung's Red Book True as a Work of Art?

The following is an excerpt from Wolfgang Giegerich's book The Flight into the Unconscious (pp. 279-282):

About Blake's productions Jung remarked critically, "they are an artistic production rather than an authentic representation [i.e., a mere documentation or “report about..."] of unconscious processes" (Letters 2, pp. 513-4). This tells us that for Jung the art making process distorts that true authenticity which for him resides only in the immediacy of the original experience itself (Urerfahrung, Urerlebnis; "the most immediate experience" [CW11 S 396]). The ground of the truth and authenticity of a vision is kept external to its representation, such as in the Red Book, by being declared to have been an experience as factual event, "There was nothing of conscious structure in these fantasies, they were just events that happened" (Analytical Psychology 97). Happenings! The positivity of "events and experiences" (MDR 182)! The facticity of their occurrence!

But all art is of "conscious structure" through and through, otherwise dogs would be able to appreciate a statue or painting as art rather than as a mere thing. Fantasies, if they are consciously released into their fantasy character and not deliberately construed as reports about factual events, are in themselves thoroughly illumined, as artwork events of consciousness.

As we already heard, Jung insisted, concerning his fantasy material: "No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature" (MDR 186). This is, by the way, diametrically opposed to the thinking of the alchemists, for whom quod natura relinquit imperfectum ars perficit. According to this view, truth can only come about through the human processing of what is naturally given as mere raw material, as factual prima materia. Truth is the end-product of a long opus contra naturam. What is naturally given is ipso facto precisely not (yet) true. Art creates its own originas and within the work of art. But Jung wants to identify truth with factual existence, as if it were a piece of nature: "An elephant is true because it exists" (CW 11 S 5). Ultimately Jung's concept of psychic truth boils down to sheer overwhelmingness, brutal power: “the overpowering force of the original experiences" (360), "quite simply experiences" (365a), "The unshakeableness of the experience"(338b). Jung is here a positivist and, in a sense, existentialist. His truth has nothing to do any more with truth in its authentic sense. 

Jung is here committed to a logic of externality and otherness. For him, the Red Book as an object has its truth, origin, and reality in itself, but fundamentally outside of itself, in the literal experience that gave rise to it. Because the event of the overwhelming experience is what really counts, he could not radically release the fantasy substance itself of his experience into its own, into logically beine fantasy, having the form of fantasy, being art (or, another possibility being philosophy or Dichtung). He needed to emphatically reject the notion of art for his Red Book because what he wanted to cling to and preserve at all cost was the so-called "original" experience external to and underlying the Red Book: the experience which for him was supposed to be the sole locus of truth and authenticity. Unthinkable that he could have released the substance of his experiences from the facticity of the experiences as well as from himself as the subject who had such experience into the negativity of the form of fantasy. Rather than à corps perdu plunging into the fantasy world as fantasy world and thus as a mental, conscious reality, as speculation, that is, rather than relentlessly releasing his experience, and himself going under, into “the soul,” his whole project was precisely to extract from the fantasy the positivity of a literal external cause of it--ultimately "the primal world of the unconscious" (MDR 200) and posit it as its a priori. "The unconscious" is the objectified, literalized, externalized--and thus killed--soul: "the soul" by definition deprived of its "being of conscious structure" or its being thought.

The clinging to the factual event of one's experience over against the fantasy character of what has been experienced is at the same time the self-preservation (or initial self-institution) of the ego (the structure or definition of the subject as "the ego" in the sense of personalistic psychology). The I is not willing to let go of itself and go under into its fantasies, so that they might be released into their inherent truth. This is why Jung described this period of his life (his) "Confrontation with the Unconscious," focusing, rather than on the work to be produced, on the crisis he had to go through an on his tormenting doubts as to his own sanity. And it is why he tried to substitute for the suggestion that what he was doing was an following theory about the telos of the process: "Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not I" (199b). This is already in nuce the dogma of Jung's psychologistic “personality cult,” as one might term it. He circled around himself (which might, be contrasted with mental-illness-plagued van Gogh's dedication to his painting). The creative impulse, which without doubt was at work in Jung, was diverted from its own direction towards the production of truth (in works of art, literature, philosophy, music), i.e., towards soul-making, and abused for egoic purposes (self-development). The truth is not allowed to come home to itself, but is forced down into the human being as (a new) literal personality.

Cause and telos are in Jung's scheme dissociated and set up as literal and external (past event or future entity, respectively). Art, poetry, philosophical thought (in other words, soul), by contrast, would be what is in between those two: presence, because owing to the absolute-negative interiorization of the experienced fantasy into itself, into its truth, into its own internal ground and archê, it contains both its cause and its telos only within its absolute negativity.

Because the Red Book has the mystery and truth that it is about, fundamentally outside itself in Jung's factual "original experience, on the one hand, and in the "new personality" to be formed in the positively existing civil man Jung, on the other hand, it is really an unwritten book. In Plato scholarship one distinguishes between Plato's exoteric written dialogues made available to the general public and his "unwritten doctrine" (agrapha dogmata) made known only orally to the esoteric inner circle of his disciples. Jung's book is esoteric in a much more radical, namely absolute, sense. Plato logically fully released his unwritten doctrine out into the open, and thus logically "published" it, even if only orally to select disciples; he could do so because he obviously had relentlessly abandoned himself to the inner truth of his thought experience. Potentially he could therefore also have written down his agrapha dogmata. But Jung’s Red Book is the paradox of his “written unwritten (and on principle unwriteable) truth”: literally, factually written, but logically unwritten. It merely points to the mystery that is per definitionem solely his mystery and not ours. "The myth commences, the one that can only be lived, not sung, the one that sings itself" (286, tr.m.), we read at one point in the Red Book. The authentic locus of his truth is now the positivity of Existenz, real life: "first and exclusively and solely in one's own person" (CW 7, p. 5, re.m.), in man whose nature is now no longer comprehended as his theoretical I (classical metaphysics) or his poietic soul (Nietzsche) but as what Heidegger would later term his mere Dasein.

Just as the authentic locus of the Christian truth is not the church as cathedral, bur the human heart, so the authentic place of Jung’s truth is not the Red Book, which, as we know, he considered his church, his cathedral. His truth has its authenticity only in the factual events of his "immediate experiences” themselves.

Jung’s paintings and calligraphy are only secondary illustrations for the external purpose of satisfying his wish to show his subjective esteem. If they were art, they would shine from within themselves. The historistic imitation of a medieval illuminated book is the telltale sign that what the Red Book contains has its worth not in itself, but only in the feeling of the man C.G. Jung. "I always knew that these experiences contained something precious, and therefore I knew of nothing better than to write them down in a precious,' that is to say, costly book and to paint the images that emerged through reliving it all ..." (360). Decoration. Ego work. It had to be ego work because the fantasy had not been released into its truth, into the form of truth. Which is why its truth could not shine forth from it of its own accord. And the fact that the calligraphy and, to a lesser degree, the paintings imitate medieval forms of expression clearly reveals that the visual aspect of the Red Book is not the self-expression, i.e., not the intrinsic form, of the material presented itself. Superimposed. An accessory. Inauthentic. Thus Jung's cited critique of Blake ("an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes") reflects upon his own production, if we understand it in a different sense from his. (This is quite apart from the fact that the idea of an authentic representation of unconscious processes is in itself fallacious. Authenticity is never the gift of the unconscious processes themselves. of raw natural events, which inevitably come in the state of imperfection and inauthenticity. If at all, authenticity can only be the produced result of the artist's or adept's ars).

The Red Book has meanwhile been published. But published only the way art works can nowadays be technically reproduced. We can never get behind the reproduction to the “original"--because Jung's own volume is in itself not, and was not supposed to be the original. Dante's Divina Commedia, by contrast, does not need a costly leather binding. Even if it comes to us in a wretched, cheaply printed paperback copy we have nevertheless the original: because as art and philosophical thought it has its illumining and heart-warming truth absolute-negatively within itself, a truth that freely communicates itself to anybody capable and willing to abandon himself to it. It is everybody’s mystery, not only Dante’s.

On the Evidence for Naturally Occurring Global Temperature Cycles

Over the past four years, I have gone from protesting human-caused global warming at the “Forward on Climate” Rally in Washington, D.C. to my current state of seriously doubting that humans play more than a marginal role in the Earth’s climate.

I have only chosen to write about this my views now because I have found multiple confirmations of climate predictions made by AGW skeptic David Dilley and discovery of the cycles of the Primary Forcing Mechanism that drive climate change globally.  There are two specific predictions in the last year that I find quite impressive.

1. Dilley’s prediction in February, going against the mainstream academic researchers, that 2017’s hurricane season will be especially harsh. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-hurricane-forecasts/meteorologists-see-normal-atlantic-hurricane-season-in-2017-idUSKBN17M2J8
   The newspaper where Dilley lives wrote the following about his system:

   “Dilley developed a computer model concept, which he touts as a one-of-a-kind long-range forecasting tool. It relies on weather cycles. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration uses several short-term weather cycle-type oscillation models — as well as La Nina or El Nino influences — to forecast six months to a year into the future. NOAA does not use weather cycle data to predict hurricanes four years out.” - http://www.ocala.com/news/20171129/hurricane-irma-made-2017-season-to-remember

2. And then quite recently, I came across a blog post Dilley wrote in 2008, stating “about the year 2017 there will be another warming.” Again, this was not predicted by mainstream research organizations, which thought “the tapering off of an El Niño period... would hold down global heat levels.”

Given Dilley’s record of success in predicting weather events, I am somewhat surprised his work, freely available on his website since 2007, has not received mainstream attention.

Before discovering Dilley’s work, there are three main sources that progressively strengthened my skepticism regarding human caused climate change.

The first time I began to take climate skepticism seriously was in reading The Scientist as Rebel, a book by distinguished Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson, who is quite liberal on most issues, claims there is no firm scientific evidence that increased carbon levels in the upper atmosphere and oceans will cause the climate crises that many other scientists forecast.

Dyson points out that the dire predictions about global warming are based on largely unproven computer simulations. Scientific truth is defined by proven experiment. I see an analogy here between the housing-market computer models used by bankers before the 2007 crash, and agree with Dyson that the scientific community needs to be wary about accepting long-term predictions of recently-developed computer models as equivalent to the results of orthodox laboratory experiments.

I find it too much to believe a scientist with as distinguished a career as Dyson would sacrificed his legacy for a corporate bribe, no matter how much he was offered. This significantly increased my openness to future arguments on the issue.

Despite Stefan Molyneux's Alt-Lite apologetics for the Alt-right, I’m including his video detailing his own experience writing code for computer climate models. Molyneux details the failure to hold climate computer models to any sort of falsifiable standard, and the resulting politicization of the climate research field. At the time, Molyneux had yet to stray into far-right apologetics, and his conviction on the issue was quite influential for me.

Soon after hearing Molyneux’s take, I found the work of Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who has been perhaps the most powerful and ruthless critic of climate alarmists, testifying before Congress, and later partnering with the conservative propaganda outlet Prager University [not a university] to make this useful overview, on the problems surrounding the idea of human caused climate change.

Discovering David Dilley’s work was the the real turning point for me. Only Dilley provides a scientific alternative to the mainstream, and the more I’ve thought about his proposals, freely available here, the more convinced I’ve become. At the risk of losing credibility for a hometown bias, I will also link to UA-Huntsville professor Roy Spencer’s website, as the discrepancy between surface temperature readings and Satellite temperature readings is an issue climate science should address.

Is it better to be bad than unlucky?

The phrase “better to be lucky than good” implies a logical contradiction, because how can something be better than goodness? The fact that we take the phrase as syllogistic truth today is a testament to the divided (pathological?) nature of today’s cultural consciousness.

It’s only in the past 70 years--since the development of modern warfare--that humanity has come to accept that the very core of our identities--our careers, how long we will live, whether or not we become rich, whether or not we live a long life--may be determined by random occurrences. Unlike many centuries-old sayings and common phrases, the phrase “better to be lucky than good” is only 75 years old. Before then, luck was a play thing--a part of children’s games and nothing more. They did not separate events from consciousness like the modern philosophy of “randomness” does.

Though I fully accept the validity of theoretical physics notion of quantum indeterminacy--that "randomness" is built into the fabric of things--I think it's dangerous for us to extend this to human experience. Randomness is fine for analyzing past events or predicting future ones, but the present moment is the domain of consciousness.

The word “random” comes from the Old English word “rinnan” which describes how river water runs and flows. Over the course of the last 800 years, the word has come to mean the opposite of the total connectedness of its original meaning “to flow”.

The flow of human consciousness excludes that possibility of randomness. The act of asserting consciousness creates a feedback loop that extends and projects more consciousness. To attribute the events of the present to “randomness” is to cut off that feedback loop from its power source.

Consciousness is nothing more, nothing less than the entirety of civil society taken as a whole. Consciousness is empathy for our fellow beings. Consciousness is the anticipation that the future holds unpredictable joys. Seeing the world through the lens of randomness excludes these emotions.

The present moment is not a simulation (despite what Elon Musk thinks!) What happens in this present moment is all that we have got. Computers have catapulted the idea of randomness to the front of our cultural consciousness. But right here, right now, there is no reset button. To call what happens in the present moment “random” is to turn off consciousness.

To confuse the randomness of computer programs and simulations with an essential part of reality is to turn away from consciousness. We need to spend more time facing the other direction.