Amerika

In further exploration of the Proto Indo-European Faith (PIEF), it seems that we must go back to the roots of spirituality, which is not “faith” as the moderns allege but pattern comparison.

Whatever constitutes our world, it has one salient attribute that underscores all of our thinking: it is consistent. Gravity does not disappear on Tuesday after being there on Sunday, even if it is lessened somewhat by the motion of the moon.

The core of its consistency comes from cause/effect relationships. Every effect — something we see in reality — has a single cause, although until the effect occurs, every cause may have multiple possible outcomes.

The footnote to that latter assertion is that similar patterns of cause beget similar patterns of effect. If you step on the tines of a rake facing away from you, the handle will come up and whap you in the face every time.

Plato argued that we could derive a hypothesis of the divine from this consistency. Causes generally involve larger patterns than effects, so at some point, he said, our reality is the effect of some vaster force or dimension.

One interesting thing about cause/effect relationships is that often the cause persists after the effect is gone, and the effect lives on as the cause of other effects, meaning that it influences whatever mass of cause is out there.

Almost no one understands the Platonic forms, which are patterns of causes not of effects. The form of a chair is not the design of the chair, but the forces of gravity and logic which make a four-legged seat with a back the best option for sitting as a bipedal creature.

In the same sense, the cause of our reality is not something like our reality, but something much more abstract. The Germanic Idealists, starting with Kant, suggested that reality is both physicality and idea, with the latter being the cause.

The PIEF, as we can trace it in paganism, Hinduism, hermeticism, and Greco-Roman religions, probably believed not just in a divine force that manifested as multiple amoral but spirited gods, but in an afterlife where people would exist as idea: the cause carries on after the effect, but not here.

Their religion was not haunted by ghosts, but entranced by worlds beyond that dwarfed this one. This belief included immortality of the individual soul, which since people seem animated by their innermost intuition and essence, seems more likely than a pure material and animalistic source for personality.

In the PIEF, humans were temporary travelers from another vaster land. They journeyed here for some time and then went on to other challenges which, in the esoteric way, fit who they were and what they had learned here.

As the modern religions collapse like houses made of butter, we turn toward these generalized but strongly naturalistic principles and rediscover our faith as it is inside of us and not in the words of some book.

Tags: afterlife, divinity, gods, immortality, PIEF, proto indo-european faith