XII

Information vs Experience 

or, What is eureka?

When you have a problem that needs to be figured out, you may opt to figure it out by concentrating on it until you find the answer, maybe stroking your chin and saying hmmm. Or, the answer may come suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, when you weren’t even thinking about it. Why does only the second method seem like inspiration? There isn’t a lot of difference here. Either way, any solution you ended up with came from your unconscious, second stage mind.

In the first example, the conscious mind thinks it worked it out or was in on it in some vital way. But the conscious mind has no capacity to use logic or math. Those talents lie in the hands of our organic mind. Our intellectual talents developed long before consciousness and are performed in a multi-tasking parallel manner which is impossible for the conscious mind to perceive. Likewise, the unconscious mind has limited ability to cope with problems that require even a minimum of conceptual structure. That requires third stage mental organizations to create a mental workspace where the problem can be broken into parts and then separately and sequentially presented to the unconscious mind which processes and responds with answers.

                If you think about it, that act we think of as thinking is simply us consciously herding or steering what other parts of our mind actually do. The role of thinking in problem solving is compiling and organizing a conceptual representation of the problem at hand, like a Power Point presentation to ourselves. Thinking of this sort is a conscious experience, and can create the illusion that all thinking is strictly a conscious process. From our conscious perspective, a sort of process is going on, unfolding in time. We see ourselves thinking logically or working it out, even though at any step of this process we have no perception of how the answer was actually arrived at. Most of the time, we see enough continuous steps to be satisfied that we are consciously sorting things out. But there is a threshold of steps below which we lose the illusion of thinking and can no longer account for our emerging ideas. That’s when we call the process intuition.

 

Intuition has been called body knowledge, or race-memory, or a spiritual message. The first two are embedded in the design of our physical forms. It is knowledge learned by your ancestors passed on genetically and built right into your emotional and intellectual character. It is knowledge from every move you’ve made and experience you’ve had, the vast majority of which you had no conscious experience of. It’s knowledge you can’t know- somatic knowledge. Our computers are a good analogy. You might know how to tell your computer to store a bitmap as a jpeg, but you probably don’t know how the little electric chicklets inside do it. It’s the same with our minds. If asked, “What was the capital of Assyria?”, you might remember the answer… but how? Historical facts are no different than the charging gorilla. Do you know how you switched on your adrenalin? As this inner knowledge is revealed through life experience, consciousness recreates this knowledge into information- what we think we know. That information becomes more conceptual building blocks of the conscious world, and it is in this context that I have used the word knowledge previously. Once experienced, we can consciously have known something all along and know that we knew it, but we can’t consciously know something that we haven’t experienced hence don’t know yet. This is why intuition isn’t known, intuition is experienced.

We can experience our intuitive processes, just not consciously. It doesn’t have to be like getting hit by a ton of bricks, even though it can be. If at some instant what we are is someone having an inspiration, even a subtle one, our unconscious mind becomes our highest level of organization, identity rises to it, and we experience it. Even the first moment of recalling a memory is not a moment of consciousness. Eureka is a second stage experience. And a distinction we wouldn’t make before we developed third stage mentalities. Long ago, we experienced our minds just like the other animals do where any and all intellect is experienced as eureka and not as information. For those living in a conscious ego, eureka is a later, secondary experience that however accurate, is entirely our own creation and not what actually happened to us. We can recreate all three kinds of intuition already mentioned; our design, our genetics and our life experience. Consciousness treats external intuitive experience the same way, by recreating it.

Intuitive knowledge isn’t just buried within us, waiting for just the right provocation to bring it to the surface. Sometimes intuition lands on the surface from beyond, and suddenly we know something that no part of ourselves ever knew before. As if a communication was received through some means that wasn’t one of our five senses. Which we figured meant coming from somewhere beyond the physical world. Why did we figure that? Because we foolishly assumed  that our five senses take in everything and are telling us all about it. After all, what could possibly be out there that a perceptual system originally developed to propagate fish might miss? Obviously, we had some sixth sense that was variously sensitive to the non-physical spiritual world. We moderns think of this sense as being spiritual itself, but before internal medicine had a good look and couldn’t find the parts, our spirituality was considered physically part of us. For us moderns, this can mean considering our soul or spirit as not part of the physical world. Both the soul and spiritual experience are part of the same vast creation as your butt. In the whole history of mankind, the issue of spirituality has been considered in a variety of ways.

 

However we consider our spirituality, the key word here is consider, which is an activity of the conscious mind. To consciousness, intuitive experience of either the internal or external variety arrives the same way- afterward, as a memory. This is when one seeks a context to put the experience in. Becoming part of the conscious world requires creating a narrative explanation. No longer intuition, this is information. It’s what you’ve told yourself your experience means. These explanations can’t float off like disconnected icebergs in the conscious mind. They need a connection to the mainland of the conscious world. If none can be made, that can create serious problems with conscious experience.

If you end up with an explanation that doesn’t fit into your everyday primary conscious world, then you might create a secondary world in which it does. One begins to live in multiple worlds, each experienced by a unique ego-self. Through life experience, the dominant self can change from one to another. I know I just said all that in the last bit, but in this context, by initiating or influencing a change of which ego-self is in dominance, intuitive experience can become either religious conversion or religious enlightenment. The conscious mind is newly informed of what’s out there and in here. These new concepts become a foundation for a new conscious world and one becomes a new self living in it. An intense eureka experience can create a deep commitment to the information created from it. The emotional impact and an increased sense of reality can cause profound change in the organic self which then supports the credibility of the conscious explanation. Even a eureka experience with a subtle effect on the organic self can result in conscious information that can change the choices and decisions we make concerning every aspect of life. In this example, information holds greater influence over the ongoing creation of the self than all one’s accumulated life experience. Information out-shouts experience. To the conscious ego-self, information is the essence of eureka, as if the explanation is what the experience was for. That can make the information seem like a message from God that bubbled up from our unconscious minds as if it were a merely a transit station instead of the actual recipient.

 

Since civilization began, this has frequently resulted in an inspired messiah type who sets out to replace the old mass-mind with a new one by making others conscious of his conscious world, or put more commonly, spreading religious enlightenment. The spreading can take the form of the experience or the information. In the first case, recreating the original inspiring experience for others in hopes they will experience the original inspiration. If experienced, it will inspire any necessary information. In the second case, we skip the do part and just share the conscious explanation. It is presumed that this delivery of info contains within it the means of triggering the original experience. That’s entirely possible, but more often the info instead becomes a good enough explanation for everyone’s pre-existing spiritual experience. By either means, this sort of cult-level mass-mind could catch on quickly, especially if enhanced by the charisma of the spreader or spreaders. That’s how it all started long ago, and how it still works today. But after the middle ages, an alternative appeared, perhaps for first time.

At the start of the modern age, fifteenth century or so, Enlightenment was still strictly a religious issue. Religion could, as it always had, still frame all the questions. It was where everyone tried to put their answers. But this was also a two-tiered world, similar to a type A or B society with haves and have-nots of full-time egos. As before, some lived predominately conscious lives (city dwellers/middle class) and some lived lives that had only occasional use for consciousness if any capacity for it at all (peasants/urban poor). The Roman Church wisely chose to accommodate both with a balance of activity and intellect. For the literate, religion was primarily information. For the illiterate, religion was still an experience. Both used exactly the same text and artifacts, and called God by the same name. Contact between these two worlds would take place in a curious blend of order and ritual. The clergy was educated and lived strict and ordered lives of conscious self-supervision to protect themselves from damnation. Resisting temptation and earning eternal salvation was fine for the self-conscious few, but for most it was quite beyond their scope. Most of the congregation wasn’t literate, rarely introspective, and could barely understand the notion of supervising one’s self to protect them from a concept. The church had to resort to the old methods like pageantry and icons for hallucinations and simpler systems for regulating behavior. The Grand Vision of Hell was presented passionately, with the promise that it awaited the disobedient.

 

But the generations that caught up with the cultural achievements of the classical world were very different from their predecessors and much more fortunate. As ego-selves go, Romans were probably their equals and they were still significantly modeled after classical concepts of self. The classical self would seem familiar, but any of us moderns would consider the conscious world they lived in constricting and too structured. We get to enjoy a much broader experience as an ego-self because we live in a conscious world where more of ourselves are a sharing part of it. The re-appearance of universities, and enough prosperity to have time to go, brought forth minds that were capable of reexamining the classical past. Greek math and Roman technology became accessible again because now there were enough stable self-directed minds to sustain the systems the old knowledge made possible. Literacy spread after the printing press and kept spreading. Suddenly, the profound and profitable were within the reach of almost anyone literate in a way that cut through class and nationality. Teaching the young became mostly information. By the high renaissance, nearly everybody was conscious but religious practice retained the two-tiered structure. Guys like Luther preached ascension through hearing just the right information about how to make the right choices in your life. Other guys like Zwingli and the evangelicals insisted that ascension was a gut experience and some, not unlike Buddha, insisted that making any conscious choices about your life could only be counter-productive. This particular schism is still popular with modern Christianity, but for many it became a non-issue.

 

These new religious guys didn’t come on as new messiahs. They denied their anointing, maintained their mortal form, but were viewed by their followers as touched by divine validation. Each claimed to be the true bearer of Christ’s aspirations, but no one tried to replace him. Christ was the last of his kind because he destroyed the mindset that anointed him. Now, he was about to do it again. By the end of the seventeenth century, a sort of historical time-bomb had gone off. What happened at this time is what could have happened had Jesus been truly successful in his own time. Only because all the social machinery of the church was a life boat that carried Christ’s aspirations of ascent to a greater self through the centuries of political chaos. Enough of the population had re-achieved the level of organization of the roman world but without its rooting in their ancient concepts of self. Now facing the same crises, here was the tool that Rome never got to use, because it never would have accepted the people who used it without disavowing itself. We have Christ and Christianity to thank for putting a greater self on the arti-physical map. Our conscious world acknowledges us as a greater self which allows us a richer conscious life within it. This is the last known ascension, in the case of being Christian or born again, into an identity that lives in a broad and compelling conscious world. We hang on to that conscious life by defending the only home that self ever had – Christendom, in one or another of its many forms. But the lifeboat had reached its destination, the temple doors were blown open and Christ escaped the church. The Second Coming had came and went.

Our inheritance from Christ is the conscious idea of a self that relates directly to God and as a result, His Creation. If we are directly answerable only to ourselves and God, that suggests that we can consciously speak to God directly, and that, in response, the universe can speak to our conscious minds directly. Even if it tells us something different than the church is telling us. It was hard not to notice that the universe could frame our questions and our answers all by itself without any assistance from any Holy Robe-ed One. All this made for a very different experience of eureka. But not a change in way our organic self relates to the physical (including spiritual) world. The aftermath of eureka now arrived to a new conscious world where it would get a whole new explanation. Information about reality was coming straight from the experience of reality itself. Anointing was found in results instead of ritual. The resulting conscious world you could be conscious of was called science. Science offered an alternative relationship with God that didn’t require an intermediary or even access to a holy word. Science was egalitarian in its inclusiveness. Anyone interested and capable of doing the work could hear the word of God by careful observance of their own experience of creation, followed by a careful and cautious examination of the resulting information.

Science can only treat even the Most Holy Relic as so much data, which made it the ultimate in heresy. This was an information revolt that the Church could not suppress with their traditional method of dealing with experience-based Gnostic or pagan religious practices. There were no icons to smash. They were up against a different kind of faith, and one that could be as consciously disciplined as theirs. To the church, science anywhere outside of the laboratory is secular humanism. Humanist are accused of dismissing any anointed authority and hence putting man above God. Trust in ourselves did not replace trust in God. Humanist trust that God gave us the ability to understand in order for us to seek a greater connection to His creation through understanding. Our first trust is in our confidence that God would not make two plus two equal five on alternate Friday’s. Creation tends to be deterministic and consistent and predictable through observation. Lucky for us. Imagine yourself as a chessman on a shifting chessboard of fleeting and changing shapes. You might think that about describes your life already, but just think of how much worse it would be if no yardstick could measure fluctuating distances or zigzagging straight lines, or if angles added up to 360 degrees only a few times a day. But no, F=MA is 24-7. To a humanist, those equations are fundamentals that give structure to creation. No one had to believe in Newton or grant him any supernatural status. The math spoke for itself. It sounds like God talking. Only this time, not to our conscious minds. Investigation and experimentation are an organic experience. Consciousness could only work it out afterward. Eureka had changed from religious enlightenment to scientific discovery.

 

The Church reacted immediately to what it saw as a challenge to its leadership. There were several points of concern about the world the humanist were constructing. Judging for ourselves undermines God’s authority. Accepting imperfection in our conscious world denies God His perfection. All atheist and hedonist, the secular humanist can only take us to Sodom and Gomorrah.  They would blame their undirected and un-divine humanist morality for the destruction of classical civilization. They would insist that God gave Man an absolute hard limit, in rules that must not be broken and lines that absolutely must not be crossed. Without sticking to those absolutes, our inherent human frailty will destroy our veneer of civilization and result in an “anything goes” mentality. There assumption was that “anything” would mostly include raping and pillaging. All we had to do is listen to what God told us to do. Then we would always make the right choice. The one God would have made. We don’t need to think for ourselves to be what God wants us to be. To choose to have such a self to think for is to become removed from the body of the Church.

At first, it was only a few that made that choice who met with any success, like not being set on fire. Guys like Galileo and Newton were the early architects of the modern arti-physical world. This Option B universe that speaks for itself became the egalitarian organizational link between all who chose it. Science became the new conscious system with new scientific fundamentals that held a stable conscious world together so we could be stable conscious selves within it and enjoy the experience of being a part of that world. While everyone else was waiting for some eventual messianic chosen one to have the goods drop on his/her head, these guys noticed that all anyone had to do was reach up and grab it. They were inspired to speak up and declare their contribution to the physical world’s explanation in our conscious minds. Soon, eureka was spreading everywhere and nobody was getting messianic about it, with a few exceptions. But you could still get killed. Perhaps realizing that killing people was all that was left for the old Roman Church, many of its elite sought new ways for the church to cope with the people that were living in it.

The church splintered into a multitude of faiths, each with their own attempt to build a religion that this new self could live in. Those who sought to escape the religious view altogether fled to the science and humanism. Religion was no longer a necessary or exclusive conduit of ascension. Hanging on to a conscious self doesn’t depend on the maintenance or defense of religious tenets. We have a choice. We can choose to be religious, because we have somewhere to be if we choose not to. There was now an alternative to the religious world. And not some isolated and eccentric world of your own, but a conscious world that is shared by lots and lots of those around you. Including many who chose religion and find it an increasing isolated and eccentric practice.

Science and humanism flourished anywhere the authority of the church couldn’t reach. For the curious, science was the new frontier, going where the church could not. While science was developing ways to predict the weather, the church was punishing anyone who said there was such a thing as a vacuum. Curiosity and exploration were mandates instead of crimes, and discovery was rewarded with invention instead of death. The freedom to examine anything, including the past, produced rapid advances in technology. Classical technology was quickly outgrown. Once business and industry realized how busy and industrious they could be by embracing science, religion was replaced as the primary organizer of our lives. Power shifted from Church to Corporate whose anointing was financial success. The new Apostles (economist and social scientists) declared the revealed principle of Progress and never looked back. An increasingly secular mass-mind was all for heresy if there was money to be made. The new heresy was anything that slowed the gears or hurt profits. Science entered the schools because it was good for business. The new “jobs” required a skilled work force that was drilled in working at the pace of the machines and, as much as possible, behaving like them. This raised generations who, however much religious, had to compartmentalize their spiritual life in order to function in or even keep up with the new market economy. Which was where we spent most of our time, and where we thought we were living. This began an assault on religion’s more vulnerable fundamental principles, like the earth being the center of a universe that was 6000 years old. Evolution threatened church notions by suggesting that imperfection was part of God’s design and undermining the creation story that our sinful nature and their jobs depended on. The church would eventually have to concede much of the new scientific descriptions of the world in a desperate attempt to remain a part of the world the new science-fed generations thought they were living in.

 

Our conscious relationship with the spiritual world is shaped by the same conceptual building blocks that build the world we are conscious of. If we think the world is run by competing deities who express themselves through the forces of nature, that will be the world that we can be conscious of spiritual experience in. The scientific view presents a challenging world to have a conscious recreation of a spiritual experience in. The more detail we become conscious of about the physical world the more challenging it becomes to find a place within it to put it. Knowledge chased man out of the Garden of Eden and into his conscious mind. Copernicus and Newton chased God out of the universe and into the alternate dimension of heaven. Or so it seemed at first. God didn’t go anywhere, we did. It’s the same story. This time, Newton chased man further out of the Garden than ever before. His science showed a world of self-contained momentum that only requires an initial act of creation to set off a chain of events that occur in measurable ways. As far as the scientific community is concerned, this act of creation was committed by person or persons unknown who promptly left the scene.

 

Everything was up and up as science enjoyed its Golden Age. Thinking it was limitless and unstoppable, the Age of Enlightenment was not prepared to discover that it too had borders and had only built a better funhouse of dogma. Useful as Newton was, the clockwork universe he conjured up in his mind was a close but incorrect model of the real one. Still, that conjuring alone got us to the moon and, with Maxwell, made us able to talk to distant relatives for free after 5pm. Like conscious systems before it, the Newtonian view of the world faced an impending crisis as more disturbing discoveries with inconvenient facts came along. This crises was culminated in Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. There was no Grand Universal Clock that controlled all time everywhere. Reality is unique to all points of perspective. Even worse, exploration of creation by our physical senses runs into a hard limit beyond which they have no perception. Our senses use reality to observe it and can become part of the event being observed. Those committed to a scientific view had to concede that while we were having fun with what we called electrons, what we can know about them has its limits. Even though these guys were talking about atomic particles, they did expose a prideful presumptiveness in our view of nature. We don’t have a God’s eye view, so we must always remember that we might be missing something. Because we might be missing something. No longer could we reveal the Grand Scientific Truth. Even with repeated evidence, only the humble, most probable explanation could be drawn. Nothing could be known for certain. We could make a guess and gamble on the benefits.

Science was better equipped than religion to handle this revelation due to its inherent flexibility, and could accept this blunt reality that we can never truly know reality without threatening its own existence. For the church, and for the state, there was no easy way to incorporate this idea. Either would have to admit that it had been gambling all along and had been so sure of itself that those Great and Eternal Truths could be used to measure the value of this or that person’s life. The people they ruled had to accept those value judgments and trust those that made them. That kind of power might be hard to hold on to without the presumption of a Grand and Final Truth. The uncertainty principle inspired a few projects in egalitarian politics like democracy or socialism, but certainty was still the cheapest fuel of political power… and difficult to resist when it is all that stands between Great Leader’s comfy chair and the Abyss.

Once applied to politics, the relativistic view of science might become too attractive a notion for the many who might be tired of being controlled by the few. Any society requires a moral center, but in a pluralistic society, it has to be agreed upon. This raises generations with an individuality that will not make this choice based on fear or intimidation. Science as a discipline means having faith only in observations and repeatable experiments of the physical world. Only mutually experience-able scientific data is used to construct the arti-physical world that its participants think is there, and every part is open to scrutiny and debate. Science requires having faith in each other, and trust that everyone’s input is faithful to its discipline. And having faith in ourselves to step forward and participate in the architecture of the arti-physical world. The result is a world built from many perspectives instead of one unquestionable view. That was Newton’s universe. Now we are living in Einstein’s, where relativity forces a further mental concession. 

 

We must concede that no one can never be conscious of an arti-physical world in their head that perfectly replicates the physical world, and even if we could, there’s no way to know that we were. We are adrift in an ocean of uncertainty and there is no one at the rudder but us. There may be a truth out there, but no one has a broad enough perspective to know it for certain. These days, even the conservatives might acknowledge this point, even accommodate it by connecting it to man’s fallibility. There is a further step, one that is a lot tougher, is to put this notion together with an acceptance that this affects our ability to receive messages from God, and share them. Which makes all examples of such equally valid but only as arti-physical paradigms. Philosophies, ideological camps and religious movements become contestants in a broader geo-political arena where no one’s anointing guarantees their long term survival.

I guess in order to play, I’ll have to put a paradigm on the table. I shall confiscate the word relativism from the clutches of the far-right republicans and everyone else. I shall become the word’s sole proprietor and personally responsible for its meaning as a socio/political philosophy. The right has been defining it for decades and successfully making it sound utterly silly. Here’s the new poop. We can never be sure of how well our understandings reflect reality. Even when we seem to have it right, they may still be just off the mark enough to distort the conceptual building blocks that become the conscious arti-physical world. Which is where and with what we get to put our ideas and explanations together. This would include ideas about a consciously guided spirituality and explanations of why millions of people should do what some Great Leader says. However, acknowledging this flaw in its usefulness as an instrument of certainty does not mean we shouldn’t use it. It suggests that we’re using it the wrong way. It’s still the same mental processing tool that our distant ancestors developed to struggle for survival. Relativism as a philosophy recognizes the limits of our conscious recreations and our sole authorship of them. Our incessant, self-acknowledged experience of consciousness can give the illusion that the ego-self is actually you and not simply your experience. Here is where our own sense of reality can get us in trouble. Since we’re all pretty sure we’re real, that could, by implication, mean our conscious minds are real, which would imply that the conscious world it thinks it lives in is equally real. It’s a very easy mistake to make, and one that it appears we’ve been making since civilization began, but it makes us artificial people in an artificial world whose physical existence is harvested for sensual input.

 

What makes this idea difficult to accept and an easy target for the conservatives is what it may seem to be saying at first; that there is no basis for faith and there is nothing we can trust. A second look might reveal that line is never crossed. The restriction only applies to our third stage mentalities and our creation of consciousness and civilization. When science tells us we can never know anything for certain, it’s talking about itself. We can’t consciously know enough about the world to explain it completely. We can only build an organization in our minds that represents the world as best as we can. Science is an ongoing draft of reality that is always open for debate and refinement. That draft is created in our conscious minds and treated as a proving ground for any understanding of the outside world that may develop. This creates a flexible arti-physical world with the added bonus of creative freedom. By keeping this world that we think is there separate from the world that actually is out there, we have much less at stake. If we screw up, or God forbid, discover that we missed something, it’s only the arti-physical world that went astray and not reality that went wrong. The only pieces we have to pick up are in our minds. This is where science could teach politics a lesson. In politics, the price inherent in the uncertainty principle is quite high. That kind of flexibility comes at the cost of anything being the truth because The Giant Space Elvis Said So.

However useful it might be for politics, this blunt wording that we can never know anything develops two problems when applied outside the discipline of science. Everyone knows it’s flat wrong, and most are uncomfortable with the requirement that their chosen faith must surrender its anointed authority, which for some, might as well be its very existence. You might be thinking now, “Screw this guy and his brain activity! There is no explanation his or anyone else’s mind can come up with that can touch what I know in my heart and soul to be true!” Point taken. Even those who were dedicated to the scientific discipline could have a difficult time reconciling their own gut feeling with the yawning chasm of uncertainty they saw before them. How come, after an experience that was like touching the mind of God, once they got to the paper work, the connection was lost? Those who presumed that connection was still there could lead themselves and others to destructive delusions and deceptions. Even if the truth was unmistakable when experienced, all anyone could ever hope to inflict on anyone else later is the resulting narration they made in their minds of the experience, not the experience itself. As if one could touch God, but never make anything of it that bears His touch. 

If there are truths in creation, we cannot be conscious of them. That doesn’t mean we can’t know them. The original organization of our minds isn’t constrained by the uncertainty principle. That’s because it doesn’t bother with the sense of continuity that our conscious mind depends on. For our first and second stage organizations, something is true the moment that it’s true. The previous moment and the next are irrelevant. The experience of intuition is expansive if not ascentual because it is a connecting to creation around you. The self other border expands to enclose more than the boundary of its physical form. This happens because you had an idea in your mind that matched one of the ideas God or whatever had used to create creation. It can be an idea that you may come up with yourself, or one that seems as if it was delivered from outside. The identity wall which separates you from the outside world can be pushed outward by self or pulled outward by other. Sort of like a balloon that expands and contracts with changes in relative air pressure between inside and out. Either way, it becomes experience of a greater part of creation than our self-contained organic body and mind. Nothing was communicated, no messages were sent, this was a moment of becoming a more inclusive creation. Yes, I’m still talking about identity rising to its highest level of organization. There is an even simpler explanation. You just feel it in your gut. Trouble is, when you become conscious of your gut feeling, the uncertainty principle applies again. Like the outside world, you can never be certain of your conscious recreation of your own intuition. We can know it’s true, but we can never consciously know for certain what is true. We are conscious of relative truth. Just as relativity effects any observation of a space-time event, consciousness observes truth as something that already happened to our organic selves as parts of the greater whole of creation.

Our one constant companion in life is our experience of creation. Relativism says never trust the information as the experience itself. Information + Certainty = Whack. We’ve seen enough of cultures and religions trying to convince each other of their absolute certainty. The only absolute to a relativist is that absolutely everything is up for debate. Save your faith for reality. 

on to Chapter XIII