Information and Spirit

The Spiritual and the Abstract

The spiritual domain heavily overlaps the informational domain—the world of patterns. I don’t think there’s a complete reduction of one domain to the other, but there is considerable overlap.

Consider a few spiritual ideas:

“Telling the truth is of spiritual importance. Lies destroy, while the truth heals.”

This is not a claim about atoms or specific biological entities. This is a claim about general patterns. Humans act based on their ideas about the world. Lies create intrinsically disharmonious patterns, while the truth creates harmonious patterns—at least in the long run. Relationships based on deception are intrinsically unstable and dangerous to humans, while relationships based on the truth are solid and stable.

This principle is both abstract and true—the truth is a pattern in the abstract domain which lies above the material.

“You cannot overcome evil with evil, but you overcome evil with good.”

This is also a claim about patterns—how some patterns relate to others. Revenge begets revenge; this is true both empirically and theoretically. I often think back to a conversation I had with Dr Hirini Kaa from New Zealand who told me about the never-ending cycles of revenge within indigenous Maori groups. These cycles were only stopped once Christian settlers introduced the concept of forgiveness to them, which was revolutionary. The pattern of forgiveness is logically incompatible with the pattern of revenge; the two cannot exist together. Therefore forgiveness, when manifested in the world, is a kind of destruction of revenge.

“Spiritual warfare is real.”

How humans relate to other humans is an objective pattern in the world. Some relationships are objectively harmonious (a loving marriage; a safe and healthy community) and other relationships are discordant (a spiteful marriage; a toxic and dangerous community). The reality of social harmony is dependent on an astronomical number of variables, including physical, economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors. All of these variables intersect with the spiritual.

The health of your body is connected to your nutrition; your nutrition is connected to your ideas; your ideas are connected to a million other information structures. Controversial cultural subjects like pornography and drug use are fundamentally spiritual subjects—their effects are objective and real in the domain of patterns. Spiritual degradation will eventually manifest in the world as physical degradation.

“The spiritual world is invisible.”

We “see” patterns differently than we see material objects. A toxic marriage doesn’t have color, a smell, or a surface area. It’s a pattern which is grasped intellectually and felt intuitively—we “see” it in terms of understanding abstract relations and we can “feel” it in our guts.

For example, the danger and chaos of physical warfare is easy to observe with your senses. The danger and chaos of spiritual warfare has to be grasped with the intellect or felt by the intuition.

“The spiritual world is timeless and eternal.”

Political leaders can be assassinated. Assassination itself, as a pattern, cannot be destroyed. Individuals can stop lying. Lying itself is not going anywhere. You can individually run away from love, but you can’t kill the pattern of love.

Humans are creatures whose heads and hearts seem to intersect the spiritual world. We have the ability to instantiate or not instantiate patterns. There is no murder in my neighborhood, but at any point, that pattern can be instantiated. The spirit of hatred is always there; the question is whether that spirit will find a host.

There’s a never-ending battle going on—whether or not specific patterns will be instantiated. It takes spiritual strength and discipline to fight it.

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It is important to re-iterate that the spiritual world does not entirely reduce to the informational world. The metaphysics are complex and confusing. The next article will be on Matter and Spirit.