Process and Me

By Romana Annette 03/26/2009

“You had better change your ways and believe in God and in Jesus Christ,” was an oft spoken admonition from my contemporaries when I was young.  It did not come from my parents, who never went to church.  I was never convinced.  Even though I had not yet heard of Asperger’s Syndrome at that time, I was exhibiting many symptoms, such as being ultra-conservative and not easily swayed by authoritarian religious arguments.  I did not reflect on any philosophical concepts, and I always expected to live in a factual world.  Since I was autistic, I really did not know how to socialize, so I relied on conforming to cultural myths to fit in.  The black and white, binary world of my youth no longer exists; I am now suspicious any and all so-called truths about sexuality, gender, race, and diversity in general.

I need to state my view of what is objective and what is subjective.  Objectivity is all about physical measurements and facts.  Subjectivity is all about philosophy, opinions, and emotions.  When I was young, I thought objectivity was indisputable, but now I realize that no living things can be objective, since all life forms are made up of energetic harmonics applied on top of objective reality.  In other words, the qualifiers living and subjective go together.

In my youth, I only read science fiction and books on scientific subjects such as astronomy, paleontology, herpetology (reptiles and amphibians,) and so forth.  I was exceedingly bland throughout high school, and I did not even go on my first date until after graduation, when I was 21.  It would take years for me to become emotionally acclimated.
Science fiction offered sensible realities not clouded by illogic and irrationality.  Science fiction stories--from the 1950’s and before—did not tend to have a lot of complicated relationships or highly subjective plots.  I could not deal with current reality, so the future still seems a whole lot better, even though it did not necessarily get simpler.  The present always seemed closed, while the future always seemed open-ended.

It amazes me how I could have been so factually disposed for so long, as if I had been walking around in my own little intellectual fog.  I became interested in Zen Buddhism in the 1970’s, probably because of its heavy objective overtones.  After I got married in 1980, I became seriously interested in Tibetan Buddhism and even attended a mediation center for a time.   Tibetan Buddhism can be spiritually heavy and even theistic, which made it a good introduction to subjective concepts for me.  Buddhism has given me many useful tools.
For instance, Buddhism teaches important concepts about ownership.  No one can own reality, or even themselves.  Since no one can really own anything, there can be no soul that so many are said to be fighting over.  There can be life before death and life after death, but no continuation of self.  Buddhist teachings set the stage for my eventually acceptance for Process Theology, which has many historical ties to Buddhism.
I always remind myself about the famous question posed to the Buddha: Is there or is there not a God?  It is said that the Buddha refused to answer the question.  While no ultimate answer was given, he did say that the purpose of religion was to help people and nothing more.  The existence or non-existence of God was philosophy, and philosophical answers were never provable.
Buddhism is not a religion that has ever cared about facts.  The four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism do not even have the same recorded historical timelines.  Yet, there has been an ongoing debate for centuries over the number of absolute states.  Many Christians perceived God as an absolute state, but Buddhism has never promoted any deities as being absolute.  Buddhist evaluations have ranged from zero to three absolute states.  I will discuss later how troublesome it is for any subjective observers to pin down any absolute measures.

I have gone through many emotional changes lately.  I started attending a Unity church in 2002, and I stayed with that church until 2007.  During this time, I was exposed to a very skeptical form of theism, and the difference between believing in something and just believing something.  I also got my first introduction to Process Theology, which did not seem that meaningful at the time.  I did begin to see that a totally rational approach might not come up with all the answers.  I had to start letting go of my tight hold on rationality; I even started living full-time as a transwoman in 2005.  Some say that this act damaged my rationalist image forever.

While I initially learned from others, lately I have begun to formulate philosophical concepts on my own.  I cannot say that they are original, because I have come to suspect that we all have access to several forms of past experiences.  Knowledge is just a collection of experiences.  Unlike closed computer programs that just produce canned results, reality is an open-ended program in which experiences can lead to unexpected results.  These experiences can flow to create stories.  While I have to be careful about generalizing the beliefs of other Process Theologians, Process Theology describes all of reality as a set of stories.  It is interesting that we, as an intelligent species, are so reflexively creative, that we like to devise fictional stories.  Since there are only so many original plots, we cannot know if there was a time or a place where the most far-fetched stories actually happened.

My story is still developing.  While I might think my plot is clever and interesting, others think it is strange.  I have to be careful with the many quirks of my personality.  I want to fix things, which I why I was a maintenance programmer, who fixed other people’s code.  I am a lot like the character Adrian Veidt, Ozymandias, in the Watchmen.  He wanted to fix the world, which was falling apart.  I am also like the character Dr. Rodney McKay on Stargate, who figures out alien technology.  So far, I have not had any alien technology to work on.

I now realize that our problems are way too complex for simple objective fixes, and subjective problems are compounded by people who are also subjective.  During my years at Boeing, I was amazed how my courses I took on the next objective fix for company problems, but it was always business as usual after these classes.  I did learn, in a study on Polarity, however, that reality is filled with tensions that are interdependent opposites and cannot be objectively solved.  This was a blow to my analytic personality and to the myth that a really knowledgeable person can just step in and fix problems that involve any number of people.

With both business and government caught in the grip of a lot of subjective nonsense, many are surprised that I turn to churches for relief.  While every church has its faults and limitations, most have some degree of sanity.  Personally, I have no use for stories such as the Bible.  I want to be my own prophet.  I want to be a prophet in the sense of my Ojibwa heritage: an Agokwa, a transgendered shaman.  Still, I am far more of a skeptic than a non-believer.  Everyone believes something.
There was an ancient warning that one cannot be both a king and a prophet.  This admonition still holds in modern times, and so many suffer when they ignore the warning.  As an autistic transwoman, there is no way I could ever be a king, so I will settle for being a prophet.

I take the Unity tact; so I do not believe in God or believe in Jesus Christ.  This is not the same as having no relationship to God or to Jesus.  As an analyst, I have noticed that there is always more going that that which we acknowledge, as if we are only subconsciously aware of most of our relationships.  While I see no reason to have God or anyone else in charge of reality, I do see a place for God as a provider of continuity and advice.  Jesus gave us many relevant commandments that almost no one on our planet seems to practice.

If there is anything I believe in, it is natural processes.  The processes that make up reality have been functioning for billions and billions of years.  Even though processes might change over time, they are the closest thing to perfection we will ever know.  However, the products of processes, such as people, planets, stars, galaxies, and universes are imperfect by nature, since they will all suffer some kind of death or cataclysmic transformation.
Processes establish relationships.  Relationships follow from the exchange of information in the form of cause and effect.  I often see relationships between all sorts of apparently separate phenomena.  My readers know that I often throw everything together in the same essay.

I like Process Theology because it supplies an objective basis to study subjectivity.  While Process Theologians are as diverse as any other group, there tends to be a dislike for any theories that disagree with observed realty.  Events such as the Holocaust brought a direct test for the power of God.  God did not directly intervene to save the Jews; the allies did.  I have observed that prayers tend to be actively answered by people, though there is still room for God passively to give advice.

Process Theology is not a religion.  It cannot supply any faith or hope, nor does it establish any sacrament or eschatology.  Process Theology devotes a lot of study to the nature, the existence, and the non-existence of God.  By so doing, Process Theology has offended nearly everyone: theists, atheists, skeptics, and believers, alike.  Still, Process Theologians tend to focus on what God is not, rather than invent shaky models that actually define God.
Process Theologians do not like authoritarian models for God, especially models that risk God being blamed when things go wrong.  God as a cosmic moralist has been referred to as the Santa Claus God.  This God keeps lists to determine who is naughty and who is nice.  This God is like a cosmic country, since he wants everyone’s verbal allegiance.   If one prays correctly, one can get special favors.  Jews even sometimes carry this farther, by arguing with God.  In a reality that is so highly-tuned by physical laws, even one favor that contradicts these laws could have terrible consequences, especially for the expectations of intelligent beings to run their own lives.

I hate paradoxes.  The theistic notion of God can abound with paradoxes.  He is often said to preside over a place that never changes, but change is the nature of reality.  Experience implies change, and without a variety of experiences, there can be no knowledge.  Reality is filled with endless variety and diversity, yet theists often claim that God hates it all.  This idea just evokes suffocating feelings for me, just like uncomfortable men’s dress clothing with its choking ties.
I always have a bad reaction whenever I hear someone mention God’s Plan.  Okay, so my plan was to be both autistic and have gender identity disorder, but it was all for my own good, for personal growth in preparation for a corrected life in the hereafter.  To make matters worse, I am supposed to ignore acting upon any inclinations that might be deemed abnormal.  Along the way, some remind me that God has a different life for me already worked out.
Process Theology says that all these concepts are philosophically unsound.  Reality is not a test; it is unfolding possibility and promise.  It is a journey without a goal.  One can speculate about what might happen, but reality is sure to deliver endless unanticipated surprises.

I have come to question many conclusions in the scientific community.  I realize that many think we are near the big breakthrough, but it is a false now moment that has likely driven intelligent beings for billions of years.  It will never happen, just as the Tibetans argue that no one can ever become fully-enlightened.
Modern physics has become more philosophical than scientific; though there is still good science behind all the conclusions.  Now we have to consider that there may be higher dimensionality and other universes.  It is all evolving, so what has happened in the past can help shape the future.  I consider it to be the duh factor, when I see reality as an intricately-threaded evolving whole, while others look for reasons outside, such as God.  Of course it is fine-tuned; how else would all the ongoing processes function?  Still, while the processes all work together fabulously, the underlying design looks like a Rube Goldberg device, not the work of a single craftsman.

Western religions often refer to life forms as convenient accidents, whose presence can only be a form of special creation.  Intelligence seems to make us even more special.  Buddhism has always denied this, saying that mind and matter go together.  The question is: what is the lure that keeps us going, since our lives are so short compared to cosmic timetables?  I had another duh moment about this: the presence of living things is essential for realty to function, because living things, as observers, supply feedback information that is critical for reality to evolve.  Our individual lives always revolve around an unacknowledged purpose of processing as much current and new information as possible.  The history of Western civilization for the last five centuries is filled with endless attempts by authorities to restrict the gathering of unauthorized information; however, neither the threat of punishment, nor even the pain of death, has ever thwarted the human mandate for all forms of exploration.
One can ask exactly how observers affect reality.  In modern physics, the uncertainty principle is an actual measure of our effect.  As observers, we cannot analyze any physical process without affecting the outcome.
What we observe is more fantastic than any science fiction or disaster movie.  There are endless explosions and special effects, as stars are born and then die, creating cosmic debris that litters stellar lanes.  Galaxies collide and eat each other, churning up all the debris.  Stars are born with planets circling them, and some of the planets even support life.  Life evolves in niches, while continents careen around like bumper cars, and rogue space debris crashes down.  Civilizations arise and crumble, but some beings escape the prisons of their home worlds before those once great abodes are consumed by their dying stars.
It is a great plot.  I wonder if I can have it copyrighted.