Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Giving Good Dominion Over Evil

We’re aware that we’re alive. There’s no disputing that. We’re aware of what’s going on inside us because we can sense and feel it. Being aware is one thing, sensing is another. Senses give us an indirect sort of awareness, but the inputs can be misleading. For example we might smell something that has the scent of a dog, however, when checking further, discover it’s a goat.

In our awareness are two mechanisms. One is a rational system that processes information provided by the senses and the other is a system that processes information taken from data stored deep in the brain or perhaps… PERHAPS! Are you listening? Or perhaps from a conduit into a world we can only speculate about. This is the world of the spirit.

When a child hears a story their eyes glow as the words, gestures, and setting takes on a reality and springs to life in their imagination. Imagination is not just an entertainment device that provides a dreamer with something akin to virtual reality. Yes, it does that, but it also provides humans with a capability that sets us apart from every other life form on the planet. It enables men and women to gameplay future scenarios and like a simulator to face tomorrow in a benign setting before living events on the stage of life.

So in our awareness are these two processes operating independent of one another. Our bio processor can’t always tell the difference between the two because they use the same programming language. When we sit in a movie theater our body responds physiologically in much the same way as it would if the events on the screen were happening in real life.

Thus in our minds we have a capacity to grasp real truth, from our senses and imaginary truth from our imagination. The question becomes, where do the inputs from our imaginations derive? Are they from the experiences of a lifetime stored in a forgotten computer file in some dusty corner of the brain or are they flooding into our awareness from somewhere else. As writers we often refer to a “Muse” and if we feel a genuine awareness of such a presence we are acknowledging something that our ancestors took for granted. God is a spiritual force who is indirectly guiding our lives.

Regardless of how you feel about traditional religious dogma, and how it goes about explaining this spiritual presence, most everyone knows there is something awesome out there when we take the time to reflect. Think about the wonder you feel on a starry night looking out at the universe. There is a connection between humans and a greater spiritual presence, and while we feel it at a visceral level we can’t acquire it with our sensors and process the data into our minds. Regardless of how sophisticated we might consider ourselves, there are incomprehensible forces at work around us. They maintain the harmony of the natural world and the equilibrium in our lives.

As they act upon us we feel the struggle in our awareness. For example we might note it as a conflict between Righteousness” and “Evil.” These forces are real and exist because we are aware of their presence. Just as we have an awareness of our lives we have an awareness of this struggle. Inside the husk of our lives we are buffeted by the conflicts and forced to make choices regarding how we are going to respond. We might be inclined towards righteousness but whispers of evil have a compelling and seductive voice. Sometimes we act showing a fundamental decency and sometimes our actions are wicked, hateful and filled with spite. We can’t pretend we don’t know what our awareness tells us and must constantly gird for the struggle to give the good in our hearts dominion over evil.