may 13 - response: luck or prayer?

Thank you, Rooson, for the input on Rainbow River.  This is an essay filled with ambiguities, confounding me, the author, as well (as everyone who writes knows, what we call "ourselves" is often superseded by another source).  The  title: "rainbow" sounds beautiful, and you are right - in this instance it is an irony something like the "primrose path of life," but it also refers to the rainbow of colors from the industrial waste.  Both, however, get back to the idea of promise (the promise of technology and an easy day on the river) and end with a reality that was not foreseen.  Again, we have the great trees that have survived past floods, but we can also realize that their seeds were dumbly planted by chance, and that their future existence is always in doubt - just as the developers dumbly put down some houses on land that looked great, but was sooner or later to be destroyed by the river.  In other words, people and plants do as they must and are equally ignorant, or beyond control, of the results; plants make seeds that drift in the wind, humans make houses and other artifacts (like chemicals), without understanding the consequences.  How much more thought, or knowledge, do we have really have than the seeds and the river - that is, the manifestations of pure nature?  And how separate really are we form  these pure manifestations?  How much are we as much mice as men?

Finally, we come to "luck;" how much does chance have to do with our lives?  How much, again, are we like the seeds in the winds, some of which land in secure places while others don't, apparently by random natural forces?   Or, are they really random?  Are we guided by God, or are we left to the laws of nature?  Would prayer affect these laws, or is this just playing with "luck" like a gambler in Vegas?   The answers to these are varied and sometimes complex; theologians say that our prayers are often not answered because our wishes do not fit into God's plan - but could this only be an excuse for an absentee god who has made his universe and now sits back, letting the wheels spin?  On the other hand, strong evidence from both Psi investigators and studies on prayer show that thinking in certain ways does (sometimes) change outcomes. Again, though, is this evidence of God, or a reflection of the actions of thought energy on natural systems?  

I hope to have another essay to bring some of these ambiguities closer to understanding, and of course I will continue to work on them through these pages.  However, something struck me yesterday as I was walking out in the field by our house.  It was a cool and windy day, with puffy clouds in a bright blue sky, and the mid-spring growth of trees and flowers added to make the scene absolutely beautiful, so beautiful that I had to give thanks to the forces that made them and made me able to appreciate them.  Then it suddenly occurred to me: the beauty of nature - and its endless ability to fascinate - is exactly its unpredictability.  It would be little more than a pretty picture without its unknowable complexity.  So this is where we are: our limited field of thought in this dimension of being is compensated by the knowledge that this which is around us is much greater than our humdrum selves; in fact, this nature intimates that our humdrum selves are not our real selves - that we are as complex and mysterious and marvelous as nature.  From our limited view, this incomprehensibly gives us freedom of choice, for if we knew everything, only the insane would make the wrong choices.  Freedom, too, gives us wonder.  On the other hand, to know everything would be to be in the Absolute, with its unspeakable ecstasy of being.  Excluding that finality, then, the "blindness" of nature indicated in the essay is, in many ways, a good thing.  It keeps us humble and striving for a truth many feel must exist - a truth so vast that to grasp it is to lose all, or nearly all, humanness.  You get one or the other, then, both of them states of wonder.  Ours is a world of wrong turns and pain and death, but it is because of this that it fascinates - and it is because of these unfathomables that we wonder and are open to beauty.  To quote the Greeks, "truth is beauty and beauty is truth" ; for me, that means that to realize beauty is to realize there is a truth - and this truth must be so encompassing that it is beyond anything this self can conceive.  That is, our ambiguity is the portal to truth and beauty.  

Finally, the essay ends with the question: will it all, like the houses and the trees, will it - all the works of man - be swept aside by the merciless forces of nature?  Or are we led by a compassionate God that will keep us from this (that is, do we live by luck or divine guidance)?  On this we need to expand, but I will start by saying - we usually don't really know.  We can't - again, the cosmos, Truth, is too big for us.  But there are examples - there does seem to be an intelligence behind our fate.  And if so, there must be an active intelligence behind nature, since one affects the other.  But here we get caught up again with free will and natural law and our limited ability to understanding.  Still, in the future I will look for examples of intervention  - of an intelligence in nature and our lives.  Any contributions to this would also be welcome in reader's response.  FK