“Terry”: “Each person looks as normal as normal can be. . . . Since there is nothing remarkable about appearances, how would YOU know which was which if you casually passed by?”
That brings to mind a saying which my mother once told me regarding perceptions of what is truth: There is (1) what a person thinks is true in his or her own mind, there is (2) what another person thinks is true in his or her own mind, and then there is (3) the actual truth, whatever that may be.
Truth is truth. It’s just a matter of how close anyone can get to perceiving it.
I think that whatever the ultimate truth is – you know, what caused the big bang and what mathematical phenomena ended up being put in place to evolve the results of that big bang, and how it all works – spacetime creation (initial instant hyperinflation stage and current continual spacetime expansion, as per “Hubble’s constant”), dark matter/energy, logic of chaos theory, limits of the “infinite” (in time and space) – the cosmic and quantum physics stuff that is in the realm of folks like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, which often tends to somewhat straddle both the purely empirical and the scientifically philosophical camps . . . . . . . . Sorry if I may have become somewhat sidetracked (just had a large black coffee and doughnut), but, anyway . . . . as I was saying: I think that whatever the ultimate truth is, it’s kind of like the classic illustration of the six blind men and the elephant. (Possibly some versions may differ in the number of blind men being six, but the standard version involves six blind men – that’s not important!) Anyway, the illustration goes like this: the little group of six men, each being blind, are feeling all around this elephant (not naughtily – get your mind out of the gutter!) . . . . okay, these blind men are feeling the elephant to attempt to deduce exactly what it is. Each one feels just one part of it but all feel a different part. Now, one of them says it’s one thing, another says it’s something else, and so on – they each think it’s something different. As stated at “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant” (under the subheading “The story”): “In some versions, they stop talking, start listening and collaborate to ‘see’ the full elephant. When a sighted man walks by and sees the entire elephant all at once, they also learn they are blind. While one’s subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of truth. If the sighted man was deaf, he would not hear the elephant bellow.”
My point in this is that everyone is “feeling around” for some kind of “God” as a form of some cosmic superbeing, and everyone has their own little take on it, but I think, going back to the above illustration, that in reality what is there is actually NOT an elephant! And, in fact, I think that the profound twist of it all is that in reality there is actually NOTHING there at all! I believe that all those blind men are delusional and that the “elephant” is actually a collective fabrication!
Indeed, I think that we are all in a kind of super psychological thriller – you know, the kind with a shocking twist at the end. (Like in the classic thriller movie Psycho, where the main character actually hasn’t been talking to his mother but conversing with himself in two different voices, and his mother had already been dead and pickled in her room.) And the big twist as far as the “God” thing goes is that there is actually nothing there at all. “God” is simply a collective delusional fabrication, and the real “God” is simply that which has ended up being put in place through the evolving mathematical chaos manifest by the processes and functioning of the universe and spacetime quantum energies as a whole. Well, that’s what I think, anyway.