Zoom Out
And you’ll know
the insignificance
Of your life.
And the relief of
your problems’
Lost smallness.
But what happens in
this macroscopic dilation?
From a wide enough
viewpoint everything is right.
Or is everything
wrong?
No, everything is
neither.
The allotment of
praise here and blame there
disappears.
Complexity obliterates the thinking agent.
Leaving only
fortunate and unfortunate parts of the world.
This is how an
omniscient god would have to see things
To forgive all.
Let's say there is a murder:
The evil does not
squirm in a single location. There is none
in the data. The
deity sees all influences: nothing short of everything
That occurred
beforehand ever everywhere. There is no choice,
Only an illusion of
choice in the murderer, the jury, the deceased,
And in such fellows
as I, crawling between ideas.
The entire
universe
Committed the act,
and every other act too – Every flinch or blip
Of motion is a
conspiracy of all particles to effect all particles.
This is how an
omniscient god would have to see things
To forgive all.
But we can’t
see things that way. Or we wipe away
The whole edifice of
agency; of self itself.
Yes, the pang of
guilt is gone, but with it goes you.
The bathwater, the
baby and the bathroom too.
Our Virtue and Vice
is but splitting hairs to the Gods
But we must keep to
our solid illusions, choosing this
Over that, sometimes
that over this. Or believe we’ve chosen
At least.
If life is a technique, it needs a dream of self to drive it.
Zoom back in.
