Soul Searching

Understanding how to chart a course in uncertain and dangerous times is more dangerous - and more important - than ever.

A friend asked me several brilliant questions (I am blessed and challenged by many smart friends), and the answers are something I have considered mightily for the past several days. Once I read them, they were so basic to the challenges before us, they have been constantly marinating in my mind, turning, and rotating over and over like a mental version of a Rubik’s Cube.

It finally dawned on me that I have been reflecting on those questions for many years without really crystallizing them in any formal or organized way.

He asked me these questions (excerpted and paraphrased):

How do you address the relationship between mainstream and global messaging and its often seemingly purposeful ambiguity? How do you manage the inevitable interpretations and their relationships to the very real cottage industry that feeds conspiratorial theories?

Are the globalists like the WEF’s Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari just cartoon Bond villains, playing a game of cat and mouse to incite, or are they serious people who feel they are unbound from any consequences of their words and actions?

Regardless, there is more and more increasingly being written on the wall that we cannot ignore and have a duty to at least attempt to interpret. Given the chaos and tumult of our times, should we interpret the landscape through corporeal filters ore are we witnessing the fulfillment of the end times as referenced in our religious texts? Will there be an anti-Christ and end time biblical fulfillment? Or simply an inevitable end-time self-destruction because of a never seen before "within reach" ability of global interconnectivity (financial and informational control) that is creating and leading to the proverbial brass ring for a true global power grab consisting of total financial and political control by a self-appointed elite, technocratic class of people?  

Is there a way to balance the supernatural (the spiritual) and the natural (the ways of men)? How do you absorb the secular and the spiritual in your mind and your spirit? How do you balance? How do you navigate going down the rabbit holes and coming back out whole and sane?

Those were some questions we all should consider because they cut to the deepest recesses of our humanity – and even our existence as sentient beings.

For me, the answer is simple, albeit with a very complex justification. When I began considering those questions in some degree of depth, before I knew it, I had written about five pages of notes.

It seems to me absorbing all the information, events, truths and lies is a functional impossibility. Without some sort of a filter, it is quite possible we all would run the risk of just going insane. The real question is this: what is the filter?

I can only answer for myself, of course, but my filter is my faith.

It’s not just faith in God (even though that is a huge part of it), it is also faith in my family, faith in myself and my own intellect, faith in logic and reason, and as hard as it is to believe these days, faith in people.

The function of any filter is to reject some things and let the rest through. What determines what stays and what goes are the sizes of the orifices, the pores, in the filter. The size and quantity of them are what keeps the grounds out of the majestic cup of coffee in front of me right now but lets the magic elixir flow through so that I may consume it as it makes me happy.

While faith makes up the filter, the orifice sizes are determined by a healthy dose of skepticism and an understanding of risk identification and management.

Take good old Klaus and Yuval, for example. I believe that they believe what they say, but my skepticism and my understanding of risk informs me that while there is a chance their grand Dr. Evil plans might come to be, the smart money is on the side of people who will never allow these agents of evil to succeed (and I understand we may disagree on the level of risk, but each of us has to choose our own filter).

That’s my faith in people at work. That filter allows me to keep Klaus and Yuval on the sidelines (but not out of sight) with all the other low-risk absurdities of our contemporary times.

My faith in God, His Word and His Promises form the filter that shields the core of my being, my soul, from the slings, arrows, and assault weapons of outrageous fortune. The filter around my soul has pores so small that almost nothing gets through. The only hurt that penetrates is when I fail my family or my friends in some way – but that is on me.

God is the root of my intellect and my morality. He is my sword and my shield for without that basis of safety, that island of constancy, we get caught in the maelstrom of chaos and open ourselves to all sorts of danger. Having a solid base from which to operate gives the both the confidence in my own morality and intellect, but it also gives me the mental flexibility to consider things outside my sandbox, but always filtered through a screen of rationality.

Because I know my soul is protected, I can take on the infinite flows of information from all sources and withstand the chaos that rages in the input side of my filter. It is also what allows me to continually reprocess information as I make rational, risk-based decisions what to allow through.

Those are the things that allow me to head all the way to the bottom of the rabbit hole and emerge scraped and dirty but generally unscathed.

Obviously, faith is defined as believing in something one cannot prove through empirical means – and basing a worldview on something that cannot be defined would seem to be the opposite of logic and reason, but even Immanuel Kant, an empiricist of the highest order, noted that for the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God’s presence empirically.

This is certainly not to claim perfection as a human, that is an impossibility because we have been, are now, and always will be a balance of rationality and irrationality. I also can’t claim an exclusive purchase on the truth, about all to which I aspire is to be at least directionally correct, to chart a crooked course toward the right and true.

I don’t know how others are able to be steadfast and optimistic in the midst of today’s Category 5 crap storm, but this is what works for me.