Sunday, February 13, 2011

The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 14: Paradise Lost

I discovered the “Stats” menu on my blog site the other day and was surprised to find that I have quite a few more visits to my blog that I had thought. I was also surprised to find that people were listening to my Ghost in the Cloud series. In fact, the most frequently visited posting on my blog is Ghost in the Cloud Chapter Ten: Truth and Falsehood. I was also surprised that I have a small following in the Netherlands. Who do I know there? How did they ever find my blog? Here I thought that perhaps only four or five people ever even took a look at it.

At any rate, I decided to go ahead and keep writing and narrating my graphic-novel-without-the-graphics-part. It is a bit crazy, I admit, and meanders all over the world as part sci-fi, part fantasy, part philosophical/spiritual dialogue and part comic book. Myth, theology, philosophy, science, and the provocation of life in a postmodern world are all the clay that I’m toying with, and the story is a journal of thinking, and reflecting. I cannot say that I have worked out a systematic philosophy of life. I cannot say that I want to. It seems to me that once a philosophy becomes a system it becomes static and the mind closes and a personal systematic philosophy becomes nothing more than yet another fundamentalist system.

That said, I will say that Love is my prime value, however poor or imperfect I am at being able to Love, my code of ethics is based on the question: What is the response of Love? Right and wrong cannot be codified. There is no rule book, only Love. I cannot imagine any criminal court operating on the basis of the Loving thing to do, but what if it were? What if all law were thrown out and we made our judgments based on Love rather than law? At first glance this must seem like extreme idealism and highly unrealistic and that such thoughts ought to be relegated to the trash can marked “Utopian Foolishness” But I think it might make a good discussion all the same. What would a society look like if it really were based on Love—not Law, Greed or Self-interest? What I propose would involve considerable use of imagination—applied imagination! Now there’s a new concept. It is the use of imagination to dream and then make the dream a dream no more. It is to put flesh on a dream—to share the mind of God in this way—to dream a world and then create it.

To refresh the reader of the basic plot, after nearly—what—about a year or so? One of the main characters is a girl called Angelina, who, at this point in the story, is on a father quest and has gotten as far as Holyhead Island off the coast of Anglsey, Wales. She is visiting with an ages old Druid who wants to help her, but a druid who also wants to be done with his role as the keeper of the sacred ancient stories by imparting them to Angelina whose nanocells have given her the ability to remember everything perfectly, virtually forever. These Nanocells were given to her by an AI called “Jack” when she was a girl. Jack has been a kind of father to her in the absence of her own father who mysteriously vanished when she was a girl. She remembers him as a loving father and feels the need to understand what happened to him and why he left all those years ago.

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