The SummerLand

Those that know me will know that I was brought up as a Christian, mainly due to my paternal grandmothers influence, and that my journey from where I was to where I am now has taken a number of turns, not all of them expected. Part of the problem I had with Christianity was that I simply couldn’t reconcile the idea of an all-powerful God with the concept of free will

You see for me the concept of an all-powerful God has a couple of implications. One possibility is that God, being all powerful has built the universe and pre designed in all of our choices. We have no real free will at all; we are just following the grand plan. This simply isn’t something I am prepared to accept. I can not just roll over and hand over control of my life and destiny to somebody else, not even to a god!

The other option for an all powerful God is that while our actions and choices haven’t been pre planned, our future isn’t totally predestined but that we are free to make our own choices. However an all powerful all knowing God, as conceived by the Christian theology, exists outside of our concepts of time. While our choices are free God knows ahead of time what choices we will make and what paths we will follow.

Again I find that I can’t accept this option either. If God, any god, knows my decisions and choices ahead of time it makes the whole concept of free will and Christianity meaningless. How can we chose to accept the sacrifice of Christ and how can that choice have any real meaning if our choice is known in advance.

This feeling comes out for me in the story of Judas. Here was a man who, if we are to believe we truly have free will, chose to betray Christ. Now if that really was a truly free choice then maybe he deserves some of the bad press that he has received over the years. But if God either predestined his choice or knew in advance what his choice would be and still put him in that position then what freedom of choice did he really have?

Equally though I wasn’t happy to abandon the idea of some for of predestination and allow that we were totally masters of our own destiny. I did not feel, and still do not feel, that we are adrift in an uncaring universe left to sink or swim with no plan, direction, or destiny at all. Things didn’t seem to be that black and white to me.

What I needed was a system that while providing for a level of predestination and general direction / meaning to our journey through life did allow for a substantial amount of free will and self-control of events. Meaningful freewill with meaningful choices but still with direction and meaning to our journey.

After considerable thought what I came up with, no doubt it’s been thought of before, was the idea of ‘Required events’. It sort of works this way.

I believe that for everybody there are a number of things that simply must happen. Events that no matter what you try to do you simply cannot avoid. These ‘events’ may be events as they are generally understood, things that happen to us, or may be interactions with others or even moments of insight and revelation. Whatever they are they are important, pivotal times for us.

There are a number of ways to think about our journey through life, ways we can visualise it.

One way to visualise this journey is as a simple journey we might make every day, a long journey perhaps to visit a relative that lives a long way away. While there may be a number of routes you could take it is certainly possible that your journey, whatever route you take, will mean you have to pass through a certain place or over a certain bridge. Maybe you have to stop at a certain petrol station to fill up or always stop at a special café for a snack. These special points on your journey, points you ‘have’ to go through are like the ‘required events’ on your life journey.

Another way of thinking about these ‘required events’ is as fixed points along the space time history that you mark out as you live. Everything in the universe marks out a path through space-time. The path is not simply the path through space, how the object or person has moved but it also record all its interactions with everything else that exists and if we believe in free will every decision we make.

This idea is used in a technique called ‘summing over histories’ which allow scientists to understand the life history of sub atomic particles.

What the scientists find is that when these particles can travel along their path with no fixed points at all forced on them the result is that there is no pattern to their arrival at all. Nobody can predict where they will end up. However is one or more fixed points are introduced along their history path then what we find is that they arrive at definite places. In fact they produce a series of very distinct bands of dark and light.

I think that the idea can be used to model our path through life. In this case if we were to draw out our history path we would see that while the line could change direction as we interact with others or make decision there are a few points through which the line has to pass. These points represent the required events in our lives, things that we simply can’t escape.

Some people have more of these required events in their journey than others and perhaps there are some that have none at all. It is perhaps notable that those people that don’t seem to have any direction or destiny, no fixed points on their journey, do not seem to produce a definite impact on the world. They are like the particles that have no definite or predictable destination.

Where people have a number of these fixed points in their life and are drawn to these points we do tend to see people with what we see as a destiny, a cause or plan to their life. They do tend to be the people that make an impact, if even only on a small local scale.

Another notable thing is that people who have a destiny or direction to their lives often are the same people who impact on the lives of others. Very rarely are they loners who live their life without interacting with others. When we interact with others our fixed points or required events are linked to a similar required event in the other person or people, where this happens a sort of nexus forms where the life paths of a number of people meet, interact and then diverge again to journey on their own paths. This forms a spider’s web of lifelines where we are free to follow our own course, make our own decisions but the inexorable movement to our next required event is maintained.

One of the big questions, for me at least, is asking how fixed are these ‘required events’. Are they totally immoveable or is there scope for changing them? Some I believe are totally fixed, sort of ‘you WILL be here’ sort of thing. These are the big events that define our destiny.

Others? Well possibly our reactions to past events, change either the nature or timing of the next required event. We have also seen that in the concept of ‘required events’ a lots of people’s passage thorough space-time are interlinked by the idea of nexuses of these ‘required events’ then how they react to things may well impact on the required events of others. Think of one person doing something that sets up a vibration through out the web subtly changing the paths of other people, possibly changing their path to their next ‘required event’ or even changing the nature of that event.

At these nexuses the decisions we make, the interactions we have will not only, potentially, change our future path but also the paths of those involved with us. When we set up a ‘vibration’ in the web we need to be aware of the impact that we may be having on others as well. One of the big problems we face when we think about how our actions may impact others is in the very nature of these nexuses. Each one will tend to exhibit lots of in- puts from different sources with these inputs being reliant on the outcomes from previous ‘required events’; this tends to have ex- actly the right structure to set up chaotic a system. Nexuses of this sort will exhibit chaotic behaviour in that even a small change in the inputs to the nexus or in the nexus its self, say by one of the people involved making an unexpected decision, can produce a radically different result. It is because of this that we should be very careful what we do and what decisions we make if we are part of one of these nexuses.

When we think of the “vibrations in the web” analogy it is also fairly easy to see how our actions can come back to haunt or bless us. The ripple from our actions will travel the web, causing change in other peoples required events and the ripples from than will travel again back to our next, or subsequent, nexus to impact on us. This sort of vibration can, if conditions are right, become multiplied during its travel through the web and the vibrations can return to us as a storm rather than a ripple. Perhaps this is the origin of the ideas behind the ‘rule of three’?

Often I haven’t noticed that I have been going through one of these required events until long after, when looking back I can see that something, or somebody, has totally altered the course of my life, either in direction or in outlook.

However it is quite possible, probable even, that there have been other, subtler, required events that I have totally missed. Some of the things I put down to chance or coincidence may well have been one of these events. Ultimately None of us can be sure whether any given event or interaction is one of these important ones but on occasion it is possible, I believe, to ‘feel’ the touch of these events.

Sometimes I can feel the approach of the nexus that a required event brings. That strange feeling of something important about to happen or the feeling of ‘something in the air’ that people get from time to time. In Macbeth one of the witches says

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

 

Something wicked this way comes.

 

Open, locks,

 

Whoever knocks”!

As Macbeth approaches the witches abode.

The feeling of an approaching nexus or ‘required event’ possibly explains that feeling of being pulled or drawn that many in the past have explained as a call from the deity or destiny. It is possibly this feeling, and the observation that people seem to be drawn, despite their wishes on occasion, to these events that lead to the development of the ideas around the fates and the wyrd one of the fundamental concepts in heathenry.

The Anglo-Saxon noun wyrd is derived from a verb, weorþan, ‘to become’, which, in turn, is derived from an Indo-European root *uert- meaning ‘to turn’. wyrd embodies the concept that everything is turning into something else while both being drawn in toward and moving out from its own origins.

In the Anglo-Saxon Riming Poem, the narrator says of his life circumstances

           “Me þæt wyrd gewæf,” ‘Wyrd wove this for me’.

In the Icelandic Njal’s Saga, the valkyries weave out the course of a battle on a loom made of weapons and threaded with human entrails. Imagine a patterned piece of cloth being woven on a loom or a spider’s web of interconnected strands of fate.

Of course many don’t see any place of the Wyrd or the Fates but for me at least I do live in a world where perhaps our ancient fore fathers understood a little better than we do the path that we all must walk.