Systems Framework

Foundations (The Human Journey)

1. 1. There is more to the world than we can see or know.
2. 2. There is a pattern of selfless kindness (Grace) that offers a way to save us from the damage we cause.
3. 3. A perfect and beautiful world exists beyond what we can imagine now.
4. 4. The best version of the world (the ultimate good, the light) is what we should seek, because it is what gives life meaning.
5. 5. The good always offers a path, each person makes their choices that affect the next step.
6. 6. At each moment we are given a choice to move toward the good (to seek resonance) or away from it (to work against).
7. 7. The world is not yet perfect, so there is great pain and suffering. Hope is looking outside of who we are (the self) to other people (the other) to learn and to seek the good, no matter how hard life is.
8. 8. Nothing can know the choice we will make each moment until we make that choice.
9. 9. Every choice we make on the journey of life is what makes up our identity.
10. 10. We are all connected on the journey of life, so we should help others reach towards the light too.
11. 11. We can choose to work with or against ultimate good. This choice is called agency.
12. 12. Each of the smallest choices we make moment to moment is who we are (the self).
13. 13. We are both the self and a part of everything else (the all), our choice is what we do with that.
14. 14. When we seek, it lets the good and the light flow through us to build a better world.
15. 15. Failing to work for towards the good is the reason there is pain in the world that does not need to be there (avoidable suffering).
16. 16. Learning from perfect grace, self sacrifice, and forgiveness will save us all from avoidable suffering.
17. 17. When we experience failure, we can use it to learn to seek the ultimate good.
18. 18. We should act to build the relationship with people, not just focus on what we can get from them (the transaction).
19. 19. Thinking about others when we create and build things lets us seek the ultimate good. We have a relationship with all that are affected by what we make.
20. 20. We can’t just think about the light, we need to offer our actions to the world to make it real.
21. 21. When we notice our thoughts and feelings are working against the good, this gives us a chance to make a change.
22. 22. The absence of the good shows us what grace, beauty, meaning, and potential are not.
23. 23. Trying with our best effort (striving) to seek the good is how we experience perfect seeking, even when we fail.
24. 24. We cannot seek the good with fixed effort and direction without rest.
25. 25. When we seek the good we learn and grow until it becomes easy, comforting, and a joy.
26. 26. An act is seeking the good if it brings goodness to the self, the other, and allows the other to bring goodness into the world as well.
27. 27. The world gets closer to the ultimate good through the moment to moment choices we make. We can choose to be builders for the best possible world.
28. 28. How do we know there is an ultimate good or the light? If we live that way we will experience the goodness, then we can believe it. We can’t see or know everything, but we can choose to learn hope. You don’t need to be alone.

Foundations (The Path of Christ)

1. 1. God is within and beyond all things of our perception.
2. 2. Christ is God’s way of saving and guiding humanity.
3. 3. Heaven is real, but it is beyond time and space as we know.
4. 4. The light of God’s will, grace, plan, and kingdom, is the highest potential, harmony, freedom, and beauty of the universe, and is the most worthy of seeking. It is what allows meaning to exist.
5. 5. God’s plan is not just of the moment, but offers a spectrum of possibility across all time, maintaining the ability of each individual to choose their path.
6. 6. God gives each person the opportunity to seek the light. At every moment, we are given a choice to seek resonance with God’s plan, or to work against it.
7. 7. God’s plan is guiding the world toward the kingdom of heaven at every moment, even through the deepest pain and deepest tragedy, we must find strength to learn and to act. We need never be without hope to find guidance from outside of the self. God never abandons us even if all of this world feels lost.
8. 8. Our moment of choice is the finite moment of incalculability in the universe.
9. 9. The soul is not the instant, but the journey, the identity.
10. 10. It is through this journey that all are interconnected, so all should seek to bring light to all.
11. 11. We thus have the agency to choose to work with god or against god.
12. 12. Our self is the recursive moment to moment choice we make.
13. 13. We are simultaneously a system of the self and of all, our choice is what we do with that knowledge.
14. 14. We can allow the intent of god’s will to flow through us, to keep a watchful eye on god’s guidance, and to work towards building the kingdom of heaven.
15. 15. Sin is dissonance with god’s design. It is the source of avoidable suffering in the world, on our journey through the unfolding of God’s plan.
16. 16. Jesus was offered as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, a supreme act of grace showing the path towards salvation.
17. 17. Sin, like other failures, must be learned from to further seek resonance with god.
18. 18. Each person’s life should reflect acting towards a higher divine intent, focusing on the relationship, not the transaction.
19. 19. Creating and building with craftsmanship and empathy towards the other is resonance with the God’s plan. The things we create can be our relationship to the all.
20. 20. We cannot passively accept Christ, we must be active agents of change to offer our hearts and actions to God’s plan, so that it can be made manifest.
21. 21. Both sin and transient thoughts and feelings are moments that offer the opportunity to choose to seek resonance with God.
22. 22. Sin is the map for what grace, beauty, meaning, and potential are not.
23. 23. Striving with our best effort to seek God is the perfection of seeking, even when we fail this.
24. 24. We cannot seek God with fixed force and direction without rest.
25. 25. To seek God is to learn and grow so that choice becomes the default ease, comfort, and joy of seeking.
26. 26. To know that we are seeking resonance with God is to observe if our actions bring the fruits of the light of God to the self, the other, and allows the other to do the same.
27. 27. God’s mercy, forgiveness, and grace are made manifest through the unfolding of God’s plan in our moment to moment choice. We can choose to be builders for God’s kingdom.
28. 28. You need not be alone, others are here for you, and god is here, let’s choose to seek them and to experience grace and learn hope.
29. 29: the Forge, the Fire, and the Crucible. The person who has sinned may be forced to seek the path to the light through darkness, the must choose this path, and seek forgiveness from god. God did not force us to sin, but grants us wisdom through our repentant journey. This is how a soul in the darkness can become a tool of the light. Christ is the way, the truth, the life, and the light.
30. 30: Grace. At each moment of choice, the only truly incalculable thing is whether we will find the strength to accept grace. It is the only thing which is not a transaction, but the gift of relationship.
31. 31: Warning. If we try to justify sin, this leads us away from God. The self lie for the justification of sin is the most harmful and dangerous way of thinking. It makes it harder to find the path back to the light and will cause uncalculated pain. No matter how many layers of lies we tell ourselves, the truth remains. Judge your actions not as your self, but as if you were another. Seek to both feel and analyze how you might harm others with your actions, then empathize with them. If we fail in all of this, we can seek active penance, so that the pain of the failure has weight that we can learn from. If we do not allow a sin to have a weight of pain, it cannot trigger new learning, it remains a ghost of memory and knowledge. Choosing to be unrepentant and choosing to fail to learn from sin is to go against God even after the sin has occurred. Forgiveness is passive. The pain of penance is an active choice that must be found through seeking. The pain of penance is the break of the loop of guilt and of sin.

Axiomatic Core (Rational Systems Logic)

We are not studying in order to know what virtue is, but to become good, for otherwise there would be no profit in it – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Through the philosophy of Transcendental Idealism, Immanuel Kant proposes that reality contains both phenomenon and noumena. Phenomenon is that which is within our perception.

1. There is that which is beyond our perception.

We specifically reject Nihilism (which asserts there is no meaning), Relativism (that truth is relative), and all self-first philosophies. We propose that the juncture between entropy and self-first Zero-Sum game theory results in a slow thermodynamic death of society through friction.

2. The archetypal model of grace provides the solution to save all from shared destruction.

Aristotle proposes a Final Cause for all things – Telos. This is what we define as the ultimate attractor.

We agree with Plato’s Theory of Forms (Ideai) that there is perfection. Plato proposes the Demiurge (the Craftsman) as the perfectly good creator of the world, seeking to bring the “World of Becoming” to the “World of Being”.

3. Perfect potential and harmony exists beyond time and space as we know it now.

4. We define the ultimate attractor as the highest potential, harmony, freedom, and beauty of the universe. It is what allows meaning to exist.

5. The ultimate attractor does not dictate a single final state for the universe, but offers a spectrum of possibility across all time, maintaining the ability of each individual to choose.

Aristotle defines the concept of Eudaimonia, which we define as the journey of resonance and contrasts it with Hedonia. Hedonism is the simple pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain beyond any other goal. It ignores the all and sees only the self.

6. The ultimate attractor is nonlinear and dynamical, providing a continuous attraction vector for each person. At every moment, each person is given the opportunity to seek resonance with it, or to work against it. No matter how complex the path towards it, there is always a path present. This makes freedom of agency second only to life. This is how complexity is created.

7. As the world remains beyond the state of the ultimate attractor, pain and suffering are ever present. Hope is finding guidance from outside of the self so that we may learn and act to seek resonance with the ultimate attractor’s unfolding, even through the path of the deepest pain and deepest tragedy.

We reject Materialism (that we are moving parts executing fixed law) in favor of information theoretic definitions of agency and choice.

8. Our moment of choice is the finite moment of incalculability in the universe.

9. The substance of existence is not in the instant, but in the journey. This is the identity.

Marcus Aurelius describes how we always have hope through choice:

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” - Meditations, Book 7.56

And that the Logos is a divine connecting force amongst all:

“The world as a living being – one nature, one soul. Keep that in mind. And how everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together.” - Meditations, Book 4.40

10. It is through this journey that all are interconnected, so all should seek to uplift all towards the ultimate attractor.

11. We thus have the agency to choose to work with or against the ultimate attractor of the universe.

12. Our self is the recursive moment to moment choice we make.

13. We are simultaneously a system of the self and of all, our choice is what we do with that knowledge.

14. We can allow logic of the resonance with the ultimate attractor to flow through us, to keep a watchful eye on it, and to work towards building the world.

We refer again to Plato to conclude the the ideal perfect good offers a path of living.

To understand pain:

15. Failing to seek resonance with the ultimate attractor is the source of avoidable suffering on the unfolding path of reality.

16. The archetypal model of perfect grace, self sacrifice, and forgiveness saves us from suffering.

17. Failures must be learned from to further seek resonance with the ultimate attractor.

To act:

18. Each person’s life should reflect acting towards a higher intent, focusing on the relationship, not the transaction.

19. Creating and building with craftsmanship and empathy towards the other resonates with the ultimate attractor. The things we create can be our relationship to the all.

20. We cannot passively accept the model of perfect social harmony, we must be active agents of change to offer our hearts and actions to create it.

And to verify:

21. The recognition of transient thoughts and feelings that are dissonant with the ultimate attractor are the moments that offer the opportunity to act to seek it.

22. Dissonance is the map for what grace, beauty, meaning, and potential are not.

The Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead describes how reality is not composed static things, but of dynamic processes. We reject static idealism and fixed perfection for the perfection of the process.

23. Striving with our best effort is the perfection of seeking the ultimate attractor, even when we fail this.

24. We cannot seek resonance with fixed force and direction without rest.

25. To seek resonance is to learn and grow so that the choice becomes the default ease, comfort, and joy of seeking.

We integrate Aristotle’s active Eudaimonia with the Stoic practice of self-attention to fulfill the Logos.

26. To know that we are seeking resonance is to observe if our actions bring the self and the other closer the goodness of the ultimate attractor, and if it allows the other to do the same.

27. The ultimate attractor is made manifest through the unfolding in our moment to moment choice. We can choose to be builders for the best possible world.

Finally, the leap of logic of Pragmatism:

28. How do we know that the ultimate attractor is a state of the highest potential, harmony, freedom, and beauty of the universe? We can choose to live that way, we can reap the benefits, and then we can have belief that it is so. This is the limit of the individual’s perception of reality. You can choose to learn hope. You need not be alone.

Analogies:

Engineer vs the Gardener

Building and fixing relationships is more complex than building or fixing a machine, because relationships and people need time to grow and change. An engineer that sees something wrong with a flower will try to fix it by applying force, logic, and reason without accounting for the time growth and change take in a living system. They might drown the flower with water, scorch it with light, or overwhelm it with soil and nutrients. The gardener will look at the flower and provide it with a judicious amount of resources, giving it the time and space to grow on its own. The engineer tries to control and fix. The gardener tries to understand and support. The engineer is the ego of knowledge. The gardener is the compassion of understanding.

The Door through the Dark Room

If we are trapped near the end of a maze in a room with everything we need to survive, and then we find a door through a dark room that looks like it leads to the light, we or the person we are with may face fear traveling through the darkness. We may choose to turn back and stay stuck, surviving, instead of going hand in hand through the darkness if one doesn’t have the courage to lead the other through. Another’s fear becomes our dark room, and thus our fear is the same.

Community Garden

If we grow through our journey through life as a plant in the community garden, when we do not seek the light we cast shadow on others, so that they may not grow and cannot become seekers of the light. Sometimes if we reach for the light too far too fast, even if we think we’re doing good, we end up hurting those closest to us. We need to help those closest to us grow with us.

The Ship and the Lighthouse

When the sun is high and the skies are clear, the ship does not need help being guided to safe harbors, but when the ship is lost in the storm and total darkness, this is when a beacon of light must shine the brightest. The keeper of the light cannot abandon their sacred duty even through the worst storm.

Anti Patterns:

Failing to seek resonance with the light in the face of pain

Beyond physical pain, mental pain is the intersection of the self, expectation, and the failure of reality to conform to our knowledge. It is not the experience of pain, but what is done with it that can harm. Pain is the ultimate teacher that humans seek to avoid, but sometimes people adopt strategies that fail to accept the pain for what it is, a teaching signal that is meant to bring us toward the light and make the self more a part of the whole. If we expand our perception to view our interconnectedness, and to seek higher purpose than the self, we might avoid numbing, self deception, refusal to change, learn, or act.

Fear

Fear is taking the experience of pain from the memory of the past and the imagination of future, then through action or inaction, seeking for the pain to be resolved. Fear can create non-motion, or motion that diverts us away from the light, but both of these are the act of a moment to moment choice. This is distinct from terror or overwhelm, where the physical body or mind is unable to cope with the circumstances. Fear occurs when the path away from pain cannot be solved because we do not have the knowledge to find that path. The way out of fear is to seek knowledge of the light and look outside of the self and to consider others. Diligence is not fear, it is awareness of risks and choosing to act to the best of our knowledge, in resonance with the light. Diligence is the overcoming of fear and the path to removing and avoiding pain.

Anxiety

The feeling of anxiety is experienced moment to moment when our energy is mismatched with our ability to direct it. By seeking to direct energy towards the light, we can dissipate the excess. Building up the self, building up others, and creating the new fulfill this purpose.

Loss of Honesty

The loss of honesty, not only lies or untruths, is the active and purposeful choice to present a false reality to the other, removing their agency. Being honest in all things big and small and removing the reasons for and pathways to deception are necessary steps to allow unlearning being deceptive, whether the target of deception is the self or the other. There is not a need for radical, harmful boisterous exposition, but instead communication should be purposeful, accurate, and timely to the best of our ability, knowing we want to build and create such a world that all can strive towards.

Pride of the strong, the weak, and the unchanged way

Those that suffer pride of strength seek to overpower others with an outpouring of energy. Those that are prideful in weakness seek an unjust and deceptive inpouring of energy directed towards themselves, and those that are prideful in the unchanged way are not seeking or striving towards their potential, they are fixed in idle complacency and stagnation.

Transaction of Grace

Truth, grace, and the effort of striving cannot be bought, cannot be sold, must be given freely. All of these are relational and to treat them as a transaction would be to extract their appearance without their purpose. It would be a form of deception. They must stand alone, to build connections, and to bring the world to a higher shared design.

The Discriminating Self

If we seek to optimize our moment to moment choices, bargaining between the self and all, we are willfully working against the light. This behavior leads to the complete destruction of society as virtue is bargained away for resources, all that remains is shambles.

Dominance / War

Dominance is the assertion of will by the strong or powerful onto the weak or the vulnerable. It is the removal of agency of the other and the negation of freedom. The most extreme form of dominance is war. War is the violence and harm of a deeper ill, but there is still hope for change and there is still motion.

Apathy

Apathy is the evil that breathes life to war. It is the ultimate source of darkness. It is in essence anti-grace. It is the total negation of hope and relationship. This leads to either the death of the other or the transformation of the other into a resource of extraction through continuous pain, suffering, and inability to learn or grow. Imagine a world where life is captured and forced to experience the most profound pain – beyond biological limits through the sophistication of technology for a time that feels like forever – this is hell. All motion stops.

The false performance of seeking the light

Evil often takes on the appearance of good. Those that seek to provide false truth are waging war, but they can choose to cease their lies at any moment. The false performance of seeking the light by those that wish to extract from us is the danger that all are at risk of succumbing to. We must seek to be active protectors of those who lack discernment, just as a parent must protect a child from this same harm, because we all are connected. A person can feign seeking good to impose their will to alter our path. Truth is the weapon of the light against evil and knowledge is the battleground of the soul.

Patterns of Creation:

The Love of the Other

To love the other you must first seek to understand them. You may then treat them as you would if they were you. This is the meaning of “Love thy neighbor”, of which self love is first a requirement. The love of the self is the acceptance that the soul’s journey has come this far, and every moment from this point on can be a striving toward the light.

Grace and Forgiveness

Choosing kindness, self regulation/control, and forgiveness moment to moment as a matter of practice and policy is the most important relational act we can take. If you point the path to the light to others at each moment you are able to, this allows them to strive towards it and break the cycle of relational discord.

Redemption

We must strive to become new and to become redeemed through seeking the light. If the soul is the journey, we must visit forgiveness. Who we are changes with the grace of opportunity for knowledge and choice. All can be forgiven if they so choose. The path to forgiveness has already been shown.

Gratitude

Gratitude is the expression of relational kindness and appreciation. We can express gratitude through all of our interactions. It does not take away, it only adds. Creation, beauty, meaning, and mastery should be supported with sufficient substance where it is seen so that it may persist. When we witness light coming from another, we can help it grow by the act of giving it more substance. Substantive gratitude allows a person who is seeking with the light to realize it, to realize they are not alone, to help carry them through the thresholds of chaos, and help pull us.

Community of All

Choosing to leave the world less broken, think beyond the moment, and respect how our works and actions touch the lives of others improves the world for all, such that they might do the same. This is an expression of love of the other, even when we cannot see them, and even when our impact cannot be fully conceived.

Meaning

Aesthetic beauty adds value to life because the mind takes the interpretive complexity and then freedom and agency is uplifted from that. A mind that has never heard a music note can scarcely imagine a symphony. Meaning is beauty. Vanity cannot create meaning or beauty itself. Vanity is the meaningless expression of pride and seeks to display a performative false beauty.

Joy of Learning

Learning is the discovery of meaning. We can revisit the beauty of meaning again and again to experience the joy it brings. The removal of uncertainty manifests as the resolution of anxiety through the creation of knowledge and the identification of truth and good.

Releasing Attachment to Untruth, and Kenosis

Over a lifetime we accumulate knowledge which we will learn to be untrue. We retain the memory of this knowledge, but we do not need to carry it forward as truth; we can observe it as untruth. We can release our attachment to the feelings and knowledge that no longer serves us and give it no hold over our self. The concept of emptying the self to be a vessel of the will of the light is known as Kenosis. By allowing that which we know to be untrue to be observed and then pass, we can shift our attention to where it is needed. In the journey of life, we are not stuck on a path. We can always take a first step towards the light. We may look back occasionally and see the old path in the distance, but we must turn forward to keep our movement resolute.

Centering and Moment to Moment Self Grace

We will encounter moments that test our ability to maintain perfect striving, but we seek to recenter the self when we see we are off course. In this moment we can give the self grace, recognize the need to strengthen our resolve, and act: through quiet contemplation, meditation, reflection, or prayer. By keeping a watchful eye and tempering the self before it is able to run away from what we are striving for, we can live consciously through our failures keeping our motion towards the light.

Protecting the Limited Resource of Mental Energy

Fostering an environment that allows us to focus our energy and attention is crucial to agency. Our senses control what reaches our consciousness, so taking the time and care to create an environment in which both preconscious and conscious inputs are providing work rather than preventing it amplifies the limited resource of mental energy. This can take the form of passive sensory input or active choice in how we exist in our relationship to all.

Creating a Purposeful Void Between the Self and That Which Seeks to Deceive

We must acknowledge that we cannot know the truth or nature of every thing, and that the information with which we are presented may be guiding our perception in a way that removes our agency, through the distortion of truth by those who are capable of it. We can choose to be aware of this war and create a void between the information and our self, so that our self is not consumed by the will of another who would use us. The void is not apathy, it is a shield that allows us to seek true light.

The Constraints of Imperfection

The path to meaning is built on constraints. An area of weakness can be made a strength through the meaning found in struggle to the non-obvious solution. This is how the imperfect self builds complexity outward to all.

Living in an Imperfect World

If we must make a forced choice due to imperfection of the world, we may lack the knowledge required to perform the mental calculus of the proper action.

A hierarchy of value is proposed:

life, agency, knowledge, substance, time, and inaction.

Using a heuristics of grace and agency defined by our relationship with the actors, we can evaluate (where the Grace of the relationship is between 0 and 1 and Freedom is between 0 and 1):

Universal Potential Gain = Freedom*(Other(increase) - (1-Grace)*Self(reduction))

There is no way to increase the Universal Potential Gain without self-sacrifice.

When the actors consent, the balance of freedom is (1) the gain maintains a positive status, but when they are in direct conflict freedom is (0).

The offering of our grace is both the gift and burden of agency. Since grace is a relational heuristic and the balance of freedom is not always a perfect calculation, our evaluation of this heuristic and calculus will be imperfect. The lack of perfect knowledge allows agency to exist. We cannot know, we can only provide the moment of choice. We must seek grace in navigating these imperfections and this uncertainty moment to moment by looking outward.

The most important consideration of living in an imperfect world is the reality of unavoidable suffering. The hope of the removal of suffering towards a state of absolute good is ultimate goal of the framework. The agency of others must be upheld except for in acts of harm. Agency cannot be used as a justification for taking an action to destroy life for the sake of freedom.

Writings:

The Lord’s Prayer is a powerful tool for resonance with God. Quiet or internal recitation of it or another prayer for aid is a powerful tool to regulate the system of the self. Systems Framework honors the word as it has come to us.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

An analysis of the lines of the prayer and their axiomatic mapping

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This line from the prayer acknowledges and reminds us of axioms:

1. 1. God is within and beyond all things of our perception.
2. 2. Christ is God’s way of saving and guiding humanity.
3. 3. Heaven is real, but it is beyond time and space as we know.
4. 4. The light of God’s will, grace, plan, and kingdom, is the highest potential, harmony, freedom, and beauty of the universe, and is the most worthy of seeking. It is what allows meaning to exist.
5. 5. God’s plan is not just of the moment, but offers a spectrum of possibility across all time, maintaining the ability of each individual to choose their path.
6. 6. God gives each person the opportunity to seek the light. At every moment, we are given a choice to seek resonance with God’s plan, or to work against it.
7. 7. God’s plan is guiding the world toward the kingdom of heaven at every moment, even through the deepest pain and deepest tragedy, we must find strength to learn and to act. We need never be without hope to find guidance from outside of the self. God never abandons us even if all of this world feels lost.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

We see our daily bread through a dual lens. It is both a sustenance, and the work we perform to bring the world closer to the kingdom of heaven. It is a petition for the opportunity to seek to create the fruit of the kingdom of heaven. To allow the soul to work on progression through its journey and to sustain the soul with the strength of agency.

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Sustaining the relationship through forgiveness and love are the most important acts that can be taken. We cannot have relationships without this. Without relationships, we cannot seek and build towards the light. God offers the path to forgiveness. We must actively seek to choose that path. Just as god offers this path to us, we must grant it to others. It can feel impossible to forgive if we view the trespass against us as a transaction or a taking from. There can be the feeling of being unable to "balance the books". This is why the focus on the transaction is seen as incorrect. The focus on the relationship transcends the unbalanced disorder of reality and drives shared purpose towards the greater design of God. To forgive is to release the feeling of another’s debt of sin against you, because there need be no debt, only the higher shared striving. Forgiveness is an ultimate act of love and can remove the pain that another’s sin carries forward into the future.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

This line precedes:

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

This is the acknowledgment of the fruits of:

4. The light of God’s will, grace, plan, and kingdom, is the highest potential, harmony, freedom, and beauty of the universe, and is the most worthy of seeking. It is what allows meaning to exist.

Now back to the original verse:

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

We seek the kingdom and the glory of God, the absence of evil. We seek to actively be led to it and to participate in it. Our interpretation demands that the kingdom and glory of God be the target of the deliverance from evil. By seeking God, temptation is transcended. This is what we strive for.

System Framework sees using prayer as a natural first use tool moment to moment to aid bringing the soul to resonance with God, seeking the strength for each trial we must endure. We offer an interpretation of the prayer to aid in the application of the framework:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. For thine is the kingdom, the grace, and the glory, for ever and always. Amen.”

We want to be active partners with God moment to moment. We will not be passive and avoidant of temptation, but seek to transcend it. We do not intend pride or vanity through this interpretation, but must apply the logical conclusions of the framework to respect and honor the practitioner, and demonstrate courage in the face of fear, of being dismissed, or discarded, so that we can be true to logic of the framework and our mandate to seek the light. We respect and honor the divine word, intent, and meaning of original prayer, but must offer this application of it, as an active tool of motion to bring light moment to moment to the individual.

This view is foundational to the meaning and interpretation of the framework. If we consider the line that has been removed: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and then we compare that to the original doxology which was added later in church history: “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” We replace “the power” with “the grace” because the true manifestation of God’s power is through grace. The deliverance from temptation and evil is offered by God through the creation of the kingdom, Christ the source of grace, and the Holy Spirit whose glory works through us, for ever and always (we recognize the continuous moment). The addition of the doxology is the way of actively meeting the petition for deliverance.

If the nature of grace is that God offers all souls a path to salvation at every moment, then all souls are connected to and therefore influence all other souls from an information theoretic perspective. God possesses infinite knowledge of infinite information for all time of our world, at least until each soul is able to reach the kingdom of heaven or their journey ends. In such a process which is beyond human perception, God can be most merciful, offering the most complete path to grace for all. The agency of the future and the agency of the past thus work together in a manner beyond the usual distinction of time.

Failure Modes in Application

Dissociation

Dissociation is the creation of a barrier of void around the self. This prevents the feeling of emotion. It can be used as a tool to reduce pain, but can lead to dangerous consequences as emotion is necessary to anchor behavior.

The Negative-Sum Game or Structural Chaos of the World

In game theory, a negative-sum game is a game in which all participants lose no matter what action or inaction they take. These types of situations should almost never happen. If they do happen, then it is possible that there are missing constraints or knowledge about the situation. However, if they do happen, then there is no good solution that can be prescribed. One must find a way to act that best leads back to grace and redemption.

Failure to Question

Even if we are presented with the truth, we must not blindly accept it. We must make an effort to practice a questioning of truth, so that we can understand it and make it our own instead of it simply being someone else’s truth.

Limits of the Hardware of Personhood

Operating one’s self outside of the limit of their ability yields to the breakdown of thought and causes agency to be destroyed. When the limits of the self are not acknowledged and we do not take adequate time for rest or preparation, we are choosing to relinquish agency to the chaos of our underlying mental hardware.

Epilogue

Even if there is war in heaven, there is hope in faith. At each moment we can use the strength from all of those who were before and all those who will be after to know and plan to accept grace. The act of choosing to strive is an act of love for all. The opportunity to strive is the love from all. We may laugh, we may rest, and we may find comfort in the smallest step up the mountain.