So God puts man here in this world first Because man is not born ready for that second world, And must have time to learn God’s ways And to wrestle with his own will— Should he be the sort to will that.
And so much of it seems to come down To how the man is willing to see himself, And whether he will let the truth of a matter Be the truth— Or whether he will twist it into something else.
And from there, if and when he ever notices That his own will differs from God’s, It comes down to who he really thinks is the boss— It comes down to whether he will yield himself.
And who among us has the will To wrestle with his own will, To make it into what it is not But should be, according to God?
Many a religion has been fabricated In order to help men pretend That they can be right with God While still defiant in their wills.
Such are cities of Cain—ever empty, Even when filled with people— Stout fortresses on this Earth, Yet fully exposed to the very Heaven That they assume is their friend.
A modern interpretation of Azazel as a Satanic, goatlike demon, from Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (Paris,1825). Credit.
There are differing opinions (of old) on whether Azazel and Satan are the same being. So to start off, let me introduce Azazel by what are probably the three most famous passages about him—the first from the Bible, and the second two from 1 Enoch. I present these without comment. Otherwise, I’d be writing a book!:
8 And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.[a]9 And Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and use it as a sin offering, 10 but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.
Leviticus 16:8-10. ESV
8. And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin.
1 Enoch 10:8. R.H. Charles Translation
1. And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals 〈of the earth〉 and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. 2. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal, (taught) astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, 〈Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun〉, and Sariel the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven . . .
Origen pegs Azazel as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
For the serpent–…–having become the cause of man’s expulsion from the divine Paradise, … having deceived the woman by a promise of divinity and of greater blessings; ….Moreover (the goat), which in the book Of Leviticus is sent away (into the wilderness), and which in the Hebrew language is named Azazel, was none other than this;
She is constantly on display And seeking approval, Even when no one is watching— Worn out in the endless Striving to meet expectations That had never had anything to do with Goodness and love and truth In the first place.
The new idea, as good and right as it may be— As true and efficacious as any— And as much needed for life As light to the eyes And air to the lungs— Seeps through the human’s mind Until it meets regions where It is turned away For causes that may never Be examined by the one Whose mind and whose objections They are.
That the man should expect God to reach out to him Any farther than he has Already reached out to us all Is troublesome to me— As if in the sacrifice of his very self, God had not yet done enough, And more were needed.
The four-year-old in this video will tell you what he thinks, not knowing that when he does, he’s revealing that has has some “missing Mindware”. And my point in this post is that adults will do quite the same thing. So let’s talk about the boy first.
The lady in the video is surveying the boy on Piaget’s conservation tasks. She expertly asks him questions to determine how he’s thinking about what he sees. For example, when the blue water is poured from one of two identical glasses (equally filled) into a new, taller-but-narrower glass, he judges that the new glass has more water than the old glass did, even though he saw the transfer of the water with his own eyes. It appears that his reasoning is based solely on the fact that the height of the water has increased, and ignores the fact that the width has decreased. (He doesn’t know that both the height and the width are factors in determining volume.
He lacks the “Mindware”, then, to account for these two factors. Nor does he know the more-sophisticated resulting principle that under normal circumstances, the volume of the water would be conserved, even if its shape changes. To you and me, these things are intuitive, but to the four-year-old, they are not. (Intuition is nothing more than understanding that is powered by memory.)
So, he happily answers the questions, normally with only one consideration in mind. And you should know that this is normal for a child of his age. The human mind is born without a grasp of these things, but typically grasps them in the early years with enough real-world experience.
Missing Mindware in Adults
Kids aren’t the only ones who can be missing Mindware. Adults can do it, too. For example, many adults will miss this problem because they either don’t know the proper way to figure it, or don’t take the proper care in the moment to reason through it well:
In a certain pond one day, a certain lily pad begins to double in size every day. On day 30, the lily pad has covered the entire surface of the pond. On what day was the lily pad half the size of the pond?
Many lacking a sufficient grasp of certain mathematical principles will answer Day 15, while the correct answer is Day 29. To arrive at the Day 15 answer, they’re not just guessing, but doing math, but it goes wrong simply because they’re doing the wrong kind of math. When they see the word “half” in the word problem, they decide to half the total days (30), which yields the answer, 15.
But this way of approaching the problem ignores some of the information given in the first sentence of the problem: “…a certain lily pad begins to double in size every day.” That is, it didn’t just double its size on the first day, but on the second day, it doubled the enlarged size of the first day, and so on until day 30.
Reframing the Problem
Suppose we had asked this related question instead:
If a certain lily pad has been doubling in size every day, how many days ago would it have been half the size it is right now?
This problem gets at the same principle as the original problem, but does it without mentioning any number of days. And it may be that when the original problem mentions “day 30”, it provides a stumbling block for the ignorant or non-careful mind. That is, it’s as if presenting the original problem to the subject excites the brain thus: “Ooh, boy!—a division problem!—I can do division!—I just need two numbers, and I’ve got a 30 already—oh, and I know that to half something, we divide it by 2—so, 30 ÷ 2 = 15. Yay, I’ve solved it!”
To keep this brief, I’ll fight off the temptation to do a full analysis of the lily pad problem. Instead, let me just say that right principle to have in mind for this problem is this:
Every day moving forward in time, the lily pad doubles in size, and every day moving backward in time, it halves in size.
Solving the Wrong Problem
The issue at hand, then, is not halving the 30 days, but halving the size at 30 days. And the size is never explicitly stated by way of numbers in the original problem. So, a brain seeking numbers to perform operations on will immediately find the 30 explicitly stated, and can rightly infer that there must be some halving that needs doing, but the number 30 is not the right thing to be halved; it’s the size at Day 30.
And for the record, let me briefly point out just two more things about the the lily pad problem before I move on to the ultimate point of this post:
Someone could know exactly how to solve this problem, and still make the Day 15 mistake simply by not paying attention well enough before answering. That is, the Mindware for the problem wasn’t missing, exactly, but it wasn’t accessed!
Another way to look at this problem is with the question, “How am I setting up the problem?”. That is, do I think this lily pad problem is about an additive process where the same amount of new area is added every day, or do I think it’s a multiplicative process instead, where there’s geometric growth involved?
It Happens with More Than Just Lily Pads!
Adults can have problems with missing or unaccessed Mindware in many ways, such as in moral behavior. For example, when a person feels mistreated by another, he may turn the tables and mistreat the mistreater if he has opportunity—as if mistreatment were only wrong when done to him, and not when he does it to someone else.
And it could be that the adult simply has not yet learned the principle of the Golden Rule, or that his mind is simply not engaging this already-learned principle in the way it responds in the moment. But whether it’s a missing Mindwareproblem or an unaccessed Mindware problem, it’s still a problem!
Conclusion
In the case of the four-year-old, we’re pretty sure that he has simply not learned the conservation Mindware at that stage in his development. But what about the adult who has some Mindware and simply doesn’t isn’t careful enough to use it in the moment? Or what about the adult whose will is habitually opposed to applying some certain principle to his own behavior?
This is so often a moral problem, and it may be one of the biggest moral problems this world has. Among other things, we call it hypocrisy, which is a particular form of double-mindedness or cognitive dissonance. And there’s so much more to be said about it, but this post will have been a smashing success if I can simply get you to be on the lookout for it—not only in others, but particularly in yourself!
It is the nature of some things That they take time to develop— Such as, for example, the drying of paint Or the acquiring of the patience required to Cope comfortably with the waiting.
.jpeg){kind=link}
