|
The Cost of the God Experience Finn’s Procedural Realism and the Price of Existence 1. Introduction: Existence as Expenditure Finn’s
aphorism “The God experience costs” arises not from theology but from ontology
— specifically from his Procedure Monism, in which every being is a local
execution of the Universal Emergence Procedure (UEP), a set of
constraints that transforms random energy into structured form. Existence, in
this view, is not a birthright but a transaction. To appear, to persist, to
mean anything at all requires the continuous outlay of energy and adaptation. To be, therefore,
is to pay. The cost is not moral but structural: existence itself demands
expenditure. Every moment of coherence is bought from chaos with effort,
tension, and decay. The God experience — the momentary recognition
that one is the total process — is the most expensive of all, because it
burns through the very boundary that sustains the experiencer. 2. The Energetics of Being Physics
and biology affirm the same rule. A cell, a star, or a human must pay to stay
real. Life consumes energy gradients; entropy constantly erodes form. A
bacterium swimming toward food, a neuron firing, or a star fusing hydrogen
each exemplify the same logic: continuity costs. In Finn’s
ontology, these are not analogies but ontological statements. Every
identifiable event is an act of energetic resistance against disorder. Being
is not a free gift but a self-funded performance —
the only theatre in which reality can appear. And here
one might recall the everyday wisdom that economists, engineers, and
pragmatists alike have long understood: there’s
no such thing as a free lunch. The universe never gives something for
nothing. Every form, every thought, every joy has a bill attached — not as
punishment, but as the necessary accounting of energy and coherence. Finn’s
“God experience costs” is the cosmic version of that principle: existence is
the ultimate lunch, and the universe always collects. 3. The God Experience as Procedural Recognition The God
experience is not mystical grace but procedural recognition: the
moment an iteration (a jīva) realises
it is a perfect local expression of the Universal Procedure. In classical Vedānta, this was aham
brahmāsmi — “I am Brahman.” In Finn’s
language: “I am the
God experience” — the system recognising itself as system. But this
recognition is destabilising. To see through the self/other boundary that
ensures survival is to expose the organism to overload. The nervous system,
built for adaptation, cannot easily sustain omnipresence. Hence the familiar
sequence: ecstasy, collapse, exhaustion. The God experience costs because the
experiencer must pay with the very energy that constitutes its bounded
identity. 4. The Indian Context: Saṃsāra
as Price In Indian
metaphysics, this cost is named saṃsāra
— the cycle of birth, death, joy, and suffering. To become real (nāma-rūpa, name and form) is to enter
that circuit of alternating pleasure and pain. Śaṅkara
promised escape — mokṣa — through
knowledge of Brahman. Finn denies such exemption. Knowledge does not cancel
the procedural cost; it only reveals the terms of the contract. His
counterpoint is brutally consistent: salvation is a priestly illusion;
participation is unavoidable. To exist is to engage in saṃsāra,
to bear the oscillation of bliss and anguish as the fee for being
identifiable. The price of the God experience is simply being here at all. 5. Phenomenological Illustrations The cost
can be observed in lived experience: 1. Near-Death
Experiences (NDEs): When boundary conditions collapse, the self briefly perceives unity with the field. The return
to bounded life requires vast psychic expenditure — confusion, exhaustion,
the painful re-entry fee. 2. Dreamless-Sleep
Awareness or Deep Meditation: Consciousness experiences
its baseline sat-cit (being-awareness). Upon
awakening, affective charge floods back — pleasure and pain, the cost of
renewed individuation. 3. Traumatic
Breakthroughs: A total system crash leads to rebirth of identity,
often interpreted as divine revelation. Yet trauma, by definition, pre-pays
the cost. Each case
demonstrates that transcendence and suffering are not opposites but phases of
one process — the energy curve of emergence and re-coherence. 6. Comparative Reflections Spinoza’s
amor Dei intellectualis proposed a serene,
cost-free union with substance through understanding. Finn calls that
metaphysical wishful thinking. To know that one is the procedure does not
dissolve pain; it recontextualises it as the price of contact.
Nietzsche’s warning — that staring into the abyss risks being consumed by it
— mirrors the same insight: ultimate contact always exacts payment. 7. The Logic of Cost 1. The
Universal Procedure generates reality through constraint. 2. Constraint
requires energy; maintenance of identity demands cost. 3. Recognition
of one’s procedural nature dissolves stabilising boundaries. 4. Reintegration
after dissolution exacts energetic, emotional, and cognitive tolls. 5. Therefore,
the God experience costs — necessarily, procedurally, universally. 8. The Druidic Equation: Contact as Currency Finn
condenses the entire ontology into one druidic formula: Contact =
Realness = Cost. To touch
the real — whether by perception, love, or insight — is to pay in energy and
limitation. Every contact burns; every burn confirms
reality. The God experience is the maximum burn — the point where
finite form meets infinite source. Yet it is also the only real wealth:
existence itself as divine expenditure. 9. Conclusion: The Price of Being Finn’s
“The God experience costs” is not a moral admonition but a natural law. There
are no free realities, no free lives, no free revelations — only systems
paying for their coherence. In ordinary idiom: there’s no such thing as a
free lunch, and in cosmic idiom: there’s no such thing as a free
existence. To exist
is to incur the debt of differentiation; to know oneself as God is to glimpse
the total ledger. The druid’s wisdom is to pay consciously — to spend one’s
finite energy as the currency of contact. In Vedāntic terms, the price of the God experience is saṃsāra. The God
experience costs — because to be real is to pay for being. The God Experience
Without Bliss Finn’s God Experience as Confinement Series
. |