How the Justice System has excluded input from the people

Last time I was called for jury duty in Delaware there were 42 cases scheduled. We figured we were just unlucky, and we’d surely be called for a jury with so many cases, despite all the tales we’d heard about people getting out of the courthouse by noon. But indeed we were out by noon. Only one case went to a jury. That means 41 people pleaded guilty to something that day, either a crime they’d committed, or a crime they felt was the least they would get away with given the system and the warnings from their defense attorney, the only person who might be expected to be on their side, that coming before a jury would be a crapshoot.

If over 90% of cases are decided by attorneys, prosecuting and defense attorneys together, we are no longer looking at an adversarial system. The only adversarial part of the system is that of the accusation versus the accused. Both prosecutor and defense have accepted the prevailing wisdom that everyone is guilty of something, the system must be preserved or total chaos will result, and therefore their roles have reverted to  highballing the punishment (prosecutor) and lowballing the punishment (defense). The prosecutor is building his or her reputation, the defense is trying not to be swamped amidst a case burden that might have applied to a whole law firm of defense lawyers in a previous time.

Nobody takes time to discover if the facts presented are true, hardly anybody even thinks about if the accused had criminal intent when he did what he was accused of. The police and prosecutor pile on enough charges to ensure that something will stick. The accused is bulldozed into pleading guilty to something so as to avoid a bigger charge. Sometime she did something criminal, sometimes she didn’t. Either way, once arrested the chances of being declared innocent are remote, and require much more money than a typical defendant is going to have.

Preserving the system is already a lost cause. The only thing attorneys are preserving at this point is their jobs. The man in the street thinks of TV shows when he thinks of the justice system, believing juries decide cases based on impassioned pleas from defense attorneys, that lack of evidence will be sufficient to free the innocent. This isn’t a part of the current system.

The first exposure to the system comes in meeting the police. Police are so overwhelmed and cynical about  whole communities that they see their job as being to preserve order, not to bring justice. Therefore when they say “If there is anymore disturbance, someone is going to be arrested” they really mean that. It really is fairly random who gets to go into the system and lose the next decade of their life to court appearances, jail time, probation, supervision, fines, etc. Add on to that reality the fact that police are often given quotas, or offered rewards to make more arrests, and sooner or later no one wants to call the police in the first place. Antonio LeGrier could tell us that, having watched his son (and an innocent neighbor) be gunned down by the Chicago police he called to help calm his son during an argument last December.

There is no point now to try to go back to the past. We have to move forward. A very helpful  first step would be to require the prosecution to prove criminal intent before someone can pay for a crime. Second, given the almost complete responsibility and control placed in the hands of attorneys today, who negotiate sentences without any jury oversight, we must surely demand that such attorneys be well qualified to make decisions concerning human motivations. Legally trained professionals cannot be expected to make decisions concerning criminal intent without further training in behavior and personality theories when they are the only  professional making decisions about people’s lives, and when they have a conflict of interest, their careers often being enhanced by gaining guilty pleas.

Given the overwhelming case burden of attorneys in the system today, this part may be facilitated by a third party involvement, not necessarily a trained psychologist, but a person trained specifically for this position. In the past guilt of motivation was decided by a jury presented with enough facts, having heard arguments from both sides, without need for psychological training. Today this assessment simply doesn’t happen, even if only because usually a jury doesn’t happen.

If a law can be passed that requires proof of criminal intent, then there must be some way that this can be decided. Here we can bring together the wisdom of age with the needs of society, given the huge numbers of older people who are retired but not ready to do nothing. Even without a cadre of people trained for careers based on a new role within the system, many such people would perform this function well based on life experience and training without great expense. The human factor can be restored to the process leaving the legally trained professionals to focus on the law.

One argument typically brought to bear when it is suggested that anyone else be brought in to the system is that it opens up the slippery slope to the privilege of privacy. Given that the public defenders’ role is now reduced to assuming guilt and arguing for reduced sentences rather than for innocence, this becomes something of a moot point. Guilt already seems to be assumed.  And whereas previously it seemed reasonable to argue for protecting the system and its safeguards, now it doesn’t seem reasonable any more. The system has already changed beyond recognition, so why not demand further change?

Why Consciousness Created A Universe

In order to understand the design of the universe, we have to know the ultimate desire of the creator. We will accept that the creator is a being with consciousness, who has desires, and has the intellectual capacity to design a place which enables the eventual fulfillment of this goal. We will also assume that the nature of the original consciousness can be approached by investigation of the creation, therefore we find that the creator must have both masculine and feminine characteristics, and that there is both internal character and external form to this being. The universe itself represents at least part of the external form.

The motivation is one of love, the desire to experience joy and relationship with and through another. However, joy experienced in and through a lesser being would necessarily be a lesser joy, therefore the desire of god is to create other beings as much like god as possible. Thus we find they need to be able to create, not just follow along a predetermined path, and we expect co-creatorship to be a part of the design of the resultant beings. Through beings created in the image of God, then God can have actual experience within the created realm, experience with real consequences and thus deep meaning, unlike experiences solely within the imagination.

Therefore we find the challenge of God in creating is how to make a being who is both other than God and the same as God, who is like God but has become like God through his or her own free choices. Thus the growth from potential to actuality is a necessary part of creation. Time is conceived as the separation between the organism at one stage of development and the organism at a later stage, with the organism being both the same and also more mature. Since we are familiar with growth from childhood to adulthood that is not a hard concept for us.

However, before the concept of growth, it is necessary to distinguish an organism from the collective universal oneness into a separate existence. Thus the concept of space is born as a separation between God and each created being, as well as between the different created beings. In order to create space, however, God must create an arena in which this can all take place, and given that there is nothing outside of God, the way to create something other can be achieved by making a realm that is finite and thus limited,  which then must necessarily exist within God’s own internal being while also being different from God’s internal being.

God would naturally have to be described as infinite dimensional, which we can think of as either filling all possible conceptual infinite-dimensional spaces to infinite extent, or as a single point of zero extension within a potential space of infinite dimensions. To a mathematician it is acceptable to equate these two in some sense.

Thus in creating a universe, God creates something other than himself by creating a realm of finite dimensionality. We observe a universe of three space dimensions plus one time dimension, although our theoretical models today permit of much higher dimensionality. Thus the physical spacetime exists as a subset of the consciousness of God, when we think of consciousness as an extended field that permeates all of reality, and exists as the “ground of our being”, to use a term common in religious circles. Thus space within this conceptual place represents the separation of the organism from the collective, allowing a collective consciousness to be expressed within a finite, four dimensional realm. Thus a human being exists both within God and separate from God.

It is necessary to establish the design in accordance with the desire to give both freedom and direction to the created beings, and indeed to the whole universe. The universe itself is the manifestation of consciousness, existing within and totally dependent upon universal consciousness. However, cocreation demands freedom of choice. There is little value in a being who reaches maturity simply by making predetermined choices and consequently growing in accordance with a pattern. If God wants safety and security, and to avoid pain, then there is no need to go beyond determinism, but if God wants something more than a robotic creation, then God must accept the reality of being actually vulnerable to the choices of her created beings. And God wants as close to other gods as it is possible to make, because great joy requires great investment of heart and love and trust.

However, God’s capacity for self-expression would be severely restricted if the only organisms available were bacteria, and so it is necessary to create a being with the internal mind and external body able to express the depths of heart necessary to manifest joy and external accomplishment through self-actualization. God wants the actual experience of day to day life, of the expression of love between two people, or two gods-made-manifest. Thus there has to be some way for God to guide the process of evolution so that God’s desires and original purpose can be accomplished, while at the same time safe-guarding the free will of the created beings. Both internal and external natures develop through the process of evolution.

Thus the universe is created to respond to desire of the created organisms, from elementary particle to human, because everything participates in universal consciousness by virtue of its very nature. Consciousness here is seen as a field underlying everything, undifferentiated except through the process of tying it down to an existence within the finite dimensional realm.

The physical universe exists as separate “droplets”; even space and time are not infinitely small, but have a smallest extension, a granularity. Physics of the twentieth century discovered this when it looked at the smallest scales, and found the quantum nature of everything. The smallest length and the smallest time are known as the Planck length and time, after Max Planck. Thus reality can be considered to consist of tiny grains. The essential nature of all creation is that of change or growth, not static existence. In accordance with A. N. Whitehead, we can suppose that the whole universe is recreated, or made manifest, at every instant of granular time, so that it is recreated every moment on a different basis, since it recreates itself in accordance with its own nature, which reflects how much movement there has been towards its own growth.

Consciousness within a four dimensional manifold is not fully expressed immediately, but rather this expression develops over time, it grows in manifestation according to the desire of the beings within the created world.  Thus it is both God’s consciousness and becoming God’s consciousness, just as a baby is both being herself and becoming herself.

God has now become totally vulnerable to the lowest expression of consciousness, because there is nothing to pull the elementary particle towards anything higher except for the fact of its own participation within consciousness. If the elementary particle decides to remain solely an elementary particle for all eternity, then that is how God will be forced to remain in his self-manifested form. However, the nature of consciousness is such that God has confidence that sooner or later an elementary particle somewhere will find the desire within to experience more. It will not be a self-reflective thought, it will not be expressed in words, but it will be a felt desire, a wondering in some sense if this is all, an urge towards growth and greater meaning.

We experience the internal nature of the elementary particle as its tendency to behave in an ordered pattern, which we describe as obeying the laws of nature. Obviously this is not the same as the internal nature of an organism, higher or lower, but it is also not nothing.

Now God has designed the world exactly in such a way as to respond to desire, because that is the meaning behind everything in creation. As soon as a particle desires to grow, even the tiniest leaning towards growth, there must be a mechanism to respond. God cannot respond to his own creation from outside of it, since that is how God designed it, to be completely self-determining, and there is no mechanism for an insubstantial being to interact with a substantial being. However, clearly this is of great priority, so in order to respond God had to have created also a world which can reach down to the desire and offer a path whereby such a desire can be substantiated. Even for a particle though, that path is not absolute, it can still choose. Generally choice increases as the organism grows in complexity, but to be consistent we must recognize that even a particle has some element of choice in a response.

Most particles are fine with remaining static, with remaining in their law-like behavior, but there is now one particle that has discovered a desire to allow the greater expression of consciousness, that has found a desire to move towards life, albeit unknowingly of course. Given that the universe recreates itself at every instant of time, at the next instant it is already a different universe, it is on a different foundation. We know from quantum entanglement that once a state has been chosen, determined by the collapse of the wave function into an actual choice of how to substantiate, then this is immediately, instantaneously, communicated to all other particles that have ever been in contact with this particle, which of course at this point we can take to be the whole universe.

Thus the particle aspect of the created being has influenced the internal distributed wave-aspect of reality. This influence then makes it somewhat more likely that other particles will make that same choice, will resonate with the desire for greater internal expression, and given that there has probably been already a very long time of existing as a lower level creation, the universe exists in a state of preparedness, so that it is likely that the desire can spread rapidly and create a sudden discontinuity in the state of matter in the created world. This brings to mind the idea of archetypes within the collective unconscious which affect the thought and behavior of humans, according to the theory of Carl Jung.

Teilhard de Chardin expresses this as a discontinuity in state, leading to the growth of the elementary freedoms in accordance with the growing synthesis of atoms and molecules subtended by growing consciousness. As greater consciousness becomes substantiated, so a greater complexity is manifested within the universe. And this in defined by the choices of the created beings themselves, not dictated by God.

How can a choice be reinforced without taking away from the freedom of choice? How does this differ from God simply dictating the next step?

For this we can look to the idea of morphological fields, as described by Rupert Sheldrake, among others, as a mechanism for the development of shape and behavior of the organism over time. Everything that exists in separated form within creation also participates in the universal oneness underlying it, so the internal nature of everything can be described also mathematically, as scientific fields, like the electromagnetic field, or the gravitational field. Ultimately of course these reflect and participate in the field of consciousness. Thus a change in an organism from one generation to the next is also reflected by a change in the holistic field within which the organism participates. The organism has both “wave and particle” nature, although this needs better vocabulary on the higher end of the evolutionary scale.

Thus, within a field, there exists waves or vibrations that reflect or carry the change that has occurred. Choice begins the change, and substantiation strengthens the change.

Let us suppose that God has some idea of the eventual bodily form of the human, (whether this is the ultimate creation or not), and let us place this idea within the imagination of God. So there is a goal of evolution, there is some teleological aspect of evolution, but free will is preserved  if choice is still honored. There can be no mechanism for direct influence of the physical world, other than through the internal nature of the created beings, so the ultimate goal of the form of the organism must lie in some other realm, which leads us to postulate that there must be a realm which has been variously described by many people throughout history where the ultimate form exists already in perfected state.

We might postulate that the perfect horse is already manifested, along the lines of Plato’s perfect form, but there is no absolute need of this to explain the directed nature of evolution. Each step occurs on the basis of a resonance between the vibrations within the morphological field within the physical world, and vibrations in the corresponding field in the spirit world. However, each step is already completely contained with the ultimate endpoi nt of creation, which we will for now take to be the human. And so if the perfected human form exists within the spiritual substantial creation, there will be vibrations corresponding to every step towards that, at least on the level of morphic development. Every step is seen in the physical world as being on the path towards this external form, but not continuing on to the completed form. Thus everything in existence is patterned after the human form, but is not necessarily going to go all the way to that end.

From this, we can suggest that the reason for the existence of angels is to be that perfected form of the eventual human, or at least to manifest that form so as to set up the vibrations necessary to resonate with the developing organisms within the physical world. This does not conflict with the desire of God to confer freedom of choice, because the spirit world does not exist as the pinnacle of God’s creation, only the ultimate destiny of the matured, or completely manifested, human. It seems likely that each spiritual being has both a physical body, and a spiritual body simultaneously, since the most natural mechanism would be resonance between the two bodies of the same person, while the spiritual body of a person generates a field which resonates with the morphic fields within the spiritual realms.

The spirit world then exists as a lesser manifestation of God, until the human reaches the state of spiritual accomplishment or manifestation that was originally desired when God created. Thus even though humans may be the ultimate pinnacle of creation, there is still a long way to go, because it certainly looks like humans have made some wrong turns along the road of evolution. And of course cocreatorship allows that to happen. At this point, we mostly assume that the angels are higher beings than we are, but ultimately it would seem that we are destined to be greater than the angels in that we will have created ourselves. We will have become manifestations of the nature of divinity by self-creation, as opposed to being created already completed.

Humans like to think of themselves as the final goal of evolution, and there are some reasons to think this might be so, but there is certainly no proof of this. In order to be the pinnacle of creation, then humans would have to demonstrate a divine capacity, which they seem far from demonstrating at this time. However, humans are still evolving. One reason why we might think that humans are the end point is that they have filled the whole space available for them without morphing into two or more species. Generally once species attain their final state, as they expand and experience the same forces of gradual change as before, sooner or later they have split into more than one species.

God incarnate will be gradually be more completely manifested through the process of evolution, and every step will be by free will, from the bottom up. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight, especially since we are only just on the verge of escaping from the earth itself and exploring out into space. We are in fact in a very primitive state, and even most likely in a state very backward from what God might reasonably have expected.

God cannot know the choices that will be made. God chooses self-limitation in her relationship with her children, and God goes through every step of the way, suffering and rejoicing with her children. However, the ultimate fate of these children is to be very like God, and God is confident that ultimately humans will tire of exploring all the negative avenues, and will decide instead to make positive choices.

Religion has been both a vehicle for communicating truth, and a disaster that has created a huge gulf between people and their God.