The Zeitgeist of Our Time

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I was in a conversation recently about the zeitgeist of our current time with a group of friends and was reminded of the film The Golden Compass.  In that film Lyra, the main character, has an alethiometer, a compass-like artifact that reveals the truth.

What a wonderful invention!! 

In our time where truth seems to have become fungible, one alternate fact easily replacing an actual fact, we are living in one world but "sharing" different realities.  What is the word for that?  

Schizophrenia?  

When I was growing up we did not "curate" our "self image" as teens.  We were just kids being kids. Maybe when you went to write your college entrance exam you burnished up your image a bit, but it was not a full time job. 

It is as if there are two of us.  Our real self and the one we "present" to the world. 

What I'm getting at is that there is a deep seated inauthenticity about the times we are living in.  AI can generate fake video, fake photos, fake authorship and even deep fake voice prints of people saying stuff they never uttered. 

But who are we?  And who do we need to be for our time? 

Here's a few queries that have come to my mind that may help clarify those two questions: 

1. What can a human being authentically generate? 
2. What can a human being, as a spiritual being, bring into existence from that which is God within us? 
3. What is real? And What is truth? And what is  our own internal Aleithiometer? 

Not easy questions but worth asking. 

At the end of the Golden Compass Lyra destroys the thing that tears children from their souls.  As an observer of both history and society, it seems that we are in the process of crumbling.  Old forms are breaking down so new forms can take their place. 

The essential element at the center of all of this is discernment.  That good old Quaker value that has us pause and listen for wisdom.   That might just be our Golden Compass.   

~ Joseph OLejak