Flowmonics and Christianity - Part 1 of 3

The War Christianity Could Not End

Why Unconditional Love Remains in Conflict with Self-Preservation

Christianity Promised Transformation. The Struggle Remains.

Think about the person you like to believe you ought to be. The patience you wish you had more of. The kindness you intended to show but didn’t. The forgiveness you know would be better than resentment. The generosity you admire until somebody asks more of you than you feel you can afford. The Love you believe ought to be unconditional—until someone humiliates you, betrays you, refuses to reciprocate, or threatens something you cannot bear to lose.

You know the difference between the person you want to be and the person you sometimes become when life becomes difficult.

The apostle Paul captured this inner conflict well when he said: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” Christianity took that inner contradiction seriously. It saw something extraordinary in the human capacity to love, and something equally troubling in our inability to live consistently according to it.

Part of its answer was to increase the pressure. Love your neighbour as yourself. Forgive those who wrong you. Care for the stranger. Love even your enemies. These weren’t just moral recommendations or admirable ideals, but divine commands. Christianity did not invent human compassion, but it elevated Unconditional Love into a moral demand of remarkable scope. It offered humanity a vision of what we could become. But it also recognised that the inner conflict is real, and it offered believers a way to return to the ideal. So, when you fail, repent, seek forgiveness, receive grace and begin again. It worked remarkably well.

The problem is that after two thousand years, the constant struggle between what the believer does and what they ought to do is painfully unresolved. Christians can be loving, generous and forgiving; they can also be jealous, vindictive and cruel. That’s no different from most good non-Christians. Sure, Christian communities achieve astonishing good, but they also reproduce the status contests and defensive hostilities seen elsewhere. After all Christianity’s influence, its followers, as a recognisable whole, still face the ordinary struggle between self-protection and Love. They are, after all, still human. They have a powerful language for their failures and for returning to the ideal, but the underlying struggle persists.

The question is why Unconditional Love is not more sustainable. Christianity promised transformation, not merely recovery from failure. Paul claimed: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” If this were true and Unconditional Love had become their prevailing way of life, the difference would be hard to miss. We would unmistakably know believers by their fruits. Yet after two thousand years the familiar cycle remains: aspiration, failure, guilt, repentance and renewed determination. For the secular person, the equivalent cycle is aspiration, failure, remorse, self-reflection, acceptance of responsibility and renewed commitment to moral improvement. For both, the next serious threat can send them down again. The difference between the two groups isn’t as great as one might expect, given that the creator of everything is involved in one of them. Christianity clearly envisioned transformation; the question is why its foundations failed to make Love the Christian Self’s ordinary operating principle, rather than just a practical way to return to the ideal. Sure, an invaluable contribution, but one that falls short of sufficiently reducing the failure rate itself so the fruit becomes the absolute norm. Are we to accept that Paul’s lament points to persistent Unconditional Love remaining an ideal?

Flowmonics makes a far more confrontational proposal than simply attempting to replace God with a secular moral code. Christianity saw the goal but misunderstood what would make it sustainable. Its spiritual resources can strengthen the aspiration to love, but have not reliably persuaded the survival-oriented Self that such Love serves its own interests. Flowmonics argues that the obstacle is not a defective, hardened, corrupt nature to be denied, renewed and spiritually transformed. That’s a sledgehammer hitting a rock that restores itself. Instead, it sees our so-called “fallen nature” as an extraordinary and necessary survival system, operating with an antiquated understanding of what it is, what threatens it, and what serves it. So the claim is that it is not a corrupted nature that needs transformation, but an outdated understanding.

If we want Unconditional Love to become more than an occasional heroic exception when we are under pressure, evolving Christianity’s greatest achievement means asking whether its explanation of how it is made possible—divine grace—is the very thing we need to move beyond.

In this three-part essay, we will explore what that means.

There Was Never a War Between Two Selves

Christianity recognised the distance between who we want to be and who emerges when we feel threatened. But why does that struggle persist even when we sincerely want to love? That question can be asked by a secular person as well. Perhaps the problem begins with Christianity’s interpretation of the conflict itself. To see why, we need to reconsider what the Self actually does when danger changes its priorities.

In the Garden of Eden story, the serpent tempts Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. She gives some to Adam, and their eyes are opened. They become conscious of their nakedness and of good and evil. Flowmonics reads this as a metaphor for the mind becoming aware of itself and, with that awareness, realising that some things threaten its survival, while others offer opportunities to secure it. One could even argue that the serpent was a tool God used to make sure no human conception of ultimate unity remains by placing Himself on the side of good and the serpent on the side of evil. To make sure we understood which side we were supposed to pick, God lowered evil’s status by cursing the serpent to crawl on its belly and eat dust for the rest of its life.

The stage for conflict was set. It didn’t take us long to realise that it wasn’t just the world that was divided into two camps, but that we too could do things that threatened others, and things that let others flourish. We could do good or evil, too. We also realised that doing evil is usually a bad idea in a relational context that offers survival benefits such as additional resources, information, abilities, connections and emotional support. So Christianity asks us not to do evil: be kind, do good, be patient, don’t be quick to anger, forget envy, forgive others, and so on, so our bonds with others can remain open and productive.

However, that was easier said than done. If there’s one thing a survival system knows, it is that threats, especially imminent ones, are often far more important to deal with decisively than to be nice to others. Anger, fear, unkindness, impatience, cruelty, envy, jealousy, and other such responses help the survival self deal with danger. The alternatives take more time and energy, involve more uncertainty and therefore carry greater risks. So when a threat shows up, the quicker, easier, and more decisive course of action is fear, anger, and whatever else follows.

Here Christianity made a mistake that threatened to shackle its own ambitions: it was careless with its language. It portrayed the moral life as a spiritual struggle: flesh against Spirit, the carnal mind against the spiritual mind, the old Self against the new. It did not literally propose two independent selves, nor did it teach that every natural impulse was sinful. Yet its language of crucifixion, mortification and spiritual warfare encouraged an understanding of moral development in which certain dimensions of human nature could come to be experienced as enemies to be overcome. The impulse to protect oneself, the anger provoked by injustice and the desire to defend one’s dignity could be mistaken for manifestations of the flesh, even when they served legitimate human needs. What might have been understood as a struggle to reconcile the different demands of life could instead become a struggle against one’s own nature. The danger was not simply that the Self would fail to love, but that its very efforts to become more loving could deepen its internal conflict. That sits at the heart of the problem.

Flowmonics begins from a different understanding. It rejects the assumption that conflicting human impulses must reflect opposing moral or spiritual natures. We are one Self, acting through one mind whose priorities shift with circumstances. We can call its two principal orientations the survival-oriented Self and the relation-oriented Self to make their different priorities easier to understand. The former prioritises immediate safety, protection, and the defence of one’s interests; the latter, connection, cooperation, trust, and the maintenance of relationships. These are not independent personalities or opposing natures, nor is one inherently defective while the other is morally elevated. Language matters. They are different expressions of a single nature, responding to different demands of existence. Both serve the fundamental imperative to sustain life, whether through immediate protection or through the relationships upon which human survival and flourishing depend. There is one Self, one nature, and no necessary war between them, only different outcomes.

Imagine being publicly humiliated by somebody whose judgement matters to you. A moment earlier, you could see that person’s perspective, the value of your relationship, and several constructive ways to respond. Then your attention fixes on the insult and the loss of social status. Your face grows hot. Your chest tightens. Suddenly the immediate issue is not understanding, but defence. You need to restore your reputation, silence them, justify yourself or withdraw before you suffer further damage. Instead of responding with patience, kindness, humility, and self-control, you may react with anger, pride, resentment, bitterness, or a desire for retaliation, becoming defensive, accusatory, unforgiving, or deliberately hurtful.

Your capacity to understand the wider situation has not disappeared. You may even know, as the anger rises, that retaliation might make matters worse. That is why the experience might feel like an inner conflict. Conscious awareness can hold both possibilities in view, model their consequences and wish the more relational response carried greater force. But the importance we assign to responding quickly to the immediate threat has shifted the balance. The mind has limited time, resources, attention and understanding. At the same time, powerful emotions can lock in the priorities through which it evaluates its options. In that moment, the immediate survival concern dominates. Anger, retaliation, or withdrawal can seem like the more sensible response. These are ordinary features of a survival system that helped life flourish long before we understood good and evil. The mind chooses that course of action because it’s the best option available at that moment, taking into account its full internal landscape and external circumstances.

This is not an indication of a fallen nature. This is not sin. It is an evolutionary achievement. Life learned to recognise threats and opportunities, assign them urgency, and do what it needs to survive given what it knows, how it thinks, what it feels, etc. Sometimes immediate protection really should outrank every wider consideration.

Christianity identified the persistence of sin as the obstacle to living continuously in Love, and understood the transformation of human nature through divine grace as the solution. But by casting the moral life as a struggle between flesh and Spirit, it risked obscuring a more fundamental possibility: that the difficulty lies not in human nature’s inherent opposition to love, but in the failure to reconcile its different and legitimate demands. The desire to protect oneself, the experience of anger, the demand for justice and the capacity for forgiveness need not be opposing forces. They can be understood as dimensions of a single Self whose moral development depends not upon the defeat of one by another, but upon their integration. Christianity didn’t know how to do it, so it chose the only alternative it could recognise: make them enemies and defeat the one who fails at Love.

The point Flowmonics makes is not to fight, suppress, or demonise that self-focused survival impulse, but to fully accept it and then change what causes it to act against Love, if it’s the better option at that moment. We don’t need a divine command. We don’t need to crucify the flesh. We need to love ourselves more fully by better understanding the nature of the world and the part we play. And yet, there is a reason why Christianity used the wrong language to describe the Self, not least because the solution to our struggle to love more fully isn’t that simple.

Jesus Broke the Ledger. But Who Pays the Giver?

Flowmonics argued above that there are not two incompatible selves to reconcile, or that, at the very least, we should not use that type of language. The same Self shifts its priorities as threats rise and recede. But that explains only why Love can lose influence under pressure. Where Christianity’s commendable command to love unconditionally is concerned, it doesn’t explain how a system that must maintain its resources can afford Love when the recipient offers nothing in return. Matthew wrote: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Love is not supposed to depend upon whether its recipient deserves it. That can be very powerful to create, maintain, or strengthen relational bonds through which flourishing can flow. But that is a very high-risk strategy for a survival-oriented system. Christianity recognised that difficulty.

Its answer reveals the next weakness.

The command to love one’s enemies is revolutionary because it collides with the ordinary terms upon which living systems cooperate. If you love someone who loves you, the relationship can be mutually beneficial. Give to someone who gives back, and both may flourish. But love somebody who despises you, help somebody who cannot repay you, or forgive somebody who has taken more than they gave—now we encounter a problem that moral admiration alone cannot easily resolve.

A survival-oriented system must balance its books. It needs sufficient resources, information, abilities, security and connections to preserve itself and improve its prospects. Its priorities are not set by detached moral contemplation. They develop around what matters for its continuation. Someone who only gives will soon have nothing left to give.

Flowmonics holds that every human motive, however generous, serves the Self’s survival and flourishing. At its foundation, we are survival-systems. Period. But the Self is more than the physical body. It inhabits an inner world of relationships, meanings and identities, prioritised by their survival value and enforced by emotion.

As a complex, evolved system, it is not perfect. Because evaluation and priority-setting happen largely beneath awareness, a survival resource, such as a loved one, can outweigh other survival priorities, especially when feedback loops are involved. In extreme cases, that means even physical survival itself might rank lower. This is also what happens when the mind prioritises shutting down a very painful emotion and gives it the highest priority, motivating someone to end their life. The flaw is structural: the mind doesn’t directly measure what best serves survival, but relies on urgency and importance signals that evolved to support different aspects of survival. Sometimes, one of those signals can become so amplified or misaligned that it can take precedence over physical survival itself. In fact, all acts of apparent sacrifice rest on this, so in some cases it’s a flaw, but it’s also what makes Unconditional Love even possible.

This does not make Love inauthentic; it explains why expressions of genuine Love feel selfless. This is also precisely why love relations sometimes end: the priority shifts from using another to meet certain survival needs to self-reliance, to another source, or simply because the cost becomes too high or risky. So for us, feeling Love and ignoring the survival calculations running beneath the hood remains important; it keeps the mind focused on what matters to it. But the key phrase here is: “what matters to IT.” If Love were wholly independent of the Self’s changing needs and circumstances, those changes could not determine whether it endured. Yet even the Bible acknowledges that Love can grow cold.

Our survival-oriented nature is why reciprocity emerged as one of life’s great survival-improvement solutions. I help you because it makes it more likely you will help me by giving me access to benefits I couldn’t secure alone so readily—resources, time, attention, information, abilities, connections and even support with modulating emotions. Families, friendships and civilisations depend upon that cooperation. There is nothing shameful about it. We wouldn’t be here without it. Christianity also leaves the door open to reciprocity through the familiar instruction: “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you.” It does not demand repayment, but it encourages the mutual regard that lets reciprocal relationships flourish.

But reciprocity carries a vulnerability. The Self that gives must believe repayment will eventually arrive and the balance will be restored. When the return doesn’t show up or appears insufficient, attention turns towards what has been lost. The recipient is no longer simply someone we care about; they become someone who owes us. The system often allows for a lot of patience. Still, if the imbalance is not sufficiently restored, both parties become defensive, and a relationship that once helped them flourish begins to threaten them.

To its credit, Christianity saw the trap. It made a series of moves to address it, but they contained a vital weakness.

First, it tried to break the ledger between giver and recipient. Love those who do not love you. Give without demanding repayment. Jesus tells his listeners to love their enemies and lend without expecting anything back.

Next, in the same breath, it offered to rebalance the ledger by promising a great reward. That is revealing. Christianity didn’t eliminate the need for return. It relocated the return to God. God sees the sacrifice. God loves the giver. Grace can strengthen the person, and a heavenly reward may await. These convictions have inspired extraordinary generosity. Christianity did not ignore the survival-oriented Self’s need to balance its ledger. Instead, it shifted the value meant to offset the sacrifice onto a divine promise. That was a clever move and most definitely bore fruit.

However, when immediate threats pressure the survival-oriented Self, that promise may struggle to outweigh what feels more urgently real. The substance of what I hold in one hand will always outweigh faith’s so-called evidence of what I hope lies unseen in the other. So Christianity has broken the moral claim that another person must repay us. It has not reliably taught the threatened Self that the psychological return is secure enough to make Love its preferred strategy. That meant Christianity showed the way but couldn’t prevent Unconditional Love from becoming a constant struggle against the Self’s shifting survival priorities.

Flowmonics begins by accepting, without apology, that the Self that continually depletes itself cannot sustain Love, because it cannot sustain the capacities through which Love is expressed. It also accepts the Christian solution that for Unconditional Love to become a stable strategy rather than an occasional sacrifice, the return must come from somewhere other than the recipient.

The agreement is therefore: Unconditional Love does not mean giving without receiving value. It means giving without requiring the receiver to provide that value.

The question is then: how do we reduce the cycle of aspiration, failure, guilt, repentance and renewed determination that Christianity condemned its followers to? And for more secular-oriented people: how do we decrease the cycle of aspiration, failure, remorse, self-reflection, accepting responsibility, and renewed commitment to moral improvement?

Flowmonics proposes that we set aside the weak point—divine promise, or, in the secular person’s case, the absence of a promise—and ask what reality itself provides. Can constructive participation in reality, understood differently, give the Self profound meaning, purpose, orientation, worth, belonging, continuity and confidence in the future? If the answer is ‘yes’ and that return is sufficiently valuable, the survival system need not betray its interests by giving without expecting repayment. It can discover that Unconditional Love in an intrinsically meaningful reality serves its own continuation and flourishing, balancing the ledger without requiring another person to settle the account. Unconditional Love becomes possible not because God commands it or because it’s a worthy moral ideal, but because it directly and demonstrably benefits the Self’s survivability.

Christianity asks God to repay us for making sacrifices—eternal life, forgiveness, blessings, healing, peace, joy and fulfilment. Flowmonics proposes securing that return in the reality that produces and sustains the Self—making it part of who and what the Self is, and therefore more consistent, reliable, and accessible than dependence on an unseen divine promise. That’s something the rational Self can get on board with.

Christianity Asked Love to Cross a Divide. Flowmonics Questions the Divide.

We’ve just uncovered that Christianity recognised that the person receiving our Love need not repay us. It offered God as another source of return. Flowmonics then accepted that the Self must receive sufficient value. Still, it challenged where the return should come from to reliably meet the survival-oriented Self’s needs.

Both these approaches face a challenge. There is a bridge that must be crossed between what is Self and that which is not Self. The danger this bridge poses is that the Self’s view of the world tends to constantly contract its field of concern around its centre of awareness: here, me, mine. 

Christianity seeks to overcome this self-centredness through divine grace: the Holy Spirit transforms the Self, redirecting its Love from itself towards God and, through God, towards others. By recognising others as equally loved by God, the Self is called to transcend the boundaries of its own immediate interests. We know this understanding doesn’t fully resolve the struggle. Divine Love may inspire the Self to take others’ concerns seriously. Still, it does not eliminate the impulses that repeatedly draw that concern back to the Self’s more immediate inner needs.

Flowmonics therefore asks: “What if the ordinary boundary between our interests and those of others is itself too narrow?” 

Consider what a person actually is. You are the sum of all influences that shape you: genes, upbringing, language, relationships, losses, discoveries, fears, hopes, beliefs and much more.

Your thoughts and emotions influence your decisions; your decisions shape your actions; your actions change what other people think and feel. Those changes, in turn, shape the decisions and actions of those you’ve influenced, spreading until the world is different from what it would have been if you didn’t think those thoughts or feel those feelings.

No isolated individual stands outside this process. One continuous causal reality, which Flowmonics calls the All-Flow, underpins it all. You are a local configuration of the All-Flow, where influences interact in a particular way, transforming what enters into what leaves. Other local configurations—other people, objects, systems and events—do the same. The All-Flow isn’t something outside them pushing them around like puppets: each is part of that continuous reality, distinguishable by its local interactions but never causally separate from the whole. It is one system. We see separation because we’ve become self-aware and it is necessary for survival, but at its foundation we are one.

Christianity finds unity in God, the common source and sustainer of all life, and calls us to express that unity through Love. It can speak of God dwelling within believers and of believers forming one body. God is the linchpin holding that unity together. Take God away, and the foundation of that Christian unity collapses. Its weakness, for the survival-oriented Self under pressure, is that its ultimate source still lies beyond the people it unites.

Flowmonics finds unity in existence’s causal reality. We are not isolated beings who must somehow become connected; we are already inseparable parts of one unfolding process. Our individuality is real, but our separation is not. It is perceptual. To love another is therefore not to reach across an ultimate divide, but to care for another expression of the same reality to which we ourselves belong. That’s huge.

This does not mean my awareness is your awareness or that individual differences do not matter. Quite the opposite. Flowmonics understands the Self as a unique point of conscious hereness: a persistent centre from which everything else is encountered. One can imagine it as a subjective 0,0,0 coordinate that only the Self can occupy. The hereness is the centre of experience, not an independent chooser standing outside the mind. The mind is the wider, changing organisation of memory, emotion, understanding and decision-making through which that Self lives and acts. Thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations are experienced in relation to that centre. Relatively enduring patterns become recognised as one’s mind, body, memories and history. In other words, the Self is a local centre of awareness within the All-Flow, not a separate object disconnected from it.

Your uniqueness lies in the particular way the local flow giving rise to your self-awareness transforms what enters into what leaves. Nobody else occupies your position in the causal story. Yet what you call your life is inseparable from everything that shaped it, everything it changes and everything through which those changes continue. You are fundamentally one with reality, not through faith in God but through our everyday experiences of causation.

Christianity commands Love for one’s neighbour. Flowmonics proposes that you and your neighbour are already fundamentally one system; part of one causal flow in which you both participate. That means their flourishing changes the conditions within which conscious life, including yours, develops. Serving the wider field is not serving things that stand separate from you; it is serving yourself; it changes the reality through which your own existence unfolds.

Of course, causal unity alone does not mean every generous act eventually sends a reward back to its author. It need not. The whole causal field is altered by every contribution, including those whose outcomes no one can trace. So the Self gets a more immediate, dependable benefit from knowing what kind of participation its actions represent. Every act of kindness, goodness, patience, tolerance, endurance, forgiveness, compassion, faith in others and hope makes a difference across the full timeframe of our continuity.

This is why the Christian command can be reframed rather than abandoned. Love your neighbour as yourself, yes—but begin by understanding that the Self whose interests you are protecting has never been separate from the reality in which your neighbour exists. Again, the point is not to erase self-interest or demonise its actions with the language of separatness, sin and fallen natures. It is to free self-interest from an unnecessarily small idea of the Self. That is what Christianity ought to have recognised.

Causal oneness widens what the Self can care about. The question now is whether reality can give that Self the meaning, worth, belonging, and continued existence it needs to love without demanding repayment.

In Part II of the series, we will confront Christianity’s profound divine promises with Flowmonics’ alternative foundations.