Flowmonics and Christianity - Part 2 of 3

From Divine Promises to Meaning, Worth and Conscious Continuation Within Reality

What God Was Supposed to Provide, Reality Already Does.

The more secure people feel in their access to sufficient resources, knowledge and abilities, and the more they experience the Love and support of others, the easier it becomes to give without expecting anything in return.

Christianity speaks to this human difficulty at a deeper level. It recognises that commanding people to love others as God loves them is not enough when doing so threatens their own well-being, flourishing or survival. Love requires more than a moral obligation; it requires a Self sufficiently grounded to risk giving without demanding repayment. Christianity therefore offers not only a commandment to love, but the assurance that we are already loved. It offers the Self a foundation that does not depend entirely on what it possesses, achieves, or receives from others. By loosening the grip of fear and self-preservation, this grounding creates greater freedom to choose and express the Love described as a fruit of the Spirit, even when giving involves sacrifice.The mind’s psychological load-bearing forces—meaning, purpose, self-worth, belonging, and continuity—are not decorative additions to life. They organise anticipation, motivation and emotional priority. When they are insecure, a local setback can become an existential crisis. Lose a job when your worth depends upon your career, and you may feel worthless, become depressed and fail to grab hold of opportunities for flourishing. Lose a partner when belonging depends upon the relationship, and your world can collapse. Death threatens even the future in which meaning might continue.

Christianity’s genius, and ultimate weakness, was to move the foundations beyond ordinary circumstances. Your life matters because God created it. You have a purpose because God intends something for you. You have worth because God loves you. You belong within God’s family. Your existence has a future because God promises eternal life. Earthly circumstances can change; the divine foundation is meant to remain. So now the survival-oriented Self can love unconditionally because the recipient no longer has to offer anything in return; the reward comes from its secured load-bearing forces and all the survival benefits they bestowed on the Self.

It worked, but only to some extent. Grounding those foundations in a supernatural source required faith. Faith is not the abandonment of reason: it lets reason proceed where established facts are unavailable, using trusted propositions as working foundations. For Christianity, divine revelation supplies those propositions. Yet beliefs differ in how securely they rest on known facts; Christianity’s central supernatural claims remain beyond what available evidence can conclusively establish. The believer is asked to trust what is hoped for and to be assured about what cannot be seen. Under pressure, the survival-oriented Self often refuses that risk. Christian faith can strengthen the load-bearing forces, but that support can falter just when the perceived threat is greatest. The difficulty lies not simply in believing that one is unconditionally loved, but in trusting that Love is enough to let go of the conditions one places on loving others.

Flowmonics recognises the importance of the five psychological load-bearing forces—meaning, purpose, self-worth, belonging, and continuity—but poses a radical challenge: why place those foundations in an unseen God if reality itself can provide them?

That’s a big ask. Belief in a supernatural God offers something the natural world, it seems, cannot guarantee: an absolute, unconditional, enduring foundation for meaning, purpose, self-worth, belonging, and continuity, independent of changing circumstances, human failings, and even death. That’s always been religion’s big attraction. At first glance, the natural world offers no comparable assurance. Its relationships, resources and possibilities are finite, vulnerable and uncertain. To ground the Self in reality rather than divine authority is therefore to relinquish the promise of ultimate security and learn to find sufficient security within the turmoil of existence itself, without requiring existence to guarantee it. That’s a much weaker proposition.

Flowmonics, however, claims that we got it all wrong: reality can indeed offer a firm foundation—comparable with that offered by religion—for the mind’s load-bearing forces. And since the question is not simply what we ought to believe, but what understanding the threatened Self can make part of its own survival strategy, reality turns out to be the better option.

Let’s begin with meaning. Christianity confers ultimate meaning through God. Our existence and experiences matter within a larger, intelligible whole.

Flowmonics begins by clarifying the word meaning: meaning is the difference one thing makes to another. Gravity changes the behaviour of matter; a word changes understanding; a decision changes a future; a kindness may change a relationship. Meaning is difference-making. Anything that makes no difference whatsoever in all of reality is completely meaningless. We wouldn't even know it existed. As the Eden story symbolises, self-awareness introduced a very different form of difference-making: conscious life. It could model reality, make predictions, and deliberately redirect causal flows. That makes conscious life meaningful in a very unique way. Now we need to see whether our meaning matters within a larger, intelligible whole. It does.

Let’s now look at purpose. Christianity understands humanity’s ultimate purpose as loving communion with God and, through that Love, with others. However, if meaning is difference-making, then perfect communion as an ultimate purpose is paradoxical: once perfection is achieved, what difference remains to be made? Such purpose makes meaning redundant, and once that happens, then what’s the point except to persist in a pleasant but meaningless state of mind. The problem is that such purpose sounds inspiring; it offers a temporary emotional resolution without practical resolution.

Flowmonics asks what reality becomes when we expand our narrow vision of survival and look at what it has been becoming. From a singularity to chemistry, life, consciousness, societies and global civilisation, our history has produced extraordinary increases in coherence, capability and integration. The path was neither straight nor guaranteed: whole branches failed, and catastrophic losses occurred. Yet our lineage acquired the capacity to understand its conditions, cooperate across enormous distances, shape its environment and deliberately influence its future. Flowmonics interprets that history as a developmental trajectory that has undergone a radical transformation in potential since the advent of consciousness. The future possibilities are beyond imagination. When human beings combine their intelligence, imagination, communication and collective effort, their capacity to accomplish things becomes formidable. Even the Bible says as much when, in the story of the tower of Babel, it writes: “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

That is our purpose: conscious participation in this extraordinary, unfolding story of becoming something beyond imagination. It remains meaningful because our purpose continues to shape what reality is becoming through our participation. It is meaningful to us because that difference-making involves us; we are becoming more than we can imagine. It is a purpose we can own and advance.

Then self-worth. In Christianity, worth is ultimately secured by God’s Love. It assures you that your worth is untouchable because it is not based on what you do but on what God bestows. And yet, it offers no independently verifiable evidence of that worth beyond the faith required to believe it.

Flowmonics recognises the sustainability value of securing self-worth in something you don’t need to earn. Still, the mind needs confirmation. Flowmonics therefore starts by viewing every conscious person as a unique epicentre of influence within life’s larger trajectory toward integration, collaboration, and flourishing. What matters is not whether that person is rich, admired, powerful or visibly useful. It is that their mere existence inevitably changes the causal field from which the future we believe to be extraordinary emerges.

Consider something as trivial as taking one seat rather than another on a bus. It alters somebody else’s choice, their timing, the exact configuration of their next meeting, thoughts, feelings and decisions. Their future is now slightly different from what it would have been, and others’ futures are similarly affected by the person your seat choice affected, and so on. Eventually, everyone’s future is different from what it would have been if you sat in a different seat.

Now imagine the scientist who makes a major discovery. That moment is not the independent achievement of one isolated genius. It occurs as the sum of all influences. That includes every influence that ripples out from you, every moment of every day, into the full field of influences. It’s not that you directly contribute to the discovery; you contribute to the All-Flow, the sum of all influences, that made it possible. The scientist and the stranger belong to the same causal history; the visible contribution of one cannot be severed from the invisible influences of all others. Flowmonics grounds equal intrinsic worth in that shared participation in a trajectory it understands as positive overall, not in an impossible accounting of who produced the greatest measurable influence.

None of us stands outside that story or creates our influence from nothing. Flowmonics holds that the larger trajectory’s positive direction gives every participant positive significance, regardless of the local moral judgement of their actions. Worth is not a prize for having made fewer mistakes. Being part of this reality—its causal flow nature, what it formed us into and the positive trajectory this affords us—gives you intrinsic worth. The survival self can work with that because, with the right attitude, it can receive regular confirmation of its worth in the difference it makes in others' lives, without its worth depending on it.

Now belonging. Christianity offers the believer the assurance that they belong to God—the ultimate source of all existence. But again, the survival-oriented Self cannot see God, cannot touch Him, cannot stand in His presence as it can with the reality immediately before it. The Christian can believe in divine indwelling or experience what they take to be God’s presence, but that does not turn the unseen foundation into the substance of something directly seen or touched. There is still the attempt to find conviction in what is hoped for but cannot be seen. That foundation is too weak to help the survival-oriented self act in Unconditional Love while under pressure. That is why it keeps doing the things it does not want to do. The Christian belongs to God, and despite the claim that the Holy Spirit dwells within them, they are still capable of being cruel, unforgiving and fearful.

Flowmonics argue that profound belonging must be more fundamental than membership, acceptance, or even mutual affection to be effective. That is precisely what the causal nature of reality, whose processes we not only experience but make experiencing possible, offers us. You belong to the All-Flow because you can’t stand anywhere outside it. And you know it’s there because you can see the effects of causation in every thought, feeling, action and event. Being kind to someone is not only an outcome of the causal flow within you, but you can see its effects on the recipient; you can experience the causal flow of their reaction as it enters and flows through you, affecting your thoughts and feelings. 

Rejection may end a relationship; exclusion may remove you from a community; neither can expel you from this reality. The relationships of ordinary life remain precious, but they no longer carry the impossible burden of providing your entire justification for existing.

And so, here is the confrontation. Christianity recognised these load-bearing needs and promised to secure them in God. Flowmonics preserves them while relocating their foundation to reality itself, where they can become part of the survival-oriented Self’s being and survival resources. The meaning of life is not assigned by a supernatural will. It is part of what life is. Purpose grows from an unfolding trajectory. Worth and belonging are intrinsic and do not await approval. The question is which account the survival-oriented Self can make sufficiently its own so those foundations reshape its emotional priorities and make Unconditional Love more available. Do we choose a foundation where we outsource everything to an idea we hope exists or one that’s already profoundly meaningful and offers purpose, worth and belonging coupled with a vision of a future in which we become extraordinary beyond imagination?

Christianity’s Most Profound Promise And The More Likely Proposition From Flowmonics.

Meaning, purpose, worth and belonging may all be grounded in the reality that produced us. Yet one threat remains powerful enough to unsettle them all: the finality of death. If death ends consciousness, it also ends our access to everything we have spent our lives building: our possessions, knowledge, abilities, relationships, Love, and future possibilities. This need not diminish our willingness to love or make sacrifices. We routinely sacrifice time, comfort, resources, and opportunities for those who matter to us because their happiness and well-being enrich our own, and our relationships give life meaning. But there is a fundamental difference between making a sacrifice because the good it brings others also benefits us, and making one for another’s good without requiring any benefit to ourselves. When a sacrifice threatens our own well-being, offers no prospect of reciprocation, recognition or personal fulfilment, and may benefit a future we will never experience, what sustains our willingness to make it? Death does not undermine our reasons to love; it sharpens the question of whether we can love without making our own interests a condition of giving.

Christianity offers a powerful solution: everlasting life. If the believer genuinely trusts this promise and expects salvation, earthly threats, losses and sacrifices become less absolute.

This has an important consequence for Love: the more secure the Self feels about its ultimate survival, the less urgently it needs to defend its immediate interests, potentially freeing it to love, give, and sacrifice without fear of ultimate loss. More importantly, whatever it gives to others without asking anything back pales in significance compared to what it ultimately receives back as a reward: an eternity with God. Christianity thus offers more than consolation about death. It offers a foundation for existential security that ought to transform the believer’s ability to love unconditionally. And yet, it doesn’t.

Christianity’s promise of eternal life offers profound reassurance, but its psychological power is limited when that reassurance depends primarily on faith in divine promise. The survival-oriented Self responds most strongly to what it experiences as real and certain. Consequently, the Self may intellectually accept eternal security without feeling secure.

But what if reason could explain the possibility of continued existence beyond death? What if the death of the body never implied the death of the conscious Self in the first place? What if the Christian hope for continuation points towards something real, but its explanation in terms of supernatural rescue is mistaken?

Such an understanding might give the Self a more convincing foundation for believing that death need not be the end.

That is the direction Flowmonics takes.  

To explain how this might be possible, we have to rebuild our understanding of who and what we are from the ground up. As long as we cannot fully explain how conscious experience arises from matter, the mystery leaves the back door open for supernatural explanations.

First, we have to unpack the peculiar difference between mind and matter, and how they can interact. How can thoughts you cannot see or prod with a finger manage to influence the physical brain so you can verbalise them? How does a nail going into your foot translate into a feeling of pain? We know a lot about electromagnetic waves and neural signals, but how do they become the experience of blueness? And apart from mind and matter, there’s also the very peculiar phenomenon of space and time that is neither mind nor matter.

Flowmonics proposes that the simplest answer is that mind, matter, space, and time share the same building blocks. Like Lego bricks, arrange them in one configuration, and you get a house; in another, a car; in yet another, a robot. The Lego bricks aren’t any of those objects, but creating a specific pattern allows the object to emerge from the bricks.

The puzzling question is what kind of neutral element can produce such different phenomena as mind, matter, space and time? That brings us back to our definition of meaning: meaning is the type of difference something makes to other things. So imagine an element whose nature is a specific type of difference-making; let’s say it’s position-ness. So this element’s difference-making is that it gives other elements position-ness. Another element could be set-ness. This one lets elements be together so they can make a difference to each other in the first place. This element makes the Universe one thing, makes you a thing, and holds this sentence and this word together. So without it, the position-ness element can’t give other elements a position because they might as well be in different Universes without it.

But what are these elements made of? The surprising thing is that the nature of all these elements is known to us in the same way blueness is known to us: they are the sense of blueness, position-ness, set-ness, spin-ness, etc. And that is why Flowmonics calls them Sensicles. It might sound strange to claim physical reality emerges from something non-physical, like sense-ness. Still, both the Bible and science claim something similarly non-material. The Bible speaks of the Logos, the divine Word through which all things came into existence, while modern physics describes matter as excitations of underlying quantum fields, with some theories suggesting that information may be more fundamental still. Yet neither fully explains the intrinsic nature of these foundations: theology invokes divine reason, while physics describes mathematical structures and their behaviour without conclusively revealing what they are in themselves. Flowmonics offers a possible answer: the Sensicles are the fundamental qualities of experience, and their interactions give rise to everything we recognise as physical reality.

So everything is a configuration of Sensicles that allows phenomena such as mind, matter, space, and time to emerge. However, if they are made from something whose nature is the sense of something, how can they be real? The simple answer is that something is real if it makes a difference to something else. A stone is real because it makes a difference to other things. It resists your hand when you push against it, breaks a window when you throw it, and displaces water when you submerge it. If you saw the stone and your hand went through it, it wouldn’t be a real stone but rather something like a real illusion. In other words, it would make a different type of difference and would therefore be a different type of real. So real is simply difference-making, and Sensicles are the most fundamental units of difference-making we know of.

Now the important part: to explain how we might survive the death of our bodies, we must understand that whatever emerges from a particular arrangement of Sensicles has its own rules. In fact, the rules are what emerges. They define the type of difference a Sensicle configuration makes. So matter follows the rules of matter, not space. And space follows the rules of space, not time. And mind follows the rules of mind and not any of the other.

Another important thing to realise is that, because mind, matter, space, and time are all made of Sensicles, they can make a difference to one another through the Set Sensicle. That is why space can create distance between particles, why mind and matter can interact, and why time plays a role in everything.

So where did the mind, and more importantly YOU, come from? For this, we need to look at evolution. The central nervous system evolved to integrate sensory information and coordinate bodily responses. This enabled organisms to respond more effectively to changes within themselves and their environment, improving their chances of survival.

According to Flowmonics, the central nervous system in some organisms gained a huge advantage: it incorporated a very basic Sensicle structure that wasn’t configured like matter. Imagine building a neuron shape from blue Lego bricks and sticking a yellow brick on top. So these new structures didn’t follow the same physics rules and weren’t affected by space the same way as matter does. There wasn’t any distance between them even when you attached them to anatomically unconnected neurons, and they did allow causation to affect them. This greatly expanded the brain’s capacity to integrate and process information, giving it a significant evolutionary advantage. It gave the densely connected neural network an extra layer of connections. It explains, within Flowmonics, why the brain developed the capacity to construct a unified mind from activity distributed across its neural systems.

Over time, increasingly sophisticated interactions between these patterns and neural activity helped develop the innate behavioural systems we recognise as instincts. But evolution did not stop there. These systems continued to develop alongside increasingly complex capacities for perception, learning, memory, and reasoning, eventually contributing to the emergence of modern humans’ sophisticated minds and, of course, self-awareness.

So how does this help you survive death? The key point is that, in Flowmonics theory, the physical brain is built from Sensicle patterns that emerge as matter, while the mind is a different kind of Sensicle organisation. It’s not matter-based, but it’s not supernatural either. It’s all part of this reality. The brain constructed and continually shaped the mind, but it did not construct the mind out of matter. It developed a non-material organisation with its own causal relations and its own means of maintaining coherence. Because that organisation is not made of physical particles, the death and decay of the brain do not themselves entail the destruction of the mind. Its causal activity can continue without the biological processes that first formed and shaped it. The persistent point of hereness that is YOU belongs to that mental organisation, not to a location in the brain. So the same experiencing Self can continue with its memories, accumulated understanding and developed emotional patterns. What survives is not merely stored information or a copy of you, but the continuing organisation through which you think, feel, choose and relate to others. You remain you.

Christianity promises that God will overcome death. Flowmonics proposes that bodily death does not annihilate the mind. Christianity places continuation in the hands of a divine power; Flowmonics places it within the nature of reality and its causal properties. The Christian ultimately places trust in an act of salvation. Flowmonics places confidence in a reasoned account of what the Self already is. Neither conviction becomes true merely because it is comforting; their difference lies in the kind of explanation the mind is asked to trust: one formulated thousands of years ago, before evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and modern scientific theories of consciousness, or one that draws upon two millennia of intellectual and scientific progress?

 

Christianity Promises Perfection. Flowmonics Keeps the Future Open.

Christianity and Flowmonics therefore disagree about what makes continuation possible: divine rescue, or the persistence of the mind’s own organisation. But the disagreement does not end with how we survive. It reaches into what survival means. The Self also needs to know that. Does eternity fulfil a perfected destiny in which the deepest struggle has ended, or allow the same Self to continue an open-ended journey of becoming? How do the two stack up against each other?

Christianity promises something extraordinary: eternal life perfected in God. No more sin, no more suffering, no more death. The struggle is over. Humanity is redeemed. God’s purpose is fulfilled. That sounds clean and simple.

But what happens to everything that makes being human such an extraordinary experience?

What becomes of achievement when failure is no longer possible, or courage when nothing remains to fear? What becomes of hope when the outcome is assured? What becomes of the satisfaction of overcoming adversity, of uncertainty resolved through discovery, or of mastering something genuinely difficult? What happens to forgiveness where there are no new wrongs, reconciliation where relationships cannot fracture, or trust where betrayal is impossible? And what becomes of the diversity of human characters and experiences through which we challenge, surprise, learn from and come to understand one another?

These are not merely unfortunate features of an imperfect existence. They are among the very things that make us human and life worth living. Our vulnerabilities give courage its significance. Our limitations give achievement its value. Our differences make understanding an accomplishment. Our uncertainties make discovery an adventure. We find meaning not simply in possessing what is good, but in pursuing it, creating it, losing it, recovering it and helping it grow.

Of course, Christianity need not deny that activity; discovery might continue in eternity. But its promise of ultimate perfection raises a question it cannot easily dismiss: what remains of the human adventure when everything that could fundamentally go wrong has been made right, once and for all? A perfected existence may sound like the ultimate victory over death. Yet a final state in which nothing essential remains to be overcome, repaired or transformed risks becoming another kind of ending: not the death of consciousness, but the death of becoming.

Flowmonics offers a radically different possibility.

We do not die only to be remade into perfected beings whose ultimate destination has already been decided. We remain ourselves: individuals shaped by unique histories, carrying our memories, relationships, understanding, aspirations, strengths, weaknesses and unfinished possibilities into whatever comes next. We remain capable of learning, loving, imagining, creating, exploring, disagreeing, making mistakes, overcoming difficulties and discovering possibilities we cannot yet conceive. But we enter the afterlife transformed, released from physical constraints. To discover what extraordinary things this entails, read the book Flowmonics, available here.

The huge difference with Christianity is that no final perfection waits to end our process of becoming. No divine blueprint that, in an instant, “completes” us. No sudden moment when the great adventure of conscious existence is declared finished. No ending after the end.

Instead, the extraordinary undertaking that began before humanity appeared can continue through us. Reality gave rise to life, life to minds, minds to imagination, and imagination to beings capable of understanding and reshaping the world that produced them. We have built languages, cultures, relationships, knowledge, art, science and civilisation. We have turned ignorance into discovery and possibility into achievement. And we have barely begun to explore what conscious life might become. Why wipe all that achievement out and replace it with instant, buy-one-get-everything-free perfection?

Why should death bring that undertaking to an end? Why should everything we have struggled to learn, everything we have become and everything we might yet create be surrendered to a state of completed perfection?

Under Flowmonics’ proposed account of continued consciousness, bodily death need not terminate our participation in this extraordinary unfolding. If the mind can maintain its organisation beyond the brain, then our individual stories may continue, together with the relationships and possibilities that give them meaning. The future remains open. There are still extraordinary things to discover, worthwhile difficulties to overcome, meaningful relationships to deepen, wrongs to repair, achievements to earn and entirely new forms of flourishing to create.

We do not receive an eternity in which everything has finally been accomplished. We receive the possibility of an eternity in which there is always more worth accomplishing.

And that changes everything for the survival self.

Here, at last, the survival Self discovers something extraordinary: Unconditional Love is one of its greatest allies. If our consciousness, memories, understanding, and relationships can continue beyond death, then this life becomes our training ground, our arena for discovery and preparation to shape the initial conditions of our life to come. Think what that means. Every friendship we deepen, every mind we inspire, every ability we develop, every wrong we help set right, and every new possibility we open for another person adds to the richness of an extraordinary unfolding existence. Everything we learn, overcome, and become can help prepare us for the extraordinary possibilities still to come. Suddenly, protecting our own interests at others’ expense begins to look remarkably short-sighted. What kind of eternity could we hope to enjoy if we spent this life impoverishing the very world of minds, relationships and possibilities that might make it worth living?

Of course, the survival-oriented mind will still prioritise more immediate concerns, and the afterlife is a distant future investment. Still, the stakes, if you accept the possibility of the afterlife, can be substantial, so it becomes another persuasive influence alongside the strengthening of the mind’s load-bearing forces. The idea is not to dissuade the mind from ever prioritising its own survival or flourishing but to give it enough to make Unconditional Love the better choice more often. But there’s another consideration to take into account: you not only have continuation in the afterlife, but you have it in this life as well. Tomorrow, next week, next year, or a decade from now is also your future. So whatever you invest in preparing for the afterlife already makes a difference in this life. The memories, understanding, and relationships you create through kindness, goodness, patience, forgiveness, understanding, compassion, and all the other attributes of Love are already yours in this life. And yes, Unconditional Love asks you to offer those things to people you might never receive anything back from in this life. However, it still changes your self-perception and how others see you. And you become someone who feels good about themselves because you know you make a meaningful difference in others’ lives. You become that admirable person everyone likes to be with and wants to keep close. You become that person that people want to get to know better and spend time with. You become the person everyone wants to emulate. You represent a life truly worth living: a life in the service of others because you are at peace with yourself.

What an extraordinary reason to live fully, learn eagerly, create boldly, overcome difficulties, build deep and loving relationships, and give generously without keeping score. This life is not merely something to survive, or a waiting room for something better. It is an opportunity to help make whatever comes next—whether tomorrow or in the afterlife—more extraordinary than what it would have been without us.

Christianity promises that death will be defeated and humanity perfected. Flowmonics proposes something more intimately human: death may not end us, perfection need not replace us, and our greatest possibilities still lie ahead.

Not an eternity in which our story has been completed for us.

An eternity in which we may continue to write it ourselves.

In Part III, we will go beyond sin and judgement by completing Christianity’s unfinished revolution. If the same Self can continue learning beyond death, what becomes of sin, moral blame and the ultimate defeat of evil? We will trace our choices back through their causes and discover the true meaning of being set free by the truth.

If you haven’t read Part I: The War Christianity Could Not End, you can find it here.