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### There's an answer to everything. Really, everything! 

Every question that opens up in the human mind is answered by some other human mind. All questions about humanity and what constitutes a human being have already been asked with interest by countless people. But what do you think, how wide, high and deep, in which dimension are you interested in your own questions? How long do you think it will take you to get to the bottom of a question that concerns you? 

How did you fare when you began to deal with mortality and the "place" of our earth and our existence? Have you received a final answer? What if I tell you that the finiteness of an answer is determined only by you, and by you alone? 

### Religion and the faith in God is a hot topic here on Steemit Hill. 

Many gather around this topic. You too? And do you think you're interested in the statements that are made? Are you looking for consistency and confirmation? What are you looking for? 

It is said that we are ruled by evil people. Accused of being either godless (separated from ethics) or stuffed with God (religious stupidity). What if you yourself are classified that small-minded? Are you at odds with someone who represents a concept of God on which you cannot formulate a consensus with him? How important do you think it is to find a match with someone who gives contrary answers? 

### What is the (true) subject of the discussion? 

That you're trying to convince him that his answer isn't equal to yours? 

## Do you think that *all* people all over the world must have the same insights at the same time? 
What would happen if this were to happen? All people have the same notion? Is that conceivable?

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What would you say if I replied: That's impossible. For this to happen, all people would have to be born at the same time, die at the same time, have the same experiences in every minute of their lives and any experience would have to completely coincide with that of another person. What I imply, is this: that the whole life story is present in your body as lived time in every respective moment. 

Then what is your consequence of this thinking? 

My answer to that would be: If all people could agree with each other at the same time, then any further experience would be completely pointless. Life in total agreement would be death again. Something like the urge to develop something or to solve a problem would have lost importance. Basically, nothing more needs to be taken care of, since everything has already been done. Somebody's running over your foot. So what?  

When you're in a twosome and you don't feel a match? Then what is the spice that makes such a conversation rich? Is it your ability to continue to feel interested in each other's answers despite a difference of opinion? 

How bad does it offend you when you feel that the other person is not really interested in your answer, but only that you accept his as valid? And what if he receives the same from you? Then where do you two stand with each other in space and time? 

How difficult do you think it is to maintain one true interest and that of another, even though he has just revealed to you an opinion against which you are inwardly rebellious? Have you ever managed to overcome this? If so, how did you feel about it? 

### Does it freak you out when someone answers with facts, even though you notice that feelings are dormant underneath? 

I have already asked some questions to other users here in this room and I didn't get any answers to many. It's like my question alone already contains an insult. That can, but does not have to be the case. Some questions people just don't want to answer. It depends on whether I get permission from the person I am talking to to appeal to him. Who does not receive this permission, remains alone with his question. In fact, some questions are so uncomfortable that it is better to avoid them. At what time someone is ready to approach a question is always up to them. 

Does that mean you have to ask permission before you ask someone a question? You don't. One can *try* to assess whether it is actually the right time to formulate one and whether the person one asks is actually able to deal responsibly with the question. But you don't really know this for sure until you get a reaction. Tolerance for trial and error is therefore legitimate. But: If you are having already this [Hintergedanke](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hintergedanke), that your question might do more harm than good, you can consider to not ask it yet. 

Some people get really angry and shout: "How can you ask such a question!" Then you have your reaction. 

### But a question is like a gift. It is no longer in the hands of the person who hands it over. 

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Therefore, it can be taken or dropped aside. What does that mean? That what you've just asked is unimportant? Maybe, but maybe it's not about you but the other who doesn't have time and nerve. It could very well be that he comes back to your question later on. Maybe days later. Or months, or even years. Maybe the person finds answer in his inner chamber but doesn't let you know, even being actually thankful for an inconvenient question of yours. 

Can you stay with this kind of positive thought? That one of your questions was being taken by another one without letting you know? And that something of significance you gave him will maybe take influence in a good way? Would like it to be probable in this way? 

I think that the true deep interest in a person is not necessarily something that we mirror each other on a daily basis. In fact, we mostly feel that there is neither real interest nor real encouragement from the other, that we are developing further and that we are encouraged by an intelligent interlocutor to bring out the best in us. I would think this is based on the strange habit of simply learning it differently. What we learn in school trains us to owe speech and answers, not questions and further questions.  

### Are you actually interested in Religion?
I am not talking about the concept of a God who "does equate to some guy that floods the earth and laughs at cancer" as just recently heard - we are ready to know that this is not what we like to talk about. It's actually belittling the intelligence of most people I know. If you consider yourself all ready to not being interested in an evil God but in the significance of the fact that religion was an attempt to raise consensus over thousands of years in its different streams and shades you cannot just brush it aside by using cheap statements. Otherwise I would say that you either are not taking yourself very seriously or that you take yourself way too seriously. Why? 

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Because it is not *you* what religion was about *before* your time. You just stepped into life and now experience how religion is being perceived and talked about *today*. But the you from now haven't lived back than when there was no other concept of reducing complexity available. So my question would be: Taking a time travel machine and fasting forward thousand years. Would you say that the attempts to understand the world by our scientific approaches must be condemned as stupidity as the future humankind will laugh at the findings we were proud of and let so many scripts for them to read and mock about (in fact, not even reading scripts)? Or would you think that some of the future earthlings would consider our attempts as understandable? And could that lead to a more tolerant attitude towards humans trying to find balance in *their* present time?

### Religion, I state, was and still is just an attempt to reduce complexity of the perception and understanding of human existence. 

So you cannot just cut a process somewhere and say: That is now the past! This is the present! 
Can you see that it doesn't work that way?

It would be the same as to saying to all German teenagers who turn 13 years: That's it. You are now fully developed. You got breasts and penises and hair at the appropriate spots, you are able to produce and give birth to babies and you are an adult now! Behave like one!  
Where is the phase of transition here? Where is the individuality of the 13 year olds where one needs longer to mature than another one? Where are the rituals and traditions in which a teenager feels to be welcomed into his phase of maturation or sees the further need to be taken care of some more time from the adults? 
Is it not so, that we automatically assume that a transition process of course is something that takes place? Why don't we see that on a higher level, too? But "we" do. 

Not only religion is an attempt to feel comfortable and somehow secure in a really complex existence. But come with me now and see the seven wonderful ways in a complete summery: 
1. Verbal language: giving nouns to processes, giving abstractions to more complex issues
2. Decision making: in taking a choice one excludes other alternatives (which, if you think about it can be infinitely thought of) 
3. Practice: Once a choice has been made, it becomes relevant in the realm of matter. 
    *"To radically reduce the space of the possible: backwards, in so far as - as described - the alternatives are eradicated, and forwards, in that what is practice also has determining forces for the future."* - [Prof. Dr. Hartmut Winkler](http://homepages.uni-paderborn.de/winkler/) 
4. Metaphysics: rituals, traditions and communal existence differing from other local habits
5. Religious order systems (theistic religions and non theistic ones like Buddhism)
6. Borders and hierarchies (national borders and structures of power like democracy)
7. Modernity/technology (computer-, -blockchain-technology, artificial intelligence programs like [Tau](http://www.idni.org) and [Agile Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development))

Of course, I am somehow kidding with my headline of this article. But here they are. The seven ways of reducing complexity ;-)

I gave this summary a chronological order to make visible that from the prehistoric human who learned to speak, language was the first thing to reduce complexity. But if you think longer about it, you might ask yourself if it was *not* like this and that this linearity does not show the correct order but makes you feel in the very back of your mind that *all at the same time* can be true. 

I was inspired by Hartmut Winkler, wo provided me with the terms and explanations. Hartmut Winkler, a German scholar from the University of Paderborn, who spoke about "Cultural techniques to reduce complexity" says in one of his lectures - also published in text as part of the Research Training Group' Automatisms - that ... 
> my thesis is ... that societies have always developed cultural techniques that limit, make manageable or intercept complexity. Differentiation processes are contrasted by mechanisms of de-differentiation.

> My thesis is that for all historical epochs there has been a systematic interweaving of increase/growth of complexity and reduction of complexity; and that one must basically assume a conflict between differentiation and de-differentiation, increase and interception of complexity. The thesis itself is, after all that has been discussed in the college, relatively low-risk; and yet it seems sensible to formulate it ... . My second intention is to place the question of automatisms in this field once again. If we have chosen 'cultural techniques to reduce complexity' as a new subtitle, it is because we believe that our subject, the automatisms, can be reinterpreted within this framework.

So, do you have any thoughts and questions reading about Mr. Winklers thesis? Search [here]((http://homepages.uni-paderborn.de/winkler/) ) for his English articles and see if you can find interest in his way of thinking and approaching topics which are also connected to technology and modernity. 

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What I find here in the realm of steemit is - how can it be otherwise? - a high concentration on technology related thinking and thinkers. Providing us with specific approaches on dealing with complexity. 

### Can you now see that - considering time and space and transition phases - that modernity and technology are just *one* part of trying to deal with complexity? 

And if you can acknowledge this: How much is left from your attitude to ridicule notions and also people and not giving them credit that they - as well as you - are just in their *own* phases of transition from here to there? Having said this, the phases of transition are not just linear, as I said above.  

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Imagine something other than a 3dimensional realm. Whether you imagine that through pure belief or through a conscious altering substance, a prayer, a computer model, a work of art, the chessboard from Star Trek, a science fiction story from Heinlein and his [Crooked house](http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/CrookedHouse.pdf): Do as you wish. 

But stop being the knower who knows it all and become a questioner who knows that he knows nothing. 

### My last questions to you: 

In what spaces do you think philosophy has a place today that it deserves? In the rooms of ecclesiastical institutions, where, long before we were born, it was undoubtedly already being used scientifically (think of [Thomas Aquinas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas), for example)? In the hearing rooms of the university faculties? And where does philosophy have its place in your everyday life? Now, what do you think is my motive for this whole article?

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<center> *"A Hintergedanke is a thought way, way, way in the back of your mind. Something that you know deep down but can’t admit." Alan Watts*</center>

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<center>  *"If your life does not have three dimensions, if you do not live in the body, but in two dimensions in the flat and printed paper world, as if you were just living your biography, then you are in nowhere. You don't see the archetypal world, but live like a pressed flower between pages of books, a mere memory of yourself."*
C. G. Jung</center>

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Text sources and recommendations:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Martin Heidegger. First published Wed Oct 12, 2011: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#BeiWor

Self across time - The diachronic unity of bodily existence by Thomas Fuchs: https://www.klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/fileadmin/zpm/psychatrie/fuchs/Literatur/Self_across_time.pdf

Analyzing Narratives and Story-Telling by Matti Hyvärinen: http://www.uta.fi/yky/yhteystiedot/henkilokunta/mattikhyvarinen/index/Chapter%2026.pdf

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ancient Theories of Soul. First published Thu Oct 23, 2003; substantive revision Wed Apr 22, 2009: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/

The Life of Saint Thomas Aquinas: 
> We approve of the publication of the book entitled " [The Life of Saint Thomas Aquinas](http://www.todayscatholicworld.com/life-of-the-angelic-doctor.pdf), by a Dominican Father," published by D. & J. Sadlier & Co. JOHN CARDINAL MCCLOSKEY, Archbishop of New York.
June, 1881.

German only: Study Body Psychotherapy - Drafting of a university curriculum based on the model of US-American Master's programmes. Inaugural dissertation for obtaining the doctorate of the Faculty of Education of the Philipps-University Marburg by Benajir Wolf from Düsseldorf. Marburg/Lahn 2010: 
http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/diss/z2010/0381/pdf/dwb.pdf

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Picture sources: 

- <sup>Fibonacci: "Yellow Chamomile head showing the arrangement in 21 (blue) and 13 (aqua) spirals. Such arrangements involving consecutive Fibonacci numbers appear in a wide variety of plants."*
- <sup>By User:Alvesgaspar:derivative work: RDBury (talk) - Mother_and_daughter.jpg, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15047443</sup>
- <sup>Blue Water: Photo by Ishan seefromthesky on Unsplash</sup>
- <sup>Gift: Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash</sup>
- <sup>Religious symbols: User:Rursus - File:Religious syms.png by Manop, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2205824: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion</sup>
- <sup>Old technology: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22407401: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology</sup>
- <sup>New technology - Astronaut: Door NASA - http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001156.html, Publiek domein, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48209: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technologie</sup>