As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still; it is we who move in infinite space.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, German poet (1875-1926)
This quote struck me because it turns backwards our thinking about the future.
The way we think of the future, most of us believe that it must bounce around as if trying to avoid us and detection. To many of us, the future is unknown, a mystery that will unfold in some fashion in ways we can't imagine at this time.
Not so. Rilke says it's not that way at all.
We are the ones who bounce around, not knowing where we are going.
Our governments seldom have long term plans for the future. As they are elected for relatively short terms, they focus on the duration of their terms, plus a couple of years more. Most give little thought to what they want for their country 25 or 50 years in the future.
They can't set policies to prepare for a future 50 years hence because they don't think about it. They only set policies they hope will get them elected next time.
Businesses, especially large ones, set long term objectives. They want to think their way into the future to be prepared for what they will face then. However, their long term plans can turn on a dime when their financial fortunes hit rough patches. In effect, they plan for the long term future, but act in their own best interests in the immediate future. Profit today, not prospects tomorrow, are what counts for them.
As individuals, most of us go through our lives as if we don't know what to expect of tomorrow, let alone what our lives might be like in ten or 20 years time. Planning might come in the form of retirement investments.
As of this writing, I recently passed my 65th birthday. I have reached the age when traditionally, in western countries, people retire. Then, going by historical records, I could be expected to die within the next decade. But it's highly unlikely that will happen.
I could easily live for another 30 or 40 years, as my ancestors lived well past the age when their own peers were dying off. I eat healthy, try to exercise enough. I make long term plans because I expect to be able to fulfill them.
Should a person of 65 years have plans for what they might be doing at age 90 or 95? To a younger person, that might seem silly. But unless my peers and I make plans for our future, we may find ourselves in wheelchairs, sitting in hallways of nursing homes for our final two decades of life. That's not my idea of Golden Years.
The future begins tomorrow. The future 25 or 50 years from now will depend entirely on what you and I and others around us plan tomorrow. We will meet the future knowing what it's like because we will have planned it. If we plan it.
My wife and I will move to a different home in a different Canadian province within the next two months. Everything will be new to us, except our citizenship. One of the first tasks we plan for our new property will be to plant trees where we want them.
We will plant spindly young trees no taller than ourselves. We plan to sit in their shade for years after they have reached their full height.
Will we do little more than to sit in the shade on a summer's day? Not at all. Chances are we will plan how to take the world by storm with our new ideas on those future days. As usual, those ideas will be rejected by the majority of people when posed, then be adopted heartily by the same people a few years later when they realize they are better than what they have.
We make our own future by building it, day by day, thought by thought, one daringly new action after another.
The future is nothing to be frightened about. We will build it ourselves, by our actions and sometimes by our inaction.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children how to prepare for the future, how to cope with it and to build it to their own satisfaction instead of just surviving it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mystery. Show all posts
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Attacking The Hypocrisy Of Science
There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Misérables
It's impossible at this time to know what Victor Hugo meant by "the human soul." As many different concepts exist for it, it would be nearly impossible to find a consensus among any group of people no matter how small.
Let's put this quote into perspective. It's extremely difficult for anyone to have a workable grasp of the immensity that is the great ocean that comprises most of the surface of our planet. As a frontier of science, the ocean is still relatively unexplored territory. New (previously unknown) species of ocean dwellers are discovered through research every week, almost at the rate of one per day.
The quantity of water and life in the great ocean are beyond the comprehension of most people, if not all of us. At the bottom of the ocean lies more than three times as much land as humans have ever walked in all of history.
What is the sky? If you take a photo of it, or many photos to comprise a panoramic view of the sky, then assemble them into a contiguous whole, would that be enough to explain the sky? Of course not. The blue of the sky is merely a blue shift of white light coming from the sun. Beyond that are galaxies we can see at night, plus billions more galaxies we can't see, then maybe other universes beyond that.
That's not even considering other dimensions that may exist all around us, features of reality we can't sense but some people feel or experience from time to time. As the concepts of multiple universes and dimensions of space-time other than the one we perceive enter science through theories such as the string theories of physics, science is forced to accept that there may be existence beyond what they can detect with their equipment, that is little more than supersensitive versions of our own five senses.
Scientists exploring other galaxies with their telescopes and spacecraft tell us that planets far beyond ours may hold life. They don't want us to accept anything we may perceive as real if they can't prove its existence themselves, but they are quite prepared to propose that whole planets of life--some maybe with non-DNA-based life--probably exist beyond our present ability to detect. They use statistics as evidence, as if anyone with any sense of experience with the false and deceptive use of statistics would grant that any credibility.
Many scientists deny the existence of the human soul. They claim it's a figment of our brains, if it exists at all. They can even show what happens in our brains when what we call a soul is active. But, they believe, it's nothing more than our imaginations at work. Yet they want us to believe in other civilizations light years away and other dimensions of existence for which they have no evidence more than a vague theory with no proof in the works.
The trouble with our concept of the human soul is that far too many people have used their own versions of fictional concepts they made up to bilk many of us out of our money. Frauds and charlatans have existed almost as long as our species has. Many of them have purported to have knowledge of the human soul that the rest of us don't have. They don't, but we and our ancestors have paid good money to hear their stories anyway.
That doesn't mean that the human soul doesn't exist. Or, for that matter, that God doesn't exist. We all know that there are as many differing concepts of God as there are religions on the planet. That includes societies such as what we call the Roman Empire, that appointed their own Caesars as gods--they worshipped their emperor as a god.
That doesn't mean that God or the human soul doesn't exist. It means that most of us haven't the ability to detect them. We may pray to God, hoping that he exists, having been threatened with eternal damnation in Hell if we don't fall on our knees before the God that someone else tells us is the real God. But we can't be certain that the God we praise is real, any more than we can prove that unknown civilizations light years away are real, or different dimensions are real.
Or even that thought is real. Science can prove that something happens in various parts of the brain as we think and that different parts "light up" on their scopes as we do different kinds of thinking. But science has only proven that something has happened in the brain when we think. It has absolutely no concept of what thought is, at least nothing I consider workable.
The very scientists who are thinking about how to explain to us that things they can't prove don't exist can't prove that thought exists. By rights we should be able to claim that their thoughts are nothing more than activity of their imaginations.
So, what is the human soul? Nothing more or less than a part of God that is on loan to us while we inhabit these bodies of ours. We are all part of one great whole.
When our body dies, it gets recycled. Not an atom is lost when our body decomposes. It all becomes either part of other things composed of atoms (matter) or it becomes some form of energy. Just ask Einstein who explained it with his famous equation, e = mc2 No matter or energy are ever lost when a transfer or transformation happens. It's all part of a great whole.
Science can't explain energy either. They know energy exists because they have experienced it. So what can science offer to those of us who have experienced something beyond what even they can't comprehend?
Perhaps science should do what it tells us to do with thoughts about subjects we can't explain: shut up.
The human soul cannot be explained by science, so science should not have any right to make definitive pronouncements about it. Since the human soul is merely part of the greater whole we call God, it follows that science should have no say about God either. Science has no right to tell us that something we believe doesn't exist while it blithely accepts theories that propose the existence of things they can't prove; that would be hypocrisy.
I feel God within me. I can't explain that. I don't even have an interest in attempting to explain it or to prove it to anyone, let alone a doubter.
The doubters always make more noise than the believers who know they are right, who know what they feel within them. That doesn't make them right or those with greater perception and higher levels of consciousness wrong.
It only shows their ignorance and inability to tolerate thoughts that go beyond what they can comprehend. They are bigots with white coats.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children truths before the charlatans get at them. or to make corrections if they have.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Misérables
It's impossible at this time to know what Victor Hugo meant by "the human soul." As many different concepts exist for it, it would be nearly impossible to find a consensus among any group of people no matter how small.
Let's put this quote into perspective. It's extremely difficult for anyone to have a workable grasp of the immensity that is the great ocean that comprises most of the surface of our planet. As a frontier of science, the ocean is still relatively unexplored territory. New (previously unknown) species of ocean dwellers are discovered through research every week, almost at the rate of one per day.
The quantity of water and life in the great ocean are beyond the comprehension of most people, if not all of us. At the bottom of the ocean lies more than three times as much land as humans have ever walked in all of history.
What is the sky? If you take a photo of it, or many photos to comprise a panoramic view of the sky, then assemble them into a contiguous whole, would that be enough to explain the sky? Of course not. The blue of the sky is merely a blue shift of white light coming from the sun. Beyond that are galaxies we can see at night, plus billions more galaxies we can't see, then maybe other universes beyond that.
That's not even considering other dimensions that may exist all around us, features of reality we can't sense but some people feel or experience from time to time. As the concepts of multiple universes and dimensions of space-time other than the one we perceive enter science through theories such as the string theories of physics, science is forced to accept that there may be existence beyond what they can detect with their equipment, that is little more than supersensitive versions of our own five senses.
Scientists exploring other galaxies with their telescopes and spacecraft tell us that planets far beyond ours may hold life. They don't want us to accept anything we may perceive as real if they can't prove its existence themselves, but they are quite prepared to propose that whole planets of life--some maybe with non-DNA-based life--probably exist beyond our present ability to detect. They use statistics as evidence, as if anyone with any sense of experience with the false and deceptive use of statistics would grant that any credibility.
Many scientists deny the existence of the human soul. They claim it's a figment of our brains, if it exists at all. They can even show what happens in our brains when what we call a soul is active. But, they believe, it's nothing more than our imaginations at work. Yet they want us to believe in other civilizations light years away and other dimensions of existence for which they have no evidence more than a vague theory with no proof in the works.
The trouble with our concept of the human soul is that far too many people have used their own versions of fictional concepts they made up to bilk many of us out of our money. Frauds and charlatans have existed almost as long as our species has. Many of them have purported to have knowledge of the human soul that the rest of us don't have. They don't, but we and our ancestors have paid good money to hear their stories anyway.
That doesn't mean that the human soul doesn't exist. Or, for that matter, that God doesn't exist. We all know that there are as many differing concepts of God as there are religions on the planet. That includes societies such as what we call the Roman Empire, that appointed their own Caesars as gods--they worshipped their emperor as a god.
That doesn't mean that God or the human soul doesn't exist. It means that most of us haven't the ability to detect them. We may pray to God, hoping that he exists, having been threatened with eternal damnation in Hell if we don't fall on our knees before the God that someone else tells us is the real God. But we can't be certain that the God we praise is real, any more than we can prove that unknown civilizations light years away are real, or different dimensions are real.
Or even that thought is real. Science can prove that something happens in various parts of the brain as we think and that different parts "light up" on their scopes as we do different kinds of thinking. But science has only proven that something has happened in the brain when we think. It has absolutely no concept of what thought is, at least nothing I consider workable.
The very scientists who are thinking about how to explain to us that things they can't prove don't exist can't prove that thought exists. By rights we should be able to claim that their thoughts are nothing more than activity of their imaginations.
So, what is the human soul? Nothing more or less than a part of God that is on loan to us while we inhabit these bodies of ours. We are all part of one great whole.
When our body dies, it gets recycled. Not an atom is lost when our body decomposes. It all becomes either part of other things composed of atoms (matter) or it becomes some form of energy. Just ask Einstein who explained it with his famous equation, e = mc2 No matter or energy are ever lost when a transfer or transformation happens. It's all part of a great whole.
Science can't explain energy either. They know energy exists because they have experienced it. So what can science offer to those of us who have experienced something beyond what even they can't comprehend?
Perhaps science should do what it tells us to do with thoughts about subjects we can't explain: shut up.
The human soul cannot be explained by science, so science should not have any right to make definitive pronouncements about it. Since the human soul is merely part of the greater whole we call God, it follows that science should have no say about God either. Science has no right to tell us that something we believe doesn't exist while it blithely accepts theories that propose the existence of things they can't prove; that would be hypocrisy.
I feel God within me. I can't explain that. I don't even have an interest in attempting to explain it or to prove it to anyone, let alone a doubter.
The doubters always make more noise than the believers who know they are right, who know what they feel within them. That doesn't make them right or those with greater perception and higher levels of consciousness wrong.
It only shows their ignorance and inability to tolerate thoughts that go beyond what they can comprehend. They are bigots with white coats.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children truths before the charlatans get at them. or to make corrections if they have.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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