Promise One Hundred Thousand plus One -- Growth
It must be -- or else I wouldn't be here right now -- the 100,001st time I've said "I really should write that down" to myself. Let this be the first of many blogs to come that represent a product of spontaneous inspired thought.... We shall see how "inspired" these thoughts sound in retrospect. But that's later... I'm here now.
A number of years ago my friend recommended to me a book called Reality Isn't What It Used To Be by Walter Truett Anderson (thanks Chris). I finally bought it, and since I have things that I need to be doing besides reading a book, I decided this would be the perfect time to read a few pages.
It turns out that I got all the way to the second page of the preface before my mind began tying ideas together and producing what I now blithely call "inspired" thought.
The book, to provide a little perspective, is subtitled "Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World." You know.... a light read. Anyway, a snippet, "...human reality -- all our history and science and systems of belief -- and the objective reality of the cosmos," got me thinking a bit.
(Note that without the vast [self-directed sarcasm]context of the first two pages, you might not get the impact of the snippet.) The text from the preceding paragraphs dealt with the way humans experience our experience (truly inspired!) admist an ocean of symbols: words. The author compared this experience to a sea otter's existence floating along in a sea of turbulent currents slothing to and fro.
The idea that humans exist in an intangible and invisible sea of symbols, containers to which humans assign meaning (words) which quite literally at times can drown us in scientific, political, idealogical, reglious, and social customs and obligation, is at once staggering and hard to grasp. Further, this experience is in cold contrast to hard reality of the cosmos.
The text that I cited inserted a visualization into my mind's eye where I am viewing the world, our Earth, from a distance so that I am just outside the reach of our atmosphere. From just another couple cosmic steps backward, the world appears as a body with a mind all its own belonging collectively to humans as we dictate meaning onto objects -- literally objectifying our entire world -- and explicitly create our World (capital W).
Scaling down to the individual person's perspective, this gives new meaning -- or, rather, highlights the ACTUAL meaning -- of the phrase "living in your own World."
I have often thought about (stay with me here) how the individual behaves much the way a family behaves much the way a community behaves much the way a society behaves much the way humans, on a macroscopic scale, behave. On the individual level, we have conflicting drives, emotions, and desires that we must seek to balance.
In this way, we humans as a species of like-minded entities are composed of groups and cultures who reflect the same conflicting desires and ways of life. As communication enables global interaction, the conflicts we have with neighboring cultures is very representative of the rifts we as individuals often have within ourselves, our psyches, until we grow into who we decide we want to be as individuals.
Likewise, as the different ideologies and belief systems clash and blend in a globalized world, human life on our planet as an entity all its own is quite literally growing up, or is essentially going through the stages an individual goes through as he or she traverses the turbulent tides of adolesence into adulthood.
And from my vantage point in space looking down at our Earth, just as retrospect is a looking-glass into one's past, I reflect upon the way mistakes are repeated in our global life, how lessons are learned slowly and through resolve to do better, and that while bad choices are made by certain facets of one's personality, on the whole most of it is good.
From an elevated perspective, the triflings and greediness become minimized in the scheme of all experience but remains significant as we as individuals provide it the energy to perpetuate. Some of our shameful history becomes laughable in the greater scheme, but none of the events in our individual or macroscopic life is without purpose in that each situation we experience -- individually and as a whole -- becomes part of who we are.
If "intelligent" life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, I wonder into what class of individual the Earth falls. Is Earth an upstanding citizen, a selfish child, or somewhere in between? How then, as the scientific community gives more credence to the possibility of a cosmic community, would we behave amongst others? More importantly, what would we think of ourselves if we could hold up a giant mirror and look ourselves in the eye? Are we proud of who we are, and if not, what as a species could we do better?
Is this not how we as individuals initiate growth?
A number of years ago my friend recommended to me a book called Reality Isn't What It Used To Be by Walter Truett Anderson (thanks Chris). I finally bought it, and since I have things that I need to be doing besides reading a book, I decided this would be the perfect time to read a few pages.
It turns out that I got all the way to the second page of the preface before my mind began tying ideas together and producing what I now blithely call "inspired" thought.
The book, to provide a little perspective, is subtitled "Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World." You know.... a light read. Anyway, a snippet, "...human reality -- all our history and science and systems of belief -- and the objective reality of the cosmos," got me thinking a bit.
(Note that without the vast [self-directed sarcasm]
The idea that humans exist in an intangible and invisible sea of symbols, containers to which humans assign meaning (words) which quite literally at times can drown us in scientific, political, idealogical, reglious, and social customs and obligation, is at once staggering and hard to grasp. Further, this experience is in cold contrast to hard reality of the cosmos.
The text that I cited inserted a visualization into my mind's eye where I am viewing the world, our Earth, from a distance so that I am just outside the reach of our atmosphere. From just another couple cosmic steps backward, the world appears as a body with a mind all its own belonging collectively to humans as we dictate meaning onto objects -- literally objectifying our entire world -- and explicitly create our World (capital W).
Scaling down to the individual person's perspective, this gives new meaning -- or, rather, highlights the ACTUAL meaning -- of the phrase "living in your own World."
I have often thought about (stay with me here) how the individual behaves much the way a family behaves much the way a community behaves much the way a society behaves much the way humans, on a macroscopic scale, behave. On the individual level, we have conflicting drives, emotions, and desires that we must seek to balance.
In this way, we humans as a species of like-minded entities are composed of groups and cultures who reflect the same conflicting desires and ways of life. As communication enables global interaction, the conflicts we have with neighboring cultures is very representative of the rifts we as individuals often have within ourselves, our psyches, until we grow into who we decide we want to be as individuals.
Likewise, as the different ideologies and belief systems clash and blend in a globalized world, human life on our planet as an entity all its own is quite literally growing up, or is essentially going through the stages an individual goes through as he or she traverses the turbulent tides of adolesence into adulthood.
And from my vantage point in space looking down at our Earth, just as retrospect is a looking-glass into one's past, I reflect upon the way mistakes are repeated in our global life, how lessons are learned slowly and through resolve to do better, and that while bad choices are made by certain facets of one's personality, on the whole most of it is good.
From an elevated perspective, the triflings and greediness become minimized in the scheme of all experience but remains significant as we as individuals provide it the energy to perpetuate. Some of our shameful history becomes laughable in the greater scheme, but none of the events in our individual or macroscopic life is without purpose in that each situation we experience -- individually and as a whole -- becomes part of who we are.
If "intelligent" life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, I wonder into what class of individual the Earth falls. Is Earth an upstanding citizen, a selfish child, or somewhere in between? How then, as the scientific community gives more credence to the possibility of a cosmic community, would we behave amongst others? More importantly, what would we think of ourselves if we could hold up a giant mirror and look ourselves in the eye? Are we proud of who we are, and if not, what as a species could we do better?
Is this not how we as individuals initiate growth?
posted by Joseph at 8:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home