A New Year

It is Sunday, the second Sunday of the year and I am setting about my plotting and scheming for the week. It is appropo to do so by writing my thoughts of the instant. No blogs have been posted for 2010 and it is about time.

There is a recurring theme in my blogs; hey, it’s all about me. Well good reader, this is why I set up the blog in the first place. It is a means to capture my thoughts, understanding, and opinions for me and for anyone else who may be interested enough to read them. I could have continued to write them in notebooks, of which there are more than thirty-five plus another 40,000 words of notes from 1995 on but this would have allowed them to sit in obscurity, probably where they belong, whereas putting them in a blog allows for the possibility of others reading them and even consider them helpful.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things I have oversimplified being; OTOH my definition of being seems to fit the reality of what I see within me and others. There are different, markedly different, personae who show themselves; who take over the driver’s seat of thought, speech, and action.

There is the question of what is life? There is the question what happens at death? Is there a continuity of being that recurs?

Then here is the Earth, a unique position in the solar system, and perhaps even in the universe, whereupon the conditions are right to allow life as we see and experience it. The eccentricity of its solar orbit and the gravitational effect of the sun and moon keep the surface of the Earth from stagnating. All of this continues to be a mystery of what, how, and why. It isn’t so much the what anymore, I have achieved a working knowledge of that; the how isn’t all that important, although some great minds are working on it all the time; but the why of it, this is what leads me along like a bull with a ring in his nose tethered by a string to a little girl’s small hand.

Well, that’s enough of this. I have to plan the week, study for a quiz tomorrow, plan and prepare for an audition tomorrow night, and get rid of some more stuff. If I was to delve into the previous paragraph I would spend the entire week doing little more.

Arthur C. Clarke died last year and he used his powers of imagination to address some of the questions of the previous, especially as told in his two books, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and 2010, Odyssey 2. He may have been further along the development curve than he knew, or perhaps he did and was trying to tell us s.t.

It is now Tuesday. I’ve started listening to a series on Existentialism and find it to be interesting and completely contrary to the way I live my life. It is a bit early in the series to be making judgments but the drift of it seems to be spontaneity v reflection. While I can see the value of the former, I can also attest to the value of the latter. In an almost Aristotelian approach I would say a mixture of the two is necessary to have an interesting and yet productive life. Said mixture would not be separated into compartments but rather mixed as one would mix coffee and cream. And that is about all I have to say about this.

The next thing he gets into is Kierkegaard, as a philosopher, and some others who are likewise not worth more than curiosity. It seems as if these “philosophers” were screwed up individuals who were articulate and in their articulations left a trail of words to be read and discussed. The genesis of their thoughts is questionable since most of them were influenced by extreme others, either parents, or teachers, or contemporaries. They put forth a belief in God. Now that is troublesome because the term is ill defined, if defined at all. It is a concept, an idea, an abstraction that defies definition. Usually people get around it by using a different set of letters to describe the concept: creator, universal mind, Allah, Great Spirit, but never is it objectively defined.

Greek myth, Inca and Maya beliefs, American Indian beliefs, pagan religions, and Islam are all religions not taken seriously by Christians who think their creed, their set of beliefs, is the only truth. Yet when you look at that set of beliefs it is as incredible as the White Buffalo maiden, Zeus, and the Sun god. Christians, as well as other religions, believe that two plus two equals five and they do so with fervor that defies reason.

There are two questions: is religious tradition the truth, and what motivates those who promote it. For me the answer to the first is that buried in all religious traditions is a kernel of truth. I am quick to admit that I don’t fully know that truth but I suspect that it is compatible with the universe as it exists both physically and, for lack of a better term, spiritually.

The answer to the second is that it is promoted to satisfy the psychological human needs of the religious leaders and adherents. It is manifested as an extreme emotional response to overcome what is lacking in rationality. One can enumerate the travesties of religious fervor:martyrdom, persecution, the Inquisition, denial of physical truth, Christian fundamentalism, and Islamic fundamentalism. Religious leaders deal with threats to their house of cards by annihilating the opposition through shunning, excommunicating, or killing them.

No, I don’t know the truth; I am quietly working to do just that. I think that I am closer to it than I was 15 years ago and a lot closer than I was 35 years ago when I began this quest. I’ll continue in my journey of discovery and, like the Universe itself, never quite fathom the fullness of it.