The Missing Ingredient

Much effort goes into the development of a being.  First, there is the issue of deciding what the being wants.  Dreams lay the groundwork for making those decisions, but more often than not, the dreams seem to come from out in left field.  It must be understood that what I am writing is autobiographical and it is hoped that it may be of some value to others in reaching some understanding of why and how.

My dreams have come from a variety of places, none seem to have been all that premeditated.  The big ones, sailing, ships, horses, Dale Carnegie instructor, manager in a large company, using digital technology, dancing, traveling the world, especially Europe, a business, a house, and now acting, all came from out of nowhere.  A possibility is that they are leftovers from previous lives.

All of them were sourced internally.  Then developed through reading about similar activities, not of others but fiction and nonfiction sources.  These are what embellish the dream, make it seem like it can be achieved.

And, while all of that is important, now I want to dwell on the realization of the dream and what it takes to do that.  There is a developmental period through which one goes as he sets out to realize a dream.  Often starting from just a dream, a statement parsed as, "I want to..." and then thinking, studying, discussing, seeing and taking the necessary steps, identifying the required skills, practicing them, and patiently doing the work.

Along the way, one reaches a point where he knows that he has the capability but lacks the ability to perform successfully.  This is when he must reach an understanding of the skills required, hone that knowledge into the basic parameters of performing, and practice those skills until they are part of him.

This having been done, he reaches a point where mental discipline is required to reach new, and better, performance levels.  And that starts with the rules.  Every endeavor, be it a career, a sport, or a hobby comes with a set of rules.  Following the rules is a matter of integrity and it takes a certain mental discipline to do so.  And the more skilled one becomes in an endeavor, the more important it is to have the mental discipline to follow the rules.  

Then there are aphorisms that describe the way one lives his daily life.  While these are not rules, they are guidelines upon which one can rely to make decisions on how to react to what is happening around him.  Keeping them in mind, perhaps not in the forefront, but always there as a framework for actions, is a big part of mental discipline.

Distractions are what take us away from disciplined action and there are several that are described in the Fourth Way and once reading the descriptions, they become readily apparent.  Recognizing them and stopping them in their tracks is also an aspect of mental discipline. In the Fourth Way, mental discipline can be seen as being present, being awake, and being aware instead of our normal state of being asleep (distracted).

One can only develop attention in increments.  It can start with a few moments of concentrated effort on a skill and build to a more sustained amount of time.  It seems that a good target for practicing, and otherwise being involved in a skill, is twenty minutes.  And even this may be difficult to achieve at first, but it is a target.  Once achieved, it can be expanded to whatever time is comfortable.

When successfully employing mental discipline, realizing one's dreams becomes a full-time job.  Just like learning a skill, it can only be developed through practice.  It is not quite the same, however, as the skills to which were we referred above, but practice through realizing when one is, and is not, paying attention to the fulfillment of dreams.

Analogies

 It is interesting to me that we use analogies to help us understand, as in, "sweet as a rose."  For me, the two grand analogies of life are stage and baseball.  In theater, from first read to strike.  In baseball, from Spring training to the last game of the season.  

For both, it is in the myriad of activities that takes place.  Both are "life" as it happens to someone else, often for our enjoyment.  And we learn as we watch, if we watch intelligently.

Electronics, the Internet, and Us (a fable)

Once upon a time, there was a family consisting of a mother and father and some children.  The parents, in thinking they were being kind and loving, provided everything the children needed and wanted, even to the point of tending to their hygiene, dressing them, cutting their meat, feeding them their meals,  and keeping them indoors because they thought they would be safer inside.

The parents, unfortunately, were killed in a freak accident and the children were left on their own to fend for themselves.  It was catastrophic for them.

(Faced with the requirement to find the square root of 123456789 without a calculator, or die, most people would die.)

Enormous Truth

 

In the New Testament is the sentence, "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32) This is the same author that gave us: "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God." 

Both of these set me off into a maelstrom of thought about what we think of as the truth.  Every civilization for more than 5000 years has had its version of "the truth" and even today there are many versions of the truth: Christian sects, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the way of the monk, the priest, the yoga, and the Fourth Way, plus others.  And there is a trap in each.  

The trap is when the follower of a teaching takes it as the truth without question, without reservation.  We, individually, are like passengers on an ocean ship.  Everything is fine until the ship sinks, and we are afloat on the open ocean.

While the ship was sailing along, we were quite content.  The captain and crew seemed qualified, the accommodations were good, the food was good, and the company was likewise compatible.  The all of a sudden, poof, it was gone, and we were left to make it on our own.  We are lost because relied on what was told to us by others who thought they knew the truth.

There is a distinct possibility that they didn't know the truth, even though they sincerely thought they did.  Same for all of those before, and until now, who preach that what they think is the truth.

Oh, there is truth alright, we just don't know what it is yet.

The truth may be so enormous that we cannot comprehend it.  The Earth, a collective noun, is a good example.  There is so much to it that no one person really understands it.  There are many disciplines of science that deal with it, such as Geology, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., yet no one person can comprehend the Earth in its entirety, and more is discovered about it every day.  It is the same for God, another collective noun.

What was thought to be the truth turns out to be not quite the truth.  The same can be said for religions.  All three of the Indian blind men were telling the truth as they felt the elephant.

Uncanny Signs

 

During our sojourn in France, my wife and I took a road trip from Chantilly, near Paris and Charles De Gaulle Airport, to the extreme west of France.  We saw the beaches and cemetery at Normandy, and Mont St. Michel.  It was a full day of driving and late when we started back.

My wife is the adventurous type when setting out but loses her confidence and tends to panic when things deteriorate.  So, when it got late and dark, and the roads were unfamiliar and not marked very well, she was getting nervous and concerned that we were lost.

Then the headlights picked up a small, roadside sign, concrete, shaped like an arrow pointing straight up, and crossed with a simple rectangle that said, "Chantilly."  This in the most out-of-the-way place in France.  It restored my confidence that we were going the right way, not necessarily hers, and we continued through the night back to our apartment in Chantilly.

To this day, I'm not sure that the sign even existed.  I saw it, but it was such a rudimentary sign, not official looking at all, weathered and faded, but it said, "Chantilly" and pointed ahead.  (This could be a Twilight Zone episode.)

Now, similar little things happen all the time, mostly with YouTube.  There will be a suggestion and it burrows into my psyche such that I'll try whatever and see how it goes.  

One of these was to take a combination of a drop of lemon juice and a tablespoon of olive oil before eating anything in the morning.  Another was to flatten my back against the wall and do a quarter squat to tone the muscles that control posture.

These are two that I now do routinely.  The olive oil for more than a year and the quarter squat for a few weeks.  They seem to have come onto my radar at the right time.  They' were both beneficial and the clips were not seen again after the one time.

Another, much earlier occasion of a resonant message, was when an engineering cohort said offhandedly, "Now you'll be wearing a suit every day."  This on the occasion of my transfer to a management position in the main office.  

I think I would have figured that out for myself anyway, but his remark hit home somehow, and the suits came off the rack, and home with me, one at a time over the next few months.  And that's all I wore to work for the next 30 years.

I'm not saying anything supernatural is going on.  I am, however, saying that there are, in the thousands of impressions we get every day, some that resonate with us.  Some few carry a message for which we are ready.

The Interface

 

Jeff Hawkins and Max Tegmark, two prominent authors in the field of artificial intelligence, examine the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in their respective books.  Both of them suggest that the extant brain be somehow be uploaded to a digital artificial intelligence device.  Then the resultant intelligence would be immortal for as long as the device was maintained and workable.  It is their conception of immortality.

This scenario has so many holes in it, it could be used to strain the spaghetti from the boiling water.  While I don't argue the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming an integral part of our daily life, much the same as network devices that we hold in our hand are now, the idea that a manufactured device would replace the human psyche is a bit far-fetched.  There are emotions and dreams that are closely linked to a spiritual world.  A world that both of these fine thinkers don't recognize as even existing.

This is where I think they are wrong. 

There is, however, a middle-ground that very possibly could come to be.  A bio-digital interface between our brain and the assembled store of knowledge that exists on the computers of the world.  An interface that would enable those in whom it is installed to access that store and do all that we are now able to do using our thoughts instead of our voices, hearing, and fingers.  And possibly able to do much more.

Data and information could be added to "the store" as it evolves in the thoughts of the users.  "The store" would be updated by new information as it becomes available.  It is the Wikipedia concept using interfaced human brains as an input device. 

Tegmark, with his bottomless imagination, could write another book using this concept.  My imagination is somewhat limited by my lack of patience, but I can readily see the possibilities of such a scenario.

It also follows that the combined efforts of the sources of digital innovation are already hard at work to build such an interface.  We do it now with our voices and fingertips, we get the output into our minds using our eyes and ears.  Bypassing these would be a great leap forward.

The generation of people that are now pre-teen are imbued with screens and speakers, with phones and computers, with all the data and programs for its use, stored in "the cloud."  The generation following them may have a bio-digital interface implant that will exponentially increase their mental capacities.

Then there may be a great divide, those with the implant and those without.  A divide greater than any cultural, racial or religious divide that we now have.

The bio-digital interface is the next major step in our evolution.  History and our current mental capacity are reaching the point where there is just too much for an individual to have "in mind" so access to it all through a bio-digital interface is the answer.  With it, I could sit here and have philosophy, music, art, literature, history, any and all of the sciences, languages, and my family history come to mind with a proper query.  I could add to "the store" whenever I thought it was proper to do so.

It's big!

Now the thought occurs that we may already be equipped with such an interface.  Not with a digital network but a mental network of biological brains linked to a spiritual world.  The only difficulty is, we don't know how to access it or use it.

Sometimes, we accidentally do and one of those serendipitous events occurs but for the most part we don't understand, or know, how to intentionally do it.  It may be that we stumbled upon it with something we call prayer.

I know there is a spiritual world that influences us in a variety of ways an on a variety of levels.  How to interface and interact with that world is not something I know.

What Will Be Said?

 

The ancient Egyptian culture recognized a spiritual existence as demonstrated through mummification and sending along items for everyday comfort, even mummifying pets for the departed.  Well, from our vantage point 2000 years later we can see it all seems a bit ridiculous.  Yet this belief system was in vogue from 3100 BC to 30 BC; more than three thousand years.  What will be said of Christianity and Islam two thousand years from now? 

In 323 AD, a council of learned religious leaders met in Nicaea and codified Christianity, that was 300 years after the fact, after the principals lived.  It would be as though today, in 2022, a group of theologians got together and gathered texts from the Bible, the Koran, and maybe some from Buddhist and Hindu scripture and delivered a new set of religious doctrine as would have been expounded by the Great Enlightenment of 1700 (or so).  It isn't far-fetched, it happened then and it could again.  The results would be the same as that of the Egyptians, reasonable, logical, consoling but not at all the way it really is.

The truth is, we don't know the truth.  And perhaps we can't handle the truth.  John 8:32:  You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.  We don't and we're not.