Atoms and elephants and really little stuff that is really big

In this age of excitement and the ever quest for evermore titillation, we become jaded to the ever uniqueness of our every breath and our every thought, without which common and ordinary and even unique have no meaning. The human mind makes it all unique, even if the composition of it all can be reduced to even a more common denomination than quarks and gluons, whatever that may be. Without a discovering mind and an inventing mind, everything just is. But with a discovering mind and an inventing mind, mere humans can get a glimpse of the Builder of ALL. First we discovered atoms. Then to our amazement we discovered a universe within each atom. Nucleons, the protons and neutrons that compose the atoms. Then even deeper within, that which we cannot see, but can detect, and we name them quarks. And this a zoo of "up" and "down" and a "chromo force" which we think even more minute and call gluons. And here we think we are, in the basement of matter! But then again, I wouldn't be surprised if this basement has a hidden trap door, and perhaps when opened, an even more and vast universe lay beyond?

We call this Builder of All, God. Yet, we are but humans, and even at our best, when we conjure up every description to describe what we acknowledge to be indescribable -- Omnipresent, Omniscient, Infinite, Truth, Love, Creator, Provider, Savior, Deliverer, Elohim, Adonai, Yahweh, Ehyeh -- we are doing our best with what we have, and that necessitates "projecting" our humanness, and the universe about us, upon that which is not. The creation is not the Creator.



I like what Isaiah says when describing God as the Potter and we humans as the clay, "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'He did not make me'? Can the pot say of the potter, 'He knows nothing'?"



"Eddington's elephant."
The astrophysicist Arthur Eddington gave an illustration of "an elephant sliding down a hill of wet grass." To the physicist the elephant is irrelevant after one ascertains it weighs two tons, and the hill is also irrelevant when one ascertains the hill is 60-degrees, and too the wet grass is irrelevant when one ascertains the friction of this wet grass. In other words the elephant has been reduced to mass and the hill reduced to angle of slope and the wet grass reduced to coefficient of friction. Now the physicist has something to chew on, a problem to solve and an answer that can be found. But in this reduction to certainties the poetry has disappeared and totally gone is that hill covered with wet grass with that zany elephant sliding down it. Irrelevant?

God is nowhere -- God is now here. The difference a little space makes.


The Starry Night Sky

The center of the universe is at the apex of the point-of-view of the one with such thoughts, the rods and cones of this observer stimulated by celestial photons of ages past are the translators, sending their electrochemical codes to the brain where the mind interprets these ancient bits of electromagnetic radiation, and there creates the entire universe, with the invisible mind at the very center.

Anything new under the sun?

Everything!

In this age of excitement and the ever quest for evermore titillation, we become jaded to the ever uniqueness of our every breath and our every thought, without which common and ordinary and even unique have no meaning. The human mind makes it all unique, even if the composition of it all (all as in ALL) can be reduced to even a more common denomination than quarks and gluons, whatever that may be. Without a discovering and inventing mind, everything just is. With a discovering and inventing mind, value is born -- how the mind positively and negatively value things and concepts -- which gives birth to concepts of good/evil, moral/immoral, all these invisible realities dwelling within the human mind that project into the natural world that recognizes none of it.

Giraffes and Egyptians and seeing the future

The Egyptians used a hieroglyph that appears to the innocent eye as a giraffe, but to the learned Egyptian the image reads "foresee" or "predict." Yet I think it was innocent eyes that recognized that indeed, the long-necked creature could see into the future, for in the tall-grass savanna the human ambles along blindly toward a pride of lions, and it is the giraffe that watches the scene and if asked, could foretell the future of that present-sighted human.

Brevity

Science finds answers.
Philosophy finds questions.
Religion puzzles over it all.

How reasonable is reason?

How does one explain the unexplainable? How does one explain feelings of rightness (as opposed to feeling right)? How does one explain comfort when this body and mind have but a paper-thin armor of skin in an environment of sticks and stones and microbes and exploding stars? How does one explain feelings of security when fear and anxiety are a part of all humanity? Perhaps a mind evolved to think the irrational, rational, makes living possible? Or maybe evolved strategies to block out the precariousness of it all, saving the mind from itself, saving it from seeing what it actually sees? For me a former "experiment" with meditation upon nothingness produced unexpected results. I found that when one purposely peels away what evolution has taken forever to arrive at, one comes to a "sum zero" point when one equals one and no more or no less. I found it not a pleasant place, to observe everything as everything is, without a filtering mind, is as close to meaningless as I dared to go. I think reason a slippery word. We seem to want anything with meaning to thereby have a reason, a reason for being meaningful. I have a watch. The reason for having the watch is to tell time. Not only is telling time reasonable, but it is helpful in coordinating one's activities with others. The modern world revolves around a standard of time using watches and clocks. Yet the reasonableness of this becomes unreasonable and absurd in a world without modern humans. A watch left behind on the moon would immediately lose its value and meaning, yet may continue to tick accurate time for years. What I mean by all this rambling is that I believe a universe without reason and meaning can but yield all that exists within it equally without reason. Reason then is no more than a ticking watch on a barren moon. Even so, I understand the reasonableness of others in not accepting this conclusion.