“that which is divinely natural,
but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.“
Mary Baker Eddy
Well, we are indeed in the presence of a miracle.
In the presence of a wonderful miracle!
In spite of the entrenched obstinacy of some ‘infallible’ and very powerful agents – who had Giordano Bruno burned in a public square for maintaining exactly the same thing – we have finally accepted this as a fact.
Some of us, at least…
What’s going on here?
What happened with/in the greatest/most powerful democracy on Earth?
Why has the American People allowed itself to be split in half? Each of those halves bowing to its own idol…
Only because ‘they had avocados’?!?
And what about Reagan? He was right, after all… Trump was the government, wasn’t he?
Reagan was incomplete.
Government is nothing but a tool. A tool for the society to govern itself with. “of the people, by the people, for the people“. But also a tool for a dictator to exploit a country.
Blaming the tool never takes the blamer out of the ‘unpleasant’ situation.
A more complete statement would have been:
‘Any unchecked government tends, sooner rather than later, to become a problem.’
The key word here being ‘unchecked’, not government. For the same reason which had prompted ‘god’ to warn us:
Any graven image you will ever make will inevitably be incomplete. Not because of your incompetence but because of my infinite complexity. I, your god, am infinite. Hence incomprehensible. You might glimpse some, or even a lot, about my ‘true’ nature but you’ll never find out enough. Enough for you to make a ‘usable’ graven image.
A reliable idol…
‘Exploring the consequences of our limited consciences‘
A truth is, first and foremost, an expression.
A message, formulated by an observer, describing a portion of what the person expressing themselves considers to be a ‘portion’ of ‘reality’. Being a message, any truth is formulated by means of a language.
Does anybody know everything about any subject? About anything, actually?
No, nobody knows everything about anything. Hence there is no such thing as a complete truth.
Furthermore, being expressed by means of a language, a truth – any expression, actually – will never be able to convey to the person receiving the message everything the transmitter intended to say. The transmitter is never able to cram ‘everything’ inside an inherently limited message, no language is absolutely ‘precise’ and no receiver will ever interpret any message the way the transmitter intended it to mean. Hence even if anybody will ever learn everything about anything, that person will never be able to convey that knowledge to anybody else. Let alone to everybody else…
What next?
‘Never ever believe anything? Anymore?!?’
Is it possible for us, humans living in concert, to cooperate in this manner?
Knowing that nothing which is being said, one way or another, is ‘true’? Completely true?
Well, we did get this far, didn’t we?
We’ve been expressing ourselves, in the imperfect manner I described above, since we’ve learned to use language. Since we’ve learned to speak…
70 000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, is when some scientists believe we’ve started to communicate more or less like we do now. The people living then had the same genes we have now and the bones they have left us to dig up and stare at are similar to ours. Hence the only thing which differentiates us from our ancestors is our culture. A treasure of knowledge which has been noticed – bit by bit, formulated using language – message by message, and remembered, one way or another. Hence the only difference between us and our ancestors is a collection of incomplete – and imperfectly interpreted – pieces of truth.
Then again, is it possible for us – humans living in concert – to cooperate by means of incomplete and ‘misinterpreted’ pieces of truth?
Well, we came this far going (up?) this way, didn’t we?
It seems that as long as we do it ‘in good faith’ things will, eventually, ‘mesh up’ just fine!
Which leads us to ‘the truth’. ‘The’ as different from ‘A’ truth.
While a truth is a message, the truth is a state of mind.
The understanding of the fact that what we call ‘reality’ can be learned only ‘in concert’.
Only as long as we help each-other along the process. Only as long as each time we formulate ‘a message’ we do our best to ‘speak the truth’.
The sign itself is simply true.
The only intriguing aspect in all this is the courage of the person who had affixed it!
You see, the first religious beliefs/cosmological explanations maintained that the whole ‘creation’ had been given birth by the ‘First Mother’. People in those times – like all of us – were just extrapolating their everyday knowledge into the metaphysical realm. Which hadn’t yet been given that name…
After the advent of agriculture – which had introduced the notion of property/inheritance, hence the need to defend those things – men took over. As owners – better suited for war – and then as dispensers of meaning. A.k.a. priests.
God followed suit. It had become a Father and a Shepard. It still is in the minds of the ordinary believers.
Reading some theology – it’s enough to scrap the surface – I found out that most theologians maintained that God was unfathomable. That its main characteristic is the fact that it is ‘hidden’.
Then how come some of us are so sure about its gender? About its will? About what it means for us to do?!?
“Propaganda machines give too much power to symbols;
they tell you the confederate flag is offensive!”
The fact that propaganda machines give too much power to symbols doesn’t mitigate the fact that some people find that flying the confederate flag is intended as an offense.
On the contrary, actually!
I’m convinced Putin still believes he might get away with it.
With whatever he wishes to accomplish…
Why?
Because he is convinced that the only thing which might prevent him from achieving his goal is ‘the West’.
You see, he is adamant that without the ‘western influence’ he would have imposed his will upon Ukraine a very long time ago. After all, he’d already done that in Russia, didn’t he?
And the West seems to be loosing its focus….
A lot of ‘distraction’. Trump is indicted on 37 counts, mainly for mishandling highly sensitive information, while Boris Johnson quits his MP chair claiming he is the victim. ‘I did mislead the Commons but I didn’t do it on purpose’.
According to Putin’s book, there’s no difference between him and these two guys. All three of them have nothing in their mind but their own interest. In this respect, Putin is absolutely right.
What he fails to realize is that Trump being indicted and Johnson being investigated by the Commons are signs of strength. The US and Britain, respectively, seem to have came back to their senses. And started cleaning up their act.
He, Putin, also fails to realize that the Western help might come in handy. For the Ukrainians.
But what keeps them fighting is their will. Their quest for freedom!
The very same thing had happened during WWII.
The West did carry huge amounts of weaponry to the former USSR. Which weapons had helped the Red Army resist – and then defeat – Hitler’s attempt to enlarge the German Lebensraum. But without the ordinary Russians putting up with the war… all western help would have been lost!
Same thing is happening under our own eyes. The arms beefing up Ukraine’s army might come in handy but it’s the Ukrainian determination to lead their own, independent, life which will eventually douse Putin’s ambition.
One final thing.
Nazi Germany had ultimately failed because it was an ‘imperium’. A socio-political arrangement where all decisions were made in a highly centralized manner. Where mistakes accumulated and eventually made it impossible for the arrangement to survive. Because unsolved past mistakes make it impossible for a system to evolve. To solve present day challenges.
Any resemblance to what’s going on in present day Russia is nothing but yet another proof that failing to understand history forces you to repeat the lesson.
For something to become a resource, it has to be identified first. As such…
Coming back to Kissinger, we need first to accept that he is the product of the world before him and one of the factors who continues to shape the current one.
We can learn from him – and coldly assess the present situation in order to avoid past mistakes going forward – or … we can let him win! And follow in his footsteps: Divide et impera, manipulate people into doing things against their own nature, despise everybody who thinks differently than what we consider to be right …
“To set a wolf to guard sheep“
Latin proverb.
A first glance, it doesn’t make much sense to put an oilman in charge of a COP conference.
Nothing more than setting a wolf to guard sheep, right?
On the other hand, shepherd dogs are nothing but ‘converted’ wolves.
Wolves who had somehow figured out that it’s more sustainable to live with the humans than in the wild.
Former wolves who had somehow figured out that’s far more sustainable – for them, to protect the sheep than to prey on them.
OK, the agent driving the process had been human. But the facts remain. Dogs have evolved from wolves.
What are we waiting for?
If the descendants of the wolves had been able to ‘cross over’, why so many reasonable people continue to believe that the ‘Global Warming’ is a hoax?
After all, we’re the ones supposed to be reasonable…
And the way I see it, it’s unreasonable to believe that burning fossil fuel accumulated during millions of years can be ‘sustainable’. Forget about ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak gas’ and remember how hot the Earth was when the first drop of fossil fuel had been set aside by Mother Nature.
‘Self awareness’ is how we call our ability to observe ourselves while observing others.
Humberto Maturana
First and foremost, existence is a concept.
Something our forefathers had coined. A mental construct built by talking about it.
Nothing existed before we saw it AND talked about it!
Think about the stars nobody knew about until we used Hubble to peek into the history of the Universe.
Think about the stars which ‘sit’ there and no man will ever see. Or otherwise perceive.
Think!
Do they, the stars, actually exist?
In the sense that has their being been ‘measured’ into existence by a self aware observer?
Has that observation been communicated by the observer to anybody else? Who had confirmed that that observation was anything more than a mere illusion?
You see, both actually – my rantings on your monitor – and figuratively, I don’t need to be told about the existence of the steps I have to climb up and down when I leave my bed each morning. On the other hand, I know that the Amazon exists because I’ve been told about it. Further more, I see for my self the steps in my house but I have a name for them – and I can write about them – because our forefathers had learned to speak. About the world they were discovering around themselves.
My point? We speak things into existence, not into being.
‘How about the things we talk about before we’ve ‘seen’ them? Neptune, the planet, had been ‘calculated’ before ‘seen’ and all mass manufactured things are first discussed and only then launched into production.
Which was the exact moment when each of them had started to exist?’
Good question!
I’m afraid I have no valid answer. This is a matter which will remain open for further debate!
After all, how else to justify our existence?
How else to find our own meaning? Other than by talking about it?
nicichiarasa 