Existential Wonderment

To live, to breath, to see, to hear, to think, to exist. This is the greatest miracle the Universe has provided. Not the orbital’s of gigantic plants, the convulsion of stars into black holes, or the tons of energy expanded from a supernova. No, all these events pale in comparison to a millisecond of the existence of human. Every miracle possible has occurred to join together the exact combination of tissues, cells, and ideas to create the perfect machine, able to contemplate it’s place in a universe of such great marvels and miraculous events, and able to look into the stars and measure it's minuteness. But rest assured if the sun had the ability to think even it would bow down to the complexity of our species. But the only flaw we have is also our greatest motivator, the flaw of desire. The desire to be better then we were yesterday, the desire to outdo the greatest of the great, the desire to be immortal through remembrance. But sometimes when striving towards the surely unimaginable goals our species has set for itself (and constantly achieved and surpassed) we sometimes forget to realize the beauty of being alive. Every second of living is a gift, either the power of god at work, a nod from the cosmos, or divine outcome of time, but whatever it is this miracle is not guaranteed to be around forever. So go out and enjoy the most basic and enjoyable part of the human experience, being alive.

The Delusion of Intelligence

The law of the conservation of mass, the principle idea that mass can be neither created nor destroyed. If we weigh everything else in mass then why not our ideas also, and as such why would this rule not apply to our ideas? The answer in short, is that it does. Humans have not created great ideas out of thin air, not made progression without base, and not become visionaries but instead only disciples. If ideas come from the joining of experience (see “On the Intelligence of Ideas”) then the experiences have always been there for us to discover and be enlightened with, and we can only be credited with properly joining together those experiences to form ideas, and not actually conjuring them from the depths of some undiscovered genius psyche. We continue on the delusion of intelligence, when we are simply replaying the information the universe has always held.

Ghosts, God, and Comfort in the Untangible.

We glance at our ghosts, assure our angels, and dispute our demons everyday. We spend everyday fighting the battles with an enemy we create. And make no mistake none of us can handle the pressure everyday without something to lean against. A friend said to me once that I use religion as the crutch in my life to support my weak persona; I said to him that if that is the case then every human being on earth has a bad back. Wheatear it is love, community, culture, drugs, or religion that becomes the crutch, it makes no difference. Humans have created these things as our shelter, as our tent from the winds of everyday life. We confine ourselves in our fortress where our fears take a back seat to a much more important cause. On a usually everyday basis we lock ourselves and become convinced the real world is only a temporary destination. As humans we are a species that likes to only step halfway through the door, wheatear it be the spiritual or “real” one, and use the other as a means of escape so we do not fall too much through to one side. We all need our escape, and none of us is capable of criticizing anyone else’s.

Information Fast Food

Nowadays I see people (including me) watching every little thing they consume, exercising regularly, consuming less chemicles and such. Now this is all well since the health of the human body is imperative to our survival, but what about the health of the human mind? How many of us can safely say we filter and sort through everything we see/smell/hear or listen to?
Something I never thought I’d say, but am driven to now, is that it’s very beneficial to argue for the sake of argument. We’re fed the equivalent of Big Macs in information everyday, stuff that seems appealing and gives us momentary satisfaction but ruins our thinking in the long run. The disturbing thing is we continue to consume these fast foods of information and justify it to ourselves by saying that we are not intelligent enough to ponder these things on our own. What a ridiculous notion! In my belief it is not that we are not capable, but instead we refuse to spend the time to do so. “I can’t do this” translates roughly to “I don’t feel like putting forth the effort”. Educate yourself, instead of agreeing with the gold-frilled ideas of others.

On the Intelligiance of Ideas

-Ideas, do they truly indicate the greatness of individual or just the product of luck? Now to take a seemingly pessimistic view of the human mind, we are nothing but a wealth of chemicals, interacting and reacting in very similar ways but to different stimuli. A great idea shows itself when just the right balance of neural pathways and chemical balances are established, when our experiences in life come together to power the light bulb we call an idea. Should we credit these individuals for their genius, or credit their influences for piecing together to form a even greater sum? To some sense of the word we are all in this sense a bit narcissist, a bit to crediting of our own ideas. We often do not create our circumstances; do not measure out every variable and event in our life to equate to this great idea. Of course not, as we do not know the formula for such a great outcome. Our ideas are products of chance and experience, not products of some kind of inner genius finally shown to the world. You can study Plato your whole life, but you may as well never be Plato. Variance in experience in its most base sense is the most important thing in life, because we might not know the ingredients list for world-changing revelations but we can be sure we gather as many materials as we can.