Now I have never visited Scotland. I apparently have some roots there in my genetic pool somewhere but I hear it’s glumly beautiful. I also understand that the Shetlands to the north to be rich with wildlife. In reading a news article today and yes the journalism was beyond slanted which I am usually ok with because hey as long as you’re not fabricating things (Fox News) or presenting entertainment as news (CNN), you have a soapbox to stand on responsibly in my book. (Blog=Soap Box). Paid journalist for a newspaper…..you have to do better …but I think we’d be hippie friends.

The article was about BP and their test drilling for a well that will be dug deeper than any before and with that depth there is increased risk. In all things, and I hold all humans to this golden standard, the good of every creature involved must be considered. Perhaps it is unfair and I am not without my concessions, but I appreciate how Robert Pirsig lays out a relationship among different levels of evolution that will dictate what is best, typically, in a given situation. (E.g.- the evolutionary ability to cognate is superior to a virus’s biological imperative to replicate and infect. The doctor treats you because you are evolutionary more complex and capable of exerting more influence on the evolutionary process directly. Well maybe I took his logic further than he did. I’ll blog on it later. It’s an incredible perspective.)

Anyhow, BP is on my shit-list after the Gulf. I won’t buy from them and I think they are negligent, irresponsible, and made a serious error in oversight in their quest for profit. Unforgivable. So when I began to read these comments, after this more biased than not article, I was left shaking my head at my work desk. The human memory, when unaffected by the emotional and cost of life effects of such a tragedy as the Gulf Oil Spill seemed to be cheering for BP. It is purely and utterly stupid. With comments such as “Man up and drill”…”let’s drink it up”…or the least thought out “With attitudes like that we would never have split the atom, gone to the moon or found the New World.” C’mon. Really? I know I shouldn’t take internet commentors seriously but this is where ignorance can be flouted at abandon. We would still have split the atom, gone to the moon, and of course ventured to the ends of the earth to discover a land of great fertility. Maybe we wouldn’t have split the atom to devise means of destruction, or had to posture against another collective entity to “race” to the moon, and we most certainly could have done better with the resources and in our negotiations to move in with the locals than we did. This argument is just stupid and I hear it so much that it demonstrates that we have so very little faith in the originality of the human mind and what we each are capable of.

Anyhow, this is my blog I can re-post a web-researched and vigilant comment if I want. I guess today I’m just fed up with people running into the arms of those who turn them around and screw them because we “need” their resource. Let’s think outside of this gasoline drenched box, please, for the love of mankind and this earth.

Didactic comment on aforementioned article:

A candid self-revelation and disclaimer to give you some context might be in order and better earlier than too late in my blogging endeavor. This blog is in existence only out of a compulsion to write. To semi-publish what stirs in my head and drives me to pursue a different kind of engagement with the world around me. I attempt to remain humble and apologize if I ever come across entirely competent or knowledgeable in all of the fields I am interested in. Mostly I read, observe, and ruminate about these things and seek connectedness between related disciplines and ideas.

Eventually I will add a booklist to this blog to give you an idea of what and who some of the authors and creative thinkers are who have and continue to inspire me to seek and aspire to serve that which I only feel comfortable as referring to as the divine- some life force, energy or sentience beyond and connected to the sentience we see striving for realization in our world. Our intuitions will not let it’s messages and values nor our suspicion of it’s existence disappear as evidenced in our entertainment today and the stories of our ancestors. Divinity exists within and around us, however the naming and classification of it’s characteristics, while comforting to the masses tends to humanize that which seems to me the inspiration for humanity rather than that which conforms to our limited perspectives and tendency to classify everything we find to fit our present constructs and understandings of such things.

As I am new to blogging and if you are reading this first I must make it evident that I rarely hold to the literalism of myths and scriptures, but instead how they inform a postmodern way of coexistence between a species that has covered the surface of this earth and must now find real ways of engaging and preserving our only home as well as it’s inhabitants. The idea of god(s) is inspirational but I hold to a belief that is more fluid and requires more faith than a participant of a single religion espouses.This is not meant to mean I have attained this measure of faith but I aspire to believe in that which is divine- a life force that courses through every living creature and promotes survival we observe as biological, cultural, and psychological evolution. It adapts and my personal belief is that we experience this as an unconscious force that is striving towards balance and coexistence. Acceptance of that which presently defies measurement, labels, and comprehension yet is the ripple of life within organisms and how they depend upon one another in such an integral way for sustenance is all I know to believe. God, spirit, deity, supernatural intelligent force, whatever- these are only ways our ancestors have worked it out for themselves and developed theologies to describe, contain, and ultimately control access to such divinity to their own ends. A true theology must be different and it must be open to fellow pilgrims who seek their own narrow path. Those who feel that the ways that have been paved before us are not our road to fulfillment, balance and peace will find a kindred spirit here.

-Abel

Recently I have been mulling over the mystery of individual perception in relation to what some theorists have called the “multiverse”. This term has been used in films and therefore seems very much like science fiction.  While intrigued, I try to remember what we observe through our senses and instruments is only as accurate as our ability to perceive and understand. Science as a construct with great and widespread utility is best utilized with humility. Not that this is any different than what we should practice in any profession or field.

I really enjoy this page for it’s visuals and laymen’s explanation of Thomas Young’s Two-Slit experiment. It arrives at one conclusion that “A quantum entity has a dual potential nature, but its actual (observed) nature is one or the other.” The potential here is what I have been ruminating about. So we have examined an elementary particle and concluded previously that it behaves with characteristics of both waves and particles. Now we discover that when one individual photon is pushed towards an obstacle with two slits that it behaves in a way that confounds and of course leaves us with another challenge to explain. Additionally from reading through this site it is important to remember the context of these observations: “In the macroscopic world ruled by classical physics, things are what they are. In the microscopic world ruled by quantum physics, there is an existential dialogue among the particle, its surroundings and the person studying it.”

To go into this area is to wander into a realm that is beyond my elementary understanding, but I look to science to ground and inform as much as I do the values and ways of living our myth and spiritual traditions have passed down. I am no physicist or scientist, although I believe myself to have a firm grasp on human psychology, cultural development and evolution, and the potential for the human species to evolve and inherit the role of curators of this earth. These are the things I read and find myself ruminating about most frequently.

With this experiment I find it fascinating that the seemingly dual properties exhibited by one photon and it’s ability to interfere with itself to perhaps be reflective of something greater than the possible existence of alternate realities or multiverses. To me it seems possible that this potential as was described in the previous quote is also present in each of us. When talking about an alternate reality we think about how given just the right set of conditions things would be different for us – perhaps we would not exist or we are under a dictatorship instead of a democracy after losing World War II or some other war that happened instead. It is staggering and fantastical to think about but this is our reality being described. Our present reality is ripe potential that has yet to be given direction. Many of us exist differently in both our personal and professional roles as if being forced through two distinct roles- one we perform in service to a system, or way of life that was established before our conception and continues to with or without significant influence from the individual, and that which is what makes up the individual. This is difficult to describe because each of us is so unique. If you start with the question, if you could have named yourself or had made decisions for yourself and independently from the day you were born, what would you choose for yourself? Another way of thinking about this is to ask yourself if this was your first day on earth and you were implanted in a life- in a body that was already here and existing apart from you, what would you think of your relationships? your career? your development from birth to adulthood?

I don’t mean to make the Young experiment a literal analogy. The potential of a particle is vastly different from the potential of a human being. Yet the particle exists and the phenomena it displays under the conditions set before it raise very interesting and speculative questions according to Newtonian and quantum mechanical principles. What of the human entity? Have we truly lost the wonder that we do exist in a kind of parallel universe from one another? Our subjective lens towards the world, perceptions affected by nature, nurture, culture and our own self-determination allow us to continue on in these parallel worlds without truly entering into a common reality with one another. There is an order to things that exists without our governance- nature left to it’s own self-sustaining course. There are things we have constructed such as governing bodies, nations, and everything down to neighborhoods and congregations that we accept into our own reality because we understand the need for ground rules and cooperation for mutual survival. What is the next step in human potential? Where is our evolution heading to have evolved such faculties as cognition, self-awareness and the capacity to feel and empathize with one another?

Should their be multiverses or alternative histories that could have accounted for a different present, the future always remains here in our present potential. We are at the precipice of such alternative realities because we have self-determination and as a collective humanity is the most significant organismic influence on our futures.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being
to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that
has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the
work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young
people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is
something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their
forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart,
they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded
time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is:
solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person
who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and
uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people
who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high
inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in
himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of
another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that
chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the
task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and
night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging
and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who
must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the
ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Paris
February 17, 1903