Sunday, January 27, 2019

Let's Put Everything In Perspective


We are currently buried in a blizzard of information, seemingly spinning out of control.  Politics and current events are so significant in our lives that they have become an all-consuming mental opioid. 

 We feel highs, depressions, and withdrawal pains.  I find Twitter to be especially addictive.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media thrust pictures, videos, and narratives in our faces, stimulating our emotions.  We feel rushes of joy, sadness, anger and outrage, until we can’t distinguish between what is existentially critical and what is totally insignificant.

A little kerfuffle between a few conservative high school students and some leftist protesters turns into the monster news story of the year.  There was no violence involved.  They didn’t even touch each other.  The only violence occurred when the news and social media decided to intentionally report it inaccurately in order to inflame peoples’ emotions.  Another mental opioid rush.

Everyone on Earth instantly gets a version of the story thrust in their angry faces and sees it unfold on video while their blood pressures rise.  Except for perhaps my wife.  She refuses to follow the news, and instead reads a lot of fiction.  She’s the smart one in the family.

Because when you look through the spyglass backward and see the world in true perspective, it’s all insignificant.

In an earlier AT piece, I mentioned I was reading a book titled “We Have No Idea” by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson.  In it, they describe the fact that we are only aware of about 5% of the known universe.  The rest is all dark matter and energy that we know absolutely nothing about.  And yet that is just a minute fraction of what we truly don’t know. 

Our limited brains and senses are totally inadequate to be able to comprehend the concept of eternity times infinity, where time and space cannot exist as we currently perceive them.  We are really no different from ants, which can only see and understand their own little anthill.  Once in a great while, something incomprehensible (to them) from the outside world intrudes into theirs.  I believe the same thing happens to us, as well.

I just finished Scott Adams book, “Win Bigly”.  He puts forth a convincing case (originally theorized by philosopher Nick Bostrom) that our universe and everything in it is a giant computer simulation created by an advanced civilization.  All of the “crazy” phenomena we “moist robots” (as Adams describes us) observe are merely glitches in the program.  Although Adams is a cartoonist (Dilbert), he is dead serious about this.

Back in the Silver Age of the 1960’s (at least for my Marvel comics) when I was a kid, I would make weekly trips to the library and each time check out at least a half-dozen books on the topics of UFOs, psychic phenomena, astral projection, and ghostly close encounters.  I was ravenous for information on the alternate dimensions of things we know nothing about.  Most of it scared the hell out of me.

A few years ago, my wife and I were vacationing in New Hampshire.  As we drove up Route 3 to the White Mountains, I observed something very startling.  We stopped, and I took a picture of it.  It was a state historical marker commemorating the first documented alien abduction in America.  I had long ago read about this account in the book “The Interrupted Journey”.  I find it amazing that the state of New Hampshire would deem the alleged incident so credible that they would honor it this way.

A few times in my life, I have experienced brief incomprehensible intrusions into my little world.  Things I can’t explain, unless you attribute them to mental mirages or delusions.  I believe most people have also witnessed some inexplicable events at some points in their lives.

Being a descendent of Doubting Thomas the Apostle, I agree that anything we witness could be a product of our own delusions or imaginations.  There is no way to discount that.  But we do know that there must be an infinite number of possibilities of things in existence that are beyond our knowledge and senses.  It is statistically highly likely that some of them would intrude into our little anthill at some point.

The Pentagon has spent $22 million from 2007 to 2012 studying UFOs in its Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program.  The Defense Department has a number of ongoing studies on advanced propulsion systems, which are related to their study of UFO’s.  One program is trying to develop a warp drive powered by dark energy.

In my early UFO studies, I read several books by George Adamski, who told incredible tales of flying in spaceships to the Moon and other planets in the solar system.  His books were illustrated with photographs and detailed diagrams of the spacecrafts’ interiors.  He said that the aliens told him the saucers were powered by crossing a cathode with an anode.

Today, our satellites are powered by ion drive, with a cathode and anode.  More recently, scientists have developed the first flight of an airplane by ion drive.  Back in 1955, when Adamski first wrote about alien ion drive propulsion, it was totally unheard of.   Is it possible that scientists are reverse-engineering alien technology?  It’s an intriguing question.

Honestly, I don’t know how much of the bizarre accounts in books and articles I have read that I am willing to accept.  I’m keeping an open mind.  Some accounts seems very credible, some do not.  As a Doubting Thomas, unless I see it for myself I will always have doubts.  Even then, I may have doubts.

However, based on a few personal experiences in these areas, I can attest that there is more going on around us than we are aware of in our daily lives.  I won’t go into describing these personal experiences, since you probably wouldn’t believe them anyway.  And I don’t blame you.

I’m convinced the human soul exists, as well as an afterlife.  I believe this not from reading the Bible (which I really haven’t read yet), but from phenomenological evidence.  I can’t accept the theory that we are only computer simulations.

Life is very, very short.  Once we go to our reward, it is doubtful we will even remember our lives on Earth, as they will be but a flicker in the scope of eternity.

I think it’s best if we take a deep breath, go out and look at the stars, and tear ourselves away from the addictive drugs of social media and network news as much as possible.  They are not good for the soul. 

Angel

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