n a t b s

I wrote again on my tabletop, scrawled the symbols for the interrelationship between matter and energy as it was understood in my day:

It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned.  There should have been an “A” in there somewhere for Awareness—without which the “E” and the “M” and the “c,” which was a mathematical constant; could not exist.

Vonnegut is a genius, not that he’s the first to have this thought, but here’s an excerpt from a great article I read yesterday:

Could the long-sought Theory of Everything be merely missing a component that was too close for us to have noticed?  Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the “Big Bang” rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality.  But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: We are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious — consciousness….In short, the attempt to explain the nature of the universe, its origins, its parameters, and what is really going on, requires an understanding of how the observer — our presence — plays a role.

-‘Biocentrism’: How life creates the universe

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

-Carl Sagan

MICHELLE BERNARD, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST:  This is—I think the most important thing I can say is that I‘m so glad that I‘m alive and old enough in a point in history to fully absorb what was happening.  I actually went away and sat in the green room by myself so that I could just absorb it and actually weep alone.

This is the most amazing evening of my entire life.  I kept looking at Barack Obama the entire evening and I kept thinking that one day that could be my son or my daughter.  Barack Obama, I think, in being elected as the Democratic Party‘s nominee has demonstrated to the entire world that in America anything is possible.

Joe Biden said it last night and you kept hearing Barack Obama say it again tonight, America‘s promise, America‘s promise, America‘s promise.  And you can‘t help but look at him and say America has finally realized its promise.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

MATTHEWS:  F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that—others have said it before that we‘re not an ethnic group, America.  Britain is an island and the French are a people.  He once said that we‘re harder to utter, something harder to utter, a willingness of the heart.  Is this nomination of Barack Obama a willingness of the heart, of the mind?  Is this a real change?  Is this a hope?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE:  Yes, it is!

MATTHEWS:  A prospect or a reality, where are we?

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

BERNARD:  It is all of the above, as they are telling us.

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

BERNARD:  We are looking tonight behind us at a sea of beautiful black, white, Asian faces.  It tells me that the era of identity politics in the United States is over.  I will be very happy on election night if we can get to a point where we don‘t have to talk about how women are voting, how African-Americans are voting, how people in Appalachia are voting.

Iowa did it first.  Iowa demonstrated that in this country white people will vote for a black man.  It‘s the greatest day in our nation‘s history.

…

America is a fundamentally different country today.  It will be even more different if he wins this election.  But regardless of the outcome of the election, our country will never be the same again.

wow

There’s a term from 1984, doublethink, which essentially means “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”  In the context of 1984 it represents a means of fascist mind control: as in if the government tells you one thing on Monday, and then something completely different on Tuesday, you’d damn well better believe what they said to be true on Tuesday despite the obvious contradiction in your head.  It is a bad thing in this context, however, since we live in a universe of paradoxes, I believe it’s actually an important ability to have.  Often in this universe, two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas are both true.  One example I was thinking of a few minutes ago is humanity.  I feel that we are simultaneously worthless debauched immoral dregs, and at the same time godly and beautiful.  How can this be?  How can we be both slimy scum and perfect god-like beings?

I’ll let you wrestle with the larger question of how two seemingly contradictory ideas can be true since I can’t really answer that anyway.  I’ll just tell you why I think each of those ideas is true.  First the pond scum.  Well, it’s actually quite literal in a way.  Life on this planet started, as far as I know, in some sort of primordial soup.  Billions of years ago, some slime in a tidal pool started to make copies of itself, yadda yadda yadda, and here we are: hence pond scum.  Furthermore, I do believe we were some form of rodentia and some point.  These are all things that we don’t treat with much respect to say the least, yet they are us.  We also do god-awful things all the time.  War, rape, murder, and taking advantage of people are all prevalent in the world.  Humans have no limit of  cruelty, sadism and selfishness: hence, immoral and debauched.

But we are also godly.  We have the ability to create.  We can tap into our vast, probably infinite, imaginations for ideas that we can then turn into reality; out of nothing, there is something.  We have compassion, understanding, and empathy.  We do selfless things: soldiers throw themselves on grenades to save their friends, people give their lives to their children and to other people all the time.  We create art and appreciate beauty.  As far as we know we’re the only life in the universe and we are able to have understanding, to recognize patterns.  We may be the sole manifestation of the universe trying to understand itself, and thus we represent a dawning magnificent awareness.  We have unlimited potential for good as well.  And we are, also quite literally, stardust.  Our atoms were forged billions of years ago in celestial fusion reactors: hence godly and beautiful.

I hope I’ve successfully demonstrated that both of these ideas are in fact viable, and that they both could be true.  But how can this be?  How can we be both divine and profane?  Perhaps humanity is a contronym, a word which is it’s own antonym, like awful.  Humanity is awful: 1) Extremely bad or unpleasant; terrible  2) Filled with awe, especially filled with or displaying great reverence.  If the word awful can be two things at once, why can’t we?

That favicon up there may look like a yin-yang but it’s not.  It is in fact the sacred chao, the holy symbol of the Discordian religion.  Here’s the full sized image:

It doesn’t come across so well in the favicon does it?  Maybe I can get a better one.  Anyway, that apple with the K is the apple of discord, thrown by the goddess Eris (aka Discordia) into a party of gods to which she was not invited…no one like chaotic guests.  The K stands for kallisti which means “to the prettiest” or “to the fairest” and arguing over who’s apple it was sparked tensions among the gods that ultimately lead to the Trojan war.  The pentagon is a sacred symbol of Discorianism because it is a five sided figure…it’s a long story.

Anyway, “Andrew why do you have a discoridan symbol on your blog, are you a discordian?”  Good question Andrew, I suppose I am somewhat of one yes.  “But why worship a religion based on chaos?” I wouldn’t say I worship it, but to sum up a complex thing in as few words as possible lets just say this:

Chaos created everything in the universe.  It created the sun, the earth, human life, and it created order.  So you tell me, who or what is god?