Thoughts On Nature

Thoughts On Nature

I like to keep panoramic thoughts like this simple. Not by choice—but when it comes to nature, the human species is no more capable of ultimate insight here than any other species. We just have the audacity to excessively often think we know more than we really do know. 

For me it starts with the logic that wherever there is a gift, there must be a gift giver. Nature is clearly a gift. It has been around for billions of years. That itself is a real stretch for our species to imagine. The gift giver in this case I will call God, perhaps so I have a God just like so many others have a God. God, for most people, comes with a lot of details and rituals, and seems to follow the same pattern ever since humans have been around. Most people inherit a particular God described in their inherited (or marriage) bestowed religious sect, a religious sect which always contains some sort of scripture written by humans many years ago, but interestingly, mostly about the same period in history, and never by any prophet themselves. Maybe it was the fad back then.  This inherited God is available for personal communication, protection, and a trip to some sort of heaven after death.  Going to this heaven, of course, requires adherence to particular scripture, certain rituals, and assorted beliefs, some of which become obviously a tad ridiculous with advancing times and knowledge. Most importantly, for sins committed, there is always a path to forgiveness. After all, we are all going to sin, it is just a matter of to what extent, and so without forgiveness, who would ever get to heaven? The problem with forgiveness is what about, for example, the victim of a murder? How do they compete to get to heaven? Or do they get automatic admission? But if they do, wouldn’t the quickest and easiest way to heaven be through being murdered? “Oh what a tangled web we weave…….”. Early on sacrifices were a way to gain God’s forgiveness with a lot of animals and hapless humans sacrificed as gifts to God. There is still some of that with suicide bombers, and religious slaughter of heathens. Plenty of humans still kill as a path to Heaven.

I can’t find in history a clear example of God having any chosen people.  Not that numerous groups haven’t claimed such a thing.  Yet, I am not aware today that there are any chosen people who are less likely to die from diseases, or death on a battlefield, or being hit by a car, or any other typical way to die. The frequency of death from all causes seems to be the same for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and so on—if the environmental circumstances are the same. Of course the praying goes on regardless, mostly as a means to cover all bases and to create some sort of hope for the matter at hand. 

With all the above to go on, I don’t spend a lot of time pretending I can describe God, or pretend to have communication with Him.  The past and the future seem to be dependent on some sort of evolutionary process that we learn more and more about with time. From what we now have learned about this process it is surely not willy-nilly or random. There are laws in existence which govern the process, and I simply assume God created the laws which govern the evolutionary process. There seem to be no evidence whatsoever that any of us are immune from these laws. And no, there is no sanctity of life on any individual basis. We are all going to die, the created process seems to insist on it. We either learn to deal with this reality, or we suffer greatly from our fear of death. 

If we cannot spend pleasant times communicating directly with God, except via illusions, then the next best thing is to understand, as best we can with our own limitations, how the evolutionary process works. Most of us spend a lot of time being impressed with human creations or particular humans or particular human situations. This is natural enough, and we spend our formative years learning enough to engage successfully in such endeavors in our productive years.  If we survive our productive years relatively intact, then only fools keep trying to believe that their time of being productive, in these kind of productive period endeavors, has not ended. Our time on the stage is over, and our character has died.  We can either go gently down the stream or make an ass of ourselves trying to constantly swim upstream. 

This leaves nature, our past experiences, and our unique personality with which to shape our terminational years. The best companions in our terminational years can be found out in nature. The humans with which we once had such meaningful relationships are far away, dead, or no longer very relevant to our lives. It is out in nature we begin to realize that the only constants in the evolutionary process are genetics, change, diversity, chance, time, and progress (not in a smooth progression, but with periods of reversal and stagnation). All of us, to varying degrees, spend so much of our life fighting change, diversity, chance, time, and progress as if we ourselves were controlling the evolutionary process. Individually we are dispensable, like it or not.  If Abraham Lincoln had not been the President to free the slaves, some other President would have. If the Wright brothers had not invented the airplane, some one else would have. If Roger Bannister had not broken the 4 minute mile someone else would have.  And that is how it goes. No individual is indispensable in the evolutionary process. 

None of us are free to be whatever we want to be. We may have the right to choose whoever we want to marry but this quest is not what we pretend it to be. We aren’t free to pick out the best person we can find to marry at all. The best we can do is compete with those at our own level of marriage desirability. The ugliest guy in the class doesn’t bother to ask the prettiest girl in the class to the prom. He is not really free to do that at all. The poorest student in class is not free to go the Harvard. The least athletic are not free to be athletic stars. So it goes, on and on. And all is not as it often seems either. The most attractive people are much more likely to have a series of divorces than the less attractive. The best athletes often have a much more difficult time achieving any contentment after the glory days are over. The wealthiest people, whether they earned their wealth or inherited it, are rarely pictures of contentment. I once was a live-in chauffeur for a very wealthy widow for a short period of time and wow, I never saw a clan of more unhappy people than her whole family clan. They had nothing really to fuss about, but they fussed about everything, almost all the smallest of matters. Their wealth was useless. No one views Donald Trump as a picture of contentment. 

So what then is really left for us to be individually content about? If we cannot be individually significant or eternal, what can we be? I reckon, when out in nature, feeling the vastness, diversity, and endless uniqueness of all the components, we can at least achieve a genuine gratitude for ever having had the chance to be a part of such a process. We got here by chance, that’s the way the evolutionary process works, and it seems a tad inane to think God individually created us just like it would be inane to say God personally created Hitler. Why would any merciful God do that?  If God intended to short circuit the evolutionary process everything would have been perfect from the start. Or so it would seem to me. These days, the most meaningful reality is out in nature. Any true interaction with nature does not leave us feeling superior to anything else in nature. What a preposterous thing for anyone to believe that “God gave us dominion over the animals, plants, and material aspects of nature”. That is a really huge self serving notion. If dinosaurs had our brain power, they certainly would have thought they had dominion too.  When I stand next to a giant redwood tree, it is a tad ridiculous for me to feel any superiority. Sure the tree cannot laugh, but then it cannot cry either. The tree cannot be happy, but then it cannot be sad, or angry, or jealous, or depressed etc. I could potentially live to be a hundred years old, but the redwood tree has the potential to live for thousands of years. I can be killed off a thousand different ways but a redwood tree has withstood numerous assaults, including forest fires over thousands of years. Only our species can take them down, and we eagerly did, early on, especially the biggest and oldest of them. I am well aware of death, the redwood tree has no such notion to fret about. While humans have invented the notion that the world is a contest of evil vs good (God vs the Devil), the evolutionary process sees everything in terms of useful and useless, adaptive to change and unadapted to change. Useful survives and uselessness does not and we get progress—a progress that has been proceeding for billions of years. 

The big difference between the “lowly” earthworm and us is that the earth worm came first and was part of the process from which we eventually evolved, and the earthworm has not the vaguest sense of it’s role in the process, or it’s death whereas we, to differing degrees, do. We and the earthworm, are just different, not one more important to the process than the other. Well, I will hedge a bit here since we currently are busy being the direct cause of one of the biggest species extinction periods in evolutionary history. Other extinction periods were caused by changes in climate more so than one species driving the others to extinction. Well, not to worry, Mother Nature always bats last. If we can’t practice responsible reproduction the evolutionary process will make us pay dearly for it. 

I always return from my hours in nature immensely more mellow, contented, and relaxed than before these little peregrinations.  And I use the term nature in the broadest sense. I can return from meandering around some unique city neighborhood and have the same sense of connection to the evolutionary process. My favorite ‘friends’ in nature are the Redwood trees.  They are so immense, so durable (some have been around thousands of years). There would even be older such trees except humans cut them down for bragging rights. 

I no more condemn humans for their ignorant behaviors than I would any other species, past or present, for their imperfections. The evolutionary process deals with such imperfections—that is what we called progress. In spite of ourselves, humans have progressed too. We don’t, as least as often, disembowel someone in public like we used to for punishment, or burn witches at the stake, and so on. Of course some, in growing numbers, are finding a need to gun down little children or classmates, or just people in random, but all this just reflects that we are overpopulating the earth, and overpopulation produces this pent up feeling of the world being ‘too much in our face’ these days. All these instant communication devices have the downside of information overload, and much of the information is emotionally explosive to us, sometimes to the point we just lose it. 

At lot of successful aging has to do with letting go. Death is, for all practical purposes, by a thousand cuts until there is precious little left to lose. It is quite normal for parents and siblings to let go after the formative years and offspring become quite independent.  Continued dependence is more abnormal. Those who fail to become independent after the formative years pay a price. This has nothing much to do with losing respect for each other at all. Often distance leads enchantment to the view and holiday gatherings become ever more so rewarding. The myriad communication devices make it ever more difficult to let go. After years of communicating with parents twenty times a day with text messaging, it is hard to stop, and failure to stop simply limits one’s world more to the same old, same old, people. For most people it is probably healthier to have endless new meaningful relationships with others. We should never forget that people build people, and warding oneself off away from people in our productive years does not bode well for contentment or invigorating challenges. Of course people are all different so there is no hard fast formula to follow—just endless opportunities to appreciate diversity.  

Since diversity is such an important factor in the evolutionary process we need resist trying to pretend otherwise. Early on in life I took this Science Teaching Methods course in which the Professor asked me to identify the best way to teach a certain scientific concept. I responded that there probably was no best method. The guy became apoplectic over my answer and demanded to know why I would say such a thing, and for what I thought the course existed. My answer was, “if we all listed the top ten teachers we ever had, they all had their own unique way of teaching, and yet all were good teachers.” He told me never again to participate in class discussions and never called on me again. I got a D in the Methods course. Fortunately he went on sabbatical and I had a replacement Professor for Practice Teaching. I got an A in Practice Teaching, so this is one of my favorite and interesting memories.  It was helped again by luck in that when I showed up to start practice teaching, the teacher in the class told me to wait a week until he finished a unit, and not to come to class since he didn’t want me to feel obligated to copy his own methods. So much in life is luck. 

Out in nature we imbibe the vastness of it all, the uniqueness of the various components, the interdependency of all the components, the solace that comes from the quietude, and the peace of mind realizing we are part of it all. I love Arboretums for all the diversity of plants, trees, and bushes.  I love the forest for all the wildlife. In my own life, at one point or another, I have had pet (wild or domestic) chickens, pigeons, goats, sheep, rabbits, hamsters, fish, cats, dogs, deer, and horses. There is something rewarding about being able to relate to other living entities in nature. It may seem strange, but one can find talking to animals or even trees a meaningful dialogue. With patience, no dialogue is really needed, just a sense of trust. Of course I can’t do much for a tree, but the tree can do much for me as part of understanding nature and the evolutionary process. There is no logical reason why I could possibly know very much about whatever it is I call God, and I try to be smart enough to not pretend that I could. If God were to look upon all the creations of His evolutionary process I really don’t know on what basis He would favor humans, let along me in particular. A pet is more important to me personally than most other people. Nature is more important and amazing to me than any selected cabal of people.

In the end, it is reward enough to have had the chance to participate, by chance, in this whole amazing process. Of course chance, genetics, and environment have been kinder to a lot of others and also a lot unkinder to a lot of others, but chance has nothing to do with unfairness. Nobody is being picked on via chance. Let’s be honest, we really prefer favoritism tilted in our direction. To be thankful this evolutionary process exists, and so successfully by the laws which govern it, is enough for which to be grateful. 

One of the best people to explain nature Was Alexander Von Humboldt (quotes below are by him). He was one of the first to base everything about life as interrelated and controlled by the laws of our cosmos. He saw both the beauty, the interconnectedness of everything in nature, and the amorality of the process in control of evolution. In evolution, progress comes at a cost and those participants in the process who are paying the cost are seen everywhere, and at all times, as the process wends itself forward. Humboldt calls this “the amoral, unforgiving means by which species improve and perpetuate themselves”

“Nature can be so soothing to the tormented mind—a blue sky, the glittering surface of lake water, the green foliage of trees, may be your solace. In such company, it is even possible to forget the reality of one’s personal existence.”  In nature we can best gain a sense of freedom and best understand the true nature of our own unique selves. “Isolation has much in its favor. One learns thereby to search inwardly to gain self-respect without being dependent on the opinions of others.”  “Nature herself is sublimely eloquent. The stars as they sparkle in the firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy, and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision. To truly understand nature, one must feel the ecstasy as well as grasp the mathematics.” And Humboldt said this: “Rather than discover new, isolated facts I preferred linking already known ones together.” Most of us are not going to uncover any “new” facts, but we need make every effort to link the dots. 

“All who possess an ordinary degree of mental activity, and delight to create to themselves an inner world of thought, must be penetrated with the sublime image of the infinite when gazing around them on the vast and boundless sea, when involuntarily the glance is attracted to the distant horizon, where air and water blend together, and the stars continually rise and set before the eyes of the mariner. This contemplation of the eternal play of the elements is clouded, like every human joy, by a touch of sadness and of longing”.  For me, the sadness is understandable—it is too much all around us—but the longing is nondescript. It is like all of history is converging in an attempt to understand the present and the future. We never feel more alive, or more humbled, than out in nature. We are at home in nature, but the home is so huge, so vast, so incomprehensible in it’s entirety, and so much of it so oft feels unreal. 

“The majestic scenes of nature, like the sublime works of poetry and the arts, leave remembrances that are incessantly awakening, and which, through the whole of life, mingle with all our feelings of what is grand and beautiful.”  It is even a useful exercise to, on occasion, go out in nature after midnight or at dawn to see nature at sleep or arising for a new day. It is always hard for me to imagine the early explorers forging ahead into land they knew nothing about, never knowing where the next meal might come from or when, or what kind of physical or medical danger might take them down, or what kind of people/animals might be lurking about. I can remember my first time in a redwood forest and how awe struck I was by a world that was so new and breathtaking for me. How much more impressionistic must the world of these early explorers have been to them. I was safe, they had zero personal security. While in one of the South American rain forests it is not uncommon to see rain for four or five months without let-up. Rain is about the only weather which aborts my own little ventures into nature. 

Nature is often the only genuine escape from any human ‘rat race’. At the other extreme, walking in city neighborhoods seems the most intense view of human nature. It is overwhelming to ponder that 7.3 billion humans are scurrying around on the earth, and increasing at the rate of 350,000/day. 

Strange, but it is to cities where most of the ‘different’ flee, where they can be alone together with everyone else.  It is in cities where you find the wealthiest and poorest on the downtown streets, where you find the most physically beautiful and ugliest people, where you find differing cultures warily engaging each other, and where we can individually feel invisible. In numbers there is invisibility. The grand prize question is always “What does all of this really mean”?  “Does it really matter what it really means to me personally anyway? Probably no more than I matter to any of the others scurrying around going nowheres and somewheres at the same time. I see the most nattily dressed gentleman walking past the most raggedy dressed beggar on the street, or overhear conversations that are erudite or ungrammatically uncivilized all within earshot. It doesn’t take an awful lot of this to accept the quietude of nature with more reverence.  We may not really know where we are going, but nature seems to smugly know the future. Yes, nature is going somewhere, we ourselves are all dead-ended, along for a short ride I guess. Strangely, the other millions of sperm seeking the same egg, were dead-ended after a short race. So much for the sanctity of life. In one sense there is a sanctity of life on this planet but it has nothing to do with any of us. We are just a means to an end, if there is an end. 

So Little Left To Need

So Little Left To Need

Things have really metamorphosed in my lifetime. Of course all antiquarian people say this, but I grew up in an age when change was fast and furious. In my childhood things were pretty simple and sparse—-simple enough that there was plenty of time for my neighborhood friends and myself to fight daily battles with boredom and daydreaming. We had bicycles and not much else. But this ‘not much else’ left plenty of time to think, to plan, to be creative, to develop relationships amongst ourselves. A trip to get some ice cream, or waiting endlessly for the Good Humor man was sometimes the most exciting thing on the agenda, right behind arguing about endless major ’stuff’, like who gets the odd piece of pizza, and trying to ‘pull the wool over’ someone’s eyes.  We mostly knew ‘which end was up’, but were equally determined to make it otherwise. 

Early on came television, but there was always just one television and everyone in the family had to pull in different ways about which program to watch.  There were only like 4 or 5 channels so the choice was limited. Most of what we watched would today seem so puerile and simple-minded. Then again, what most of us refuse to watch today is shallow, loud, dim-witted insufferableness. When I am in the mood for that I write it. Wandering around was the most common adventure, and back then it was no big deal to disappear in the morning and not return home until supper. Parents didn’t worry much about anything happening to us, so we kind of wandered wherever we felt inclined to go. Sometimes, at age 10 or so, we would board a train to New York City, use the subway, and end up at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And we could afford it from a meager allowance. Sports was a big deal to us ragamuffins, but it was all neighborhood pick up games, no organized youth leagues of any sort.  At any rate, the list of things that could, with some creativity, be made neat for us, was endless. And it all came, mostly snail-paced.  Now our needs are met endlessly to the point where, with all the gadgets at our disposal we can all be alone together. Real live people are hardly necessary to be physically present. And our choice of whom to connect to via some media gadget is endless. Neighborhood communities are a thing of the past, we have internet connections to replace all that. It is almost strange to look at someone without seeing something attached to their ears or find them not staring at a device in their hand or on their wrist, or a tablet on their lap. 

There was more pressure back then to have diverse friends, in that what was in our face daily was the menu—there were no chat rooms, no varied internet outlets for selecting others a duplicate of our own peculiarities. Today, if you are still a flat-earth person there are probably others like that across the globe. I just Googled ‘Flat Earth Society’ and came up with several hits. There you go, 

a ‘birds of a feather’ just for such people. Since there is strength in numbers this poses a threat to everyone on just about everything—that is, there is now the means for every small or large group to create havoc of some sort, including terrorism. It is now a vastly different world. 

No one argues today over which TV show to watch, there are TV’s in every room, enough for everyone in the family to go off and watch whatever they want. And there are hundreds of channels. But that is not enough, we have the internet with thousands of connections available throughout the world. There are chat rooms, twitter, text messaging, games, movies, and of course Google— where any question about anything can be answered immediately.  No need for any trip to the library spending endless hours with card files to find books with the answers. Children today are never really alone since gadget communication is there permanently 24 hrs a day. Nor do they do much choosing, or creating, since activities for them are pretty much planned out. They are not much turned loose to ‘hang out’ with whom and where they choose as it is too dangerous. I can’t remember, when going to school when young, that it ever remotely crossed my mind that I could get shot, or some kook might come into the school and massacre everyone in sight, then kill themselves. Realistically though, every child with access to a computer can venture into all sorts of ‘worlds’ unbeknownst to parents.Perhaps wandering around a neighborhood in the past was a bit safer for kids than wandering the internet today.

It is hard to have any idea what access to the internet has on any child’s sexual development. When I was young it was rather difficult to gain access to naked people pics and any sex movies were grainy vanilla sex with hoods over the faces. Today, every kind of sex with attractive participants can be found all over the internet. What this means for kids whose hormones are not yet driving their sex behaviors is not clear, at least not to me. It is even less clear what it means for those whose hormones are driving their sexual energy. That ends this paragraph. Sex today is less special, easier to come by, and not the big deal it was back when I was young.  

Recently I read about some device, I forget the name, which is being developed so that you can sit in your recliner, hook up this device and channel in any kind of experience desired, and with this head set it will give you a real 3-D experience for like going down the Grand Canyon, or bunjee jumping, or cliff climbing, or rafting—viewing anything in the world you wish to have the feeling of at the moment. Where will this all end?  Even teachers are becoming obsolete. A student can learn things from very competent courses on the internet, email questions at any time, and proceed at an individual pace. Maybe most schools will really become a thing of the past. Wow. Why go on a trip?  We can sit and feel like we are really there minus any physical effort on our part to really, for example, climb a trail in the Grand Canyon. Maybe sexual experiences will be something we just program into a headset describing our partner with a list of sexual activities we wish to experience. Probably something will need to be attached to our genitals to complete the experience. That will sure change dating and any need to be attractive ourselves. Halle Berry will be available by subscription. Every bed-time will have the potential to become an orgasmic adventure (what is your favorite sexual activity?” “Oh, I don’t know, I have had so many”).

I also saw recently a small plane, which dissembles enough to fit into a van. You attach the wings, sit in the pilot seat, stand up and run a few feet to get the plane going, then up it goes and you close the trap door where your feet were running along and away you go soaring with the eagles. Who will need all our highways in the future? Probably just need special head gear on the ground to guard against something more sizable than bird poop. Not to mention dressing up just to sit in your back yard. Then again, dressing down has been in vogue now for some time. A recent poll of high school males stated that 30% of them had received at least one email naked pic of some female in their class. It is not clear why it is almost always the girl who agrees to pose naked, if we ignore Brett Favre’s private part. 

Cars are in the final stage of development which drive themselves while you read a book or whatever. I don’t comprehend how these kind of cars will ever be legal on the highway. Who wants to get totaled by a car whose computer went down or malfunctioned? And what about the speed of these cars on the road?  Will everyone then be traveling at the same snail-pace speed?  All I really need is a Mac Truck with a snow plough in front, a gas peddle, and a horn. 

A business opened up recently where you circle what you want for dinner each night of the week, and all the ingredients and a recipe arrive at your doorstep each day. Then we just need some sort of programable device that cooks anything any which way desired once programmed, then we just dump in the ingredients and wait for the finished meal. 

Retail stores will likely be a thing of the past with giant companies like Amazon.com providing whatever substance or gadget we need. Amazon.com is even talking now about drones to deliver it to our place. Now when I go for my long walks, it won’t be mosquitoes, but hordes of drones buzzing around in the air. Has Amazon.com ever considered that drone hunting will likely become a major sport—down the drone and get a surprise package. 

We already have perfect pictures, pictures which take reality and make it even more appealing via Photo Shop. I guess those 3-D video head set reality gadgets can make a trip down the Grand Canyon more impressive than reality if they use photo shop as part of the presentation. I don’t want to even think about the enhancement of a sexual experience, although after photo shop all of us can be marketable porn stars, if we eliminate performance.  

Most jobs I guess will require little thinking, just putting the proper information into a computer and waiting for the decision and directions to follow. Many things we usually have to think about can now be done faster and more accurately by a computer. We are becoming more computer aides than great thinkers. Computers have become the great thinkers. Our destiny is more and more not to think but to provide information to computers to think. If they need more input they will inform us to go fetch. Step and fetchit’s we have become. 

There will, I guess, be no such thing as normal in most matters, and every set of peculiar people on any matter can communicate with similar peculiars anywhere in the world. No need to feel different out and about any more, or, I guess to be out and about much at all.  Perhaps countries and nations will be done away with and replaced by global cabals of like minded souls. I mean, why not, hardly anyone is involved that much anymore with neighbors or community groups, voting, etc so it is only natural that our identified group become mirror images of ourselves and connected via internet. These internet cabals are rapidly growing, and every minority of any ilk, exist as a potential terrorist group. Each group demands their way and each group now has the means to create consequences for failure to meet their demands. Oh boy! This is going to be a bumpy ride. 

With our ‘reality headsets’ there is no need to argue over how often and what kind of sex, it is all programmed into our reality headset so we can orgasm when we are damn ready to do so. Probably be banned on public transportation though. I have seen enough bad sights in my life without having to put up with that. I once, on the way out of a Forest Preserve where I used to rendezvous with some deer to feed them apples, saw a lawn party of maybe around 20 people. All but one person was chatting with someone on a cell phone. What I thought was rather rude, apparently was rather chic. I have been tempted, when on a bus or train or in a store etc, to just pull out a cell phone and manufacture a conversation which would make me appear to be a very important powerful affluent person, like maybe negotiating a $500,000 contract over the phone with Donald Trump. I once waited in line at the bank for a teller while the person at the teller window answered his cell phone and discussed a work related problem with one of his workers over the phone while the rest of us stood there and waited for the call to end. If someone cuts me off driving I don’t use my finger anymore lest I get shot. That can work to one’s advantage though. One time I couldn’t resist using the finger to someone reading a newspaper while driving on the highway. He got so mad he would pass me, then slow down real slow and finally I pulled along side him and reached inside by jacket inner pocket like I was going to pull out a gun—he faded quickly from my rear view mirror. If I had a gun I might have made a U-turn and headed right back at him. Whee!!!!!!! 

Music will be a digital phenomenon and we will be able to synthesize our own voice in ways which will make all of us perfect (Louvin Brothers like)  singers accompanied by the perfect instrumentation. Musicians will no longer play a guitar but synthesize the sound by computerization. Audience applause, I guess, will be for the synthesizer machine. 

Perhaps at birth we can have implants to replace all the stuff which today we attach to our ears for communication. Probably no need to even talk, just let the brain waves speak for us, in perfect English with the perfect annunciation. No thanks, I create enough animosity selectively communicating my thoughts. 

The perfect amount of sleep will be attained via an implantation which will put us to sleep as needed for the right length of time in the right stages of sleep in the right order and duration. Every night will be a perfect sleep.

Moods will be generated on demand.  Your team loses the Super Bowl—no problem, you press your personal happiness button and you will be dancing in the street with the winners

We keep moving closer and closer to a world in which, if affluent enough, will have no needs. My question is, “but who will we really be even though we can be anything we want to be?”  What do we really feel about anything when we can feel anyway we want to feel about anything anytime? Suppose we can finally tamper with the genetic components which govern aging and not age? What then? The ‘same old same old’ for ever and ever? Raising kids will not be a parental challenge anymore, kids will be raised by implanted computer chips in children which ensure proper behavior and problem solving by kids, as they meet formative year challenges with the perfect computer directed solutions and feelings. 

What if the next evolutionary advancement is not survival of the fittest, but computers which create species? If they don’t look and think like me I am going to be pissed.  Suppose brain transplants become available? Then, if a child is a jerk of some sort, or retarded, we just go to Amazon.com and pick out a new customized brain right down to our own desired specs for our soon to become ‘new’ child.?  Frankly, I would not have trusted my parents on that one. Then again, none of us are the same person over our lifetime. We all change, sometimes for the better, some times for the worse and really, it is amazing that as many marriages last as long as they do. I guess we won’t have to go to orphanages to adopt a child, we can simply go to the neighborhood genetic lab and pick out the right chromosomal sperm and egg to meet our specs.Then, when the test tube baby is far along enough to live outside the lab, we just go and pick this new  adopted ‘child’ up like today we do a new car. Maybe this lab created kid will be guaranteed to be MVP in the NFL or your money back. At last we will all be perfect. No more struggling to find the most attractive, smart, and personable mate. Decide when you are ready for a mate and then just grab the first one who passes by. It sort of sounds like global incest to me. 

Strangely, aligned with the nature of life reality, we ourselves change with time. Some more than others. Few probably change as much as I have. I am no longer the shy, sickly, socially ill at ease, self absorbed, obscure, emotionally precarious, insecure, kid of long ago. I had just about every childhood disease one could get, I had frequent severe headaches which always led to vomiting, and almost always on Sundays. Just weird. I was deeply religious in the classic sense of believing in the righteousness of my inherited religion. Billy Graham was a admired demigod.  I was a die-hard Republican just like my parents with Barry Goldwater another demigod. My country, right or wrong, was the mental mode back then. Bomb the Vietnamese into oblivion. Jail the draft dodgers.  If some people didn’t like the way they were being treated they should just leave the country. No one was forcing them to stay. Never did I really hate any group per se, they were just never part of my world. The town I grew up in was like 20% black but I don’t recall ever having had any hostile encounters with any black, or anger toward them, or ever having had many meaningful conversation with them until my senior year in high school when I went out for track and cross-country. I was surprised to find out on TV just how angry they all were. After all, I never had any bad experiences with any of them.

Not that everything changes, because it doesn’t. From the git-go, pets were always among my most treasured friends—dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, sheep, horses, a pigeon, chickens. Today, I have little sympathy with organized religions. The Golden Rule is sufficient for me. Most of organized religion seems a farce and the trouble they generate is of the worst kind. I feel now that when I was young I had braces on my brain. My politics moved from far right to I guess far left. I am still a loner, but of a different bent. I embrace diversity these days, and while appreciative of my own good fortunes, the empathy for others less fortunate weighs on my mind. I am relatively healthy in a delicate sort of way. Getting a doctorate in Physiology helped me protect my delicate physical state.  And most important, with time, I learned to better understand when enough is enough, that enough is as good as a feast. I have no expensive hobbies unless having a nice home environment and eating well are considered hobbies. I have never bought anything on time except my first new car. The interest saved, and the luck with stocks have made me affluent enough that I can easily spend far more money on the less fortunate than I do on myself. Ironically, it is Republican policies which enable me to amass more and more money without doing more than shuffling papers around. I have a much lower tax rate than those who actually work hard at one or more jobs. Weird. Income from financial speculations exceeds my pension and once I shift it to my FANAFI Fund there are no taxes, just deductions.  

Any way, before I generate a new musing here, suffice it say that while so much has, and is changing all around me, I too have changed tremendously over the years. Still for most older chaps, the changes in the world outpace the changes in ourselves. It can make us dizzy.

Enough. Stop the world, I want to get off. Never mind, I will soon be evicted by death anyway. Goodnight Mrs. Calabash wherever you are (you have to be old to relate to this).

Addendum to Self Importance as a Delusion

Addendum to Self Importance as a Delusion

Some have understandably questioned my attack on ‘family values’ as practiced today by many families. The question raised in various ways relates to “why should strong family relationships be dissed?” 

There is nothing inherent in my remarks which suggest strong family relationships be dissed or be shunned at all. Since ‘family values’ was not the subject matter, but self importance the topic in question, I did not elaborate much on family values. I will here, since the questions raised by others are not trivial. 

Parenting is one of the most challenging, demanding, and risky aspects of life. Every child is different,  every parent is different, and each environment is different. The whole process is ripe with uncontrollable variables. To be a parent comes with unquestionable responsibilities. Some are up to these responsibilities and others are not. Some children are easy to raise, others are not. Like with teaching, there is no single best way to raise children. Many parents realize this, that is to say they accept that different approaches often need to be taken with one child as opposed to another. Somehow a parent needs to find a way to successfully merge their own personality with that of a particular child in such a way the parenting becomes successful—-and successful meaning that strong positive bonding occurs between child and parent, and the strong bonds remain throughout life.  

To suggest that parenting is not a life long responsibility in no way implies that any strong bonds created between child and a parent need ever be broken. Naturally, given the nature of parenting, sometimes no such strong bonds will develop for various reasons. That risk is always there. Parenting is a responsibility that exists within the framework of the society in which the parenting occurs. But it also needs to be remembered that the welfare of society always trumps individual rights. That is why we cannot steal, murder, drive too fast, and so on. We may want to drive real fast, but that right is overridden by societal needs, in this case the welfare of others. That is why, when the planet suffers from human overpopulation the right of parents to have no limitation on reproduction is overridden by the welfare of the whole earth society. 

In the same vein, it is not in the best interests of any society to allow too much of it’s wealth be held by a small percentage of genetic cabals. Inheriting wealth is an injustice committed to the general society. The American way is for each person, as an adult, to earn their own ‘pot of gold’. That material wealth is invariably a pot of gold is by no means even a given truth. When a child is not yet grown, parents have the primary responsibility for raising the child successfully. Sometimes they will succeed and sometimes they will not. Once adulthood is achieved the primary responsibility for governing that adult is society in general. Some adults need no help and are very successful, to varying degrees, and that is good for the society. Other adults, for varied reasons, need assistance or punishment, or rewards, and that is the responsibility of everyone in society. This is where ethics kicks in big time. The most fortunate members of a society have an ethical responsibility, as adults, to help the less fortunate. That is why we need graduated income taxes, and steep inheritance taxes. There is nothing wrong with expecting young adults to earn their own ‘pot of gold’. And clearly it is not necessary for every young adult to earn a ‘pot of gold’ for them to achieve contentment. Some of the most contented people are those who are satisfied with little, and some of the most discontented people are those for whom enough is never enough.

Parenting, by definition, is raising a child to adulthood properly. When a child becomes an adult, the responsibility for ‘parenting’ that adult becomes the responsibility of everyone in society. If there are pressing medical needs, society should be there for any adult, not expect parents to foot the bill. If an adult needs career opportunities, that is the responsibility of the society in general.  And so it goes, as adults the Golden Rule is the basis for ethics.

None of the above in any way alters the bonding between offspring and parents. What the above does imply is, that if the bonding between parent and offspring is dependent on inheriting money or financial help all their lives, then the existence of such a bond is unhealthy for both parent and offspring. If we are fortunate enough to acquire a good amount of wealth on our own in life, we are really obligated to return this wealth to the society from which we extracted it, so that others upon reaching adulthood have the same chance to do the same (acquiring wealth) themselves. When 2-5% of citizens own 90% of the wealth in our country, this is disastrous, and has always been in history.  There are no exceptions. Wealthy nations have always imploded from foreign empires too expensive to maintain, or too much wealth accumulating in the hands of too few domestically, and usually both.

For our society to continue to flourish, we have to find the willpower to curtail the cost of foreign ‘empires’, and stop genetic cabals from amassing too much of our wealth. We did just that back in the days of Teddy Roosevelt, when we enacted steep graduated inheritance laws and steep graduated income taxes. Wealthy people didn’t disappear, just the genetic cabals busted up to more manageable size, and what followed was one of the most robust economic periods in our history, a period where every economic bracket did well, and individuals on their own, could amass their own pot of gold. 

To put it bluntly, if the only reason an offspring maintains a close relationship with a parent is to acquire the parent’s wealth on the parent’s death——well, we all know the relationship is a fraud. 

This is not a healthy relationship, and it is not a rewarding relationship. If society is doing it’s ethical job, then no parent has to worry that if one of their offspring has needs as an adult, the financial burden will fall on the parents of the offspring. Of course it shouldn’t, as adults in a societal setting are ethically obligated to provide justice for all, mercy for all, and responsibility for all—irregardless of who the parents are. That is the Golden Rule, that is reasoned out ethics, and that is the only way to achieve a just and protective society for all. It really has nothing to do with how strong the parental-offspring bonds are. In other words, family values, employed properly are perfectly valid, while the umbrella of protection afforded all citizens is by collective ethics, each toward others, which creates the desired atmosphere for society in general, and the rewards are peace and prosperity. Family values, as being too oft employed by too many, create conflict, and economic disparity to the extreme. Not good, not ethical, and not going to last much longer. 

Shifting welfare responsibility from parents to society as a whole after parenting (offspring reaching adult status) carries with it substantial benefits:

It eliminates the kind of family carnage which is often created when offspring battle over inheritance matters. More siblings end up hostile to each other over inheritance matters than most any other reason. Dependency on parents past the formative years often stifles the kind of effort and creativity needed for a particular person to reach their own potential. Parental independence forces every young adult to plan their life more carefully when they realize they are on their own with no parental bail-out waiting in the wings. Some offspring, for varied reasons, many reasons which have nothing to do with parental failure, will end up among the less fortunate in society. They then become a societal problem, not a parental responsibility. When the Golden Rule is the basis of ethics, in any society, all adults and children are given the best and most appropriate help. There would be an end to lousy schools for the poor, poor health care for the poor, mentally disturbed persons wandering around the public with their mental demons, unreasonable minimum wages which are not adjusted each year as the cost of living goes up or down, just like for the elderly on social security, and parents would no longer be faced with the problem of dead beat offspring still being their personal burden. The bonds between parent and offspring, if strong, have no reason to end. But adult welfare, of any ilk, is the collective responsibility of the entire society. And most importantly, the amount of wealth squirreled away into genetic cabals would be limited. As T.O. would say, “Fair is fair”. Each young adult needs to build their own success on as level a playing field as possible, with sensible safety nets for those struggling, fair punishments for transgressions against society, and proper assistance for those with handicaps of most any sort. 

In the long term analysis, there is no choice. No society can long afford to let wealth accumulate in genetic cabals. Today we have managed to create a situation in which it is increasingly easier for the already wealthy to become more wealthy, and since the wealth they accumulate has to come from somewhere it ends up coming from the middle class, which drives more of the middle class into poverty. The additional wealth for the already wealthy can’t come from the poor, they have nothing left to give. Today 47% of Americans pay no taxes. While some may be wealthy smart alecks, almost all are just too poor to be taxed. Trickle down hasn’t worked since it’s conception 50 years ago. Given the availability of modern communication devices, if these 40+% erupt in violence, the scene will not be pretty, especially in a society saturated with guns.  In these kind of societal uprisings, throughout history, those with much to protect will lose to those with nothing to lose. We need to reconstruct a society in which parents do the best they can, and then society does the best it can to ensure the maximum number of our citizens achieve enough of their potential to achieve reasonable success and contentment. Circling the wagons around family or any other kind of cabals, is not going to protect either the ones intended to protect, our society at large, humankind at large, or planetary life as we have known it on earth for so long. We are the first species with enough intelligence to prevent an evolutionary harsh evolutionary correction. But we cannot do it with the illusion that ourselves or our own cabals are important and special. Only when the Golden Rule is adopted universally as our ethical mantra, can humans collectively be important and make a difference for the near future. That is just the way it is. 

Let’s angle it this way. Of course we value our personal achievements and successes, such as financial security, good health, athletic achievements, scholastic achievements, social achievements, and of course, strong relations with offspring till death. These things help us achieve contentment in life. However, like every other person, we are all unimportant to the grand scheme of evolution. Anything that we don’t do, which will contribute to the evolutionary process, someone else will. That is the way the evolutionary process was designed. What the near term future holds for our offspring in any society depends on the extent to which everyone, as adults, follows the Golden Rule. If we do not, collectively, assume responsibility for everyone else in our society, society will collapse and our offspring will pay the price. We can pretend ourselves or our offspring or any other self serving cabal is more important, but this is an illusion regarding the big picture.  We are now a global community in every sense of the word. It is how everyone in the world relates to everyone else in the world, and what kind of efforts and responsibility we take collectively to ensure everyone has the best chance to reach their potential, which determine the future for all offspring. If we fail to progress along these lines, then it doesn’t make any difference how special we make our offspring or how much money we pass on to our offspring, for when the shit hits the fan, everyone pays. So if we want to really pass on a future for our offspring we better engage the Golden Rule across the board, to everyone in our society, and our society today is the entire human population. Old fashion imperialism is now inoperative—Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Syria, and so on illustrate the limitations of military power. Without Golden Rule power, Mother Nature will surely, as she has in the past, generate another evolutionary correction, and these kind of catastrophic setbacks can last for hundreds of thousand of years, even millions of years. That is just the way it is, and always has been. Real evolutionary progress does not operate on human time.   

The Importance of Self as Delusion

The Importance of Self as Delusion

Life has many lessons to teach but the most painful lessons have to do with coming to grips with our delusion of self importance in an evolutionary process that has been around for billions of years. Everything in our own sense of reality dictates we surely must be important, and that there is a God who will save us from the land mines of life, if we just follow inherited or marriage adopted religious scripture of some sort. After all, if we are not important enough to be granted exceptions from the laws which govern this evolutionary process, what is the sense of even existing? 

Part of the problem is our inability to grasp the enormousness of our universe, or comprehend how it could have ever begun.  After all, how can something come from nothing? Clearly something did, and whatever “essence’  or “Gift giver’ is responsible for it all is eternally mysterious to us. This gift giver is given the name of God and the nature of God we often end up creating ourselves, in our own image, coupled with a hope that we can become special, and personally involved with this human created image of God. 

The math helps put all of this in perspective. There are over 7 billion humans on the earth today. Population has doubled in my own life time. We are stressing our planet via our activities to the hilt right now. What happens if it doubles again? Is our species exempt from the consequences of species overpopulation? To think that seems a tad unrealistic. And responsible reproduction is not even a hot political debate. After all, who is going to tell any of us just how many offspring we can have? Over our dead body. But then again, it is not our dead body but a lot of future dead bodies at stake here. There are over eight million different species here on earth today and scientists estimate that there are 5 million more yet to be identified. Right now, today, humans are behind another huge mass extinction rate in evolutionary history. In the past, climate changes created mass extinction rates, today it is our own species behind this newest extinction rate. We are on a rampant tear to push out millions of species to make more room for more of us, undaunted that the natural resources to sustain this human over population growth are not there. The blind leading the blind. 

We hope, at best, to approach 100 years in longevity. What kind of time period is that to an earth which has been around for billions of years? What is earth anyway in the big picture of things? The sun, relatively close to us as a planet is not close in human terms. Roughly, if we could travel 100 miles/hr all day long it would take us 100 years to reach the sun. And this distance is a minuscule distance compared to most distances in our known solar system. Frankly, past a certain unimaginably large distance, we have no idea what is out there. We can’t comprehend any ending any more than we can comprehend any beginning. 

All of the above, without piling on even more unimaginable stats, kind of relegates our own importance to the total picture as a disappointingly infinitesimal nothingburger.  So why don’t we just shoot ourselves, get it over with, and avoid all the stresses which come with life?  The answer is easy enough—there is the potential for some happiness, some pleasant excitement, some achievements, some contentment, some laughter, some appreciation, some love of others, some new knowledge and so on. That is all any of us has—some potential. 

While all of us are unique and different, none of us can achieve much on our own. We depend on others, or we fail, in which case our potential never gets realized. How much help is needed varies just like everything else around us. Diversity is a cornerstone of the evolutionary process and essential for evolutionary progress. A Terrell Owens may achieve a lot purely on his own, but that is not the norm, the typical, the reality for most of us. We need help from others, endless help, albeit different kinds of help at different stages in our lives. And yet, despite all the help from others, we are all in this life alone together. 

At any rate, the above, to the extent we can really relate to it all, kind of puts a realistic perspective on our own importance. Of course this is annoying—we try all our lives to be important, only in moments of reality, to be face to face with our own unimportance. Our own world does not operate in any meaningful way with the other 7 plus billion people on our earth. Our time concept is meaningless compared to the billions of years the earth has been in existence, and we actually have no solid reason to believe our own species will be the end product, or even survive in future Time. Time seems to be a constant, that is TIME stays, we Go. That, of course, is really annoying. Not that others will go, but that we will too. It is so much easier to assume others will die than to assume such a permanent thing could happen to us. And if it does, we are going to Heaven, which of course, none of us can begin remotely to describe, let alone claim we have such a ticket to go there. Interestingly, all religions always have an escape clause to get us into this ‘Heaven’, even if we often disregard the scriptures which we claim guide our lives. 

We not only often create a God as some kind of comfort food for our individuality, but we pretend that our offspring are somehow very close intimate copies of ourselves, some sort of significant bonding of identities. There are varying degrees of success in creating such close identities, but realistically, the match between offspring and parent is practically as diverse in reality as our closeness to nearby neighbors or distant neighbors. We all know that adding an atom here, a molecule there, etc will often create a totally new compound hardly resembling at all the components added to get the new compound. Genetics is rather similar, a gene here, a gene there, and just like that something quite different from the original parents is created. I reckon it all depends on what we consider important. If two white people marry then yes, the offspring are most likely to be white too. But what is unique about that?  There are millions of other people in existence with white skin too. Essentially, it is not physical traits, but personalities which enable two people to form close bonds. Ok, not always. The prom queen is not likely to marry an ugly guy which really only proves how irrational sex is as a determinate of anything. Only fools try to get too rational about sexual proclivities. If we have a foot fetish, our only choice is to deal with it as best we can.  Sex is entertainment, and requires, most of the time, two people. If both can’t enjoy the same entertainment, the sexual relationship will not be successful. Sex is always the circus element in our lives and we are the clowns. If someone is physically attractive they can legally have sex as much as they want with, in essence, as many people as they like BUT, if someone is ugly, and no one particularly is willing to have sex with them, then they are to abstain from sex and if someone will have sex with them for money, both are then eligible to arrest. A tad illogical.

Offspring, most of the time, go their own way. This is natural. Humans have managed to make it far more complicated. We actually create a priority/value system called ‘Family values’. Essentially this means that we and our offspring are more ‘important’ than others. We often confuse obligations to real ethics. Parents, human or otherwise, have an obligation to raise their young until the young can exist on their own. That is obligation, and it comes inborn genetically, or in the case of humans, it is an understood learned obligation. It has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s ethical importance. It is the Golden Rule which, via reason, establishes the equal importance of everyone to everyone else. To the extent the Golden Rule reigns as the basis for human ethics, the earth is a pleasant enough environment with contentment maximized for the entire species. Because of diversity, the amount of help needed for individuals to reach their potential in life varies, but when help is available, and that needed help, required from the more fortunate, is forthcoming from that source, then the most people can achieve some contentment. 

Yet things are today going in a different direction. ‘Family values’, of various ilk, is gaining ground, and more and more people are circling the wagons around genetic cabals, or religious cabals, or economic cabals, or racial cabals, or cultural cabals, or whatever other cabals, instead of the most fortunate focusing their help on the less fortunate. We have become almost cannibalistic in nature, denying children in poor families less health care than those children in affluent families, devising educational funding systems in which the kids of affluence get better schools and teachers than those in poor families. We start wars in which everyone is not required to sacrifice for the effort, but we use mercenary ‘volunteer armies’, which is essentially a safe guard to ensure the more fortunate are not required to put their lives at stake. In fact they don’t even have to put their money at stake since we tend to fight wars on borrowed money. Why did we kill 2 million Vietnamese?  There is no good answer but we did. What good has been achieved by killing millions of Iraqis and Afghanistans? We invade, we kill, then tire of the killing, declare victory and leave. But what have we left behind? Simply countries that are more seeped in violence than when we invaded. Violence begets violence, always has, and yet we pretend otherwise. Around half of our citizens feel we have only failed because we have not done enough killing across the globe. Who knows, maybe this mentality will be the factor which solves the human overpopulation problem.  We certainly are making a decent run with this approach to human overpopulation. 

If we could find some way to deal with our own self serving sense of importance, accept the reality that we are on borrowed time, and understand the fundamental responsibility of the more fortunate to help the less fortunate as the basis for ethics, then the earth and all the species on it, would have a more peaceful, contented existence. Quality of life not only counts, but is the primary goal of every species. We can be collectively very significant, what we cannot be is individually significant. If Lincoln had not freed the slaves, someone else at some point would have, if the Wright Brothers had not invented the airplane, someone else would have, if women had not achieved the right to vote when they did, they would have achieved it at some other point. Evolution moves on, and moves in a direction which is independent of any particular person’s contribution. 

So there we have it in a nutshell: it is the evolutionary process which is important, not any individuals of the process. Individuals can affect the Timing, but not the direction of evolution. Remember, Time stays, individuals go. There is no sanctity of life for individuals of any species, just a sanctity of life for the evolutionary process. Life continues and every living cell comes from another living cell and always has from the beginning of time. Life just keeps passing from one form to another, endlessly, over time, using the same basic building blocks, just rearranging them in billions of ways to create diversity and improvement.  It is never good vs evil or God vs the Devil but the useful vs the useless. What is new with the human species is an inherent ethical nature which makes it possible for even the useless to achieve some degree of personal contentment——a sort of dog eat dog as a kinder, more civilized version. Thus with our species, we get the survival of the fittest (in the broadest sense of the term) along with mercy for the less fit.  At least the potential is there but ethics is still in the developing stage.  

The Modern Age of Killing Fields (literally and figuratively) or On the Brink of an Evolutionary Correction

The Modern Age of Killing Fields (literally and figuratively) or On the Brink of an Evolutionary Correction

For brevity’s sake there is no need for an essay here, just some notables which all point to a near term major evolutionary correction, and this time from environmental changes caused not by natural disasters, but by the activities of a particular species. Guess which species?

suicide bombers, drone killings, smart missiles, decapitation, stoning, snipers, open carry, uzis, stand your ground, police attacks, terrorist attacks, drive-by shootings, drug wars, religious wars, ethnic wars, bars on home windows and doors, waterboarding, physical bullying, internet bullying, suicide from internet bullying, gang wars, school shootings, mall shootings, refugee camps, deaths by the millions from preventive diseases, death from starvation, death from inadequate health care coverage, deaths from climate change weather extremes, species extinction, hidden grenades/explosives, homemade bombs, deaths from revenge, non livable wages, unemployment, rising poverty levels, homelessness, 2 or more jobs to survive, corpocracitic greed, family values (circling the wagons around genetic cabals), human overpopulation (irresponsible reproduction), pollution,  record huge military budgets, decline in quality of those going into teaching, decline of community, rise of global internet groups, billionaire sponsored elections, information overload, degradation of natural resources, divorce rate increases, rise in prison population, decline in local retail businesses, 2-5% of citizens owning 90% of a nations wealth, reduced work benefits, loss of retirement benefits, wage scale declines or stagnation, soaring medical costs, no global minimum wage, (increasing tax breaks, benefits, decreasing tax rates, increasing exemptions, increasing loopholes, reduced inheritance taxation—all of this for the already affluent), and so it goes. 

All of the above contributes to, or are examples of, a global human population supporting violence as a means to an end, mostly selfish ends, reeking with lack of tolerance or empathy for diversity.  Violence begets violence—it always has throughout human history. Fortunately, Mother Nature Bats last, and the laws which control the evolutionary process will continue to operate. It is we who go, TIME stays, and evolutionary progress will continue in ways beyond our comprehension, albeit there are often hundreds of thousands, and even millions of years, between temporary global setbacks in the process. There is sanctity of life for sure, but there is no sanctity of individual lives or even particular species. Life on this planet has never been one of good vs evil or God vs the devil—this is all human created delusional dribble. Progress over endless TIME is controlled by chance, genetics, environment, and diversity—with the useful triumphing over the useless. Thus, in the end, everything gets better in a progressive way, but on evolutionary time, not human time. We are here today, we are gone tomorrow, and evolution moves on. That is just the way it is.  We can pray all we want, individually, or collectively, but prayer does not control the evolutionary process. Wherever there is a gift, there is a gift giver, proof enough for the existence of a God, but a God beyond our human power to define, and His laws govern the evolutionary process, not human created religious sects with outdated scriptures from past cultures. 

The vastness of our universe, the eternity of Time, the diversity of life in this universe, the limitations of human intelligence, the illusion of our own individual importance in the evolutionary process, and the delusional belief in the sanctity of our lives, all generate stumbling blocks for us to understand the reality of our lives being lived in a ‘little gleam of Time between two eternities’.  Without a logical basis for our realities, contentment becomes harder to achieve given the frustrations, disappointments, and failures of our expectations. Reality is found in nature along with clearer conceptions of God’s evolutionary process. As we lose no sleep over having not been present for billions of years in the past history of our Universe, we have nothing to fear from death—for while we are alive, there is no death, and when we are dead we have no life to worry about. In the long run we are all dead, and this itself is a good, since it makes way for new diversified life forms which then temporarily strut themselves on life’s stage and the show goes on. Let us simply be grateful for having had the chance to be a part of a process so everlasting and awesome.