- One bright day in the middle of the night,
- Two dead boys got up to fight.
- Back-to-back they faced one another,
- Drew their swords and shot each other.
- One was blind and the other couldn't see,
- So they chose a dummy for a referee.
- A blind man went to see fair play,
- A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"
- A deaf policeman heard the noise,
- And came and shot the two dead boys.
- A paralyzed donkey walking by,
- Kicked the copper in the eye,
- Sent him through a rubber wall,
- Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.
- (If you don't believe this lie is true,
- Ask the blind man -- he saw it too!)
How do you give order to chaos? How do you separate the definition of a planet's ordinary trip around a star from the fact that no two orbits are exactly the same?
While looking into the faces of Leanne, Ryan, Valentina, Izzie and the Forgotten Feline volunteer my wife chatted with today, I asked myself those questions.
What do we really know?
Every year we harvest seed and replant but no two plants in a field are completely identical.
Lightning may strike twice in the same spot but the lightning path is never the same.
Day after day I receive information that every sender thinks is a special, sometimes surreptitious, method of delivery - I see the repetition in the delivery but know every delivery path is unique.
I know who I think I am to myself but never completely know who I am to others.
Are you the kind, loving mother/father at home, or the stern, unlikeable boss at work?
Do you and should you compartmentalise your personality traits?
By extension, should we compartmentalize our societies?
What does "normal" mean to you?
Have you ever played heavy metal music on Jamaican steel drums?
A man with his son asleep on his shoulders waiting on a table at Another Broken Egg Cafe, his friend J. wearing a Saints NFC championship shirt. A boy climbing a light pole. A husband laughing with his wife about having to hold her skirt down in a high wind.
Do you know what's going to happen next?
And if you did, what would you do if you saw yourself doing what you knew you were going to do even though you thought you couldn't and tried not to?
A rocket test gone awry.
A software glitch guaranteed not to happen.
Starting history all over again.
Retreating to lose the battle but win the war.
Ignoring your friends' snide remarks about your one-person trendsetting apparel.
Losing your grip on someone else's reality to see life at it really is.
Leaving secret messages in totally meaningless open arena gatherings.
If you can't prove what you know you know, then do you really know what you know you know?
Truth, facts, liberty, justice - symbols all.
History does not exist. There is no such thing as the past or the future. There is this moment. Any other idea of a moment is an illusion no matter what we say or think.
The multiple paths we take in our thoughts, the multiple paths we take in our societies, the multiple answers we give our children - all the same, not the same.
Is logic a word, a concept or a living fact to you?
Is happiness a word, a concept or a living fact to you?
Can you eliminate all words, concepts and facts and see a reality of multiple realities? How quickly can you process everything all at once and still maintain a word / concept / fact set you believe is uniquely qualified to represent all situations all the time?
A number representing relative humidity represented by condensation on a window.
A politician living in the open 24-hours a day.
Are you governed by oaths and written agreements in public and/or private employment which guarantee you will not disclose information for whatever reason(s) for some period(s)?
Layering our society with bright fabrics, ribbons, medals and the emperor's new clothes.
I don't create secrets but I keep yours when you ask me to. Why? Because I believe you can believe you have the right to privacy and secrecy if you want to believe, even if I don't. Thus, the mini-society in my thoughts includes compartments with limited access, which I choose to extend into our society and watch the consequences of my actions and yours together with secrets out in the open for all to see that only those who know can see.
Do you look for simple ciphers? Do you understand 3D locks / filters? Do you know how to embed real life in real life?
Transparency is easy if you know how light bends and doesn't bend at the same time.
When you know life happens because life happens and what will happen in 1000 years will happen in 1000 years, you go ahead and act the way you're going to act, regardless of what you think others think or how others will react to what you do, because people will think / react the way they're supposed to think / react anyway.
Do you understand timespace travel? Do you see that we'll send people and/or their machines to another place in timespace to travel to another timespace that represents us in some moment in near/future space that gives us the impression the timespace travelers have come from the future?
What do I mean? If you isolate a group of people and/or machines who are used to being isolated, give them unlimited resources and the right to pursue their impossible dreams, and keep them away from general society for a great length of time, you will find a virtual bending of spacetime has occurred in relation to the development of society.
Total isolation. Another planetary system or a vessel with what seems like unlimited resources to the isolated group of developers.
Now that you understand time travel happens all the time all around you, why do you miss the technological leaps / revolutions and only see evolutionary changes in technology?
When a leap occurs that creates transparent boundaries, what do you think you'll see?
We know herd / hive / tribe mentality because we're used to it. And when there's something totally new in person-to-society-to-person communication, will you notice it has already happened?
If only I could tell you what's already in front of your face ... alas, I am but a poor, amateur writer wandering the woods and highways almost anonymously, with gifts he did not ask for and wants to give away ... my destiny is not to reveal the new technology to you, it belongs to another group/person/machine interface you will encounter.
When you know what you know gains you nothing in return for perpetuating what you previously knew, the moment being all, what does it gain you to live out your life in complete compliance with what the future has already revealed? For instance, when you have the universe in your hand, what is the reason for having a soul?
When folks with names like Medvedev, Obama, Bush, Merkel, Chavez, Jintao and Castro all have access to the same information as you do, you know that everyone is the same. How you act upon the information is what defines the moment, that's all.
Can you see what hides in oceans and Earth orbits? Do you know the difference between a mercenary, a privateer and a person sworn to protect you? Is there a difference at the atomic, cellular or multicellular level?
When you attach a power plant to a passing asteroid and settle in as part of the maintenance crew for the rest of your life, would you still call Earth home? If you took along a family, what kind of useful hobbies would replace fishing and quiltmaking? How much would you expect your family to show loyalty to the employer to whom you swore an oath of protection and/or information nondisclosure? Would it make any difference if you were more machine than person?
No comments:
Post a Comment