whales

What makes us assume we are the most advanced creature existing on our planet? Because we think we can manipulate the environment? Because we are numerous? Because we have lethal powers? Because we handle tools?

Ants might think themselves in this way as being highly advanced. We certainly do.

Advancement, superiority, high point of evolution, civilisation - much depends on the criteria of what it is that defines advanced or superior. If it is killing power, population numbers, or whatever, we may come up with several answers and usually - us. However, if philosophic contemplation of life were the criteria, and bowhead whales have the brain capacity to do this (and they have and we don't know that they don't do this), then, maybe, they are the dominant life form on this planet. Dominant meaning most intelligent rather than most powerful.

meaning of life

Clearly blogs are personal diaries where people can record their thoughts without being immediately ridiculed, and all sorts of lame, daft ideas will therefore be published on the internet. But someone probably also has put out some profound thought that may be the equivalence of descarte's 'cogito ergo sum' or einstein's e=mc2.

But how to find it?

erosion

The driving force of life is, I wonder, erosion. Erosion is nature's way of saying "I am", of assertion, of the will to impel. Which is, by way of explaining what the Big Bang essentially is - I am as opposed to I am not. But both parts have to be linked and are part of the duality we experience in life and sometimes simplify by describing as good and bad.

Erosion is not a passive action. It is active and demands a response - participation or resistance. Another duality. Is this function of life the equivalence of the Higgs boson - the god particle? And, if one part of the duality - good or god - is an aspect we imagine is intrinsic to ourselves, why, then, not the other?

sapere aude!

Kant 1784: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolve and courage to use it without another's guidance. Sapere aude! Dare to know! That is the motto of Enlightenment."

role reversal

All my working life I have been a teacher and a leader; now I would like to be a learner and disciple.

from alan moore "voice of the fire"

We are all, each of us , the stinging, bloody fragments of a God that was torn into pieces by the birth-wail of Eternity. When all the days are done, She who is bride and Mother unto us all shall gather every scrap of scattered being up into one place, where we shall know again what we knew at the start of things, before that dreadful sundering. All being is divided between that which is , or else that which is not. Of these the last is greater, and has more importance. To know thought is to be in another country. everything is actual. Everything.

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