Polynomial

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Meditierranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the southern hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is the Malagasy Republic. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast. Date Taken: December 07, 1972

I’m currently in my thirties… And the more I see of the “wonder of creation” around me, the more I feel privileged and honored to be standing here on this third rock from the Sun, experiencing this golden moment of Now with you all. It truly is a blinding feat of chance that we have come into being… And I write this post with a view to understanding this fortunate chance that we have all been bestowed with.

While attaining a good understanding about the probability of Life coming into being is no easy act (mainly because of all the variables involved in providing a place with a predilection for chemical evolution), it does provide one with a healthy and balanced view of the world in which they live i.e. that it is a finite space that contains finite resources in a vast desert of space and time. I know that might sound a desolate and somewhat bleak view of reality to some… But that’s simply because they are not thinking straight. Just because something seems bleak and desolate doesn’t mean it has to affect us in a negative manner and pull our daily lives down into a never ending depression. Quite the opposite in fact. We should see this truth, and thus revise our mindset into a more measured and mature view of the world and universe which we inhabit, thereby allowing us to treasure this rarity that we know as Life on Earth.

I am glad to say, there is no right or wrong way of going about this. Ultimately it’s up to you to figure out what, where and how you came to be here… You’ve got to do it under your own steam in order for it to have full affect. The one thing that you need to know though, is that you should test your beliefs, as well as the facts that forged these beliefs, in order to see what fits and what doesn’t. Make sure you understand the process. And make sure it’s based on workable/empirical evidence i.e. evidence that you can test rather than speculate on… Because if you don’t understand it, or it isn’t based on something tangible, then you’re likely to simply become a parrot speaking words without gleaning any knowing or understanding about their function or meaning.

But… And there is always a but somewhere… If you’re not sure about all this climate change business, etc… And think it’s probably a new consumerist fad or something… One that you can’t be bothered to buy into. Then I’d like to offer up an idea that might allow you to develop a better understanding about where we live i.e. that it is only a planet that we live on, with limited resources, which should be conserved for your future children’s children… We exist within a delicate ecosystem… With an atmosphere that is only 20 miles thick… And any of actions that the 7 billion of us currently do i.e. burning of fossil fuels, using water beyond true need, etc… can easily affect this little gas chamber in which we live. Yes… You better believe… The Earth is only a little self contained gas chamber. What I’m hoping for is that perhaps this simple idea might be the first few stones of that avalanche of change that helps posit a better understanding about how we should act now. Because key to future survival IS change now.

This change might take many years… I know it did for me. And it won’t simply arise from immersing oneself in the everyday distractions of life i.e. the rat race, the job, the car, the need for security or monetary gain for one’s own family, nor down the pub with a pint of fine Belgium beer in your hand cheering on the footie. It’ll only come from deep “need” within one’s being… Something akin to a never wavering intent to question where you came from, what you are, how you are, all regardless of what you might find or who you might upset in the process. This is your chance to understand where you came from, without blindly listening to all that other trite that people daily impinge into the general consensus of the world’s population and its collective understanding. With this jilted need to understand, to ponder deeply on whether a “God” made everything OR ask if it is all simply just chance in an universal dynamic… This need should be as strong as your need for air when drowning.

For me, this painstaking process of combing over much science fact and much science fiction for the better part of my life, using an equal measure of logical/philosophical reasoning/deductioning, along with lashings of social interaction with other professionals in their fields, has allowed me to adequately begin to untangle this mat of knowledge that man has woven into the fabric of his own understanding. For me, this is important. I’ve needed to do this to act clearly and with intention… Because when I found out that much of what man believes was actually centered on egocentric perceptions, delusions from biased view points, biological miscalculations resulting from the way the body is structured, I realized that what I could have been taught when at school and university might also be nothing more than a type of delusion too. Thus I’ve since quested for my own understanding of things and, in the process, I feel very rewarded simply doing.

And I’ve discovered something too… I’ve discovered a certain disparity between the way We are and the knowledge of processes that we are becoming aware of. There’s a certain error somewhere… I can definitely say that the data I’ve learned from my scientific study is NOT at fault. In fact it works perfectly well in nearly all experimental situations, allowing me to grasp and intuit how other aspects of the puzzle fit into the bigger picture. So what is it? Well… It was the attitudes of the people i.e. the attitudes of us, that didn’t marry up to the empirical flow/workings of things. Let me explain…

A lot of the knowledge we still use now came from those times when we lived in world that had instigated in man, in us, an “unenlightened” mind i.e. devoid of any empirical/scientific explanation or understanding of how everything interlinks into a vast sea of causes and effects. Thus we made up stories that gave rise to cultural and ritual rites; rites which fashioned the nations and countries of the Earth as we know them today. These rites explained the world to their founding fathers in terms of cultural ritual, and created reasons for things that we did not fully understand back then. Those were times when the predominant concern of our ancestors was survival… Done in terms of hunting and gathering and/or crop yields. Most of their traveling was done by foot. And thus man could only glimpse at the vast unending surface of the Earth, as he travelled into areas of more abundance, taking his fair share, before moving on again. I can only imagine what type of a world he must have seen: one of vast forests, plains, deserts, and watery flatlands, that stretch out as far as the eye could see… No wonder he did not grasp that he was standing on a sphere initially. No doubt this example of a flat earth is but one of the long outdated modes of human understanding that we have managed to shed from our wooly coat of knowledge. But trust me… There are many more obsolete view that we haven’t removed.

What gets to me is… These outmoded types of human understanding still cloud the potential that we, as human beings, could bring into our current state of being. Modes that could shape our everyday life for the better! These understandings could allow us to become shepherds of the Earth, rather than squanderers of it’s resources. No doubt we pay our taxes, and many of us encourage scientific research for new discoveries… But how many of those new discoveries will we allow to shape the way we think about the world around us… ? So that we develop a more healthy way of understanding ourselves and our environment? And how many of the ideas will we solely expect to be used simply for providing us with new technologies for an “easier” way of life? Many of us still don’t realize that all this science, philosophy and mindfulness has afforded mankind a truly unique vantage point… We now have a chance to see beyond the material pursuits of the consumerist world, and begin to glimpse at the true splendor of what we are, where we are, and when we are… To see the amazing complexity of Life and grasp its improbable appearance here in this garden of Eden. With this new world view (and with a bit of science, philosophy and mindfulness, as well as some “good-old” history), we can begin to shape our habits into a more eco-friendly and sustainable way of being and living. One that will allow us all to see everyone else, and everything else for that matter, interwoven into a long chain of cause and effect. Once we do this for ourselves, we’ll no longer be able to ignore the fact that our actions are having a BIG affect on the Earth and it’s delicate ecosystem… And we’ll have to address our blatant over consumption of resources… And do so quickly!!! Change won’t be easy. But this is good! Because we need new challenges to unit and come together to fight this war against our own selfish needs… We need to be challenged to balanced ourselves and our ways of Life within the environment in which WE ALL (every Life form on Earth) live. When we see that WE are our own worst enemies, then WE can truly say that WE are the problem here… And that’s when WE know WE care about one another and Life on Earth! But if we don’t… Then we’re only ignoring the problem.

This mental change into a unified world view will take time… And no doubt there will be many modes of old understanding i.e. certain religious decrees, out-dated habits, selfish desires, etc… that simply won’t fit into current empirical observations. People will have a hard time letting go… Or not taking things so literally. But this is the way of change (see William Sargant’s “Battle For The Mind”). The more research we do into the patterns of Universal happening, the more WE all will know what a fortunate occurrence Life is. While being here in the present moment, with the sun splashing warmly upon my face on this cold, clear winter’s morn, I feel the cascade of events that gave rise to a long line of interlinking causes and effects. It is this chain of events that firstly created the matter that we are made from from i.e. the fine atomic dust that stars forge deep within their cycles of life and death… And which ultimately gave Life, as we know it today, a chance to arise from the “clanky” mechanisms of biological atomic machinery and their resulting cyclic reactions. No doubt, when life got out of this cyclic molecular rut, and the first highly successful single celled organisms began to colonize the Earth nearly four billion years ago, that was truly a momentous day for all Life here on Earth… AND to balance that view… I also see the various paths of the future that lay before us… Futures that we are affecting with our current actions. No doubt many of you reading this will have found a similar mode of understanding. But some of you might not feel that deeper connection with creation. But that’s okay… I know how easy it is to forget this “magic” of existence, especially in all the man-made misery of the world around us. None the less, it’s always here… Waiting to be discovered… Just within an arm’s throw of anyone who would but care to reach out and grasp it.

But you’ve got to want to grasp it… It’s now your birth right! You’ve made it here against all odds. Out of all those sperm swimming to the egg in your mother’s womb, YOU made it. That’s just the tip of the atom of the iceberg in an ocean of probability. But if you’re not sure about reaching out… Then perhaps I might offer some encouragement by providing you with the very catalyst that profoundly changed my view of the world around me when I was only but a child of 8 years of age. For that catalyst is only a story… And stories are good places to start… Especially on journeys of rediscovery.

It’s a true story too… A story that united mankind for day… A day when we all looked to the heavens above and, despite the efforts of the few, all of us said, “WE made it!” And how right WE all were! It’s a story full of adventure, discovery, challenge, risk, and even loss. But none the less, the story unfolded and the rewards were big enough to inspire and pursue at any cost. For this story expresses the insatiable need for mankind to understand itself and its place within the heavens. Simply put… This is the true story of Life. Life that left the Earth on a long voyage… A voyage that travelled further than any known expedition has ever been before… And having seen what “it” saw on the deserts of the moon, then came back home with a new and invigorated view of just how amazing all of THIS around is really is… That WE live on this wondrous paradise of a planet… And WE have everything that WE could ever need right here. When WE all see this, even if it’s only just a hint of the bigger picture, for only just a moment… Much in the same way that our narrator, James May, did… Then WE might realize that this truly is a garden of Eden in the heavens above… And perhaps we might then understand that it demands as much tender loving care and attention as do our own children.