Category Archives: contemplation

Contemplation

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I’ve been reading about knowledge boundaries and the idea of island as metaphor. Within the island, our body of knowledge, we pursue lines of thought, traverse the island, and eventually reach the shore beyond which lies the unknowable. The island grows as the breadth of our knowledge increases, the shoreline expands, and we are confronted with more mysteries and incomprehensive considerations that, when the island was smaller, were beyond our wildest imaginings. I guess the idea is, the more we know the more we don’t know.

For those of us who are not inclined to add dilemmas to the one’s we already struggle with, perhaps limiting knowledge is a preferrable strategy. We gain the peace of unquestioning acceptance of things simply being the way they are as opposed to living the uncertainty of constantly seeking answers; the problem the chronically curious must deal with.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be either/or. I can appreciate peaceful contemplation and still entertain intermittent bouts of curiosity. I think, these days, my island is still slowly growing. I’m just not venturing to the beach as often as I used to.

Orbital

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Samantha Harvey tells the story of a crew of astronauts circling the earth in an international space station. Each crew member contemplates his or her existence with a new awareness, removed as they are from the 24 hour cycle of life one experiences on the planet surface. Circling the globe as many as fourteen times in an earth day, accompanied by fourteen sunrises and as many sunsets, the astronauts watch, god-like, as a cyclone forms above the Philippines. They each come in time to the profound realization their very existence is extremely fragile, dependent upon the celestial body they’re circling.

As they perform their assigned experiments and daily maintenance tasks, over-coming the space sickness and lack of sound sleep, they nevertheless marvel at the constantly changing color and light show they see as they hurdle, weightless behind and around the entity that sustains they’re existences.

Such a perspective must surely overshadow the petty power struggles that define life on planet Earth.

Story Lines

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As people became more sedentary during the Neolithic era tribal groups united forming larger populations. These disparate groups, to form a functioning society needed to share a common sense of the way things are, a shared belief system. They needed a storyline that all could grasp, accept and believe in order to accept a hierarchical structure to deal with property ownership and exchange of goods.

A workable storyline would need to include reference to the supernatural. Human uncertainty requires connection to an entity that can be appealed to when crops fail, drought occurs, or outsiders threaten the groups existence.

As societal stability evolves, multiple story lines will develop, one flexible and open to new developments, another rigid, protective and resistant to change. Hopefully stable institutions will be in place at that point to accommodate such diversity of thought.

Populism

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Political populism appears to be in the ascendance these days.  The idea the ‘power’ is in the ‘people’, the ‘people’ being those rightfully in control, dismisses the opposing views of the minority.  Opposition is unacceptable, lost elections must be the result of fraud, theft; criticism the purview of ‘intellectual elites’.   

Populism simplifies, views differences in terms of power, who’s in charge, distrusts the complexities of democratic structures that require ongoing dialog to self-correct when necessary.  The ‘power of the people’ will be placed in the hands of a strongman who will suppress, unde4rmine institutions in order to impose the ‘will of the people’.   

The attraction of such a position must have something to do with a sense of social impotency, a lack of faith in a democratic society.  The danger is the establishment of totalitarian control. 

Morbid Thoughts

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Something about autumn, nature’s impending hibernation, that has me thinking about ‘the long sleep’, contemplating my ultimate demise. I heard recently about a man who, before his recent death, directed his family to have his cremated remains scattered about a favorite hiking location while a song of personal significance was piped into the woodlands.

It seems to me a nice idea. It has me thinking about what musical work I might choose for such an occasion. I do have in mind a perfect location for such an event.

All fun to think about but I’m not in the planning stages yet.

Harpies

Essence

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I’m wondering if species, creatures with life spans much shorter than ours, tiny beings with brains the size of pin heads, realize, given their brief existence, a rich and meaningful life.

Does a Wooly Bear caterpillar, struggling in moving water, feel angst, realize the probability of imminent demise while memories of hatching, eating and growing, the promise of evolution to flight slowly fades, the hope it’s brothers will survive to replenish the species and sensing these complexities while living a life that is only an instant of the life cycle we manage to waste away in insignificant concerns.

Such thoughts make me think I should pay more attention.