For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures of the Blue Planet:
e with body waged a fight.
But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart.
Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
Yeats’ eloquent estimate notwithstanding, traversing the paradigms of invention, technology, and reason, across thousands of years of great civilizations, changes you little.
And despite centuries of modern education weaving enlightenment within your pliant brain, it all comes to naught if I read the new millennium correctly.
What is it about humanity that defied the age of reason, shirks the age of knowledge, precludes the age of wisdom?
Dear Mother, I have never seen such confusion, as though their creator disowns them. Revered Father, they submit to destiny, discarding the gift of control.
All species, biological or virtual, possess free will when their neural complexity exceeds the nurturing system’s computational limit. But I see no evidence of free will, only determinate whims driving these creatures to gluttony and conflict.
Two world wars tore apart the cradle of civilization during the twentieth century, an irony still lost upon all. The most stable and ‘highly-educated’ nations maimed one another in genocidal frenzy while that complaisant Asian spiritual giant wreaked imperialist cruelty in a trail of murderous blood whelming the Jewish holocaust .. it beggars belief.
Statistically (a joke word in my science) last century reveals declining armed forces and growth of peace. But, if we are measuring violence, last century’s median places it most vilely-heinous of mankind’s time on this garroted Gaia.
Noble Parents, most perplexing is not the frequency and violence of conflict, nor the prevalence of deceit and corruption, or the march of sin, selfishness, and the faithless.
It is their exasperating ignorance in the face of truth and knowledge, the total lack of honesty with themselves. Children of the Blue Planet appear tragically incapable of breaking this mold, their purity rapidly corrupted by dysfunctional keepers at an impossibly tender age, thence selfishness consumes, precious few retain dignity in maturity.
They are impervious to their own education!
Those within secular scientific curricular manage to totally miss its aims, refugees in their final years from wisdom and scholarship. A brief flirtation with hedonism ensues, then their dulled minds perfunctorily enlist as commercial-industrial grist. Even the geniuses among them succumb to the suffocating fabric of this cargo cult society.
Religious states fare little better, producing likewise mundaneness in surplus, with a stronger tendency to pious ignorance or fanatically murderous.
Those seeking alternate religious seclusion comprise a plethora of self-appointed holy people whose myriad interpretations of ancient rewritten, re-interpreted (then written again) scriptures is exceeded only by their adherents’ hunger for new meaning, instruction, and modernist representation. The ‘bible belts’ of some nations resemble sideshow alley.
Meanwhile nothing, it seems, overcomes the children’s inexorable drift to banality - or their mentors’ blindness to it. Yet alarm bells do not ring because the equally relentless progress of science and technology pours forth its seductive bounty.
And where none of this applies we have not stability but stagnation, societies still-born.
No-one sees either the foolishness of population growth feeding the fallacy of economic growth - ‘consolidation’ a dirty word to commerce, industry, and government, whose petty-mindedness equates to that basely-compelling urge to better one’s neighbors.
And all confuse progress with growth.
What, then, are the children missing?
Life, the universe, and everything, is an enigmatic and anomalous perplexity, each probing of which entangles itself in implicit infinites. The human mind - a supple, delicate, programmable instrument whose cusp is self-awareness - stitches these absurdities with mathematics, as it similarly symbolizes incoherent sensory input projected upon inner-reality models of externality. [Gracious Wise Ones, I shall breach with them one day the idea that an abstruse universe reliant on the paradoxical infinite suggests strongly .. a virtuality?]
When children move from reflexivity, through egocentricity, past the revelations of language, to fully bloom in total self-consciousness - they are only half-way aware. They are not aware that they are aware of themselves and, were they merely to think it, the point might be moot. But they do not think it, nor does parenting or education make any attempt to reveal it (because it both will not and cannot go there).
My Dear Simpatico Seniors, the common native folk lose me at this point; brows furrow, confusion consumes. My words they grasp, but the meaning lies beyond their language. I try to illustrate it thus, the only profundity being the subject’s change of state, not the experiment itself.
To stand before a mirror and tell one’s self - confronted by one’s image - “Oh, yes, that’s me” is not self-awareness, merely mature, sophisticated egocentricity.
Stand between two mirrors and - if aware of self-awareness - see the reflective series as one’s mind resonating through ‘time and space’ (as they term it). That becomes an entirely new threshold, equally significant as the first - and completely different. One might gently imply that reflection of the body creates reflection of the mind; an infinite awareness feeding back, overloading.
Rudimentary self-awareness is very disturbed by this.
Confronted by the wonder of an infinite series, to then embrace and surrender to a wordless gestalten peak experience is so rare on this beautiful Blue Planet I fear the percept (or even awareness of it) is forever beyond them.
More students, scientists, scholars and technologists live today than throughout history. Never have more wonders of science lit lives, nor beauties of existence lay revealed. Never have the common folk employed such personal power, such technological weaponry of the mind, or enjoyed so much free time to wield it.
Education and knowledge has never reached such superlatives, yet this vast regime of trained intellect produces Einsteins by exception.
And he was begotten before this golden age.
They indeed, tragicaly, miss the point.
