Thank God for an uneventful week after the porcupine incident. We've started to go walking in the woods with the dogs again now that the prickly little beasts have departed to higher grounds.During the week I often peruse the net for news and other tidbits of interest. I came upon this headline by accident while going about my daily routine.
People not smart enough to understand universe: scientist.
This comes from an interview with Lord Martin Rees the president of the Royal Society of Astronomy in England. Surely anyone who's ever seen a live parliamentary debate or the Doctor Phil Show will agree without question. Lord Rees states that the idea of multiple parallel universes, human consciousness and the very idea of reality may be simply beyond our understanding.'' Just as a fish may be barely aware of he medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." The idea of parallel universes or dimensions is not new. If you've ever heard of the string theory it's worth looking into. I won't dwell on this but you can get a brief intro on it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M
This immediately made me think of Aldous Huxley who wrote '' Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large''. This is most probably identical to the One Mind philosophy in Zen Buddhism. He concludes ''But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet''.He also believed that this so called reduction valve could be dilated by the use of drugs, especially mescaline the main active ingredient in peyote. Aboriginal peoples in south america have been using the drug in rituals for thousands of years to alter their state of consciousness and get closer to the gods which could be interpreted as transcending their unilateral dimension. We have somehow forgotten how these so called primitives had a much better understanding of the universe and it's fragile equilibrium. Even when we send our high tech toys to explore the space frontier, in effect, we're still playing in our own backyard. Some people resort to meditation or yoga with the same objective in mind, supraconsciousness . Others have used drugs to accelerate the process of understanding the universe and our place in the whole scheme of things. Unsatisfied with the unilateral vision of the world they lived in, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Hunter S.Thompson, Beaudelaire and a horde of other creative individuals embarked on psychedelic journeys to ascend to a different plane of thought and consciousness. I don't advocate the use of drugs for kids, since they are most often used as a means of recreation and escape and getting totally fucked up during spring break. But I think our world leaders would do well to have a mescaline party when they meet . They would quickly realize the mess they continue to unilaterally perpetuate and hopefully they would immerse themselves in a larger vision of what could be a better world for future generations. Plus, it would make for funnier and more interesting G8 summits.Of course they would have to be under strict surveillance just in case Angela Merkel decided to run naked through the gardens singing I am the walrus since the whole drug fueled get together would be televised. Great entertainment and maybe for once, some genuine and original ideas would take shape.
