Rule #1: Question everything.

Rule #2: If you didn’t question the validity of Rule #1, you fail!

lol

I love this ad for Discovery

As I was driving home this evening from my usual Thursday night dinner with my parents, my mind meandered again, how it often does these days, to thoughts of the infinite possibilities that led to my being. The single outcome of who am I, what I am doing with my life, my personality, the choices I make, my entire being. Thinking about this is ultimately beyond comprehension but I find it fun to try and wrap my mind around. In daily life you run across so many choices that have so many different outcomes that could alter your life in seemingly minute to massive ways. This is the idea of the metaphorical (or not?) concept behind the butterfly effect (butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, causes hurricane in Florida due to currents in the wind being built upon, etc etc etc).

What started make me think more though was that it’s not just actions one takes but also the inactions that are equally powerful. This leads to the fact that I have to be appreciative of all the men and women who were equally inactive enough to let my parents end up together and eventually lead to me. But multiply that times a a mere few generations, the exact circumstances that each successive person was born in just the compatible way to find another person to have a child at the exact moment they did with all the external factors placed on them and all the other possible people vying but failing to be that mate, and that one sperm with its DNA just so to give A properties, B personality, C looks to get the right circumstances for the next generation and you have to realize that the probability of me is so infinitesimally small that we could safely say through math that I cannot possibly exist. Yet here I am. I am the tinniest probability of compounded possibilities in a dynamic ever morphing world. Now stretch that back to the beginning of the universe, through the formation of the planet, to the most basic life on earth of some group of self assembling proteins to bacteria, to multi-cellular organisms, to animals and eventually to us animals, humans. To this exact moment I sit at my computer and type this.

Every step of the way led to your and my existence, against all the odds it is you reading this, right now.

Some may argue, without realizing this is the argument they really use, that this is the proof of why there has to be a god, as how can we possibly exist against such odds. How could we have possibly evolved from monkeys, monkeys from marmots, marmots from rodents, etc etc, all the way back to the first semblance of life and before? I agree, the odds do seem impossible, but there must be the one final outcome that results. We and every living thing around us are that outcome, compounded, multiplied and squared to the power of infinity. That single, precious outcome of the thing we call life, of consciousness of being. And yet so many of us squander it, throw it away in wars and petty feuds over ultimately nothing.

It was here at this thought that I realized something.  As abhorrent as some of the atrocities committed in the world were/are, I have to at the same time account for them in my thinking. For it is those crimes, violence, wars that led to my existence too. If the Ottoman Empire hadn’t extended into Greece and enslaved my ancestors then likely my great^8 grandmother wouldn’t have met my great^8 grandfather and decide to have children which would eventually lead to this present of me.

So as bizarre and backwards as it sounds, in a way I could say that I’m thankful to the Turks for enslaving my country, because without that I would not exist. Was it morally right, no. Did it undoubtedly cause suffering and pain for millions, absolutely. Would I change history if I could? Only if I could exist again in this same present. It feels so selfish to admit this truth, yet it is just that. I love life, I love living, I love being able to live. Even in my most saddened times I try to find solace that I’ve even been given the opportunity and privilege to be sad*.

So where did all this thinking lead me? It means that no matter what I decide to do with my life, no matter how I decide to live, what choices, what actions I take and don’t take, that at some point in the future, there will be some other individual whose life will have been intertwined in some minute yet paramount significant detail that will thank me, regardless of who I was**. If I die tomorrow, some woman who I would have married and had kids with, will marry and have kids with someone else, and that child will be the product of an improbability as well, becoming tied into the infinite stream of life’s possibilities that I was honoured to be a part of, hopefully to one day think back and reflect on all the events, people, creatures, bacteria, protein, atoms, and quarks that led to them, there, at that exact moment.

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* Usually doesn’t work, but once in a while it holds off me being angry at some of the smaller things that try to get me down hahaha

** I don’t say this and mean it to be taken as I have no reason to be morally right or don’t care about how I may hurt others by my actions, I am merely stating that all events, right/wrong/indifferent have an outcome that influences the future. A morality discussion is for another day!

Having telekenesis would be freakin sweet, but the more I think about it honestly and the times I would use it, I’d be pretty irresponsible. Oh sure I have grand notions of helping the world, saving people, generally being a modern day real life super man. But I tell you, put that kind of power at my finger tips and then have the guy in the car in front of me throw a cigarette butt out the window…well…lets just say it’s better if I don’t have these powers.

With great power comes great irresponsibility.

If you can truthfully admit that you live a lie then your living in itself a truth. What is each of us but a facade of normality, interspersed with leaps of considered insanity. But to be free of all societal pressure and live on a self-governed code is itself suicide as others can not allow it. No, the only way is to skirt the border between the forces however close or far they may be apart. Live as much as you can live. Play as much as you can play. Modifying your life to reach out and embrace that insanity, absorb it, master it and let it tempt your mind. Let yourself taste a freedom yet still adhere to a standard under which we lie.

Yep, too much Dexter.

I think humanity has used our world resources as I tend to use my toothpaste.  When the tube is full, I always make sure i have a full length of toothpaste on the brush.  I don’t think that i’m going to run out.  And for a while it appears as though I’m not going to.  Depletion just doesn’t seem to occur for that initial 1/3 of a tube.  Then i start to notice that it is actually decreasing in volume, but hey, the toothpaste is still half full.  Do i change my use? No, of course not!

Pretty soon i’m down to the last 1/4 of a tube, but think ahh it’s no big deal, i can just go out an buy another tube of toothpaste, so continue using it as i usually do.  But then that fatefull day comes when i squeeze and nothing comes out…at first i panic as I didn’t go out and actually buy another tube as that would have taken foresight on my behalf.  But then upon further inspection i realize “oh hey, if i start from the bottom and squeeze up tightly i still have some left!” So i do that, and from that day on i make sure to use only the tiniest bit of toothpaste in each brush. I take what i would have normally used up in 2 days and make it last for 2 weeks but ultimately it still runs out.

I could have made it last 100 times as long if only i had metered out that amount for the entire tube, but that’s just not how we view things is it?

Fortunately for me i the real final few days i managed to scam a new tube off my dad when i was home…all I can say is that I hope we colonize the moon or mars soon.

And that my friends, is how I’ve simplified our global environmental crisis into one simple toothpaste metaphor.

I found these little thoughts in my gmail drafts while I was cleaning it out last week, and didn’t want to just throw it out so thought I’d toss it on here incase it actually means something to someone! I don’t really remember writing it, but I guess I did when I was back in my deep thought blog writing stage many many moons ago hahaha

Anyways, enjoy!

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What is it to try and change a man?  Is it to make them see what blinds them?  Or perhaps to the close doors to where their dreams lie? How can you ask someone to follow a path of your desire without running  the risk of tearing down a bridge to what they might truly desire most?

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Reality is a most harsh creature, one in which we’ve evolved a seeming necessity of savagery for survival.  Why is that? Ingrained in each of us is the capability for such a range of character.  I’d like to think that we’ve progressed into civility, but that seems so misconstrued upon further reflection.  Look at the natural world around us.

There has been a shift.  In the animal world, creatures fight others of their own kind for territorial reasons.  An obvious comparison is made with humans today.  But in addition to that, there is also jealousy, greed, hate, religion, ignorance, manipulation; all these things strike against making a case for civility.  A so-called self aware mind has made us so self-important that we forget, we lose our connection to those around us, though not just humans, but to all creatures.  We are poisoning our world, destroying hundreds of millions of years of precious evolution.  That preciousness that has led to our own self being, my own self being.  The mere thought of the countless improbabilities to bring any single life into being is astounding, yet we ferociously and consistently rip it out.  So can you say we are really the rulers of the earth or just a mere obscene mistake?

But what of our redeeming characteristics.  Surely they must construct some support for which to lay our tired souls.  What is it that may separate us from other creatures.  It is hard to find an attribute that we have that cannot be found in our animal kin.  What differs is that though examples of our kinder emotions can be found scattered in various amounts among different species, it is within us that all of them lie, even if not shown by everyone.  And not only that, but our minds have allowed us to expand, to evolve our benevolent traits to a higher level.  We have raised our character to a higher plane of existence.

We can hope for the good, for the kind, for the heart to guide us, but is this a false premise? Perhaps, but anything less than that hope would place our kind into a spiral of despair.  So I know I for one will maintain my ideological desires for the forward progress of civility and thought for our species.

There was always a reason I didn’t join facebook until a year later than everyone else.  It was something in the concept of it: the accruing of friends solely to have friends, a subtle expectation to be in constant contact with those people on your list and lastly having people from yesteryear that you really don’t care for anymore contacting you.

Now many arguments can be made for facebook, and some I do support.  I personally used facebook throughout my travels abroad for an easy way to keep in touch with people I met as a simple e-mail address exchange provides all the information you could want about a person and profiles are very helpful in helping my now old mind to remember meeting the person.

I came across an article on one of the (nerd/tech) sites I visit on a regular basis  with an article written by one of the editors that argues against facebook.  His sentiments mirror my own in regards to friendship.  Here’s a small snippet with the link to the entire article following:

Friendship is not based on constant contact and interaction. Friendship is based on the emotional attachment that we have to other individuals, and if this emotional attachment is real, it doesn’t become weaker over time, no matter how rarely you see that person. I have a friend that I’ve known since I was three years old and sometimes we go two or three years without seeing each other. Does that mean that our friendship is weak? No. Does that mean that I should register on Facebook and add him to my friends list so that we can communicate more often? No. It means that our friendship is strong enough that if we get together after three years of not seeing each other, it feels as if we’d seen each other only yesterday.

You can find the rest of the article here.

If you ascribe to god a multitude of seemingly inconsequential and unconnected events, belie your own common rational thinking by rendering unto them a collection of conclusive thoughts in quiet self-justification, then what is attained? Would it not be solely a dark veil between you and that of rational thought? Can one so lost be found again? Could the mere thought of such a meaning not be rationalized to that of superstitious folly? Is it not possible that your belief in the deceiving power of existentialist thought is meant only to deceive yourself? Failure to understand, no rather, failure to truly need and desire to understand is not failing only yourself but life in its beautiful entirety.
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It takes but a mere attentiveness to the world around us, in which we breath, we listen, we dream, we live, to perceive the most desirable pleasures we are sorely denied. Those most selfish pleasures of thoughts without influence, without subjugation to the whims and wants of those who shape our world. Through mediums both prevalent and minute, the permeation of control saturates our very existence. Free thought? A fanciful idea. However that pleasant notion of uninfluenced perception and unbiased opinions forever escapes our utopic fantasies. As masses we mold our minds to fit the perfect die already set, faults certainly cast away. Most accept this reality. Upon few dawns the enlightenment of our endless cycle, but nearly always after their time has set. Their struggles and defiance swiftly suppressed, extinguished into an oblivion. We hope endlessly for those even lesser precious few who can break through, alighting our world with renewed life and thought, procuring within us a spirit and passion that cannot be crushed. And so we wait, patiently acting as we are bidden, puppets to others as much as they are puppets to us.

I thought this was pretty much bang on!