September 1, 2007

• Things that Explain Life

  This is September’s first Featured_Grownups challenge.

  Maybe there’s a simple explanation for life, the Universe, and everything… one, I mean, that is more than just a joke, reasonably accurate and helpful.  I put a lot of energy into finding such an explanation, in my younger years.  I don’t recall precisely when that quest for a simple explanation morphed into my simply collecting an assortment of various explanations, simple and complex, reasonable and ridiculous, helpful or otherwise.

  Along the way, I have encountered many other seekers who had found some explanations that suited them.  Back in the 1960s, I shot speed, smoked dope, and huffed nitrous oxide with Ken Kesey, another red-haired Virgo seeker like me.  A decade or so after that, around the time John Lennon died, Ken wrote a piece for Rolling Stone, in which he said that anyone can be adequately successful at negotiating life’s twists and turns, meeting its challenges, with the Bible for a road map and I Ching for a compass.  I think that such an East-West combination has some merit, but having studied ten or a dozen different translations of the Christian Bible, having spent a few years working with I Ching, and having observed a lot of life, I think there’s more to it than that.

  Another thinker I respect is Dick Sutphen, who says, “Everything is Karma… or nothing is.”  Now, just on the face of it, that seems to be too extreme for me, too black-and-white.  I don’t see why some things couldn’t be accounted for by Karma and other things by something else.  Mind you, “Karma” in Dick’s reality, isn’t what popular western culture has made of it, a sickeningly black-and-white, “God’s gonna get you for that,” synonym for divine retribution.  To him, as to me, Karma is cause-and-effect.  Just about everything I perceive can be seen to have a cause, but there is some tantalizing resonance (“the ring of truth” or at least plausibility) in the ideas of acausality and retrocausality.  I am not at this time ready to buy any all-or-nothing explanation.

  I have not found any obvious holes or untruths in the Seven Huna Principles:

      1. The World Is What You Think It Is.
      2. There are no limits.
      3. Energy Flows Where Attention Goes.
      4. Now Is The Moment Of Power.
      5. To Love Is To Be Happy With (someone or something).
      6. All Power Comes From Within.
      7. Effectiveness Is The Measure Of Truth.

  That does not mean that this is the one and only perfect recipe for reality.  I’m keeping an open mind.  As David Hume said, “I must confess that a man is guilty of
  unpardonable arrogance who concludes, because an argument has escaped
  his own investigation, that therefore it does not really exist.“  My quest goes on and my collection continues to grow.  I could go on and on (and frequently I do).  I have two weeks or so in which to remember other interesting BS (belief systems) before this current challenge expires, so, for now, I will leave it at this:

  My best explanation for it all:  We are All ONE.

  

  • 2:19 pm
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