Friday, July 18, 2014

The Mission of Understanding

What a miracle this is.  All of this.  We yearn to discover yet we cannot totally understand the origin of our species, or more grandly speaking, the origin of our universe.  The breath taking feats of science and technology have been able to break open the door to understanding who we are.  We can now look out into the cosmos and understand how small our world is and how life does existence on other planets and distant moons (even if it is not "intelligent" life).  But the mission of understanding life is seemingly endless.  And I fear that our engrained ways of thinking and dogmatic systems of thought have thwarted us from fully absorbing the knowledge that science has put forth.  I humbly admit I forget too often incorporate these truths into my world view.

What a miracle it is that we can type onto a keypad and send protons of electricity into a system that interprets these signals into legible thoughts.  At it's core technology enhances our ability to communicate, not only to each other, but to life itself.  Technology and scientific philosophy enhance our ability to "control" the course of life in a way in which we desire.

Just a short time ago none of this was possible.  Just one million years ago our Earth harbored no intelligent life (or so we believe).  The oceans were colonized by single cell organisms while the lands where barren dessert.  And here we are now, so tiny, yet which actions that collectively effect the entire planet.  Instead of letting our egos take charge by pretending it knows what reality is, why don't we humble our selves and realize how ignorant we all are?  Ignorance is inherently human, yet we deny this and in doing so we suppress some of our greatest abilities.  By not seeing what we do or who we are we never allow ourselves to go beyond the known and grow into something we may actually become.  This relates both to our inner life and our outer life.

The patterns we all replay.  The stories we tell each other will continue to go on.  The things that we accept as reality will stay as "factual" reality.  But only when we admit to ourselves that we really do not know much at all, maybe then will life again become endlessly interesting.  Maybe then will be accelerate our growth, both intrapersonally (in context to oneself) and interpersonally (in context to society.