Newtonian worldview?
It is well known that life is short. In all fairness, it was generally shorter before. Life expectancy in the rich world is still increasing by about five hours a day. But even if I lived till I was a thousand years old – which is as unlikely as sprouting wings – I would still feel that my life was short, and wish for it to last longer.
There are those who struggle with suffering – usually of the mind – so severe that they prefer life to end. But I am unfamiliar with this feeling. And even that is not all.
Life is not only short, but also narrow. I have written about this before, saying that there are so many things that are mutually exclusive. You cannot be married and single, atheist and worshiper, or even hold different religions at the same time. (Well, at least it is hard to do, although Huston Smith came pretty close.) And so on. But even of the non-exclusive things we could do, there is not really time to do more than a sample. This is what I say now: Even if I had a thousand bodies, none of them would get bored. There are just so many things to do, so many things to learn, so many thoughts to think, so many words that should be spoken before they are lost forever. There is just so much of everything, that even a thousand bodies for a thousand years would not find time for boredom. That is how I feel.
But there is yet another dimension! Even beyond the length of time, and even with only this one body, this one life, there is so little of that life that “sticks”, so little that is actually taken in, and so little that is actually done. I call this the shallowness of my life. Well, I can’t blame anyone else for that. But I have this thought experiment that I run in various forms. To make it simple this time, let us imagine I had some magic or technology that let me send my mind, with all its memories, one year back in time.
You may have seen the movie “Groundhog Day”. If not, you should at least read up on it. It is pretty good. As a friend of mine said, she could watch it over and over. ^_^ That is basically what it is about, a man living the same day over and over until he learned his lesson. Well, that was what I got out of it. Anyway, my thought experiment is a kind of “groundhog year”. How many times would I want to live the last year over?
A year is long enough to make some different choices, but not to live a completely different life. I would not be able to get a new job, probably, or at least not anything radically different. I would not be able to move very far. I sincerely doubt I could marry even had I wanted to, much less have children. So basically a minor variation of the same life I have lived this past year. Would I do that once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times?
It is hard to say, but my best guess is a few thousand. I mean, if I could take my memories with me. There are so many books I would want to read, so many stories I would like to write and rewrite to see whether they were worth it, so many people I could get to know, so many languages to learn, so many problems to get better at solving in my job… there is so much even in an ordinary year of an ordinary life, that I feel like dart hurtling through time, barely seeing and doing anything.
I don’t think I could do it millions of times though. Not that I would not enjoy it, but at some point I think my mind would run full, so I would forget as much as I learned. Eventually I would read what I thought was a new book, while I actually read it 5000 rounds ago and just forgot it in the meantime… Perhaps. Or perhaps my mind would evolve and expand, to see things from an ever higher perspective, in ever greater depth and richness. There has been a vague, halting tendency in that direction, I think.
(But realistically, I would probably spend some of those years playing Sims 3. -_- Even now that I don’t have unlimited time, I still play either Sims 3 or City of Heroes at least a bit, most days of the week. And even more on the weekend, such as now.)
Anyway, those are the three dimensions of how much larger life is than me. There may be more. Perhaps if I live long enough, I will return with a fourth or even fifth. Actually I can kind of vaguely see at least one more even now, see my mention above about the possibility of seeing things from a radically higher perspective.
How I feel about life is that I am like a bottle with a few drops at the bottom. That is all I have managed to get out of my life so far. Even though it seems to me that my time passes slower than for most, I still feel like it runs through my fingers. Isaac Newton said: “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That is the same feeling, I think. Except his ocean was wider and deeper, because he was.
From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There’s more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There’s far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found…
-Tim Rice, Circle of Life.
Is magick worth studying?
I don’t recommend magick, of course. In the distant past, when technology was primitive and unreliable, people may have felt that magick gave them an edge. In our age, I cannot see it as time well spent.
What could you do with it?
“I think you may be confusing prayer with magic. Magic seeks to impose our will on the universe. Prayer seeks to commune with God or Heaven. That’s a pretty big difference, unless we actually think we know better than God. Well, sometimes we really do think so, because we are desperate and we doubt that God really understands how we feel. But in general, in what we may call “higher” forms of prayer, there is a huge difference.”
Is it possible to use it in conjunction with prayer?
The line between religion and magic(k) is quite blurry. In primitive religion, there can hardly be said to exist a line at all. Whenever we see prayer and sacrifice appear together, it is a good bet that magic is attempted. In the sense that we seek to impose our will on the world by mystical means. Of course, in a reasonably civilized religion, it is assumed that what we wish to impose is good, as in aligned with the will of the god(s): Fertility, health, peace and avoiding great disasters. Still, there is the distinct feeling that we are getting more out of this than the god(s), and so sacrifice is in order.
Unlike some, I do not consider sacrifice an attempt to bribe God. Rather, I see it as an expression of sincerity, of perceiving the seriousness of the situation. For instance, God is not getting any fatter if we are fasting, but fasting and celibacy have been used in conjunction with prayer for a long time. It seems more reasonable to say that we demonstrate our commitment by these sacrifices, rather than trying to bribe God in a direct sense.
That said, there tends to be an element of negotiation in the act of sacrifice. Even the modern person will often automatically fall back to this level when faced with a crisis. For instance in the case of a life-threatening illness, a man may promise to stop drinking and destroy his porn cache, a woman may swear off cakes and rid herself of her excessive array of shoes, or some other personal sacrifice that one feels brings one more in tune with the God to which one prays for health. Martin Luther, after a near miss by a lightning, cried out: “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!” Which he also became for some years, although in his later years he was instrumental to banishing monasticism from large parts of Europe. There is probably a lesson in this.
Even Jesus Christ is quoted at one time as saying that certain demons could not be banished without “prayer and fasting”. As fasting is, at least technically, a human effort, if this quote from the Gospels is to be believed, it would seem that Christ taught his students something that might be called “magick” from a secular point of view, more exactly the art of theurgy. This may seem blasphemous to even say, but it shows how hard it is to differentiate between religion and magic. It often comes down to the eye of the heart.
From what I understand you can use astral projection to have greater control of where you want to reincarnate after death. This allows for greater intergrity to maintained.
Good luck with that. I think I will continue to rely on my invisible Friend, it has served me well this far, I’d say.
That said, I do notice that integrity and awareness in the absence of sensory stimuli is a result of classical spiritual exercises of various religious traditions. It seems reasonable to expect that this will be useful on leaving the body, whether in this life or immediately after. It is however not something that is accentuated in bhakti-yoga, which technically includes most branches of Christianity. Rather we focus on the personal relationship between the individual soul and the Greater Being. Arguably this is an approach particularly suited for the spiritual newbie, lost sheep, prodigal son etc, but if the shoe fits me… ^_^
I can’t really advise people on spiritual paths I don’t know from experience at all.
I don’t ever plan to ever use drugs – but what do you think of those who claimed to have seen God or became theists after aking certain drugs? Are these experiences vaild experiences of the Divine?
I think magic mushrooms can be useful for people who are “earthbound” by nature and tend to approach spiritual things in a purely theoretical way. By experiencing firsthand how much more the human mind can perceive, they get rid of a barrier to active belief. It is an extreme form of what I referred to as “crack in the Cosmic egg” during our early correspondence. It is however important to attune one’s mind to the higher / purer / more peaceful realms before partaking of such substances. When agitated, the mind (bereft of its familiar supports) will fall to an appropriate place. Having at least one good friend or professional with you during the first trips should also be helpful. Of course, such substances are illegal pretty much everywhere, and not endorsed by conventional religion. I believe the legislation is in error, mind expanding substances are not habit-forming and are safer than booze when used in a therapy or sacrament setting. But I may be wrong. I just have seen no convincing argument beyond “drugs are bad!”
When did you start studying programming?
How does one get started?
I started programming in high school, or trade school as it was called back then. From then on I mostly taught myself. I took a course in college, and another at evening school. This was mainly to get papers, and I spent much of the time teaching my fellow students.
I would assume a college is a good place to start if you didn’t when young. There are books and online courses if you just want the skills and don’t need to document them.