fact, opinion and poetry (not airy-fairy)


Sunday 21 October 2012

A Perfect World?

Today I heard someone say that the world is perfect, that all that is wrong with it is the greed and lust for power of mankind. The only cure is for us to obey The Spiritual Laws.
     But what are they?
     And what about rabies? Rabies has long troubled me, not because I am likely to catch it, but because it seems such an unjust thing for someone to suffer from. It destroys the brain, robbing people of whatever good qualities they may have possessed.
     I am not convinced that perfection exists among the Ten Thousand Things. The world of phenomena seems delicately balanced between chaos and order. Thermodynamics warns us that disorder is constantly increasing toward a condition of maximum probability (entropy). At the end of time, the cosmos will be a uniform brown sludge.
     Civilisation as we know it has existed for only a few thousand years among the 4,500,000,000 that the Earth has existed for. Advanced civilisation for only a couple of centuries. It is based on rapidly depleting mineral ores. We are living in atypical times, of transient character.
     Greed for wealth is one thing, but part of our problem is a greed for knowledge. Specifically for a grand scheme that we can fool ourselves means we know everything that matters. A kind of mental mastery of the world. Men of both science and religion have long sought this Holy Grail. It is a vanity, a chimera.
     We must learn to live with only one certainty, or we befuddle ourselves.
     This is not intended as a counsel of despair, but of acceptance.
     Recommended reading: Tao Te Ching.

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