To Control The World

Life is hard. No doubt about it. Sometimes scary. It's a high-speed, many-looped roller coaster ride. There are mountains and valleys - high ones and low, long ones, respectively.

Who wouldn't want an edge to get through it all?

Our scientific materialist friends often accuse us spiritual-minded folks of needing a crutch and an invisible friend (or friends). "Whatever gets you through the night," they say.

However, I suspect the materialists are no less prone to find ways of imposing order or attempting to gain control of this thing called life. That is why they hate mystery and imponderables (not in the sense of things beyond our current ability to understand, but rather that perhaps there are things beyond human comprehension that will never be fully understood).

It seems to me that sometimes the universe just doesn't make good sense. I would go further and suggest that scientists have as poor a record of prognosticating the future as do the religious prophets. That isn't meant as a knock against science, but rather a statement of my distrust of using a single system of thought to attempt to control or impose order on the future.

Perhaps the universe isn't some inert collection of matter acted upon by "the laws of nature." Perhaps mind is the ultimate reality and creation an ongoing process.

Emerson offered that a "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Well, yes; true freethinking is more freewheeling than it is often credited with being.

This is a rather humbling insight for me and has dissuaded me from further attempts to construct a rigid worldview that might seem to allow me to exercise control over things.

As a child of the cosmos I must content myself, I believe, to "go with the flow" and recognize the limits of my ability to understand fully. I seek approaches rather than rigid systems. I recognize the power of illusion. I may believe but shouldn't pretend to know.