THE FERAL ULTIMATUM: Conflict or Resolution

[RascalPuff]

The word "invention" can denote ideas far removed from the machines to which the people of our mechanically inclined era seek constantly to limit the word. Let us take one refined example. The zero, invented twice in the mists of prehistory, once by the Hindus and once by the Maya, lies at the root of all complicated mathematics, yet it is not a "thing." Rather, it is a "no thing," a "nothing," without which Roman mathematics was a heavy, lumbering affair. In our time that necessary zero leaps instantaneously through the circuits of computers, helping to guide a rocket on the long pathway to Mars. One might say that an unknown mathematical genius seeking pure abstract understanding was a necessary prehistoric prelude to the success of the computer. He was also, and tragically, the possible indirect creator of world disaster in the shape of atomic war.

"Traveling long journeys is costly, at all times troublesome, at some times dangerous," warned a seventeenth-century writer. These were true words spoken of great seas and unmapped continents. They can also be spoken of the scientific journey itself. Today, magnified beyond the comprehension of that ancient wayfarer, we contemplate roads across the planetary orbits, the penetration of unknown atmospheres, and the defiance of solar flares. This effort has become the primary obsession of the great continental powers. Into the organization of this endeavor has gone an outpouring of wealth and inventive genius so vast that it constitutes a public sacrifice equivalent in terms of relative wealth to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza almost five thousand years ago. Indeed, there is a sense in which modern science is involved in the construction of just such a pyramid, though an invisible one.

Science, too, demands great sacrifice, persistence of purpose across the generations, and an almost religious devotion. Whether its creations will loom to future ages as strangely antiquated as the sepulchres of the divine pharaohs, time alone will tell. Perhaps, in the final reckoning, only understanding will enable man to look back upon his pathway. For if inventions of power outrun understanding, as they now threaten to do, man may well sink into a night more abysmal than any he has yet experienced. Understanding increasingly begets power, but, as perceptive statesmen have long observed, power in the wrong hands has a way of corrupting understanding.

There is an eye atop Palomar Mountain that peers at fleeing galaxies so remote that eons have elapsed since the light which reaches that great lens began its journey. There is another eye, that of the electron microscope, which peers deep into our own being. Both eyes are important. They are eyes of understanding. They balance and steady each other. They give our world perspective; they place man where he belongs. Such eyes, however, are subject to their human makers. Men may devise or acquire, and use beautiful or deathly machines and yet have no true time sense, no tolerance, no genuine awareness of their own history. By contrast, the balanced eye, the rare true eye of understanding, can explore the gulfs of history in a night or sense with uncanny accuracy the subtle moment when a civilization in all its panoply of power turns deathward. There are such troubled seers among us today -- men who fear that the ramifications of the huge industrial complex centering upon space is draining us of energy and wealth for other enterprises -- that it has about it a threatening, insensitive, and cataclysmic quality.
***
It is a thing to consider, because with understanding arise instruments of power, which always spread faster than the inventions of calm understanding. The tools of violence appeal to the fanatic, the illiterate, the blindly venomous. The inventions of power have grown monstrous in our time. Man's newfound ingenuity has given him health, wealth, and increase, but there is added now the ingredient of an ever-growing terror. Man is only beginning dimly to discern that the ultimate menace, the final interior zero, may lie in his own nature.

"The Invisible Pyramid," by Loren Eiseley, Professor of Anthropology
(A Naturalist Analyses the Rocket Century, copyright 1970.)
http://www.american-buddha.com/eisel...yramid.pro.htm

[Graybeard]

This Eiseley ... He is a romantic isn't he ??

cool bananas ... greg

[labelwench]

You post some very interesting material, Kai.

The following taken from the link you posted is very worthwhile contemplation in relation to our place in the the cosmos.

As ever,

Lorrina

So relative is the cosmos we inhabit that, as we gaze upon the outer galaxies available to the reach of our telescopes, we are placed in about the position that a single white blood cell in our bodies would occupy, if it were intelligently capable of seeking to understand the nature of its own universe, the body it inhabits. The cell would encounter rivers ramifying into miles of distance seemingly leading nowhere. It would pass through gigantic structures whose meaning it could never grasp -- the brain, for example. It could never know there was an outside, a vast being on a scale it could not conceive of and of which it formed an infinitesimal part. It would know only the pouring tumult of the creation it inhabited, but of the nature of that great beast, or even indeed that it was a beast, it could have no conception whatever. It might examine the liquid in which it floated and decide, as in the case of the fall of Lucretius's atoms, that the pouring of obscure torrents had created its world.

It might discover that creatures other than itself swam in the torrent. But that its universe was alive, had been born and was destined to perish, its own ephemeral existence would never allow it to perceive. It would never know the sun; it would explore only through dim tactile sensations and react to chemical stimuli that were borne to it along the mysterious conduits of the arteries and veins. Its universe would be centered upon a great arborescent tree of spouting blood. This, at best, generations of white blood cells by enormous labor and continuity might succeed, like astronomers, in charting.

They could never, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, be aware that their so-called universe was, in actuality, the prowling body of a cat or the more time-enduring body of a philosopher, himself engaged upon the same quest in a more gigantic world and perhaps deceived proportionately by greater vistas. What if, for example, the far galaxies man observes make up, across void spaces of which even we are atomically composed, some kind of enormous creature or cosmic snowflake whose exterior we will never see? We will know more than the phagocyte in our bodies, but no more than that limited creature can we climb out of our universe, or successfully enhance our size or longevity sufficiently to thrust our heads through the confines of the universe that terminates our vision.

Some further "outside" will hover elusively in our thought, but upon its nature, or even its reality, we can do no more than speculate. The phagocyte might observe the salty turbulence of an eternal river system, Lucretius the fall of atoms creating momentary living shapes. We suspiciously sense, in the concept of the expanding universe derived from the primordial atom -- the monobloc -- some kind of oscillating universal heart. At the instant of its contraction we will vanish. It is not given us, nor can our science recapture, the state beyond the monobloc, nor whether we exist in the diastole of some inconceivable being. We know only a little more extended reality than the hypothetical creature below us. Above us may lie realms it is beyond our power to grasp.

[RascalPuff]

THE INVISIBLE PYRAMID - A NATURALIST ANALYSES THE ROCKET CENTURY

Once in a cycle the comet
Doubles its lonesome track.
Enriched with the tears of a thousand years,
Aeschylus wanders back.
-- JOHN G. NEIHARDT

"In times of war, truth is the first casualty."
- Sen. Hiram Walker, 1917, quoting Aeschylus

"We shall embark upon exploration, and at the end of all our exploring, we return to where we started, and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Eliott, 4 Quartets

PROLOGUE
Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. If, in this book, I choose to act in the ambivalent character of pessimist and optimist, it is because mankind itself plays a similar contradictory role upon the stage of life. Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggests it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there.
If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star travelers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth. As an anthropologist I know that we exist in the morning twilight of humanity and pray that we may survive its noon. The travail of the men of my profession is to delve amid the fragments of civilizations irretrievably lost and, at the same time, to know man's enormous capacity to create.
But I dream, and because I dream, I severally condemn, fear, and salute the future. It is the salute of a gladiator ringed by the indifference of the watching stars. Man himself is the solitary arbiter of his own defeats and victories. I have mused on the dead of all epochs from flint to steel. They fought blindly and well against the future, or the cities and ourselves would not be here. Now all about us, unseen, the final desperate engagement continues.
If man goes down I do not believe that he will ever again have the resources or the strength to defend the sunflower forest and simultaneously to follow the beckoning road across the star fields. It is now or never for both, and the price is very high. It may be, as A. E. Housman said, that we breathe the air that kills both at home and afar. He did not speak of pollution; he spoke instead of the death that comes with memory. I have wondered how long the social memory of a great culture can be sustained without similarly growing lethal. This also our century may decide.
I confess that the air that kills has been breathed upon the pages of this book, but upon it also has shone the silver light of flying thistledown. In the heart of the city I have heard the wild geese crying on the pathways that lie over a vanished forest. Nature has not changed the force that drives them. Man, too, is a different expression of that natural force. He has fought his way from the sea's depths to Palomar Mountain. He has mastered the plague. Now, in some final Armageddon, he confronts himself.

As a boy I once rolled dice in an empty house, playing against myself. I suppose I was afraid. It was twilight, and I forget who won. I was too young to have known that the old abandoned house in which I played was the universe. I would play for man more fiercely if the years would take me back.
- Loren Eiseley, 1907 - 1977

[labelwench]

Conflict or resolution.......does resolution ever become of conflict? I wonder.......

Driving in to work this morning, there was an interview on the radio with the former Ombudsman for Veteran Affairs, followed by an interview with the current Minister for Veteran's Affairs.

The discussion was largely centered around the question of whether we are treating our current veterans from the Afghan war with the same respect and financial assistance as the veterans of previous conflicts.

This was interesting to me as my grandfather held the post of Head of Veteran Affairs in the early days, after he was wounded by shrapnel in WW1 and at that time and through the depression there was not much assistance for those early wounded warriors, and none of the support systems to retrain and assist a disabled individual toward some level of integration and actualization in the society of the day, it being far more physical and less technology oriented than today.

While we are able to aid at the physical and financial level in the rebuilding of a life or livelihood for our soldiers, my heart aches for the irreparable damage that is done to the minds of individuals when they are placed into a 'kill or be killed' situation, which is not the normal frame of mind for our species, I would suggest, or for any that I have observed.

In a reflective mood today, and remembering some of the songs that my father, also a soldier, used to sing. The melody seems so at odds with the circumstances that the soldiers so often had to endure.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPk21...eature=related

[RascalPuff]

A Link for you

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=21432

Hi RP...I thought you might be interested in this link which is more like an assessment article by a high up Military Admiral....

Regards Mikal
_____________________________________

Hi hi Mikal. Indeed
I do find the information in your provided link very interesting. By your presumed approval I'll access it to Lloyd's thead in 'Logic & Reasoning'- 'EAST meets WEST' and see what others may have to say about the MutualAnnihilationDeterremt gridlock and the culminating ultimatum of finding a solution, or, rendering the world uninhabitable.
Much thanks for your awareness of and responsivity to my interests - civilization, war; it's causes, effects and possible remedies...

- RP

[Mikal]

http://www.realecontv.com/page/744.html

A true hero for the people....


Regards Mikal