Anyone ever been on a road
trip and somewhere down the road you find out not everyone is on the same page?
For instance, you break out a PB&J sandwich
you made for the ride, and all the sudden someone behind you yells--“Oh my
gosh--I’m allergic to peanuts! Please throw
that sandwich out the window right away!”
Something like that, or if you’re a non-smoker and a few miles down the
road the driver pulls out a pack of smokes and lights up. “Oh, I didn’t tell
you? I’ll be quick about it, don’t worry.”
Or, if you’re a smoker, the worst to hear is, “Sorry man, we just gassed
up and won’t be stopping for a couple hours at least, so you’re just going to
have to wait.”
The point here is that
scenario in life, where the people assembled suddenly realize they’re not on
the same page.
Since we’re all fellow travelers,
the road-trip metaphor is my favorite, but in this case we’re not on a road
trip, we’re at a lecture, and for it to be worthwhile we have to first all get
on the same page--which, unfortunately--means we have to go through a few minutes
of tedious, boring stuff.
To get on the same page,
let’s start with a quote by a famous philosopher: never accept anything as true
that we don’t clearly know to be true.
OK, what do we know to be
true? How do we know it’s true that we exist
in the first place? The weather today, it
was…. Unless you’re a vampire, everyone in town knows what kind of day it was,
right? Someone please stand up. Please tell us your name. Can everyone see (name) shirt? We all agree it’s a collared shirt, right? Thank you (name). In order to know these things--what the
weather was today, what clothing (name) is wearing--we had to think. Therefore we know we exist because we’re thinking--and
not only are we thinking individually, but we’re also thinking collectively as
well. Does anyone disagree it was **degrees
today? Anyone think (name) is wearing a Halter
top? If we know we’re thinking
individually and collectively, it means we’re experiencing consciousness; that each
one of us exists as a unique, individual aspect of consciousness, and together we
exist as a unique, collective aspect of consciousness.
Besides humans, is there
anything else on the planet that’s experiencing consciousness? Animals, right? They’re experiencing consciousness too. Can it be that dogs and cats are Zen masters
of consciousness and we humans don’t get it?
Some pet owners would say Yes, but what’s the difference between animal
consciousness and human consciousness? Why
are things between humans and animals similar, yet so different? The difference is clarified by two words from
the English language: sentience and sapience.
Sentience is the natural intelligence to catch food and survive. We’ve all seen documentaries about this. One of my favorite examples is whales making
a circle of bubbles to corral their prey.
They swim deep down as a group, then in a circle while they send
air-bubbles to the surface. They tighten the ring, and then come to the surface,
mouths wide open, and feed. So sentience is the natural intelligence to catch
food and survive. Sapience is not only that, but also the ability to reflect on
easier, more comfortable ways to survive, like the capability to build power
plants. Animals and humans can communicate feelings and attitudes, but because
there is an absence of evidence, apparently only humans can communicate abstract
ideas. We don’t have dog poets yearning
to compose words to make sense of dog existence, right? We don’t have a documented history of cats
who paint, right? The ability to create,
in a word, is sapience, a word derived from the Latin Sapere, which means to taste,
to know, or wisdom.
So what about this sapience
of ours? Prince Hamlet once declared that surely there must be a reason for it.
There must be a reason for our ability to remember the past, consider the
present, and imagine the future. Hold
that thought, we’ll get back to it.
OK, next: what is a continuum? The dictionary lists a continuum as a range
or series of things that exist between opposites. For instance, space is a continuum:
is it empty or full, light or dark, hot or cold, small or big? Everything is a continuum--a
chair is a continuum--is it soft or firm, light or heavy, modern or antique?
So not only do we know we
exist, and that we’re experiencing consciousness, we know there’s a duality to
existence, a Yin and Yang at play for everything we can name--including humans--we
who are happy or sad, courageous or afraid, selfish or generous. Everything that makes up existence, including
the Sun and Earth, Moon and stars, is something existing between two opposites.
Of course the most
interesting continuum is the one concerned with our sapience itself, that is, the
continuum of opinion. Opinion can be logical or illogical, rational or
irrational, subjective or objective. Of
the subjective/objective opinions, some people aren’t sure what the difference
is between the two. I’ve even heard it
said that there is no such thing as objective opinion, that objectivity and
opinion are themselves at opposite ends of a continuum, and it’s oxymoronic to combine
the two.
Is there anyone here who
doesn’t like pizza? Whoever hates pizza,
please raise your hand. What’s the best
topping for pizza? Some think it’s
vegetables, some think it’s meat, some think it’s a combo. What’s the best car to drive? What’s the best vacation to take? What’s the best sports team? These are all subjective opinions that can’t
be answered by anyone but the individual.
The opposite end of all that
is objective opinion; for example, if you have a favorite sports team, if
you’re a real die-hard fan, you know how your team played the previous game, who
they’re playing next, how they played that team the time before, if anyone is
out injured, all that. Based on those
facts you can make an opinion of who will win, and come Sunday afternoon--boom
you’re either proven correct or not.
But it will never be fact
that pepperoni pizza is better than other pizza, right? So the difference between the objective opinion
and subjective opinion is that objective opinion, with time, can become a fact:
your team won.
People who offer up objective
opinion that often turns out to be true, those are people we call smart, those
are people we want to hang out with. But in hanging out with people, no matter
how often they are right or wrong, there are those who are right about a lot of
things, but then wrong about critical things.
Can you imagine that? Living life
based on an opinion that has no basis in reality? We may have been such a person in the past or--shocker--we
may be one of those people right now. Most
people disliked logic and truth tables in college, but we can all appreciate
the utility of being able to mathematically prove an opinion as valid or
invalid. It means that when it comes to objective matters, you don’t get to believe
what you want. Unless you’re rich--then you
can believe whatever you want.
OK, so we know we’re sapient
beings on a planet, and there is this kind of all-pervasive duality at play,
but how did we get here? How did all these
cities and towns and modes of transportation get to be this way? There is ongoing discovery as to when, where,
and how our civilization came about, but what we clearly know to be true is
that we’re part of a civilization, and all high civilizations are composed of
three things: laws, sciences, and arts.
Sciences and Arts we can
couple together because they are two sides of the same coin: each relies on our
sapience. We couldn’t build a space ship
without the accumulated knowledge of astronomy, physics, engineering, and
materials. In the arts, the best way to prepare cobalt blue oil paint is based
on the same thing--accumulated knowledge and the ability to examine the past,
consider the present, and imagine the future--sapience. It was once said that the
sciences are the stars, and the arts are the heart; or, the sciences are the
big outside, the arts are the big inside.
OK, sciences, arts and what
else? Laws.
Why do laws exist, and what
are they composed of? Laws exist to
prevent harm, and they are composed of two things: letter and spirit. A good example of this is the world’s first stop
sign. It went up in Detroit, Michigan, in the year 1915.
Obviously, with the advent of the automobile, the people alive then reached
consensus that something had to be done about accidents. So they passed a law that an automobile shall
come to a complete stop at a stop sign. The letter of the law--shall come to a
complete stop--embodies the spirit of the law--which was and still is--that we
don’t want people getting hurt.
The final thing to discuss,
so we’re all on the same page, is the continuum that determines how humanity actually
approaches existence on Earth: politics.
Have you ever entered a room
with other people watching TV, and you didn’t know what was on? And you sit down and it takes a little bit
before you grasp what everyone is watching?
Well, politics are like that in the sense that when you have your political
awakening--usually somewhere in your late-teens/early-twenties--you aren’t
certain what you’re watching, but then over a couple years or more, you get a
better understanding, until at some point, you finally realize what the show is
about--corrupt politicians talking about what they’re doing to combat
corruption. A lot of people today say
they’re not political, or have turned politics off because it’s such a
charade. American politics today is kind
of like a Dungeons and Dragons for people in business attire. That said, let’s prove it, let’s show how and
why American politics are a charade.
American society exists, and
all this (gesture to room) exists because of a war that took place back in the late1700s. The result of that war was that 13 colonies
became 13 republics, and eventually they all entered into a contract known as the
Constitution. That’s why we’re here
today because without the Constitution, you don’t have an American flag, and
without and American flag you don’t have our current state of existence. The
individuals at the convention which drafted the Constitution were both slave
owners and people who thought slavery an abomination. If and when entering into
a legal agreement with someone you don’t like, of course you make sure there is
a way of discussing things if they’re not working out. So they put a clause in Article V, where if
enough states don’t like what is going on, the Congress was bound by the
Constitution to issue the call for a convention where state delegates could
discuss and build consensus about what to do.
As it turns out, researchers have reviewed Congressional Records and
it’s a matter of public record that the states have cast hundreds and hundreds
of applications over the decades, including this decade, and one session of
Congress after the next, simply ignores them.
There is currently a political action before the judiciary committees of
Congress, requesting a count of existing applications. Hopefully that will result in the convention
call, but for now, we have verifiable proof of how American politics are a
charade: the Congress is illegally preventing the Constitution from operating
as intended by denying the American citizen their right to formally discuss
their government, by refusing to issue the call for a federal convention of the
states. Finally, the reason this
situation exists is due to the influence of private money on public elections. The politicians act in the interests of those
entities which fund campaigns.
That concludes the
expository information.
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