The Power Of Mind

Embracing the Animal May 17, 2017     Humans are half animal, half god. Our minds have the ability to ponder the infinite, create devices that allow us to go into outer space and eradicate entire strains of disease. Our bodies still cling to evolutionary traits designed to help survive in, as Thomas Hobbes would call, a state of nature (this is when survival is of paramount importance and no moral compasses guide any actions. Life is constantly on the edge of death). We cling to negative memories much more easily than to positive memories because remembering the negative, our bodies believe, increase our chances of survival while the positive are superfluous. A tiger attack compared to a pretty sunset. A negative comment amidst a sea of praise.     Evolution is the gradual adaptation of a species for the sake of survival. Before humans, animals evolved on a body level, take Darwin’s birds in the Galapagos, the bird’s be...

Mythology serves the purpose of illustrating larger than life ideas. Because they are larger than life, we lack a vocabulary as far as this world is concerned. We are limited in real life happenings. This is when we make up stories. The ancient greeks could not figure out how the sun came and went, so they made the story of Apollo and the sun chariot. Ancient Hindus could not figure out how life came to be, so they created Brahman. These stories are not to be taken literally, rather, they illustrate human thought. When considering the mythology of humans worldwide, we see crazy amounts of similarities. There are amazing continuities between Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish thought. All have the idea of one transcendental truth. All have moral and ethical restraints their people must adhere to. All serve the purpose of making human life eternal. We can look at this one of two ways. The first is that there is a Universal truth that humans have d...

When I was younger, I didn’t know for a fact that time was relative, but understood it intuitively. I would always think about how fast time would move for me when I was sick v.s. sleeping. How in one case an hour could feel like a week and the other an hour could feel like seconds. Then I would wonder about other people and their relative experience of time. Obviously everyone couldn’t experience time in the same way, so I would think about where people would be in time, based on their experiences. If I was in recess while a friend in detention, I would reason that their present moment is different from mine. In these cases it would be pretty obvious to me that they were in a different place in time from me entirely, possibly a few hours behind my time. If someone wasn’t even in the same moment as me, how could I have any chance to interact or connect with them. Think about people who have experienced something like war, with all of its atrocities and horror. Could someone from the c...