Center of the Universe: Carrying further the “center of the universe” idea I sent to Robert N. Bellah, author of “Religion in Human Evolution”. All sensations of the vibrations of parts of that sphere reach me simultaneously. Sounds and light from the house next door and the microwave echo of the Big Bang – all photons, pressure of electron clouds (in air vibrations, aromatic chemicals, and pressure of “other” objects, e.g. molecules or atoms) occur “here” – “right now”. I can “imagine” (perhaps even mathematically) what it might or even must be like in a different space-time; but, try as I might, I can’t get out of the center of my sensual universe. I know now way other than “imagination”; imaging, images. Images are not “reality”.
Far too many vibrations stimulate my senses than I can attend to, so I filter and filter and filter out everything but the ........ “truth”?. Now wouldn’t that be something, some fantastic accomplishment. Perhaps I can filter so much that only say, a quark-gluon plasma remains “unexplained” or perhaps it's the only the summum bonum.
Perhaps the filters remove the truth, placing the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” beyond our grasp. Anyway, I’ve got this whole implosion of the universe’s sensations to help me figure it out. Which ones do I let pass into my thoughts? An implosion that never ends; a reverse horn of cornucopia. No other implosion is like it; no other “mind” has had access to what mine has, nor has mine had access to what any other mind has “sensed”.
So how can anyone ever agree or even communicate with me about any “actual” thing? because we all “see” each thing differently. We CAN agree about abstract “classes” of things, but these aren’t “real” of course. Or are they Plato? Is “thought” “real”? How about math? Perhaps with sufficient sensory implosions and sufficient mathematical filters, one could tell me when the next leaf will fall for a tree, thought that is, for now at least, and perhaps always, beyond human ken and mathematics; let alone for another to tell my next thought; that is even beyond me.
ISTMRN that many, most people agree that math accurately describes “reality”. I find more consensus on that than anything else – Newtonian physics, at least in America, not far behind. But there is much knowledge of “experts” that remains in the inner sanctums of modern universities and military laboratories (often closely linked at the hip). Somehow, sometime (definitely prodded by the Enlightenment) such authority merged with “morality” and out came “universal human values”.
Beyond morality are obvious, self-evident values if not God-given values including democracy, human rights, (especially today, i.e. women’s rights, how can “rights” of a subgroup be “universal”?), freedom, liberty, etc. All may be only euphemisms for personal safety and security as well as “ordered” civilized society.
Another value, “opportunity” for development of “full human potential” both personal and social (whatever the hell those might be, i.e what is full potential for anything?).
Gender Neutral Pronoun: It seems a great world need is for a gender neutral pronoun for a human being of indeterminate gender or God. How many times have you seen or written “he/she” or “she/he” or “he or she” or “she or he”? All these constructions are very awkward and very contrived from inadequate words. Perhaps we could combine the two as “shehe” or “heshe”.
You see the problem, which sex gets to be first? Plus “he” and “she” do not contain the neutrality we are after; neutrality adequately expressed by the pronoun “it”. But “it” is for things not people. Now “she”, of course, already includes “he” as its last two letters. So if we were to use an “s” for “she” and an “h” for “he” (recognizing that “she” contains “he” so the “sh” order is OK), plus the “h” gets double recognition, once for the each of the “h”'s in “she” and “he”, compensating for a secondary listing, quite fair it seems to me.
So we have for the gender neutral human pronoun one that contains the gender fair “sh” and one that expresses the gender neutral “it”: “shit”.
|
|