My Renewed Mission in Life

I used to think I was special. Of course I am - everyone is by the way, nobody is exactly the same - but for a long time I seriously thought I was one of a kind. Looking back, this was a result of my childhood environment more than anything else. Scandinavia, and my cherished motherland in particular, seem to have a keen and effective ambition to quench any desire to separate yourself from the mainstream collective. Thus it wasn’t until I significantly and wholeheartedly expanded my own personal world that I found other people with a more genuine similarity to myself. More so as I simultaneously expanded my mind, I found that my tribe had more members than I ever thought. Thankfully though, we are still fairly hard to come by. Reading in On the Origin of Species how Charles Darwin would wander the gardens of familiar castles and draw conclusions about evolution based on everyday observations and comparing them to his experiences on travels around the world, instantly reminded me of my own description of this natural curiosity that drives everything I do, (see ‘Just a Rock’). Finally, here is a person who thinks like me! Sad that he has been dead for decades. Watching Cosmos on Nat Geo about a year later, brilliantly educated me about how these amazing individuals looked at the world with this intuitive curiosity and questioned how things work. From Newton with his apples to Cecilia Payne who deciphered the composition of stars by looking at the light they emitted. I realized that they, like Darwin, were also likeminded people who managed to transcend the dogmas and convictions of their respective paradigms and reach new enlightened levels. And not only that, they also managed to pave the way for the rest of the world to join them and thus reach a higher level of enlightenment. Despite obstinate resistance from their peers, they stood their ground and eventually effected real and everlasting change.

Recently a documentary in the series Ancient Aliens on History Channel made a great comment about this type of people. Calling them prophets, they stated that these people have appeared throughout history, spawning new fantastic thoughts that helped carry our species further up the evolutionary ladder, step by step to where we are today. Their theory was that they might have had help from extraterrestrials feeding them information previously unavailable to humans. I wouldn’t go that far, but it seems clear to me that these prophets definitely had some special skill to quiet their minds, take an objective look at the world around them and driven by a natural curiosity make fundamental discoveries that revolutionized their respective worlds. Ancient Aliens used Einstein as their prime modern example and rightly so. Here is a man who has completely changed the field of physics and thus also our entire world view. And according to the documentary, Einstein’s famous relativity theory was spawned in a misty German street where he observed how the light of a street lamp was being blocked by the mist surrounding it, and thus he realized that light travels at a certain speed which in turn led him to discover and share relativity with the world, which in turn have jetted Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku and other great contemporary thinkers in exciting new directions. But just like Darwin, Newton and Payne, Einstein came to these groundbreaking discoveries through everyday observations driven by his natural curiosity and with the help of these he changed the world and brought humans a step forward in our evolution. The more I think about these people and what they did for the species, the more I believe that these thoughts are what’s really important and where my focus should actually lie. I mean, furthering human evolution, changing the way people see the world, educating about truth, how the universe works, and on the way perhaps discovering new “truths” that encourage other people to look in other directions and further evolve the human psyche, can there be any cause more important than that. I don’t believe so. We have to keep evolving, otherwise we will certainly perish over time. Sure, our modern world needs a lot of quick fixing, but thankfully there are numerous people willing to dedicate themselves to these causes. I think my talents are better spent here, writing this stuff in whatever form it eventually ends up in. In other words, I have found a new mission. Maybe these thinkers didn’t have aliens whispering in their ears, rather they had their intuition and the ability to listen to it, see the signs the universe threw at them and follow it. So in a sense they were being guided, but not by aliens, by the universe, gently pushing them down their personal legend and the road taken leading us all forward in the process. Prophets indeed, yet I call them by another name as I will eventually get to.

These long dead legends as well as their contemporary heirs, feel more like kindred spirits more so than any person I met for a long time. Thankfully I meet more and more and each of these fellow thinkers who have managed to look beyond social stigmas, religious doctrines and general human dictation, absorb my ideas and help them grow larger, and for that I am truly thankful. In many ways they are my audience, but hopefully I can also reach other groups and give them tools to look at the world in the same way. The hope is to eventually find an outlet that will enable anyone trapped in the noise of the mistuned rhythms of society, religion and tradition a chance to drown out the sound pollution and listen and feel the universal clockwork slowly ticking away.

The Universal Clockwork and Patterns of Recognition

Since realizing my deterministic worldview, I have become infinitely more adept at noticing patterns. This is where these thoughts are now flowing from. What I have previously referred to as a network of legends, is this infinite series of random events governing and driving everything. A form of universal clockwork ticking away, driving everything forward with it. And once you come to this realization it becomes increasingly easier to see the aforementioned patterns. You can suddenly see parallels between animals and humans. Why? Because we are all slaves of the universe. We are all governed, ruled if you will, by the same laws of nature. Gravity, evolution, time, space, these forces affect all beings, objects and nothingness in similar fashion, connecting us all in the same gigantic framework, egging us on down the road taken. Both as individuals, as a given species, as a being, but also as part of this big machine, entity or just empty canvas, known as the universe. As with everything else it is all about scale. Once you start grasping this you can actually see everything in a clearer light. More and more I am starting to drift away from my compatibilistic determinism and maybe realizing that things aren’t really that random but rather part of this mechanical framework. Maybe free will is indeed an illusion but one that we are so immersed in that it will never feel fake even if we start to realize something is up. In this sense a compatibilistic approach might still work, at least on the conscious level, the human level. Like any philosophical discussion, the human intellect can only sniff at any kind of solution anyway. Without transcending our meat prisons, we can only guess at these things, but guessing might just be more than enough over the course of one lifetime. True transcendence would require several. (One day!) The Buddhists have got this covered through the concept of reincarnation. Only through maintaining your consciousness over the course of several lifetimes can you achieve true enlightenment. Hopefully, one day science will help us live longer or even forever with the help of cyborg bodies or cloning, then the human intellect could really go places. Right now, it can only go so far as one generation allows and is thus mired by the current level of evolution that it inhabits as I will now demonstrate.

Patterns not only exist between all living organisms in the universal clockwork but also have a way of repeating themselves across history. This may sound like a broken record; ‘history repeats itself, d’uh’, but understanding the underlying cause for why this is, is not that simple. The reason is, that humans 5000 years ago were EXACTLY the same as humans today. This may sound unlikely, but think about it. When you strip away the shifts in paradigms, religions, science, languages etc. and focus on the bare human psyche, it’s exactly the same. Thought processes and learning was the same then and now. This realization came to me in stages but I remember two specific incidents in particular. One was in my apartment in Copenhagen looking out my window at a beautiful autumn dusk sky and sniffing the cool fresh air. Suddenly, with a speed seemingly matching quantum physics, my mind transported me to the morning of the Battle of Waterloo. (I love my brain on shuffle! I mean where can’t you go? Everywhere is accessible via the mind.) Soldiers who fought in that battle took similar breaths and had similar views. They too might have appreciated the freshness of the Belgian air and beauty of a colorful sunrise and dawn sky. Perhaps to an infinitely higher degree because they knew they might never see or smell another morning again. This realization continued into an appreciation of death as experienced by dying or dead people, something for a future entry. Important for this one is that people experience the world around them similarly. What mental filter you choose to lay over and shape that experience is of course subjective (see “Just a Rock”) but the fact remains that perception has the same criteria across time periods. A sunset might have held different meanings to the ancient Egyptians being how they were sun worshippers, yet how their senses experienced it has not changed one bit. Thus one can conclude that all that’s changed since then is the paradigm in which humans exist but not the humans themselves. Staying with the ancient Egyptians leads me to the second incident towards this realization. Years later I was strolling around Kuala Lumpur at night and entered a new and contemporary looking shopping mall and walking through the doors for an instant blew my mind. I was completely unprepared for the sheer scope of this particular mall, it was huge! The foyer was designed in such a clever way that all the levels and inside mechanics of glass elevators and escalators was revealed in one awe inspiring moment upon entering. The awe I experienced then instantly transported me back to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Here I remembered taking a knee in front of a massive statue of an ancient pharaoh simply because the sheer scope of the statue seemed to dictate it. Coming from a tiny country I have a natural affinity for large things, be it buildings, statues or natural wonders. Although this might make me easy to impress, I also knew the people who designed that shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur had my reaction in mind in their design. Similarly, the Egyptian pharaohs intended their subjects to feel inclined to subject themselves to the blunt magnificence of their statues and monuments and this is where the realization from looking out my window in my apartment took final shape. Not only do people sense and perceive things equally across time, they also act accordingly. What made sense to ancient sun worshippers, still makes sense to contemporary architects. Seeing the pattern? The humans behind these projects are essentially the same, just inserted in different time periods, paradigms and languages. The intention is the same but no longer aimed at mausoleums honoring ancestors as gods but rather as a tribute to consumerism, a monument to the prevailing current leading civilization’s trademark feature. Shopping malls in many ways are monuments to consumerism and might in a distant future be photographed by evolved humans the same way we take pictures of the Pyramids. The pointe should stand clear now, times change, humans don’t. What humans can then achieve is highly dependent on the time period which they inhabit. In that sense our generation is at the peak of evolution with technology and knowledge available to us that the ancient Egyptians could never have thought of, let alone dreamed of. The idea is that each generation further builds and enhances these criteria so that the next generation can take our species even further. In many ways I believe this should really be the goal of a human lifetime. It has certainly become mine, as I will describe in the following post.

I'm Back, Baby!

Hello blog. Did you think I had forgotten about you? Never. Although it has been two years since my last post, that does not mean that my brain has been in suspended animation, it has been as active as ever, and now has numerous of epiphanies to share with the world or at least whoever is interested. The past two years since I last posted in Alice Springs have been very tumultuous. I finally made it out of Australia and through a lot of wonderful coincidences my road taken has now led me to Malaysian Borneo where I have made a base for the immediate future. This stability has given my many thoughts time to settle and the time has come once again to put them into words. In fact, many of the coming posts were written down while on location as part of my new life in documentary production which I have found to be very stimulating for my creativity and to give form to my thoughts.

Looking back from Alice Springs to now, in the time in-between I have found myself in a geographical limbo always trying to move forward to a place that I did not yet know where was. A lot of this time was spent in my home country of Denmark which gave me invaluable time to put things into perspective and realize exactly what kind of environment I needed to settle in. Although trying at times, and with lots of quiet nights filled with doubts for the future, I just went with the road taken, put my faith in the universe and eventually it led me here. On the way, I have found others who share similar points of views, I have visited new amazing locations and thus further expanded my personal world, but most importantly, I have learned that my thoughts are nothing new to humanity. In fact, it even has a name. It is called determinism and has been around for a long time. Determinism is a generic term for a whole collection of philosophical perspectives, but they all relate to causality and how one event inevitably leads to another. The overall divide within determinism is the existence or lack of, a free will. Some determinists say that everything happens in conjunction with previous events and can thus be predicted as the next link in a chain of events, i.e. there is no free will, while others believe in a more compatibilistic approach where you do have power to affect the future through your choices in the present. Upon first reading about determinism, I placed myself in the compatibilistic section, yet over time as I will demonstrate, that might have changed. In some form or other, determinism encompasses most of the terms that I have so far arrived at, i.e. personal worlds, the road taken and the network of legends. I do like to think though, that my particular brand of determinism is special, and the first couple of posts in this renaissance will address exactly how my brand of determinism functions, introducing a few new terms to help better illustrate my points of view. Meeting like-minded people and realizing that others in the past have had similar thoughts has not only helped me put my thoughts in to order, it has given me a sense of belonging that I have long been lacking. Generally I feel I have recently entered a new phase of my life, one that gives me lots of hope for the future and further intellectual and personal development. Fitting that I will also age-wise soon be entering a new decade. So here’s to a new beginning and a higher sense of clarity. Please enjoy my posts, I have many to come, and feel free to share your thoughts with me, online or in person. I am always up for a late night drunken discussion!