I just finished trying to teach a course called "Ethics in the Information Age," which was the first time I ever went at ethics by attempting to describe an age and the particular problems it makes for everybody. I came away thinking that the increase in generally available information and in free-floating power in the last maybe 20 years repeats what happened in the late 19th Century/early 20th Century, first to an educated class accustomed to leadership and then more generally to all sorts of people. I think of the great names: the Wright Brothers, Brigham Young, Edison, Pasteur. If anything, change was moving much faster then: it is a much bigger deal to fly for the first time than to fly to the moon, to cure the first major disease than to cure cancer, to communicate at all over vast distances than to communicate voice, video, massive data streams.
We have in the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th models for what folks in intoxicated periods do right and wrong. I think that that history is shadowing us in all sorts of ways, that it has become essential in our curriculum.
Posted by shea0017 at May 5, 2004 9:45 AMEverything is merely a repetition of the past. Physically and mentally. People are only born to live out their lives the same way in different forms. Idea wave lines are constantly undulating through a sempiternal, unchanging stream. These streams will circulate steadily through the mind, supplying us with actions and feelings. Blindly, everyone follows the road that wave lines pave, without ever knowing they've stepped foot onto it. This is just one way the mind will conspire against us. Our subconscious makes us forget an ample amount of everything that is done in the duration of a day. This is the second way the human mind works to conspire against us. The subconscious mind will completely erase a multitude of ideas and actions you have undergone each night causing us to repeat ourselves again and again the following day without any recollection of doing so. Without recorded documentation a person’s state of awareness will never realize how repetitious day-to-day thoughts are.. People should feel so enslaved by these idea wave lines that cause our subliminal self to act and feel according to its placement at that current time, but in reality most people are oblivious to the fact our minds are even being governed by an unperceived control! It is inevitable. Repetition is inevitable. Controlling the subliminal self is inevitable. I thought I'd changed myself and deviated from the inevitable fate of life, but after recording my day to day thoughts and feelings, I have realized I’ve only thought I’d deviated, and in actuality have been thinking not new thoughts at all, just reproductions of thoughts previously felt.
Even in nature, the place I used to find total solitude, I’ve found a well camouflaged governed force. Phi helps explain my theory. A tree will always form branches, a river will always bend, a snail will always have curves in its shell. This shows that even something as free as nature is abiding by an impalpable, repetitious force (a wave line).
When trying to disprove my theory, I also thought.. “How can I possibly think our minds, and nature are under governed control from the same thought wave line?”… “We are all so different....” A tree doesn’t form the same branches as any other tree, two rivers will never bend in the same way, and two minds will never think completely a like. This is true, but, when I say “we are all the same, just in different forms” this doesn’t mean we are all the same person, it merely means people are all the same once stripped from all forms of consciousness. It is in this subconscious state of mind that we are not our individual selves, were all the same here in this self-subliminal state. This is where the thought wave line will take the mind as its possession, and begin controlling our memory, our actions, and our thoughts. Repeat.