Freedom!

I was looking at the stars the other night, thinking of how awesome it would be to have my own Star ship. Of course the goal would be to find strange new worlds. But then the thought came to me: Even if I could travel much faster than light, would I find those "m-class" planets? Or is space just too vast that all probability says I would never find one?
The information age is well upon us, and we are flooded in an absolute deluge of information. Its pretty much impossible to sort it all out. That's the funny thing, with all this info, I don't fell like anybody is getting any smarter, know what I mean? The great realization of this time may not stem from the floods of information available to us, but from the fact that there is no way in hell anybody can possibly take it all in.
Its this fundamental fact, the realization of ignorance, that most defines this time. It may be that the greatest expression of human intelligence is not in knowing a lot, but in knowing exactly what you don't know, as well as what you don't know you don't know, (to quote Rummy) and bringing it into our calculations.
For most people though, its a hard step. The comfort of the world we thought we knew falls away, and we are left with a world where "reality" is nothing but an approximation, a story. This can lead to its own disease of thought, one where we don't think reality exists at all. The "nothing is true" mentality. But the very statement "nothing is true" shows this cannot be the case, for if nothing is indeed ultimately true, then the statement "nothing is true" cannot be true either, so something must be true. This reasoning doesn't, however, tell us what that true something is...So what we are left with is an ultimate Reality we only know by implication. I call it "The Implicate Order" (no relation to Bohm's work) because I like the sci-fi poetics of it. Throughout history though, people have called it "God". The point is, its real, its out there, but its nature is always ultimately mysterious to us. Its the truth about God, The Universe, and everything, and its simply to large to fit in our little mortal brains.
So what are we left with? The functioning of our tiny mortal brains, the point of this blog. (before it also became my safe place for drunken babbling) Mortal brains function like life, they are bold. They don't understand the game well enough to know what will win, but they play anyway. They pick a strategy, a story or narrative, and they go with it. They move forward. And they call that story 'reality', used as a substitute for the thing they cannot see, God, the implicate order. That chosen reality is experienced as real, but its actually the lens through which we experience our fragment of the Implicate Order. Physical evolution is similar: a base strategy (do what worked before) dictates the shape of life forms, then they combine a couple forms through sex and try some new form. They have absolutely no idea, no reasoning as to why a form might work, they just throw something out, and its judged by the implicate order. The successes are passed on through rule 1. Our minds work basically the same way.
But this leads us to a startling conclusion: 100% of people are technically lying all the time. Not the rational "nothing is true" type of lie I talked about above, but the kind of lie that is told when one drunk mentally disabled man tries to explain the theory of relativity he heard about to the other: No deception is intended, but he simply doesn't have the capacity to relate the actual thing. He gives it his best, but it will always fall short. So its all lies anyway, right? Nothing is true? No. Though this is a place where natural language falls a little short in expressing what I am saying, it remains that the implicate order is True. Whatever stories are told, they will be judged for their utility within the context of the implicate order. So life, that of living things and of stories told, is the process of making offerings to the implicate order, and discovering what things might be acceptable in it's sight.
To see what it has found acceptable, one need only consider that the live of thoughts is an extension of the story of the life of forms, and take a walk in some pristine nature. This is the product of the implicate order over billions of years, this is what's pleasing in its sight.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the structure of the web
 -Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, 167 CE

So that's what works, that's what succeeds. Those little flowers in the field. Why? We really don't know, but their existence is the product of passing many tests of time. The words of Marcus Aurelius are the same, I'm writing them almost 2000 years after the fact. Why? Because they have that quality we call true, the resonate with the implicate order, the real Truth of which we cannot understand. 

But the key with both, is that they exist... Which tells us that at some point in time, something, and somebody was given enough freedom to express itself in a new form, to play with new ideas and stories, to roll the dice in the ancient game of making offering to the Implicate Order. It is from that freedom from which all things were ultimately born, and it is that freedom to express in new way which ultimately gives rise to our collective destiny.