"Fire / Radiation / Energy" (painting #12) Krallosveird series

    Ideas are more powerful than lightning bolts in their effect upon the course of human life on Earth.  Notions of divine cosmologies and beliefs in supernatural creators have driven the major civilizations in and out of being.  The transformation of thought into myth contains mechanisms generating the invisibility of the origins and history of each myth thereby protecting them from the process of their undoing.  In other words, it is more than just convenient to profess that there is no such thing as evolution since it is the evolution of the religion itself that is being hidden. Even myths in which there is no deity, but rather a focus on social structure, contain twists and turns making for blurred, if not missing, sources of the first phases of the society.  The belief system may inevitably become a source unto itself.

    Isis may have originally been a large black stone remnant of a meteor that was not completely destroyed entering the atmosphere and landing on Earth.  Over time, the stone goddess was replaced with story and myth of a female deity with powers and attributes of a supernatural human being.  The myth in turn spawned other myths and related stories and tales that also grew to become more real than fantasy.  The process eventually became lost altogether and what remained was whatever story was passed down for the next generations to recall to the next, etc.

   Even the original artifacts associated with the myth became clouded in their origins and purpose related to the official stories.  The black stone of Isis was not included in the newer versions of the myth.  It was relegated to a smaller, lesser shrine where many believers possibly never even heard of or related to it.

As the philosopher, Alan Watts, said in one of his talks;

 

      …”Ideas are very powerful.  It’s not only emotions that are powerful in human life.  Psychoanalysis has, of course, examined the emotional basis of human opinions and beliefs, but one should also examine the intellectual basis of psychological principles, or theories, or therapies.  Because everybody who speaks a language at all has underneath the surface of the language, or the figuring, that he uses certain basic assumptions that are usually unexamined.   And these unexamined systems of belief are extremely powerful in their influence over our lives.”…  - Alan Watts

 

     In large-scale modern belief systems, entire areas of examination, inquiry, scrutiny or investigation are avoided as though there is nothing there to look for.   Like water to the fish, or the little story about someone looking for their lost car keys at night under the light of the street lamp - the reply to a passerby in the night; “Well, I lost my keys back there, but the light is much better over here” – entire populations of people can be ignorant of blind spots within their cultural paradigm.   Entire societies can end up looking in the wrong place for the answers to their problems, and worse, the problems may not even appear to be their own in the first place.

     The phenomenon of belief and positive thinking is not merely a quirk of culture.  There are very basic needs and natural human tendencies at work behind these characteristics.  There are real needs, instincts, and innate qualities involved in systems of belief.  Therefore, finding new ways to view our common dilemma is not an easy task.  Perhaps we can learn from past examples of “truths” later known as less than factual or natural.

     Nature, and what is considered “natural”, has been redefined in modern times.  Society is largely oblivious to the symbiotic relationship it has with the environment.  Wearing clothes and driving cars seems to set human mammals apart from other life forms and people lose touch with the simple connection with natural cycles as part of animal behavior.  Evolution within Earth’s day and night cycles, the turning of the seasons, and connection with the environment and the sun and moon, becomes buried beneath the trappings of modern lifestyles, and our “second nature” seems above and beyond the limits of mere animals.  Modern humans seem to exist as if above the powers and workings of the natural world.  Our ideas of what is normal and natural have evolved to suit new products and ways of life.

During World War II, Doctors prescribed cigarettes for medicinal purposes related to stress.  Smoking was not only considered appropriate, it was considered good for your health. Now, of course, after millions of smoking related deaths, there are lawsuits and anti-smoking campaigns and the facts have changed radically in this matter.

     The Big Bang Theory put forth in the 1940’s was once considered almost a scientific certainty and it was a popular idea that the entire universe was once crushed into a single atom.  Though this idea still finds a popular audience, as does religion related to genesis mythology, it is now known that there is no scientific basis for long distance application of the Doppler Shift related to velocity (the Big Bang postulates that the farther away an object is, the faster it is moving away, like bullets fired from a gun last year moving faster than those fired today), and local microwave radiation is not the noise of a massive explosion, except in leaps of faith.

     It is becoming more and more popular to consider the notion that the light from distant red shifted objects is older the farther away it is and the longer it has traveled through space and the stuff of the universe.

     The facts and notions of one time become the outdated folklore of the future.  The “truth” in human terms is that humankind does not know the answers related to the big questions.  Ideas that there can be ultimate answers sometimes cloud and thwart attempts to improve upon what ideas there are to examine.

     The Grand Unified Theory of The Universe, as another example, is said to be illusive and difficult.  In reality, the attempts to justify, explain and answer this problem seem to me to be directly related to problems with the nature of the formula and question itself.  Assumptions made as to the nature of those elements and forces existing to be considered and related to a Unified Field Theory are in error.  Gravity, a key element and part of the problem to be solved, does not actually exist as an element unto itself, but is rather a product of matter (in my own theoretical work, gravity is produced by K-Matter).

     In short, making assumptions that a question or problem is logical, answers can be totally illusive and impossible.  Belief can cloud opportunity for new creative thinking.