GREENYGREY’S RAMBLES

Hello, it’s Wolfgang von Greenygrey again.  Hopefully, it’s a nice surprise, as you might have been expecting the Grand Council, but we don’t take it in turns here you know.  It is a battle of wills of the most momentous kind.  Anyway, I just popped on to bring you another of Grey’s blogs from Western Australia, and some good news.  It seems as if the grey one has escaped from Latham with the help of the Animals and Eagles, and has got out of the place on a long road.

Here are its first blogs from Latham, West Australia:

Latham is Weird Off the Rails

I made good progress on the way to Latham, but never really felt like I was getting nearer: like some things you just can’t reach. I also passed some signs to Perth on the way. It was a bit of a roundabout way to get to Perth, but Latham did sound rather interesting, as Lassie’d suggested.

Reaching and Walking All Over Latham

I shapeshifted into an emu for the last part of the journey and made good progress after that. I didn’t know I’d arrived when I got there, because the Welcome sign said MAHTAL rather than LATHAM, like there was expected to be some kind of mirror effect or something. I thought it seemed kind of weird, so I quickly changed into a human.

But it seemed really nice when I got inside, with lots of people happily playing sports and doing fun things in forested parks and pristine lakes.

However, then I crossed the tracks and it didn’t seem nice at all, with lots of people surviving in the sewers and slaving in sweat shops; and this not surprisingly led to a rather depressing and hostile atmosphere. I felt more at home on this side of the tracks funnily enough. I think Green would have preferred the other.

Meeting Twentieth Century British People Used as Forced Labour

A ball fell into my path, and I kicked it back to its owners. They asked where I was from, and I said I’d just been sent over from Britain. They said that was funny, because the same had happened to them as child migrants fifty years before.

Moreover, as I hadn’t been allowed contact with Green, they never heard from their families. They had also been used as forced labour, so at least I was a little better off, being free.

They said life had improved now, and bought me lunch in a pub where we continued our chat. It was a nice atmosphere in the pub, and although I only intended to drink a schooner or two, once I had the taste I found it difficult to leave.

I awoke the next day on the edge of town.

The Wisdom of Ants is Pants when Hungover

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while, but things have gone all weird in Latham, and I seem to have lost track of space and time, as well as self.  I was going to get up after my day on the ale in Latham, but then I felt groggy and my head hurt so I lay back down. Then I heard something saying: ‘You think you’re big you do, don’t you.’I looked up and could see nothing around. I thought I must be hearing voices in my confused state.But then I heard it again: ‘You think you’re big you do, don’t you.’ And this time it was followed by: ‘Oi, you big bundle of grey fluff, you think you’re big don’t you, you can’t even see me down here.’ So I looked down and saw an ant, carrying a massive weight on its back, and working hard farming aphids. I felt quite guilty, sleeping off a hangover, while that wee chap was working so hard. Then it said: ‘Well, when you get a chance, read Marc Latham’s ant theory article on Existential, because it might make you look on ants, humanity, life, the universe and the Great Scheme of Things in a completely different way…or maybe a little anyway, and you might even notice how similar us ants are to you werewolves.’ I was just about to respond, but it had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. I went back to sleep, and dreamt of antstronauts exploring the universe. 

Hello, it’s Wolfgang von Greenygrey here.  I was feeling down recently, with things not going well in the Greenygrey world, but then I read Marc Latham’s ant theory article on Existential, and it gave me renewed hope that the Grand Council can be controlled, because it made me believe that they may not be the architects of reality after all.

There was a blog about the meditating and yogaing Yogi on BNT, and I added this comment:

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I saw that story and also came across a couple of related quotes/thoughts this week.

Firstly, on his new Discovery series looking at the universe, Stephen Hawking said that alien life forms might be beyond our comprehension and understanding, such as learning to live on things unknown on this planet, like the yogi might be doing.

Then I had a webzine newsletter with the following JFK quote:

‘The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.’

We know a lot more than our ancestors, but our descendents will know much more…

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So although Paper is the Planet’s Gold may seem a strange slogan at first, these are strange days…

I just updated some of my Brave New Traveler articles with comments containing relevant recent news stories:

Ant Theory of Humanity

Just came across Indra’s Net, which is a buddhist idea similar to the one in this article, and of course precedes it by quite some time!:

http://www.heartspace.org/misc/IndraNet.html

First alerted to it in an article on metaphor by Bridget Holding in Writing Magazine, April 2010.

 God and Natural Disasters

An Iranian cleric has recently blamed promiscuous women for earthquakes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8631775.stm

 Space Exploration Compared with History

NASA is celebrating the twenieth anniversary of Hubble this week:

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/Hubble20/

Although this website generally promotes an agnostic pantheist pagan ideology, it respects people’s rights to worship what they want as long as they don’t try and force it on others or use it to harm other life.

If people want to believe in monotheistic religions, and heaven and hells, then that is up to them.  I wish I could in many ways.

Paganism and Christianity in the UK

On the question of religion in UK history, I think Christianity was good in some ways, such as getting rid of the use of sacrifice; but it also did a lot of bad, such as the witch-burnings.

Christianity is mostly benign now, giving comfort and tradition to believers, but can still be used for bad; such as when those in respectable positions abuse the trust put in them, and destroy the lives of those they are supposed to be leading.

Religion in the UK and on Television Today

I think New Age Paganism offers more in this day and age: where we are at in terms of astronomy; science; human and animal rights; and the environment.  But I wouldn’t want to force that opinion on anybody.  People can stop reading the blog, or just disagree if they wish.

There was a debate about whether paganism is more relevant than Christianity on the BBC’s Big Questions programme last Sunday, and it’s viewable on BBC iplayer until 10.59 next Sunday (February 7th).

Channel Four also has a series about the history of the bible on at the moment, for those who wish to become more informed about the Middle-East and why the holy land is still at war thousands of years after the monotheistic religions that dominate our world started. 

The last episode was about Abraham, the father of all three great (?) monotheistic religions, and the arguments that still divide the world all started with him too!

Ant theory has been a part of this blog almost since its conception.  It made its debut under the title Anybody for Ant Theory (dated November 26, 2008) over ten years after its inspiration.  Ten years of being on my mind.  It shared that blog with two other topics.  If you search ant theory on this blog there are fourteen other results before this one.

Ant Theory Published

I am therefore delighted to say that Ant Theory has found a home outside this blog, and that Brave New Traveler has published an article covering the essential components of the theory: which is basically my theory of humanity’s current position in the great scheme of things, using ants on Planet Earth as a comparison.

Ant Theory: What Now?

Motivation for Ant Theory.  I didn’t really have any motivations for Ant Theory when it first emerged into my conscious mind.  It was just my thoughts on  humanity’s place in the great scheme of things; a way to try and imagine our place in the great scheme of things and find out more.  To test my own and humanity’s knowledge of the universe.

I feel that it has worked in this way: there is obviously loads more that both I and humanity can learn about the universe, and our place in the great scheme of things.

I will hopefully learn more from any comments and feedback pertaining to the article, or other relevant articles to emerge on BNT.  Christine Garvin has a very interesting article about how travel inspires abstract thought accessible from a link at the start of my article, and there are other links to articles and videos relevant to the philosophical questions discussed in my article.

How may it contribute to humanity and the planet?  Having taken the theory to its current limits thanks to BNT publishing it, I have to ask myself what is its use, and how could it help humanity and the world.

Like most ideas, theories and philosophies through time it can probably be received and used positively or negatively. 

It was meant positively, and if it has any effect I hope it will make humanity realise that it is not all knowing and powerful in the universe at the moment, and that all the religious bickering and wars fighting over the ‘truth’ of our existence that have dominated the planet since the dawn of civilisation are in the end petty and futile. 

I think they are as futile in the great scheme of things as two colonies of ants fighting each other on our planet.

The original ant encounter and photo that inspired Ant Theory:

I’ve been a bit bored of my fellow werewolf celebrities this week, so I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking … and you know what primarily filled my mind, my ant theory of course.  You can follow the links back to all ant theory blogs, but to recap it compares humanity’s physical expansion and knowledge limitation in the mammal world to ants in the insect.  And the old light bulb in my noggin just clicked on another exciting thought and analogy, so I just had to report it to you.

The Limits of Human Knowledge Compared to the Limits of the Physical

Thinking back to the Horizon programme about Black Holes, and how there is a gap in human understanding of the universe known as the point of singularity made me think of the 100m sprint race and how the world record is always getting broken but nobody expects somebody to ever do it without any time: in zero seconds.

As nobody expects somebody to do 100m in zero seconds, maybe we shouldn’t expect anybody to work out everything about the universe: because working out the point of singularity is the mental equivalent to running the 100m in zero time.

Celebrity Werewolf Thoughts: Recognising Our Mental Limitations

While we (humanity as a whole) seem to be happy recognising our physical limitations, we also appear just as reluctant to admit our mental ones.

Maybe our brains just aren’t capable of working out the system of the universe, as our bodies aren’t capable of moving us 100m in zero seconds.

Celebrity Werewolf Thoughts: Keep Chipping Away at the Stone

Of course, just because nobody is likely to do 100m in zero seconds during our lifetimes doesn’t mean we should just stop running and competing. 

And the same goes for our mental quest to work out the meaning of the universe; just because we in our lifetimes may never know the point of singularity doesn’t mean scientists and astronomers should stop searching for more knowledge.

Maybe we should just lower our expectations, and appreciate what we have and know.

On Tuesday night the BBC’s Horizon provided the latest research on Black Holes, and how they are thought to provide possible answers to the start of the universe.  This blog discusses what we can extrapolate from this programme.

Einstein’s Work Questioned

The programme showed how Black Hole researchers think that the discovery of Black Holes in space call into question Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has been the accepted theory for a century.

At the moment there is a void within Black Holes knowledge that scientists cannot work out; although they have been theorised about for a long time, evidence of them is still very recent. 

Theory breaks down somewhere between Einstein’s theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics used to study atoms: this place beyond current human knowledge is known as singularity (thoughts turn to Folding Mirrors!)

Socrates Still Top Dog Philosopher

2500 years after Socrates declared that the wisest are those who admit they know very little the programme ended with the admission that people don’t know what’s out there, they may give you an answer but they’d probably be wrong.

This admission showed wisdom and courage.  For scientists to admit they don’t know, and to have overturned the accepted knowledge to study something so elusive and miniscule in the big scheme of things is brilliant.

Does God Live in Black Holes?

Of course, scientists admitting they don’t know everything about time and space leaves the door open for God.  Maybe the monotheistic God is living beyond our knowledge in Black Holes?  But no religious documents mention Black Holes as far as I know.

As Galileo provided the correct Earth/Sun relationship, it is scientists and astronomers rather than the dominant monotheist religions that are informing us about our universe.

In five or fifty years we will probably know more about Black Holes and our universe, and the dominant monotheistic religions will again have to adopt their thinking to the evolution of science.

Whos_Afraid_of_a_Big_Black_Hole/ is available to watch until November 28, 2009.

The site is now 1 year old.  The greenygrey wishes you all a happy anniversary!!  It asked me to let you know if it was still in hibernation; as it is.

Following yesterday’s blog, I was thinking about eternal life and the environment; would it be good or bad for the planet.

I think the logical conclusion would be that there might be more people, but if there was better life security the global population explosion might stabilise.

Moreover, people might look after the world better if they thought they were going to be here forever with it.

(this is more ironical than philosophical by the way)

I’m sorry for going on about my sunburn, but I’ve realised over the weekend that if there is a Sun God it was my fault I got sunburnt. (This was previously discussed in a blog that is now available at wwww.greenygrey.co.uk/blog)

I had wanted a sunny weekend, and it delivered, and because I doubted it, I stayed out in it too long and got sunburnt.

So if there is a Sun God, it was my lack of faith in it that brought the sunburn on myself…and therefore I deserved the pain.

Kind of like the Flight of Icarus, without the flying!

More on Genius

Yes, sorry, to be stuck on the same topics as last week, and will get off them soon.

It’s just that I was a closet genius for a long time, and now that I’m able to talk about it, I just don’t want to stop!

It’s just that this morning I remembered that Thomas Edison said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Well with me, in the early days I would say that it was about 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration. But I have been working hard recently, so I’d say it is about 50-50 now.

Think that’s enough on sunburn and genius now…