An introduction

I suppose this is a rant a long time coming. There was a time in my life when I was so far gone that I can’t even imagine where I would be now if I hadn’t changed. The thing I can’t really place is what initiated the change?  

The shift I am talking about is my current secular mindset. I am fully aware of the craziest things I used to think. The ideas I harbored about myself and the world. They were off the beaten path. They were out of the norm. What they definitely weren’t though is any more insane than a group of politically motivated idiots that thinks the world is 6,000 years old or less. They simply have better representation. 

If I were to make a confession about the things I used to believe, I could think of a time when I didn’t question it. I suppose this was the impetus for my own personal change. The time I began to question things that seemed self-evident. If anything started me on this path, it was my desire to read over anything else. Conflicting ideas are a great battlefield for complacent acceptance to die.  

I can remember being a questioning child. But, like all children, I can also remember the security of trusting authority. I was, at times, also known to be a stubborn and impudent child. I think the latter has hindered me in my teenage years, but served me in my adult years. Equally true is my trust in authority. I would think this is true for all people. The only change would be what we consider authority.  

Authority, for me, used to be anyone older than myself. From there, it was anyone who put enough effort into writing a book. Thereafter, it was anyone who could demonstrate a sort of competency of facts. This final point is where my world actually collapsed. I suppose it is a small thank you to dedicate my current placement in the world to a single person. I met Robi Sen through a network of what I would now consider the clinically insane. It was a stroke of luck that he was the one that contacted me.  

Robi and I practiced martial arts together for a little more than two years. Originally I respected him for his command of the martial arts he taught me. In time though, I came to respect him for his mental acuity, and his ability to dissect situations into components that functioned within the real world. He mentioned two things that have stuck with me to this day. The first, “We do the things that are most difficult for us, so when something difficult arrives, it is not such a big deal. The second, “Question everything everyone tells you. Even what I say.” It was this last bit that caught me off guard the most.  

Robi moved away to continue the natural arc of his life. A year after that, he came back for a time. I had taken everything he had said to heart. I had learned a lot. And, more importantly, I had continued to read. This time though I wasn’t reading fiction, I wasn’t reading half-baked ideas of some idiot claiming to understand the secrets of life, I was reading physics. I was learning math. I was reading philosophy. I came to understand the importance of history. Robi had provided some of the books, but the others I sought out on my own. When I talked to Robi that time, my final bit of misunderstanding broke.  

We discussed energy, and its importance in martial arts. I had never really comprehended what he was getting at when we’d started training, but I knew now. I had, through all of this, held a special place for something extraordinary outside of what could be. I had set aside a place where gnomes could hide, or energy fields, or a teapot in space. Robi told me everything that occurs, whether you could measure it or not was physics. Everything we observe obeys the laws of the universe. It is our misunderstanding of the situation that is imperfect.  

As I’ve progressed through my education, I have found this to be true. Science has opened up true wonder to my eye. The amount of innovation it takes to trick out the secrets of a parabolic arc gone awry is simply astounding. When I began looking at why people are what they are, I wanted to know their potential. I think I understand that now. Our most important legacy has been the expansion of knowledge over generations. This is something that has built into a torrent. What is even more interesting is that when you reach a new cusp, you are still staring into a vast wasteland of what we don’t know. This is surely the sentiment that Karl Popper was getting at when he said, “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must remain ignorant.” Our potential and limitations lie within this statement. Our path can only be one of science, because it is the only system we have to truly understand what functions within the world we live in. It is the only system that checks itself, and much like math, it is only limited by the people that engage in the process of solution.