The Consuming Faith

I have at my command, the power of faith

But I must be a student of that power, so that it does not consume me

As a fire consumes fuel

My evidence is experience, and with that I build trust.

And should that trust be tested and remain valid for me

I will place my belief into the soundness of that trust.

In time, if that belief proves also reliable, I will indulge my tendencies

To predict

And with doing that, place my precious hope into the cradle

Of my certainty.

And in that certainty remain faithful

for the sake of honoring my freedom to choose

respecting all the while

faith can burn like fire

for left unattended my faith can also consume me

by inattention to what is actual

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

But after observation and analysis

When you find that anything agrees with reason

And is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all

Then accept it and live up to it.

Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.

The Sacred Point of View

  The story goes that a kindergarten pupil told his teach that he had found a cat, but it was dead.

   “How do you know the cat was dead?” she asked her pupil.

   “Because I pissed in its ear and it didn’t move,” the child replied.

   “You did WHAT?!” the teacher exclaimed in alarm.

   “You know,” explained the boy, “I leaned over and went “Psst!” and it didn’t move.”

 The above amusing dialog is but a precious demonstration of innocence colliding with a point of view expectation.  The joke reminds me over again how easily I can be seduced to embrace the worst of situations; more succinctly, to agree that others are motivated by despicable attributes.  All of that to say I practice assigning others intent.  As sorry as I am to report this on a public forum my possessing such foibles, forever sinking any fledgling hope of being informed I had won an election to a great and powerful position, I remain unabashedly naked in the light of truth.  I jump to conclusions; to the degree I climb into people’s skulls and believe…yes believe I know what they are thinking, feeling, and planning; just like the teacher had with her young protégé.   

Let me also add these are not the mistakes of adolescence, but continue to persist into my elder years; such as they are.  I’ve lost count of how many arguments I’ve been embroiled in based upon perception of what I felt others meant.  In every instance I engaged in emotionally laden combat rather than speak in kinder tones requesting clarification. Time and again in the aftermath, should peace be resorted, and where revisiting what each meant could be discussed without eogic ownership of the sacred position of rightness, it would be revealed once again by a shared, surprised exclamation of

“Oh, I thought you meant…”

    Mistaken assumptions compounded by accusation and insult.  But never mind all of that in its glorious generality, because I’m amused by the continued practice of a quality afterwards that I never get tired of being part of; forgiveness.

   “What doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger” said Fredrick Nietzsche.  In affairs of the heart, that can be doubly applied.  Oh, and isn’t it a really great opportunity to learn to laugh at our imperfections? It’s as if they were always there.  Funny that.

Cat Powered Space Flight

 

Hershey is a dear soul, if you were to embrace that creatures besides human beings possess souls. To avoid lurking nit-pick readers out there disclaiming my discussion even before it leaves the launch pad, let me rephrase my homily to, Hershey has a pleasant disposition; then, all of that in order to add my addendum; until she has to travel in a cat carrier to the vet. On such occasions we are gifted with the joy of hearing her protest the entire trip there and back; to the tune of 96 per leg of the trip, and yes I counted. So I checked the mileage and found the Vet clinic is 3.51 miles from our house, or 7.02 miles round trip. Divided by 192 meows, that comes to 27.35 meows a mile. It was noted that no amount of assurances dissuaded poor little Hershey from that tempo. She was upset with our taking control, and her auto-pilot-mewer was letting us know about it. It was then that it dawned on me. Such an incessancy of noise could be used for the forces of good rather than just tolerated as evil upon my ears. How about using a cat for inter-planetary space travel?

  It’s been discussed in scientific circles that light and sound waves behave pretty much the same in space. In our earthly atmosphere the two main differences between sound waves and light waves is in velocity. Sound waves travel through air at the speed of approximately 1,100 feet per second; light waves travel through air and empty space at a speed of approximately 186,000 miles per second, so yeah, light is faster. The second difference is that sound is composed of longitudinal waves (alternate compressions and expansions of matter) while light is composed of transverse waves in an electromagnetic field. Although both are forms of wave motion, sound requires a solid, liquid, or gaseous medium; meaning for this discussion space is a vacuum, and since sound needs a medium to propagate, ( air, water, something material) it couldn’t be used in space as we know sound; so let me do a slight of hand and accept what we call sound is electromagnetic waves so we can return to the notion that in space, they’d behave pretty much like light.

  Just asking ‘what is light energy’ opens up to a flood of other questions with trying to narrow down the context of the question. In photometry, luminous energy is the perceived energy of light. It can also be defined as the electromagnetic radiation of visible light. Since light itself is energy, another definition is relevant: light is nature’s way of transferring energy through space. Light exerts a physical pressure on objects in its path. Just as the electromagnetic energy of a cat’s meow. This is explained by the particle nature in which photons strike and transfer their momentum. electromagnetic pressure is equal to the power of the light beam divided by the speed of light. The effect of light pressure is negligible for everyday objects. For example, you can lift a coin with laser pointer, but it would take 1 billion of them to do it. But electromagnetic pressure can cause asteroids to spin faster by working on them like wind pushing a windmill. So we can gather up a herd of cats…I know cats don’t travel in herds, but what do you call a large number of cats? Get them all jazzed up in cages on your nifty spacecraft from Walmart, attach microphones taped near the front of the cages and then broadcast their mewing behind your box-top rocket as thrusters into space and presto….Alpha Centauri here we come.

  Pressure makes me think of desperate things. Because I know I’d volunteer Hershey to any experiment along these lines after a short trip to the vet; let the chips fall where they may.