Theodore Cogswell, who lived from 1918 to 1987, wasn't a very prolific writer, but he hit one right on the mark in 1953 with his science fiction short story The Wall Around the World, published in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories: 15 (1953) (DAW Books, 1986). If you started reading this brief tale but left before the ending, you might prefer to instead place it in the fantasy genre of fiction...but then you'd be missing its entire point...
A boy lives a Harry Potter-kind of life, flying on broomsticks, making incantations, and learning all sorts of magic in his magically-based society...but there are no muggles here, everyone is a wizard. And this place he lives in is surrounded by an unsurmountable high smooth wall, with the "other" side forbidden with dire consequences of punishment. But curious Porgie, realizing that no magic will get him over the wall to see what is beyond, begins to experiment with scientific ways to accomplish this feat...in spite of warnings from his teacher. To see what happens, I recommend you read the story yourself, although you might find some difficulty in obtaining it...
As I see it, The Wall Around the World is a prescient analogy to what is going on now in the world around us: the contrasts between intuition and science when it comes to increasing our knowledge and enlightenment...and the gulf between the two approaches has become only wider since this story's release in 1953. We've had the 1960s counterculture, the New Age movement, renewed interest in witchcraft and the paranormal, and different religions experiencing rebirths in popularity through fundamentalism...none of them based on science. Yet we enjoy the fruits of scientific accomplishment as well, while at the same time some of us criticize technological development as being out of harmony with life. People get bored watching real moon landings on TV and change the channel to watch Star Trek reruns, and then flock by the hundreds of millions to movie theaters to watch fantasy or science fiction movies. I can understand this pushback on science to an extent when I look back on the twentieth century, the early part thoroughly dominated by a strong push for scientific and technological development...as well as two world wars, discredited political ideologies like Communism and Nazism claiming scientific justification and causing mass subjugation and millions of deaths, and the racist "scientific" field of eugenics, incorporated by the Nazis, that further damaged the image of science in the eyes of many. And the environmental movement was also in some ways an indictment of how technology had been applied in a shortsighted manner, leading some people to mistakenly reject it in its entirely as a means of progress...
Of course, in The Wall Around the World, as well as with Harry Potter, the magic is real...whether or not there is anything of this sort happening in our world is a matter not of objective analysis but rather subjective personal conclusions. And that, I think, is a major reason why science doesn't seem all that attractive to many while these more intuitive areas do...for in the latter we get to create our own personal "realities" and "truths" that can be neither objectively proven nor disproven...
Showing posts with label Supernatural. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supernatural. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Eleven Eleven
I think we've all had a little fun with numbers since the commencement of the new millennium. Every year there is a special date that runs the same across the board: 01/01/01, 02/02/02, and so on. Yippee, looks like I might make it all the way to 11/11/11! And then it will be 12/12/12 the following year. Subsequent fun will depend on adding extra months to 2013 and beyond. After 2030 or 2031 (depending on how long the extra months are), days would have to be added to the months to continue the merriment.
But back to "eleven eleven"...
The combination of the numbers 11 & 11 seems to have taken on some kind of mystical, superstitious importance over the past few years. George Noory, the conspiracist believe-anything-that's-loony talk radio host of late night's Coast-to-Coast AM, has repeatedly hammered home his experiences of impulsively looking at clocks when it is 11:11, as if this carried some kind of supernatural or paranormal significance. As for me, this phenomenon happens a lot, too. But truth but told, I never noticed it until I had heard Noory and others refer to it. Then my mind programmed itself to respond at the appropriate moment, in the same way that I have an uncanny ability, after sleeping for hours, to suddenly jump out of bed wide awake seconds before my wake-up alarm goes off. So there's nothing unusual about this for me. And since others are human like me and share similar physiologies, they probably also have allowed themselves to be conditioned by others to look out for this time of day, at least subconsciously. Nothing mysterious or supernatural about that...
But this apparently won't stop some from trying to capitalize on 11-11, or I should say, 11/11/11. A group calling itself "One Breath One World" is staging on that date, apparently in Orlando, a stadium event grouping together 20,000 like-minded believers in this kind of numerology to try to create a miracle, for the sake of the planet, world peace, enlightenment, and all of those other cozy-sounding new age ideals. And how are they to accomplish this? At the signal, everyone is to breathe in unison! And that will change everything. But first, these miracle workers need to get online and purchase their tickets...
I'm not sure this won't possibly come back to bite these gullible do-gooders in the ass, though. I remember a science fiction short story by Orson Scott Card titled Deep Breathing Exercises. The premise expressed in this interesting tale was that, when people were grouped together in a setting in which they were about to collectively perish due to a calamity, they inexplicably began inhaling and exhaling in total unison. So maybe if you're of the gullible type who believes, as George Noory claims to believe, that there are no such things as coincidences, then you just might consider NOT hanging around Orlando on "miracle day" 11/11/11!
I don't believe in either scenario. But if people are looking for miracles, they need to look within themselves and recognize their amazing human capacity for change. These 20,000 will already be interested in miraculous change: now if they can only see that, by taking each day they live and treating the people they encounter with more compassion and respect than they did the previous day, there is the possibility of a miracle of sorts coming about after all. For human behavior is infectious: others copy successful models of behavior that they observe and internalize them to become a new part of their own personalities. A truly "kinder, gentler" society (without the political overtones) would be a miracle, and one accomplished without the need for pretense about supernatural forces causing it.
And without the need to buy a ticket!
But back to "eleven eleven"...
The combination of the numbers 11 & 11 seems to have taken on some kind of mystical, superstitious importance over the past few years. George Noory, the conspiracist believe-anything-that's-loony talk radio host of late night's Coast-to-Coast AM, has repeatedly hammered home his experiences of impulsively looking at clocks when it is 11:11, as if this carried some kind of supernatural or paranormal significance. As for me, this phenomenon happens a lot, too. But truth but told, I never noticed it until I had heard Noory and others refer to it. Then my mind programmed itself to respond at the appropriate moment, in the same way that I have an uncanny ability, after sleeping for hours, to suddenly jump out of bed wide awake seconds before my wake-up alarm goes off. So there's nothing unusual about this for me. And since others are human like me and share similar physiologies, they probably also have allowed themselves to be conditioned by others to look out for this time of day, at least subconsciously. Nothing mysterious or supernatural about that...
But this apparently won't stop some from trying to capitalize on 11-11, or I should say, 11/11/11. A group calling itself "One Breath One World" is staging on that date, apparently in Orlando, a stadium event grouping together 20,000 like-minded believers in this kind of numerology to try to create a miracle, for the sake of the planet, world peace, enlightenment, and all of those other cozy-sounding new age ideals. And how are they to accomplish this? At the signal, everyone is to breathe in unison! And that will change everything. But first, these miracle workers need to get online and purchase their tickets...
I'm not sure this won't possibly come back to bite these gullible do-gooders in the ass, though. I remember a science fiction short story by Orson Scott Card titled Deep Breathing Exercises. The premise expressed in this interesting tale was that, when people were grouped together in a setting in which they were about to collectively perish due to a calamity, they inexplicably began inhaling and exhaling in total unison. So maybe if you're of the gullible type who believes, as George Noory claims to believe, that there are no such things as coincidences, then you just might consider NOT hanging around Orlando on "miracle day" 11/11/11!
I don't believe in either scenario. But if people are looking for miracles, they need to look within themselves and recognize their amazing human capacity for change. These 20,000 will already be interested in miraculous change: now if they can only see that, by taking each day they live and treating the people they encounter with more compassion and respect than they did the previous day, there is the possibility of a miracle of sorts coming about after all. For human behavior is infectious: others copy successful models of behavior that they observe and internalize them to become a new part of their own personalities. A truly "kinder, gentler" society (without the political overtones) would be a miracle, and one accomplished without the need for pretense about supernatural forces causing it.
And without the need to buy a ticket!
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