Sometimes you just need to go
Outside of the buildings
Outside of the lights
The screens and computers
And digital fights Continue reading Outside
Tag: control
What If The Higher Power Really Is Higher?
Seems to me it must be hard to live in this beautiful world and remain entirely confident that it is only accidental, that our lives are only accidental, and that our meaning and love and passions and sense of right and wrong are only the accidental output of material machinery marching to the orders of accidental DNA. Pure materialism doesn’t fit well with our actual experience of life on Earth. Even many who are not religious recognise this, and acknowledge the probable existence of a “higher power”.
Allowing for a higher power solves a lot of problems. It gives an explanation for love beyond chemical imbalances, hope beyond physical death, and value beyond usefulness. Religious or not, most people still want these things to be true, and still see (rightly) that they cannot be derived from pure materialism. Yet for all the problems it solves, the idea of a higher power raises more questions than it answers. What exactly is a “higher power”? One thing is for sure: it’s high.
A higher power is, by definition, higher than we are. Continue reading What If The Higher Power Really Is Higher?
The Humiliation Of Sleep
There’s a meme going around saying that a bed is just a padded shelf where we put our body when we’re not using it. The saying is oddly clever, but it doesn’t capture the fact that we don’t actually have a choice about sleeping. It’s going to happen. Consciousness wears us out, and then leaves us, despite our best efforts to force it to stay for the coffee and energy drinks. Eventually, we all need that shelf to serve as our wireless recharging station. Try as we might, even the strongest and fittest and most prominent humans can’t avoid shutting down regularly. For hours on end, we lie prostrate, vulnerable, and undignified on our beds, completely unaware and unable to work on our to-do lists and ambitions. Presidents snore. Queens drool on silk pillows. Celebrities wake up with bad breath and messy hair. Geniuses roll out of bed with foggy brains, groping for the coffee pot.
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