The Tenuous Law of Gravity

I touched on this subject briefly in my post Galaxme: Part I, but I think the subject deserves a little more exploration, and since I’m not an astrophysicist, or any other kind of phsyicist or scientist, I’ll enthusiastically welcome ideas and edification on this subject from readers.

Scientifically speaking, gravity is what makes the world go ’round. Literally. Gasses, debris, molecules, all the stuff of life in this universe appears, moves, and disappears because of gravity. What I want to know is how this force factors into our lives, beyond the obvious effects. Is gravity behind the unseen phenomena? Is gravity the momentum driving the patterns in our lives, or our personal orbits?  Take a look at your patterns: Tendencies toward recurring periodic experiences or events  seem to indicate a circular movement of life. I’m not talking about birth, life, death, rebirth, but the actual day to day and year to year experiences of a lifetime.

 If gravity is in fact driving this movement, then changing the experiences of our lives means changing our orbits. And as the title of this post states, the force of gravity can be reisited. Standing, walking, typing. These are accomplished by the alternate allowing and resisting of gravity. So can god be reduced to the principles of gravity and free will the resistance of that force?

I don’t have a clue about how to do this. Ideas?

 

-Griz

Hello…Is This Thing On?

Thought I’d write about a little experiment I conducted a few weeks ago as I was coming to the difficult conclusion that there is no Cosmic Daddy, Mommy, or even a Cosmic Customer Service Rep up/out yonder.

I was reading another blogster’s posts about signs. He’s really gung ho about how the Universe communicates with us, answering our questions, so that one does not have to resort to eeny-meeny-miny-mo, coming to a decision in such a random fashion.

Following his advice, I thought of a question I needed an answer to, and gave a 24 hour time limit for receiving the sign. I dialed up the Cosmic 411 and asked, “Should I sell my car?” Over the next 24 hours nothing jumped out at me. I didn’t see “For Sale” signs on cars, I didn’t hear any songs or announcments on the radio or TV that seemed pointed at my question. Nothing.

A week later, I asked again, this time I asked for a specific sign: a white feather. “If it’s a good idea to sell my car right now, please indicate with a white feather within 24 hours.”

No white feather. No gray, black, speckled or any other kind of feather. No real feathers, no pictures of feathers or songs about feathers. Nothing.

According to Berlitz’s Angelic Signs to English traveler’s dictionary, No sign means a “No” answer. The answer was ‘No, don’t sell your car right now.’ Really? Hmmm….

I wanted to verify the ‘answer’, so I posed the question in reverse: If I should NOT sell my car right now, please send a white feather as a sign over the next 24 hours.”

No feather or any other indication that the Universe was entertaining my enquiry appeared.

Conclusion: Nobody’s home. Angels/God/ To Whom It May Concern–all busted.  It seems then that the decision, as it always has been, is up to me.

About Sides and Signs

I stayed up late the other night watching The Messenger, one of the many versions of the Jeanne D’Arc story.
Dustin Hoffman played her Conscience, and the dialouge between his character and Milla Jovovich’s Joan was a revealing, naked account of what Catholics and Christians would certainly interpret as the sin of doubt, and dwindling faith, and what I would call critical thinking.

Joan was trying to justify the events that had led to her circumstances, second-guessing her defense to the tribunal’s interrogation. Of course she had done the right things, of course she was on the correct path, she had seen the signs, and obeyed the divine directives.

“The signs? What signs?” presses her Conscience. “The wind; the clouds, the bells!” says Joan. You can see doubt darken her expression as she realizes how nebulous these phenomena are as signs.

“…the sword! The sword in the field–surely that’s a sign!” She’s found her irrefutible sign from God…she thinks.

“A sword in a field a sign from God?” her Conscience disparages. “It’s a sword in a field.” Hoffman goes on, postulating some of the different ways the sword could have wound up in that field. “For every action there is a cause; nothing exists in a vacuum.” Of course, this would be terribly sophisticated reasoning for a 15th century illiterate peasant girl. But at least in this film, she couldn’t refute the logic; her bubble was burst.

And the whole Joan of Arc story is about bursting bubbles. The English needed to find her guilty of heresy to restore morale and faith to its Catholic soldiers. If God is on France’s side, how can we, the English faithful, believe that he hears our righteous prayers? This conundrum might cause one to question how many side God can take, and if he would choose one faithful adversary over another, what then is the point of belief? And if one cannot make sense of religion as a team sport, then maybe the rest fails in reason also. Here is the slippery slope of doubt that the Church and England wished to avoid with Joan’s trial and execution.

If you find a sword in a field, it’s just a sword in a field.

…and waiting

I prayed to God, asking for a sign one way or another about my decision to become an atheist.

I’m still waiting for an answer.

Depression and the Law of Attraction – updated 4/23/08

I’m curious about organic and chemical diseases and a person’s ability to create reality. I’d prefer that my fate were left to a benevolent magical being, especially as I have difficulty mustering strong positive emotions around things I want, but as time goes by, I don’t believe there is a cosmic saviour, and the idea that each of us creates his or her own reality makes sense to me. Mostly.

I have difficulty with some aspects of the Law of Attraction, like its seeming random timing between intention and manifestation, and the rationale behind negative intentions/thinking not manifesting immediately because the energy driving those intentions is supposedly weaker. The proponents of this theory have never witnessed my road rage.

While the basic concept that thoughts become things seems logical, and it sounds perfectly reasonable that desire and emotions have an energetic pull, attracting circumstances into our lives, the claims of infallibility irk me.

I’ve noticed that some believers in the LOA qualify the ‘absoluteness’ of the like-attracts-like theory with such statements as, “You musn’t’ doubt for one second!” and stipulating that the intention contains the wording “for the highest good of all,” and “in God’s perfect time”. So how is this creating your own reality if there are variables still left up to some supreme cosmic overseer? These qualifiers basically negate the position that our fate and circumstances are up to us.

And, what are you supposed to do if you’re clinically depressed,  manic-depressive, or schizophrenic, and can’t control your thinking or emotions for chemical reasons? It may be a simple thing if you’re not clinically depressed, to tell someone who is to just think happy thoughts, or to not conentrate on the situation or things or people that seem to be triggering negative thinking, but people who are really, clinically, chemically sick, can’t just switch their feelings from dark to light. People who are depressed because of their brain chemistry aren’t depressed about something, which is the frustrating thing about the illness. If they were bummed out about a particular thing, they could reason their way to a solution. It an external trigger is the cause, one’s  mood darkens around a thing that can be fixed, remedied, rationalized, paid off, or ignored, but the cause is a real thing.

And if thoughts become things, why don’t we see the demons and wild creatures manifested bodily in the lives of psychotic people? They’re feeling and believing these scenarios are real; so where are they? The theory of subjective reality aside, other people can see the physical product of my poverty mentality. Are we protected from the delusions of the mentally ill by some sort of safety mechanism?

If it doesn’t work all the time, for every person, in every situation, then it’s not a law. It’s a marketing ploy. But maybe the law of attraction isn’t the only force determining the outcome of our lives.

Karma patches the holes in the law of attraction theory, if one believes that we created at least a basic fabric or plot to our lives in advance, either by actions of previous lifetimes or having designed a blueprint before birth which arranges for us to meet certain people, have particular experiences, in order to accomplish a preordained mission, then this ties everything up nicely. My god that is a long sentence.

Is it possible that our lives are governed by more than one force? Are our lives expressed as a combination of pre-incarnation mapping, intention manifestation, and divine intervention in emergencies?