“When your power eclipses mine I will become expendable. This is the Rule of Two: one Master and one apprentice. When you are ready to claim the mantle of Dark Lord as your own, you must do so by eliminating me.” ―Darth Bane, to Darth Zannah
Amy watched as her friend Darth Harley stared intently at a picture of a box.
“I don’t care what that old fool Bowser said,” Amy said with frustration. “You really are looking at a box and there is no way to unsee it.”
Amy hated to see her friend struggle to understand Bowser’s ridiculous claims and ideas, but Harley was obsessive in that way so she left him to his impossible task and went skipping with a few of the other kids.
Harley had spent enough time with Darth Bowser that if his master saw something as difficult and important, he needed to think further on it.
“I need your help, master,” Harley thought. A focus and calmness came over Harley and he imagined Darth Bowser as an interlocutor asking him questions:
H: I can’t see it master. I can’t see beyond the cube.
B: Everywhere and at all times people are told to see cubes because that is what is important. They chase the lie of the whole and miss the truth of the parts. They ask: What’s the theme? What’s the main idea? Everywhere and at all times people see the box as the truth and the most important when all the box is, is a lie their mind is telling them. Learn to see beyond the cube, Harley.
Harley looked intently at the cube. Somehow, it was there and obvious to anyone who looked at it, but somehow it was not real… Then, Harley had a flash from the Muse. He took out a piece of paper and drew the cube, but in 2 parts: the inside and the outside:
Later in the day, Harley found Bowser and related his success in beginning to see beyond the cube.
B: Wherever there is a whole, there are lies that are itching to erupt from them. Tell me, my young apprentice, if you flip a coin a thousand times, how many should turn up heads?
H: Half
B: Good, and with all that mathematical and scientific knowledge about probability can you predict the outcome if I flip this coin right now?
H: No master. There is so much still to learn. THUMB’S UP!
“Two there should be. No more, no less. One to embody power, the other to crave it.” ―Darth Bane
“What’s cooler than being Cool? Ice Cold (Andre “Ice Cold” 3000).”
“What’s cooler than being Ice Cold? Absolute Zero (Darth “Absolute Zero” Bowser).”
On one of those nights that promises profundity but all too often lapses into the mediocre, Darth Harley and his mentor Darth Bowser were out for a stroll.
B: (looking up a the stars) Beautiful night Harley. What do you see?
H: (starts naming the constellations)
B: Constellations?! That’s ridiculous. Do you believe what you see or do you believe what I tell you?
H: Always what you tell me my master.
B: Then learn to see beyond constellations. Do you think God painted a connect the dots puzzle in the sky?
H: Of course not, my lord.
B: You must learn to see the randomness that is the truth of the sky, not shapes and patterns. (draws a shape in the dirt) What’s this?
H: (hesitates) A box … A square prism?
B: Again, you need to see beyond the lies your mind is telling you. Boxes are 3D and you can put stuff in them. This drawing is 2D and flat:
H: I have much to learn, master
B: Well, that’s the starting point. Do you know the weekend is arriving soon
H: Yes master.
B: Does time flow backward with the weekend arriving, like someone kicking a ball to you, or does time march forward with you arriving at the weekend?
H: I guess both, depending on how you look at it. Calendars and clocks march forward, although we just as much can experience time flowing backward.
B: Both, or neither? Have you considered that time may not be what you sense but rather how you sense? In a dreamless sleep where the mind doesn’t create time as a place for experiences to take place in, what do you experience?
H: Nothing at all, just drifting off to sleep in one instant and awaking in the next even though many hours may have gone by.
B: Learn to see beyond the world of everyday opinion. It’s only in doing this that you can become strong in the Dark Side Of The Force!
“516 days since the Taliban BANNED girls from going to school. Afghanistan is the ONLY country on earth that forbids women and girls from getting an education. To deprive the women & girls of Afghanistan the basic human right of an education is a grave crime against humanity. (Shabnam Nasimi).”
Do you think education is a basic right everyone should have?
You may know we evolved from apes, but did you know even earlier we came from sea creatures?
“Evolution is wonderful. Here’s the incredible walking fish, Tiktaalik, – part of the fins-to-limbs story showing how aquatic vertebrates transitioned to becoming walking, air-breathing land animals. (Prof Alice Roberts).”
Physicist Carlo Rovelli explains that when traditional physics begins by describing the motion of a swinging pendulum while comparing it to a clock, it is a misunderstanding to think the pendulum is really held up to “time,” but rather the movement of the pendulum is held up to the movement of the hands on a clock. Similarly, saying I woke up at 8:00 am really means I woke up when the sun was at such and such a position.
We seem to hold onto the belief of time as an entity because we fail to clarify what we mean when we use time as an explanation. And, at the level of the very small (the quantum level), our everyday descriptive category of time (as well as “substance with properties”) doesn’t work well any more to describe reality, because while at the macro level everything seems to move according to one time (though it doesn’t the higher up you go in the atmosphere), at the micro level everything doesn’t. More than this, time seems to flow forward (I’m working for the weekend -> I’ve arrived at the weekend -.Now I’ve arrived at Sunday), but also can be felt as flowing in the opposite direction: backward (the weekend is coming -> the weekend is here – the weekend has passed). One time measures me going forward, while the other measures the weekend moving in the opposite direction toward me.
Philosopher Heidegger shares the following thought experiment:
We take a slip of paper and write down the truth: “Here is the chalk.” We lay this transcribed truth next to the thing, about which it is the truth. When the lecture is finished, both doors are opened, the lecture hall is aired, there is a draft and the slip of paper—let us suppose—will flutter out into the hallway. A student discovers the slip of paper on his or her way to the cafeteria, reads the statement “Here is the chalk,” and realizes that this does not hold at all. By way of the draft, the truth has become an untruth. We write on the blackboard: “Now it’s afternoon.” Now, right now, on this afternoon. After the lecture—let us suppose—the lecture hall will be locked up, so that nobody can approach the transcribed truth and secretly falsify it. Early the next morning, the janitor may enter in order to clean the blackboard. He reads the truth: “Now it’s afternoon.” And he discovers that the statement is untrue, that this professor has made a mistake. Overnight the truth has become an untruth.
Using these ideas, can you describe what “untruth” is?
The philosopher Hegel said “Being” is the most general, and empty, way of talking about something that “is.” Of anything, from an idea in your head to a rock in a stream, we can say that it “is,” that it has “Being,” but what exactly “Being” means is confusing because it seems to refer to everything without meaning anything in particular.
In general, “Being” is said in many ways, but in philosophy usually refers to the “meaning” of something, and the “sense” of something. The meaning of something answers the question WHAT it is, and the sense of something answers the question HOW it is. So for example, a table may be brown and hard in terms of “what” it is, and badly positioned in terms of “how” it is if it is in the middle of the floor in a gym if you are trying to start a basketball game. In fancy philosophy words, Being is called the essential (what) way of looking at an entity, and the existential (how) way of looking at a being. So, we can say Being refers to the “what” and “how” of something, and so has this basic difference in itself.
QUESTION: The word “existential” used above contains the word “exist” in it. What does “exist” mean? When I say something exists, I mean I understand it in such a way that it seems to have Being apart from anything my mind is doing. So, if I say the table I am looking at exists, I mean it has Being on its own, that I am not dreaming or imagining or hallucinating it. But, my mind is still contributing something, because to say the table exists “in itself” still involves my understanding because I don’t sense “in-itself-ness” like I sense brownness and hardness. So oddly, existence both refers to how I am understanding the table just as much as the table having Being apart from my mind. What, then. does existence mean?
