Actually, not really. The surprising thing is you don’t really have to believe the things, just the possibility of the things. it’s to say that things happen for a reason instead of being utterly random. There’s a theory I haven’t seen much discussed here called the chaos theory that states that even the flapping of a flag has a hidden meaning; they look for hidden meanings in the most inconsequential things, which sounds like a tiring thing to do. When it comes down to it, the basic underlying premise of most belief structures is to just live. Beyond the ‘believe this or else’ built into things and the ‘us vs. them’ is another world of just living where you account for these beliefs and those who carry them and actually pay attention to reality and see from that reality where these beliefs might have stemmed from personal experiences; but then you eventually reach a point where the results can no longer be reproduced because people try too hard to reproduce them through analytical thought processes and trying to nail them down, which is the premise behind what I said.
Another surprising part is that it becomes easier to work with the more knowledge you take in because in essence it’s just another juggling act that we deal with while living and we are expert jugglers when it comes to dealing with mental tasks. We have to be after a while if we wish to actually partake in life and the world around us and work around other people.
It’s not to say that every ideology gets a trophy as that would be silly. There are no trophies given; no medals awarded for advanced thought processes being delivered. There’s no glory to be gained and no reason to push forward your own knowledge except because you choose to, because it’s the gift of free will we find in a world bound by fate and self-fulfilling prophecies all around us. For me, it’s an on-going conversation in the back of my head and some times in the forefront. From chakras and third eyes to christs and antichrists to meditation and balance; I incorporate the best and discard the discrepancies that get so many people going on in hating the groups that bring forth these ideas. There is no real evolution of the texts and ideas and so people are continually stuck with decadent philosophies and wonder why we keep trodding the same paths of them and getting seeming nowhere with them individually. The more you incorporate into your mind; the more you open it; the easier it is to just keep going in life itself and not just in the belief of these things. It’s something I’ve mastered that I like to refer to as mental martial arts; wherein you develop fluidity of mind which leads to fluidity of body and actual martial arts which we learn on a daily basis without realizing it. Tying everything together can be a daunting task, but what of future generations that, as you describe, may get tired of the diversity and pretending that the differences between them are worth having wars over; worth losing friends over; worth stabbing people in the back just to get a momentary one-up.
The fact is that I would not be so silly; and neither would many other people; to believe that I could generate energy charges like in Dragon Ball Z or fly like in the Matrix or perform such tricks as Jedis do, for to assume that we can do such as such is ridiculous given the present nature of reality. What I’m saying is that such may be possible if we were to change the perceptions of our world and to let go of such binding ideas of the laws that we put in place for true nature and true reality cares little for the laws of men, if it cares for men at all as a species; which it must if we are to believe anything at all about these teachings, for why would we be taught methods that we can incorporate into our lives that help us deal with those lives as we transgress what seems like Hell on Earth with the promise of a savior and Heaven on Earth’ with the idea that through meditation; which we all do in one way or another; we can learn to manage more than just our bodies, we could soar the universe in our minds eyes and see things that we might never see in our short life spans.
What if immortality were possible and the only reason why people don’t live forever is all of the stress and anxiety and fighting. What if, by getting along together and learning these things that teach us how to do so instead of falling for the us vs. them mentality or the ‘we’re better than them and this is why’ stupidity we could free our selves from the only things that actually kill us, since even the toxins our factories produce are produced from naturally occuring developments. What if we kill our selves on such an epic scale in such an epic way as to realistically be the most tragic story ever told on a cosmic scale as people kill and are killed for no other reason than because they can not move past their own mental traumas, insecurities and insanities; can’t transgress the differences in ideologies to bring them together as they might have once been before a great divide occurred to tear them apart into all of the in-fighting we see today throughout every culture known to man. I tie history and psychology and the provable things into it all and it makes more and more sense and nobody can disprove it and if they could; even if we got everyone squared away and found our selves to still be mortal and to still die at the end of a lifespan, wouldn’t we at least experience world peace and deliver it to every generation that were to come after us in epic style?
That’s what I look at… no matter what you believe, we’re soon coming upon a time when there will be an epic showdown and a once-and-for-all struggle for dominance and I personally believe that peace will win out for eternity because eternity to the nth degree has to be worse than eternity and one stretch of eternity can be so vastly different; so what is eternity except the concept of a belief structure evolving over time and learning so many things; as has been evidenced throughout our cultural achievements and our evolution of intelligence, not to mention how we know the things we know; where our information and knowledge comes from in the back of our minds; how it develops, etc. Where do geniuses come from and how can everyone be a genius and an idiot in the same breath is the question you ask at last and isn’t that the cosmic balance? Isn’t that the answer to the question asked? The very act of finding a definitive answer to work with and to set the groundwork for future analysis in a field of study that would be vastly rewarding regardless of everything else that happened around us would set us free from the very things we seek to be free from and people would no longer wish to be craven and licentious monsters and they would care about each other as they do already when they finally find their groupings to settle down into to create the us vs. them mentalities.
And people who delve too deeply into beliefs instead of rolling with the flow of reality as it comes would look like fools trying to manipulate reality itself as they do while looking crazy after a while and having it said of them that they fell too far into drugs or researched the wrong things. What if the balance of life is to account for it all until it develops the deeper understanding that so many search in vain for; to let it come to you instead of chasing it.
And, off the record; Tolkien did a great job of recreating religion with his words. Here’s a question that Tolkien could never answer, though: what happens at the end when Melkor is finally released? All of Middle Earth is destroyed. And, what was so bad about Melkor to begin with that they had to lock him away to the point where he created so many shadow creatures to reach out to everyone else; all for introducing a darker section to the music the Valar created in the beginning with Illuvitar. They blamed him and were all like wtf, why are you introducing that, why do you have to put that in and perhaps it was just a part of his knowledge, a part of him that they hated him for and he really just wanted to be like them and to fit in with the crowd; maybe Illuvitar needed a devil to work with, but to what end result? What of Melkor’s love life, or the Wizards or the other Valar? What did they sacrifice to do what they did? The stories don’t speak of that and neither do religious works paint a picture of the angels and demons and what their ultimate goal is. In fact, if you read the silmarillion, the only God that knew what they were doing was Illuvitar, the rest made music with him to create everything; one made dwarves in private and what of Fourth Age Middle Earth with Aragorn in charge?
What of the politics between nations; the inevitable simmering down of conflict into a tolerable peace before Melkor was released, since no real evil existed in the world after the fall of Sauron; though there is still room enough for lesser evils to slip through every so often when societies let their guard down; the inevitable progression and evolution of that evil from direct fighting and conquest to the political manipulation such as wormtongue and the dissipation of magical energies as the wizards and elves leave middle earth in large and leave a bare minimum. What of the fifth age and the sixth?
And then there’s the Chronicles of Narnia and C.S. Lewis. Why is Narnia only truly create once those children bring the white witch there and why did Aslan not do more to understand enough about her to prevent the destruction of Narnia. The White witch being the main source of evil in THAT world; allowed by Aslan who obviously could have had the power to show her out and chose not to; allowed her to stay and do what she did and for what end? The same question to be asked of Illuvitar and Melkor, of God and the Devil. Even C.S. Lewis accounts for a multiple world theory. It’s a matter of asking where do these stories come from? These people don’t just create these stories… they’re just not that good. These stories come to them in their dreams and imaginations and they get caught up in the flow of reality as it flows out of them, just the same as I get caught up in the flow of reality as I bring forth my words to speak the ideas I speak; to write the poetry I write.
What is really prophecy and what is really learning lessons and what is really just a warning of what could happen if we refuse to learn something from it all? When there are so many common trends in our culture, isn’t it a fools errand to discount any of it as foolish?