Originally posted 1/27/2010
A beautiful mind.
Last night, on my 55th birthday anniversary, an intangible gift from Heaven blew my mind.
Oh, I received some other extraordinary gifts yesterday that had already marked this birthday as a very special day indeed in my otherwise mundane and unremarkable existence. My young and head-strong friend Over Unity continued to butt heads with me, allowing me to analyze and categorize the very same mental "features" (as we jokingly call "bugs" in computer software) that immobilized my thinking for much of my life. My friend Carla, a woman of exceptional insight, once again pointed out a small detail with enormous implications that I had never really thought about, despite its everyday occurrence and its impact on all of our lives. My off-the-wall friend Zephram Stark (when I hear my English friend use the word "loopy", I often think of Zeph), despite creating his own reality that implausibly includes both me and Over Unity, still manages to provoke trains of thought in my mind that lead to new and revealing understandings about the human condition. Yes, these "strangers" (stranger than me, I suspect) that I have never met have enriched my life. These are all wonderful gifts (found in the comments of my prior blog), and I felt very blessed on my 55th birthday.
And then, when I thought the day couldn't be better, another gift fell out of the sky into my lap. That gift was from the mind of one man. Of course, he is only the latest link in a longer chain. He stands on the shoulders of giants, and he readily acknowledges it. But he probed farther with stubborn curiosity and determination, going where no man has gone before, at least not in the last 10,000 years or so. Chances are nearly 100% that you have never heard of this man or the giants on whose shoulders he is perched. That is revealing in itself, especially when you consider that you have probably all heard and accepted as fact the conventional and absurd explanations for the structures he is investigating.
This is the story of a water pump. It doesn't involve motors, or diaphragms, or coiled springs, or even steel. Instead it involves the simplest of things, like stone, precision, gravity, physics, and thinking (something we are encouraged to avoid in our "bread and circus" society -- why is that?). Perhaps "simplest" is a poor word choice here. Instead, let's say it involves the most "fundamental" of things. And finally, it involves one of the largest, "in-your-face" mysteries in the entire world. No, it's not my "why is that?" question.
This time, for a long list of reasons, I'm not going to spoon-feed the puzzle pieces to you. I want you to learn to feed yourself. Like any child being weaned from his mother's breast, many of you are not going to like this. Hopefully later, like that same child, you will understand and be grateful. At least, that is my hope. Should this exercise fail to have the desired result, the fall-back position is that I am, of course, a crazy idiot.
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