Thoughts 7

Thoughts 7

The flow of eternity wraps around me and I exalt...!

I wrote the above in a modified version at the end of an earlier post, but here it is again in hopes that it will stimulate enough interest to help people continue to read. The above is the original form I wrote it in the 1990's. It is where I am trying to get to with this series of the blog.

We group things together to make a whole. Family is a whole. Nation is a whole. We have a comparison when we use family, nation, mountains, or mountain range. We have a duality; family: us and them, nation: again us and them, mountains: tall (high) to low (short). We break things into pieces so that we can tell what we are talking about.

Using the word family we could be talking about everyone with one particular family name or we could talking about a man, woman and children. There are still more divisions that could be made; splitting the family into individuals. Using the word ocean we know that the subject is not land. It is most of the Earth's surface, but we need to divide the great waters into segments to have a better understanding of the location on this orb we call Earth that we are talking about. Nations are not naturally made. Nations are set up by men. The divisions are arbitrarily set by men. There is still the comparison, so we have a start and a stop, a duality. Another way it could be described is a reference frame. When we talk; we have comparisons (references). We cannot talk about one individual and have the individual as part of mankind unless we are referencing the one to the whole.

One reference frame could be the United States of America. Another is the individual, but we can and do set reference frames for parts of the individual: hair, skin, eyes, organs, etc. We can further break this down to different cells which in turn break down to genes, and then genes into elements. But if we have the elements we cannot make a human, nor understand a person. We cannot randomly look at elements and say that the combination will make any particular thing except for what we have already set as standards. We divide to understand, but the more we divide the less we can see the whole.

We can see the relationship between some of parts. Take the human heart as an example. We can tell that the heart pumps blood through the body, but we cannot see how the human heart relates to the star of our solar system, Sol. Most of the energy that the heart uses comes from the sun, but does our heart affect the sun in anyway even the most minute way. That maybe an extreme example, but what I am trying to show is for the human intellect to comprehend we have to set up standards. Mentally break it apart and put it into reference frames.

The most basic duality or reference frame would have to be the material and non-material. We can look at the elements (material) that make up a human body, but we cannot see the human life (non-material) in the elements. We know that we think, but we cannot know the thought by looking the physical processes of a brain while thinking even though they are one thing.

If I need to be more complete in the description of learning with the intellect, please let me know and I will add the extra.