Mind & Destiny

By Elwin Reed

Do you remember the last time when you heard, or saw, or read another of those predictions of doom and gloom for our civilization? Was it just yesterday, certainly sometime within the last week. Perhaps it was about how we are going to perish from a global warming brought about by any of perhaps a dozen of the currently popular doomsday theories, ranging from the decimation of the rain forests to the thinning of the ozone layer; and I don't deny it, these do loom large as problems on the planet earth.

Then there is the contrarian view, that instead of worrying about global warming, we should be pre-occupied with the onslaught of a new Ice Age; instead of burning up, we are going to freeze to death!

And if that particular end doesn't appeal to you, there are scientists who stand ready to persuade you that before you ever get a chance to fry from the heat, or freeze from the cold, the global changes in weather patterns are already underway that will result in such enormous meltoffs of the polar icecaps, that most of the human race will simply drown in the rising waters of the oceans.

And then there are the possibilities of the earth tilting on its axis, or a catastrophic series of earthquakes, or we might all perish in a thermonuclear holocaust.

Pretty grim stuff, isn't it? And we are surrounded by it, inundated in it, there seems to be no getting away from it some days.

As the wife said to her husband: "Shall we watch the six o'clock news and get indigestion, or wait for the ten o'clock news and have insomnia?"

There seems to be something in man's nature that just loves bad news [see Disasterbation]. Don't believe me? Just look at a newspaper.., any paper.., any day, and look for the good news. Since the dawn of our known civilization ten thousand years ago, it's been like that, and I don't think it's going to change now.

But it can change for you and I. We don't have to subscribe to all the doom and gloom scenarios that abound out there! There is too much to be positive about, there is too glorious a future ahead for our civilization, for us to get bogged down in the negativities of this present time, which in the over all scale of the human existence, may be measured as no more than a fleeting moment. And this isn't some kind of pollyann-ish optimism. It's not an optimism based on a positive attitude without anything to back it up.

We, the human race, have got an ace in the hole. We've got a MIND.

That's right, I said a mind! The human mind is what has got us this far and it's going to get us a lot farther. Just how far, no one knows, but later on I would like to suggest a few possibilities, possibilities that are so far reaching as to be beyond our present capacities of complete comprehension. We can understand the underlying logic of the possibility, we just can't grasp all the ramifications if "possibility" becomes "reality."

Few of us really appreciate the absolute marvel that is our minds. Everything you have - your work, your relationships, your philosophy of life, your material possessions - has come to you as a result of your using your mind. Now consider this: Experts say that we use less than ten per cent of our mental capacity, and some noted and well-known scientists, like Margaret Mead, and Abraham Maslow, believed the figure was actually closer to five or six per cent.

At UCLA, there is a Brain Research Institute and their work points to enormous abilities latent in everyone. Researchers there suggest an incredible hypothesis:

The ultimate creative capacity of the human brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite.

A Russian scientist by the name of Yefremov, wrote this in a scientific journal:

Man, under average conditions of work and life, uses only a small part of his thinking equipment. If we were to use only half its capacity, we could, without any difficulty whatever, learn forty languages, memorize the largest encyclopedia from cover to cover, and complete the required courses for degrees in dozens of colleges.

Amongst the experts, that statement is not considered as an exaggeration; it is the generally accepted theoretical view of man's mental potentials.

And here is where the optimistic part comes into play. When Maslow and Mead were estimating that man was only using five or six per cent of his potential thinking capacity, that was thirty or forty years ago. There is reason to believe that today, forty years later, man is actually using closer to ten percent of his capacity.

Because of the dynamics of present day television and movies, for example, with the visual effects of space and starships, and the life-like replication of human anatomy in books and models, we are gradually changing the way we think, and it takes more of our mental capacity to think in this new way. Rather than a linear flow of thought and reasoning, we are slowly adapting to an holistic flow of thought and reasoning. Rather than solving a problem as a logical progression of reasoning from fact A, to fact B, and so on, to a resultant conclusion, we are sometimes using an holistic viewpoint, we see the problem in a more multi-dimensional fashion, which may or may not lead, ultimately, to the same conclusion as before, but more quickly, and having considered more possibilities.

And like the story of the one-hundredth monkey, this is happening to all of us; whether we are eight or eighty, we are all of us using more of our mental capacity now than our parents did, and who knows how much more those born one hundred years from now, will be using?

Think for a moment where we have been, and where we've come in terms of progress, and we must realize that it is the human mind that has brought it about. It's hard to believe that we've come farther in the realm of progress in the past fifty years than we have in all the preceding ten thousand years of human civilization. Of all the scientists that have ever lived, ninety per cent of them are alive today, which may account for another astounding fact, our scientific knowledge is estimated to have doubled in just the last forty years, that is, since 1955. And for some of us, that doesn't seem like such a long time ago!

We, the human race, are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge of all kinds. We are on a ride to the future, and we are positioned on the early quickening of an exponential curve. And we had better buckle in, because like it or not, we're all going along on this ride, there's no choice! You all know what an exponential curve looks like. There's this flat part at the start where at first there seems to be little discernible difference in the level of the line, it looks more like a straight line than a curve, then slowly it starts rising, then more and more quickly, until finally it begins to look like a straight line again, only now it's a vertical straight line, and the rate of increase becomes astronomical in value.

And that part at the bottom, where the flat straight line starts curving up into the vertical line, that's where we are right now. We're just starting on the really interesting part.

Posted by paul at June 17, 2004 01:57 AM