There is considerably more material I wanted to include in the Series “Trump So Far” which covers Trump’s actions from the time he won the Presidential election to his Inauguration. HOWEVER, I’ve grown weary of writing about Trump and am ready to move on to other topics.
At this time I’m quite satisfied with what I have presented so far on President Trump and I pray, dear Reader, you will be inspired to pursue your own research and take action in your own way as a citizen of either America, the World or both.
My published books are all about the Christian Faith and its relevance to the modern human experience. In addition, I have a plethora of other interests, ranging from music and mathematics to cosmology and quantum physics; all of which are entangled with GOD and His Divine Purpose for our species.
Recently my brother-in-law and I were having a conversation on an interesting topic that I wish to begin addressing in this blog: YOU.
Dear Reader: YOU are truly a Mystery wrapped in an Enigma! Humanity’s sharpest intellects have scoured every atom in your body yet COULD NOT FIND YOU! Today’s scientists are still at a loss at determining exactly WHAT YOU ARE! Philosophers and mystics from ages past have perhaps gotten closer to the Truth…
YOU are. YOU exist. You are an “I AM.” You are a self-aware “consciousness.” You are a Sentient Being…you are a SOUL.
You are NOT your brain…you are not even your body; it is even suspected that you do not even need either to exist. You are precious and unique…perhaps even immortal. There is no known process that can produce you in any laboratory on Earth. Like the Universe you dwell in, it is not known by modern science where you came from, or where your Ultimate Destination is.
That being said, there is a great deal about you and your tent that thousands of years of recorded human experience (and insight from the Spirit of GOD) has taught us. For instance…
…you are NOW. Follow me carefully: you are not IN the present moment–YOU ARE THE PRESENT MOMENT! Thanks to the discoveries of Einstein and his peers we now understand that you (as The Now that you are) are (in a very real sense) at the center of Time; and from you (whatever you are), in ever-growing concentric circles exists The PAST.
Everything around you is in the PAST. The light bouncing off the surface of whatever device you’re reading this blog from hits your eye ONLY AFTER A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TIME HAS TRANSPIRED…that amount of time being measured by the movement of heavenly bodies like the Sun and Moon, man-made time pieces (clocks), the speed of sound and even the speed of light itself, WHICH IS NOT INSTANT. No, dear Reader, light itself has a finite speed: 671 million miles per hour or 1.08 billion kilometers per hour. The distance from this reading surface to your eyes may seem insignificant, but it isn’t. Add to that the time it takes your brain to process the light and create a picture in your mind and…well, you “see” what I mean.
The farther away you look, the farther back in time you gaze. When you look at the Moon, you’re seeing it as it existed 1.3 seconds ago. When you gaze (hopefully for ever-so-brief a moment) at the Sun as it rises or sets, you see the Sun as it existed 8 minutes ago…not as it is now. And so it goes. View our nearest star in a telescope is no different that looking 4 years into the past. Looking at Sagittarius A is looking 30,000 years into the past.
In a way, we have all been time-travelling our entire lives without realizing it! Light is amazingly fast, but sound is much slower: 761 mph or 1,225 kmh. When Mount Saint Helens blew its top on 18-May-1980, the speed of the material ejected grew from 220 mph to 670 mph. The sound of the blast at the mountain’s altitude, however was 735 mph. The blast originating in Washington State was heard as far south as Northern California–quite a few seconds after the blast actually took place.
“So Calvin…if I’m the Present and everything around me is the Past, where or when is the Future?”
Great question!
Scientists can calculate where an object is GOING TO BE at a particular MOMENT in the FUTURE if they know:
where the object IS NOW
where the object HAS BEEN
HOW LONG (Time) the object took to get from “has been” to “is now”
Hypothetically, we can theorize that the Future is a function of the Past and the Now (YOU).
Translation: the Future is the process of MOVING through Space, and therefore through Time. Space and Time are NOT two different things; they are TWO DIFFERENT WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE SAME THING.
Imagine you and your “sexual partner” (my poor attempt at political correctness) are on opposite ends of the country (say, New York and Los Angeles). Experientially, both of you are NOW, yet are 2,451 miles (3,944 kilometers) apart. By walking distance the object of your affection is WEEKS in the Past. By the speed of sound, however, your partner is 3.22 hours in the Past; yet at the speed of light your beloved is only 13 thousandths of a second away.
From this we see that the RELATIONSHIP between two NOWs is directly affected by the SPEED at which they are traveling relative to each other as well as the CHANGING DISTANCE they are from each other! Furthermore, we CHEAT TIME through the use of electricity and light in our telecommunications systems to create the illusion (by phone or FaceTime or Skype, etc.) that we are much closer to each other than we really are physically…
…when we use phones or video conferencing technology WE ARE TIME TRAVELING!!!
It is also fascinating that we as a species define “intimacy” and “pleasure” by how successful we are in our attempts to occupy the same NOW with the ones we love!!!
So we see that the Future (as well as the progression of Time itself) is defined by the MOVEMENT of all of the countless trillions of NOWs that exist throughout SpaceTime!
There’s an excellent Nova episode on YouTube that demonstrates that, according to Einstein, the Future COEXISTS alongside the Present and the Past! This lends credence to the Biblical idea of PROPHECY, where God “plays” the Future to His servants as though it were the Present.
MOVEMENT is what connects the Past, the Present and the Future together IN OUR MINDS…and perhaps nowhere else.
Everything moves! That is everyone is moving (whether breathing, eating or walking or running) or are made of things that themselves are moving (vibrating, like atoms and their components). Even after you die, the atoms of your body continue their chemical dance as they transform into other things.
Now take the Biblical idea of GOD, Who technically DOESN’T MOVE because all movement occurs WITHIN HIMSELF (Jeremiah 23:34), and your imagination goes wild with the possibilities (i.e., if GOD is everywhere, He has nowhere to go)! Here we grasp at concepts such as Eternity, in which all PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE is but a Singularity that exists in its Divinely-appointed completeness!
The Bible says we were created in GOD’s Image and Likeness; if this is true, I suspect that the answers to our most enigmatic mysteries lie only in GOD Himself, Who has offered us the Miracle of co-inhabiting His Now (John 17:22,23)!!!