abtw777

Those of us who want to ‘save the planet’ have a tough time. For one thing, someone’s sure to point out that the phrase, ‘save the planet’ is just human hubris. The planet got on just fine without us and it will get on just fine once we’re gone – so, strictly speaking, there’s no ‘saving’ needing done. Sure, the oceans will boil away – oh, and the atmosphere will be full of poisonous gas – oh, and, did I mention, all life will have gone extinct. But apart from all that, same dear old Mother Earth. So no saving to be done. Those folk who point this out are right of course. But the folk who are really irked by the saving-the-planet thing are the folk who ARE NOT trying to save the planet. Because, of course, pointing out to them that YOU are trying to save the planet and THEY are not – well, that just makes them really mad. They will see us as scaremongers. They will see us as fanatics. And, of course, they are also at least partly right. We planet-savers are often a motley b...

An ancient Chinese philosopher, Kung-Sun Lung, once said, ‘a white horse is not a horse.’ Now I don’t know if this was simply a one-off mysterious statement by Kung-Sun, or if he was in the habit of saying such things on a regular basis. And likewise, I don’t know how it was received by his contemporaries – whether he was regarded as a sage or as something of a fruitcake. But I want to unpack the saying a bit, because – whilst it may appear, at first, inconsequential – in fact it strikes a devastating blow to Western philosophy, science and religion. How so? you may wonder. Well, here’s how. At first strike, Kung-Sun might simply have meant that there are no truly white horses. Of course, this is surely true. But the real explanation – and true power – of the statement lies a little deeper. Take that word ‘white’. This is what we describe as a ‘universal’. A universal is not a mysterious thing – at least in theory. Adjectives – like ‘white’ here, in ‘the white horse’ – are...

How did it ever come to this? How is it that we – by which I mean humanity – find ourselves at war with aliens? Interstellar war! And all of our own making. It started, as these things often do, with some really trivial things. It started first with a philosophical puzzle. And this was the puzzle. How can you prove that a rhinoceros will not spontaneously appear in your room? The puzzle is attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein when he was a philosophy undergraduate student in England. He asked the question of his philosophy professor, and apparently felt that his professor could not adequately answer it. Now it may seem like a rather trivial and silly puzzle – and it is, in and of itself. But it tipped into something that would eventually become a major obsession of humanity and lead to the interstellar conflict that we now face. How did this happen? To answer that we have to go a little into the types of truth that are defined by philosophers. First up we have necessary and ...

How could someone smile so much? That’s what I was thinking, again, as another meeting got under way. The subject of my puzzlement was a young woman who was one of the facilitators of a spiritual encounter group I was attending. The girl with the woolly hat. Last week she had set an assignment. It was along the lines of – if you could change anything in the world, what would it be? This week we were reporting back. We were split into pairs for the discussion and I was paired with woolly hat girl. She beamed her smile at me, waiting expectantly for me to report on what I’d like to change out there in the world. My first thought had been forests. This fitted well with the style of the meetings, which – as well as their spiritual theme – were also geared toward an environmental ethic. Re-forest as much of the world as we can. But then it occurred to me that to carry out this miracle there would need to be some side issues to clear up – agriculture and human infrastructure and b...