Hi, I'm Doug Saarel and welcome to my on-line newsletter. I look forward to sharing with you a number of ideas developed over several years of life experiences both in business and as an in-depth observer of the developing new sciences. My purpose has been to try and help all of us to better understand what's going on out there and in here regarding our daily lives in this knowledge and technology-driven web-based world in which we live. Further, I hope to share some practical tools which I believe will permit all of us to be more successful in our relationships and in our abilities to achieve the results each one of us desires.
Key to our discussion together is the fact that the universe we inhabit is based much more on randomess than certainty. Unfortunately, we humans are programmed to far better deal with "hard facts" than abstractions. In addition we have been brainwashed for almost three hundred years by leaders of the "Enlightenment" to strongly believe in cause and effect and an analytic mechanical view of the world in which we live. Much of this was reinforced by the Industrial Revolution and its emphasis on a metaphor based upon an economy that was "gaining steam", "putting the gears in motion,"and "a smooth running machine," which transferred from business to all other walks of life.
Metaphors vividly describe our reality and are usually based upon what the technology of the time permits. Those people of an earlier time who believed the earth was flat were no dummies and relied upon the technology of their times to arrive at their conclusions. For a powerful illustration of what things may have been like for Columbus trying to raise funds and royal permission to sail west to find the riches of China, pick up the movie, "1492, Conquest of Paradise" and view the first ten minutes or so. The reality which was then so real certainly changed with what technology permitted Galileo, Copernicus, Decartes, La Place, and Newton to see and understand in their times: A universe that ran with the precision of a clock, each star, planet, molecule, and atom in its static place, all of which ran under a banner of "cause and effect."
Fast forward to May 29, 1919, and the classical physics of the "Enlightenment" fell before the confirmation of Einstein's juggernaut of General Relativity, and slightly later, Neils Bohr's and others' (including Einstein) Quantum Physics. No longer did certainty rule the roost. Randomness reigned! Time on earth and throughout the universe was related to space. And, depending upon your position in the universe and how fast you were moving, your relative time was different from that of your cousin who was on a rocket to somewhere else or living on a planet, the speed and location of which, was different from that of your own.
We discovered that reality was relative and subject to random forces. In fact, we found that everything in the universe is related to everything else and that existance is a tendency based upon observing possibilities and not solid substance (for one credible intrepretation check out the movie, "What the Bleep do we know"). It became clear to those who understood these phenomena that life and everthing connected to it was more like a weather system than a well oiled machine. In the early 1960's Edward Lorenz, an MIT trained meteorologist and early proponent of Chaos Thoery in physics demonstrated figuratively how the beating of the wings of a butterfly in China could literally cause a hurricane to occur in Texas (very slight changes in initial conditions of a non-lnear system expoentially affect its outcome).
But, most of us have had a hard time accepting the new reality in which we exist although its evident confirmation has been around for more than half a century. We are creatures of paradigms and habit. Our reality is based upon our perceptions which, in turn, create our paradigms. We long for the good old days and when things will get back to normal. It's so hard for us to take the leap into a brave new world.
With the above in mind, I have been making progress (which I will share in upcoming editions of this newsletter) to come up with a way to help most of us effectively move from perception of a reality that no longer exists, except in limited forms, and to perceive and embrace the new reality visible to us today and the randomness, chance, and luck that are a major part of it.
Remaining in the past and trying to act on perceptions that are not true lacks integrity, is at best frustrating, and at worst extremely dangerous (Eg. our preparations for 9/11, Katrina, the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and others). However, it is extremely difficult for someone to revise his or her perceptions and beliefs within a practically useful period of time (read Plato's Allegory of a Cave; The Republic, Book VII) . It unfortunately appears from observation that the majority of those who believe in the "old ways", with generally few exceptions, need to die off before a new generation rises to the challenge of a new paradigm based on the "truth" of the present inspired by new technology.
We can't afford to wait! (Integrity and Reality cannot be separated!).
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