- Time and tide wait for no man
- Change and decay in all around I see
- Plus ca change
- The only constant thing is change
- The impermanence of all created things
- Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die
- Gather ye rosebuds while you may.
Galaxies, stars and planets are born and die. Continental drift ensures that the land masses of planet earth keep shifting and that mountains and oceans come and go. A giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs. Inappropriate agriculture gave rise to the great American dust bowl. The Amazonian rain forest is being raped for timber. Individual human beings are born, live for a short while and then die. While living, their thoughts and feelings emerge from the unconscious to inhabit the attention centre for a short time and then drift back into it. Everything changes.
It seems to us humans that there is an energy or force that drives the change. It seems as if there is a perpetual churn of dynamic flux. The unusual words make the idea stick out.
A churn involves agitation and mixing where components are stirred and shaken, tossed and blended.
It is perpetual when it is continuous, non-stop and everlasting.
A flux is flowing and exhibits continuous change, passage, or movement.
It is dynamic when it is vigorous, active and everchanging; it makes things happen and gets things done in terms of both creation and destruction.
Stuff happens. The universe would be pretty quiet if it didn’t. Stuff happens at the level of the very fast and the very small (quantum events) and also at the level of the very large and the very slow (cosmic events).
As human beings we do not easily appreciate the extremes of fast/slow and large/small. Our mindbrain evolved to deal with things that, in terms of size, are between a few millimeters and a few Km and, in terms of time, are between a few seconds, a few days, and about 75 earth years
Unreflective human beings have very simple and elementary forms of intuition and common sense. We know about the outside world because of stimuli impacting on our sense organs. But the sense organs have a limited range of sensitivity. For example our eyes respond only to ‘visible’ light (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) and this does not include the ultraviolet and the infrared.
All individuals have a world view that is rooted in their nature, nurture and in serendipity. Both their conscious and unconscious mindbrains are conditioned by the time and place of their enculturation. This world view tends to be polarised around the notion of me/us and of us/them.
The us/them boundary need not be set in stone. It can expand to embrace humanity, all animals and plants, the fragile ecosystems, and even the rocks and stones themselves. This brings to mind Carl Sagan’s poetic image “We are stardust!”
4.7 billion years ago planet earth came into being and it was inanimate and lacking in consciousness. 3.6 million years ago self replicating macromolecules emerged from the perpetual churn of dynamic flux, and ‘life’ took off.
Single celled beings became many celled. There were plants with chlorophyll that could photosynthesize and provide food for animals. The vertebrate animals began as fish that evolved into amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. When a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs the mammals filled the vacant niches. Monkeys and apes appeared and gave rise to the hominids that were our ancestors. And then about 200,000 years ago human beings appeared who were conscious and possibly conscious of being conscious - especially after language evolved about 100,000 years ago.
Those are the bare bones of the present scientific worldview. That which has been called the perpetual churn of dynamic flux is what other people call God. This is useful as it offers variety that is the foundation upon which natural selection is built. There will be survival of the fittest.
We are star dust that never steps in the same river twice,
is driven by the perpetual churn of dynamic flux, and
is channeled by the natural selection of Darwinian evolution
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