If you’re a fan of Frank Zappa, well, Frank Zappa gets a lot of cites for this statement and that’s fine. Truth be told, he was born in 1940, long after this pithy statement had a rash of appearances in newspapers across the United States as early as October, 1927. It was picked up by a Scottish distiller-and-maker-of-witty-epigrams, named Lord Thomas Robert Dewar in 1928 (he read Brit versions of US papers) so he’s credited with it too. It’s been recurring all the decades since—the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, the Cornell Engineer, even the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Circus (screenplay by Robert Ellis and Helen Logan)—because, a Truth will stick around to be re-dis-covered forever.
Truth springs Eternal: A Mind Is Like a Parachute; It Only Functions When It Is Open.
Open-mindedness seems the natural default to me. Yet I’ve known people who were welded shut with close-mindedness on a certain subject, or as a lifestyle. Out of fear? Of what? An ‘unknown?’ The Unknown? Remember the friend who gave me the Rainer Maria Rilke verse of “live some distant day into the answers?” (Post 4. Clinging I Shall Die of Boredom) She also framed and gave me this quote:
“I dwell in possibility.”
Emily Dickenson
What is so fearful about ‘possibilities’ that a person cannot bear to stray one question away from their known? They remain clamped shut to considering anything other than what they presently believe? Why not ask? Why not venture? You can always come back. You can always return to Square One. Ground Zero. From whence you came. You will not get lost. I’ve asked a lot of questions…a…lot…of…questions…and I’m still standing.
A case for close-mindedness—not open to any and all considerations, to other possibilities—it just baffles me. I can’t make the case. It seems so limiting to me. Can anything be gained by closed-mindedness? Who benefits from close-mindedness? Perhaps a person wants to limit the amount of information they must contain? To be open-minded to possibilities, to ask questions of the status quo would be to have to contain ‘more’ than they want to deal with? Maybe.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes.
Life is all about evolving. Think about fire and the heat it provides. How it started with a couple rocks or sticks, a teeny spark and look what we have evolved fire into today. It can be brought inside and char our meat beyond palatability. It can be harnessed to provide warmth through big silver hoses to anywhere in our house. Think about communication. From smoke signals to jungle drums to telegraph wires to air waves to a computer on your wrist! Think about the Industrial Revolution…then picture every “As Seen on TV” gadget that has ever been invented. That’s evolution. And evolution is what EVERYTHING is about. Evolve is what EVERYTHING does. We started as energy blasted from a big bang, not even a dust mote, and look what we and billions of galaxies have evolved to.
I recall that the word ‘evolution’ may be a sticky wicket for some. Evolving is just growing. A baby grows to a child who grows to an adult who grows to an elder. What if a baby didn’t ‘evolve’ into an adult? What if an acorn never evolved into an oak? Growing is what is built in every molecule of our DNA, in every thing. Life was given to us for the purpose of growing. Not just in size and stature (or acquisitions), but in improving—understanding, communicating, coping, interacting, contributing. Learning more about why we were created in the first place. Evolving. Growing better, stronger, smarter, kinder.
Evolving is improving. Look at how rudimentary inventions have been improved through multiple generations of product. “All New and Improved.” And they just keep on improving, growing, evolving. Since humans are the creators of inventions, products, we should be the leaders in evolving and growing our selves.
I hear myself pointing out that even God “evolved.” Look at the wrathful, smiteful God he was in the Old Testament, sending all sorts of plagues and tragedies on one of his most faithful, Job. Then, seven, eight hundred years later when the New Testament books were being written after an infusion into the human species named Jesus, look what a loving father he grew into being. Did God himself evolve and grow? The Omniscient one? Once Omniscient, he should always be Omniscient, right? Maybe he got better writers to describe him?
So I’m pointing out that God probably didn’t ‘evolve.’ It really was OUR understanding of God and OUR place in the universe that evolved. We grew in our understanding about ourselves, the human psyche, relationship to nature, our surroundings, that big ball of heat in our sky, and those starry, starry nights. Hence, as we evolved/grew in our understanding of ourselves, our understanding of the unknown/Unknown ‘evolved’ with us. We wrote new stories and myths to exhibit our new understanding. Practically every Sci-Fi show or book you’ve seen or read is someone trying out a new possibility of our existence to consider.
I’ve mentioned Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, many times, and many times repeated one of the plethora of Dots he dropped: “Myths are the contents of man’s psyche.” So as we grow in our understanding of our place in the universe, our myths grow with us. Hu-man started out feeling there was something else in control of us, so we called upon sun gods, moon goddesses, fertility gods, corn maidens, rain gods, and multitudes of gods we intuited we had to appease for help in surviving this unknown nature around us.
Greek gods were overtaken by Roman Gods. Egyptian gods, Indian gods paralleled. Everyone was writing their stories to better grasp an understanding of our place in a life on this one planet of an unfathomable universe of unknown ‘out there.’ Gods kept being replaced, morphing, as the first humans grew to cogitate on their experiences in life and increase their understanding of who we are…trying to answer, “why” are we? Evolving. Eventually we made our way from many gods to one god. Polytheism to monotheism. And even monotheism just keeps evolving, changing, splitting, asking new questions and getting further awareness.
Evolving is our way of life. How can we do our best if we aren’t open to other possibilities, the all-new-and-improved, the next step in growing? Growing/evolving/becoming more than we are now/growing forward—it was hardwired into us as the very first energy of the big bang started a multi-billion-year-process that would become us. That’s a Big Picture.
You really can’t stop evolution. You can be blind to it. You can deny it. But you can’t stop evolution. Humans are going to evolve even if it means leaving others behind.
It is reported that there are as many as six (6) billion, with a b, Earth-like planets in our galaxy. And billions of worlds beyond our solar system. Whoever set off the big bang which evolved into this particular human species on this one-of-billions-of-planets biosphere–It built in the mechanism to evolve. We are ONLY here because of the innate and persistent evolution that has taken place for billions of years. Billions of years.
If you think of it at all, you can’t think that this place that we are all at right now is the end all-be all for human evolution. If as a species we can’t exhibit the love and acceptance that Jesus personified as an example for us, if we can’t “love thy neighbor as thyself” (as commanded over two millennia ago) or even “tolerate thy neighbor,” or erase all war, erase all inequality, erase all hunger and poverty, how can we possibly think that we are where God intended us to “stop” our evolution. Poke a fork in it—Done? Don’t think so. I certainly don’t have the quantity of hubris needed for that, so I keep on asking, searching, growing—evolving.
Just like the acorn has everything in that tiny kernel to become a giant oak, so does every soul born have everything inside to grow into a manifestation of the Eternal–that is the Self that Jung helps us find.
So to me, the Raison d’etre is to grow. Be All That You Can Be. Look on the inside and you will find the Eternal hidden there, covered up with all the flotsam and jetsam and BS you’ve piled on yourself from the day you entered earth’s atmosphere. Re-learn all the Knowing you dis-remembered when you left that warm, cozy, fully-nurtured womb for a shockingly cold, bright-lighted earth’s atmosphere. The Ember of that Knowing is still there. The Raison d’etre is to look at You and find It.