Introducing a Wagnerian journey through The Lord of the Rings

The Fellowship of the Ring, Part One

The Fellowship of the Ring, Part Two

The Two Towers, Part One

The Two Towers, Part Two

The Return of the King, Part One

The Return of the King, Part Two

I spent all of this last summer becoming acquainted with Wagner’s Ring cycle, for no reason other than to become acquainted with it and enjoy watching them that much more. Little did I know that those dozens of hours of listening would pay off in another way as well.

On or around September 5th, I was visiting some relatives in Maryland, and I had the thought of making a music video of The Lord of the Rings using music from Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). I very quickly began conceiving how I could create a whole series, and which piece of The Ring I could use for which scene of The Lord of the Rings.

Even though I was away from home and had no access to my computer, I began jotting down on my phone the locations and durations of the orchestral segments in The Ring. I began listening to the music with the project in mind, brainstorming what could go where. Some combinations were obvious and were decided upon even at this early stage. These include using the theft of the ring music for the scene where Sauron gets the ring cut from his hand, the Siegfried forest music for the shire, and the “descent into nibelheim” music for the scene where we descend into Isengard and see orcs forging weapons.

So, quite some time was spent just writing down what all the orchestral pieces in the cycle were, and thinking about where they could be used in The Lord of the Rings. I wrote down anything that came to mind as an orchestral segment, which included everything in the opera that was over twenty seconds long or so.

Then, after arriving back in Seattle on September 8th, and after some more jotting and brainstorming work, I began editing in Final Cut Pro. I actually chose to use Final Cut Pro over iMovie solely for the audio cross dissolve feature, which allows me to transition from one piece of music to another as smoothly as possible. Once I became re-familiarized with the program, I was glad I had chosen it for other reasons as well.

Anyways, so I put down the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring in my timeline, and dragged in the opening prelude to Das Rheingold, and got to work. Basically the process was pretty simple throughout the project. I had the whole film right there, dragged in whatever piece of music I wanted to use, and sculpted down the footage around it. Then I would drag in the next piece of music, make sure there’s a smooth transition between it and the last one, and continue to cut footage around that piece accordingly. Of course it was almost never as simple as this sounds in reality, but overall that’s what was happening.

A lot of the choices I made in terms of which piece goes to which scene were made in advance, but some combinations came up as I went along. The video and audio would be playing together, and suddenly I’d be seeing a scene along with this music that I hadn’t planned to use in that place, but it happens to fit really well, so I’d go with it and edit that scene around the music.

The basic editing for each of the six videos took about five to eight hours approximately. Then there’d be hours of fine tuning work, making sure audio and visual transitions are smooth, and sometimes making more major changes if I didn’t like something.

I mostly avoided having any voices from the music be in the video, though there are a few places where a hint of a voice can be heard, because it trailed into the beginning of the segment of music I wanted to use. This only happens two or three times throughout the whole series.

Also, there are a few notable exceptions to the rule, which I chose to do. When Gandalf is fighting the Balrog, I had to use the music of Siegfried fighting the dragon, and it includes the dragon yelling during the fight. In my video it appears as though the Balrog is the one yelling. Also, in the first part of The Return of the King, we hear the eight voice chorus of the Valkyries at one point when Faramir and his troops are running from Osgiliath. And finally, when Frodo and Gollum are fighting over the ring, and falling over the edge of the cliff into the cracks of doom, Hagen's voice is heard shouting "Keep away from the Ring!" (in German). I didn't really have a choice here, because I needed to use all the music before and after it, and I allowed it to stay because it does really fit in the context.

And at the very end, after the ring is destroyed and the Hobbits are back in the shire, I use the beautiful song from the end of Siegfried, “Ewig war ich, ewig bin ich,” and we hear a voice really sing for the first time.

I thought this would be a really fun project to do, because the music of Wagner’s Ring Cycle is in a way the “original” score to the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s story is quite similar to Wagner’s, and as can be seen in the videos, the music summons up the same mood as the images. I was honestly surprised that no one else had done this yet.

Anyways, here again are the links to the six parts! Total running time is about 1 hour 38 minutes, making it by far the longest fan music video ever made.

The Fellowship of the Ring, Part One

The Fellowship of the Ring, Part Two

The Two Towers, Part One

The Two Towers, Part Two

The Return of the King, Part One

The Return of the King, Part Two

There are no individuals; only different elements of the whole.

The vast majority of people I have ever spoken to can all name someone on this planet that they don’t like. Someone who they think is perpetuating or encouraging a lack of morality usually. They look at this person and say “You’re a bad person. You’re doing bad things. If you didn’t exist other people would be better off.”

But if that person didn’t exist, someone else would be in their place saying the exact same things they are. In other words, the “individual” is completely irrelevant. They are merely, coincidentally, the instrument through which that particular expression is currently being expressed.

It is that element of human nature that people despise, but to label a singular individual by name, saying that they are causing that element, is ludicrous. They are only, at this point in time, the physical manifestation of that portion of the whole. If humanity grows past the point of having these undesirable elements, then nobody will display those undesirable characteristics, but currently, it is humanity as a whole that is at a place that still harbors these characteristics. You are part of it as much as the person you dislike is. The current human mindset, the one you and almost everyone else is in, is the mindset that allows monsters to grow. They just happen to be where they are, and you happen to be where you are.

The nature of "respect" for others beliefs.

A lot of people tout the idea that we should be respectful of each others beliefs. If you’re an atheist, and your neighbor is a christian, you should respect that, and treat that person with the same kindness and compassion that you would another atheist.

But there’s a fundamental problem with the notion of respecting others beliefs, because it requires on your part that you grant their beliefs credibility. Nobody unconditionally respects someone else’s belief. They say “well, I agree that your belief has enough credibility, that I will respect your having adopted it, even though I don’t agree with it.”

You can respect your neighbors belief in UFOs for example, because you can say “well, I don’t believe they exist, but I don’t know for sure. My neighbor could be right, but at this point in time I disagree.”

Would you respect your neighbor if they believed that you were ten years younger than you actually are? You might be flattered, but you’d think they were crazy if they honestly stuck to that belief in the face of your birth certificate. You would not be able to respect their belief, at all. Likewise, you wouldn’t be able to respect their belief if they believed that cars can fly, or that Star Wars was filmed in 1950. You wouldn’t be able to respect their belief if they believed that cats have three stomachs.

In other words, no human has any place within themselves to find respect for a belief that they know cannot be true. And this is the thorn in the side of the notion of unconditional respect for each others beliefs. We can behave kindly towards those who believe things that we know cannot be true, but we cannot respect their beliefs. You would have to delude yourself greatly in order to convince yourself that you’re feeling true respect for their belief. You cannot respect it because you know it cannot be.

When you feel that you cannot know for sure one way or another, then you can respect opposing viewpoints, because you agree that there is a possibility of their authenticity. And of course, in all areas where it’s a matter of taste, such as which movie is good, which car is most comfortable, etc, in those cases it is easy to respect others beliefs, because it’s a matter of taste. There is no empirical reality about it out there.

This is how mixed religion marriages can work. If an atheist marries a christian, and feels “well, I don’t believe what my partner does, but there’s always the slim possibility that it’s true,” then that’s great. The atheist is granting credibility and possibility to the christian’s beliefs, even though they don’t agree. But if an atheist enters a relationship with the knowledge that the christian stories cannot be true, they will not be able to respect the beliefs of their partner.

So, nobody is really respectful of others beliefs. They are only respectful of what they themselves have agreed to grant credibility to. When a person feels that something simply cannot be true, there is no respect for it.

Credibility comes from majority vote.

Imagine that one day you meet a person who believes that there are monsters living under his or her bed. They tell you all about them, and explain all their theories. Also, they claim that if one eats apples, the monsters under the bed grow larger. And furthermore, they tell you that there are monsters under your bed too, as well as everybody else’s.

I don’t need to ask you how you would view this person, and what your internal reaction to their claims would be. But before we run off with the assumption that people are willing to say “you’re insane and childish” if someone is, there’s an important fact we have to realize about recognizing insanity in other people.

The reality is, a lot of people wouldn’t be finding that person’s story crazy because it’s crazy, but they’d be finding it crazy because that person is in a tiny minority, if not alone, with their crazy story. See, imagine that that person’s best friend begins to subscribe to the monster story, and then a few more friends, and it begins to spread out in a small community. Imagine then that within a few years, one billion people on earth believe that there are monsters under our beds, and that they grow larger when we eat apples.

Suddenly, the idea would have credibility, regardless of how insane it is. It would be rude to say “you’re an insane child” to someone who believes in the monsters. There would be intelligent scientists and philosophers discussing the possibility of the monsters, and coming up with stories of evidence for it.

What people consider normal, weird, crazy, sane, etc, just has to do with how many people believe it. One of the first defenses a person will have when you point out how crazy something they think is, is that “lots of people feel this way!” They feel that that gives them credibility, because, if so many others feel the same way, there must be something to it.

The monster example was taking an idea that we all agree is crazy, and showing how it could gain credibility if enough people believed it. The reverse example would be taking something like religion, which is currently accepted as a valid belief system, and reducing the number of believers down until the majority of people would feel that it is insane. If there were only five christians on earth, or even fifty, or five hundred, they would be laughed and scoffed at, and be labeled insane children.

We are creatures of habit.

Everybody has heard this phrase before, but today I’d like to point to a much more elusive aspect of this reality, one that clouds our vision and distorts our perception of life every second of every day.

Everything that we feel is normal, as humans, we feel is normal because it’s a habit. This includes eating, walking, talking, breathing, and even being shaped the way we’re shaped.

Look at your legs. Look at your arms. Feel your face. How would you feel if you didn’t have a deep-set habit that your form is somehow normal? And I’m talking philosophically here, I’m not talking about whether you’re skinny or fat or whatever. I’m talking about your form as a monkey. Having two hands, two feet, a nose, two eyes, etc. It could be considered a very strange form and a very odd body to be in, but we feel completely at home in it and never even think about it. We think of ourselves as “people,” a kind of “gold standard” among creatures on earth. We hold ourselves as gods among the animals in a way.

When you walk, you don’t feel strange or amazed doing so. You just walk. One long leg moving in front of the other, and then the other one coming up to move in front of that one.... if you didn’t have a deeply ingrained habit of walking and perceiving it as a normal thing, you’d be much, much more in touch with your animal nature.

And putting on clothes especially! We feel so normal doing that. We get up in the morning and slip on a shirt, pants, whatever, and it’s like “yeah, I’m a person. I’m getting dressed.” The habit of seeing ourselves as people instead of animals greatly clouds our vision. Look at your hands. Look at your arms. Look at yourself sitting there. Why do you feel normal and comfortable? Like this is a normal way of being, of doing things, of perceiving? What do you think this is, really? Outside of “I need to go to college, I need to get a job, I want to have a family.” What is this Really about?

What do you think life might be about, outside of all the things that everyone’s always told you you need to do? School and work are just things we get programmed into doing, like a machine. There’s nothing personal about that. Having a family happens because the species wants to reproduce. So what’s going on here?

We likely will never know. But for now, it is a good thing to try and break free of the habit of perceiving all this as something normal. People are born, and they’re told “You’re so and so, you have to go to school, get a job, and have a family,” and the baby later repeats “I am so and so, I have to go to school, get a job, and have a family,” and that’s it. That’s how deep the level of thought is with a lot of people. It’s literally no different than when I program my computer to do something and then it executes it.

Break free of the habit of perceiving those steps as a kind of “center” of reality. I’ll say that again. Break free of the habit of perceiving those steps (school, college, work, family) as a kind of “center” of reality. The earth to the universe is like a femtometer to the earth, but in many people’s perception, all these earthly things are stretched way out of proportion, to fill nearly the entire universe. They know there’s other universe out there, but they experience this planet and our doings as a sort of staple or pillar in the universe. It’s not. Perceiving our form, our actions, our aspirations and systems and philosophies, as a kind of “norm” is a habit. A habit that constantly takes us away from the bizarre and mystifying question of existence.

Begin to perceive life and think about what this Really might be, at its true nature. In the presence of that mysterious question, life becomes much more alive.

The difference between projection and perception.

Most people are familiar with the idea that what one sees around themselves in the world is to a certain degree a projection of their mind. That if you see someone as angry, it could be that you’re angry and “projecting” it on them, or if you feel certain that a certain outcome is going to happen for another person, it could be that that’s the outcome you had in a similar situation, and you’re projecting your experience on them, etc.

Certainly, people do project. A lot. The average person hardly ever perceives anything clearly, always projecting their own insecurities, memories, beliefs and prejudices onto people around them. For example, a person might be completely certain that if their friend has sex with a certain person, that they’re going to get hurt and end up really sad and lonely. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that this prediction is coming from a person who had that experience themselves, and simply doesn’t know that things can be different for other people, and that not everything in the world is exactly like them.

If “not knowing that things can be different for other people” seems like something not suited to be preceded by “simply” to you, let me explain. You’re right, not knowing that things can be different for others is a big deal, I would venture to say bordering on some form of pseudo-autism, but the psychological mechanism that results in this blindness is actually quite simple, hence the use of that word. They “simply” don’t know. It’s a huge problem and mental defect, yes, but also a simple one. People are simply projecting their entire reality onto everything around them, with no awareness to the fact that other people could perceive things differently than them, or feel differently about things than they do.

So that’s projection, in it’s most basic, blinding form. It takes the projector clear away from reality, by cutting off all awareness of things around them. All they see is their own mind and their own stories, plastered everywhere in the world and onto everybody they meet.

Now, before I go into how clear perception works and why it is possible, let me first confirm that it is 100% true that you can never see anything in the world that isn’t also within you. When they say “you could not see that person as angry, unless there was anger within you,” that is true. And in this sense, the basic understanding of how human projection works is true, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that this law does not prevent a wise, intelligent person from perceiving completely clearly, as opposed to projecting. I will explain how this works.

Basically, the fundamental truth at the center of the concept of humans projecting things onto others, is that you cannot see something that you don’t believe or understand yourself. If you have no notion of fear, you won’t be able to detect if someone else is afraid. If you have no notion of anger, you won’t be able to detect when someone else is angry. You’ll see their actions, hear the volume of their voice, etc, but you won’t be able to make any sense of it if you don’t know what anger is.

The common misunderstanding surrounding this truth is this: If you see something in someone else, it is within you, only within you, and has an emotional hold on you. In the anger example, this would mean, if you see someone as angry, it’s because you have anger issues yourself, and the person you’re perceiving may or may not be angry at all, and it has no relation to your perception. This is of course ridiculous. If you were seeing anger in that person only because there is anger within you, then you would see every single person as angry, because your anger would be projected in the same way everywhere.

All that the concept “you can’t see what you don’t have within yourself” says is that in order to recognize something in someone else, you have to have an awareness and understanding of it yourself. It’s like radio channels. If you have the frequency “anger” within you, then you can pick up the signal when someone else is angry. It doesn’t mean that anger has a hold of you at that moment, and it doesn’t mean that the other person isn’t angry. It just means that in order for you to perceive anger, you did need to have it within yourself, in one way or another, otherwise it would not exist in your reality.

So, as you can see, projection and perception are two completely different things, and both are possible. Projection is a blind superimposition of your own mind onto things around you. Perception is being able to recognize the nature of things around you, using your own understanding and experience with those things, in order to be able to recognize them. The statement “it must be within you if you see it outside of yourself” holds completely true, but as I’ve shown, it does not negate the possibility of clear perception.

Imagine a giant board filled with numbers. Random numbers spread across a giant checkered board. And every person has certain numbers within their mind, and they can only see on the board those numbers that they also have in their mind. For example, if a person had only the numbers 19, 37 and 102 in their mind, then they’d only see those numbers on the board, wherever they show up, and everything else would look blank. The more numbers you have in your mind, the more you can see. It doesn’t mean you’re “projecting” those numbers. It means you’re able to perceive them, because you understand them yourself. It’s more of a resonation than a projection.

This is how projection and perception can both exist. And it is quite irritating when a clear-headed person makes an accurate observation, and is told “well, if that’s what you’re seeing, that must be what’s within you. It has nothing to do with what’s out there.” That is utter bull shit.

What science is.

As a kind of follow up to my last post, I’d like to clarify what exactly science is, and therefore explain why it can be appropriate to put “science” or “scientists” in quotes sometimes.

Science is simply the process of figuring out whether or not something is true, based on sound, testable methods. If I eat a bowl of beans, and then get in a car accident two hours later, one could hypothesize that the beans caused that. So we feed bowls of beans to a thousand people lets say, and if none, or very few of them get in car accidents later, then we know that it wasn’t the beans that caused it. That’s it. That’s science.

I have the deepest respect for science and the scientific method. The scientific method is the most perfected system we have thus far conceived as humans, for deducing what is true and what is not.

The problem is, because of the immense credibility of the scientific method, people often call what they do scientific, because it sounds really good. Scientists and “scientists” are sometimes two separate things.

And a good example of cases where even good intentioned, knowledgable scientists engage in pseudo-science, is when they test “alternative” medicines in the same way they test conventional medicines. Homeopathy, herbal medicine and chiropractic have all been called scams by the scientific community, but none of these things were ever claimed to operate the same way prescription drugs do. So when “scientists” take them into a test lab and expect them to kill symptoms instantaneously the way the drugs do, their conclusion is that they don’t work.

It’s like testing a car next to a boat in the water, and saying “my gosh, this boat is terrible. It can’t float at all.” It’s not a boat.

Most alternative medical practices focus more on building up the big picture of the bodies health, so that it can fight off whatever it’s trying to fight off. They do not target individual symptoms and attempt to eliminate them without addressing the underlying cause, the way most conventional medicine does. And in the case of homeopathy, if anybody ever advertises a remedy that claims to eliminate a certain symptom, that likely is a scam, because it’s against the principle of how homeopathy works and what it does.

Anyways, this post is not about alternative medicine or conventional medicine. Those will be discussed later in more detail. The point is that science, and the scientific method, are practically infallible. The scientific method is a system of testing whether something is true or not, and it’s a system that is flawless, because of it’s brilliant simplicity and tight relationship with reality.

It’s people that are not infallible. People who are not flawless, brilliant, simple, or in tight relationship with reality. And this is why many “scientists” and “scientific experiments” belong in quotes.

Looking at the vaccine controversy.

The vaccine debates and controversies are well known throughout the world. There are the fanatic “scientists” who say they’re completely safe and effective and the greatest thing since sliced bread, there are the fanatic “alternative” people who say that they’re 100% poison and have never worked at all, and then there are a wide variety of people in the middle.

I put “scientists” in quotes, because a lot of these people are simply reciting what they’re told by the FDA and other such organizations, which is not science driven, but profit driven. The scientific method is amazing, and it is one of the crowning inventions of the human pre-frontal cortex, but unfortunately the mainstream medical establishment is not really doing science. They’re doing business. There are often good-intentioned scientists working within the system, but what ends up being pushed and marketed and endorsed is what will make the most money, not what will make the most health. It’s as simple as that.

In the case of vaccines, the classic argument of the “scientists” is that the disease rates dropped dramatically after the vaccines were introduced. The classic argument of the anti-vaxers is that the disease rates were already dropping rapidly before the vaccines were introduced. This argument can be settled by facts and numbers. The disease rates were not dropping rapidly before the vaccines were introduced. When the vaccines were introduced, reported cases dropped dramatically. So, the scientists are right here. There were up and down trends in the reported cases prior to vaccines, but vaccines dramatically reduced the reported cases when they were introduced. Vaccines do “work.” Some better than others, as you can see in the charts below.

But this isn’t the end of the story. When the anti-vaxers say that the disease rates were already dropping rapidly before the vaccines we’re introduced, they’re wrong of course, but there’s a truth that is similar to what they’re claiming that should not be ignored.

The death rates were dropping rapidly before the vaccines were introduced.

Most of the statistical charts and data talk only about the number of cases reported. There is no mention of how many of those cases died. By the 1960s, when the vaccine for measles was introduced for example, there were only a tiny fraction of the amount of deaths from it than there were in the late 19th century or early 20th century. A lot of children were still getting measles, but hardly anybody was dying anymore, because of improved nutrition and hygiene practices.

So, if improved living conditions resulted in a massive decrease in deaths from measles between 1900 and 1960, how much more would that death rate have been reduced, with or without the vaccine, between 1960 and 2011? In first world countries, if we ceased measles vaccinations right now, how many people would actually die? Is it more or less than the occasional death or crippling adverse reaction from the vaccines? We don’t know. And we don’t know what the vaccines do to people long term. Auto-immune diseases run completely rampant throughout America now, in absurdly high amounts of the adult population, unheard of in previous centuries or even before the 1960s. Vaccines mess with the immune system in an artificial way. I think there is a logical reason to suspect a possible correlation there.

And could it be healthy for children to go through the childhood diseases and build natural immunity to them? If our modern hygiene and nutrition eliminate the possibility of death from any of these diseases, is it better to let children get them and naturally build immunity? This is a valid question, especially considering that vaccines do cause crippling and death sometimes (rarely), as well as their unknown long-term effects.

Below are some snapshots from the 1978 edition of "Health, United States." The full document can be found here, though it's a large file and may be difficult to load: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus78.pdf#050

The Universe has no size.

This might seem like a blatant contradiction to my previous post “The Universe is really, really big,” and it is actually. My previous post should have been called “The Universe is really, really big compared to us.”

In reality, nothing can have a size until it is compared to something else. An ant is small next to my shoe, my shoe is small next to me, I’m small next to an elephant, an elephant is small next to a jumbo jet, a jumbo jet is small next to a space shuttle, etc. Are all these items small then? The elephant is huge next to the ant, the jumbo jet is huge next to the elephant, and so on.

I know this sounds incredibly basic, and it is. What’s not basic though, is when we start thinking about the entire universe. How big is the universe? What are we supposed to measure it next to? There is nothing we can measure it next to because we have no perception of anything outside of it. And even if there is a space in which the universe is held, what would you measure the size of that space next to?

The fact is, no matter what exists, nothing has any definite size, ever. If the universe is in a space that stretches in all directions forever, then that’s not a size either. Forever is both everything and nothing. Forever is actually something the human mind can’t fully grasp, but in theory we can see that an endless universe would be both the smallest thing that can possibly exist, and the largest thing that can possibly exist, at the same time. It has no size. It just is.

Another possibility is that the observable universe is all the “space” that exists right now, and that “outside” of it there is just energy, not manifested as anything. No space, no time, no forms, etc. So our universe in that case would be kind of floating in nothing, and therefore still have no size, because there’s nothing to measure it against.

And if nothing has an actual size, it doesn’t really exist in the way we usually think of things existing. Our concepts of objects existing is very rooted in a notion that they “are” whatever size they are relative to us. 

What are the things in your life, if they don’t have a size? What are you? What is this?

The whole universe is right here, in your awareness, as it moves over these words.

The two kinds of beliefs.

Ultimately, nothing we believe can ever be true, because the entire idea of things being true or not true is a fabrication of our mind. But regardless, within the typical dualistic human paradigm, there are things that “seem” to be true, even though our expression of their truth is just another story. For example, when you say “I am twenty-five years old,” it very likely is true that this planet did circle around our sun twenty-five times since you were born, and each circle is what we call a year, so there is some reality that is in alignment with your story. So, even though nothing we believe can be true in a concrete way, some beliefs are “provable” and are “true” within the typical human paradigm.

Now, within this standard dualistic paradigm of humanity, there are two kinds of beliefs that one can hold in their mind.

The first kind is a belief that is neutrally, emotionlessly, almost reluctantly held by the thinker, in response to a logically convincing amount of evidence. The person holds this belief not because they care if it’s true or not, but because they’ve seen a convincing amount of evidence, and so they say “This seems to be true, so unless a lot of contradictory evidence suddenly shows up, I’ll hold this to be true. I believe it.”

For example, if it’s clearly proven that broccoli is incredibly healthy to eat, and there isn’t any contradictory evidence, I will eat broccoli. And if suddenly it’s discovered that there’s actually something really unhealthy about it, I’ll stop eating broccoli. There are plenty of other foods. Not a problem. I had no attachment to broccoli being healthy or unhealthy. I simply wanted to find out as best I could which it is, so I’m informed about what I should eat.

The second kind of belief is very different. The second kind of belief is something someone needs to believe. Something they have a very strong bias towards, on which their peace of mind is dependent. They don’t care about evidence or logic, they only care about doing whatever they can to prove that belief true, because without it, they can’t find peace, or their identity falls apart, or whatever.

For example, a belief in heaven. People like to believe in heaven, because they wish they could go to such a place after they die. They want to believe that it’s there waiting for them. There isn’t any evidence for it, but nonetheless people firmly believe they’re going to heaven, because it makes them feel good.

So, in summary, the two kinds of beliefs are:

1. A belief held by a person because they have seen substantial convincing evidence for it and have concluded, for now (they are open to any new evidence that may come along), that the claim appears to be true.

2. A belief held by a person, toward which they have a strong bias because their ego wants or needs it to be true for various reasons, usually involving fear or conformity.

Most people hold many beliefs in the second category. Way too many. I myself have a few I’m sure. But I think we all should strive to only believe things in the manner of the first kind of belief. The second kind of belief is useless, and usually hinders our ability to be powerful and productive in life, because it takes us away from reality, and distorts our perception of things. One should never care if their belief is proven false. Beliefs should not be intertwined with ego. A belief should simply be a neutral observation: “That appears to be true, based on the evidence we have so far.”

Reality as we know it does not really exist.

We humans think, talk and perceive in terms of separate identities, meaning, happiness, sadness, desire, justice, countries, governments, up, down, left, right, good, bad, easy, hard, normal, insane, and on and on and on.

These are all things that exist only in our minds, and therefore exist only on our teeny tiny little rock of a planet. They don’t exist anywhere else, at all. We don’t know why the universe is here, but there are billions of light years of stars and galaxies that are just there, burning, with no notion of any of the stories that we have invented. They’re neutral. Every human story, from identity to justice, is localized. It exists only where we are and only where we think it.

Here’s an analogy:

Imagine a huge field of trees. And I mean huge. Let’s say it’s 100 million square miles of densely packed trees.

Now imagine that one of the trees is blue. One of them. At one of the corners of the 100 million square mile field, there is one tree that is blue. Surely we recognize this as an anomaly, and we recognize that it is not a condition universal among the field, and in fact the vast, vast majority of the field is green and has no trace or hint of blue; it just doesn’t exist.

The same is true in the universe, involving all the things that humans take to be components of their reality. The entire paradigm in which we perceive reality is confined to our planet! Our entire way of thinking about life is not a constant throughout the universe. Our planet is like that blue tree. We have made up billions of stories, starting with the story of “me” as a separate identity (more on this in future posts), and we somehow feel like life “is” what is happening on this planet. That in life there is misery, in life there is happiness, in life there is good and bad. All these things don’t exist anywhere else. We made them up! Imagine reality from the perspective of our sun for a minute. Or from Mars. Or from the other stars and galaxies.

Can you see how tiny our planet is compared to what’s around it? And how nothing outside of this planet is telling the stories we tell? Reality as we know it, as we live it on this rock, does not exist. All the concepts and stories that make up our everyday lives are complete fiction. 

Our entire reality is confined to this rock. Outside of this rock there are no stories. No happiness, no sadness, no good or bad, no justice or injustice, no peace or war, nothing. These are the fictional building blocks of our projected realities. Everywhere else, there is just existence.

The Universe is really, really big.

I love pondering over the size of the universe, and coming up with different calculations to try and grasp just how big it is. When I look around me on this planet in everyday life, I feel like a lot of people aren’t actually aware of how massive it is. So, please join me as I attempt to present numbers and analogies in a graspable way.

First of all, as I’m sure a lot of you know, our sun is 93 million miles from earth. Uranus, which is the most distant planet in our solar system, is 1.59 billion miles away. It would take 17.7 years to fly to the sun in a fast jet plane, and 302.5 years to fly to Uranus.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, 669.6 million miles per hour, or 5.86 trillion miles per year. Light is 1,116,000 times as fast as a jet plane, meaning it travels 211 miles for every 1 foot the plane travels.

At the speed of light, the sun is only 8.33 minutes away, and Uranus is 2 hours and 22 minutes away. Imagine that. Traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles every second (7.44 entire loops around the equator of the earth in each second), it takes 2 hours and 22 minutes to reach the farthest planet in our solar system. That’s a very long time for such a speed. But remember, it would take 302.5 years to cover the same distance in a plane.

So, now that we have a concept of how large our solar system is, and how fast the speed of light is, let’s begin to look out at the rest of our galaxy. If you set up a miniature solar system in Seattle, WA, and placed the sun about 60 feet from the earth, the nearest other star to us would have to be put in Boston, MA, for the scale to be in proportion. This star is called Proxima Centauri, and it is 4.2 light years from the earth. Light years. Remember how it took 2 hours and 22 minutes to reach Uranus at 186,000 miles per second? Well, it takes 4.2 years to reach Proxima Centauri at the same speed, and that is the nearest star to us other than our sun. It is 24.6 trillion miles away. 264,902 times the distance of the sun.

Betelgeuse is another nearby star, about 640 light years from the earth. Traveling at the speed of light (669.6 million miles an hour, 186,000 miles a second) it would take 640 years to reach Betelgeuse. Why do I say this is nearby? Because the galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter, and 1,000 light years in thickness. If you put a model of the milky way galaxy covering all of the state of texas, our sun would be 0.2 millimeters from earth. That’s right. To fit our galaxy within the borders of texas, our sun has to be a fifth of a millimeter from the earth.

There are 200-400 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, and approximately 50 billion planets. So, with the galaxy being 100,000 light years across, Proxima Centauri and Betelgeuse, lying 4.2 and 640 light years from us, do turn out to be merely our close neighbors, even though Centauri is 264,902 times the distance of the sun, and Betelgeuse is 40.4 million times the distance of the sun. 40.4 million times the distance. This is approximately 5.05 miles from the earth and sun on our texas scale.

So, we have a concept of the size of the milky way galaxy now, and you can imagine how, if it were the entire universe, it would at least be a theoretically plausible proposition to wrap one’s head around the size of it. But the actual reality is truly ungraspable. We can lay out mathematical analogies and know theoretically what the distances are, but there is no way for the human mind to really comprehend it or imagine it clearly.

The milky way galaxy is just one out of about 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

Our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away, and is one of the closest other galaxies to us. There are some others that are slightly closer, but Andromeda is considered our main neighbor galaxy because it’s a spiral galaxy, just like the milky way, and it looks cool.

Think about this. We’re still talking about that pace of 186,000 miles per second. How could it take 2.5 million years to get somewhere at that speed? Can you imagine the distance? For 2.5 million years you’re moving 186,000 miles every single second. See why I said it’s ungraspable?

2.5 million light years is only twenty five times the diameter of the milky way. So if we made a 10 square foot model of the milky way, Andromeda would be 250 feet away from it. Not very far. Hence why it’s our neighbor galaxy. However, keep in mind that the milky way galaxy is actually 586 quadrillion miles across (100,000 light years), not 10 feet. The galaxies are only close if you’re thinking in terms of those sizes.

So, where are the rest of the 200 billion galaxies? (Take a minute to remember how big the milky way galaxy is, from the distances to Uranus and the sun, to the nearby stars, etc. There are 200 billion galaxies, all in the general size range of the milky way). They’re spread out throughout the observable universe, which is about 13.7 billion years old, and 93 billion light years in diameter.

Until now we’ve talked about light seconds (186,000 miles each), light minutes, light hours, and even light years on massive scales, from the 100,000 light year diameter of the milky way, to the 2.5 million light year distance to our neighbor galaxy Andromeda.

Now, we’re talking about the universe being 93 billion light years in diameter. Traveling at 186,000 miles every second, 11.1 million miles every minute, 669.6 million miles every hour, 16 billion miles every day, and 5.86 trillion miles every year, it would take you 93 billion years to span the universe. 93 billion light years is 37,200 times the distance between us and Andromeda. So, if you somehow travelled at the speed of light, and somehow lived to be 2.5 million years old, and made it to Andromeda, it would be like starting off on a journey from Seattle to Boston, and covering a couple blocks.

One last image: If the universe was the size of the earth, the earth would be 1.17 femtometers in diameter. A femtometer is one quadrillionth (or one millionth of a billionth) of a meter. There are one trillion femtometers in a millimeter.

The Universe is really, really big.