Thinking Education and beliefs.

 

 

Thinking Education and beliefs.

All my life I loved animals. I chose to live the rest of my life, after retirement, in a place where I can be close to nature and the four-legged creatures. The animals are much like us and have similar bodies, emotions, feelings of loyalty, and even a sense of humor. What they don’t have is our ability to think. We can think about life, ideas, and death. Our thinking allows us to solve problems, invent things, and be creative. It also allows me to remember some things and forget others. Without it, I may lose my mind. If my conscience existed before the moment I was born, I would love to remember where I was and predict where I will be after death. I must consider however that there could exist a good reason why that knowledge is hidden from me. This life may just be a holiday from another life that we can’t see from here. Our senses don’t detect much of the universe.

When we see a newborn baby we realize that there is something in it that makes it a person. The newborn doesn’t yet know anything that it can do by thinking and acting. It knows how to breathe, eat, and clear the waste from the body but not much else. The rest comes later mostly after observing those who already know. For the animals, it happens much faster. They act more on the sub-conscience while we learn ideas.

At one point I learned to use my hands to grab and at another to walk on two feet. How did I do it? I don’t know. I learned millions of little things that I use throughout life and can’t remember when or how. One thing is clear to me when I think about it. I am not free. All of what I know, like how to be a human being, I learned from those around me. Not acting that way would have been unpleasant for me since society made those myths we learn and insist that all humans learn them. I learned what others call common sense. Much of what we learned in the past turned out not to be true. The Earth is not flat, and we are not the center of the universe.

Year after year the people around were teaching me more about how to be like them, therefore human. If I had any ideas of doing something my way I got criticized and when I did it their way I received praise. Each year I was working hard to do things like my elders. The kindergarten turned to grade one, in which I was waiting to be in grade two. The kids in the next grade were always bigger, faster, and knew more things and I couldn’t wait to be like them. The biggest change was graduating from grade eight. The kids looked like adults and I assumed that adults had all the freedoms of the world.

When I came to Canada there was a different graduation system. At eighteen you could pass a test and drive and at twenty-one you could drink alcohol. Young people joined their older counterparts in the race to see who can make more money. They divided their time between work and pleasure. Work provides money that will allow to buy happiness, but it never does. The work is something they do but wouldn’t have done without pay. The money is promising to buy pleasure but can’t. The reward is always in the future and after a brief moment is in the past. The “life” remains unfulfilled. We are always living in anticipation of something better coming. A trip perhaps or a long-awaited visit. Possibly a move to a better place.

People go through the levels of education, train for work, get promoted, and discover that they are making someone else rich or more powerful while not improving their own lives. Retirement comes and they don’t have the energy to truly enjoy it. The human race is growing new humans to be like us and tell them that this is freedom, which they believe.

The biggest questions are never answered. Who am I? I am not my body. I have seen living people die and leave the body. Where did they go? Religions try to answer that question but never agree.

Humans tell stories and stories become reality. Religions are stories that often were written by the smartest humans of their time drawing upon stories of humans in touch with the divine. Other humans worked hard to shape the stories and make them improve what humans do, and we teach those ways to new humans. They always have some promises for a better future but the ultimate future is not seen by the living.

I am convinced that the Universe is not dumb and that we are not a mistake of nature. The universal mind is guiding us in some direction and acts like a loving father or parent. It leaves us in charge giving us free will. It exists regardless if we are alive or after we die. It allows us to destroy ourselves or improve our existence. We choose with the help of our stories.

Now  I am old and perhaps at the end of my life. I don’t know if the animals may have a better life without my ability to think. They don’t have a religion or God and don’t think about the afterlife. I can’t avoid it.