[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_99mcINufQ[/youtube]
We are a people of destiny. Destined to be the masters of time.
Destined to be nearest to the gods. . .
No race on this world has been entirely free from the practice of human sacrifice in some form, at some time. The Chinese, Hindus, Egyptians, Hebrews, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, Central and South Americans, and many other peoples, have found a need to sacrifice their fellows to satisfy some religious custom. But despite the shaman’s boast that he and the Aztecas were the Masters of Time, lopping off the heads of their hermanos didn’t add a single second to their personal mortality.
Films that make it around the world can become important cultural benchmarks for shared ideas and experiences. The Matrix is such a film. A venturesome science-fiction/mythical story pitting man against machine against new age nihilism against slow-motion bullets, with a dash of time transcendence thrown in for special effects crunchy goodness. Without putting a value judgment on it as a film or a philosophy, it can still serve as a planet-wide meme for the purveyors of and partakers in world culture, even a rudimentary philosophy of reality.
And this is valuable because. . .
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtPPG8CJGd4&feature=channel_page[/youtube]
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Wait, not that.
This one.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhymzx6ovfQ&feature=related[/youtube]
“All I’m offering is the truth— nothing more.”
Yes. Truth is valuable; truth can illuminate destiny. And it can become a personal possession. But.
Man’s search for meaning— as a cultural benchmark— hasn’t taken him very far beyond the idea that mind is much, much more than an electrochemical mechanism that is somehow mysteriously capable of bringing about the non-mechanical world of thought and self-consciousness, along with an often-insatiable need for pleasure and self-gratification; Party on Wayne.
And then there are those who want to somehow master time; those that believe truth is more real than the material world in which they find themselves, and know there is something more going on. They don’t like the idea of the end of time, their time, so they dare; like Neo; they dare to change their life goals beyond the material.
The goal of human self-realization should be spiritual, not material. The only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual, and eternal. Mortal man is entitled to the enjoyment of physical pleasures and to the satisfaction of human affections; he is benefited by loyalty to human associations and temporal institutions; but these are not the eternal foundations upon which to build the immortal personality which must transcend space, vanquish time, and achieve the eternal destiny of divine perfection. . .
Jesus portrayed the profound surety of the God-knowing mortal when he said: “To a God-knowing kingdom believer, what does it matter if all things earthly crash?” Temporal securities are vulnerable, but spiritual sureties are impregnable. When the flood tides of human adversity, selfishness, cruelty, hate, malice, and jealousy beat about the mortal soul, you may rest in the assurance that there is one inner bastion, the citadel of the spirit, which is absolutely unassailable; at least this is true of every human being who has dedicated the keeping of his soul to the indwelling spirit of the eternal God.
After such spiritual attainment, whether secured by gradual growth or specific crisis, there occurs a new orientation of personality as well as the development of a new standard of values. Such spirit-born individuals are so remotivated in life that they can calmly stand by while their fondest ambitions perish and their keenest hopes crash; they positively know that such catastrophes are but the redirecting cataclysms which wreck one’s temporal creations preliminary to the rearing of the more noble and enduring realities of a new and more sublime level of universe attainment.
—The Urantia Book
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