A Pocketful of Reasoning

A POCKETFUL OF REASONING

(Realign Your Thinking, Realign Your Life)

LAURIE SONES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Laurie Sones

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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DEDICATION

To a little Bosnian girl I shall never meet and would not recognize even if I did; or to her memory if she did not survive her ordeal. Her suffering both humbled and inspired me. It is in her honour, and through her inspiration, that I have here attempted to shed light on the human condition by asking why?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Part One: The System

1. Is There No Purpose to Life and Nature?

2. Making Meaning

3. The Composition of Comparison

4. The Structure of Evermore

5. The Individual Eternal

6. The Completion of Balance

Part two: Conclusions and Personal Applications

7. The Principle of Gift

8. The Individual's Structure

9. New Concepts for Practical Creativity

10. Reconciliation beyond the Status Quo

Final Thoughts

References and Notes

About the Author

FOREWORD

It’s been my constant observation that most people struggle in their quest for self-esteem. Take the example of children brought up in the Western world. Most live in conditions awash with the facilities and opportunities needed to experience, learn, grow, and be of real use in life. Yet how many daily succumb to the deceptions of drug pushers and the like, even in the supposed safety of their schools? And what purpose do drugs serve other than to change reality—which appears to offer so much? What understanding of the nature of reality has been achieved when, despite education about the dangers of drugs, more and more kids turn to them? Is it that youngsters’ reasoning describes their lives not as wonderful opportunities but as boring, painful and completely pointless? Do they appear to themselves and each other as having no real value?

Indeed, whether child or adult, our behaviour often shows that we don’t really believe our actions have genuine worth and make any real difference to the way things are. Each day, in the United Kingdom alone, an average of 13 people take their own lives, a death rate greater than that from road-traffic accidents. Our reasoning, as yet, seems to place us as no more than pawns in a game of life of which we know neither the rules nor the purpose.

In this book I set out to change that position and to begin a realignment in thinking about ourselves and our world. I do this by uncovering the essentials of an underlying structure to existence which demonstrates that there indeed are rules and a purpose, and that each individual is a first-team player. For those who will doubt that such a structure is provable, I provide strong arguments to show that, paradoxically, an incapacity to produce categoric proof is an essential part of it. I argue also that a system of natural justice, though tangibly present, is similarly difficult to verify.

I make no deliberate attempt to establish dogmatic truth, indeed quite the reverse. An intrinsic part of individuality is that one’s version of events will always be just that bit different from all others’. This is a necessary feature that allows us to interact creatively with each other. Provided that your version of the truth sits well with you, and allows you to live a constructive, happy, and fulfilling life, all is well. If, however, things are not so easy, and awkward questions just aren’t being met with answers that you consider acceptable, then there may be some food for thought in the following pages.

The creative mind will always engage, challenge, and finally expand and deepen its understanding of truth. It’s in its nature. It is its true purpose.

[N.B. I’ve chosen to use the word man to represent humankind; this has no male chauvinistic intent, and merely seeks by economy to improve the book’s readability. Indeed, I do insist here that man and woman, far from being true opposites or in opposition, are in reality merely two different representations of the same essence. Objective differences between them can never belie that totally essential quality. Moreover, I argue that this equivalence applies similarly to the varieties of race and creed, and, in a deeper sense, to all life forms.]

PART ONE

THE SYSTEM

I think there are clearly religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe.(1)

Professor Stephen Hawking, cosmological scientist

1. IS THERE NO PURPOSE TO LIFE AND NATURE?

On 8 February 1993, I sat watching a television documentary that was to change my life. The subject was the war then raging in Bosnia. It was a bloody conflict, a civil war based on cultural, ethnic, and religious divisions. The term ethnic cleansing was used in this terror as a political justification for abduction, murder, and other atrocities.

A remarkable thing about this war was that the rest of the civilized world was apparently willing, yet unable, to stem its brutality. The United Nations’ forces were spectators, picking up the pieces when and where they could by trying to get aid convoys into, and the wounded out of, the afflicted areas. Still more remarkable was that carnage could be wrought so openly, with the world’s media taking the opportunity to report live and in detail the horrors of war.

It was the account of one of those horrors that was to have such a profound and lasting effect on me. A woman was telling how she, twelve other women, and a six-year-old girl, had been treated in captivity after an ethnic cleansing operation. Incarcerated in an elementary school-house in Sokolac, 20 miles from Sarajevo, the women were subject daily to multiple rape. Incredibly it has been mooted that such rape had a political motive, in that any child born from this terrible intimacy would be of its father’s cultural and ethnic persuasion, and therefore bolster the numbers on the rapists’ side, while at the same time denying his opponents the opportunity of adding to theirs. Whilst to some this violation may therefore be justified by some sort of reason, the outcome for the six-year-old girl seemed to me to be truly beyond reason. For she too had been taken by her captors and multiply raped.

She was returned to the rest of the group unable to walk, split open, blood pouring down her legs, wanting to kill herself. The other women, all cramped together in the same room, managed to stop her.

Even through the mediation of a television screen I could feel the horror. That deep emotion still lives with me today. I recall later the same evening eating out with a friend, and having to make a rapid exit from the restaurant at the end of a meal whose taste had meant nothing to me. My mind had been grappling incessantly with what I’d seen, but I couldn’t come up with any rational explanations. Once outside I broke down, crying, kicking, and shouting in outrage: How can that happen?

When eventually this overflow subsided, I was both surprised and jolted by my subsequent feelings. Strangely, there remained no direct sense of blame on individuals, as there had been initially. Somehow, for me, what had been represented was something beyond the act itself. Not that the image had disappeared from my mind. Indeed it now seemed even more intense. What was going on?

Unexpectedly there grew a feeling of enormous guilt, and it was from this that I was able to work out what was happening within. I was sensing that I was somehow part of the action, both victim and rapist alike. Some element of responsibility resided in me, yet how could this be? I could not possibly have stopped that terror or any of the other millions of atrocities perpetrated over time.

The phase of responsibility was succeeded by one of frustration. I wanted urgently to act in order to change things, but didn’t know what I could do to be of use. Here I’m not talking about the provision of money, aid or medicine, all of which are most noble and necessary elements of helping, but of the ability to influence people’s minds and behaviour.

I had long been a believer in education and learning as the best way of changing people, or rather helping them change themselves, for the better. Benjamin Disraeli, an outstanding British Prime Minister of the Victorian era, said:

Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends.

I had extended that sentiment, replacing the word country with world in both instances.

Today, we in the West believe we have a better, more civilized way of life than ever before, with, for example, improved health care, hygiene, food production and housing, and with easier transport broadening our horizons. Yet there’s still terrible violence, outrage, and worse, an underlying discontent that seems almost unchanging irrespective of scientific and cultural advances. Was I wrong about education being the way forward, or was it perhaps the balance of what was being learnt, and more to the point what was being taught, that was askew?

In relation to the gross abuse of a six-year-old child, no adequate answers to my question (how could that happen?) were forthcoming. Oh yes, we can talk of God and fate, evil and the Devil, and bandy such glib phrases as it’s always been this way, and nature is cruel like that. Yet somehow aren’t we at best uncomfortable with these notions, and at worst more and more outraged at Man’s inability to change the tide of his own malevolence, greed, and bigotry? Do we sense, I wonder, a fundamental imbalance in Man’s achievements? Some item of information critical to the reasoning of the whole process of life seems to have eluded us. Our technological brilliance produces machinery that can send men to the moon, yet we can’t provide the means required to avert violence and atrocity. What an irony that our technical achievements in communications bring us not confirmation of our successes but face to face with our huge failings.

The following sequence of questions summarizes the position.

Can we continue to allow a little girl’s sufferings to pass off without further thought or exploration?

Can we provide answers that would help stop such things ever happening again?

Could we, armed with such answers, take the necessary actions to this end? Would we be brave enough?

Can we at least prove, by our preparedness to shift position even a little, that the agonies of one so innocent were not entirely in vain?

Can we yet adequately address the question of why?

There is an overwhelming incentive to try. That child represents not only herself, but all who question our inability to comprehend and nurture our own humanity.

Where do we start when faced with such questions, emotionally loaded as they are? First, I’d hold it’s necessary to offload as much of that emotion as possible. Not to do so invites a colouring of judgement that could mask many truths. Better still, the emotion might be channelled as a driving force to seeking out those truths and exposing them to our conscious judgement.

With some containment or redirection of emotion achieved, what then? What do we have to work on? A question, a puzzle, still the question why? We may broaden the question to: Why are things the way they are? But most attempts to confront this question look immediately towards the need for categorical answers, answers of absolute certainty, and consequently grind to a halt. Therefore, let’s take a slightly different approach and ask another question instead: What kinds of answers could be acceptable to the question? Provable ones comes the reply. Have we now gone round in a circle? Surely certain and provable are one and the same. Maybe not. Let’s examine just exactly what provable means. First, a dictionary definition of prove:

To try by experiment, to ascertain by fact, by evidence, to demonstrate, to show, to establish validity.

One word that seems to me to jump from this entry is fact, which is itself defined as anything actually true. There are still people on this planet who believe it’s actually true that the world is flat. To these people this is fact and all evidence to the contrary is flawed. Ridiculous, we may say, We can prove the world is round by any number of methods, including satellite photography. That may well be so, but sometimes the boot is on the other foot.

An instance of this inversion occurred in the early part of the sixteenth century, when Nicolas Copernicus, the Polish theologian and astronomer, theorized that the earth revolved around the sun.