Patience is a virtue we’ve lost.

There is a phrase I once heard that goes something like, “an enigma wrapped up in mystery”, essentially a thing unexplainable. This would be how I would describe the human mind, how can we even think to claim we understand it? After all these centuries & great minds such as Socrates, Freud, Jung, among many, who have spent lifetimes trying to learn but never truly known the truth about our consciousness. Thought they all believed that they had, they had merely scratched a portion of the surface. Thus far we have uncovered small, simple clues to understand what the mystery is, but there is still much we don’t know.
At times, looking around me I feel saddened to see only proof that we can barely handle the knowledge we already have. To quote a favourite, “I was reading about how countless species are being pushed towards extinction by mans destruction of forests. Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”(-Bill Watterson)
Our biggest hindrances today are the instabilities we’ve created in our society because of the egocentric mentality that has evolved. We now live in a world where everyone almost literally lives in a bubble and if we take certain aspects of scientific progress, science fiction stories and the world as it is around us, we can see that pretty soon we might all actually be living in bubbles. To put it in the clearest possible way, we have become a race of people with the capacity for great things, drowning in our own apathy and taking the world with us. Even many of the so-called heroes working for everyone’s benefit are only doing so to gain something for themselves, only a very small few are truly in it to make a difference.
Bouncing on to another point of interest: as far as the concepts of aliens go, in every movie we see, there is one thing to be noted, they are all either physically superior to us & brutal or have mental abilities far exceeding our own. Our concept of a superior intelligence was & is higher thinking, telepathy, and pre-cognition, among others. I don’t know how many people are aware of this, but the average human uses maybe 10- 15% of their brain capacity, Einstein at his peak used maybe some 20%, give or take a bit. Most people agree that expanding our minds and learning is the only way for us as a species to grow; intelligence is what will see us through the future, not power or cunning. The strange thing is that even knowing this we persist in our anarchic ways, making small allowances but missing the big picture; passing up the opportunity at a better life. Today we live our lives as though we are on Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t believe a utopia is a long-term option. Humans, being what we are, would eventually find something that was unacceptable; we might have\someone who gets greedy or maybe just plain bored. It is inevitable; it is our nature. But we might get close if we can only learn to reopen our minds to what we can be, if we see our world that supports us, from desolate deserts to lush rainforests to the merciless arctic. The one truth that I strongly feel we need to accept is that all men are created equal & that no matter whom you are you take the good with the bad. After all, how can you know joy without sorrow, sanity without insanity? No human being could live like that; eventually someone would get curious about the wrong thing & it would signify the beginning of the end.
As a species we are driving ourselves toward a bleak future lacking in humanity. Perhaps we need to take a clue from stories like Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and many others which show us the kind of clinical, heartless and in the end, lifeless society we could create. The scariest part of it all is that as science and technology have grown, we can actually see many of these things becoming a reality, like a real life Big Brother perhaps?Within each one of us exist the race memories of millennia of evolution & learning & failure as well. We are but one small stem on a branch of life; we have a long way to grow to our full potential, so we don’t have to feel like were running out of time. Time is the one thing we still have if we put it to good use. A day will come when our branch will also bloom & flourish into new ones; all we need is a little patience & a bit of faith in ourselves. After all, we have in a very short time created a potentially wonderful society even in the face of constant anger, hatred & cynicism. So what’s to stop us going just a little further?