In an ideal world things should not break, or should they?

This is one way to distinguish between the immaterialist and the idealist world views. This is just where western philosophy took a false turn. The orient may have avoided this error, but then they were not afforded the opportunity to learn from this very serendipitous mistake.

We can blame it all on Plato. He saw this world as a corruption of a higher ideal realm. This was the beginning of Western dualism: pure ideas and corrupt matter. Gnosticism had similar roots. This world was a botched creation, ruled over by an evil demiurge. Our collective destiny will be resolved in a future Armageddon between the forces of good and evil. This comes from Zoroaster (6th C. BC, Persia), a seminal thinker for all of us, and probably for Plato as well.

OK, so our world went bust, almost at the beginning, and that is why our VCR�s and our bodies also go bust. Obviously this world needs a better spin doctor, and the aquarium comes to the rescue.

Science has this story partly right, but like all their stories, they have it upside down, inside out and backwards. Let me try to set it straight.

Yes, logic and physics do play a vital role in our present reality, science has that much right. The main problem with science is that it is too platonic, or perhaps too scientific! It ascribes an absolute power to the laws of physics and the rules of logic. Those laws are carved in stone, somewhere in the cosmos. No, they are just an aspect of the cosmic intelligence that has become lodged in our collective unconscious. This may seem to be a semantic quibble, and it is as far as history is concerned, but when the sky begins to fall, it will become more than an academic issue.

The "laws" of entropy and cause and effect tell us that things have to wear out and break, and that it can be very difficult to fix them. The gremlin in your VCR is actually our collective unconscious at work. And without this gremlin there would have been nothing remotely resembling human history. History was meant to be appreciated only in hindsight, only after the eschaton. As soon as we truly appreciate it we will also have transcended it. The moral is that you should celebrate when your VCR next goes on the fritz, because it may be the very last time you will get to have that meaningful experience. Yes, you will live to miss that. Mark my words in your calendar.

If soon, we will no longer be needing to periodically replace our bodies, what does that have to say about the future of metabolism and reproduction, or simply food and sex. In the future these experiences will be largely gratuitous, which is to say that they will no longer have the depth of significance they now enjoy. The Pope was right after all, sex and sin feed upon each other. What is sex without the fig leaf? Sex, death and reproduction are presently our closest encounters with eternity. As we all become mystics of one sort or another, we will be finding other transcendental outlets, don�t you think. Do I hear any skeptics? You of little faith!

Figuring out how to retrain all those auto mechanics will be one of the principal challenges for post-modern, post-eschaton economics. More on that soon. Let me just say that the auto mechanic of the future will be functioning more like the pet psychiatrist of today. And you thought that pet psychiatry was a joke. Well, you haven�t seen anything yet!

I almost forgot. The point of this story is that just because this world is not ideal, should not imply that it is not immaterial. It just looks that way. Everybody has gotten used to taking matter seriously except for the quantum physicists. Bless them.

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rev. 4/2/97