Edward’s Diary Entry 11 - Infinity?

We live in a crazy world, and we can now measure the craziness. When I was a kid, I had a book of science-fiction stories called “Store of Infinity”. That’s what it’s like today. A department store with infinite goods and services available for all. With our various interests, we sit down to talk, and all of a sudden we all take out our smartphones and tablets and spend hours and hours – if we have the free time – looking at the latest videos, quotes, jokes, pictures or whatever, expressing our likes or dislikes and comparing them. All the TV series, the films, and books and blogs and videos and tweets, and on and on it goes. At work we have to be totally efficient and use time to our advantage and respond to instantaneous messaging and emails. And then if you watch TV, plug in your earphones and listen to your favourite music, answer emails, read a newspaper or settle down with a nice book, you keep your mind occupied all the time with inputs from outside. And our minds are so smart they adapt right away. They even love it! Minds love to be occupied. It’s their nature; what they’ve been taught to do. And the possibilities are infinite. We no longer believe in Relativity. We want Total Infinity. And thanks to modern media and networks, we’ve got it: Worldometers publishes real-time counters that says some 2.4 million new book titles were published in 2015; 400 million newspapers circulated today; 200 billion emails sent every day; 800 million tweets; 3.5 billion google searches today, etc. Technology is a means to an end, and it’s great. But how often do we use technology instead of letting it use us? We have to have an end for the means to be viable in our lives. So in the face of Infinity, we have to focus daily on One Single Thing, one Finite Element, the one thing that makes our world go round without our even noticing it. One single mantra, a single concept: “I”, or “Who am I”. Only that concept can counteract all the attention-grabbing influences that come from the infinity of aims, desires, wishes, wants and other mental constructs that allow our perceptions to reach out to an infinite choice of possibilities in the world “out there” as opposed to our own “inner world”. Who can do this? Does anyone really want to? Are we “mad” if we look inside? Or saner? You choose.