Recently I began thinking of things, using an arrowed cross measure. An arrowed cross is a cross having the vertical and horizontal lines (measures) having arrows at their extremities. (The arrows simply indicate directions. Nothing else.) The horizontal measure is marked with 1 on the left and 10 on the right. It is a measure of survival competition on the earth, or the measure of egos and imitations/competitions driven by the egos. It is the “tellurian” measure of realities, which are characterized by the collision and jostling of egos against egos.
   The vertical measure is marked with 0 (nothing) below and ∞ (infinity) above. It is in a manner of speaking a “cosmic” measure. The lower half of the measure (0 measure) is a sort of scientific scale by which our analysis of all the phenomena around us is gauged. The upper half of the measure (∞ measure) is a sort of artistic scale by which our creativity in search of our “self” and “style” (=values/visions) is gauged.
   With this cross measure applied, Qaddafi is an apt example of 10 tumbling down to 1 along the horizontal measure. He was a monumentally egocentric figure who had no heart to feel for the others. He, like so many despots in the past, tormented many people and at the end died a dog’s death hunted down by the tormented. There is little about him that can be measured with the 0 scale or the ∞ scale.
   The world today faces not a few knotty problems. The earthly pundits huff and puff on TV, applying the horizontal measure only. They don’t know we are cosmic beings also. (They better learn something from Miyazawa Kenji.) The ultimate solution, if any, for an individual or a country may never materialize until we begin seeking our “self” and “style” by applying the vertical measure also.

Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, is an outspoken proponent of the multiverse. According to him, the multiverse is “a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes,” our universe being a single expanding bubble inhabiting it. As I understand it, his multiverse proposition may be based on the following backgrounds:

1. Einstein’s equations break down at the initial moment of our universe. The big bang therefore provides no insight into what powered the bang itself.
2. In the 1990s, some astronomers measured the rate of cosmic deceleration, which they theorized to result from gravity, but they discovered instead that the expansion of space went into “overdrive about 7 billion years ago” and has been accelerating ever since. This signifies the discovery of “dark energy” which drives every galaxy apart from each other.
3. After that, scientists attempted to determine the amount of dark energy to explain the observed cosmic acceleration. But this attempt ended in a spectacular failure with a “greatest mismatch between observation and the theory in the history of science.”
4. String theory, which was originally hoped to provide a single set of definitive equations realizing Einstein’s dream of a unified theory, came up with numerous solutions, which may be as numerous as 10⁵⁰⁰ . The enormous diversity of possible universes thus implied proves vital to the advocates of the multiverse.
5. Potential collisions between our expanding universe and its neighbors may provide direct evidence for the multiverse.

The “multiverse” expands the circumference of our ignorance a billionfold. Questions arise. Like what about the beginning and the possible end of the multiverse? Or is the question of the beginning and the end (time scale) of the multiverse completely irrelevant? And, as I strongly suspect, there may be neither “physical” zero nor “physical” infinity, like there is no “physical” time. If there is some interaction between the bubble universes, isn’t the totality of the multiverse still a universe, so isn’t the multiverse a misnomer at best?

  “Mandela, Mandela, you’re the only one. There’s nobody like you,” sang many South African people in praise of what he’s done for them.
    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Humanity has lost a brightest star sparkling with celestial grace like Venus in the predawn sky. But, of course, the star Mandela will keep on shining in our hearts even more beautifully.
    In the apartheid South Africa, he must have suffered hellish pains both physical and mental in the face of heartless prejudice and sheer cruelty. His soul must have been tormented by incessant onslaughts of bitter hate, anger, and grief. But he eventually turned his hate, anger, and grief into Love, Forgiveness, and Smile magnified a billionfold.
    The scarcity of Mandela wisdom in the human world is appalling. We definitely need Nelson Mandelas in Syria (where the DT-worshiping fanatics are butchering each other in a Dan-Brownesque Inferno), in Japan and China (where petty-minded, goody-two-shoes politicos are bickering over tiny islands in the East China Sea), and everywhere around the world.
    “Mandela, Mandela, you are the only one. There’s nobody like you,” we must keep singing.

Although you may most likely disagree with me, there is no universe, and therefore no “space” and no “time,” for a stone under your foot. You disagree with me because you are completely forgetting that you are a “conscious” being. Our consciousness has given birth to our language (and science), which itself is a miracle, something so marvelous I have no thought to complain about it. The soft spot of our language (and concepts), however, is it is based on our “seeing is believing.”
    It’s been a long TIME since I began telling my friends there is no such thing as time in our universe.
    Quite belatedly, though, the scientific world seems at long last to be warming up to the notion of “timelessness” of our universe.
    According to Craig Callender in IS TIME AN ILLUSION? in the special collector’s edition of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:
   “many in theoretical physics have come to believe that time fundamentally does not even exist.”
   “As physicists pursue his (Einstein’s) dream of unifying relativity with quantum mechanics, … Many held that a unified theory will describe a timeless world.”
   Also,  “Space and time are secondary concepts that are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein’s university professors, famously declared.”

My position is pretty close to Minkowski’s. Space and time are not fundamentally there to decide our fate. Space and time are something we must create for ourselves from our cosmic (self) positions also. The sad reality is that our individual spaces and our individual times, often ill-conceived from our tellurian (ego) positions only, cross each other to create a murderous mess of destruction as can be seen in the world today.

On December 18, 2015 (when Oliver Carter, my dear beer-drinking buddy, died of cancer), I heard CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewing American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail
Kornienko in the International Space Station (ISS). Roughly 400 km above us, the ISS is hurtling around Earth at a speed of 7.66 km/sec. About the climate change accord recently signed in Paris between 195 nations, Kelly expressed his view: It is good news; the atmosphere looks so thin and fragile with pollution plainly evident from the ISS.
    Asked about the US-Russian relationship aboard the ISS, Kornienko replied that America and Russia cooperate with each other quite nicely and suggested that the politicians at loggerheads with each other on the ground spend at least one month on board the ISS together, which would resolve most of their problems.
    On the ground, the farce being acted out by the GOP’s birdbrained presidential candidates and their equally purblind supporters in the face of ISIS threat is so dismaying. It’s all the more disheartening now that it is happening in America, a nation considered an important leader of the world. The likes of ISIS may keep arriving as long as the Koran contains more than 100 verses urging believers to destroy nonbelievers. We need open-minded wisdom to deal with the inanity of
religious fundamentalism. Simply forcing one’s values upon opposing ideologies won’t work.
    Perhaps, all of us subcelestial mortals, Trump and the other
Republican presidential hopefuls in particular, must be shot up to the ISS to gawk down at the thin and fragile atmosphere precariously perched on our blue planet Earth.

Around 6 a.m. December 28, 2016, I was adrift in shallow sleep enjoying a heavenly warmth of my bed. Presently beautiful words of remorse over the Pacific War carnage and reconciliation after that began flowing into my sleepy skull from TV by the bed. They belonged to the speeches made by Prime Minister Abe and then by President Obama at Pearl Harbor. In my early morning stupor, I suddenly felt “heart” in them and was almost driven to tears. It has been widely known that Abe is a hawk intent on rewriting the Japanese “pacifist” constitution into a more “hard-nosed” one.
   The year 2016 has been another of the craziest and bloodiest year for the world. The U.S. presidential election came out with a pure demagogue of Donald Trump after more than one year of hoo-ha. (Some pundits called it idiocracy.) Trump is an erratic individual avaricious only of “money”, “power” and “name” and least steeped in “truth” (science) or “beauty”. He unabashedly proclaimed to “make America great again” when he, as an important leader of the world, was supposed to proclaim to run the world more wisely.
   The plight of stupid people electing stupid leaders is as clear as day. See Venezuela after Chavez, North Korea under Kim Jong-un, Syria under Assad, and countless other examples. Stupid leaders do a thing or two to please the populace that have voted for them. Some euphoria may follow but is always short-lived. Their long-term effects are mostly dire consequences.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the American political system is mature enough to place shackles on the holly-golly of Trump.

I see trees of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
Oh yeah

croons Luis Armstrong from my TV.

This may be one reality of our world we must nurture by all means. But the world is inherently precarious, and humans inane through and through.
   The same TV keeps blaring out the other reality of our world ― human follies and sufferings ― day in and day out.