By Eric Zehnder
In the 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. Up until then, leaders alike thought the opposite: they thought the earth was completely fixed and unmoving. They built both governing and mental systems according to the way they thought. They built society as a totally fixed order system where everyone knew his or her place in the order and no one ever questioned it. No one ever got up and thought new or moved forward on their own.
A massive by-product of the new model by Copernicus went far beyond the field of science. Its new zeitgeist made people believe if the earth was not fixed neither were human beings.
If the earth moved, in an also moving universe, then so could humans. If the nature of the universe and spheres in it was to be moving, then the nature of humans as individuals, in groups, in their spheres, and those spheres with them should be moving and advancing.
Freedom meant: You do not need anyone’s permission to advance. By that definition, before the new guiding mindset by Copernicus, the tendency was to build an overarching total system where everyone had to ask permission.
Such a “fixed-order” system was extremely low in innovation. This in turn gave low production, a poor economy for the bottom 90 percent. There was almost no upwards social or economic mobility.
The concepts of service or servant-leaders almost didn’t exist. If you were on the top you, don’t raise the bottom, strengthen the middle, or work to make everyone achieve fruit-bearing. You just give orders.
The nation of a “perfect-fixed-order system” came from an understanding of one of the ways, Aristotle thought about language.
Think of a word. In fact, let’s use the term “word.” It is spelled w-o-r-d. You have a fixed-order system on a tiny scale. The “empire” would be the same thing on a maximized scale. In the case of having a “word” you can’t just let a letter evaporate, melt until you can’t make it out, or change its place in the order. If you allow even a little of this, the entire word won’t work.
There was a global empire, a global religion and nations whose leaders thought with this model they finally had the “true word.” Most important to know about life: this was both your stabilizing force and our policy guidance force. This model had a great competitor in Jesus Christ, and also in Plato and Neo-Platonism. Both of these put what was inside a person, both a singular life force and their own mind ahead of any finite body, small, middle, or big.
But nonetheless for hundreds of years called the Dark Ages, the Aristotelean thought about the “first word” held sway in most institutions or nations. Then singularly, suddenly, significantly, in the early 1500’s in Europe, the Renaissance following Plato and the Reformation following Christ broke out.
From it came a very different way or mind of looking at words. It was observed that the same word was used many times in many different sentences, essays, or occupations, spheres etc. and nothing was breaking down. In fact, people were getting all kinds of breakthroughs. Anywhere they turned this mind, in any self-talk, relations, occupations, spheres and even relation with God or the transcendent; people were constantly breaking old barriers and going upwards. This was something new–a river that runs upwards.
The key was no longer a fixed word by itself. The key was an explorative and developed mind in each person capable of multiple uses and headed towards even infinity, or exponentiation or to say it differently, a heart and mind that cannot be stopped. But for people to understand each other, interact, and to build with each other there had to be shared principles or universal ways that words are embodied in.
Think of words as fish in a river and in two banks. The ever moving forward waters include giving direct attention and two-way communication. The first bank is helping people in their life in the human body of relations and work. The second bank is raising people to build greater enterprises in all spheres of life and then unite these to create great cities, culture, and civilization. Then you would say the river keeps giving to take humans around new bends into new frontiers. Thus, a never “river-minded” humanity keeps an Age of Discovery going, and keeps the Dark Ages from coming again.
The river now moving and interacting with this new river-minded humanity then takes humans even further. Together they take us to some of human kind’s latest and greatest growing and building sites.
Thus, we have a fivefold river principle; much like a hand with five fingers. In an abbreviated way, we can describe the five major categories which are also five underlying, uniting great dynamics as: people can communicate together, work together, build together as the “shared grace” they give to everyone, and then given these individuals, groups, or very large groupings can open and develop new frontiers and following this with new genius and greatness becoming history-makers, game-changes and new world finders or builders–which may mean even going to the stars.
Change the metaphor from a fivefold river to a five-lane road. There is no unity in the particular humans walking down the road nor in the types of vehicles they drive. The ability to have unity or be a union of people who freely consent to be united, comes strictly from the road, just like all physical roads, is embedded in how three-dimensionality works.
Principles are strictly derived from repeated success in interacting well with actual three-dimensional reality. You are fighters who should always live before all the eyes of history, and who will always live before all the eyes of heaven and God. There are, as always been the case, only two types of ages. One is the Age of Discovery where every human sets to use his own free mind and a Dark Ages where he or she does not. There is only one and always “fixed game,” which is between these two very different types of ages. Everything else, for everyone else, is stacked on how this game was won or lost.
Yes, you’ve fought for your country, but you’ve also fought for the principles it was based on. You have fought in the universal war, the eternal war. You have been warriors on the side of freedom and thank God, you answered the call.
I have been told repeatedly, no one has cast the truly great vision for America. I ask you to let me try. There are just two–just two great examples of large groups of people in history whose members were united by principles: the early Christian church and the United States of America. Every other large group was united in either common ethnicity or by a strong- arm dictator.
I believe America has a divine purpose. That purpose is to show to the whole world that a large people with individuals from every nation, occupation, race, gender, background, age or sphere can indeed still have great unity through great principles.
There must be lots of people who fight for this or our soldiers fighting is wasted. If we fudge or lapse, or use principles mostly for show, we will only find there is no long- term safe middle between the Age of Freedom and some form of the Dark Ages.
We civilians honor you best; by being true to this first duty. We want you to be proud of the homeland you fought for. Maybe, you didn’t know it but you fought the battle of the ages. Without regular and fresh “direct game” interaction with 3-D realities, principles become lofty sentiments or just plain puppets. Without principles, the meaning of words, lose both their stabilizing and their expansive powers. This means chaos, dysfunction, disappointments, faltering divisiveness and death of a universe at some point. Then to save us from chaos, people, leaders take up the old Aristotelian
Way of how we think about words.
We look again at the term “word” and see it as spelled w-o-r-d. It is a fixed-order system. It is a closed body system. Now all we have to do is scale it up to build a giant fixed order system, one great machine, one giant closed body system.
Principles alone, allow us our freedom of mind and choice. Remove the principles and actual 3-D ways of living and backing up your words to others and even without an enemy there will be growing squabbling, suffering, excommunication, lack of money, lack of sense. A hollow tree will be blown over by a strong storm.
Principles act like a tree that is above and there for both sides of its branches. It’s like saying the game of football is there for both teams. In politics for instance the liberals usually emphasize raising up new life and giving it a greater chance. The conservatives actually emphasize rewarding those who had already worked hard and developed skills. But both honor a tree of principles as something necessary to any branch.
The Age of Discovery gives us our free and full use of mind. Principles then keep the mind from becoming anarchic, legalistic, totalitarian, manipulative, corrupt, backwards or stagnant. We get the principles, the free and full use of the mind and the Union all in a tree. Where there are true shared principles in a sense, the other side is on your side. New life and already working life are necessary to a great Union and the Union is necessary to both of them.
U.S. soldiers that died are remembered today. These soldiers gave their life so a Free America will never fall. A soldier may fall, but this cause for which they fought, must never fall.
Mr. Eric Zehnder is a retired Huntington Beach contractor
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