Somewhere in the conditioning of my youth, I remember a schoolteacher who fancied himself as a priest doing his best to instil fear into a class full of young children. It’s a little sad when supposedly superior adults resort to scaring the hell out of kids in a pitiful attempt to prove their superiority.
To prove his point, he called upon his limited knowledge of the Old Testament, citing the story of Lot’s wife and how a superior, loving, all-powerful Creator had resorted to turning a woman into a pillar of salt for disobeying Him.
Years later, I remember reading a rather convincing argument for previously lost, intelligent, technologically advanced civilisations on this planet. It suggested that Lot’s wife had looked back, witnessed a nuclear explosion and been turned into a pillar of salt.
Well, with my limited knowledge of nuclear physics, I figured that even if she hadn’t disobeyed her God, she would still have come horribly unstuck whether she looked back or not. And what about the well-disciplined believers who were with her who apparently escaped unharmed? So, who looked back to see what had happened to Lot’s wife?
The science doesn’t work.
Extract the Principle and the Science
There is, however, another possibility.
Maybe the story is not literally true, but is a parable designed to explain a simple principle—a life skill—to people who are willing to think.
We cannot go forward while we are looking backwards.
Well, if I am right—and why should my explanation be any less plausible than all the others?—education and social conditioning still haven’t made much progress.
Our past has no bearing on our future.
At school we are almost totally historically schooled. We study the history of every subject because we cannot be taught facts about future possibilities. We become socially stooped in tradition and brainwashed into resisting change—the only constant in the Universe.
We learn to use our intelligence to argue the validity of our past perceptions instead of changing ourselves so that we may adapt to future possibilities. Then we appear dumbfounded and paralysed by the stress of trying to stop the Universe from evolving.
Consider this for just a moment.
As human beings we are created to look forward and move forward, and imagination became part of the package, I presume, so that we might look into the future and create the world of our dreams.
Our past has no bearing on our future unless we choose to be past-orientated, in which case we will use our thoughts to keep creating what was instead of what could be.
History was only the route to Now.
Now is the springboard for future possibilities.
Tomorrow will be as great as the possibilities of our imagination, fired by the courage to make our dreams come true.
By David Pickard Wyllie