Space: the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds,
to seek out new life and new civilizations,
to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Have you watched one of the innumerable episodes of the most successful T.V. franchise in history, Star Trek, and wondered why we earthlings can’t have a society as cooperative and harmonious as the crew of the Starship Enterprise?
You don’t have to be a trekkie and watch The Big Bang Theory nightly to profit from the profound insights of Gene Roddenberry’s inspired series.
Will We Make It?
Leonard Nimoy, the world-renowned actor inseparable from the Vulcan character, Commander Spock, passed away recently. However, the multibillionaire media franchise of which he is the ultimate symbol, after 50 years, shows no signs of going away anytime soon.
Like George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise, it is almost impossible to overestimate its impact. Star Trek directly inspired two of the hottest consumer gadgets the world has ever seen, the iPhone and the iPad.
Unlike Star Wars, which begins with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” Star Trek takes us several hundred years into the future, based, where else, but in San Francisco, California.
Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek holds an immense sense of optimism that permeates the original egalitarian crew, including whites, an Afro-American woman, a Russian and a Japanese. Dr. Spock, as a Vulcan, has flawless logic, backed by state-of-the-art computing.
While every episode presents formidable challenges, we have an inner sense that no matter what happens, they will come through. They are not in it for war, but for peace.
Exploration, not violence, is their mandate. These are earthlings who grew up and finally learned how to work and play together.
Far ranging thinkers contemplating the “Big History” of the universe put humanity at the adolescent stage, half-children, half-adult. They are increasingly acknowledging the vital role our newly created global brain (the World Wide Web and the Internet) will play in maturing us.
We are in a rite of passage into adulthood as a species. Why won’t we make it?
Does It Matter?
Any sober-minded person with a decent education in world history will have plenty of concerns about our present prospects of overcoming the environmental crisis, accentuated in recent decades by global warming, and now erratic climate change.
If our future is so much in doubt, why not “eat, drink and by merry, for tomorrow we die”?
Anyone who observed the 2016 American Presidential election will likely agree that it was stranger than fiction.
No sober-minded fiction writer would come up with nominees such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and then to have Trump win the way he did. The truth is stranger than fiction.
So why can’t Star Trek be an accurate projection of the future?
If the universe did not emerge by pure chance, as naïve interpretations of evolution would have us believe, then perhaps we are part of a grand design.
The great physicists, from Einstein to Steven Hawking, have devoted their lives to discerning the “Mind of God,” perhaps because they intuited that we actually live in the Mind of God, that nothing is really “out there” in quite the way that it appears.
If this is not all by blind chance, then perhaps it is better seen as a masterpiece of art, a magnificent dance perfectly orchestrated throughout the centuries.
Each of us has an indispensable role to play, without which the total composition would make no sense whatsoever.
What Is Our Destiny?
Could it possibly be that our destiny is in the stars, just like Captain Kirk and Commander Spock?
If one closely follows science fiction, from Jules Verne to William Gibson, it is most apparent that it is a popular form of prophecy. Anything visualized with as much passion and intensity as the Star Trek generations has a way of coming true.
When Commander Spock held up his hand with the familiar Vulcan salute, “Live long and prosper,” it was picked up on the streets around the world within days. Leonard Nimoy had actually adopted the salute from one he saw as a youth in his local synagogue. Perhaps this is the universal sign.
Some very sharp people, such as Elon Musk, head of both Space X and Tesla Motors, is making concrete plans for privately funded colonization of Mars within a finite amount of time.
Elon is no idle dreamer, as he is pioneering self-driving cars, which may soon crowd the freeways. Richard Branson, of Virgin Airlines, is seriously planning Virgin Space, where tourists can orbit near space for a reasonable sum of money.
The human spirit and our vision of divinity are far too strong for us to go out with a whimper.
If we go out at all, it will be with a bang. My bet is that we will successfully reach for the stars.
Why Optimism Is the Only Way to Go
Wisdom would suggest that it is much wiser to bet on humanity than against it.
If we look at two uncontested world leaders, both saints in their own right, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and His Holiness, Pope Francis I, we can’t help but be truly overwhelmed by their humility, compassion and love for the common people.
If you read the sermons of Pope Francis, you are deeply moved by his unshakable faith in humanity. If God was willing to become a human, why should we doubt that we are on our way to becoming God?
When we look at global warming, religious terrorism and the monetary crisis, we might wonder how are we ever going to get it right. Isn’t the clock running? Are we not at the eleventh hour?
Yet, should we look back to 1942, we would bet that the future belonged to Chancellor Adolph Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Forty million people died in World War II. Russia took a devastating beating.
Tokyo and Berlin underwent saturation bombing, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese perished from the first wartime use of atomic bombs. YET WE PULLED THROUGH.
Related article: How To Turn Your Life Around
Claim Your Passport as Child of the Universe, the Next Star Trek Generation
Your overall sanity, and your ability to make the most of your life have much to do with which picture you choose to focus upon: Star Wars or Star Trek?
Are we doomed to an endless spiral of warfare? Or are we destined to explore the universe? Both are terrific movies, but Star Wars is not a promising model out of which to build our collective future.
Everything is lining up to go beyond being a U.S. or Chinese or Russian citizen, but a global citizen, a child of Planet Earth, of the Milky Way galaxy, a child of the universe. This is your birthright.
You are both a child of the universe AND a child of God. You, me, all of us are in the Mind of God, and God is our only true Self.
In God’s Mind, the universe dances, and we dance with it.
Why not join the next Star Trek Generation. Organize a science fiction party, and greet your friends with the universal signature:
LIVE LONG… AND PROSPER!
Star Trek Generations: The Quest Has Only Begun appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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