A Point of View by Paul Montesino

When Stars and Satellites miss their true appointments.
A point of View © 1996
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA, CSP.

Last week, the main subject of conversation in sections of America was not about politics, wars, the Boston Marathon, or the impending April 15 income tax filing deadline, even the most recent versions of expensive smartphones. It was something called “the solar eclipse.”

The obvious and deserved excitement caused people to leave everything they were doing and travel at any cost to certain areas of the United States called “the path of totality,” a sky area where daylight suddenly would become night darkness.

My first eclipse experience was in the nineteen nineties. I happened to be in San Francisco while on the West Coast gathering local details for the first novel of my eventual fifty-eight count, one called “Recycling: The Novel.” The common experience of thousands of people sitting on the ground and “not” looking, only watching the sun hiding partially from sight protectively with special eyeglasses was unforgettable. It was a common meditation exercise, legs crossed and all, and the words “flower generation” had real meaning.

Satellites have happened for millions of years, noticing them for as long as we look at the sky, knowing their causes only for the few centuries we have been astronomers.

But living a life where every event must have its cause, it hasn’t been difficult to concoct a reason, no matter how senseless, to attribute a connection between the appearance, or disappearance, of the sun and human events.

So it was that eclipses were the cause of wars, epidemics, even mental disorders, anything that lacked a logical explanation.

But eclipses are only metaphors of the many invented reasons by those who try to influence our thinking on any areas of life we are not experts, be them technical, political, informational, or metaphysical, and control what we do, one of the reasons why, at this very moment, and recently in one of my recent articles, I referred to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the new line on the sand of mental life. Eclipses are consequences, not causes.

AI experts are waiting on the sidelines trying to tell us the purposes of new solar eclipses in our minds. We must be careful and avoid the path of totality in our lives.

And that is my Point of View today. So Long.