There are those of us who nature is awakening to the secrets of the universe; apart from religious dogma or occult dabbling. It is Natural Law. It is awakening the minds and quickening the senses of those whom it's calling its descendants. Nature is fighting for its rightful place, which can never be fully usurped. Those who are most open to this knowledge are artists (poets, musicians, writers) who also happen to be free thinkers or "outsiders" to the system. We hear a voice that is calling us to waken to the secrets of the universe. Perhaps in some distant future, humanity will read of us; the ones who paved the way for this Pali or New Romanticism called the awakening unto Nature's Law. It won't be technology or software that paves the way, but nature. It won't allow itself to be destroyed, maybe uninhabitable for a time for humans, but never destroyed. There are those of us, the chosen few who are following the narrow path. We will be the future thinkers and writers who generations will read about that truly changed the world, and made a way where there seemingly was none.

Something as superfluous as "play" is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, "Because it's fun." But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)

[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;__t is a mean or compromise,between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil_

The law's a necessary evil--we canna be doing without it--but do ye not think it a poor substitute for conscience?

Christianity now is in crisis, and a large part because people have marketed it as a religion of good people getting better, when in fact it is religion a bad people coping with their failure to be good.

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.