The Sorcerer’s Apprentices

That which you call ‘Nothing’ is everything which has not yet chosen to manifest as some thing.
It waits to be called; waiting for the flickering possibilities to call its name.

There has never been Nothing! There can never be nothing!
There is no more, nor less, in the Universe now than there ever was.

You can never get something from nothing but something which you thought was nothing can take on properties that may cause you to think something has come from nothing.

There has always been awareness, there has always been life and there always will be!
The Universe is balanced, things appear to change but the balance remains.
Things change yet they are the same; they are the same but you see them as different... Rain falls and becomes a river, the river runs to the sea, the sea gives to the clouds…

Many of the things which you believe to be special to you, are common to all. Many of the things you think are common to all, are special to you.

A chicken lays an egg, the egg becomes a chicken, the chicken lays an egg.
You see this with a chicken and you grasp the cycle of life.
Grass has seeds, seeds become grass, grass has seeds.
Again you can see the cycle.
Seeds suck soil, chickens eat seeds, man eats chickens -
once more you see the cycle.

There is no more, nor less, Earth now than there ever was.
If there are more men and more chickens there must be less other things.
We can alter things but we cannot create them from nothing.

Everywhere in the Universe there are codes, shorthand, like codes in a computer that are not really anything but they represent something -
they are virtual representations.

There are nuclear codes that define atoms and molecules.
There are genetic codes (DNA) that defines growing things.
There are Universal codes that man has not yet become aware of.

When we alter a code we do not create something truly ‘new’ but rather a modification. We can call these modified codes ‘new strains’ because often they are a strain…

Nature has rules for making modifications but by circumventing some of those rules we can strain the codes and the processes which implement these codes.

Don’t forget that these codes are followed like interactive blueprints used to ‘grow’ the thing that the code describes… the codes are important yes… but should you damage the ‘builders’ who follow the code what then.
Blueprints do not build themselves and man cannot build builders!

When scientists come up with a bit of DNA code to, say, make insulin, they have to splice it into a working cell and hope the builders will build the insulin for them.

So we are sorcerer’s apprentices meddling with spells we don’t fully understand and confident that the Master Magician will never return - we claim his spells as ours.

What happens when, inevitably, a spell goes wrong?
Well, of course the apprentices will fix it - if they can!

I thought I’d better add that it isn’t just the different ways we are meddling with Nature that I blame for the state of the planet but simply the arrogant attitude that we have toward it and the other life it nurtures.

It is NOT our planet yet we treat as though it is, taking all the food and resources we can find and poisoning the planet while we do it.

Worse we are rapidly destroying many other forms of life in our blind rush toward subduing Nature.

We are turning the world into a series of journeys between car parks and while some welcome the neon and plastic prisons we hide in when we are not driving between car parks and find comfort in their familiar settings of tarmac, brick and concrete - many others look around and wonder if we are attempting to turn from men into machines, safe in our electric avenues...
plugged in yet safely insulated from life.

It may well be that our arrogance and childlike curiosity has pushed the Earth so far out of balance that the natural forces which protect the planet will respond with changes that our sorcerer’s apprentices cannot even comprehend let alone counter.

Meanwhile the greedy ones, for whom these arrogant apprentices cast their feeble spells, ignore the growing doubts of their sobering spell casters and look for ways to profit from the growing chaos.