I live on a big round ball
I never do dream I may fall….
From Defying Gravity by Jesse Winchester ©1974
The earth is round, although it doesn’t really look that way. But it is round, and finite, although we don’t really live that way.
The intellect understands, from books and from watching ship’s masts disappear over the horizon and from traveling the globe and from meeting others who have made around the world voyages, that the earth is a bounded sphere.
But the lizard brain–the prime and primal mover of human energies–does not conceive the environment in terms of Euclidean solids and chains of implications. It is concerned with survival and expansion and excitement.
The intellect has power and we kid ourselves that it mainly rules (or should rule) human affairs. But the lizard is king.
And that is one reason why we are making infinite demands on our finite, spherical home.
Why is it so hard for the intellect to train the lizard?
(image from http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/2/19278/4139)
therearelimits 