Kerry Spackman - The ant and the Ferrari : lifting the hood on truth, society and the universe

I want you to imagine a really close-up shot of an ant walking on a shiny red surface. Because the zoom is so tight the ants tiny body fills your entire view. At this range you can even see its minute antennae waving around. You notice its six little legs struggling for grip because the red surface on which it walks is so highly polished.

Now allow the view in your mind to slowly zoom out. As the image widens notice how the ant becomes smaller and smaller while the vast red surface on which its walking begins to fill your vision. Before long the ant is just a black dot on a desert of shiny red emptiness stretching without end. On this scale the ant has become insignificant. And as you let your field of view widen even further you notice the shiny flat surface actually starts to curve. It begins to form a shape you recognize the hood of a Ferrari.

This image reminds us there are many things the ant will never understand no matter how hard it tries. Its view of the world is so limited it has no idea what lies beneath the bonnet or even that there is a world existing under the hood at all. Its senses simply arent powerful enough to see the overall picture. But even if we could somehow show the ant all the complex electronics and hydraulics hidden under its feet, it would never understand how they work because an insects brain is just too small to comprehend all that information.

Its obvious from this story the ant understands only a tiny fraction of the Universe and how it works. But are our brains equally limited? Maybe well never know more than 1 per cent of how the Universe works either. After all, it would be a surprising coincidence if our brains were exactly the right size to understand everything, particularly when its clear every other animal only knows a fraction of whats going on around it. Maybe we are also just like ants crawling across the bonnet of the Universe blissfully unaware of how the vast majority of the Universe really works and missing out on the most interesting aspects of our short lives.

This book is partly about lifting the hood to reveal all the interesting things normally hidden underneath so you can have a richer and more fulfilling life. Instead of just being carried along for the ride youll be able to understand the how and the why of the journey.

More importantly, this book is about Truth about what is actually under the hood rather than what our common sense tells us to believe is under there. For well soon find out our common sense and unaided logic are little more effective than the ants vision. Instead, well need some metaphysical tools to help us see further and in more detail. Doing so will allow us to discover the purpose and meaning of life.

Now if youre like the thousands of people Ive spoken to over the years, youll probably raise some objections as soon as I mention the word Truth. The most common objections usually go along the following lines:

• Theres no such thing as absolute Truth. All Truth is relative. Whats true for you isnt necessarily true for me.
• What anyone calls Truth is just a human approximation to Reality.
• Science is just another belief system and is no more valid than any other belief system.
• What makes you think youve got a more valid or special way of finding Truth than I have?
• The only way we can know Absolute Truth is by revelation from a higher being. Humans are just too limited to ever discover Absolute Truth by themselves.
• There are many paths to Truth and it is arrogant to think anyone can say which way is better.

Im not sure if any of those ideas had any resonance with you, but theyre all extremely serious issues and so well treat each of them with the respect they deserve. As we do, well use them to answer some of the biggest questions that have puzzled mankind since the beginning of time:

• What is the origin of the Universe? Was a creator involved or can the Big Bang explain everything?
• Is there life after death? Can we ever know?
• How should we organize society and what are our greatest political and economic threats to peace and happiness? Has capitalism had its day?
• If every event has a cause then what caused God or the Big Bang?
• Can you really have free will and a destiny at the same time?
• Is Evolution really able to produce something as complex as a human or is there still something missing?
• Is there any basis for ethics or is it everyone for themselves?

PLAY LIFE BY THE WRONG RULES

The reason why these questions are so important is because our beliefs influence every aspect of our life. If our beliefs dont match Reality, it would be like playing the game of life by the wrong rules. For sure youd be upset if you were playing blackjack and had bet your entire life savings on what you thought was a winning hand, only for the casino owner to tell you hed changed the rules and now 18 was a winning hand instead of 21.

Its the same with life. If our beliefs dont match Reality whatever Reality is were likely to end up with a losing hand. Unfortunately, we often acquire our beliefs when we are young and least equipped to audit their validity. But once inside us, even demonstrably false beliefs are remarkably immune to contrary evidence because of the way our brains work. As well see in Chapter 12, The Psychology of Belief, our beliefs distort Reality so that any conflicting information is twisted to match our beliefs and keep them intact. Its as if we wear blue mental glasses for blue beliefs and red mental glasses for red beliefs. Thats part of the reason why our own beliefs always seem so sensible to us while everyone elses seem so silly.

As I mentioned before, one of the purposes of this book is to develop tools which will allow us to take off our tinted glasses and see things unhindered by our human limitations.

The door of the prejudiced mind opens outward so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more tightly. Ogden Nash

A PERSONAL CHALLENGE

By now you might be getting a little sceptical as to whether this book can actually live up to its promise. After all, bookstores are packed with books claiming to make you thinner, richer, happier, wealthier and lead you to the path of true enlightenment and most of them dont live up to their wild claims. Why should this book be any different?

The best answer I can give is that after finishing the first draft of this book, I sent out what I called my Editors Draft to as wide a range of people around the world as I could find. I wanted to get feedback from surfer hippies, Buddhist monks, mums looking after children, scientists, business people, the unemployed, philosophers, writers, teenagers and people who wouldnt even normally read this type of book. The only thing I asked in return was that they filled out an anonymous survey on what they liked and didnt like so I could improve the book. To make it easy for everyone, I set up a private little website where they could leave their comments about any aspect of the book. That way they could be totally open and as critical as they liked because Id never know whod written each comment.