Stuart Harrison's Blog, page 6

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A new Pope for Easter, just to prove how far we’ve come (NOT)

In the Christian calendar, Easter marks the date when tradition has it that Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and the easter egg, hot cross buns and rabbits are the familiar symbols we all know. Most people are probably aware that Easter was actually celebrated for thousands of years before Christianity appeared. It is the time of the equinox, marking the passage of the sun along the ecliptic. In the northern hemisphere this is the beginning of spring and is associated with growth and fertility, hence the egg and the bunny symbolism. The cross symbolism, refers to the four points of the solar calendar, two solstices and two equinoxes.

In fact the entire story of Jesus is an allegory of the passage of the sun along the ecliptic and through the zodiac constellations throughout the year. The lowest point of the passage of the sun towards the horizon occurs on the 22nd December, which is the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. This is when the ancient cultures said the sun ‘died’. For three days it appears to stand still, just like the three days Jesus is said to have laid dead in a cave, and then the sun begins its upwards passage again towards the equinox point of spring. It is reborn. The three kings who are said to have travelled to witness this birth are the tree stars of Orion’s belt which line up with Sirius, the star in the east, to point to the place where the sun will rise on the horizon of December 25th. The larger constellation where this takes place was known in ancient times as the cradle or manger. The solar symbolism is endless, and would take a far longer article than this to explain further. Here’s a link if you’d like to read more.  http://www.solarmythology.com/

Jesus, the son of God, is actually a sun-god. Christianity is a solar religion, whether the church(es) admit it or not. The same ideas that were applied to Jesus, such as his birth date, his virgin mother (Virgo) his crucifixion and resurrection and so on, were all familiar to followers of the Persian Mithras, the Indian Krishna, the Egyptian Horus and a host of others around the world, which predated Christianity by thousands of years. The reason for this was that they were all sun gods. Their stories were identical because they were allegories of the same phenomenon.

It’s possible, despite all this, that Jesus actually existed. There may well have been a person who taught certain ideas to do with the purpose of life and spirituality. The early church may have attached the solar allegories to the real stories surrounding this person in order to create a religion and convert followers, since the sun-god myth would have been familiar to everbody then. Christianity has a tradition of adopting earlier festivals and beliefs and calling them its’ own, with various modifications.

It never ceases to amaze me that in this modern age, so many people remain religious in the sense that they adhere to the rules and teachings of their faiths that were dreamed up by people several thousand years ago, to apply to societies that existed then. It’s changing of course, though quite slowly. Wherever people are educated, free of religious influence, organised religion loses its grip. This is why religions flourish in underdeveloped countries and why fundamentalists hate the West, where freedom of speech and actions, and equality for all are the death knell of repressive religions. Yet even in arguably the most advanced nation on earth, the USA, religion retains a strong grip, at least outwardly. What president would ever be elected if he or she were to state that the story of Jesus is a solar allegory that the church adopted and adapted for its own ends?

Today, the science of the really small stuff, at the level of the structure of electrons and protons in the atom, is where we might find the answer to questions about god, spirituality and soul. It seems that consciousness might be an electromagnetic field of some kind, linked to the body and so part of it, but able to continue to exist when the physical body dies. Personally I think that’s the case, though the ‘me’ I identify with is largely bound up with my physical existence, so it stands to reason that that part of me must expire when my body does. We need something to replace the religious beliefs the world is currently saddled with. Something based on knowledge and science, but without the ‘we are simply biological animals’ approach of some scientists. Their approach is a reaction against religious superstition and ignorance, but they are in danger of replacing one blind inflexible doctrine with another.

This new global religion idea is actually central to my Black Sun novels, though the results aren’t what you might expect.

 

 

A scene from Arizona Lights episode one of my Black Sun Novels

Tell me if you like this scene from Arizona Lights…

…Perez woke with a start. He heard the diminishing echo of his own cry and knew that was what brought him out of the dream. He was soaked in sweat and his heart was hammering as if he’d just run five laps of the high school track. Beside him, his wife, Christina, murmured as she stirred.

“It’s alright,” he said softly, not wanting her to wake up. “Go back to sleep.” But it was too late and she opened her eyes groggily.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Just things on my mind. Work, that’s all.”

She frowned. “Ever since we’ve been married you’ve never let work worry you like this.”

“It’s just the changes at school. It’ll be okay. I’ll go through to the other room for a while. You need your sleep.”

“Philippe,” she reached for his arm to stop him. “Tell me what’s really wrong. I don’t believe it’s the school.”

“Of course it is,” he said, though he hated lying to her.

“Then why can’t you look at me?”

“What do you mean? I’m looking at you now.”

She stared at him from her big, dark eyes that seemed to see into his very soul. “Tell me there’s nobody else.”

“What?” He was shocked by the very idea. “Is that what you think?”

“What am I supposed to think? Ever since that night when you didn’t come home you’ve been acting weird. It’s like you’re not really here. The kids have noticed too. And every night you wait until I’m asleep and then you go through to the other room. Is it because you don’t want to sleep in the same bed with me anymore, Philippe? Tell me.”

“No, Christina, of course it isn’t.” He put his arms around her and held her close. “How could you even think it? I love you. I love you as much as I ever have. More even. There could never be anyone else for me.”

“If that is true, then tell me what is wrong. Tell me what is wrong and where you were that night.”

Tears ran down her face. It broke his heart to see her like this and he realized he should have told her about the dream. He was only trying to protect her because he didn’t want her to know how much it scared him. He didn’t want her to know he was afraid for her and their children. “I have never lied to you, Christina,” he said. “You have to believe me. I don’t know where I was that night. I can’t remember. I swear to you. You must believe me.”

He saw the doubt in her eyes. She thought he had made up the story because he’d been with another woman. He almost wished that was the truth. At least then he wouldn’t feel the way he did.

And then she put her arms around him. “I do believe you. I do.”

He knew then that he was wrong to keep anything from her. She was strong. “I should have told you everything,” he said, and he began to tell her about the dream and how afraid he was, and when he was finished she was very quiet, and he knew that she was frightened by what he said.

“But it’s only a bad dream, Philippe,” she said eventually. “It can’t really hurt us.”

“I know.”

“Everything will be alright.”

“Yes, yes of course.”

“Go to sleep now. It will all seem better in the morning.”

“You’re right,” he said and he smiled. “I feel so much better now.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

He knew how much she wanted to believe it and his heart was heavy. “Of course,” he lied. “It was just a bad dream. It’s nothing. You know how real these things feel when you wake up. And then the feeling goes and everything’s alright again.”

“Then you think you will be able to sleep now?”

“Yes,” he said and he kissed her. “Let’s both go to sleep now.”

That’s it! Perez, by the way, is one of four people who have experienced what appears to be a classic alien abduction, though of course things are never what they seem.

If this isn’t to your taste, visit my website, the link’s at the bottom of the page, and take a look at the completely rewritten, newly available version of the 1999 million copy bestseller The Snow Falcon. Or maybe the newly published novel The Flyer, which is about one man’s struggle to find acceptance, friendship and love, set during and before The First World, against the backdrop of an English country mansion, and the deadly air war above the fields of France. Though I say it myself, this is a great novel. it’s the kind of novel I always wanted to write someday, so I finally did.

What do you think of the first page of my novel?

The signal faded to static. Frowning, Ellen Baker leaned across to tweak the tuner on her radio, keeping one eye fixed on the road ahead. It was straight as an arrow, flanked by scrub and mesquite, and the occasional pair of eyes picked out by her headlights.

Taylor Swift’s voice emerged free from the static and Ellen tapped her fingers on the wheel to the beat. She liked Taylor’s songs. The lyrics dwelt on the endless dance of relationships, love lost and found, but there was always a wry twist that showed the lady had a sense of humor, as in they were never, ever – getting back together.

Ellen frowned as once again the song was drowned by a hissing nest of static. “Dammit,” she muttered.

The Honda had seen better days, as people were fond of remarking. They thought a doctor should drive something newer, and lately she’d been thinking that maybe it was time to upgrade. The radio might be just the incentive she needed. The problem wasn’t atmospheric, because the sky was clear. What she ought to do was buy something with a stereo that she could plug her I-pod into. Time to get into the twenty first century.

The static continued, even though she tried fiddling with the tuner again. In the end she gave up and turned the thing off. Maybe there was a storm coming in over the mountains or something, though there was no sign of one. As always, the clarity of the Arizona night took her breath away. The Milky Way stretched overhead – a smear of brilliant light. Ellen peered through the windshield, searching out the constellations. There was Sagittarius, aiming his bow at the dark rift at the galactic core.

Something flashed above the mountains to the east. She wondered if it was a shooting star and pulled over…

…Okay, that’s it. The novel is episode one of my Black Sun series, Arizona Lights. So here’s the thing – Did it grab you? Did you hate it? Love it? Want to read more? Fell asleep and didn’t reach the end? – HEY! Wake up!

Let me know, or like my page on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/stuartharrisonauthor?ref=hl , or even better go to Kindle and get the book for FREE if you’re with prime, or a huge 99c if you’re not.

Write what you care about and it’ll probably be what you know

In my last post I crunched some numbers to illustrate why I need to write 3000 words a day to stay on track with my series. I’m now 8 days into the first draft and I have over 30 000 words, so I’ve topped my target, which is great. The reason I have been able to do that, apart from being disciplined about my working habits, which is a no-brainer, I can put down to a single word: Planning.

Yeah, boring I know. Writing novels shouldn’t be about stuff like that. It should be about allowing the creative impulse to take hold, to weave a story out of thin air, bringing to life memorable characters and situations that take the reader on a roller coaster … Okay, cue the scratchy sound as the monologue is abruptly terminated. That’s all bullshit. It isn’t the way it happens.

Writing novels is really hard work. There are two ways to approach it. One is a version of the method I just dismissed, which is the head down and get it all out approach, most likely based on a pretty vague idea about the story and characters and where it’s all headed. Somebody once said, there are no great writers, only great re-writers. I don’t know who that was, but he or she was on the money because if you take the head down, get it all out approach, only one thing is certain, and that is you will be doing a lot of rewrites. Really. A lot. Either that or you will have a poorly constructed novel at the end of it.

I know this because I wrote my first published novel using this method. I wrote many, many drafts, probably a million words, and ended up with a novel I called The Snow Falcon. It started off being the story of an IRA hitman on the run in Canada, and it ended up being the story of a man with a troubled past, a boy, his mother (both also troubled) and a falcon. No IRA. No hitman. Nothing like that. It was translated into a dozen languages and sold something approaching a million copies. So, I’m not saying that method doesn’t work, I’m just saying it makes a tough job even tougher. (As an aside, I rewrote that book last year, because I’ve learnt a lot since it came out. It’s now much better than the original and you can find details on my website http://www.stuartharrison.com/ )

These days I plan. The Black Sun novels, being an ongoing series, require a lot of planning. I need a whiteboard or something to keep track of all the characters, the themes, the events. I’m going to have to do that because already I’m finding there’s stuff I can’t remember. So planning is about what? It’s about knowing the story arc, and all the twists and turns along the way, and of course the characters. Maybe not so much the characters because they tend to come to life as I write. Usually I try to know one thing about them, one interesting thing other than the part they play in the story, and that’s a good starting point. But I’ll come back to planning another time. It’s a big subject. Really what I want to mention now is an aspect of novel-writing that I think is part of planning. It’s often said people should write about they know. A more accurate rendering of that statement would be; write about what you care about. Write about things that interest you, or that you’re passionate about. That way you should already know a lot about your chosen subject, and what you have to learn won’t feel like a chore.

For me, choosing to write the Black Sun novels was a way of turning my fascination with mysteries past and present into a story that expresses some of my own ideas about what those mysteries signify. My story is set in the present time and the premise is that the climate change we’re seeing now is part of a cycle governed by the electromagnetic forces of the sun and the wider galaxy. In the past, these recurring cycles have caused cataclysms that wiped out civilizations and when that happened we lost the evidence of the true history of the Earth and the human race. In the novels I get to use all the research I’ve done, all the information I’ve gathered over the years from reading countless books, and I get to take all those questions about whether UFO’s exist, or was there a civilization called Atlantis, or how did religions really get started, and I can weave my own take on the answers into a fascinating (I hope) and entertaining (I also hope) story.

My point is that knowledge is part of the planning process. If you already have the knowledge, you’re halfway there.

How I Begin Writing a New Novel in my Black Sun Series

I have just begun writing the fourth episode of my series, and since I imagine that people who come here might be interested in how writers write, as well as the topics they write about, I’ve decided to blog about both things. Sometimes I’ll talk about the themes related to the books, other times I’ll talk about the actual writing process.

I haven’t got a title for this novel yet. It is a novel, by the way, because although it’s part of an ongoing narrative, each episode has its own story arc, by which I mean a beginning. middle and end, if you like. The first three episodes I wrote were probably less defined in that sense, and that’s because I originally wrote them all as one long novel. When I decided the story I wanted to write could actually cover half a dozen long novels, I decided to rewrite the original so that it would work as three episodes, and then continue the story from there by regularly producing new episodes in the series. I had imagined each one to be about a third of the length of a long novel, but now I’ve decided on a half novel length, which is about 60 000 words, or roughly 200 pages.

Okay, that’s the background. So the situation now is that I have a 60 000 word novel to write, have edited, and publish with artwork etc, in the space of three months. It’s not impossible by any means, but it does require a fairly tight schedule, which becomes apparent when you break down the numbers. 60 000 words over three months, writing say, five days a week, so sixty days total, works out to about a thousand words a day, or a little over three pages. All the numbers are approximate. However, I don’t really have sixty days because I need at least two weeks of that time for editing, artwork, formatting etc, so that I’m ready to publish. Sixty days become fifty. But that number is also wrong, because a novel can’t possibly be ready without at least one thorough re-write, and the re-write takes as long as the first draft. So fifty days has just become twenty-five. So now we’re talking about 2400 words per day, or around 8 pages. (This is the way I write, by the way, I do a full draft and then rewrite, as opposed to revising as I go, as some writers do. It makes no difference to the numbers either way)

I’m still not there yet though, because I’ve left out one important element, and that is the planning. If I plan to complete a novel with just one (albeit thorough) rewrite, I better have the story worked out pretty well, including the characters and all the major conflicts and turning points etc, otherwise I’m going to end up with a mess. So how long should I allow for planning? Assuming that I think about it and dream about it all the time anyway, which I do, I’m still going to need two solid weeks of getting it down in print. If you’ve ever tried it, you’ll know this is the really hard part. It’s also probably the most important. Get this wrong, and everything I do afterwards will also be wrong. Lot of pressure there.

Finally though, I’m ready to begin writing the first draft. I now have fifty days, less ten for planning, so forty; which means twenty days each for first and final drafts. That’s 3000 words per day, or around ten pages. That’s a lot to do, especially when I also have to blog and take care of other marketing issues.

I’ll be posting regular upates on my progress, as well as my thoughts on the writing process.

A New Episode of my Black Sun Series and Reality Continues to Imitate Fiction, or is the Other Way Around?

Mesa hits the virtual bookshelves today. Mesa being the title of the latest episode in my Black Sun series of novels. Of course it’s not quite the same as having actual print copies appear in highly visible stacks in book stores across the world, where I think they’d look pretty cool, actually. Instead they lie dormant as digital bytes in the servers of Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords and elsewhere that ebooks are sold, waiting for somebody to stumble across them. Hence this blog, of course. My posts are meant to stir you to action. I’m hoping you’ll be intrigued enough that you go and buy episode one which is for sale for around a buck, so you’re not taking much of a risk. After that, if my plan works, you’ll be hooked. You’ll buy the other episodes, tell your friends, who’ll act on your recommendation and buy the books too, and they will tell their friends… etc etc.

Actually, I am already getting excellent feedback from people who actually are telling me they are hooked. I love hearing that, of course. I’ve been a writer for a few years now, and I’m used to the ups and downs. I’m aware that I’ve written good books and not so good books, and it’s painful to hear about the not so good ones. That’s life though, for all of us, and we learn from our mistakes and failures. It’s much, much more fun to hear the good stuff though. Writers toil away in their rooms/offices/wherever, immersed in their fictional worlds, never really knowing if anyone will be even slightly interested in what they produce, so when we surface it’s gratifying to find that, yes, actually they are.

Now here comes the plug. My Black Sun series of novels is about how the world may end, but actually not quite. Maybe it will change in drastic and profound ways. Maybe we will change. I’ve always been interested in stories of lost, ancient civilizations, like Atlantis. I’m intrigued by the Great Pyramid, which if you look into it, is quite obviously not a tomb, nor was it built with hemp ropes and wooden rollers or giant ramps. Over the years I’ve researched this stuff, along with UFO’s, paranormal phenomenon, religion and a host of other subjects. I’ve also taken a keen interest in what’s happening to the climate on our planet, and what’s happening to the sun. In my series I’ve taken all this information, along with current and new ideas regarding how the universe operates, and I’m writing an ongoing narrative that both entertains and informs, which is always the best kind of fiction in my view. If you’re interested in these things too, and you enjoy a well written novel, you should buy my series. Maybe they will get you thinking.

Don’t forget to post your reviews and tell everybody you know. Thanks

Pyramids, the Electric Sun, Eathquakes and the Future

I visit a YouTube site everyday, where a very smart guy somewhere in America posts a three-minute video about the current world weather, earthquake and volcanic activity, and how these relate to what’s happening with the sun. Essentially he is on of the growing community of citizens and scientists who have recognised that the sun is electrically connected to the earth and all the other planets, as well as to the wider galaxy and in turn the universe. One of the things this means is that the sun’s activity affects not only earth’s climate, but also earthquake and volcanic activity. occasionally this guy calls what he has termed an earthquake watch based on coronal holes on the sun facing towards earth in combination with specific alignments of the planets. The planets, remember, are electrically connected to the sun and each other, and there is also a gravitational relationship, so certain alignments have greater or lesser effects on other planets. (This is actually well recognised in terms of radio communication. Planetary alignments affect certain radio waves). A couple of days ago the Suspicious Observer (that’s the name of his site) called an earthquake watch based on emerging solar activity and planetary alignments. The earthquakes started happening right on cue. Magnitude 6 or more earthquakes occurred in multiple locations around the globe. Of course this all flies in the face of current mainstream science, but bear in mind that science is knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in, and anyone who thinks we’ve got that nailed is hopelessly deluded, in my view. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPq2eF_Q00c&list=UUTiL1q9YbrVam5nP2xzFTWQ&index=1

We live in an electric universe. This earth has been subjected to cataclysmic electrical forces in the past and it will be again. The sun draws it’s energy from the galactic environment via electric currents that flow through plasma throughout space. The electrical environment is unstable and therefore variable, which means that as the solar system travels through space it encounters different regions of electrical potential and utlimately all of this affects earth, just as it does the other planets and stars. Everything is electrical, including us, so we are affected too. Many thousands of years ago, and the reality is nobody can be certain how many, the Great Pyramid on the Giza plateau was built. This is the one we are all most familiar with from innumerable TV shows, tourist images etc. It has been the subject of thousands of books and articles. I won’t get into the details of the many enigmas surrounding this structure here. Instead I want to comment on one of them. The Great Pyramid didn’t always look the way it does now. Originally its sides were covered by polished limestone blocks that fitted precisely together. Only a few courses remain now as they were taken away over the centuries to be used for buildings elsewhere. This limestone outer covering would have made the structure smooth-sided. It would have been a glistening white edifice, capped by the now missing pyramidion that may have been copper or gold. The internal structure of the pyramid is made from different types of stone, for example particular granites. As has been noted in modern times, the Great Pyramid was designed to exhibit specific electrical properties. The polished limestone outer casing is essentially an insulating medium, while the inner structures are made from materials with unique conducting properties. This is too big a subject to more than mention here, but I will return to it often.

In my Black Sun novels, the world is changing both physically and socially, and it’s happening because the solar system is being influenced by a new electrical environment. The mainstream view of history and science says our current societies represent the pinnacle of human achievement, and yet there was once a global civilisation that built pyramid structures across the world that corresponded to very specific latitude and longitudinal lines. This vanished civilisation had a deep understanding of the electrical nature of the universe. In my series of novels I present an unfolding scenario in which human society enters a new phase, but it may all have happened before. Though the novels are fiction, take a look around. Todays’ fiction, tomorrow’s reality

Little Ice Age on the Way – It’s all About the Sun!

Novels begin with ideas. The Black Sun novels began with the idea of writing a fictional account of the near future, based on the premise that much of what we think we know about our planet and human history is wrong, as are many of the scientific certainties that a large part of the science community insist are undisputed facts.

Of course, the great thing about being a novelist is that I don’t have to prove my ideas, I can just invent stories to fit them. Which is a bit like what some scientists do, now I come to think of it. Take climate scientists, for example; they don’t have to prove that co2 emissions from human activity are the cause of climate change, although they insist this is the case. They claim the cause and effect is proven, and show us lots of graphs using selectively chosen data to make their case. But guess what? Earth’s climate is driven by the sun! Nobody has a full grasp on exactly how it works, but the sunspot cycle has a lot to do with it. Right now we’re at the peak of the approximately eleven year cycle, which means there should be a lot of sunspots. There aren’t though. The sun is asleep. During a period known as the Maunder Minimum the sun was also asleep. It lasted from roughly 1645 to 1720 and during that time the planet cooled. That meant very cold winters and shorter growing seasons. The river Thames froze solid every year. They held frost fairs there. There were probably a lot of other things happening too, such as extreme weather events like we’re seeing today.

The Maunder Minimum is sometimes referred to as the Little Ice Age. Of course we don’t know as much about that event, or others that have occurred before, because there were no TV’s then, or internet, or even many books. Also, the further back in time you go, the less likely it is that there was much science going on because the church said everything was God’s will, period. If wasn’t a good idea to disagree. It’s funny how things go around though. Science is the new religion now, which is often a good thing, of course, though you still have to toe the party line, otherwise they get upset. They might start accusing you of being a climate change denier, and they can get hysterical about it. Now they’ve got everyone else doing it too. In New Zealand, where I live, most politicians are dismissive of anybody who suggests that climate science as it currently stands is simply wrong. At least publicly they are. Which is another way of saying the sun has nothing to do with climate. Brilliant. Here’s a link for a great short video on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuYTcnN7TQk&list=UUTiL1q9YbrVam5nP2xzFTWQ

The good news is that attitudes are changing. Even NASA is starting to admit that there might be some kind of ice age on the way, and it might even have something to do with the sun.

The Black Sun Novels are based on the premise that this has all happened before, and it happened for reasons that were once understood, though that knowledge was lost a long time ago. Everything happens in cycles. The Earth could change and it could happen very quickly. Wars could break out as society descends into chaos, until civilization completely collapses. It might not happen that way though. There could be people who know what is coming, and have been making preparations for a long time. Maybe that happened before too. Every ancient culture spoke of advanced gods and angels who brought knowledge. Today’s fiction – tomorrow’s reality.

The Sun is Quiet and Our World is Changing; the Future is Almost Here

As I get myself ready to begin writing the fourth episode in my series of Black Sun novels, I look around at the world and what’s happening and I wonder just how accurate my depiction of the very near future will turn out to be. Everybody on the planet knows something is going on with our climate. Extreme weather events are commonplace all over the world. The climate science community has been telling us for years now that climate change is a result of human activity increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This theory is wrong. The evidence is all over the place, for anyone who cares to look. Climate is driven by the electromagnetic activity of the sun, which fluctuates in cycles of varying duration. Right now, we are at solar maximum in the eleven year sunspot cycle. That means there ought to be a lot of sunspots. The reverse is actually the case, however. Sunspot activity is very low. Earth’s atmosphere is collapsing as a result. We are experiencing extreme climate events every day somewhere in the world, but that is only the beginning.

Our world is changing, just as it has many times before; and our future is almost here. Today’s fiction, tomorrow’s reality. My Black Sun novels depict a very possible future. In the past, this planet has been affected by cataclyms that almost wiped out civilizations like the Egyptians and Sumerians. In time, they recovered. The surviving Sumerians migrated to new lands, including Egypt, and they took their knowledge with them. Nobody really knows where the Sumerians came from, but they were probably survivors from earlier disasters. In times of upheaval, societies reivent themselves and the same thing will happen this time. Forget all those TV shows and books that depict a dystopian society of bands of survivors struggling to get started again in a feudal society reminiscent of the Middle Ages. That’s not going to happen. In my version of events, there are people who are aware of what is just around the corner. They have been preparing for decades. It’s time for human society to evolve to the next logical step of a global government and that is what will happen, but just like the Egyptian Phoenix that burns and is reborn from the ashes, change is rarely a peaceful process. Destruction precedes renewal, and though some elements of society may believe they can control that process, the universe is a far more mysterious place than we imagine.