Tonight I found that one of my friend's father's had passed on. Since he was at least 90 maybe it was his time. He was telling me how his Dad helped design the guidance systems for rockets at NASA as an engineer. He was mentioning that the early version of what keeps planes on Autopilot and allows them to be flown from the ground in an emergency his father was one of the designers.
My friend is a Zen Buddhist and studied Zen Buddhism with his father in Japan when he was a boy. I find it hard to talk to him about spiritual things even though I find Zen very scientific and useful because he doesn't believe in God. So, since I see the value of Buddhism as a useful humanistic philosophy and have studied with Tibetan Lamas in the U.S. and India and Nepal we do have some things in common. However, since I am a mystic I am also spiritual and I also believe in God. So, like today I asked him where his father was now. And he said, "That's not important! What is important to be in every moment and to be present." However, because my 23 year old daughter has done two 10 day Vipassanas where you don't talk for 10 days and has spoken with me about what she learns on these inner voyages I could finally understand some of the things my friend was saying to me recently while we both we at a fund raiser for his daughter's and my daughter's private school. So, I left the fund raiser very impressed with what I had learned about how my friend actually perceives reality. Even though it isn't my path I can be impressed with the logic of his path. It appears that as one realizes that 'resistence is futile' one relaxes through both pleasure and pain and thereby increases one's lifespan and awareness of each and every moment. I sometimes find myself doing this as well as it is something that one who lives past 40 often does automatically just to stay alive another day or another year.
Then I found myself beginning to thing about how flying a passenger plane from the ground actually works technologically. I visualized "explosive decompression" at an altitude of around 40,000 feet which did not damage the fuselage, or wings or control surfaces. So, everyone in the plane was no longer alive. Since the plane was on automatic pilot before this and since the control tower of where the plane was headed could not raise the ship on the radio I could imagine them taking over the plane from automatic pilot to be flown remotely much like a drone and then landing the plane so the plane wasn't lost and so all the bodies of those on board could go to their next of kin, and also so it didn't crash into a building somewhere or people on the ground or into a military base or something like that.
With today's passenger planes this is now possible and likely has been for over 10 or 15 years now.
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