One of my teachers, while I was in high school and doing my silo philosophy thinking, was Ken Trott. He's always been one of my favorite teachers. Now that I'm older, and hopefully a little wiser, I'm glad to have him as a friend. I was a student in his Civics class as a freshman. My silo philosophy started when he conducted a mock trial and I was on the jury. We learned to think and look at subjects from more than one side and listened to both sides present their evidence and arguments, and then we had to come up with a verdicts. Mr. Trott told me recently, that he still has the notebook where I kept notes for that trial.
I credit that class with opening up my mind and teaching me to not blindly accept everything that I hear or read. We all need to examine the evidence, ask questions, and then come up with a conclusion based on what we have found.
I carried that way of examining things up into the silo with me as I threw down silage for the cows each evening after school. What better place is there, than an old silo, to ponder the great mysteries of the universe?
Today it's hard to find a working silo. Most silage and haylage is now stored in concrete bunkers or those big, long, white "worms" that you see on most farms. Real silos stand empty and unused on many farms. Sometimes you see a lonely silo standing, but the barn and other buildings are gone.
Let me tell you, a lot of deep thinking took place in our silos. There within the concrete block wall that surrounded me, I was alone with my thoughts. It was a great place for uninterrupted thinking. Just as the walls of the silo were round, with no beginning and no end, the thoughts running through my mind were also without end. I always refer to this as my "silo philosophy period." As I loosened the silage with the fork and threw it down the chute, I also loosened the thoughts churning around in my mind. It was the genesis of the way I still look at many things today. The ideas that germinated in Mr. Trott's class were like stones thrown into the water. They caused ripples in my mind that began expanding as I tried to find answers to life's mysteries while working in that silo.
Many of the ideas I came up with, in answer to the things I pondered, seemed very far-fetched back in the late 1950's and early 60's. It was only in the mid-1920's, a mere 20 years before I was born, that the famous astronomer, Edwin Hubble, showed us that other galaxies exist beyond the Milky Way. Before that time, our universe seemed pretty small, compared to what we know about it today. Some astronomers have estimated that our Milky Way Galaxy contains up to a trillion stars. What if each star had only one planet revolving around it? That's a lot of potential for some type of life to exist, besides on earth, just in our own galaxy.
Even in my silo philosophy days, I thought there must be other life forms out there some place. Now we know there isn't just one galaxy. Astronomers estimate that over 100 billion galaxies are accessible to earthbound and orbiting telescopes today. The number of stars and planets within all those galaxies is mind-boggling and many of them must have the potential for life. Those are pretty good odds, even if you're not a betting person.
Back in my silo philosophy days, I even came up with the hair-brained idea that maybe our universe is next to another universe and if we could get to the end of ours and cross over, we would enter another world. Now astronomers and others are talking about the possibility of parallel universes. Maybe that silo philosophy thinking of mine wasn't as crazy as I thought at the time.
A also wondered about dreams, because some of them seemed very real and I often encountered people that I'd never seen before and places that were strange to me. I wondered if the dream state was actually our mind entering another universe or perhaps revisiting an earlier life. It's an out of body trip to another world we can enter with our mind. Perhaps life and death is as simple as that. We continue on to another life and dimension, leaving our old body behind. Call it life after death. Most religions of the world have the concept of some type of life after death. Even the Pagan Vikings were buried with objects that would accompany them to Valhalla in the afterlife.
I've always enjoyed stretching my mind and thinking to the limits and beyond. I've never been accused of accepting everything that's told to me as gospel. I like to think my old silo philosophy thinking days expanded my mind. After reading these thoughts, some of you will probably say the silo gases warped it! We all know those silo gases can kill you. I figure, what didn't kill me only made me stronger.
They say most people use only ten percent of their mind-power. That leaves a lot of exploring to do in the frontier of the mind. I plan to keep exploring.
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