Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, here we stand, yammering away, tiny voices echoing in the great unknown of a new millennium.

Some of us, an inch or two taller than the rest, yammer more loudly about fantastic new wonders descried in the near-distance. We applaud, give prizes, buy new stuff, and ourselves yammer on.

Reductive science and its bastard child, technology, fill our noisy days and restive nights with gadgets galore. The nano-path forward seems clear and powerfully seductive.

Turn, for a moment, the dial on the way-back machine to, say, 1600 and ponder what you see: the first faint streaks of the dawn of empiricism: Observe, catalog, test, confirm.

Already Copernicus has shown the way, making for the first time real sense of the puzzling motions of objects in the day and night sky.

Our curiosity long piqued by the stuff around us right here on the planet, we begin paying close, rational attention to phenomena. Seashells on mountaintops? Hmmm. Why that could only mean… The earth a sphere? Why that could only mean… Those long, long lists of Egyptian kings that the ancient Greeks kept and that have only recently come again to light? Why that could only mean…

Enticing clues surrounded us then and we responded with cleverness, maybe more cleverness than we knew we had in us. One thing led to another and before you knew it, we had iPods and Priuses and H-bombs.

Many of those clues visible in 1600 were mightily distressing to the powers-that-were and their tidy, well-ordered, myopic view of things. Take that list of Egyptian kings seriously and the comfortable biblical creation-date of 4004 goes out the window, etc.

In this strange and perhaps quite dangerous red-blue, US-EU hiatus we find ourselves in now, a mass of clues are still out there as baffling (and threatening to present orthodoxy) as the clues the clever ones in 1600 latched onto.

So powerful is our own orthodoxy today that even to list some of the clues is to open oneself to cries of "Crackpot!" and "Weirdo!" It is well to remember that 400 years ago the Vicar of Christ oversaw the burning (BURNING) of Giordano Bruno at the stake in Florence (IN FLORENCE!) because he dared think and write about the clues that caught his attention in a new way.

If Bruno could be burned in Florence once, he (and his free-thinking ilk) can (and have been and will be) burned in other unlikely locales, you may be sure.

Still, in the ceaseless information-tattarrattat that we inhabit, it behooves us to recall the clues littering the old culture landscape which our vaunted clever, taller dwarfs vehemently don’t want attention called to. UFOs. LSD. DMT. OBE’s. And that’s just for starters.

The mere mention of such elicits reponses of "Crazy!"

This is stuff, probably very important stuff, that doesn’t fit. Just as the seashells on mountan tops didn’t fit 400 years ago.

But somewhere on the planet today, right now, there are baby dwarfs who will grow into new giants by opening their minds to that which doesn’t fit and try to make new, paradigm-shifting sense of it.

To extrapolate the 21st century without taking the likes of these coming dwarfs into account is as foolhardy as the behavior of those church fathers 400 years ago who were determined to secure a kingdom on earth modeled on one that was even then already 2000 years out of date.

If you try to extrapolate the 21st century, certainly you must assume more of the same old natural and human pestilence and destruction. That’s easy to see.

What’s not easy to see—because we are so blindered by pride in our technological progress—is the worlds those new dwarfs will open to us as they stand on the shoulders of the old, old giants. Chances are good, very good, that some of those worlds will be—to us—shockingly, disturbingly, dangerously different from the reductive materialist world whose gadgetary benefits we now view as the crown of creation.

Even as they burned Bruno, the powers that were were wholly blind to the effects of others in their midst. We’ve forgotten Bruno’s screams. But we remember—oh, do we remember, Caravaggio, say, and Shakespeare… and soon to come, Newton, Leibnitz, et al.