ON THE MEANING OF LIFE
ESSAY 3 : ALONG THE ROAD TO TRUTH
There are two mistakes one can make along
the road to truth – not going all the way, and not starting.
- BUDDHA
Life is an
opportunity to walk along the road to truth – to the truth about humanity, and
to the truth about our self. Along the road most of us make one of the mistakes
identified for us by Buddha, above – and many make both. I have at least avoided
the mistake of not starting, and it is my intention to try and avoid the other
mistake by going as far along the road to truth as I can. You are welcome to
come with me and learn from my adventures – from my discoveries – from my
successes and my mistakes.
In the previous
two essays I examined the House of God and the House of Disbelief, and found them
both to be unsound shelters rather than the homes of truth they claim to be.
Shelters containing nothing other than souls seeking comfort – souls, in other
words, going nowhere along Buddha’s “Road to Truth”. Is this a problem – the
comfort of dwelling inside a House helps people enjoy their lives – must we all
be seekers? It is my belief that a life spent in comfort – sheltering, rather
than seeking – misses the great opportunity that life offers to our spiritual selves.
That most discomforting of all philosophers, Socrates, said: “An unexamined
life is not worth living” and I agree. The cost of an unexamined life – a life spent
sheltering in a House rather than exploring the road to truth – calculated in
the currency of our spiritual lives, is high.
How so?
Admission to
the House of God is coined in primitive, unevolved, spiritual beliefs – belief in
a parochial, jealous, vain, brutal, sexist “g” god created many years ago around
the Hebrew campfires in man’s image; belief that the meaning of life is to
achieve salvation from the sin of being human. The admission fee to the House
of Disbelief, measured in spiritual currency, is also steep – involving the outright
denial of the existence of the spiritual at all, or any special meaning or ultimate
purpose to life.
To enter either
House, the denizens have had to forfeit the spiritual opportunities that a life
lived outside our sheltering Houses allows. If life offers us anything other
than a few animal experiences, it is a spiritual opportunity. What sort of
opportunity? The only place we will find the answer to this question is along
the road to truth.
AN INVITATION
TO VENTURE OUTSIDE OUR HOUSES
I invite those within their Houses to venture outside
and join me in an effort to firstly find the road to truth, then go as far
along it as we can. It will be a demanding journey into challenging territory –
fraught with cliffs of fall but, hopefully, blessed with exhilarating heights
and stunning views. We may be disturbed by what we find, but take heart – consider
this, from one of the wisest of us all:
“Those
who seek should not stop seeking until they find.
When they find, they will be
disturbed.
When they are disturbed, they
will marvel.”
Jesus
– Gospel of Thomas (2:1-3)
EMERGING FROM OUR HOUSES AND FINDING THE ROAD TO
TRUTH
The House of God and the House of Disbelief are easy to
find – being built upon the high moral ground they are clearly visible. And
they are remarkably close together, because being a fundamentalist believer or
disbeliever leaves you in much the same spot relative to the Truth – far, far
away. A few brave souls emerge from their Houses at my invitation to explore
without their walls, and together we descend to the fields below.
The fields below the high moral ground are lush – being
well fertilised by the sacred cows of both Houses which graze upon them. As we cast
about for our “Road to Truth” we are spied by the soldiers of orthodoxy from
both Houses, tending their cows. As we discovered in the previous two essays, sacred
cows are vulnerable, and we are quickly escorted away by the sacred-cowherds. We
find we have been ushered towards a river which has steep banks and wildly
flowing waters.
ALL GREAT TRUTHS BEGIN AS BLASPHEMIES
There is a rickety bridge across the river and we have
no choice but to take it. The bridge bears a sign informing us that it is
called: “
The bridge creaks beneath our feet and we can see through
its insecure planks to the treacherous river below – full of ideological whirlpools
which can make the head spin before they drag you under – a meal for the crocodiles.
Cautiously, we make it across and step off the bridge onto the other bank. We find
ourselves delivered to the beginning of a small track, which leads directly off
into the depths of a looming forest. Could this possibly be the start of our
royal “Road”? It doesn’t look very promising, but we take it because there is
no other.
BURNING OUR BRIDGE BEHIND US
As we head into the forest the rashest in our band
pause and, in a show of bravado, set fire to the bridge behind us. It is quickly
alight – there is no going back. However, the flames do cast some light along the
darkening track, and fortunately so, because we are soon confronted by two
pitfalls. One is sign-posted “Supernatural” and the other “Metaphysical”. These
mark the entries into uncertain labyrinths wherein it has been reputed many
escapees from the Houses of God and Disbelief have ventured to seek Truth – only
to emerge more confused than ever (if at all). Maybe we will return to peek
into these areas later if we can find a reliable guide but, for the moment, I
propose we dance around these potential traps – that we explore the unnatural
rather than the supernatural, and the non-physical rather than the metaphysical.
THE UNNATURAL AND THE NON-PHYSICAL
What do I mean by these terms? By the “unnatural” I
mean those things in life which are not adequately described by the natural, physical,
mechanistic, causal explanation for everything espoused by our physical
sciences, and by the “non-physical” I mean those things which are not of the material
world of atoms and physical forces emanating from the conversion of energy into
matter.
Let’s look at the natural, physical explanation for
everything.
THE NATURAL PHYSICAL EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING
It goes something like this: everything in life can
be explained as a natural, causal consequence of a physical event that most
scientists are calling the Big Bang – which occurred about 13.7 billion years
ago and marked the beginning of everything. There are other terms for the physical
beginning (the big expansion, big inflation etc.) but all basically envisage
the same thing – that everything came from nothing spontaneously and accidentally
– that is, without the aid of any outside cause or power – like a God.
The Big Bang was a multi-billion degree maelstrom of
energy converting into matter – initially sub-atomic particles like quarks and
gluons – forming quickly into protons and neutrons. These latter two sub-atomic
particles combined with electrons about 380,000 years later to form the
simplest atoms: hydrogen (a nucleus comprised of one proton and one neutron
encompassed by one whizzing electron) and helium (2 protons, neutrons,
electrons). In time, bigger atoms with more protons, neutrons and electrons occurred
and, eventually, combinations of atoms became molecules. This was all star
stuff – generated in the atomic factories we call stars.
In time, some of this “star stuff” became alive –
naturally, accidentally spontaneously. Life in this scenario is a physical
consequence of previous physical events. Somehow the purely physical, inert, inorganic
original conditions became, with time, organic – enabling life (on at least one
planet). But this spontaneous life occurrence did not stop there – the original
simple, single-cell lifeform then somehow became capable of multiplying itself.
These reproductions were sometimes affected by random mutations which the
environment automatically selected as either advantageous or disadvantageous for
survival. In this way advantageous mutations were naturally selected to survive
and multiply, and disadvantageous ones failed – in a process called natural
selection. This process resulted in the original, simple lifeform evolving
eventually into many complex animals – including us.
Is this natural, physical theory of everything
lacking? – is the existence of anything unexplained? There seem to be a few
things.
WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING?
The biggest is, why is there something rather than
nothing? It is one thing to have made certain observations of our universe and
to combine that with our knowledge about the interrelationship of energy and
matter (Energy = mass X speed of light squared) – and thus deduce that in the
beginning matter proceeded from energy in a Big Bang – but why/how/where did energy
originate? Science tells us (in the first law of thermodynamics) that neither energy
nor matter can be created or destroyed – absolute – not accidental, and out of
nothing.
And the original conditions of order, which existed,
and acted on the chaotic consequences of energy becoming matter – where did
they come from? Original conditions, which not only enabled order to prevail
over chaos, and matter to prevail over anti-matter, but which enabled in time amazing,
intricate creativity (physical and non-physical)?
And, where did the wellspring of organic life come
from? How did some of the purely physical, absolutely inert, originally billion
degree universe – inert star dust – naturally become organic?
And, when some stardust became alive, how did it come
to observe itself? And, not only “observe” itself, but some stardust came to observe
so well that it can understand the language the universe was written in (mathematics)
– to the point of becoming stardust not only observing itself, but understanding
itself. Stardust has come to understand itself to the point that it can re-create
itself (through genetic engineering). Was it natural that stardust should become
creatures and creators – both?
SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST
Those who subscribe to the natural, physical, accidental,
materialistic theory of everything therefore are expecting us to believe six
impossible things before breakfast.
After breakfast the materialists ask us to believe many
more impossible things. Even if we ignore the mysteries of: the original
existence of energy; the prevailing conditions of order; the inert becoming
organic; stardust being able to observe itself; stardust understanding itself; stardust
recreating itself – and find ourselves capable of believing humans were accidental,
inevitable – was it natural, accidental, inevitable that humans should compose
the 9th symphony, carve the Pieta, construct the Sagrada Familiglia,
paint the Giaconda, sing the Messiah, dance Swan Lake, and write Hamlet? – and/or
many other beautiful things which move our souls? Is it natural one lifeform (calling
itself human) proceeding from an accident – a purely physical beginning of
atoms and physical forces – should come to understand and appreciate many
unphysical things – beauty, music, humour, virtue, honour, shame, right, wrong,
the numinous? Further, how can we possess souls which can be moved?
A GHOST IN THE MACHINE?
The physical universe appears, in many ways, to be
mechanistic – but there also appears to be a ghost in the machine!?
MANY TRACKS, BUT WHICH WAY TO VENTURE?
We haven’t ventured very far down our track yet, but
we have come to some very interesting things which need some more exploration. We
have emerged from our initial, gloomy forest into a little light, and we have
come to a place where there are many tracks – but which to follow? We need some
direction, a map, a compass – but above all we need wisdom. Philosophy is meant
to be the love of wisdom, truth’s sharpest tool – let’s take out our philosophical
compass and see where it points us?
PHILOSOPHY NO LONGER A FOOTNOTE TO PLATO
Scientific discoveries since Galileo have spurred philosophy
to move away from a position which for centuries was well described as a “footnote
to Plato”. But it has come, instead, to a position which I would describe as the
“handmaiden of science”. Since
MEANINGLESSNESS MUST BE OUR LOGICAL DEFAULT POSITION
If we allow the above, what must we rationally and
logically deduce about life? Modern philosophy’s majority position is, indeed, that
we are just our bodies and that they are the result of random natural, physical
forces acting on an accidental, spontaneous beginning – and, further, that we
have no free choice and all our thinking and our behaviour is controlled by
genetic imperatives. The conclusion of modern philosophy is therefore to
logically deduce that life is devoid of special meaning and ultimate purpose. There
can be no “D” Divine, no first cause, and that humans have no duty or destiny. Any
meaning must necessarily be personal, and any purpose animal. Further, in a
relative universe all is relative, and there can be no Absolute – and
importantly for our quest – no “T” Truth – only your, or my “t” truth.
Meaninglessness, therefore, must be our logical
default philosophical position, any divergence from this must be proven.
Philosopher Jacques Monod sees it like this:
“The
ancient covenant is in pieces: man at last knows that he is alone in the
unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by
chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. ”
- (P.167, “Chance and
Necessity”).
LOST ON THE ROAD TO TRUTH?
So, basically,
we are wasting our time on our “Road to Truth”. The truth is: there is no “T”
Truth. Our compass must necessarily point nowhere – we are lost in a sometimes
magnificent but, ultimately bleak, land. We thought we were getting somewhere,
but while our royal road to Truth is still a track we have come to, so soon,
the brink of one of those “cliffs of fall” I mentioned in my introduction. What
to do, where to go?
Physicist, Paul
Davies has this to say about Monod’s words:
“If the
magnificent edifice of life is the consequence of a random and purely
incidental quirk of fate, as the French biologist Jacques Monod claimed, we
must surely find common cause with his bleak atheism.”
- (P. 3,
“The Fifth Miracle”)
“Bleak” is the
word. Here we stand, dangerously poised on the brink of meaninglessness, with no
map, and a philosophical compass pointing at the abyss. But, Davies leaves us just
a little glimmer – with his use of the word “if”.
IF
Let’s examine
this little (but potentially giant) word “if”. If humanity has emerged
out of the universe “only by chance”, if we are “the consequence of a
random and purely incidental quirk of fate”, if everything has proceeded
mechanistically from an accidental beginning, if we are just our bodies
– then meaninglessness and purposelessness must reign – we are lost on a road
with no destination. Worse, we have committed blasphemy and burned our bridges
back to a comforting House.
So, quickly, with
a little glimmer of hope in our hearts, let’s draw up a map of the “iffy” bits
of the natural, physical theory of everything. We have considered some of these
things briefly above, but now it’s time to explore them more closely, and some
other even more mysterious things. What sort of “things”? Things that don’t
look like they are well explained by the words “mechanistic”, “accidental”,
“spontaneous”, “meaningless”, “purposeless”, “causal”, “materialistic”,
“random”. Let’s look at the unlikely; the unnatural; the non-physical; the
spiritual – the mysteries of life. Such things as:
·
THE
INCREDIBLE UNLIKELINESS OF MATTER
·
THE
INCREDIBLE UNLIKELINESS OF BEING
·
INTELLIGENT
DESIGN
·
GOD
·
THE
ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES
·
GOOD,
BAD, RIGHT, AND WRONG.
·
SHAME,
ETHICS, CONSCIENCE AND AN INKLING OF THE SPIRITUAL.
·
BEAUTY
·
HUMAN
FACIAL BEAUTY
·
MATHEMATICS
AND THE UNCANNY TUNING OF THE HUMAN MIND TO NATURE
·
OVER-DEVELOPMENT
OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
·
CONSCIOUSNESS
·
MUSIC
AND POETRY
·
SPIRITUAL
EVOLUTION
·
HAPPINESS
·
SPIRITUAL
OR PSYCHOLOGICAL?
·
EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL
·
THE
PARANORMAL AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
·
NDE’s
·
THE
PHYSICAL WORLD AS MIND STUFF – QUANTUM WEIRDNESS
·
HUMOUR
So, there’s our map. We have obeyed Buddha’s first injunction
and set out on the Road to Truth, now let’s bravely continue on our path to see
if we can meet his other injunction to go all the way. Let’s explore the first
place on our map.
Shakespeare said that “The whole world’s a stage and
we are but players upon it”. Let’s examine, firstly, that stage.
Some scientists have become aware the more they learn
about the universe the more they come to realise that our existence is the
result of a mysterious multitude of crucial, delicate settings between the
forces of order, and disorder. The slightest alteration to any of them would
reduce our intricately interdependent universe to a chaotic jumble of energy
and radiation, which by rights it should naturally have been if it were the
product of an accident :
“We
really should live in a Universe with just radiation and no matter at all. But
we don’t – and one of the most exciting aspects of modern cosmology is trying
to understand what monumental accidents happened in the first microsecond of the
Universe’s existence.”
– Cosmologist Larry Krauss (quoted in Universe, Couper & Henbest P. 26).
So, our universe is already looking a little unnatural.
If natural, it should be a “universe with just radiation and no matter at all”.
But it’s not as it should naturally be. However, Krauss is not getting carried
away – while it’s not as it should be, and it may be “exciting”, the strange
facts leading to creation are still accidents – albeit “monumental”.
Let’s consider these “monumental accidents” recorded
by Krauss. Firstly, the accident of the unlikely formation of enough and
suitable matter to form a universe. This from Krauss (in ‘Universe’ again, describing the initial moments after the beginning):
“Every
time a particle of ordinary matter was created, a deadly twin of antimatter was
spawned as well. The birth of every electron, for instance, also saw the
creation of an ‘anti-electron’, or positron. The two have exactly opposite
properties. If an electron and positron subsequently meet up again, they
mutually annihilate in a burst of energy. In the young Universe equally matched
battalions of matter and antimatter waged war on each other. The skirmishes
produced radiation…Why is there any material – matter or antimatter – left in
the Universe today?…every now and then, one out of 10 billion interactions
might have produced a particle of matter – one more than a particle of
antimatter. In the end, you’d have 10 billion particles of antimatter, and 10
billion and one particles of matter. The 10 billion particles of matter and
antimatter would annihilate, leaving just the one particle of matter left over.
And that little bit extra is responsible for everything we can see today – it’s
kinda remarkable!”
(Pp. 25-26 ibid.)
Kinda! Why
not 10 billion and one particles of antimatter instead?
THE FINE BALANCE BETWEEN ORDER AND DISORDER
And, not only is there a very fine balance between
matter and anti-matter – something vs. nothing – there is an equally fine
balance between order and disorder. All should be chaos in an accidental,
spontaneous natural beginning – any accidental order quickly reduced by
entropy. Professor Roger Penrose (mathematics, Oxford) has shown that to
produce the complexity we observe in our universe the chances of naturally
having the required amount of order to combat the forces of disorder is one in
1010 123 – a number so huge that the number of zeros totals more
than all the atoms in the universe!
WHY IS THE UNIVERSE SO HUGE?
The question also arises as to why is the universe had
to be so huge – doesn’t it speak of some inefficiencies of design that you
would not expect in a God? But apparently size does matter – not only were the
above extraordinarily fine balances of matter and anti-matter, order and
disorder critical – but the size and density of the universe is critical as
well:
“…the
mean density of matter in the universe at the very beginning has to be within 1
part in 1060 of the so-called ‘critical density’… If the density
is smaller than it is by this amount then the universe will expand far too
quickly for stars and galaxies to be able to form. If it is greater then the
whole universe will recollapse under gravity in just a few months … the
universe needs to be the vast size it is in order for man to exist. This is the
size it inevitably reaches in the 14,000 million years which it takes to evolve
human beings…only if it is so vast could we be here! ”
-
Dr.
Rodney Holder, P53 “Think” – issue 12
The universe is not looking very accidental, is it? If
anything it is looking amazingly like it has unnatural planning and intent? But
we won’t enter the stormy waters of the Intelligent Design debate just yet. We’ll
stay with our map and I see the I.D. debate is up ahead a little way. But our track
is becoming more of a path – will it become a road? Let’s see.
We have examined the physical universe and found its
chances of occurring naturally (that is by accident) in its finely tuned state,
to be so small as to be virtually incalculable. We started by contemplating
life’s improbable stage, now let’s contemplate life’s improbable players.
How did the non-living transform into the living – the
inorganic into the organic?
“What
physical and chemical processes can transform non-living matter into a living
organism?…It is currently being tackled by an army of chemists, biologists,
astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians … On the basis of their research,
many of them fervently conclude that
the laws of nature are, to put it bluntly, rigged in favour of life.…Belief
that life is written into the laws of nature carries a faint echo of a bygone
religious age, of a universe designed for habitation. …Many scientists are
scornful of such notions, insisting that the origin of life was a freak
accident of chemistry, unique to Earth, and that the subsequent emergence of
complex organisms, including conscious beings, is likewise purely the chance
outcome of a gigantic cosmic lottery.”
- Paul Davies, P. xii “The
Fifth Miracle”.
But –
“The
living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. …How did
something so immensely complicated, so finessed, so exquisitely clever, come
into being all on its own? How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing
and pulling their immediate neighbours, cooperate to form and sustain something
as ingenious as a living organism?” (P.5, ibid.)
ARE WE THE RESULT OF A TRIPLE FLUKE
So, let’s do the maths. We are not just “the chance outcome of a gigantic cosmic lottery”
but actually the chance outcome of three gigantic lotteries: first there was
the fluke of the material universe of atoms happening accidentally; then secondly
the fluke of life happening in it accidentally; and finally “complex organisms, including conscious
beings” arising accidentally from the first simple, single cell lifeform. The
odds, again, are so small as to be incalculable – one multi-billion chance
multiplied by another, by another. We have consciousness down on our map for
later exploration, so here we’ll just marvel that billions of cooperating cells
made up of mindless molecules which are “capable only of pushing and pulling
their immediate neighbours” – have accidentally formed beings capable of
understanding themselves (and the universe as well) – conscious star dust understanding
itself. Can this happen accidentally?
Philosophical conclusions, to be sound, must be made
considering the available evidence – but then can only be held either: “on the
balance of probabilities”, or sometimes “beyond reasonable doubt”, after we consider
the strength of that evidence. That we stand here now as the result of an
accident is not a conclusion that can be held even on the basis of the balance
of probabilities – considering the trillions and trillions-to-one against odds.
Mechanistic evolution through natural selection can explain some part of the
third leg of our accidental trifecta (the evolution of complexity) but it has
nothing to offer as an answer to the question of the original existence of
something rather than nothing, the order inherent in the original conditions, and
the spontaneous emergence of life from the inert.
Before we can declare life to be purposeful and
meaningful we will need to examine more evidence, but at this point on our road
to truth we can say that it is hard
to see how meaninglessness has become the default philosophical speculation for
the post-modern academic world. Those who subscribe to accident as a
satisfactory explanation to the universe and the life within it seem to have
accepted the totally unlikely multiplied by the completely improbable to the
power of the incredible. We have a fair way to go on our journey, but Monod’s meaninglessness
is not looking too sound as a philosophical conclusion.
THE MULTIVERSE ANSWER
I must mention that a “Multiverse Theory” has been
concocted (from no observations of its existence) with the aim of undoing the
probability maths I have contemplated above. This theory hypothesises that, if there
was an infinite number of accidental universes, one with the required amount of
order out of chaos for matter to exist would eventually occur – and with the
right amount and order of accidents for life to occur in it – and that such
life would emerge to consciousness – and exhibit all the strange spiritual
behaviours we are due to consider on the road ahead. Multiverse theory is a
theory based on the existence of a thing which has never been observed, and stacked
with complicated assumptions which would be treated harshly by Ockham’s razor.
It is a theory which also only presents problems for religions’ primitive “g” gods
– not for a rational “G” God, as we shall see.
So, we have moved
along our path, but our path has stopped at the shores of a lake which we will have
to cross. There is enough material lying around to build a raft – but we must
be brave because there is a storm brewing on the lake – whipped up by furious
debate about matters of design that I have just touched on.
·
INTELLIGENT
DESIGN
The storm that is brewing on our philosophical lake
is the wind and fury generated by the Intelligent Design debate which is raging
in philosophy at present. We are forced into the storm when we talked (as we
did above) of the unlikeliness of being accidentally alive in an accidentally
occurring universe. And also when we quoted authors talking about: “a faint echo of a bygone religious age”;
and the universe: “rigged in
favour of life”; and things: “written
into the laws of nature”. Let’s see if we can cross the lake safely?
What muddies the waters of the Intelligent Design
debate is that the proponents of Intelligent Design are usually, on one side,
followers of religions who are trying to insinuate their stone-age god into the
fact that our unlikely-to-be-a-fluke existence in an unlikely-to-be-a-fluke
universe is mysterious. Our suspiciously designed situation in their belief
opens the way for their argument of irreducible complexity – leading to the
conclusion that animals were created entire as we see them now (i.e. total
creation in 6 days and the Biblical god is still a possibility). On the other
hand, the opponents of Intelligent Design feel that if they successfully demolish
Biblical design, and with it the Biblical god, they have succeeded in killing
off any and all possible design and “D” Divine(s). Like Nietzsche in his
definitive statement: “God is dead, and
we have killed him” they are urging us to dance on the grave of any and
every possible Divine when at the very best it contains only the corpse of a “g”
god created around the campfires of primitive, pre-scientific, nomadic goat-herders
– or is most likely, empty because such a god never existed in the first place.
Both have chosen the wrong argument to prove their
position. Atheists have only proven that Intelligent Design is not science, and
the religious have only succeeded in proving that mystery remains. There are plenty
of other arguments for the existence of special meaning, purpose, and a “D” Divine
(albeit not a god of any religion) every bit as strong as the observation that
the universe appears “rigged”, with things designedly “written into nature”.
So, the Intelligent Design debate is mainly about
installing or killing off the old Hebrew “g” god and not about examining the apparent
design of the universe for Truth. One thing that is not in doubt, looking
dispassionately at the Intelligent Design debate is that I.D., as presented by
the religious, is of religion and philosophy, not science. To attempt to bring
religion into science classes by teaching I.D. as science, leaves Western
civilization at risk of losing its position of pre-eminence – as the once
pre-eminent, scientifically-advanced Moslem civilisation managed by this means.
IS THE UNIVERSE
BIO-FRIENDLY?
But, within the
The importance
for philosophy is that thinkers supporting the first position take this as an
indication of the accidental nature and hence meaninglessness of life. Thinkers
following behind scientists adhering to the second position see this as
potential proof of God and special purpose – bio-friendliness speaking of
special design of the universe. Of :
“a
universe designed for habitation by living creatures.”
- p.xi, The Origin of Life, Paul Davies (my underlining).
Finding life on other planets will be yet another
shaft into the side of the already incredible Biblical account of reality, and its
god (who placed humanity at the centre of the universe as his only begotten
children). However, in “a universe designed for habitation” such that
there is life on many planets, there is room for a larger Divine (one who was
not just obsessed with humanity) who could have designed life to happen in as
many forms as possible. Such a God is vastly different to religions’ gods – and
more credible for it.
SHARED DOCTRINE
Religion and atheism do share two pieces of doctrine:
1. Life is peculiar to Earth and
2. We only have one life.
The first doctrine interests us here (I will examine
position 2. further along our road). The “Life is peculiar to Earth” doctrine
allows the religious to maintain belief in the Bible which states that Earth is
special to God – being the only place where “He” created life – while it also allows
atheists to maintain that life is just a one-off accident of the original
accidental conditions. But I argue that, even if it is eventually proven that
life is peculiar to Earth, neither position has been necessarily established.
Life being peculiar to Earth would not necessarily establish
the latter “accident” hypothesis – nor even demolish religion’s creator God, because
a creator God could still have generated life on a single suitable planet. A creator
God could also cause suitable, creative mutations on lifeforms so that, at
crucial points, mutations were not random – to influence the designs of
evolution (and the differing speed of evolution of resulting animals – such
differing speeds do appear to have occurred). Or a creator God could still have
designed the whole process in the first place to follow a random, but inherently
creative path because of the forces that have been apparently built into the
creative universe. Of course, such a creator God does not resemble the old,
tribal, “maker in God’s image” of the Old Testament who did it all in 6 days.
If it is eventually determined that life only occurs on Earth, the only
assistance this gives religion is that the Bible is not contradicted on this
point. If life only occurs on Earth, it still does not confirm that the Earth and
the life on it is 6000 years old – nor all the rest of Biblical religion’s
incredibilities.
We will have to wait the outcome of our explorations
into outer space to establish the bio-friendliness or otherwise of the universe.
But it is not likely to be an issue resolved any time soon (unless we are
irrefutably visited or contacted) by aliens because a definitive answer would
involve exploration of all galaxies!
MANY MORE MYSTERIES THAN APPARENT DESIGN
I don’t want to waste a lot of the expedition’s time
and energy on the whole, stormy, Intelligent Design debate. Looking at the map of
our journey there are many more mysteries awaiting us that remain to be
explored – mysteries that speak even more strongly of special meaning, ultimate
purpose, and the possibility of a Divine – than the apparent “D” Design of the
universe does.
So we cross the stormy I.D. lake without capsizing
and land on the other shore. There is a track leading away from the lake, but
it disappears into a hedge maze, which has a signpost declaring it to be the
“Maze of the Ineffable Divine”. Must we go there? We have to, it is across our
path – if we are to go all the way along the Road to Truth we will need to
approach any Divine. Many will cry out: “Why does there have to be a God?” There
doesn’t have to be a God, there either just is one or there isn’t – and the
question remains one of the biggest for Philosophy.
When we start talking of “God” we run into problems
because our bodies (and our brains are, very much, part of our bodies) are an
evolutionary product of the relative/material world, and therefore will find it
hard to contemplate the Absolute/Divine. But must God necessarily remain ineffable
to us?
I’m inclined to believe that, while the totality of
the Absolute may be beyond a mind born of the relative, if star stuff can not
only contemplate the stars but come to comprehend them through a mysterious
ability to understand mathematics (the language the universe was written in),
then we can approach the Absolute more closely than we have managed so far.
OUR IDEAS ABOUT GOD SO FAR ARE PRIMITIVE AND DIVISIVE
We certainly need to try, because some of the
primitive ideas we have had about God so far (and what “He” wants from us) have
been pretty horrendous – and the cause most of our present problems. We live in
a beautiful and creative universe which creates through the process of
evolution, and the sharpest tool in this creative process is natural selection.
Natural selection is the selection of those lifeforms most suited to survive in
the universe – by the universe. If we are to be selected as a species suitable to
survive in the universe by the universe, we need to survive each other first.
Humans are part of the universe, and one of the most virulent agents in the evolutionary
process on planet Earth. To survive each other we need to dismantle our ideas
of separation and recognise our unity. The biggest force fighting against the
recognition of our unity – the biggest force for our separation – is our
separate notions of the Divine.
IS A CREDIBLE GOD POSSIBLE?
The whole notion of a Divine has come to be regarded
as primitive by modern philosophy because our present gods were created in pre-scientific
times when our understandings of the universe we live in were primitive. The ancient, Abrahamic god shared by Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity was created by iron-age man (and I mean “man”) in his
own image. This iron-age, man-made “g” god had very few Divine characteristics –
he was male, sexist, jealous, parochial, brutal, and in need of praise. To this
day, this god is the one which comes to most people’s minds whenever the word “God”
is used. Anybody prepared to talk of God is thus tarred with the brush of this
primitive, Abrahamic god. Is it possible to contemplate a credible God?
Let’s try. To approach a rational God we need firstly
to rationally contemplate the question – how does anything exist at all?
HOW DOES ANYTHING EXIST AT ALL?
We do know how life evolved once it existed, and we
may in the future even come to understand how life began – but how was there something
in the first place to become alive? This initial mystery is a huge mystery for science,
and for its camp-follower, philosophy – especially materialist/reductionist
philosophy. Some try to solve this difficulty by subscribing to scepticism (“How
do we know that we exist – how do we know we are not something like a brain in
a vat thinking this all up?”). I address scepticism at another place in these
essays but, for now, let’s stick to the track through this maze and not get
lost in any existential by-ways.
Here, let’s just contemplate that we – anything, everything
– exist because energy exists.
ENERGY
Energy is the elephant in the House of Disbelief’s
lounge room – no one wants to notice it because that involves thinking about the
implications of its original existence in the first place. Those who think that
the universe accidentally emerged from nothing have a problem – the universe
cannot have accidentally emerged from nothing unless energy can accidentally
emerge from nothing. It is a basic understanding of science (stated in the
First Law of Thermodynamics) that energy cannot be created – energy exists, therefore
energy must always have existed. The other basic scientific understanding about
energy is that it can never be destroyed – therefore it must always continue to
exist. If energy exists now, it must always have existed – and must always
continue to exist. There can’t ever be nothing, energy always was and always
will be – it is absolute.
Science also tells us energy can convert – to matter
(Big Bang) and vice versa (atom bomb). Humans have come to know that energy and
matter are interrelated, we have used, and proved, Einstein’s beautiful
equation E=mc2 over
and over again. So energy created our material universe – the absolute became
relative.
What was before the Big Bang? We can know only one
thing – if energy cannot be created, energy must have existed “before” the Big
Bang – the creation of matter and relativity and time. Before the Big Bang was
“all time, no time”; the “All in All”. The original singularity, that absolute
of energy which existed before the Big Bang is what we try to approach when we
use the word “God” – when we try to approach the ineffable with language.
And, further. All matter in our material universe came
from the originally existing energy – then, the Universe is God – or at the
very least – of God. All living beings, of course, have not only matter from
the originally existing energy but also life energy from the same source – therefore
all living things are of God: body and life. I argue further (and present
evidence later) that humans, are not fully described as animal bodies, but are spiritual
beings with animal bodies. Therefore humans, at least (maybe other animals as
well?), are of God: body, life, and soul.
This presents a
philosophical corollary for humanity: those who claim to believe in God and
claim to love (or fear – more common, unfortunately) God, should consider more
carefully how they treat others – because other people are as close to God that
we are going to come this side of the absolute/relative divide. We are the way
God experiences physical, material existence – what we do to each other we do
to God.
The clincher
argument against the existence of God for atheists of the Bertrand Russell
school has always been: “If God created everything, then who created God?” The
original energy was God – energy/God cannot be created. It is not necessary for
God to have been “created”. And God didn’t create the universe – it is one of
the properties of energy that it can become matter – God became the universe. The
universe is God. And there can only be one God – not a Jewish God, or a Muslim
God, or a Christian God – “g” gods, sure, but not “G” Gods. Energy is a unity,
not a multiplicity.
But some will still say that all is accidental
including the original existence of energy. Everything in the universe is
causal – flowing spontaneously from an original accident. Can energy exist
accidentally, and can it accidentally convert to matter? We can never know
absolutely in a relative world. We can only ever hold beliefs in this relative
world “on the balance of probabilities” or “beyond reasonable doubt”. What we
hold is our philosophy, and it is as securely held as the evidence we hold it
on is substantial. To determine the strength of our philosophy we need to look
at the evidence we are basing it on.
So, what exactly has been created by the original
energy? How accidental does the universe and everything in it appear? Does
there appear to be any Divine plan, any special meaning or ultimate purpose to existence?
We have contemplated a rational physics of God, but how about the nature of
God?
THE NATURE OF GOD
It has been said many times that “God is Love”. And
by some that “God is Evil” (because if God is omnipotent, and evil exists, it
is only by God’s consent – which would make God evil). So, what is the evidence
for the real nature of God?
If the physics of God is as I have concluded above –
the original energy was God, or of God – and our bodies are matter flowing from
the original energy, as is our life energy – then we are God and God is us. We
are then a reflection of God, and our nature reflects that of God. So let’s now
emerge from the “Maze of the Ineffable Maze” and have a closer look at human
beings. We will get an idea of our natures by examining some of the things that
we value. Let’s see some of the things we value in our selves – let’s go back
to one of our wisest – Aristotle.
These are the human virtues as identified by
Aristotle :
Courage, Friendliness, Temperance,
Truthfulness, Liberality, Wittiness, Magnificence, Shame, Pride, Justice, Good
temper, Honour.
Generally accepted modern virtues include: Modesty, Sincerity,
Empathy, Humility, Integrity, Compassion, Tolerance, Honesty, Fidelity,
Benevolence, Determination, Reliability, Insightfulness, Commitment,
Persistence, Resourcefulness, Creativity, Enthusiasm, Perspicacity,
Broadmindedness.
Now the peculiar thing about virtues is, if the
majority scientific position is true (that the universe is a purely physical
event) how did non-physical things like virtues come to exist? How were they generated
in a material world born of energy and comprised of matter – blind atoms and
forces proceeding mechanistically? Of course, virtues could only come to exist
after life came to exist because they are characteristics of lifeforms, but the
scientific explanation for the existence of lifeforms is that they must be the
purely physical result of a purely physical event. Now our sciences are
necessarily limited because they are, after all, empirical disciplines and if
asked for an explanation for anything (including something as mysterious as
human behaviour) they are stuck with trying to explain it in physical,
observable, measureable terms (like neural electrical impulses which can show
up on a screen if asked to explain virtues).
The philosophical handmaiden to our physical sciences
is the materialist school of philosophy – which holds, that because everything in
the universe is the causal consequence of an initial physical event, everything
must be consequently physical (and, because also accidental, existence is
necessarily devoid of special meaning). Free-will can not exist, we have one
accidental life during which we proceed mechanistically to a purposeless (and
eternal) end – “we” are just our bodies, nothing more. Physical scientists and
materialist philosophers have to describe non-material things like virtues in material
terms of physical brain states which can be shown on computer screens by blips
and flashes. But physical the fact that things like brains being able to
comprehend and construct non-physical things like virtues causes problems for
the materialist theory of everything. Tadeusz Zawidzki (Assistant Professor of
Philosophy, George Washington Univ.) outlines some of the problems thus:
“The
sciences of human nature, including neuroscience, biology, and cognitive
science, assume human behaviour is entirely the product of the nervous
system…Nervous systems are composed entirely of physical components: cells and
tissues constructed out of proteins, communicating using electrical and
chemical signals…Brain states exist in real space and time. They have a definite
location and duration. So they can only be related to other events and objects
that exist in space and time. For example, they can be triggered by light that
reflects off real objects, hits the retina in the eye and is consequently transduced
into neural impulses in the brain. But human beings can think about things
which do not exist in space and time. Human thoughts can be directed at numbers
and other abstract mathematical objects. Humans can think about other abstract
ideals like justice and beauty [and virtues]…But how can a state
of the nervous system, a pattern of neural activation, existing in space and
time, be about or directed at objects that don’t exist in space and time?”
(Pp.12-14
“Dennet”, Tadeusz Zawidzki – One World Thinkers)
Problems.
NEO DARWINISM
Enter Neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinists attempt to show
us how non-physical characteristics may have been selected once in existence –
by using
Here it is interesting to notice that virtues are not
unremittingly advantageous to the survival and propagation of the genes
carrying them (if that indeed is where they reside), and it is hard to believe
that some of them were selected naturally. For example, some virtues (like compassion)
have caused people to assist unrelated others (and their unrelated genes) to
survive sickness, injuries and dangers. This ensures the survival of competing genes
in direct contravention of evolutionary logic. Neo-Darwinians explain this away
by developing notions like “group altruism” – which could help individual genes
survive by being a member of a successful group (which may not all be related).
But humans often help strangers (non-group members) – even wounded enemies on a
battlefield (anti-group members). Virtues like compassion have evolutionary
disadvantages in equal measure – so how were they naturally selected?
Let’s consider another virtue – courage. When danger
enters the equation it is not enough to just have compassion, one must have
courage as well. Compassion and courage in the face of danger can see the
possessor not only wanting to help someone with competing genes to survive, but
being courageous enough to do so in dangerous circumstances – thus not only
enabling the propagation of competing genes, but risking their own precious
genes in the process – double jeopardy to the Darwinian notion of all human
behaviour being explicable by and reducible to purely survival and genetic
imperatives. To answer this problem neo-Darwinians ideologists have developed a
rationale they call ‘reciprocal altruism’ to explain away risky altruism. This
is altruism to non-related others from whom you could reasonably expect
pay-back – which would then help your genes survive. This from Richard Dawkins:
“The
other [the first being kin altruism]
main type of altruism for which we have a well-worked out Darwinian rationale
is reciprocal altruism (‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’)”.
“The
God Delusion”, P. 216
But the problems I have mentioned above that human
behaviour often presents for kin altruism explanations for virtue also apply to
reciprocal altruism – lives have been risked and even lost helping individuals
from other groups (tourists from other countries for example) who we know can
never reciprocate our altruism, and we show altruism even to hostile strangers
who are direct genetic threats – more likely to kill us than reciprocate (there
are many examples of soldiers risking their lives to rescue enemy soldiers on a
battlefield). Humans have also shown unnatural compassion and courage when
rescuing animals of other species (that they don’t own – either as pets nor
stock). I have two newspaper articles in my hand – one (The Border Mail – Albury/Wodonga
3/1/2008) about the Melbourne-based Rescue Squad undertaking a 600 kilometre
round-trip to rescue an old dog from a mineshaft – and another (Herald-Sun –
Melbourne 2/7/2008) showing the picture of a man in the USA who jumped into the
ocean to rescue a panicked, 165 kg. black bear from drowning. Where’s the group-,
kin-, or reciprocal-altruism in such behaviours? These are just two recently recorded
examples of humans risking their own survival, and that of their precious genes,
purely out of compassion – virtuously. We all know of acts of compassion and
bravery to animals (that aren’t useful to our survival) that do not make it to
the newspapers.
There is no doubt that humans do act out of kin-,
group-, and reciprocal-altruism – some recent studies using university students
as guinea pigs have shown that people do act this way – but life shows us that
this is not always, or even mostly, the case. Other studies (we examined one by
Pinker in Essay 2) show that our behaviour towards each other is improving at a
fairly fast rate and that we are evolving to be more virtuous and kindly, not
only towards other humans, but to animals as well. How is this happening if our
behaviours are selected naturally and amorally, according to the genetic
survival advantages imparted?
How about non-virtues – don’t they exist too and
conform to the expectations of the neo-Darwinian theories of “selfish genes”? For
example, cowardice – this would enable the person possessing it to survive and
pass on his/her genes. While we may have a conception of non-virtues as
something that exist as things in themselves – they don’t in fact exist. They
only refer to an absence of the virtues, not a presence – cowardice being the
absence of courage. We can only have a virtue in some measure, a non-virtue (or
vice) just describes a non-presence. Non-virtues should have been
overwhelmingly selected by Neo-Darwinian logic, leaving us as a cowardly,
selfish, uncompassionate, shameful, dishonest species. While some answer this
description (and just about all sometimes) as a species we are virtuous.
So, to sum up, the unnatural is this: science tells
us natural, self-occurring, physical processes accidentally formed life. But
one life form thus accidentally formed has mysterious, unnatural, non-physical
things called virtues which often lead to non-accidental behaviours which cut
across the only natural purpose for human behaviour which science can ascertain
– physical survival and genetic dominance. These non-physical virtues have
driven us to be so much more than: “just
bags of genetic material” (Dick Gross – “godless Gospel”, P. 238), or Pinker’s “meat puppet”. I’m not saying that Darwinian ideas do not explain some
behaviours, just that they do not describe all human behaviours – especially
those which define us as human. Virtues are non-physical things in a supposedly
purely physical world – so maybe the world is not purely physical and
mechanistic, maybe virtues are manifestations of the ghost in the machine?
SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION?
All that can be concluded at the moment is that our
relative (good, better, best) world is definitely very creative and evolution
is its sharpest tool. But more than just our bodies seems to be evolving. Maybe
the evolution of virtues in humanity describes our spiritual evolution? I see spiritual
evolution is on our map a little further down the road, and I guess we will explore
it in much more detail when we get there.
For the time being, we have advanced a little on our journey,
our track now is looking a little more like a road. Let’s see if we can get
further by examining what makes a behaviour a virtue – let’s examine humanity’s
unnatural notions of good and bad, right and wrong.
Again, these
are things non-physical and, again, we encounter the question of how the
non-physical came to exist in a world made up of physical matter proceeding by
physical forces and laws from a purely physical beginning? Why is it that we agree
on subjective things such as good and bad, right and wrong – in an objective
world where nothing is actually “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”?
And good, bad,
right, wrong – ethics (or lack of them) – are peculiarly human notions, part of
what defines us as human. We share our ethics with no other animals – they are
unnatural. A human risking survival and selfish genes saving another human who
is not kin (neo-Darwinian “kin altruism”), who is not of our tribal/social
group (group altruism), or who is not able to reciprocate (reciprocal altruism)
is, nevertheless, still seen as “good” and “right” and rewarded with praise,
respect, and even civilian medals. If life is solely natural – about survival
of self and/or related genes – the above behaviour should instead be seen as
perverse – naturally “bad” and “wrong” i.e. against nature.
Conversely,
more natural acts that would benefit you and your genes’ survival at the
expense of others’ (robbery, rape and murder for example) are seen as “bad” and
“wrong” by humanity and punished – even to the extent of ending that life by
community-sanctioned murder (execution). Only one species of animal on this
planet has notions of universal good and bad, right and wrong – notions which
are not found in nature – although sanctions may vary.
Sometimes,
usually in the past, humans behave in a more natural, Darwinian way – as if
robbery, rape, and ethnic cleansing against members of other tribal and genetic
groups was good. The Bible, for example, offers many instances where this was
seen as good – sanctioned and even aided by God (the Hebrew god extended
daylight hours so Joshua could more effectively cleanse
So where does
this sense of good and bad, right and wrong, come from? Some would say that because
it is not within us, not natural, we have been taught it by religion. But to
quote atheist philosopher Stephen Law :
“So it seems
that humans have an in-built sense of right and wrong that operates anyway,
independently of their exposure to religion. …I admit there is a difficulty [as
an atheist] about explaining how we come by moral knowledge. But religion does
not solve that problem.”
- (P.115 “Philosophy Gym”.)
Considering the
question of how we came by moral knowledge leads us into another question for
those who believe that everything is the mechanistic result of accidental
physical events – where did the spiritual come from? The religious impulse is
endemic to humanity, past and present. All societies have religions – but hold
them with various degrees of enthusiasm (usually to do with the hold of other
competing distractions like materialism, prosperity, politics etc.). Religion may
have become Darwinian – about power over an interventionist god, and survival
in eternity – but it was spurred in the first place as a result of our
encounters with the numinous in life – the ghost in the machine. The fact that
our present religions are primitive and incredible does not remove the fact of
the experience of numinous and spiritual experiences which generated them in
the first place. How do we experience the spiritual in a purely physical,
mechanical world? As we have seen in the previous essay which examined the
House of Disbelief – it is not enough to demolish an ancient “g” god, to be
able to declare “G” God dead.
By recognising our
“in-built sense of right and wrong”, atheist Stephen Law has led us to a fertile
valley which our road now passes through, an area where some really strange and
unnatural moral and spiritual ideas grow – unnatural ideas like shame,
conscience and ethics.
·
SHAME,
ETHICS, CONSCIENCE, AND AN INKLING OF THE SPIRITUAL
So, our
conscience, a sense of right and wrong, our “moral knowledge”, seems to be (in
Dr Law’s words) “in-built”? Because it often cuts across our natural, animal
and genetic imperatives, it is therefore a non-animal sense – a spiritual
sense, rather than animal? “In-built” because it is “us” (our selves, our souls).
Is our notion of right and wrong to do with a spiritual notion of what it is to
be a human being – a spiritual being – albeit with an obviously animal body?
A SPIRITUAL
BEING WITH AN ANIMAL BODY
Studying our
behaviours – spiritual and animal – the best description of a human being seems
to be: a spiritual being with an animal body. In the course of a life we will
do many things which are behaviours driven by our animal bodily needs, instincts,
and genetic imperatives. But we will also do things governed by what our self decides
to be “right” or “wrong” – not necessarily genetically beneficial. We have
bodies but we are not our bodies – we are our selves, souls, spirits – call our
“being” what you will. Our bodies are natural, and do natural things. Our
selves are spiritual and do many “unnatural” things. We have even turned the
study of humanity’s unnatural notions of right and wrong into a discipline –
ethics. There is broad agreement across humanity on the ethicality of certain
actions, on what is good form or poor form – what denotes uniquely “human” as
opposed to purely “animal” behaviours. We often call something of which we
vehemently disapprove – “an animal act”.
TO BE HUMAN
So, what does it
take to be human? To answer this question let’s consider a uniquely human
notion – that of shame. A natural, wild animal does not have guilt or shame
when it falls short of an ideal – of “good” behaviour for its species. A lion
has, for example, no notion of the human concept of “brave”, or what is
expected in terms of behaviour to define an ideal lion. A pack of lions tearing
apart a baby elephant wastes no time debating the “shame” brought to the ideal of
what it is to be a lion, or whether their actions are “brave” or “cowardly” –
beneath the “dignity” of a lion. They have no “shame” at the “lop-sided match”,
waste no time on the “ethics” of the “cruel” situation or what is “beneath”
them. All of the notions in inverted commas are peculiar to humans and their
ethics and ideals – the tag of “kings of the jungle” has been imposed on lions.
The tag has a sense of “noblesse oblige”, even people can be said to have
leonine bearing – implying a nobility.
If notions of
shame, nobility, and dignity are not natural, what are they? They are spiritual
– they speak of the human being – the “self”, not the animal body. One of our
most prized possessions is our human dignity – the human sense of unique
difference from all the other animals. Anyone who sees dignity or a sense of
good and bad, ethics, guilt, or shame in other animals (except in pets who are
not in a natural situation and are trained by us to behave like us – e.g. to be
“nice” to other dogs etc.) is suffering from severe anthropomorphism. No wild,
natural animal has a sense of “bad” behaviour as defined by their idea of their
“selves”. Only humans blush from shame or embarrassment. A blush of shame is
one physical proof of the existence of the spiritual. I’m told that hippopotami
blush, but this is a flush of rage, not a blush of shame. Their flush is
visible because of hairlessness – it can be seen when they are angry – for
example, when hippopotami fight. The animal in us can also flush with anger,
but only the spiritual in us can blush with shame.
OUR SENSE OF
RESPONSIBILITY AS PEAK LIFE FORM
Humanity’s
unnatural ethics are even affecting the natural, physical Universe. The
continued existence of some endangered animals hangs on humanity’s notion of ethics – the responsibility we feel towards
other animals because we recognise we are the peak life form in our world
(maybe not in the universe?). Whales are a good example. Whales have been
brought back from the brink of a natural extinction at our hands because we
consider it “unethical” and/or cruel to prey on these gentle giants from our
superior and uniquely knowing position. Neo-Darwinians would put forward the
argument that we protect other animals only because we understand that bio-diversity
is in the best interest of our animal survival. This may be a part of the consideration,
of course, but when arguments are put forward as to why we should protect other
species the most compelling are based on ethics – an appeal to our conscience.
Shame is our biggest reaction to human-caused extinctions of other species – an
abdication of our moral responsibility from being the peak species.
A MARK OF OUR
SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION
We have
spiritually evolved to see animals as fellow-travellers. Instead of being seen
as slow-swimming hunks of meat, we see whales as fellow-travellers – and are
spiritually moved by their “songs” – making recordings of them which we sell on
CD’s to each other. If we are just Darwinian animals – go figure! When we were
less spiritually evolved – when we were acting more like animals – we drove
other species to extinction (Moas and Dodos for example) simply because they
were easy to catch and eat. Now we are acting more ethically we get a sense of
pride at conserving species – and shame when driving species to extinction. The
more evolved spiritually we become the more ethically we behave.
I repeat, it is
the human condition to be a spiritual being with an animal body. We can hear the natural drumbeat of our
animal bodies and of our genetic imperatives, but what we think of our
spiritual being, the self, is as important to us as animal survival and
sometimes more so – many people have committed suicide because of shame. We are
a natural evolutionary product, but have become an unnatural evolutionary force
because of our ethics. We have also become an unnatural evolutionary force
because of our unnatural aesthetics – we save beautiful but useless animals
just for their beauty, for example koala bears).
Beauty?
We have come to an interesting point on our road with
a bit of a lookout. Let’s go and admire the view.
Beauty
is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
What is this strange, unnatural, human idea of beauty?
“Unnatural” because humans, alone of all the animal species have an
understanding of what beauty is, and an appreciation of beauty in all its forms
– natural and human-made.
Because we’re on a lookout, let’s first examine the
unique human idea of scenic beauty. Humans speak of scenic beauty “taking our
breath away” – Jack London, describing the beauty of the
“One
caught one’s breath and felt the pang that is almost hurt, so exquisite was the
beauty of it.”
Darwin himself writes of being spiritually uplifted
by the beauty of the world:
“In
my journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a
Brazilian forest ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher
feelings of wonder, admiration and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is
more in man than the breath of his body.”
-
Charles Darwin, Autobiography
“More to man than the breath of his body” Charles? That
is exactly what these essays are trying to find out – it is, however, an idea
that fills your latter-day ideological followers with fear and loathing.
So, what’s going on with humanity’s (unique in the
animal world) appreciation of a “view”? Animals have never been spotted on
lookouts admiring the view; when cattle settle for a rest they face any-which-way
– not towards the view; a pod of dolphins doesn’t queue up to look into a
glass-bottomed boat to view the wonders of humanity; Bonobo chimps don’t go to
pretty places for picnics. Humans, alone of all the animals admire – and go to
great (and dangerous) lengths – to see the view and are spiritually moved by it,
and have universal agreement of what is beautiful in scenery (although we may
differ on what is most beautiful).
THE NEO-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION
The (exceedingly uncompelling) Darwinian explanation for
our appreciation scenic beauty from evolutionary psychology is:
“Why
do we find certain landscapes pleasing? Well, they are the ones that are most
promising for hunting and shelter. Hence if we are attracted to them we have a
greater chance of survival.”
-
“The Secret Power of Beauty”, (John Armstrong, P. 105)
This may go a little part of the way towards
explaining why we may find a view of an arable valley beautiful – but why do we
find a snow-capped mountain beautiful; a scene from Antarctica; a desert at
sunset; a waterfall; a beach; an iceberg; a field of colourful weeds – even an
advancing storm beautiful (and, for all those who remember the 60’s film Dr.
Strangelove, consider the beauty in the atomic bomb detonations in the closing frames)?
All of these things give no survival advantages (most of the examples above are
even inimical to our survival) but are still seen as beautiful.
BEAUTY IS UNNATURAL
It is unnatural that a purely physical pile of atoms
combined randomly by natural forces to no particular purpose, with no possible
survival or genetic use to us (like a snow-capped mountain) should be deemed
universally beautiful and have an uplifting spiritual effect on our human soul.
The “natural” neo-Darwinian theory of beauty does not cut it – we need to look
deeper into the question than the neo-Darwinians’ ideological theme of genetic
self-interest allows.
So, in an attempt to look deeper into the mystery, let’s
now consider animal beauty.
THE BEAUTY OF
ANIMALS
David Castle
(professor at the Mental Health Research Institute) sees the mystery and has
this to say:
“the roots of
our aesthetic perception lie in sexual selection, which is an evolutionary thing.
Why should we be driven to like nice-looking things? What’s the point, unless
there’s some evolutionary selective pressure?”
Melbourne
Age newspaper (14/4/2004)
SEXUAL SELECTION
Sexual selection is an interesting part of Darwinian
theory. Basically it says that beauty in a bird, say, is evolved because it is
positively selected for by the female when choosing a mate to bestow her sexual
(and genetic) favours on. For example, a bird of paradise has become beautiful
because colour and elaborate form has been selected by the females. Two things:
firstly, we accept this argument because we see the male bird-of-paradise as
beautiful – but why should the female bird see beauty? The “beautiful” male’s gaudy,
bright colours will only make her offspring more likely to be seen by a
predator – and his elaborate feathers that we find beautiful will only make her
offspring more ungainly and less able to avoid a predator). Secondly, why do we
humans see this bird as beautiful at all – we hardly are planning to mate with
it!? It is not sexual selection for us. Nor is it good for our survival – we are
not planning to eat it.
IS BEAUTY IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER?
Some would say beauty is just in the eye of the
beholder – but all people find flowers beautiful, or a panda bear, or Miss
Universe. There are some cultural and personal differences when asked to
determine “more” or “most” beautiful – but there is often general consensus on
the existence of beauty in a thing. For example, take scenic beauty again –
asked to supply an example of beauty in landscape from their home country, a
Norwegian might tender a view of the Fiords, an Englishman a view of the
Cotswolds, an Australian a view of the Great Barrier Reef, an Arab a view of
the desert, an American a view of the
THE BEAUTY OF COLOUR
And the beauty of colour? Sometimes colour transforms
an ordinary scene into beauty. A field of “Patterson’s Curse” weed, for
example, turns an ordinary paddock into a beautiful purple (while making it
useless). Even unnatural colour can be beautiful – like the Uluru monolith in
the Australian desert turning purple at sunset. People come from all over the
world at great trouble and expense to see Uluru, and are spiritually moved by
it. Beauty purely through colour and/or form – rather than use – and being
moved spiritually by it? What’s going on within this strange, unnatural,
spiritual, human animal?
THE BEAUTY OF SMELLS
And there also is the mystery of beautiful smells. Being
repelled by bad smells has selection advantages because excrescence and rotting
things have germs which could endanger our survival – but why are we attracted
to “nice” smells which have no survival advantage? We even grow useless
flowering plants in vast, decorative gardens which take up arable land suitable
because, as well as their form and colour, we like their smell. We find gardens
spiritually uplifting. Worse than useless for our animal bodies, gardens take
up soil valuable for survival. And they take up time and energy we could better
spend protecting our genetic kin – or giving birth to more of them – which we
should be rightly doing if our life is purely governed by genetic and survival
imperatives as we are assured by the neo-Darwinians.
BEAUTY THROUGH ALL THE SENSES
We also find beauty through our other senses – touch:
fur; taste: great cooking (as opposed to just feeding); hearing: music (an
important area which will get its own section). All of these things we find spiritually
“moving”, and none have any animal survival value. Where do we get these
unnatural human concepts from when they not only have no natural selection
advantages but could perhaps even be fatal (the fur of a lion, the taste of a
Japanese puffer fish)?
What do others think? This from that well-known judge
of all things beautiful – Tink R. Bell:
“ ‘Beauty’
is a non-natural property. It is non-natural in the sense that the philosopher
Robert Adams discusses: it ‘cannot be stated entirely in the language of
physics, chemistry, biology, and human or animal psychology.’ But let me tell
you, beauty is real a thing in the world. Who among you is so cold-hearted as
to deny that there is beauty in a piece of music, a poem, a painting, the face
of a lover, an artful bed of tulips? You might well start pontificating that
‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, or some other such cynical nonsense.
Are you going to start saying the same thing about the non-natural property of morality?
That it too is in the eye of the beholder? Of course not. No, you may dispute
about the degree to which something is beautiful or ugly, lovely or unlovely,
but that is merely to debate the measurement of those aesthetic properties. To
engage in such a debate is already to concede that there are aesthetic
properties. The aesthetic qualities themselves are there, real, and not some
physical things that one might pick apart on a lab bench. “
Tink R. Bell (otherwise known as Professor
Steven D. Hales,
Beauty, then, is a mystery. How about a peek into the
metaphysical?
A PEEK INTO THE METAPHYSICAL
Our knowledge and appreciation of beauty is, as I am
constantly saying: unnatural – or as Professor Hales describes it –
“non-natural”. Plato said that humanity had an a priori knowledge and appreciation of beauty. We are skirting the
metaphysical here, but natural explanations have failed us. So let’s be naughty
and take a little peep into the, potentially entrapping, metaphysical cavern we
avoided early-on in our journey. This from David Fontana, visiting fellow at
“Are
our thoughts, our creative endeavours, our art, our poetry, our philosophy, our
music no more than the by-products of electro-chemical energy in a brain that
would live out its earthly life just as well without them? Or are these
creative masterpieces hints and whispers of a grander and finer reality of
which we are all a part?”
-
“Is There An Afterlife?” (P. 468)
We may have a deeper look into the metaphysical and
supernatural a little later on our journey. Here, let it be established that we
are spiritually moved by beauty in all its forms is – and that it is, at the
very least, unnatural. It is also part of the mounting empirical evidence of
the existence of the spiritual and that humans are spiritual beings.
We are a strange animal. The unnatural is piling up.
Let’s get a bit more personal with beauty. Our journey has arrived at a
consideration of what makes a human beautiful.
Seeing beauty
in a body can be given a natural, Darwinian explanation. For example, big
breasts and hips are attractive characteristics in a female for breeding
purposes. Likewise wide shoulders, muscular torso, thin hips, strong fast legs are
similarly desirable in a male. But what about that beauty which humans regard
as equally, if not more important – facial beauty? What instructions are there
in the human mind which recognises a face as beautiful when it has no natural
selection advantage? Darwinian apologists give the tenuous explanation that
what makes a face beautiful is a healthy glow and shiny hair (hence good for
breeding etc. etc). But what about people who are recognised as “ugly”, yet whose
visage radiates rude health? Consider, conversely, those beautiful but wan,
unrobust, and unhealthy-looking heroines so loved in novels and films (Lady of
the Camellias comes to mind)?
FACIAL BEAUTY
IN A MATE IS A GENETIC RISK
In fact, seeking
facial beauty in a mate is often at the risk of the survival of our genes –
facial beauty can blind us to narrow hips in a woman and weediness in a man,
for example. A beautiful face often comes with vanity and a poisonous
personality because people are constantly drawn to it and pander to it (usually
in order to use its beauty for their own purposes). Having an egotistically damaged
personality makes a partner an unreliable breeding mate to propagate your
genes.
An even more
important point is that a beautiful partner is more likely to be wooed from you
by others for their beauty. If you are a woman this could leave you and your
offspring without a protector/provider – or, if you are a man, a beautiful
woman is more likely to be impregnated by another, leaving you bringing up
someone else’s genes. As Shakespeare said: “It is a wise man who knows his own
father.” We should rightly be wooing “ugly” partners if all is Darwinian – but
we are in fact repelled by an ugly face. Why?
And it’s not a
cultural factor – facial beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Cultural
factors can come into play when recognising beauty in body shapes – for
example, big bottoms in Kalahari Bushmen. Big bottoms have natural, survival
explanation (reserves of fat to survive the harsh
THE
NEO-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION
Some studies
have kept the neo-Darwinian explanation for human facial beauty alive by
suggesting that men see certain characteristics as beautiful because they are associated
with youthfulness (therefore appear to be good breeding stock), large eyes,
small nose, full lips and small chin etc. But young people are very definite about
recognising beauty and ugliness amongst the faces of their peers – youthfulness
of features has no influence in this situation because they are all equally
young – the recognition of “beauty” being the only determinant. Also consider
that women are very definite in the recognition of what makes another woman
beautiful – there is no Darwinian/genetic explanation for this. Other studies
have shown men aren’t always attracted to younger women, much less to her
fitness to reproduce.
FACIAL BEAUTY
ONLY APPLIES TO HUMANS
Unnaturally,
facial beauty only applies to human animals. You don’t see other male animals
fighting over just “beautiful” females in a herd. Male animals spread their
genes over every available female they can cover – not just those with
beautiful faces. Watch a ram working a flock of ewes, or a bull a herd of cows,
or a stag some hinds – the face is the last thing they look at. The important
natural cues for attractiveness is just the colour, sight and smell of the
genitals indicating readiness to mate. Just the natural, blind, Darwinian
spreading of genes for genetic survival and dominance that, we are assured by
scientists, explains all human behaviour as well.
A SOUL-MATE?
So, another
mystery? Maybe the answer resides in the importance for humans of eye contact.
Most human relationships are initiated by eye contact – a spiritual contact. A
beautiful, older (even barren) woman, or man, can win out over a younger person
if “the eyes have it”. It is often said that our eyes are the “gateway to the
soul”. Maybe we are all searching for a soul-mate?
Time to move on and examine another mystery. As well
as faces, humans can even find beauty in mathematics. Our road has wound its
way to the strange world of mathematics.
The mysterious
underlying order of the universe, which we examined earlier on our journey, can
be expressed in mathematical form, and the human mind – through its
understanding of mathematics – is thereby mysteriously linked into the secrets
of the universe. This from Paul Davies:
“The
belief that the underlying order of the world can be expressed in mathematical
form lies at the very heart of science, and is rarely questioned …Why this
should be so is one of the great mysteries of the universe.” (p.148 Paul
Davies, “The Mind of God”).
And:
“no
feature of this uncanny ‘tuning’ of the human mind to the workings of nature is
more striking than mathematics, the product of the human mind that is somehow
linked into the secrets of the universe.” (ibid. p. 160).
Science,
through its adoption of evolutionary theory, would have it that a human mind is
the mechanistic product of a physical event – in fact, the natural product of a
meaningless physical accident. Yet the human mind is tuned into the process of
the accidental formation of the universe through its understanding of
mathematics – the language the whole process and “the underlying order of the
world can expressed in”? At the beginning of our journey we discovered, through
Davies, the fact that the world has mysterious “underlying order”. Now we find
that this mysterious order can be “expressed in mathematical form” – that maths
is the language of the universe.
Davies quotes
astronomer James Jeans: “God is a mathematician”, and Galileo: “The book of
nature is written in mathematical language.” The secrets of nature are
available to some mechanistic star-stuff called humanity, through its
understanding of mathematics – the language the universe was written in. Another
unnatural fact about our supposedly entirely “natural” (therefore accidental)
existence that needs examination – or to use
But is
mathematics the product of our own mind as Davies muses?
There is some
dispute in the world of science as to whether mathematics is purely a human
invention, or whether it was always underlying order, having an independent
existence, and man just uncovered it. These opposing views are called: the
formalist school of thought (mathematics is only an invention of the human
mind, having no meaning beyond that attributed to it by mathematicians); and
the “Platonists” (from Plato’s dualistic vision of reality, who feel we do not
invent mathematics, we discover it). Leading
“The
complete details of the complication of the structure of Mandelbrot’s set
cannot really be fully comprehended by any one of us, nor can it be fully
revealed by any computer. It would seem that this structure is not just part of
our minds, but it has a reality of its own … The Mandelbrot set is not an
invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like
– Roger Penrose, “The
Emperor’s New Mind”, p. 95
Davies has this to say about the Mandelbrot set:
“This
set has such an extraordinarily complicated structure that it is impossible to
convey in words its awesome beauty.”
– Op. Cit. p.151.
(There’s that word “beauty” again – this time in the
arcane realm of pure mathematics – British mathematician G.H.Hardy also wrote
that he “practiced mathematics for its
beauty, not its practical value”.) Penrose has no doubt mathematicians are
dealing with the “works of God” and sees an analogy between mathematics and
inspired works of art:
“It is a
feeling not uncommon amongst artists, that in their greatest works they are
revealing eternal truths which have some kind of prior ethereal existence … I
cannot help feeling that, with mathematics, the case for believing in some kind
of ethereal, eternal existence … is a good deal stronger.”
– Op. Cit. p. 97
Paul Davies in his examination of the uncanny in
mathematics quotes physicist Heinrich Hertz:
“One
cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent
existence of their own, and they are wiser than even their discoverers, that we
get more out of them than was originally put into them.”
– Op. Cit. p. 154, (from M.
Kline, Mathematics p. 338.)
And Richard Feynman:
“When
you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you
found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere, but there’s
nowhere for such things … in the case of physics we have double trouble. We
come upon these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe,
so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing.”
– “Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?”
P. Davies and J.R. Brown pp. 207-8
For my purposes
the resolution of the dispute about mathematics being “created” as the
formalists would have it or “discovered” as the Platonists would have it does
not matter. The point is, for our exploration of the mysteries of life, is that
it is unnatural that the human mind has this capacity to understand and relate
to the workings of our universe through mathematics beyond what is explicable
by the Darwinian need to survive. Other animals survive perfectly well without having
an understanding of mathematics – and other societies. Why did we move on to a
discovery (or creation) when it was overkill? – we were already on top of the
food chain.
There seems to be no
particular reason why we should need to be able to achieve this sort of deep
[mathematical] knowledge in order to make a living in the world. In fact, many
communities for many thousands of years, have made a perfectly satisfactory
living on this planet without having such an underlying theoretical knowledge.
“Are We Alone?”, Paul
Davies – p. 82
No
neo-Darwinian explanation has been tendered to try and explain way the
peculiarity that is our being in tune with mathematics – the language of the
universe. Davies again:
“consciousness
and our ability to do mathematics is no mere accident, no trivial detail, no
insignificant by-product of evolution that is piggy-backing on some other
mundane property. It points to what I like to call the cosmic connection, the
existence of a really deep relationship between the minds that can do
mathematics and the underlying laws of nature that produce them.”
- Ibid. p. 84
We will explore
the interesting field of consciousness in a moment, at this point on our road –
the idea of the unnatural over-development of human capacities beyond what is
required for animal survival – needs more exploration.
This from scientist John Barrow:
“But
how strange this is. Our minds are the products of the laws of Nature; yet they
are in a position to reflect upon them … A more interesting problem is the
extent to which the brain is qualitatively adapted to understand the
Universe. Why should its categories of thought and understanding be able to cope with the scope and nature of the
real world? Why should the Theory of Everything be written in a ‘language’ that
our minds can decode? Why has the process of natural selection so over-endowed
us with mental faculties that we can understand the whole fabric of the
Universe far beyond anything required for our past and present survival?… None
of the sophisticated ideas involved
appear to offer any selective advantage to be exploited during the
pre-conscious period of our evolution…Why should it be us?”
– Theories of Everything: The Quest for
Ultimate Explanation, Pp. 172&173
Downright unnatural, I say. Paul Davies, as usual, is
more eloquent :
“What
is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this
code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual
equipment for us to unlock the secrets of nature…we find a situation in which
the difficulty of the cosmic code seems almost to be attuned to human
capabilities …The challenge is just hard enough to attract some of the best
brains available, but not so hard as to defeat their combined efforts and
deflect them onto easier tasks …The mystery in all this is that human
intellectual powers are presumably determined by biological evolution, and have
absolutely no connection with doing science. Our brains have evolved in
response to environmental pressures, such as the ability to hunt, avoid
predators, dodge falling objects etc. What has this got to do with discovering
the laws of electromagnetism or the structure of the atom?”
– (Mind of God, Pp. 158-159).
The minds of
every other animal developed just as far as they needed to survive, to cope
with environmental survival imperatives. The unnatural here is obvious. Humans
are supposedly purely physical, accidentally-occurring, natural animals – so
natural we were actually created by our environment – but find ourselves now on
the brink of a full understanding of it. We are in fact not only on the brink
of understanding it but beyond the brink of knowingly altering it, purposely
creating it anew for our own ends with our scientific endeavours like genetic engineering
(for better or worse?). We are star-stuff, not only able to observe the stars,
but understanding and altering our universe as well. We are creatures and
creators – both. Weird stuff.
And it is unique
in the animal kingdom – our nearest neighbours are the chimps who are just 1.5%
different in DNA, but they are not just 1.5% behind us in the understanding our
shared universe – they do not have 98.5% of our understanding but zero
understanding of the concept “universe” let alone the language it is written in.
But chimps cope quite well in the survival stakes – all in exactly the same
amount of time as humans had to evolve (we have a common ancestor). Why have
human intellectual powers evolved so far in advance of our animal cousins when we
have just evolved, like them, “in response to environmental pressures such as
the ability to hunt, avoid predators, dodge falling objects etc.” – in the same
amount of time?
If you firstly accept
the initial mysteries of existence (something rather than nothing, order rather
than chaos, the occurrence of life) then the range of mammals is pretty much
what you would expect to see as a result of evolution, given the environment of
our world – except for humans – who are so different from their fellow mammals
that it is a mystery. Are we radically different in any other ways we are
conscious of? “Conscious of”? – consciousness – now there’s an interesting peak
to climb on our journey. Let’s see if we can manage to scale a little way up
its difficult slopes which have defeated many attempts of complete conquest.
·
CONSCIOUSNESS
The phenomenon
of human consciousness provides substantial problems for those who believe that
the human condition can be entirely and satisfactorily described in purely physical
terms. Our physical sciences have to imagine that ours is a universe with
causal closure – everything is caused by physical and mechanistic processes from
a material beginning – it is an entirely physical universe. The problem that
consciousness presents for this theory of everything is that if everything is the
mechanistic consequence of an entirely material beginning, how does something non-physical
like consciousness exist? How did consciousness – awareness and understanding –
proceed from matter – the non-material from the material?
Nobody has the slightest
idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would
be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.
“The Big Idea: Can There Be a Science of Mind?” Jerry
Fodor – Times Literary Supplement 3, (July 1992):5.
It’s an area of
much controversy and puzzlement. This from the International Dictionary of Psychology (Stuart Sutherland, 1989):
Consciousness is a
fascinating but elusive phenomena; it is impossible to specify what it is, what
it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.
Impossible to
say “what it is”…”what it does”…”nothing worth reading has been written about it.”?
Now there’s a challenge – let’s have a go.
So, firstly, what
is it? Consciousness is being aware of life. Consciousness is being aware that
we are alive (and that we are mortal). It is being aware of life to the point of
understanding the language the universe was written in. It is being aware (in
Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s words) “of what it is like to be” – a human. Consciousness
is, in fact, one of the defining factors of the human condition – other animals
are conscious, in that they are aware of their surroundings, but they have no
understanding of being alive, or of being mortal, or of being part of a
universe, or an awareness of being a bird, a fish, a lion.
Secondly, what
does it do? To have consciousness of being mortal, conscious of being part of
something bigger, conscious of what it is to be a human – allows us to
contemplate life and spurs us to contemplate life’s meaning and purpose. What’s
the purpose of that? Seeking life’s meaning and purpose drives us to think
about living, to think about our self, and the opportunities it allows our self.
By being conscious of our self – conscious of our consciousness – we have the
opportunity to raise our consciousness beyond just an animal experience.
RAISING OUR
CONSCIOUSNESS
An example of “raising”
our consciousness is when we heighten our awareness of our surroundings and
allow elements like beauty – elements “above” our physical needs and our physical,
animal senses – to move our soul, our self. We have already considered beauty
and
“In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in the
midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of
wonder, admiration and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is
more in man than the breath of his body.”
- Charles Darwin, Autobiography
“Higher”
(feelings of wonder); “elevate” (the mind); “grandeur” (of the jungle).
Why should we raise
our consciousness when all other animals do perfectly well without doing so? If
we manage to raise our consciousness – become aware of the spiritual aspects of
being human – we can employ those aspects in our day to day lives, and more joy
may be available from life. How? Ecstasy becomes available to us when we bring
a consciousness of the spiritual aspect of what it is to be human to the
physical enjoyments of life – when we make love rather than have sex; when we
dine rather than feed; when we enjoy the beauty of the scenery of our physical
universe rather than just pass through on a genetic mission; when we stop to
smell the roses and en-joy them – when we employ the physical and spiritual together
– when we raise our consciousness of living.
CONSCIOUSNESS
LOWERING AND EXISTENTIAL ANGST
While raising our
consciousness of life allows us to especially enjoy the fact that we are alive,
lowering our consciousness causes us to descend to more animal, Darwinian
behaviour. After the Enlightenment, existential beliefs and the angst they
generated became a big part of the 20th century human experience. It
is a century which saw the death of a credible belief in our primitive religions,
and the savagery and turmoil created by secular political systems like Nazism
and Communism which replaced them. The main philosophies of the 20th
century became existentialism (characterised by angst from a sense of absurdity
in life because of the absence of any apparent rational meaning); scepticism
(how do we know we exist, are we really experiencing this, maybe we are just a
brain in a jar thinking it all up?); post-modern relativism (everything is
relative, there are no “T” Truths only your or my “t” truths); materialism
(everything is of matter); neo-Darwinism (everything can be explained in
physical terms by natural selection and genetic imperatives); and consumerism
(consume then die) .
SPIRITUAL
EVOLUTION
But after an
almost century-long “ism” mania, and lowering of our consciousness, an
understanding that a full description of the human being requires us to address
our spiritual self emerged. In the latter part of the 20th century
and into the 21st century “New Age” religions have thrived, and some
people are re-examining the old religions. Everything in a relative world is in
a state of evolution – even our consciousness. This is spiritual evolution.
THE NEO-DARWINIAN
EXPLANATION
But the
neo-Darwinians deny the spiritual. Is consciousness so mysterious, can
consciousness be explained in material and evolutionary terms – is it natural
to expect it to evolve from matter? Philosopher and psychologist Nicholas
Humphrey thinks so:
The more mysterious and
unworldly the qualities of consciousness, the more seriously significant the
Self. And the more significant the Self, the greater the boost to human
self-confidence and self-importance – and the greater the value that
individuals place on their own and others’ lives.
In which case it is easy to
see how the very qualities of consciousness that seem to render it so
mysterious and magical would have been the occasion for consciousnesses’
becoming a runaway evolutionary success. In fact these qualities would soon
have been designed in.
“Seeing Red”, Nicholas Humphrey (P. 132)
This is the
standard neo-Darwinian attempt to explain the existence of everything through
natural selection. Like all such natural selection arguments, it still does not
explain how the non-material, like consciousness, emerged from a purely material
world to be available for selection. In the words of Thomas Nagel, “natural
selection…doesn’t explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them.”
How cells comprised of inert atoms could bunch together mechanistically into “mindless molecules, capable only of pushing
and pulling their immediate neighbours” (in the words of Paul Davies) into more and more complicated arrangements
until they became not only alive, but aware of being alive, i.e. conscious – is
a mystery – even if a flimsy argument can be made for its possible natural
selection once in existence. Conscious of the universe and its beginning, and
conscious of concepts like nothing; everything; then; now; death; eternity; the
relative; and the Absolute? Other animals are conscious beings but, of all
Earth’s animals, only humans know they are conscious, know they are alive (and
mortal), and they know they know – we have consciousness.
For Professor
Humphrey “Consciousness is something we do with our brains” (p. 133 ibid.) and thus
can be dismissed, with the brain, as being part of the evolved animal body –
therefore somehow entirely natural, and its existence not mysterious at all. We
might as well say that music is not mysterious because it is something we do
with our hands. Humphrey has entered the ‘mind/body’ problem strongly on the
side that holds consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon – a function of
the physical stuff that is our brains. But there are other schools of thought that
hold consciousness “exists independently of its physical substrate” (Horgan,
“The End Of Science” p. 173 – quoted from Roy Williams, “God Actually” p. 67).
Williams concludes about consciousness:
“What
is, I think, incontestable is that the properties of consciousness are
deeply complex and almost
utterly mysterious. They remain beyond explanation in a material, determinist
way, by any laws of chemistry or physics.” (ibid. p. 67)
IS THE SELF THE
SAME AS THE BODY
So what does an
examination of life provide as evidence to resolve the tension between these
conflicting assertions? Is Humphrey’s notion of “S” Self being just a fancy
word for the body correct? Is the old Cartesian mind/body dualism the one that
we should be still wrestling with, or should we accept that the mind is of the
body and we should rather be considering humanity’s body/self duality?
The Self is not
the body. The Self remains the same (albeit with some evolution in the course
of a life) while the material, physical stuff of the body changes as our atoms
change (which they are constantly doing – there are no human atoms, just atoms
which we swap with the environment). How can the self be the body? If
consciousness is just a product of a physical part of the body how can the
present self be conscious of earlier thoughts our minds had when not one atom
of the present mind remains from the old mind which originally had those
thoughts?
Consciousness
is not invariably an evolutionary advantage for out-surviving and/or
out-breeding our genetic rivals – many of the most conscious of us are reducing
the number of children they have, or have put off having children at all –
while the least conscious are breeding away full steam. Consciousness does more
than give us an exaggerated notion of Self, as Humphrey would have it, it leads
humans to struggle with the notions of existence versus non-existence, meaning
versus meaninglessness – for only genetic disadvantage – while other animals, or
humans with a lower consciousness, just get on very successfully with the Darwinian
out-breeding thing. There is something weird about humanity that is not well
explained by an upright posture and an opposable thumb.
RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS
AND CREATIVITY
Further
evidence that human consciousness is a product of our spiritual beings and not
a physical product of a physical event rests in the role our consciousness (and
our raising of it) plays in human artistic creativity. We can communicate with
each other without words through our raised consciousness – spiritually – through
our arts. Our consciousness is a great creative driver – music, poetry, dance, painting,
sculpture, humour, literature all speak of our consciousness of life and its
beauties, absurdities, joys and dramas – of what it is to be alive, and what it
is to be a human. Our spirits can be moved, raised – our selves can be inspired
– by the raised spiritual consciousness of another human being – through our
various arts.
In this way our
individual consciousnesses can speak to each other on a level higher than the animal
and physical – on a raised, spiritual level.
OBSERVING AND
CREATING OUR WORLD – AND US
Our
consciousness allows us not only to observe and consider our world, but to partake
in its ongoing creation. We do not just react to life, like other animals, but
because we are conscious of it we consider it, and try to understand it. We are
a product of life, but through our consciousness we are also taking part in the
creating of it – especially the part that is our Selves. Some people feel that
for life to have meaning it should be a safe theme park – no danger, no
accidents, predictable, no sickness, good to the good, bad to the bad, no death.
This, of course, would not be life but a version of heaven, and no creativity,
no evolution – spiritual or physical – would be spurred. The point, the special
meaning, the ultimate purpose of the relative Universe lies in its creativity. To
get closer to any special meaning and ultimate purpose we need to contemplate
what exactly is being created.
Physical things
like bodies are being created/evolved by our relative universe in the classic
Darwinian way, but non-physical, spiritual things like our “Selves” are also
being created/evolved in our relative universe through our consciousness. How
this happens we are due to examine shortly, here suffice it to say that those who
cannot manage to raise their consciousness above their bodies are missing quite
an experience, and quite an opportunity – the opportunity of spiritual
evolution.
Did we scale this
particular peak on our road to truth? Understanding consciousness is a big task
that has occupied many a more expert expedition for a much longer time. We have
definitely highlighted the mystery of being a conscious product of an
unconscious world. We have also seen that our consciousness, and our ability to
raise our consciousness, adds evidence to the contention that we are spiritual
beings. All considered, we have climbed high enough up the difficult peak to
see something of a glimmer in the distance – is it the “T” Truth? Maybe – but
we have a way to go yet before we may approach it.
So what’s next
on our journey towards Truth? The contention that we are spiritual beings is
pivotal to any special meaning or ultimate purpose our lives may have, and it
needs further examination. We have seen how our arts are a product of our
consciousness of life. Our arts also speak to, and of, our souls. To get closer
to our spiritual beings they need closer examination. Time to relax a little on
our journey and listen to some:-
The
man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with
concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons,
stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit
are dull as night,
And his affections dark as
Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
-
Shakespeare, The Merchant of
How do we have
a soul (or a “spirit”, in Shakespeare’s words) if we are just an animal body – the
evolved but entirely physical product of an original purely physical event? Neo-Darwinians
would say we don’t have a soul, we are just bodies evolved by natural selection
from a physical accident who like to imagine that we have souls because,
somehow, the notion gives genetic advantage, therefore has been naturally
selected. But, if we don’t have souls, what part of our animal body is moved by
our arts like music and poetry, and how?
Let’s examine music
a bit more closely – why are humans the only animal who make music, why is
music (an unnecessary part of life with no adaptive function) universal in all
human societies back to the dawn of history? It’s a mystery to neuroscience:
“Given its
omnipresence in human culture, why is there no clear-cut adaptive function?
…The origins and adaptive significance of music thus remain deeply mysterious.”
-
Hauser
& McDermott, nature neuroscience, July
2003.
How do we
convey non-physical, spiritual states to other consciousnesses through the
physical act of making air molecules vibrate at different pitch, beat and
timbre? Why did only humans develop the capacity to enjoy and perform music based
on mathematical scales? Neo-Darwinian scientists argue that all human skills,
such as language or walking on two legs, were naturally selected in that they
gave their possessors an evolutionary advantage over rival creatures. But
Charles Darwin wrote in 1871:
“As
neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties
of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be
ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”
– “The Descent of Man and Selection in
Relation to Sex”, P.878.
Music is of no practical use, it adds no advantage to the execution of our
“daily habits of life”. Music just allows us to express something of our
consciousness of being alive and something of our consciousness of the human
condition – something of the ineffability of life. As Aldous Huxley described
it: “After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible
is music.”
How does music
work? Could music be just a freak accident (like neo-Darwinians assure us
explains the phenomena of even life itself?) or is there something deeply
mysterious about music – as there is with humans being in key with mathematics
– the language the universe was written in? Music and mathematics are related.
“How likely is
it that music is but another freak accident of Nature? Music works because of
the laws of mathematics, and those laws are wired into the Universe from the
beginning.”
- “God, Actually.” – Roy Williams, p. 92
THE
NEO-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION
The “music” of
other animals, for example, bird and whale “songs”, can be given a Neo-Darwinian
interpretation – viz. noises for territorial and/or mating purposes. And some
human music can have an evolutionary/animal explanations and functions – for
example, martial music (to spur adrenalin of soldiers), rock and roll music (to
spur the hormones), relaxing background music (similar to the vibrations of our
mother’s voice we were soothed by in the womb). However, some music – for
example classical music – can move the soul.
THE MUSIC OF
OTHER ANIMALS CAN MOVE US
Just as we can
be moved by the beauty of other animals, we can also be moved by their raw
music (e.g. bird song). Neither fact confers any survival advantage to be
selected for. What makes the noises of other animals beautiful to us if we are
completely describable as just an animal on genetic business – as the
Neo-Darwinians would have us believe? How do we universally recognise some
animal sounds (the nightingale for example) as beautiful and be moved by them?
“Now
more than ever it seems rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou are pouring forth thy soul
abroad
In such an ecstasy!”
- John Keats,
“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)
This brings us
to poetry.
POETRY
Not only music can
move our souls – our souls can be transported on the wings of beautiful words. How
can words be beautiful and spiritually moving if they are just animal
communication?
More from Keats:
“Away!
away! for I will fly to thee,
Not
charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But
on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Thou
the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already
with thee! tender is the night
And
haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne…”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
moves us by bringing the music and meaning of words magically together:
“I
caught this morning morning’s minion,
king-
dom
of daylight’s dauphin dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,
in
his riding
Of
the rolling level underneath him steady air, and
striding
High
there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In
his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
As
a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
And
gliding
Rebuffed
the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred
for a bird – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
– Gerard
Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”.
And Dylan
Thomas rages against the mortality of the human condition:
“And
you, my father, there on the sad height
Curse,
bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do
not go gentle into that good night.
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.”
– Do Not Go
Gentle Into That Good Night
I don’t think
that there is any debate that music and poetry, like beauty, can move our souls
– can raise our consciousness of the beauty of our world – and of what it is to
be alive. The sounds of music and poetry may enter our bodies through our
physical organs and be received by our physical brains, but they stir our soul/self.
They move us – not in a physical way – but in a spiritual way. The fact that our
spirits are moved by music and poetry is more empirical evidence that we are
spiritual beings.
The Shakespearian
quote at the beginning of our exploration of music raises an interesting point
– is there anyone who “hath no music in
himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds”? Most people can be
moved spiritually by music, poetry and beauty – but maybe some can’t be, and/or
are moved to lesser extents?
This raises the
issue of spiritual evolution – an issue that we need to examine if we are to
get any further on our journey.
What exactly do I
mean by “spiritual evolution”? Spiritual evolution is the evolution, the growth,
the development of our spiritual being – our self/spirit/soul. Our being is
associated with an animal body – but we, our being, cannot be satisfactorily
described by only referring to those bodies.
OUR BODIES CHANGE
Our animal bodies
are made up of atoms which are constantly changing – moving into and out of the
body all the time. If we are adults, our bodies are highly unlikely to have any
atoms remaining from those we were born with – and any that may have found
their way back to our body are most likely to be now be making up other organs
or parts of our body – a hydrogen atom in our brain may have been in one of our
muscles before. There is no such thing as a brain atom, or a leg atom. Or a
human atom – most likely the majority of our present atoms previously made up
other animals, plants, and/or our planet. An atom is an atom, is an atom – there
is no difference between a carbon atom in a rabbit, radish or rock – animal,
vegetable or mineral. There is no such thing as a unique collection of atoms
that is “us”.
OUR SELF REMAINS
THE SAME
We are not our
atoms. But there is such a thing as “us” – a unique human being – a
unique self. There are no two people whose selves are identical – even
identical twins (with the same nature and nurture). Our body are not the same
matter we began with, but our being, our self, remains the original entity
known as “us” that was born years ago. We do not interchange our selves with
other human selves, other animals – as we do with the fabric of our bodies.
Our atoms are on
loan – our self is us – forever – albeit with some evolution.
OUR SELVES DO
EVOLVE OVER A LIFE
Our bodies do not
evolve over the course of a life – they do age, but they don’t evolve. Physical
evolution takes generations upon generations. However, “we” – our selves – observably
change, grow, develop – evolve – over the course of a life. And that change is spiritual
evolution.
“The rung of a
ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough
to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.”
– T. H. Huxley
Life is a ladder
– an opportunity to ascend. Some take life’s opportunity and manage to climb
several rungs in a life, some don’t – some even seem to manage a descent?
Do we only have
one ladder? Maybe we/our selves/souls have more than one life and we evolve our
selves over several lives? Many religious traditions hold this to be true.
There is no evidence against this belief and some for it. I see from our
roadmap we may examine this idea more closely further down our road?
KNOW THYSELF
Life in this
relative, neutral, dangerous but thrilling, frightening but beautiful, challenging
but rewarding universe – inevitably and immaculately reveals our self for us to
know. Life peels us layer by layer, like an onion, to reveal our core – our
self. “Know Thyself” has been received as wisdom in most human civilisations –
but while it is stated as an injunction, it is a choice. While the revelation
of self is something a full life does, self knowledge is not inevitable – we
must choose it.
FREE CHOICE
This implies free
choice. The Theory of Everything of atheists, sceptics, and Neo-Darwinists (most
are all three) states that free-choice does not exist. But the fact that some
of us take the choice to know our self, and some don’t, is evidence that free
choice exists.
THE SOUL HAS
CHOICES, THE BODY HAS IMPERATIVES
The soul has choices
– unlike the body which only has imperatives. This is why free choice is
anathema to the House of Disbelief. According to it, only the body exists – to
accept free choice is to imply that there exists something other than the driven
animal body – something other than the physical, the material, the
phenomenological, the causal universe – anathema to their core beliefs.
HOW DOES SELF
EVOLUTION WORK?
Only after self
knowledge is chosen, is self evolution possible. Life reveals our selves by our
actions rather than our words – are we compassionate or uncaring; are we brave
or cowardly; are we determined or feckless; are we giving or selfish; are we
kind or cruel; which human virtues do we have; which do we lack? How have we
filled our many roles: have we been a good friend or poor; a good parent or
negligent; a good worker or lazy; a good citizen or not; an inspiring human
being or shameful? Some feel these characteristics are solely determined by
genetics and/or upbringing – nature or nurture. Any parent will tell you this
is untrue. My two boys are different souls to me, and to each other, while they
share similar genetics and very similar upbringing (only 2 years apart). They
were different souls from the beginning, as is the case with the children of
all my friends. I know of no one whose children are identical selves.
Of course, their
nurture has determined some of their experiences – but this has just given
their selves experiences, not created them. Our body is determined by genetic
factors: tall or short, athletic or clumsy; pretty or plain; dark or fair – and
by some nurturing factors: nutrition; self-improvement like body-building
and/or conditioning etc. But our self is determined by what makes us happy. This
is how self evolution works. I see by our map that we are exploring happiness
next on our road.
WHAT EVIDENCE IS
THERE OF HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION?
I have covered much
of this ground in essay 2, but it needs a reprise here. While many may be
observably striving for self-knowing and self-growing, what evidence is there that
it is working – that humanity is evolving spiritually?
Some days humanity’s
spiritual evolution is a bit hard to see but a very short tour back through
history will show you that spiritual evolution is happening – our choices and
values are getting what Darwin himself called “higher”. Even only 100 years ago
spiritually evolved attitudes were unlikely, 200 years ago non-existent. I
tender an example of our “enlightened” attitudes just over 100 years ago – this
from Thomas Huxley in 1871. (Huxley was known as an enlightened liberal in his
time – and as
“No rational
man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal,
still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply
incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous
relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be
able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival,
in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The
highest places in the hierarchy of civilizations will be assuredly not be
within the reach of our dusky cousins.”
-
Huxley 1871 (Quoted from The God
Delusion, Richard Dawkins. P.266).
So much for educated, secular enlightenment and the
spiritual evolution of the best of us 136 years ago – ironic to read it now, just
after Barak Obama’s election to President of the
“The
spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals,
howling with pain, were singed, roasted and finally carbonised.” Steven
Pinker, TED Conference,
Less than 2000 years ago (still a blink in terms of
the time humans have been around) people were killed by wild animals and each
other for amusement in sports stadiums; 2000-3000 years ago slavery, animal
sacrifice and ethnic cleansing were even approved by our “god” – according to the
Bible – and brutal death by stoning was righteous punishment for a long list of
minor “offences” including blasphemy, working on the Sabbath, adultery,
homosexuality, and disrespecting one’s parents!
We have demonstrably become less violent, more compassionate,
more spiritually evolved. But some disagree – it has become politically correct
to state humanity is getting worse, less evolved. This from journalist and
“Some people do
not like to hear that the world may not, after all, be getting worse in every
way. But those of us who believe in the possibility of the improvement in the
human condition are not necessarily foolish or naïve. In the past century there
has been a revolution in health, longevity, education, human rights. The
proportion of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has dropped
from about 80% in 1820 to about 20% today. You’d never think it by watching the
nightly news, but since the early 1990’s the number of armed conflicts in the
world has fallen by 40%. The percentage of men estimated to have died in
violence in hunter-gatherer societies is approximately 30%. The percentage of
men who die in violence in the twentieth century, despite two world wars, is
approximately 1%. The trends for violent deaths so far in the twenty-first century
are still falling, despite wars in
-
Pamela Bone, Bad Hair Days, Pp. 208-209.
And more from the above TED address by Steven Pinker (renowned
atheist/humanist – responsible for the opinion: “man is just a lucky meat
puppet”):
“In the decade
of Darfur and
Some of the evidence has
been under our noses all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in
many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment,
human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labour-saving device,
conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of
acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death
penalty for misdemeanours and differences of opinion, assassination as the
mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as
outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution –
all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But,
today, they are rare to non-existent in the West, far less common elsewhere
than they used to be, concealed when they do occur and widely condemned when
they are brought to light.”
-
Lecture at TED Conference –
IS THIS SECULAR EVOLUTION – ARE WE THE SAME
UNDERNEATH?
But, does this improvement represent spiritual
evolution or are we still the same “underneath”, in our selves/spirits – are we
now just more constrained by secular laws and orders? I say we show
demonstrable signs of spiritual evolution. Wars still originate, but now a
growing number of us demonstrate vehemently in the streets against them –
consider the recent marches and demonstrations against the war in
As well as against wars we now also have massive
protests against despoiling the natural beauty of our planet, we march for whales
and for animal rights, against economic policies perceived as unfair to foreign
third-world countries (as shown by the World Economic Forum demonstrations at
Davos and elsewhere). And we demonstrate against racist and sexist ideas. Political
assassinations now only occur in
And, unnaturally again, humanity alone is taking these
spiritually evolutionary steps. I am open about the idea whether other animals
have spirits, but in the last 100 – 250 – 100,000 years – a chimpanzee (98% DNA
the same as humans) is a chimpanzee, is a chimpanzee, is a chimpanzee. They can
be trained by humans but show no signs of even rudimentary spiritual evolution.
Humans are well short of anything resembling perfection but we are noticeably evolving – spiritually –
in our selves – in what behaviours defines us as human. And the things which
make us feel happy with our self are those things which we see as human virtues
– and the majority of them unnatural – i.e. not possessed, or valued, by all
the other animal species which are behaving as Neo-Darwinians say they should
if driven solely by animal needs, instinct and genetic imperatives.
What do neo-Darwinians have to say about our
spiritual evolution? They find it a mystery. Pinker, again from the above
lecture:
“The other
challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that
pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents and scales of
social organisation mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. … Nor could
it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense. Even if the
meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favour the genes for
meekness quickly enough ... Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has
profound implications … Why is there peace? From the likelihood that states
will commit genocide to the way people treat cats, we must have been doing
something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.”
So our growing human virtues are a mystery that “mocks
our standard tools of causal explanation” and “Nor could it possibly be
explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense.” Maybe to understand the
“decline of violence”, our increasing “meekness”, and how “we must have been
doing something right” we need to move away from the Neo-Darwinian causal
explanations for everything, away from explanations based on Neo-Darwinian
evolutionary theory? Or, maybe it can be explained by evolution, – but in
the spiritual sense – by our spiritual evolution? Evolution is after all what
relativity allows, even drives.
But our spiritual evolution has not been a
straight-line advance – more like a dance: some steps forward, some to the side
and some back. Some individuals and even some countries, it seems? are more spiritually
evolved than others (usually those not stymied by religions, which are after
all Darwinian rather than spiritual – as I discussed in Essay 1). Some nations regress
for a time – reverting to the animal, usually in response to threats to their animal
security – like the
Our spiritual evolution is a mystery if you believe
we are no more than our animal bodies. It is a mystery which just may be the
key to any ultimate purpose of life, so let’s look further into this mystery of
our spiritual evolution – and what may be driving it.
It’s time on our journey along the road to truth to
enter the sylvan glades of human happiness.
·
HAPPINESS
“What
is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost
complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness and
make happiness identical with good life and successful living. They disagree,
however, about the meaning of happiness.”
Aristotle,
(Nicomachean Ethics 1.4)
Human happiness is a very popular area for research –
and important. Why? The idea of happiness is peculiar to humans – humans are
driven to be happy when other animals are just driven to be. The answer to the
question of what makes us happy will have much to tell us about the human
condition – about who we are, and maybe even about what we are meant to be
doing here?
We are so driven by the desire to be happy, it often seems
to be the purpose of our life.
Whether
one believes in religion or not, whether ones believes in this religion or that
religion, the very purpose of our life is happiness, the very motion of our
life is toward happiness.
– Dali Lama
So what makes
us happy?
HAPPINESS THROUGH
OUR ANIMAL SENSES, NEEDS AND IMPERATIVES
Human animals, can
achieve pleasure and contentment – even passing happiness – through the animal
senses and/or meeting bodily needs. We can experience a degree of happiness
when we are tickled, when we feed, when we drink, when we find warmth, even when
we just smell baking bread. These animal pleasures can be said to make us
“happy” – but only for a while. Contentment from the animal senses must
necessarily be passing – all pleasant stimulation to the body’s senses will
soon be no pleasure at all – constant tickle will soon turn to pain, we need to
be thirsty to get some happiness from a drink, hungry to get contentment from
food, cold to get contentment from warmth.
HAPPINESS
THROUGH BREEDING
We can also get
some happiness from obeying our genetic imperatives and having offspring –
observe new parents and/or grandparents. But just being parents and/or
grandparents is not all that is required to be lastingly happy (there are many
unhappy parents and/or grandparents).
HAPPINESS
THROUGH HEALTH
To be healthy
is a good feeling. If we feel healthy we feel as though we are “bursting with
life”, we feel as though we are “ready for anything” – we can feel happiness.
But, like successful breeding, good health is not enough on its own to make us
lastingly happy people – many unhappy people can have rude health, and many
unhealthy people can be happy (I have seen friends who have died of cancer who
remained happy people).
BUT THE ANIMAL
IS PART OF THE HUMAN EQUATION
Because we do
get some happiness from our animal senses, health, needs and imperatives it
must be concluded that being animal is very much a part of the human equation. But
are there any other ways we can experience feelings of happiness?
SPIRITUAL
HAPPINESS
Just about
every day certain things will make us happy by uplifting our spirits. For
example: seeing a beautiful view; hearing beautiful music; smelling a beautifully
perfumed flower, tasting beautiful food. These may be experienced through our
animal senses and register in our animal brains, but they are not about our animal
needs and genetic imperatives. There are other things which are not of our
animal needs but serve to make us feel happiness by inspiring us: a gratuitous
act of kindness; witnessing virtuosity in any field of endeavour; encountering
a beautiful soul.
THE HUMAN
CONDITION – ANIMAL AND SPIRITUAL BOTH
So, spiritual
things can give us contentment and can make us happy as well as animal things. If
what makes us happy are animal and spiritual things, both, we have found out
something about our selves – we are animal and spiritual, both. We are perhaps
best described as spiritual beings with an animal body? Let’s explore this
point on our road further.
THE HUMAN
DUALITY
Many have seen
the human condition as a mind/body duality – but the human mind is obviously of
our animal body (and obviously evolved/evolving – we still have remnants of the
reptilian part – and apparently some reptilian responses and behaviours).
But maybe the
true duality is soul/body? We are definitely a duality because we have seen
that two distinct things can make us happy – sometimes spiritual, sometimes animal
things. But, even more interesting, sometimes the two can be met together – with
blissful results.
ANIMAL AND
SPIRITUAL TOGETHER
When the two factors
of the human equation are met together we can experience intense “peak”
experiences – of ecstasy. For example, when eating a beautifully-cooked and
presented meal (as opposed to just feeding); when making love to someone you
love (as opposed to just having an orgasm); or during peak sporting
achievements (of able flesh and willing spirit). Healthy flesh is always willing,
but if the spirit is weak, ecstasy will not be available for the human self. We
will examine ecstasy a bit more in a moment, but here it is sufficient to
notice that all these experiences – animal, spiritual, or even both together in
peak experiences of ecstasy – can only make us feel passing happiness. The big
question is:-
WHAT DOES IT
TAKE FOR US TO BE HAPPY PEOPLE?
Can we be happy
people (as opposed to just experiencing happiness)? If so, what possession(s)
enable us to be happy people? To answer these questions we need to go deeper
into the human condition – we need to explore the self – and especially the
self’s needs.
BEING HAPPY
WITH THE SELF
The key to humanity
rests literally with the word “being”. We are not our bodies. We have bodies, but
we are a being – a self/soul/spirit – call it what you will.
The first step
to being a happy self, rather than just experiencing passing happiness, is to chose
to come to know our self. We have already discovered in the above section of
our journey which explored spiritual evolution the importance of the ancient
dictum to “Know Thyself”. Why is this important in our quest to be happy? Because,
if we come to truly know our self we can come to know if we can be happy with
our self – with our being – with who life has revealed us to be. Can
we be (as the saying goes) “happy in our skins”?
THE TRUE SELF
If we manage to
come to truly know our self, and can honestly say that we love that self,
then we will be happy – as opposed to just feeling happiness. “Truly” is
crucial here because faking it won’t work for long. If we imagine our selves to
be other than we truly are – through wishful thinking; through being misled by egotism;
through mistaking the body for the self; or through being misled by the
blandishments of others – we will never know the real self, lasting happiness
will not be available, and unhappiness beckons.
THE DANGER OF
NOT KNOWING THE TRUE SELF
The ego is an
essential ingredient for animal survival, but more and more studies have shown
that criminals who are given to random violence actually have a high ego,
rather than being victims of low self esteem. A high, but false, sense of pride
in the self – of personal superiority even – can lead to anger and violence
when the world does not agree with your own inflated opinion of self. As I will
discuss shortly, the best reality check of our own self opinion is genuine love
from others.
WE BECOME OUR
CHOICES
Our true self is
represented by our actions flowing from our choices. In this way we create our
selves – we become our choices – not our wishes or our dreams, but our actions.
Do we love our actions, can we love our self? Neo-Darwinians, materialists, and
the such like, won’t allow free choice because it does not fit their
necessarily mechanistic model of the universe, but nowhere is there greater
evidence for the existence of free-choice than in our creation of self – we
don’t all create the same self.
UNHAPPINESS
Of course, just
knowing our true selves is not enough to be happy – in fact it may lead to unhappiness.
If we cannot love the self we have come to truly know, then we will be unhappy
– even to the point of self-loathing and sickness. Medical studies have shown that
self-loathing can lead to fatal sickness – more empirical evidence of the
existence of the spiritual.
However, unhappiness,
even self-loathing, is not the end – the discomfort of it can spur us on to
life’s greatest opportunity.
THE
If we are not
happy with the self that life has allowed us to know, life gives us its
greatest opportunity – the opportunity to grow our self – to evolve spiritually.
Life in the relative is an opportunity for many things, its most immaculate is this
one to evolve our self. To know and grow – driven by humanity’s unique need to
be happy with our self. “Unique”, as I have said before, because other animals
don’t need to be happy with the self, they just need to be.
Every person
who can be described as truly and lastingly happy (as opposed to just feeling happy
for the moment) is happy with their self, to the point of being able to love
the self. Mind you, most people who are happy are not deliriously happy
all the time – I would describe them as having a quiet happiness, a background
radiation of happiness almost – which helps them through life’s difficulties
and inevitable moments of sadness and unhappinesses.
What, then, is
the best way to get genuine, well-founded, enduring self-love?
THE GETTING OF LOVE
Humans do many
things for the getting of love – some work, some don’t. Some not only do not
work, but are counter-productive – involving us in Faustian pacts against the self/soul.
“What does it benefit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” Money,
power, and fame are the main culprits here.
MONEY
We have seen on
our journey that humans are complicated things, actions can have clear motives,
or they can have dual (animal and spiritual) motives. Or they may start out as
one thing and end up as another. For example, the accumulation of money may
start as the animal need to be rich enough for survival, but end up being about
feeling good about the self – the attitudes of other people towards you changes
when you become rich. If you are rich, people will appear to respect you, to
like you – even to love you – allowing you to love your self. But “appear”
because it is usually blandishments to get their hands on your wealth, or some
of your prestige by association. People who are as rich as you are (or richer)
don’t treat you as anything special. Money, in and of itself – and beyond the
needs of survival – won’t make you any happier. This from Professor Mirko
Bagaric,
“money makes a
negligible difference to our well-being once we are beyond average wealth,
extracting ourselves from poverty gives a significant boost to our happiness
barometer.”
Quoted from Age
newspaper – 27th May, 2009.
Money more than
our fellows allows a change in self-respect – a change (we know, perhaps
unconsciously) as fragile as our temporal wealth.
POWER
Power, another
popular way to get self love, also may start out with animal survival motives
but again, when achieved, the possession of it changes people’s behaviour
towards you. You mistake their behaviour as respect, and even love – but it is
most likely fear – people don’t love or respect your self, but fear you, or
want some of your power. Communist dictators are/were good examples of this –
all the false fawning admiration expressed in statues etc, and the false
mourning at death (there are still tears to be seen in the tomb of that bloody murderer,
Lenin. The Old Testament god is another good example of fear being mistaken for
love. Religious people are mostly victims of the Stockholm syndrome – a
syndrome about mistaking fear for love – where people come to love the captors
that have power over them. The religious fear a brutal God and mistake it for
love. Is it possible to love a god who slew men, women, children, horses,
donkeys, and anything that drew breath in innocent cities that his chosen tribe
wanted. A god still advocating such behaviour in the “New” Testament?
FAME
Fame also
brings many people to you who profess friendship, love and respect. But ask any
ex-star how genuine this is. “Love” from people based on fame, like love based
on power and/or money, disappears as quickly as that fame, power or money. Any
self-love based on such love is built on quicksand.
To watch their
antics is to know that the powerful, rich, famous, and/or beautiful are most
often the unhappiest (or at least, the not-happiest) of all.
OTHER METHODS
AND TALL-POPPY LOPPING
Many of us also
get self-respect/love and some happiness from our being associated with power
and/or success through membership of a gang, a religion, a football team. It
does explain why some apparently decent people will do indecent things to
further their religion. But self-love by association is fraught (as any
supporter of
We most often
measure our own achievements with the yardstick of others’ achievements. Some
of us, frustrated at this attempt to feel good about the self, realise that it
is easier to drag others down than build our selves up, and engage in that all
too human pastime of tall-poppy lopping. Bringing others down to our own
perceived level (or below) brings some grim satisfaction, but no lasting happiness
– there are always others who appear relatively good/better/best.
HOW TO GET REAL
SELF RESPECT AND LOVE?
So, how best to
get self love and self-respect that is true and lasting? We are not all capable
of truly great achievements in fields like the artistic, sporting, or academic,
for example – most of us have humble capacities. But there are some things we
all have the ability to do. We all have the ability to love others, to forgive
them, and do good things for them (the things we would like them to do for us).
Love, forgive,
do – sounds familiar? Consider also this:
“If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of
his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and the latter
gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth.”
– Charles Darwin, (Autobiography, P. 94.)
From
THE IMPORTANCE
OF THE LOVE AND APPROVAL OF OTHERS
Why is the
approbation of our fellow men so important? Because the best evidence of our
self-worth seems to come from others. This from Alain de Botton:
“The attentions
of others might be said to matter to us principally because we are affected by
a congenital uncertainty as to our own value – as a result of which what others
think of us comes to play a determining role in how we are able to view
ourselves.”
Alain
de Botton, “Status Anxiety” – P. 15
And self-worth
is more important than bodily survival.
“For the
dueller, what other people think of him will be the only factor in settling
what he may think of himself.”
Alain de Botton, ibid – P. 116
ACADEMIC
STUDIES ON HAPPINESS
What do academic
studies have for us on the subject of happiness? Innumerable studies have found
that if we have friends, a partner, good connections with our community, a job,
purpose in our life, the love of our fellow men, we will be happy.
True. But why
do these things make us genuinely happy? For the reasons we discussed, above –
they allow us to feel good about our selves, our beings – genuinely happy for
genuine achievements. They are a mark of the worth of our selves/souls – not the
beauty of our bodies, of our power, the amount of our temporal possessions. This
from 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne about assessing our
worth:
“A man may have
a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large
income. All that may surround him, but it is not him…Measure his height with
his stilts off: let him lay aside his wealth and his decorations and show
himself to us naked…What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful
one, able, happily endowed with all her functions? Are her riches her own or
are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? ... That is what we need
to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by.”
Quoted from Alain de
Botton, “Status Anxiety” P. 200.
TO EVOLVE A
BEAUTIFUL SOUL
So, if life is
an opportunity to know our self, then grow/evolve our self until we are happy
with our self – then it is an opportunity to evolve de Montaigne’s “beautiful
soul”. The best way to achieve it seems to be to obey the above injunctions of
Jesus and Darwin – to “love one another”, and “act for the good of others”. If
we do this we will find we have lots of friends, a partner who loves us,
connections with our community, purpose in our life, love from our fellows – all
the things academic studies have shown to be necessary to our lasting happiness.
We will be happy because we will have become a beautiful soul – spiritually evolved.
Only our
beautiful souls/selves will not lose their power, money, fame, or get wrinkles
– it is the only part of our being which has any chance of being eternal.
NEO-DARWINIAN
IDEOLOGY
In the
background I can hear the neo-Darwinians ideologists singing their usual
refrain: self love and happiness is not about spiritual growth, evolving a
“beautiful soul”, but just about the animal – ego, status and prestige –
necessary for animal survival and breeding purposes. This from Jonathan Haidt
(Haidt uses an elephant as an analogy for the human body):
“The elephant [human body] was shaped by natural selection to win at
the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their
admiration, and rise in relative rank. The elephant cares about prestige,
not happiness and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is
prestigious.”
- P. 101 “The Happiness Hypothesis” (Haidt’s italics underlined).
Seen through
the lens of neo-Darwinian ideology, gaining the admiration of others is not
about our need to be happy with our spiritual self – but just another purely
animal act to garner prestige in order to breed more successfully than other
animals of our species – to win the “game of life”.
DO WE CARE ONLY
ABOUT PRESTIGE, NOT HAPPINESS?
Is this what truly
drives the human need for the admiration of our fellows? Is this what makes their
admiration, in the words of
For Haidt, in
“the game of life” all animals, including humans, are the same, and: “the
elephant [our animal body] cares about prestige, not happiness”. But we have
seen on our exploration that humans spend much of their waking hours in
non-genetic, or non-survival behaviours – in seeking happiness (even if the
activity is not recognised as such, and/or is futile). Many of us have
recognised that a higher happiness is available beyond just prestige for
breeding – the happiest people you will meet are those who recognise the
prestige treadmill for what it is and have stepped off – taken a survival risk,
tried to know their true selves – to follow their vocation, their calling,
their souls.
HAIDT’S DUALITY
Haidt, by
stating “the elephant cares about prestige, not happiness” allows that
happiness and prestige are different. Neo-Darwinians tend to confuse the two. Prestige
and status is of our animal bodies and driven by our egos. Our animal egos
are to do with bodily survival and successful mating. Lasting happiness is, conversely,
happiness with the self/soul/spirit. Throughout his book Haidt refers to the
human duality as analogous to an elephant and a rider – the elephant being the animal
body with its unconscious animal instincts and genetic imperatives, and the
rider is the mind – the conscious, thinking self. But this exploration has
allowed us to see the human duality rather as a spiritual being with an animal
body. The human mind is part of the bodily singularity – it is an animal mind. To
couch this idea in terms of Haidt’s analogy I would describe the body (which includes
the mind) as the elephant (our delightful but doomed material vehicle), and the
self (our possibly eternal spirit) as the rider. In other words, I see the mind
not as the rider of the animal body, but as an integral part of it – and it is
not always in control!
The spirit/rider
is not of the body, but is moved by other things, what gives our self joy is on
a higher plane, or higher consciousness, than the animal. It often seems to be
part of something “larger” – a numinous – a Divine even – an “S” Self. We have
seen that the spiritual and the animal can be stimulated together to experience
ecstasy – but they are essentially separate factors of the human animal/divine
equation. The human totality seems to be the way the Divine experiences this
physical world – its joys and fears, its dangers and beauties, its animal and
spiritual experiences.
SO WHAT IS
HAPPINESS AND WHAT OURS SAY ABOUT US AND OUR PURPOSE?
We posed these
questions at the beginning of this section on happiness. We have answered the first
“what is happiness?” question by discovering that lasting happiness is firstly knowing
the self, and knowing that we can love the self.
The second question
– what does our happiness say about us? It says two things:- firstly, that because
both animal and spiritual things can give us contentment and some happiness it
says that we are both animal and spiritual; and secondly:- because love is the
only thing which works invariably to
make us lastingly happy – we are love.
Genuine self-respect and love, based on the true love of others, is the only
thing the possession of which invariably leads to happiness and self-loathing
invariably leads to unhappiness. Self-love is also the only possession which is
totally within our control. We can do evil – but it is never the object of our
action in itself. Evil sometimes emanates from the animal side of the human
equation in an effort to ensure our animal survival (for example, invading the
land of others and killing or enslaving them – read the Bible) – or from the
self side of the human equation when we engage in (vain) efforts to love the
self through the getting of power and/or money by any means. Evil never leads
to lasting happiness but, if the life is long enough, it will invariably lead to
self-loathing – ask anyone on their deathbed.
And the third question
– our purpose? The purpose of anything is what it does. What do we do? The relative
universe (and that includes us) does creation. We create many things, but our greatest
creation is our self. We create our selves in our striving to be happy – we are
what makes us happy. But only love makes us truly happy. So we are love. It
takes a lifetime (maybe several?) – to know that.
We now, in our
journey along the road to truth, emerge from the sylvan glades of happiness and
stumble into the foggy hollows of semantics. Some shelter in their mists for
comfort playing a semantic game, saying the self/spirit does not exist, all is
in the mind (psychological), or all is animal (emotional).
I have stated,
and presented evidence throughout this essay, that we are spiritual beings with
animal bodies. But those who see life as just a fluke occurrence in an equally
fluky, entirely physical and mechanistic universe argue that the spiritual does
not exist, that the things I have been ascribing to our spiritual being is more
correctly psychological and emotional – in other words, of our bodies. Those
who believe that existence is a meaningless fluke maintain that we, our “selves”,
are just animal bodies – our “spirituality” just a psychological response of an
animal organ – our brain. Is this semantic gymnastics by neo-Darwinian
materialists to explain away the difficulties that the existence of the
spiritual poses for their material theory of everything?
Some semantic
difficulties can arise because certain words can be used to describe both psychological/animal
things and spiritual things. For example, by the word “love” we can mean the
Darwinian, naturally-selected feeling we must have towards our genetic
offspring and/or our tribe members to survive as a species, and/or that other
Darwinian love: the romantic love (or lust) we must have to procreate. But, in
humans, love from others is as important as love for others. Spiritual
love – the love we must have for our selves/souls/spirits – is essential for us
to be happy, and a different thing to Darwinian love we must have for our
partners to breed, and/or the love of our social group and/or offspring to survive
as a species. Spiritual love is unnatural because other animals don’t have the
need to get love from other animals – as we have seen before, animals other
than humans don’t need to be happy, they just need to be.
To elucidate
this point, consider the peacock. A peacock spreads his tail – for only one
purpose – to spread his genes. This is a natural behaviour with a Darwinian
motive – the type of motive that evolutionary ideologists claim explains all
human behaviours as well. Now, a human can also do the Darwinian thing and dress
up like a peacock to attract partners in order to spread their genes, but humans
are a bit more complicated – they may be after another thing when they exhibit
this behaviour. They may not be interested in breeding – they may even be past
child-bearing or de-sexed – but are trying to feel good about their selves by
being considered physically attractive. Similarly, to be considered attractive
by others so that they can feel good about their selves, older humans who are often
past breeding will risk animal survival by having body-enhancing plastic
surgery. They probably won’t succeed with their ultimate aim of happiness because
they are confusing the body with the self, but the point I am making is that
the driving need for human peacock-type behaviour is not necessarily Darwinian
gene-spreading but sometimes the unnatural, human need to love the self –
spiritual, not animal. “Unnatural” because with the peacock and other animals it
is always natural animal behaviour – animals other than humans have no need to
love the self to achieve the level of physical contentment they are capable of.
To get back to
the original point, human self-love is a spiritual need and cannot be demoted
to a psychological, animal need.
Emotions are not
the same as being spiritually moved – or inspired. Emotions are bodily
responses to Darwinian survival situations – for example the animal emotions of
fear and anger, which trigger the physical reactions – flight or fight. Are
these reactions of the same level as those I call spiritual – for example, when
we hear sublime music or take in a sublime vista – both of which spiritually
move us but have no Darwinian function? Is the deep, spiritual connection we
have for someone whose soul we have experienced – a lover, a close friend – a
soul mate – the same as the Darwinian emotions we feel for a sexy individual
who has just come into view, or the emotions we accord a fellow teammate or tribe
member? The former speaks of a spiritual connection and understanding – the
latter of bodily needs and animal/genetic survival.
WE CONFUSE
RELIGION WITH THE SPIRITUAL
The way that
the spiritual is most often confused with the psychological is by confusing it
with religion. Religion is about our bodily/psychological needs and our
emotions. To illustrate this let’s consider this about the psychology of
religion from Freud:
“illusions,
fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind…man’s
need to make his helplessness tolerable”
-
(Sigmund
Freud, Civilisation, Society and
Religion, Page 208. Penguin, 1985).
And the
following which, along with: “religion is
the opiate of the masses”, we might call Marx’s atheist manifesto? :
“Religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world and the
soul of the soulless condition.”
-
(Economic
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.)
Jungians also
see religion as a useful part of society – about the collective unconscious, a
necessary and therapeutic tool for civilisation. Sociologists such as Emile
Durkheim have a similar utilitarian outlook on religion as well, viewing
religion as a social tool, something used by societies to control and maintain
societies in their complexity.
RELIGION IS
DARWINIAN
Religion is, in
fact, rarely spiritual but Darwinian, about the venal – power over people, control
of a vain god through worship, and especially about animal/bodily survival. Salvation
is key Christian doctrine – and the explanation for its sweep through the
Religion is
of the emotional and psychological – animal responses to existential threats. But
to establish that religion is of the animal side of the human equation is not
the same as proving that the spiritual is likewise, and that it should be
dismissed with religion as purely animal – emotional and psychological. The
human condition is only partly animal, we are spiritual beings – and religion
is not necessarily an expression of our spirituality – just as often it is
Darwinian – about our fears and wishes. Human spirituality is rarely served by
our religions, but our animal fears are always – the spiritual exists in many
places other than the religious in our world. Empirical evidence of the
spiritual outside of religious imaginings is what this essay seeks.
So far I have
considered the evidence for the existence of the spiritual presented by abstract
notions like beauty, but is there any empirical evidence for the existence of
the spiritual?
·
EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL
We have
discovered on our journey that medical studies have shown that self-loathing
can produce physical changes to our bodies – people can get bodily sick (even
to the point of death) from loathing the self. It has also been shown that feeling
good about the self, loving the self, can result in positive physical changes
to our bodies. Hospital studies have shown that sick people can have their
spirits lifted by music or pets, and such “lifting” can positively affect their
physical health. How? There is nothing about the love, or touch, of a pet, or
about music that changes the physical molecular structure of our bodies – it
can only affect our spirits/souls/selves – which in turn must make the physical
changes to our bodies. Bodily changes, brought about by spiritual means, is
empirical evidence for the existence of the spiritual. More evidence that
humans cannot be totally described in material terms – while we have a body –
we are not that body.
GUILT
Conversely,
people can become sick through spiritual means. For example, people can get physically
sick from guilt. Guilt can be very destructive, physically, to the human body –
“badness” to others does not sit well with the human condition – or not for
long. And it is interesting what we see as “bad”. For instance, rape – if we
are just genetic machines then raping someone is natural (as it is in the
animal kingdom) and, more correctly, “good” because it furthers the domination
of our genes. But for us it is a crime against another’s being, their self,
their soul – and for those of us with average spiritual evolution it will
produce guilt within. The fact that there is not one recorded case of someone
from getting sick from being good to others or by being loved by others – in
fact the very idea is ludicrous – is further evidence in the discussion about
the true human nature is love – being good suits us, being bad or “evil” (a
concept not available to other animals) can make us physically sick.
SOME CAN’T GET
NO SATISFACTION
More empirical evidence
for the existence of the spiritual can be found in our sexuality – which can
operate from base animal levels of satisfaction, to sublime spiritual levels.
At the “lowest” animal/physical level of human sexuality we have masturbation,
prostitution, and sexual exploitation (by pop-stars or sports-stars of fans, exploitation
by those in power of those under them – for example, adults of children, or
managers of underlings). Sex at these base levels provides animal, physical
satisfaction but absolutely no self/spiritual satisfaction – hence the pop
song. Animal “satisfactions” of the type above can even lead to self-loathing –
spiritual damage.
PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL
ECSTASY
But, as we have
seen in the above exploration of human happiness, human sexuality can rise to a
higher spiritual level enabling a higher level of satisfaction – ecstasy. Making
love to someone you love, rather than just having sex for animal pleasure or
ego satisfaction – or for spreading your genes – is a vastly different
experience available to humans. Tantric sex, often called spiritual sex, is an
example of incorporating love into the sex act. Tantric sex is a physical
manifestation of a spiritual bond – it is the physical realisation of the love
of a soul mate – it produces a physical/spiritual ecstasy through the self and
the body. The difference the spiritual makes to a physical, animal act is more empirical
physical evidence for the existence of the spiritual.
More evidence for
the existence of the spiritual is available in the fact that ecstasy can be
achieved by introducing spiritual elements to other physical pleasures and/or
needs – for example, eating. Feeding meets animal needs but dining can
be ecstatic. Good food cooked with artistry and, as many great chefs describe
it – with love – can lift the spirits enabling heights of enjoyment beyond just
meeting survival needs. And we can dine (as opposed to feed) when we are
presented with just a single, beautiful piece of fruit – we can be moved spiritually
by the physical perfection of it – shape, colour, ripeness, smell, taste,
texture – and of course the fact that someone thought enough of you to present
you with such a perfect thing. The Japanese, for instance, spend great amounts
of money on just one perfect piece of food, perfectly presented – it is not
just about the food, but the perfection and the honour conferred. Receiving and
eating such a gift can lifts our spirits – if we manage to lift our
consciousness sufficiently to appreciate it all, of course.
Once ecstasy has
been experienced, physical satisfaction without the spiritual being addressed at
the same time is much the same as a boring meal – adequate on an animal level,
but uninspiring. We can’t remain in a state of lasting ecstasy in this relative
world (sometimes animal survival must come to the fore) but it is good to know
that ecstasy is available – but it can only be achieved by bringing spiritual
consciousness to bear on our physical pleasures.
RAISING OUR
CONSCIOUSNESS FOR GREATER ENJOYMENT OF LIFE
Also we can
achieve ecstasy much more often than we do. If we take advantage of life’s
opportunity to evolve our spirituality, raise our consciousness in/of life, we
can appreciate physical/animal existence in the relative/material world much
more. We can raise our consciousness alone – walking through a garden, through
the bush, along a beach – or with others – singing in a choir, playing in a
band. We humans, uniquely among the animals, have to put up with existential
suffering because of our unique higher consciousness of life (of our mortality,
for example) so we might as well also enjoy the benefits that higher consciousness
can provide. Spiritual evolution allows us to bring the spiritual factors of
the human equation to bear on day to day life for our greater enjoyment of it.
The complete
human equation has spiritual as well as animal factors, we need to raise our
consciousness of our condition so that we can come to know who we really are – and
what we are really capable of. Those who try to describe the human condition in
terms of its body alone are doing the equivalent of trying to describe a book
by referring only to its paper. We need to be conscious that our selves are spiritual
– possibly part of a larger Divine – if we are to ever “Know thy ‘Self’”.
What other
evidence is there for the spiritual? Is there any evidence for an existence, a
reality, beyond the temporal? At this point of our journey I suggest we double
back along the Road to Truth to have a peek into those labyrinths we
encountered earlier, labyrinths that were signposted “Paranormal” and
“Supernatural”. We skirted them at the beginning of our journey because they
are dangerous and we were low on light, courage, and a reliable guide.
·
THE PARANORMAL
AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
Is there such a
thing as a reliable guide into the potentially dangerous areas of the paranormal
and supernatural? ”Dangerous” because they deal with the strong wishes (our “t”
truths) we rely on to get through life, and/or the fears we have to suppress. This
area is a minefield of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and vested
interests – misleading and unsettling to those who may be presently having a struggle
with life – often the sort of people who are driven there. While many good
souls inhabit the area, evidence is often anecdotal, and charlatans who exploit
the damaged and needy also abound.
At the end of
the 19th century and the start of the 20th the popularity
of the paranormal grew. This was an era after the persecution of “witches” by
the House of God, and before scientism built House of Disbelief into the
default residence for the majority of thinking humanity. Mediums were popular –
the best renowned – and séances became common forms of entertainment. Religion
made tentative forays into the paranormal (usually in the form of exorcism) but
was generally reticent – afraid of the potential can of worms that could be uncovered
for religious doctrine. Have there been any recent objective studies done into
the spiritual world by a modern scientist(s), do we now have a reliable guide through
the minefield of fears, wishes, and vested interests to the “T” Truth who has
some non-anecdotal experience of the paranormal?
A RELIABLE
GUIDE?
Psychology, as
a science, made some early assays into the spiritual world. The “Father” of
modern psychology, William James, was one to do so – with mixed results. Academia
has tended to confuse and/or equate the spirit world with religion, and as a
result, spirituality has been tarred with religion’s brush of decreasing
credibility (at the hands of science). As a result not many respectable scientists
have seriously ventured therein subsequent to James. However, recently, one did
so – Professor David Fontana (Professor of Psychology at Liverpool’s
I find
Poo-pooing psychic
abilities is a politically-correct thing which has brought many easy plaudits
to those who need them. But Fontana called it as he saw it, and came down
heavily on the side of the fact of the veracity of the psychic abilities of
some practitioners – this from his concluding chapter:
“Having studied
the evidence for these [psychic]
abilities for over 30 years and seen a significant amount of the evidence at
first hand, I am in no doubt that the evidence of psychic abilities can only be
rejected on doctrinaire grounds and not on those of objective judgement.
Psychic abilities are a matter of fact, not of belief.”
Fontana
recognised that the existence of any spiritual afterlife, and its nature, is a
very important question, pivotal to humanity – not only to the meaning and
purpose of our lives – but to the way we should live them:
“There is no
doubt in my mind that the question of whether or not we live after death is the
most important that faces us, and has always faced us. It is the most important
not only because it has to do with our destiny and the meaning and purpose of
existence, but because it has implications for the way we live our present lives.”
After a
consideration of his extensive experiences (often in the company of other
respected scientists) of the paranormal (the most intriguing of which is the
2-year-long examination of the séances at Scole – a town in
… If your answer is that you
are more than a biological accident whose ultimately meaningless life is
bounded by the cradle and the grave, then I have to say I agree with you.”
-
All the above, David Fontana, Is There an
Afterlife?(Pp. 468-9)
THE SCEPTIC
RESPONSE
The Sceptics
have responded to the studies
“the Scole
Group had no discernible financial motive for practising deception. In fact
they were considerably out-of-pocket as a result of the work of their Spiritual
Science Foundation, and steadfastly refused financial assistance …even to cover
their expenses. Publicity could also be ruled out as a motive for deception,
particularly in the case of the two mediums, who remained anonymous throughout
the investigation.”
p. 329 Ibid.
As I have
stated, sceptics have a very important role to play, but for the most strident,
the slightest possibility of fraud is given the same weight as proof that it
did happen. I suspect that the stridency of some comes from their desire
not to seek truth, but rather their desire not to lose the comfort that
residency in the House of Disbelief offers – comfort from the guilt we all sometimes
suffer, and from fear. Even if not fear of dying, or of Divine punishment, the
insidious fear that we, our self, has been revealed by life – to be witnessed
by all at some time and place of absolute knowing?
WHAT INFORMATION
WAS COMMUNICATED?
“that the way
in which the next world – at least at the lower levels – is experienced by each
individual is shaped not just by his or her own thoughts, but by the thoughts
of others who think in similar ways. Thus it is said we gravitate to that part
of the next world where there are people of like mind to ourselves. Those who
love trees and flowers, peace and harmony, go to a domain where the thoughts of
others who love these things have helped to create just such an environment. By
contrast, if we prefer the city, we go to a city-like environment, and if we
are identified with violence and strife we go to a place of violence and
strife.”
–
I like that one
– talk about Divine justice!? And in harmony with some of the discoveries of quantum
physics that matter has more the nature of energy than substance – and in
harmony with the discovery that our observations and consciousness affect
(maybe effect?) realities.
And I like
these communications about judgement:
“Generally,
however, these communications speak of this judgement as a form of
self-judgement rather than as something handed down from on high.” (ibid. P. 454)
And punishment:
“…involves
directly experiencing within oneself the emotional happiness and suffering
caused in others – including non-human forms of life – by one’s actions. No
divine being hands out rewards or punishments. The rewards and punishments are
implicit in the judgement process itself, and in the pleasure on the one hand
and the remorse on the other that it brings. This judgement must sooner or
later be if spiritual progress is to be made…”
(ibid P. 454)
And love:
”…it is
important to add here that there is an almost universal emphasis, from mystics
and communicators alike, upon the fact that ultimate reality is “love”, and
that the purpose of our life on earth is to learn how to love, how to behave
selflessly and compassionately, and to overcome the ignorance, greed, and
hatred to which material existence lays us open.”
(ibid. P.
455)
If
IS THE ANSWER
TO THE MEANING OF LIFE MEANT TO BE AVAILABLE?
The father of
modern psychology, William James, after his frustrations at proving anything
from studying this area concluded that for life to work properly it needs to
retain its mystery – any ultimate purpose of life may well be denied by our
full knowledge of it?
“If this is
indeed the case, then I assume it is because the Almighty has decreed that the
personal search for meaning and purpose in life and in death are of more value
than having meaning and purpose handed down as certainties from others. If the
certainties of life and death were so well known that they appeared in every
school textbook, there would no longer be scope for the personal search, and
for the inner development that may be possible only as a product of such a
search.”
p. 327 ibid.
“Inner
development” is, of course, the same phenomenon of life that I have been
calling spiritual/self evolution. To create our selves, we need to make our own
choices – in the present functioning of our present world we are the sum of our
choices. Such “sum”, is our Self – to be known by our self, and evolved into a
better Self for our greater happiness – if we choose. This is such an
immaculate function of life that it seems to be its purpose.
There is another
area that we need to explore while we are in the world of the paranormal before
we can make our decisions about these areas.
There have been
several books written on the subject of near death experiences. NDE’s have been
taken seriously by many in the scientific world, especially those who are
involved in the more intensive-care medical areas where people frequently die.
Some respectable studies on the phenomena of NDE’s have already been conducted,
and more are in the pipeline. Kenneth Ring, professor of psychology at the
“I do believe –
but just not on the basis of my own or others’ data regarding NDE’s – that we continue to have conscious existence
after our physical death and that the core experience does represent its beginning,
[and] a glimpse of things to come.
Quoted from “Near Death – stories from the other
side”, Craig Mitchell, Pp. 136-7.
Those who have
personally experienced them are completely convinced and find them
life-changing – changing their outlook on life, fear of death and even their
own previously received spirituality. In just about every case the changes are
positive. The following, concerning changes in the fear of death, is from Dr.
Cherie Sutherland (
“A strong
decrease in fear of death among near-death experiencers has also been noted by
a number of researchers and commented upon by most people writing in this
area…This change in attitude on the part of those who’ve had an NDE has
important implications, not only for their own future lives, but for society in
general since, as Flynn notes:
‘ Psychologists and sociologist have traced
many of our individual as well as societal problems to anxieties related to
death…Such freedom from fear leads to indifference to negative kinds of
immortality striving.’
Freedom from a drive for
material success, with all that entails, is one such change frequently noted.
An intuitive acceptance of both life and death and a focus of attention on the
here and now are further outcomes of this change in attitude to death.”
“Transformed By The Light,” Cherie Sutherland
Pp. 40-41
I also find it
particularly interesting that many NDE experiencers return to this physical
plane more spiritual than they used to be – but not necessarily more religious.
More from Dr. Sutherland:
“In terms of
religious affiliation, about half of the sample (46 per cent) claimed to have
no religious affiliation at the time of their NDE. However, after their
experience 84 per cent claimed to have no religion.”
- Sutherland, ibid. P. 95.
NDE’s therefore do
not seem to be a product of religious conditioning and/or expectations – as
some sceptics claim. Many diverge from previously received religious
understanding of the afterlife. This from Professor David Fontana – who also
studied NDE’s, in his previously mentioned exploration of the paranormal:
“Furthermore, although religious belief is
very much a feature of both US and Indian culture, Osis and Haraldsson found
that the ‘phenomena [of NDE’s] within each culture often did not conform
the religious afterlife beliefs.’ Several
basic beliefs, such as judgement, salvation and redemption, in the case of
Christians, and reincarnation and dissolution into Brahma in the case of
Hindus, were notably absent. ‘We reached the impression,’ say the authors, ‘that cultural conditioning by Christian and
Hindu teaching is, in part, contradicted in the visionary experiences of the
dying.’ “
-
Some experiencers
report contact with a God or “Higher Being” that is hugely different – grander,
more accessible – to the gods of religious traditions. The 51 person sample of
in Dr. Sutherland’s study of NDE’s reported:
“there is a
feeling among this sample that they now have an ongoing direct contact with God
or a Higher Power that requires no mediation by institutions such as the Church
or interpretation by the teachings of any denomination or tradition.”
- Sutherland, Op. Cit. P107
I have read a few
books on the subject and find several related experiences of NDE’s convincing.
Particularly compelling were the experiences of people who have reported NDE’s
even though they have been blind from birth. They experienced, and accurately
reported on, a world they had never seen with their eyes. Professor
Kenneth Ring studied 21 blind people (Ring and Cooper 1999) – some blind from
birth – and most had encounters indistinguishable from experiences recounted by
sighted people. There was some understandable confusion among some who had
never experienced sight as to what they were experiencing during their NDE’s
but five said they could see, and two “contain
accounts of particularly clear vision of both earthly and ‘paradise’ conditions
during the NDE.” – their descriptions of objects were “striking and precise.”
THE MATERIALIST
EXPLANATION
Materialists have
attempted a few answers for the phenomenon of NDE. These answers usually fall
into pharmacological, psychological, physiological, and/or neurological
categories. The most heavily relied upon theory is that NDE’s are a result of
mind-altering medicines which may have been administered to patients who
“died”. Psychotropic medicines can give people hallucinations but,
equally, many near death experiences have been reported by people who had their
NDE away from medical treatment.
Professor K. Ring
summarises naturalistic interpretations as follows:
“It is not
difficult – in fact it is easy – to propose naturalistic interpretations that
could conceivably explain some aspects of the core experience…[ a naturalistic] interpretation, to be acceptable, should be able to provide a
comprehensive explanation of all the various aspects…”
K. Ring, “Life at
Death”, P. 216
The truly
interesting NDE’s tend to be those which in which the main aspects bear
striking similarities – regardless of culture, religion, personal expectations
– or whether they occurred under drugs or not. And as I have previously said,
the ones I find most compelling are those NDE’s experienced by people blind
from birth – NDE’s during which they can see. How does the pharmacological,
psychological, physiological, and/or neurological explanation cope with that
phenomenon? It must also be noted that not all psychological events that people
experience during health dramas fit the description of near death experiences –
some are just plain hysteria, dreams or nightmares – and should not be included
as NDE’s. It is an area which lends itself to controversy, and some of the
studies currently underway may tell us more.
But there are
some facts of human life that are not well explained by our physical sciences –
some facts that are non-physical therefore must remain mysteries to them. We
have examined many of these during our journey along the Road to Truth and, as
Dr. Sutherland says:
“It is
important to keep this caution [against accepting scientific belief as
scientific data – as some similarly do with religious belief] in mind since the fallacy of ‘scientism’ is
that empiric-analytical science, grounded in the five senses, is the only path
to knowledge.”
- Sutherland, Op Cit, P. 19
Bear in mind also,
that only one of the many NDE experiences recorded has to be true, for a higher
reality (for example, an existence of the self independent of the present body
and outside of this material world) to be true.
A DECISION –
CHOICES, CHOICES?
The decision
about the existence of another higher reality and what it has to say about the
special meaning and ultimate purpose of this life (and/or a Divine) rests
forever in our hands – and must remain so – if life is to retain special
meaning and ultimate purpose. Our Selves flow from our choices about life, and from
our actions based on them. Such choices and actions are unerringly
Self-revelatory – and, not so unerringly – Self-evolutionary.
We, our selves,
are the end result of a long string of choices we make about life. Even the
belief that life offers no choices is a choice we have made – a free choice –
based on evidence we choose to accept, and/or how we choose to interpret. If we
choose to believe that we have no freedom of choice in life, and choose to
believe that therefore we can only proceed blindly as an animal – subject only
to our animal drives and genetic imperatives (and secular sanctions over them) in
a causal universe – then our subsequent actions are as a result of our free
choices to that affect. Like all choices, these latter choices are Self-revelatory
(but not likely to be Self-evolutionary any time soon).
There are no
absolute proofs in life, or it would not work. We can only decide our
philosophies “on the balance” – of probabilities.
“Are we no more
than biological accidents with nothing to motivate us beyond the struggle to
stay alive, or is there more to it than this? Is there no purpose to our lives
beyond self-interest, or are selfless ideals such as love and compassion,
empathy and altruism, peace and harmony, the very stuff from which existence
arises? Are our thought, our creative endeavours, our art, our poetry, our
philosophy, our music, no more than the by-products of electro-chemical energy
in a brain that would live out its earthly life just as well without them? Or
are these creative masterpieces hints and whispers of a grander and finer
reality of which we are all a part?”
-
Your choices
about these important questions will create your Self.
THERE CAN BE NO
PHYSICAL PROOF OF THE NON-PHYSICAL
NDE’s are just another
part of the rich tapestry of human spiritual experiences. NDE’s (like other paranormal
evidence from mediums and spirit guides) support, but do not settle for all
time, the question of separate existence of self and body (cf. mind and body). In
the end, irrefutable empirical evidence sufficient to convince materialists (physical
proof from this material world produced by our physical sciences) must always
be lacking in these areas which explore the non-physical. Even if a materialist
had a personal experience that he found convincing, he could not bring a lump
of it back to convince his fellow materialists. But quantum physics has shown
us that even a lump of stuff is mysterious – hardly rock-solid. In fact, our
supposedly entirely material world looks curioser and curioser the closer we
look at it. Time to explore the material world that materialists are convinced
is all.
We emerge from
the paranormal labyrinths, to get our feet back on the ground. But to travel
any further we have to consider that very ground. Our path along the Road to
Truth is about to be enveloped by the swirling mists of quantum “reality”.
·
THE PHYSICAL
WORLD AS MIND-STUFF – QUANTUM WEIRDNESS
Those who feel
that our material world is rock-solid – purely physical and completely understood,
and that such a material, mechanically causal world must argue against psychic and
spiritual phenomena – have not contemplated the actual weirdness of our
“physical” world. We may feel we live in a world of Newtonian physics of cause
and effect, but we actually exist in a barely conceivable quantum world full of
the non-solid. A world where there is evidence for many more dimensions than the
four we can experience; that matter can be altered by the consciousness of the
observer of it – mind affecting matter; and of something called “non-locality” where
particles can continue to be connected to each other even though far apart
physically – allowing mind and brain to be unglued (or perhaps, self and body?).
“Unglued”? In our
world both thoughts and things exist – a dualism. Our brains are things with
thoughts. If we didn’t allow some dualism in our philosophy we may be worried
about crashing our cars into the thoughts of others, for example. But consider
this:
“Much of modern
science can be seen as an attempt to disprove dualism. In the strictly
scientific world-view there is only one stuff – out of which bricks and brains
are constructed. My thoughts and feelings are just what the brain does…It’s
largely an illusion that the mind has any affect on the world. We’re all
imprisoned in the chains of cause and affect that started with the Big Bang.
But in spite of numerous claims this remains a statement of faith.
Neuroscientists may be able to show what happens in the brain when we think, or
when we exercise “free will”, but this cannot be shown to be proof that dualism
is wrong…Those electrical patterns are not thought itself; they may be no more
than symptoms of thought.”
And:
“quantum
mechanics…is the most effective scientific idea ever: it powers your
television, your computer, anything dependant on electronics. So we know it’s
true enough to work, but it’s also weird enough to defy belief…Crucially, two
things [have] been discovered. First particles can continue to be connected to
each other even though separated by long distances…a phenomena known as
non-locality. Second, quantum theory shows that the mind can affect the world.”
Bryan Appleyard – Both quotes Weekend Australian
Magazine, 17-18 January, 2009 (Pp. 15-16).
Appleyard
quotes distinguished physicist Henry Strapp (
“The observer
is brought into quantum physics in an essential way, not only as a passive
observer, but as an active part of the dynamics. He makes certain choices not
specified by the physical dynamics which seem to come from the psychologically
described realm rather than the physically described realm.”
Ibid. P. 16
THE END OF CAUSALITY
AND SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM?
The
implications for the debate about the existence, or not, of free choice are
considerable. Non-locality, for example, allows the mind to be separate to the
brain – and Strapp’s “certain choices not specified by the physical dynamics” unhinges
causality. These discoveries are, in Appleyard’s words:
“world-changing.
This idea would, if widely accepted, end the reign of scientific materialism,
replacing it with a new dualism. It would mean that the universe is not a
“causally closed” system, locked down since the Big Bang, as mainstream science
has always insisted it is, but open to freedom of choice by the autonomous,
floating, matter-altering mind. We would have regained our souls.”
Ibid. P.16
Our actual “material”
world is comprised of more space and energy than matter – even our bodies are way
more space and energy than anything else. The particles which make up atoms (which
make up our bodies) have more space between them proportionally than the scattered
bodies of the universe – electro-magnetic and nuclear forces create an illusion
of solidarity. Is then the “spirit“-world, from which beings reportedly can pass
through our “solid” objects like walls, so weird – so unlikely? If we find that
we can create or alter physical “reality” by our observations of, and choices
about, it – is then an after-world of spiritual energy incredible?
“Thanks to the
advances of modern science we know that this material [the matter of which
this world is composed] is also
mysterious, and more in the nature of energy than of solid substance. We do not
know what it really is and we do not know from where it really comes. If the
findings of quantum physics are to be believed and if it can indeed be directly
influenced at some level by the consciousness of the observer, it may be rather
nearer to a form of “mind stuff” than a form of inert matter. The more we
ponder such possibilities, the more descriptions of the next world come to
seem, if not credible, at least a little less incredible.”
- David Fontana (Op. Cit. P.453)
Another mystery
in our “certain” world. We are getting near the end of our journey. Only one
more mysterious place on our map to explore. Time for a laugh. Did you hear the
one about:-
The world is a comedy to those who think,
A tragedy to those who feel.
– Horace Walpole
What is humour?
Why does it make us smile, even sometimes in the grimmest of situations? Why
does it make us go into strange, almost involuntary spasms of the body called
laughter? It is a mystery with no good Darwinian explanation. This from Arthur
Koestler:
“What is the
survival value of the involuntary, simultaneous contraction of fifteen facial
muscles associated with certain noises which are often irrepressible? Laughter
is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; one
might call it a luxury reflex. Its only utilitarian function, as far as one can
see, is to provide temporary relief from utilitarian pressures … where laughter
arises, an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humourless universe
governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest … that a
complicated mental activity like the reading of a page by Thurber should cause a
specific motor response on the reflex level is a lopsided phenomena which has
puzzled philosophers since antiquity.”
Arthur Koestler, “The Act of Creation”, 1964 (Quoted
from “How the Mind Works”, Steven Pinker – P. 545)
The noise of
people laughing is one of the loveliest sounds. It is funny in itself, and can
be enough to make us laugh on its own. Are we the only species that laughs?
Without being too anthropomorphic, I feel some animals seem to, and some seem
to indulge in the lowest form of humour – elementary slapstick humour – watch a
cage full of chimps for a while.
IRONY,
SLAPSTICK AND HYSTERIA
Humans like
slapstick too, but humans often take the mysterious thing that is humour a step
further. We indulge in irony and laugh at satires of the human condition. We
find much of life ridiculous and absurd – witness the popularity of human
satire comedy like the Goons or Monty Python. Human humour often skirts the
abyss, bordering on madness and hysteria, bringing barely controllable hysterical
laughter. We also laugh at death in black humour and gallows humour. We laugh
at our selves, at our pomposities and dignities –, we find our existential
fears and angsts risible.
We split our
sides at the unnaturalness of human life – the sublime soul having to cohabit
with the base animal – so we like jokes derived from natural animal behaviours
like the sexual: “dirty” jokes; and excretory: (toilet humour). We humans are
the only animal to be embarrassed by engaging in natural things like excretion
or copulation in company. How can humans be so offended or amused by natural
acts if we are just animals and no more? Animals we undoubtedly are, but we
have greater aspirations – this from one of our greatest comedians:
“Humour [is] something that thrives between man’s
aspirations and his limitations.”
– Victor Borge
Are we are
tickled by the ridiculous dichotomy – the absurdity – of the spiritual self in
a base, animal body? Is that the Truth?
“There is more
logic in humour than in anything else. Because, you see, humour is truth.”
– Victor
Borge
We’ve been on
our road for a while now, and we have explored the last place marked on our map.
It feels like we have come a long way, but have we made any progress towards Truth?
The once small glimmer of something up ahead, is now just over the last
remaining rise, and seems to have become brighter. Is it the Truth?
Time to scale our
last vantage – to consolidate our discoveries to see what they amount to.
CONCLUSION – OUR LAST CLIMB
On our Road to Truth we bravely started in a darkling
forest – lit only by our burning bridges; crossed a lake made stormy by the
Intelligent Design debate; climbed some arduous and controversial hills; crossed
some broad and sunny fields; descended into a few dim dales; scrambled through
some prickly Darwinian brambles; scaled occasional spiritual heights; skirted the
odd frightening abyss; peeked into the metaphysical labyrinth; wandered in the
quantum mists; had a laugh at the whole existential experience – to arrive here.
Where?
We started along the Road to Truth, but have we
managed to obey Buddha’s other injunction to go all the way? If not, was it
worthwhile risking all by leaving our safe and comfortable Houses? Have the
previous residents of the House of God who joined our journey blown their
chances with God by rejecting Pascal’s wager that it is easier (and safer) to
believe; have the previous residents of the House of Disbelief disturbed a
comfortable belief in meaninglessness but not found the meaning of life?
Personally I think examining life, examining our
comfortable beliefs, is essential if we are to get anything other than the
animal experience out of life. I’m with Socrates when he said: “the
unexamined life is not worth living”.
BUT IS THE EXAMINED LIFE WORTH LIVING?
Have we found a life that, in Socrates’ terms, is
“worth living”? What exactly have we found? On this journey we found that although we
are obviously in, and of, a natural, neutral, material world which proceeds by
mechanistic laws, there is plenty in our world that is not mechanistic and
causal – much that is inexplicable to the materialistic world view – especially
when you examine human behaviour. We have found that there is much in our
behaviour that is seemingly “unnatural” – non-physical, not part of a
causally-closed material universe, much that does not proceed mechanistically
but is subject to free choice. For example, we have chosen of our own free will
to come on this journey along the “Road to Truth”.
We have also found that,
while humans observably have an animal body, we just as observably have a
spiritual being. We have found that that being is our Self – we have, but we
are not, an animal body. We may even have found hints of a Divine – but a
rational Divine visible without the rose-coloured binoculars of faith – there
is something “fishy” about our world.
For a supposedly accidental, spontaneous machine it often operates:
“by
grace of some pretty felicitous arrangements … how are we to judge just how
‘fishy’ the set-up is? The problem is that there is no natural way to quantify
the intrinsic improbability of the known ‘coincidences’. … What is needed is a
sort of metatheory – a theory of theories – that supplies a well-defined
probability for any given range of parameter values. No such metatheory is
available, or has to my knowledge even been proposed. Until it is, the degree
of ‘fishiness’ involved must remain entirely subjective. Nevertheless, fishy it
is!”
– Paul Davies,
The Mind of God P. 226.
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
For me, the greatest “fishiness” of life – apart from
the fact that anything exists at all – is the fact that such an apparently
accidental, relative, material, random, mechanistic universe is such an
immaculate process of self revelation – and then, if we choose to know the
revealed self, an immaculate opportunity for self evolution. The physical universe
may be mechanistic, a machine – but there is a ghost in the machine – the Self.
SELF EVOLUTION – THE PURPOSE OF LIFE?
The purpose of anything is revealed by what it does. Life
does self evolution through self knowledge. The purpose of life therefore is
self/spiritual evolution. But why? Why should we bother our pretty little heads
about meaning and purpose and go to all that uncomfortable trouble about coming
to know our self and growing our self? Know and grow? – why not just take our
dumb, animal luck at being alive and enjoy life?
Life can be enjoyed on a simple animal plane,
but by raising our consciousness of life – and of each other – through our spiritual
evolution we can incorporate the spiritual into our physical/animal pleasures
and bring more joy to our life – en-joy it more. We can enjoy it more by experiencing
ecstasy. Ecstasy is only available when the spiritual is engaged in our animal pleasure-taking
– if we make love rather than have sex, dine rather than feed, experience the
beauty of our physical environment rather than just pass through it on genetic
business (a good description of some lives). If we looked at each other as
fellow souls and lovers rather than just as competitors for food, money, power,
fame and genetic dominance; if we look at life as a spiritual opportunity
rather than an animal struggle (or as a religious test for somewhere better) – what
a much more fabulous experience it could become – and for all, not just a lucky
few.
And if we could come to accept we are spiritual
selves, and come to truly know those selves we could enjoy life more by
achieving lasting happiness through growing those selves until we are happy
with our selves.
WHAT OF SICKNESS, DISEASE, AND EARLY DEATHS,?
Some feel the above self-growth purpose of life is invalid
because some lives are blighted by disease and injury, or (like
WHAT OF GOD, HEAVEN AND HELL?
What did we discover on our journey about God and
heaven and hell – ideas that have always been part of the human condition? We
discovered some evidence of over-riding order and design possibly by a Divine,
and we discovered that there may be higher planes of existence – but absolutely
no evidence that religious traditions of a male, human-like God or a hell
(apart from experiencing what we bestowed – or inflicted on others on this
temporal plane) – or of life being a test for that place. The fact that the
spiritual dimensions dreamed up by our ancient religions are incredible does
not stand as evidence against the existence of spiritual dimensions – it just
stands against religions.
IS MEANINGLESSNESS A LOGICAL DEFAULT SETTING?
So at what point do we decide that life has special
meaning – how much of Paul Davies’ “fishiness” do we endure before
meaninglessness is removed as the default setting for our post-modern world? Many
forget that meaninglessness, itself, is a speculation. Speculations are only as
good as the evidence they are based on, and this examination of life has shown
that there is much more evidence against the speculation of meaninglessness
than for it. On what basis can meaninglessness become our default speculation in
a world full of numinous experiences and creative order? I would say only on
the basis of wishful thinking – by people who hope it is so. If all was purely
natural (i.e. accidental, totally self-occurring and mechanistic) science can
show it would be chaos – any accidental order that did occur quickly reduced by
entropy. Mathematically the chances of it being accidentally creative rather
than entirely entropic are trillions upon trillions to one against. While the
creative process has a seemingly fair amount of randomness in it, there are
fundamental laws and constants which keep interesting, creative things happening
without any particularly observable master plan. This from Davies:
“There
is no blueprint for the universe only a set of laws with an in-built facility
for making interesting things happen. The universe is then free to create
itself as it goes along … The very fact that the universe is creative and has
organised its own self-awareness is, for me, powerful evidence that there is
something going on behind it all.” (Paul Davies, Bulletin Magazine [Australia], 17/7/1990.)
There may be no blueprint for the universe, but its
master plan is creativity – because that is what it so immaculately does – and
through its ability to organise its own self-awareness. Life allows us to
create our selves – through self awareness – “Know Thyself”. Our spiritual evolution
is indeed “powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all”.
SELF AWARENESS – STAR STUFF OBSERVING THE STARS
Humans are of the universe – and the way that the
universe has “organised its own self-awareness” (on this world, at least). We
are of the stuff of this universe and at the same time are able to observe and
understand it – or to use Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase of wonder: “Star-stuff
observing the stars”. Not only are we strangely observing the stars but,
through our understanding of mathematics – the language the universe is written
in – we can understand the stars. But wait, there’s more – using this understanding
(in, for example, genetic engineering) – we have become stardust altering the
stars. We are – at one and the same time – creature and creator, both. Stranger
still, we are spiritual beings which have strange, unnatural notions of beauty,
shame, dignity, humour, compassion, and right and wrong – all in a supposedly entirely
natural – mechanistic, causal, amoral – universe.
ALL UP, A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF HUMANITY IS
INADEQUATE
Humans may have animal bodies but there’s more. It is
pretty much universally accepted that, through science, we understand how human
bodies evolved, but to try and describe human beings solely in terms of our
bodies is hopeless – it is like trying to describe a book by only referring to
its paper – you can do it but you get an inadequate, incomplete picture. If our
journey has shown anything, then it has shown that it is impossible to explain
all of human behaviour in terms of our genetic imperatives – although their
existence is undoubted. There comes a time when we must agree with Davies’
observation about “how fishy the set-up is” – a time to admit that if it looks
like a fish, swims like a fish, feels like a fish, smells like a fish, and
tastes like a fish – it most probably is a fish!
WE ARE ALL SPIRITUAL BEINGS OF THE ONE DIVINE
If our human societies are going to survive they have
to be more in touch with our spirituality, rather than be governed by our
religions – which are of our animal bodies and their fears and wishes – Darwinian,
not spiritual. Humanity is identical in our possession of spirituality (if not
in our individual spiritual evolution), and our identical spiritual needs are
our path to unity – our differing religions are paths only to our separation. We
are all spiritual beings from the one Divine spirit. When we are moved by
spiritual things, it is the Divine spirit which is moved. When our spirit is
moved it is the Divine experiencing the physical universe through us.
OUR SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION LAGS OUR SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION
Spiritual evolution has not been, and will not be, a
straight-line march for humanity but more like a dance – two steps forward,
some to the side and one back. Some countries are ahead of others in their
spiritual evolution (the laggards are usually oppressed by ideologies similar
in their fundamentalism – like materialism, communism, capitalism, or religion.
But, while it may be erratic, you don’t have to go back many years to prove spiritual
evolution is observably happening to the human race. But we are in trouble when
our technological evolution is way ahead of our spiritual evolution – when we
have atom bombs in the hands of stone-age religions whose gods approve a final
holocaust. We need urgently to increase our spiritual evolution, to raise our
spiritual consciousness beyond what is allowed by our Darwinian religions – we
need to contemplate a rational God, rather than most of our best minds slaughtering
the same sacred cow Nietzsche declared dead long ago.
“By
degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather
than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called
instincts.” (Autobiography P. 94)
“Higher” impulses
(higher than our purely animal “sensuous
passions”) are our spiritual impulses. And, likewise, our “higher impulses… rendered habitual” (to
the point of being instinctual) is spiritual evolution.
WHY?
But there is an
elephant in my living room – the ultimate question – “WHY?” Is the glimmer we earlier
reported up ahead of our road, the “T” Truth, or have we just created for
ourselves a larger question? Have we torn down the “IF” we encountered at the
very start of our journey, broken it up, only to find we have forged ourselves a
massive “WHY?” We may have determined that the ultimate purpose of life is
spiritual evolution because that is what it does – but why? Is the glimmer up ahead
not the shinning light of Truth but the bright, rational sun of our post-modern
era glinting off this ultimate and obdurate WHY? question?
OVER THE LAST RISE IN OUR JOURNEY
So, gamely, in an effort to obey Buddha’s injunction
to go all the way along the Road to Truth, we climb up and over the last rise.
As we clamber down the other side – we see ahead of
us, indeed, a giant WHY? – bathed in and glowing from the unremitting light of a
rational age. And beside it we find a Goliath – a giant made from the evil men
do, carrying the protective shield of religion, its flanks hidebound by ideology,
and armed with disbelief’s sharp spear of doubt – a monster of meaninglessness
and the arch-enemy of humanity’s survival. An enemy that humanity one day must
slay – or it will slay us. Time is running out – having come face to face with our
nemesis, let’s confront it now.
So we walk up to stand, bravely but trembling, before
the enemy of meaning and purpose. And we have every right to be afraid – we are
facing a Goliath of the absolute armed only with a slingshot – a mind born of
the relative. But it’s all we’ve got and, keeping a wary eye on the enemy, we reach
down to pick up a rock to load our sling.
We grab one, and before we fit it to our sling we look
down, quickly, to check if we have selected a missile suitable for slaying such
a foe. We see that we have picked up a thing of incredible beauty – a large and
perfect diamond – and our attention is drawn, for a moment, into its luminous
depths. Therein we can make out some wondrous things: we can see beauty in our physical
world which should be just chaotic matter and energy – beauty in the sight of our
world’s snowy mountains; in the smell of a rose; the touch of fur; the taste of
a peach; the sound of a nightingale’s song; and in our own artistic creations. We
can see mysterious things – why anything exists at all; the underlying laws over-riding
our universe’s chaotic beginning ; the mystery of our unnatural understanding
of the language the universe is written in; the mystery of humans being
stardust observing and understanding the stars; we see our unnatural notions
like right and wrong; the mysteries of human consciousness; the strangeness of the
recognition of uniquely human virtues; the existence of human humour; human compassion
for genetic competitors when all should naturally be genetic imperatives; we
see the existence of the spiritual in a universe born solely of physical forces;
we see the infallible process of self revelation and self knowledge that life
is; and the immaculate opportunity for self evolution that it provides. And
within we can also see that love is our nature and our deepest need; that loving
our self is the key to human happiness; and finally – we can see the “T” Truth
in the message – brought to us in such a way – of the primacy of loving one
another; forgiveness even for our enemies; and doing unto others as we would
have them do unto us.
We know in an instant we are well armed and load our
missile to the sling. We raise our eyes to take aim – only to find that the
monster of meaninglessness has gone – faltered and fled – turned tail and run.
The massive WHY – left unsupported by the Goliath – has
fallen flat, to reveal the Truth.
We have it in our hand.
Graeme Meakin, 2003. Revised 13th June,
2009
EXAMINATION
OF THE HOUSE OF GOD