I, for one, do not believe that a sophisticated nervous system is required to produce thought. Most thoughts are unconscious. The unconscious mind has to be quite pervasive in nature. Instincts are thoughts as well. The idea of thought has to be broadened, or a new term invented that can include a broader definition of thought in the evolutionary process. Pre-conceptual ideas are found throughout nature. Intellectual concepts develop out of them. I like Whitehead’s term “prehensions,” which implies that inanimate matter has the ability to feel and combine, that is, incorporate the other into itself to become something different than it would be by itself. Philosophically, I think that evolution is driven by the urge to become more than an entity is by itself. This is done by combining into different states and compounds and is seen throughout time in the evolutionary cycle.
The universe does not care or plan. This is obvious from the randomness of events and the mass extinctions our world has undergone. People want to believe the universe cares, so they invent all these different ways to show how this could be. What makes nature advance is the natural urge to unite and be more than we are by ourselves. Always remember when asking such questions that the universe is billions of years old, and man and his ideas and beliefs are newcomers to the cosmos. Making nature and gods out to be like people is the cause of much false thinking,
The only constant is change. We are all our own gods. What we find hard to understand is that within infinity, all things are possible, and infinity has to be because the finite is here.
Social conditioning makes us see beyond ourselves. It is not always best, depending on the society.
Remaking the world in your own image is a colossal bore.
Many people say they want peace. Everyone wants love. Like the weather itself, these two ideas are measured in degrees – sometimes hot and sometimes cold, now and then just right.
People love to fear. It is a free emotion that costs little in the present, though it blackens the future.
To live is not just to suffer, but to rejoice, feel joy and pain, suffering and elation. To live successfully is to balance the extremes.
It appears to me that if knowledge of the truth were known by all, the world would not exist. My focus at the moment is on the experience of the world and the world being one. The “one needs the other like a child needs a mother” was a line on one of my songs. Since there is basically nothing in existence but one ultimate reality, and that reality becomes the many, then the one needs the world as much as the world needs the one. If not, we would not even be talking.
I was trying to relate that the vibrational states that compose matter in the wave forms are basically like digital recordings. They encode information into chemical elements. They are read by the ‘laser’ of thought and organized into chemical compounds and organic structures. In this manner, events are recorded and strung together in strands to become experience. It is this experience that makes our world, local and universal.
Standing at a crossroads, deciding between modern city life, ancient ruins, and peaceful natural paths.
March 2015
Very complex problems have a variety of answers because the many cases are quite different from each other. Most parents want their kids, even if they cannot afford them. That has always been so. Single parents have a hell of a load to bear in our conservative-based societies. Conservatives love the embryo and hate the child because it costs them for support.
There is no one solution for the world at large. Every country, every ethnic group has its own variations of the problem of wealth distribution, education, opportunity and moral correctness.
In developed nations, we probably need to start with a minimum income for everyone to level the playing field and support a population that will not later rebel and become terrorists from lack of opportunity and extremely unequal distributions of wealth. That this would be abused is certain, but we will never banish abuse itself. All we can do is attempt to regulate in an intelligent and unemotional manner.
Large corporate control is not an answer for the population. They are too focused on the bottom line for stockholders, and the CEOs are too out of touch with the realities of the middle and lower levels. This creates chaos and misery for all. Even the CEOs find that they can only spend so much money. Money is power, and power corrupts absolutely, just as the divine rulers of earlier eras corrupted their kingdoms.
In the end, it will take the populations of nations concerned about their own stability to stand up and demand change. With creative doers and thinkers in every strata working together, we can ensure a decent future for all.
The right to contentment and happiness will never be universal, but it is an individual choice that can be made. We can learn to be happy individually, not collectively. That comes later. The nations we live in must be able to provide the basic necessities of food, shelter from the storm, the opportunity to learn, and become productive in a manner that is not based on mindless and truly repetitive tasks with corporate bullwhips leading a herd of working stiffs.
A vibrant cluster of distant galaxies and cosmic matter forms a bright, colorful celestial structure.
March, 5, 2015
Worshipping is a human idea and value. God is far older than these values and ideas. Why would infinity–if infinity is a Godhead–want to be worshipped by our mundane human values? This has nothing to do with humility, mine or others. When awareness meets itself, consciousness arises as an act of knowing.
The mathematical nature of the world and natural laws that control being did not evolve over time. They have always existed. They had to originate in a place beyond space and time, a place where time and space are not dimensions. This place has to be infinite because the world is finite. By logic alone, a God has to be more than a place with no thought, will, or being. We are all in infinity by necessity because that is all there is. Call it a dream, call it an illusion, call it a play … it is still the one manifesting in different forms and appearances.
God is beyond anyone’s ability to discern because it is not accessible in the dimension in which we live. We cannot pretend to know what exists or does not exist in infinity … all things possible are possible, and all potentialities that can exist do exist in the eternal vast smallness of an infinity outside of time and space.
Although ancient concepts are interesting, they are ancient. Modern ideas are more in tune with our times and present knowledge. The problem with endowing a godhead with creative powers is that these ideas are misused by religions to control the masses. This is not to say that there are not creative powers at work in a universal sense, but they are not the same as human concepts that insist upon a god the Father and family figure. The creative power in the universe seems to stem from the mathematical structure that underlies it and the unconscious tendency of matter to form more complex, survivable structures.
Beliefs that some theocratic entity has planned our existence and whose sovereign will governs our behavior are but vestiges of primitive thought and an insult to the great spirit of freedom that exists everywhere in nature. However, that does not at all mean that there is nothing spiritual in the universe.
People often say, when they do not know the answer, “Who knows what is in the mind of God?”
People say, “God knows all.”
Take the common conception of God as a divine being that creates and governs the universe. Then take all the people here on Earth–what they all are thinking, what they all have been, and what they all will be.
Imagine that God knows all that. Then add all the other conscious forms of life on Earth, as well as the history of the planet and solar system. Imagine that God knows that as well.
Then realize that the Earth is a speck of dust in a commonplace galaxy. Remember that there are trillions of stars and billions of galaxies, and uncounted billions of planets. Try to imagine a mind that knows all this.
What would it be like? One thing is certain. It would not be like the human mind.
But would God even have a Self? Is God self-aware?
What need would God have for self-awareness?
Humans have self-awareness. Some animals surely have forms of self-awareness.
Self-awareness is a curse and a blessing. It creates loneliness. It creates unhappiness. If God were self-aware, God would be lonely.
Does God get lonely?
THE SINGULARITY OF THE SELF
The self can only be aware of its own self by knowing that there is another outside that is not the self.
If God is everything, then what would exist outside God for God to be self-aware? If God isn’t everything, then what is this thing outside that is not God?
What is a mind? What are the makings of a mind–– neural synapses, connections, electrical impulses, fields of energy? Some would call it a brain, but what use would a brain be for God? A brain is far too small to hold everything.
If we use the concept of ‘membrane’ instead of ‘brain’, could God be the membrane that binds the electrical impulses–fused, united, linked, and bound together to create thought?
What is this membrane made of?
Is it made of electrical fields or atomic and subatomic particles?
Quarks and electrons seem to only have a definite location––a place in time––when they are observed. Are they only the result of observations? Or is there something there that we cannot perceive?
If objects are the results of observation, then awareness and conceptions would be essential to everything. Observation would be what causes the universe to come into being. Observations would be the history, the present, and the form, the basis of the ideas for the future of all.
SELF-AWARENESS
Who says that what is observed must be self-aware? The observer does not need to be self-aware. The world existed before self-awareness. So, as far as we can tell, the universe has only had self-awareness for a minute fraction of an eternal epoch. The universe has gotten along quite well for billions of years without self-awareness.
So do we live in a fraction of an eon when the mud learned to think, stand up, and become self-aware?
And does that matter at all to the mind of God that has no self and no need for a self?
HELIOS 