The God that evolved

Let’s rewind back to the beginning of human consciousness, some millions of years back in history; back in Africa, back to the time when the then hominids’ brains just about evolved to point that they realized they could understand their environment better than the other creatures. At this point (rather period) in human history the requirement was only survival. It is unlikely that they needed any god, life was mostly instinctual.

 

Forwarding a couple of million years the hominid brains almost tripled in size and this was key to self-consciousness historian say. But the world was still an unforgiving place. Only might was right; hunting and foraging was survival. Staying in groups ensured better survival and having a strong leader for the group helped well. The leader possibly became the origin of lords; Servility and condescension to the lord(s) of the group, most of the time, guaranteed security of both food and life.

 

Moving ahead in time, generations’ later, and our still-crude almost-human ancestors realized that there are forces of nature that were way more powerful that any of their group-lords. Earth (quakes), Wind (storms) and Fires were definitely on top of the list.

With the advent of agriculture on the fertile banks of rivers, human physical and belief evolutions took a fast pace. Agriculture and social structures brought security (relative to the past) to food supply and otherwise. Our ancestors had now some time to imagine: and so they thought that dark-forces (it still being a rather pessimistic time) governed the uncertainty (in harvests and in health) to life and so were gods. The earlier-identified powerful awe-elements (Earth, wind, fire & water) were never fully understood and so never discarded, just associated with these new inventions.

Wind is the carrier of disease (and of locusts), lightning the spear of the gods and volcano the seat of the gods. In fact, the then insurmountable mountains were all the seats of the gods, in most cultures.

 

A few thousand years back time was right for the need for stability and direction. The more time certain humans had at their disposal then more they wanted to make sense of the chaos of the world: Gods, sacrifices, fluid kingdom-lines, etcetra. And so arose the concept of Godhead of the gods. The creator of the minions, the more-powerful and higher in the escalation matrix! It was only logically to amalgamate the gods, based on their creative/preservative/dissolutive natures, under any of the three or two hoods. Most spiritually-progressive religions of the world had come up to this realization quite early. A good comparison is in India: over the last thousand years all the individual gods, prevalent across south Asia, were assigned as a manifestation of one of the Godheads of the Hindu trinity.

 

Last two thousand years: we contemplate that there can be only one God who is most powerful and most merciful. Notice the shift from a negative to a positive God; the One positive for humans. Now the three is boxed into One with each head being simply a face of the ultimate. That’s again only logical :)

 

Hinduism achieved this heap-to-singularity; so did its sister religions: Buddhism and Jainism; and so did the Abrahamic religions.

 

The next logical phase in the spiritual evolution is blending everything into the One! There can be no distinction between us and That; between good and evil. I am That. No duality. In this level of spiritual-maturity-model, only the eastern philosophies come close.

 

We have come a long way baby; why try harder :)

 

So I ask: what changed over the course of history? God or our concept of God? For instance, observe the character change of God/god from the Old testament to the New Testament: from a jealous, capricious, vengeful one to a gracious and merciful one.  If God is infinite how can he change in this short time-period. Its absurd to think in such lines.

The funny fact is that humans created this being(s) and changed the definition over time to rationalize the world.

Maha-maya

A portion of 'The Matrix’ movie script:

"…
Neo: Right now we're inside a computer program?
Morpheus: Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different. The plugs in your arms and head are gone. Your hair is changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self.
Neo: This...this isn't real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You've been living in a dream world, Neo
…
"

Coming to think of it, what is reality? Is what we see real? What if our eyes are deceiving us? What if the color of this wall is not white but something else that our human eyes cannot register? Does Bats see it better because they do not see light but see sound! Bonzu the dog's vision is blurred where it is two dimensional. He cannot see photographs or watch television, but sometimes barks at nothingness....ghosts?
So who can see really? Us or them? I read once that cats see in black & white, so is that the real reality of the world? Are our eyes distracting our real vision of reality with 'unreal' color?
Elephants can hear sounds that are on one extreme end of the sound spectrum; Bloodhounds and bears can sniff out their objectives many tens of miles away. We cannot. So are we incomplete in our concept of reality?


Now read this para about solidity by Deepak Chopra:

"...
At a deeper level, there is really no boundary between ourselves and everything else in the world. When you touch an object, it feels solid, as though there was a distinct boundary between it and you. Physicists would say that we experience that boundary as solid because everything is made up of atoms, and the solidity is the sense of atoms bumping against atoms. But consider what an atom is. An atom has a little nucleus with a large cloud of electrons around it. There is no rigid outer shell, just an electron cloud. To visualize this, imagine a peanut in the middle of a football stadium. The peanut represents the nucleus, and the stadium represents the size of the electron cloud around the nucleus. When we touch an object, we perceive solidity when the clouds of electrons meet. That is our interpretation of solidity, given the sensitivity (or relative insensitivity) of our senses.
..."

So we perceive solidity wherever we 'feel' a force-field AND when we 'see' there is something to touch?

Sense organs scan the surroundings and send the information, within their limit ranges, to the brain which then create the experience of the world around. How are we to know that this experience is the right one? Are our instruments of reality sensors ineffective or inadequate? Was this a deliberation or isn’t there anything called reality?

Are we dreaming?! Are we living in a (virtual) reality that is only a generation by our brains?

Are we blind and sizing up the elephant?!

Slowing down

One perspective to the Recession:

 

This is a corrective phase...correcting the collective greed that was prevalent during the bulldozing and hyped-up economic situation that was before.

The corrective intensity is directly proportional to the amount of collective greed (conscious or subconscious) that was prevalent in the earlier period.

Its victims are individuals and the systems that surfed the greed wave. But the 'corrected' would be the individuals or systems that totally disregarded, in order to achieve their selfish needs, either the connection to the basic principles (ethics) or the connection with the grassroots(ordinary people).

 

If there will be no learning or change the recession will visit again. It is relentless and ruthless.

A new order and learning has to come out of every such phase.

A recession can also be within the personal scheme of things and this personal phase need not have anything to do with the outside world scenario.

≈ Mirage

At the beginning of the 20^th century most physicists believed they soon would come up with an explanation to everything in this universe i.e. A Theory of Everything. Arising to the occasion came Einstein, Neil Bohr, Heisenberg with his Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger with his Cat and many more. But the theory didn’t come. Instead we saw a series of new discoveries, more mysteries, more explanations and more theories. A section of classical physics had to even break off to become a new field of research known as Quantum Physics. When things started to look more complicated than before the physicists declared that it would take 'a little more time' before the Theory of Everything is out. It seemed the more they strived for the ultimate truth the more mysteries propped up.

Well, if that was a century ago then lets see what is the state of physics in 2005:

• We still can’t figure out what the fundamental particle is. Weird. And new sub and sub-sub atomic particles keep propping up

•  Sub-atomic complexities are on the rise. If my understanding’s right, there are some particles which have Spin 1/2 i.e. that need to be spun 2 complete revolutions to bring it back to it's original state. Duh! :-{
• We still can’t figure out where solidity begins. At sub-atomic levels there is no ‘balls’ or ‘beads’ of electrons and protons as we were shown in the school physics textbooks. So what we touch is just a force field?!

 

Trillions of dollars and man-centuries of work must have gone into quantum physics researches alone. The expenditure in the other streams must only be more. Imagine how much time and money is being spent throughout history to get to the ultimate answer.

 

Will we ever find the answer? I feel the answer is like the mirage; we will never reach it. The depth of any subject will continuously deepen the more we focus on it and it will deepen to infinity. One will be lost in the never-ending labyrinth of knowledge streams with the new discoveries, new insights and new dimensions.

All these researches may just be skimming the surface of ONE endless ocean.

 

"Stay in thy matrix! Dare not come close to Me. Dare not understand Me" maybe the Almighty's intent :-)

 

ΰ Fountainhead

Nobody can really own an invention or a discovery or even an idea. My opinion. That finding was supposed or rather waiting to be come into existence. We (as in humans) just took time to come across the finding. And most of the time one doesn’t go out to invent or discover anything … its just chance that one stumbles across while trying to find something else! The inventor/discoverer/innovator is just credited for his/her effort.

Everything, I feel, is and was already there in the Universe. The universe I consider is the Superset; the sum total of everything. And humans are a piece of this universe. This may be the reason that some mystics say all the answers one need is in one-self.

“Seek and ye shall find” ....what you look for if not yet found. Or more even.

The universe being the ONE and only all-inclusive entity; all answers, ideas, patterns and structures already exist within. No invention/discovery/idea is therefore in my view original to anybody.

Having said all that I would have to add all hats are off to the inventors for their inventions; discoverers for their enterprise and discoveries; and smart people for their ideas. They have made our lives easier. I keep reminding my friends what an amazing invention the braking system of the car seat belt is, same with the ubiquitous Nut and the Bolt, or something even simpler as the Safety Pin!

Singularity

The Yin-Yang: It looks like two distinct forces or entities trying to dominate each other as well as try become/consume the other at the same time. Each is in continuous action in doing so. But either of the two would have no objective or movement without the other. Call the two forces/entities whatever you like: White & Black; Passive & Active; Light & Dark; Good & Evil.

 

The Yin and the Yang are enclosed or rather confined into ONE circle. The ONE can be regarded as Singularity (Adwaitha Vedanta) while the Yin-Yang forms represent Duality (Dwaitham). The two are inherent of the ONE and ONE manifests into the two. And this is the simplest representation of the relationship between duality and singularity.

 

Extending the above concept a little further: In the beginning there is nothing else but the ONE; after all ONE is everything. Then ONE stopped being and within itself two things manifested. The action between these two in turn churned out the rest of the complexities. So in my understanding: all intricacies, harmonies, clashes, causes and effects that we can imagine arise from and exist within the ONE big system.

 

I would call this ONE the Universe as a whole. Some prefer to call the bigger system the Universal spirit or Universal consciousness or God. Most religious books also corroborate this concept.

 

The question is why did ONE complicate itself by dividing into two by its own intent? Probably just for entertainment ;-)

OrgaNized complEx

When one examine any individual cell in the human body (from any part), it is amazing to note that it is a complete organism by itself; complete in its energy sources, reproductive mechanisms, protective environments, behaviors etc.

And the human body is composed of a few multiples of ten thousand billion cells. Its again amazing to observe that these cells group into tissues that function together for a purpose!

And just as amazing to observe tissues group into whole organs to perform a particular function. The important thing is that here too the whole has a purpose.

And even more amazing to observe different organs interacting with each other to form systems! Like digestive, nervous, lymphatic, reproductive, immune etc., that performs a vital function for the entire human body. All these systems are interrelated, interdependent and interact harmoniously to form a composite whole. Any dissonance in an individual system would make the ‘whole’ to react and re-organize itself back to harmony.

 

Even a simple epithelial cell can be viewed as independent and as if the most important entity for the whole but the fact is that this one cell is just but one cog or wheel in the bigger machine, the whole.

 

Now, can we as an individual human being map as one cell within a bigger entity?!

 

Our planet Earth: observe it wholisticaly and one can see it is an organism too. Mother Earth is but a group of interacting, interrelated and interdependent elements (land, water, air, heat; flora, fauna; climate; systems interacting) forming a very complex whole. We need her and she needs us.

And, just as in our body, mother earth reorganizes occasionally into balance by belching lava, climate changes, new viruses, platonic shifts, atmospheric holes etc. Stability will finally prevail and she’s a composite whole again.

 

Need I illustrate again the same considering the absolute whole i.e. the Universe? Is it not obvious now that microcosmically or macrocosmically there is no end to complexity and amazement?

 

Everything: every being, every system, every process, every group, every star is part of a larger organism. So what seems disorder and chaos to us may not be at all. It is just that our heads are too small to understand it.