Tuesday

Coming Down To Earth

"It is I who am the part of my mother;
and it is I who am the mother. It is I who am the wife;
it is I who am the virgin. It is I who am pregnant;
it is I who am the midwife. It is I who am the one that comforts pains of travail. It is my husband who bore me;
and it is I who am his mother. And it is he who is my father and my lord. It is he who is my force; What he desires, he says with reason.
I am in the process of becoming; yet I have borne a man as lord." **From: "On the origin of the world" - Gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi Library

Another pearl from the Gnostic texts. Here again is Life telling us Her plight. She is actually the one that created God, not literally, but defining an experience. It is She who is His mother and it is He who is Her Lord. The last sentence tells us again that we have to do with the process of life and evolution: 'I am in the process of becoming.'

The question is: in the process of becoming what?
**

First I want to redefine the term survival in accordance with the new definition of the life forces, pleasure, pain and fear. It’s not hard to accept that just like us, dogs, cats etc go hungry when they fail to feed themselves. We can even go as far as beetles, spiders etc, going hungry. It becomes harder when we talk about trees and plants.

But the fact that we’ve evolved from such species and we’ve never proofed they don’t, hunger could as well be a universal force in life. So on this premise I’d like to show you a distinct difference in what I call ‘original life’ and us mammals.

It goes like this: If survival is the ultimate goal of every life-form, feeding must be the number one priority after birth. As we can see in life all around us, the ‘original life-forms’ present hundreds of millions of years longer on this planet than us mammals can all feed themselves after birth. None of them need instructions where, how and on what to feed. This universal strategy is off course logical if you want your offspring to survive.

For the fittest to ‘win the race’ has always been the ability and opportunity to reproduce. That’s the struggle. The logical outcome to a blind process based on survival of the fittest would ultimately end up in huge dinosaurs, built to perfection to do their task of feeding and reproducing. Like the sharks in the sea, built for the kill.


Now let me introduce you to:


The Amazing Mammal! (Or why survival of the fittest doesn't fit the facts anymore.)

When we take an in-depth look at life all around us we can truly say that the evolutionary path of the mammal is very special. In contrast to other animals the mammal evolved in an ever more fragile and helpless form which culminated in the most ‘successful’ of our species; Human kind. We are the most fragile and helpless creature ever to have been born on earth.

According to prevailing scientific wisdom this should be the outcome of a blind process based on who is best able to feed him or her self. And not only that, it also means that a random process is responsible for the co-evolution of ever more caring parents. And all this while we were staple food for the dinosaurs.

When we compare our evolutionary path with that of most other and far more ancient life forms and put that against our scientific and cultural prevailing wisdom of survival of the fittest, it oddly looks like the opposite has happened. The process actually evolved into a form of survival of the weakest, as we wouldn't stand a chance, even when you put us next to the cat's milk.

We mammals arrived 210 million years ago, we are relatively new. We arrived shortly after the dinosaur, who had established itself firmly after the most catastrophic event that ever befell life; The Permian extinction that killed 95% of all species. It took life about 20 million years to repopulate the earth. This is in evolutionary terms a very short period. When life climbed out of the water, 400 million years ago, it took her another 150 million years to populate the (dry) earth. You see this kind of accelerated evolution after every major mass extinction, the next one always quicker then the one before. I believe that this points to a process that has the capability to learn and remember.

For the next 150 million years we mammals and dinosaurs would evolve together. From 190 million years ago, 20 million years into our mammalian existence, the dinosaur took a turn for the worse. Over the next 100 million years the population of the dinosaur slowly but steadily decreased. No one is quite sure why this extinction in slow motion took place. As we developed, the dinosaur was slowly, but purposefully being replaced by the ever more successful mammalian species.

But before this process of extinction could come to its natural end, God intervened, by throwing a big, bad meteor! Most of us think the Dinosaur came to its end because of the meteor impact, hardly anybody knows that at the time the meteor struck, roughly 10% of the original number of dinosaurs was left.

But we didn’t lose the dinosaur entirely. We lost a monster but gained the birds. Even more amazing is that the only two "families of species" that have caring and instructing parents are mammals and birds. The story of a bird's life is in effect a metaphor of why we're here and it's a tribute to the species that had to make place for us mammals.
**

Simply put, life had to react on a massive disaster that befell her. It was her first global disaster. Not because of the size of the disaster, but more accurately put, the size of life. When the end-Permian hit, she inhabited earth globally, from mountain top to deep sea troughs. This global event called the Permian Extinction, a semi-global volcano eruption, probably lasting of and on for a million years, the event that decimated life, also made her aware of where and how vulnerable she was. But she survived.

The experience literally created a new environment for her to adapt to. Her earlier experiments with ‘life young’ within the reptile species had some advantages, but how to adapt to a inherent hostile environment, changing, erupting unexpectedly, changing our environment in an instant? How do you know where to feed when you environment changes frequently. The old paradigm is largely based on continuity, conservative and dogmatic. But in a hostile environment you need to adapt faster and more effectively. To do this the most logical step for life was to create an ‘instructor’. When you learn from the one who directly experienced it, you’ll build on that knowledge and if all goes well, you’ll teaching your own offspring soon. That’s how it started, by wanting to adapt to a unstable environment. During the process new things happened, new strategies had to be sought. How about adapting to meteors striking earth, like 65 million years ago?

***

This is from the biblical text of Job, chapter 40: It talks of big brute beasts of the past that lived among us (by us I mean mammals)




15. "Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox.16. What strength he has in his loins what power in the muscles of his belly!17. His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit18. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron.19. He ranks first among the works of God, yet his Maker can approach him with his sword. -



God finished off the dinosaur.


It's not the physical appearance that lies at the heart of these biblical creatures, but how they behave. Even though the original life forms like dinosaurs evolved to be mighty and powerful beasts, God is far more powerful. The meteor-impact 65 million years ago proves this. To deal with God we need another strategy of survival. In our religious texts we find references to the difference between our mammalian heritage and the dinosaurs and what eventually evolved from the dinosaur.

Job 41 for example tells us that behemoths or leviathans are not like mammals and birds, with which we do have very special mutual relationships and cooperation:

3. Will he keep begging you for mercy? Will he speak to you with gentle words? 4. Will he make an agreement with you for you to take him as your slave for life? 5. Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls? **

***

Like I said before, to survive, we humans were inevitable. When you take a look at the history of our evolution, from ape to man, its really astounding to see how our brains developed along with our physical development.

The real problem of our evolution lies within the life forces, how to use them. Unlike other life forms our purpose is to become exited about stuff that hasn’t a direct link to feeding. To become a poet, stars inspire you. To become a musician, nature inspires you. For us to become what we’re supposed to be, the act of feeding has to fade to the background and the leisure time we’re left with must be filled with the creation of value of things and convictions not in immediate relation to survival. Even though it always will linger in the background.

That’s us; creators of value. Because it’ll always boil down to the pain and pleasure principle at the core of our consciousness, good, evil, ethics and morality are also inevitable. As human history has shown us, with the emphasis on his-story, when we hunger or lust for our convictions, others suffer.

Without the life force there is no life and thus no suffering. Without pain and fear we too wouldn’t suffer. Imagine a car about to hit you at high speed, but you feel no fear, when it hits you feel no pain, even when you’re dying on the spot, you’ll feel no fear of dying. Now imagine someone doing what we believe to be one of the most evil things to do to another person, torture. What I’m trying to say is that without pain and fear we can do no evil or experience evil. But we do and we can…

So, to create a life form like ours, life had to have known that to learn all she wanted to learn from this experience, it would be a bloody mess. The way we are built, gives us a opportunity of gaining excessive power. Power is the ability to create a situation wherein your conviction or view about life prevails over others with sufficient margins. To keep power you either have a truthful conviction with the ceasing of suffering at its core, or you bludgeon your critics to death.

This story of human-kind, unknowing of their plight, ignorant of their heritage, has to be kept as short as possible. As we now stand at the end of an era in our human consciousness, life can finally take over again. With all we know and experienced, life can create that brand new life-form; re-united with the original way of experiencing life. But, we’re not there yet.

To mould and guide the human generation, life intervenes now and then, mostly as inspiration, or revelation. This resulted on a greater scale our religions world-wide. When we take a look from ‘a distance’ we can extrapolate two major trains of though, all sprung from a form of animism. One got distracted by the stars, the other by the process of life.

To guide us religion and the believe that there is something greater than us had to be part of our existence. Because there is…

Human kind and their silly beliefs...


Abrahamic Wisdom.

Let me introduce you to the Shekhinah, the mystical afterthought of Judaism.

"She so pervades this lower world... that if you search in deed, thought and speculation, you will find Shechinah, for there is no beginning or end to her. Rabbi Joseph 13th-cent mystic"


"A new myth of Judaism emerged in,the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hiding behind the word kabbalah, which means tradition itself. Here is presented a Judaism of mythic complexity that had been previously unknown, one in which the single, static, nic monotheism is and essentially masculine God of biblical-rabbi replaced by a dynamic, multifaceted, ever-flowing, separating and uniting, new kind of ten-in-one monotheistic deity. In that paradigm of the inner life of God, described through so many rich and varied images in the kabbalistic literature, the Shekhinah took a major role."

http://www.dhushara.com/book/sakina/saksource/shek.htm

"Traditional Jewish scholars have always insisted that the Shechinah is not a separate presence from the one God whom Jews worship. At the same time, they have given us a Shechinah literature replete with images, descriptions, and qualities of the most detailed and often anthropomorphic nature. This body of commentary, poetry, and prayer provides, in my view, a filtered but consistent memory of "God the Mother," and is the basis for the "Jewish Goddess."  

"She is introduced in the early rabbinical commentaries as the "immanence" or "indwelling" of the living God, whose role as the animating life force of the earth is to balance the transcendent deity. While she does not appear by name in the five books of Moses, the explicators of the Old Testament refer to her in interpreting the text. For example, when Moses encounters the burning bush, he is told to remove his shoes and prepare himself to receive the Shechinah. According to the rabbis, the choice of the simple thorn bush as the vehicle for the revelation was to emphasize the Shechinah's presence, since nothing in nature can exist without her.

In Proverbs, we are introduced to the Divine Mother as Chochmah (Wisdom), who was present from the time of creation as the loving consort and coarchitect with the YHVH. In this Solomonic portrayal, she delights in humanity and provides us with her wise direction towards the path of truth and justice.

In the Talmudic view, actions harmful to other human beings or the earth cause the Shechinah to flee, and she rises upward to the Seven Heavens.' On the other side of the scale are the positive actions of humanity which attract her presence downward to the earth. Specifically, in Jewish tradition, we are told that the goodness of our patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, merited her presence, although even they "lost" her at times when their behavior was amiss.
***

Western religions come from the time when we still worshipped the sun (Astrotheology). The whole idea of western religious tradition is to focus on what’s above and out of reach. This worshipping of the sun morphed into a more personal form of worship, personifying the sun into God and giving mankind a central place (Anthropomorphism).

This personification of sun worship gave rise to the three Abrahamic religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The common factor is their believe in the one God, undivided, all powerful, all knowing, the Creator of the universe. First came Judaism. Out of Judaism came Christianity. The Christian Bible combines both the religious texts of the Torah and the New Testament.

An obvious difference between the Torah and the New Testament is the way God is described. In the Torah or old Testament He is a vengeful God who punishes whole nations when they are not obeying Him. While in the New Testament He is described as a loving God, forgiving and kind.

The Thora or Old testament is in essence a "the Promise" of God (Yhwh) made by Life that She will not abandon her Creations, whatever they do. Like a mother She will always feel responsible. The story, myth if you will, of the Jewish people represents all of our stories and most of all the story of Life herself. 

The enslavement of the Jewish people followed by the flight and wandering through the desert, hungry and yearning for the land of milk and honey, is in effect the story of all of us.

Out of Judaism arose Christianity. Christianity represents Desire or Lust. Judaism represents Hunger, Pain. Without being aware of it Christians incorporated the Old Testament (the Thora) with some changes into their own New testament. Thereby imitating the Life Force: Hunger /Lust.

From these two religions arose Islam, the last of the Abrahamic faiths. Allah or God in the Qur’an is more angry, like He’s running out of patience with all the lying and stealing and killing in His name. He is warning us for the punishment that awaits the sinners. But He keeps telling us and showing us He is merciful and understanding.

Even our religious texts cannot hide the truth:

This one is from the Bible, The book of Wisdom, chapter 19, verse 18: -- "For the things of the land were turned into things of the water: and the things before swam in the water passed upon the land." Even here we can see a reference to evolution, in the Bible of all places!

Here you can find a reference to the Big Bang in the Qur'an: "21:30 ARE, THEN, they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were [once] one single entity, which We then parted asunder? –

***

No comments: