Hidden in plain sight: Hunger is the Life Force & Life (Sophia) is our creator.

Great stuff...

2011-09-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

Dear visitor, with the following writings i will introduce you, over and over again, that we’re not a product of random evolution. I will show you, over and over again, that life is an evolving consciousness trying to… survive. I will show you, over and over again, that we are a logical result within ‘intelligent’ evolution we humans are a necessity for the next step in our evolutionary path; leaving the nest. By nest mean the necessity for life to be able to leave this planet in order to insure it’s survival. Nobody today denies the fact that life to survive will eventually leave the nest, our planet.

I will, over and over again, show that, in contrast to science, our life forces are real and we all know and experience them one way or the other every day. We use their names as metaphors for every kind of situation. These yin/yang, opposites, pain/pleasure forces defined by religions and philosophers since the dawn of men are the mundane forces that keep us alive. These three or trinity of life forces are the missing link between science and religion and reveal our creator, life. It is She, life, that created us, humans, in Her image (and His) to look for Him, God, up in the heavens. If there is a 'God' residing in heaven, we'll find Him. If not, other explanations will arise from our quest.

I answer the question; what’s in the sky that life needs to adapt to if she wants to survive?

Or.. now we’ve (life) conquered the planet, what is it that comes from beyond and threatens our existence?

Please read as much as you can bear and call me on any discrepancy you can find, and I assure you there must be a lot.

But anyway, thank you for your time.

Martijn van Galen Last

And oh,… my warning earlier hints at the soon coming demise of our precious fought entitlements to not have to suffer unnecessary. We're now destined to fend for ourselves. Our western leading philosophy of life, the fallacy of survival of the fittest, will prevail for a short time, creating massive suffering. But our ability to adapt will lead us eventually to the knowledge of our purpose for being here...

Conclusion.

2011-05-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

However you see, feel or project yourself into this world, we're only here for one thing. To learn. To learn what, you say? To learn how to be an individual between individuals. Our most important goal is how we deal with 'the other'. The other, or if you prefer 'your neighbour', is the ultimate necessity for surviving in the long run.

Life is forever evolving, forever living. For life to survive many incredible adaptations can be seen and studied. We to easily forget 'us' humans when we grapple with our environment. We forget that it is our consciousness that defines our surroundings.

We also forget that for life to survive indefinitely She'll have to leave this planet eventually. Life, like us, is trying, failing and trying again. Eventually She succeeds in Her efforts. Just like us.

For life to survive means adapting to the universe surrounding our nest, Earth. Leaving the nest is the only way to survive. We know that now.

Human kind as we define it today, inherited a planet full of life, therefore full of sustenance. Today we're exploiting Her recourses as expected.

The evolutionary process we're in will eventually aid life to create individuals able to leave our planet. Individuals who are conscious of their interdependence with their surroundings, more important still, of their future need for 'the other' when we'll have to leave this planet, our nest.

Life or the process of evolution isn't dumb or blind, She's surviving. Our consciousness began, scientist say, 3,5 billion years ago (hmm... time, times and half a time...). The pain and pleasure metaphors found in philosophical and religious thought throughout history and within all cultures, are bourn from our first interaction with our environment, 3,5 billion years ago.

Feeding.

Even though modern day, western, atheist, scientific thought keep telling us there is no goal to be defined in the proces of evolution, there obviously is. Life's purpose is to live and keep living as long as possible. We call it 'survival of the fittest'. But in our universe Life by nature is weak, to survive She needs to interact with her enviroment. Modern science and philosophy fail miserably defining the absolute first interaction of Life with her enviroment. It's pretty sad.

It's not the ever quoted 'spontaneously copying of molecules' that kickstarted Life, something came before. Before copying or reproduction, Life fed Herself. It might have taken fractions of a second, but before Life reproduced, She fed herself.

For Life to grow and evolve feeding is a precondition. Just like with all lifeforms we know of now, studied, no lifeform reproduces before feeding.

So to define a reliable definition for a Life Force I redirect you to the title of this blog.

Hunger is our primal pain, Lust our primal pleasure. We can experience both when we just stop eating.

This primal Pain-Pleasure paradigm we find within most, if not all, religions and philosphies around the world. This primal duality of our consciousness eventually created the third force of Life to complete the trinity of our consiousness, Fear.

I know that something dear to us and most important is is missing here. Love. But after 3,5 bollion years of Life and evolution, Love is our only hope for survival. When we are forced to leave this planet, we have nothing to retreat to. No planet full of sustenance that we can fall back on. We'll be totally depending on each other. Hence the universal: 'do not unto others what you don't want others to do unto you'. Or, the more simple Abrahamic version: Love your neighbour as youself.

I can't put it more plainly; We're here taking part in one of the most important experiments of Life; creating a highly intelligent 'individual' capable of independent thought and analisys and fully aware of our common purpose, to survive.

What will come would amaze you if you could fathom it. Life has survived for billions of years. As long as there is food, Life can live eternal. The amazing thing is, so will we.

Let’s solve a little dilemma.

2011-04-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

Eastern philosophy, spanning most eastern cultures base their core beliefs on a revolving process of life, some invoke reincarnation others quote karma to identify the continuity and organic view of our predicament. They’re spot on.

On the other side there is the Abrahamic tradition. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their core-beliefs are that there is an infallible God, creator of the universe, omnipotent. And our reason d’être is to submit to His demands, to worship Him. I’d rather say to adapt to Him. They too are spot on.

And then we’ve got science. With amazing success science improved and destroyed many lives. They claim that their core-belief isn’t a believe, but actual fact; that life started billions of years ago and evolved to what we see today in living nature. Again, they too are right on the mark.

All three are right. All three tell a true story, but none of them tells the whole story. Together they do.

Let’s start with the ‘it’s a fact’ crowd. Yes, you’re right we did evolve! But that’s not really the point, is it?

You claim that this evolutionary process is in a sense blind, that it has no purpose, no meaning. You say that it’s random, happening within the so-called genetic reproduction process wthin our genes. You claim that errors within our reproductive process deliver 'good' and 'bad' results for the chances of survival. And the ones with the best results, survive. But you do not call these results results. You call them adaptations.

It's adaptation that created an ever more complex web of life on our planet. But to adapt in essence means to react to your environment, which describes a conscious effort.

That we’ve evolved over many aeons is a fact. The how and why of our evolution isn't answered by science.

But even Darwin wasn't a Darwinist. (I'll quote him later on this). Evolution is not blind it does what it does. And we humans are here to make sure it'll be able continuing what is does and wants. The most pertinent answer to the question of why we're here is;

Survival.

You have to copy paste this and translate from Wingdings to whatever readable font you prefer. (it spells survival, to save you the hassel)

...

Hi! You’re still here? Great!

Let me go on.

So there you have it. Science isn’t that wrong. You can find part of the answer in the accepted, but sociological based description “survival of the fittest’. It should be; ‘survival of Life’.

When we accept this answer, other questions arise. Some very pertinent ones. One of the most obvious is; why us? We don’t seem to be able to save life, we destroy it most of all. Correct, I say. But are we really in control?

Life’s been here for billions of years, from life we sprung just maybe a couple of millions of years ago. Life survived natural disasters unknown to men, I stand corrected, that were unknown to men. We know now, since the seventies, that life experienced some horrific events. We’ve all been taught about the meteor impact 65 millions years ago that ended the reign of the dinosaur, some claim. Then there was a more terrestrial calamity 250 million years ago. 95% of all of Life’s species died out. Life almost perished. Look at us now.

So, why us? Well, we hover in space, we are exceptionally well equipped to ensure our survival. We learn, fail and try again till we succeed. If there is any animal on this planet throughout the history of Life, only we might have a shot at averting a calamity as Life experienced 65 million years ago when a comet almost destroyed our planet, our habitat. It turned out to be to small for destroying our planet, but what about the next one?

The amazing and complex evolution of highly skilled life-forms with specialized traits to survive sometimes baffles us. From the ‘lowest’ life-forms to the ‘highest’ ones, you see brilliant survival techniques. Take some time out from your busy lives and watch some recent nature doc’s, you’ll be amazed how a blind process can come up with these things. Weird Nature is one of my favourites. Anyhow, back to our answer.

The first of many ‘irony’s’ is that the core principles of science share more with the eastern religions than with the Abrahamic religions they originated from. The idea of a revolving wheel of life, reincarnation and growth through experience, does touch the theory of evolution on some major levels. Science says: Life evolved into ever more complex life-forms, Eastern philosophy says: because it’s learning, failing and succeeding. That’s the process: it’s not dumb, it’s definitely not blind, it’s surviving anyway it can. We humans are Life’s creation that must be a part of Life’s adaptation to something so powerful, it can finish us all. It comes from nowhere, unannounced and turns our planet into an inferno. Whatever it is, we have to adapt to it if we want to survive.

So our third mission is to find out what or who it might be that Lords over us from the skies. Lets call Him God.

So started the Abrahamic tradition. The omnipotent, all powerful and undivided God.

Now I’d like to ask you to come with me into the world I found we live in, and are imported parts of. Suspend your own convictions for a while and follow me.

Life created us with a purpose. This purpose is part and parcel of Life. Life’s actions define this purpose. These actions will reach right into both the eastern and western religious traditions. It’s one of the most divisive disputes in Christian history and it’s, on a whole different level, part and parcel of eastern religious writings: the Trinity.

In Christian history the Idea that God = 3 in one lead to the schism that created eastern Orthodox Christianity and western Catholicism. Also the idea of the Madonna being the Mother of God created strife. In eastern traditions the trinity can be found in for example the Tao, verse 42, that tells of three forces emanating from the Tao. Further in the verse they sometimes are depicted as the life-force. The four noble truths in Buddhist writings talk about suffering being the first force, though it’s caused by desire.

This trinity comes back to us, to Life. I already said that the actions define our purpose. So what is it that all life does, and more important, why?

The answer to all is simple, the answer to why looks harder but is simply resolved by imagining not doing it. It’s the why that will show us the trinity of our consciousness. How and why it came into existence, I don’t know, nobody knows, even Life doesn’t know. And that’s too why we’re here.

Pain & Pleasure. Most of us are familiar with this age old paradox. They seem to go together, they say that they can’t exist without each other. And we know it makes sense. How can you enjoy something if everything is as enjoyable. It has been discussed by most philosophers, is intricate to all religions in one way or the other.

You should know, and most of us already do, that at the base of this integral behaviour of Life lies exactly that! The experience of pain & pleasure is part and parcel of feeding. Like I said, stop feeding end experience for yourself.

Most people I know answer the question why we eat with; ‘otherwise we die’. But that’s not the answer when we look at Life. We eat because, one; we get an appetite. This appetite is overall an pleasurable experience because you get to think and fantasize about what you’re going to eat. But here is the catch. If you do not feed your appetite, this pleasure will eventuality turn into pain. Hunger.

May I introduce you to the Life-force; it is Hunger. Or maybe it’s Lust, pleasure, because it comes first. But did pleasure make Life move? No, it was hunger that compelled Life to react. Somehow matter was endowed with the life-force and compelled it to feed. And, as our scientists so well explained, we got the hang of it and even started to copy ourselves. We feed and excreted an identical twin. How amazing.

If you know a little about the discussion of how life began, you’ll notice that reproduction comes second in my thesis. I go even further by claiming that if feeding is the first action of Life points to one of the main aspects we attribute to our definition of consciousness; how we relate to our surroundings. Feeding is interacting with our environment. So I submit that consciousness lies at the base of life, it compelled us to act. When we did, the pain subsided, just as it would today with us. But only temporary. The rhythm of Life lies within the Yin/Yang of feeding. To feed before pleasure becomes pain. Those are the core forces at the base of our consciousness. The first two that came from the Tao. The first noble truth, suffering completely agrees with hunger, even the cause of suffering, desire (i.e. pleasure) completely agrees with Life’s forces. But what about the third, to complete the trinity? It’s so obvious, it’s painful. Fear. When you’ve experienced pleasure and pain and you know how to avert the pain, pain becomes a distant memory. But when you’re confronted again with pain, and survive, you’ll start to fear it. Hunger, Lust & Fear.

Pain, Pleasure and Fear the of pain, later of death (or of ‘not to be’) are the forces that make Life feed, reproduce and adapt to her environment. And that She did. With amazing skill that would eventually lead to something like us, humans. Because surviving goes beyond our narrow Darwinist view of life. Life’s been learning all her life, life has always been intelligent. But what Life needs now is a life form that can survive without a planet. A life form that is endowed with a feeling of self and a feeling of us. Who can act autonomous but knows it depends on the other. Just like us.

The pain the suffering, the wars, torture, are all part of one big experiment where we all are confronted with ourselves as lonely individuals, at the centre of our universe. We do not know where we came from, but we do know without the other we wouldn’t live today. This ‘other’ I talk about is was created by life 210 million years ago. The other is our mother.

As you al know we are mammals. One of my teachers told me something I knew but never realized, is that of all life-forms, humans are the most successful and at the same time the most dependent species on earth. I didn’t realize then, I was 13, that this clashes with the notion of Survival of the fittest. In contrast to far more ancient life forms, we need someone else to teach us how to survive, while lizards, fish, insects already seem to know everything they need to live their lives. To know when, where and how to eat and be physically capable of doing it sounds like a great strategy to survive. To be dependent on someone else while physically unable to fend for yourself seems treacherous. Still, Life changed her strategy 210 million years ago and created mammals. Wh-wh-why?

Here is my first quote of many I will use to strenghten my argument. Over 1500 years ago someone wrote a what we call a mystical text. As you'll read on you will read many ancient texts that support this thesis. The following text is from the Nag Hammadi Library, an exerpt from 'The Origin Of The World".

"An androgynous human being was produced, whom the Greeks call Hermaphrodites; and whose mother the Hebrews call Eve of Life (Zoe), namely, the female instructor of life. Her offspring is the creature that is lord. Afterwards, the authorities called it "Beast", so that it might lead astray their modelled creatures. The interpretation of "the beast" is "the instructor". For it was found to be the wisest of all beings."

Before mammals Life was simple; you crawl out of your egg, ore whatever and you’re on your own. We still see that all around us in nature today. So why make an animal that has to learn from another to survive? It’s our environment, stupid.

It changes all the time, but sometimes it changes rapidly and is disastrous for Life. Mammals evolved out of such a disaster, the end Permian extinction, 250 million years ago. It was a terrestrial disaster, the planet was torn from Siberia to south Africa. This global catastrophe continued for millions of years. Most of the planet was in disarray. Life had to adapt to an environment that could change overnight. To survive in such a world every life-form that successfully survives to mating age has experienced and knowledge of her environment that is to valuable to waste. Teaching her offspring by example accelerated the accumulation of knowledge.

When the meteor struck, 65 million years ago, Life was definitely introduced to the idea of God. The planet nor the universe around us can be ignored when it comes to surviving. The planet can only be a temporary home for Life, the universe contains both dangers and opportunities for survival. We’ll have to adapt to it.

But what about death?

2011-03-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

Before I go deep into the subjects mentioned above, I need you to reconsider two basic, accepted ideas, many times discussed but never figured out completely. Then I will again explain the whole thing. And after that again from another angle.

"Third time I said that, I'll probably say it three more times you see. In my line of work you got to keep repeating things, over and over and over again for the truth to sink in. To kinda of catapult the propaganda" - President G.W. Bush.

I'll explain it from different angels, arriving at the same result. That we're a prelude to a life-form that will eventually leave this planet. In a sense we are all victims of Life’s lust/hunger for living.

Before we will actually leave this planet Life needs for us to become balanced. We can only be balanced when we know why we’re here. When we see a solution to a problem, we’ll adapt our behaviour to it, so the problem is solved. This might happen to us and will most definitely happen to who'll come after us.

Let’s be honest, we’re a physically weak species, which made us do so well in adapting nature to our needs instead of us adapting to nature. Speed, teeth, claws, night vision, sonar, scales or shells that protect and give an edge to many life-forms are absent in our existence. Our flesh tears quite easily, we’re not protected by scales or shells. We can’t outrun our fellow predators, but still we've prevailed and populate the planet with about 7 billion individuals.

The whole notion of 'Do unto others that you want others to do unto you' and 'Love your neighbour' are rooted in what we will become: Independent of our planet, but completely depending on each other. Our 10.000 year history is to experience our extremities and learn from them. It's our experience that'll shape the next generation.

****

Let me catapult my propaganda as I explain the myths and reality of eternal life.

I’d like you to include what we call consciousness in the equation. How we relate to our environment. For example; you can freeze your body with cryogenics, but what if when you awake you have no recollection whatever and essentially start out again as a baby having to learn everything. Your body has ‘survived’ but your mind or consciousness is empty.

Of course I don’t know this will happen, nobody knows. But there is an opposite of this idea of eternal life that we can see everywhere around us, in life forms that have populated this planet far longer than we humans have.

Eternal consciousness as opposed to the eternal body. It’s not new. Religions, philosophies, humankind has dealt with this idea for thousands of years. In every culture at any time. But we've only known, empirically about our evolutionary past for about a 150 years. The awareness of millions, even billions of years that it took to eventually create us is brand new.

Now forget about form and concentrate on consciousness. How do we relate to our environment? How do we act within our environment?

This brings me to the second basic idea, somewhat less ambiguous. Surviving. The now accepted paradigm within the Darwinian theory of evolution is at it’s core; survival of the fittest. I do not want to go into the semantics as this being a philosophical tautology, or into the stunning complexity that life brings us. I want to observe what it is life does and how. You can observe it to and already have. Let me take you back a while.

To survive one must eat. There is no theory about life that doesn’t accept this premise. Energy is what fuels us, food is energy. Enter consciousness. How do we relate to our environment? First we eat. When we apply reduction in our search for ‘the first interaction with the environment’ feeding must stand lonely at the top. It doesn’t however. It’s replication that has topped our charts for over a century. I contest that theory.

Back to our Darwinian philosophy of survival of the fittest. To survive you feeding was and is our main priority. So if life wants to survive wouldn’t it be logical that all new bourns would be able to feed themselves? Wouldn’t it be great when being born you know what to do and are able (physically) to do that? From the outset you know where to find a meal, what is dangerous, how to defend yourself and after a while where to find your mate and procreate. And during all these lives, experiences, triumphs and failures, will be inherited by you offspring.

As you see, I am describing the opposite situation of our existence. We’re born completely dependent, physically incapable of surviving on our own.

The last description of life, us humans, stands in stark contrast with life forms we all know and existed way before even our class of species appeared in evolutionary terms. Class Mammalia.

These life forms, essentially all except birds and mammals, when it comes to feeding have to fend for themselves from birth. We all have seen a nature program where we see a hatchling lizard go about his way as if it was just another day. I even saw a lizard, half hatched, play dead.

A rat was passing his nest right at the moment the lizard clawed through his (or her) eggshell. He somehow knew what to do. We pass it of as ‘instinct’. But nobody really knows what’s going on. Is it instinct for a spider to built a complex web? For me instinct means subconscious reactions, like veering back when somebody wants to punch me. But building a bow and arrow, the equivalent of the spiders web, is not what I’d call instinct.

In fact, we were the first class of species that evolved into ever more dependent life forms, and as you all know by heart if you were taught Darwinian thoughts, is that ‘ironically’ we humans are the most successful species ever on earth, but at the same time the most fragile and dependent creatures when we’re born.

In reality, it’s not ironic at all.

Remember this well: our class of species, mammals, evolved into existence around 210 million years ago. Life inhabited this planet over 3 Billion years!

That means that after all those billions of years, life parted from an old strategy. Before (and still) life evolved skills through experience, i.e. became conscious of and adapted to, that were passed on to the offspring genetically. The new way created a new dimension to the genetic evolution of consciousness; real time learning. Now we have real life experiences that can be taught to your offspring, enabling them to face and survive in their environment more up to date. Learning from mistakes and triumphs, on the spot, from the one you trust with every fibre in your body. There is a simple explanation for why life started to experiment with this new and daring adventure.

I went way too far into my initial two subjects, as I always do when I’m finally writing again, so I’m going to get to the point.

Eternal life doesn’t have to be physical. The fact that many animals we know, are born with full knowledge and capability to ensure their species survival, shows this. Imagine you would die this instant, and few moments later you’ll find yourself ‘waking up’ in a babies body. You open your eyes and as your eyes and brains adjust to this new vehicle of your life, slowly you start to remember. And, for sure, after a couple of hours you are completely aware and remember everything up until you died. A new body, but transferred consciousness. That’s what we can distil from a lizards life. And a fish and an insect. Just the birds come close to our choices in our evolutionary paths.

I hope you have distilled my core thesis. Life is an evolving consciousness, born on this planet by reacting to her impulses. This eventually made her feed and reproduce and evolve. We call this surviving. In reality it is an ever increasing complex way of feeding and procreating. To be or not to be is the most eloquent description of our predicament. We’re here for a reason, a reason old as life itself. To survive.

But how do we fit in this picture?

I’m going to explain all this and my first focus is on how to ‘redefine’ the life force. This will go right into the core of our consciousness and will answer some age old philosophical and religious questions, never answered before. I’m referring here to the most magical of numbers, strewn through religious and philosophical thought everywhere and in all times. The number 3.

It will answer the question of the Ttrinity, holy or unholy. The three jewels of Buddhism. The three forces coming from the Tao. There all directly related to the core of our consciousness, that what made life move for the first time.

Now forget everything I said except the idea of an eternal consciousness in contrast to an exclusively physical eternity, actually seen in nature all around us.

To help me with my argument, I will use quotes and references from religious books, philosophical writings and scientific findings from the search for truth and wisdom throughout our human history.

It will tell us that it's not the strong and powerful that seem to cohere to the theory of survival of the fittest, but that we're a part of a process trying to achive the opposite; survival of the weakest. Creating thereby a life form feasible of leaving this planet and surviving indefinitely.

It's the sacrifices we make and endure for the other that makes up our path to completion. We call it love, but have interpreted its values in many different ways.

The first thing I’d like you to reconsider is your accepted idea of the term/idea eternal life. Most of us in western society equate this idea with the search for it. Cryogenics, genetic manipulation. Trying not to age, or reversing the process of aging. All these thoughts come from our rather narrow view of life being all about the physical and genetics. I’d like you to consider another idea about eternal life. You don’t have to accept it, just consider it.

Maslow's Pyramid

2011-03-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

"The myth is always an explanation of something already known"

Introduction

2010-04-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

Call me crazy...

Why hasn’t anybody, no scientists, no philosophers, thought of investigating the simple and logical theory that life in itself isn’t a dumb process, but an ever expanding intelligent process, looking to survive? Let me explain myself…

Now we know that life has been evolving for probably billions of years, more specific, around 3.5 billion years, when you look around you in nature, you stand in awe of the creatures life creates, always adapting to the environment with some of the craziest and most beautiful inventions. We know it started out on microscopic scale, but over the millions of years it, with erratic intervals, evolved into the most complex of creatures, all connected with each other in a complex maze of feeding, fighting, fornicating and fleeing. The immediate conclusion you make when you’re confronted with this web of life is that it all points to survival by all means necessary. Of the individual itself, then the offspring it produces. This is what kept life going on till today, but not without some big potholes on the way, that’s where we come in.

If this life, this process we’re part of isn’t blind or random, but trying, failing and succeeding (much like our own human evolution) then why would we’ve become an indispensable item for life to survive? We’ve already answered this question many, many times since 1974, when we first found that in the long history of life major catastrophe’s befell her. In 1974 we connected the extinction of the dinosaur with a meteorite hitting our planet. There you have it, there is our so-called God, being vengeful and creating an end-time for life. The end always rings in a new beginning…

So that’s what I’m going to try to do over the next 30 or so pages. I’m going to delve in to the idea that we’re purposely created, not by a almighty God, but by life itself. That we’re part of a strategy that will eventually create the necessary and far more complete beings who will be able to survive this planet and the relative vulnerable place we occupy in space.

Between 200 and 400AC Christian Gnostic writings described it like this:

"We, humanity, are existing in this realm because a member of the transcendent godhead, Sophia (Wisdom), desired to actualize her innate potential for creativity without the approval of her partner or divine consort. Her hubris, in this regard, stood forth as raw materiality, and her desire, which was for the mysterious ineffable Father, manifested itself as Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge, that renegade principle of generation and corruption which, by its unalterable necessity, brings all beings to life, for a brief moment, and then to death for eternity. However, since even the Pleroma itself is not, according to the Gnostics, exempt from desire or passion, there must come into play a salvific event or savior.. (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 9:25-25:14 ff.).
***

Desire is only one half of the Life Force. Desire, or lust, has been named as primary throughout history.

Sartre: In order to ground itself, the self needs projects, which can be viewed as aspects of an individual’s fundamental project and motivated by a desire for “being” lying within the individual’s consciousness

Epicurus: He taught that the point of all one’s actions was to attain pleasure (conceived of as tranquility) for oneself, and that this could be done by limiting one’s desires and by banishing the fear of the gods and of death

Freud: Thus his theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energized or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure.

C.G. Jung: The error of Sophia, which is usually identified as a reckless desire to know the transcendent God, leads to the hypostatization of her desire in the form of a semi-divine and essentially ignorant creature known as the Demiurge

I can go on and on, but my point is; We never defined the second half of the life force.

The Buddha: The second noble truth, or reality of the origin of suffering, calls for the practice of renunciation to all mental states that generate suffering for oneself and others. The mental state that appears in the second noble truth is taṇhā, literally “thirst.” It was customary in the first Western translations of Buddhist texts (Burnouf, Fausboll, Muller, Oldenberg, Warren) to translate taṇhā by desire. This translation has misled many to think that the ultimate goal of Buddhists is the cessation of all desires. However, as Damien Keown puts it, “it is an oversimplification of the Buddhist position to assume that it seeks an end to all desire.” (1992: 222).

The first two Noble Truths of Buddhism are: Suffering & Desire.
***

The actual reason life created us are the mass extinctions of aeons past. Even though we sometimes think we are more likely to destroy our planet than save it, we're actually saving it. We're in no way able to destroy all life, let alone the planet. And don't worry, we're not even in control.

The major problem with the answer of the question; why are we (human-kind) here, are the sheer logical answers to the most sought after questions in ‘man’s history. For example; We'll define the life force or life forces so that it fit's almost all descriptions given to it over the last 5 millennia or so. But you won’t like it.

You won't be able to deny it’s innate properties and the significant similarities to major religious and philosophic definitions of it, you can’t even deny experiencing it, but you probably won't accept it.

But if and when you do, even just as an experiment, you’ll find that all peoples, cultures, religions, philosophies ask and try to answer the same questions, when they’re given the time an space to reflect. And that we are purposefully ignorant of our mission as to create as much uniqueness in human endeavours as possible, but always having to struggle with… authority.

God does exist as an experience life tries to define for us (and we for her...) as an abstract, unknowable, before we learned and her consciousness developed into our own. He, God, nearly killed us by creating an inferno on earth, lasting for aeons (multiple times!). We now know that earth has been hit many times, if God is doing this, He’s been visiting the Kuiper Belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt). But we (life) always survived and adapted.

So think, how do you adapt to unpredictable and unbelievable danger from, what we now call, deep space? Or, even worse, how do you adapt to a violent planet, that has threatened our global chances of survival even more in the past?

Well, you'll need something like us humans to learn and do all that's possible. And when knowledge and wisdom are sufficient you'll discard the bad and keep the good. I believe we know enough to be wise, but desperately try to hold on to our foolishness.

Nothing in this story is illogical or even needs a so-called leap of faith. I’m fully convinced that this is the reality of our existence and we will eventually all agree on that. Of course… this probably won’t be your opinion. No major new insight in who or what we are ever was accepted in the messengers life-time. So feel free to, no I urge you, to point out my misinterpretations, false statements and general ignorant assumptions. I’m perfectly willing to abdicate my conviction if proven wrong.

I used to be, pretty much, a Darwinian evolutionist. I never ever believed in a almighty God up in the heavens, and I never ever abdicated my firm believe that we’re the result of an evolving process, over many, many years and only recently ‘arrived at the scene’. A few things kept nagging me.

Why do we define nature as being 'a struggle to survive' based on competition, when I can see and feel clearly that nature is an intricate balancing act where everything depends on everything else.

Why is it that I feel 'me' as somehow separate from nature, even when I know I'm not. That must mean something. Even though I experience life as being at the centre of it, I rationally know that I'm part of this process of living nature. I sprung from nature and completely depend on nature's abundance. All I can conclude, reasoning from my ego point of view, that my, our, 'mission' must have something to do with learning. Learning through experience.

To counter the 'competition dogma' I'd like to quote Charles Eisenstein:
“In fact, the competition that we see as the driving force of life and evolution is very much a projection of our own cultural beliefs. Just as we project our own anxiety onto primitive peoples, so we project the relentless competitiveness of modern human life onto nature. Competition is an important part of nature, of course, but not the prime mover, the defining feature, nor the engine of progress." - Charles Eisenstein, "The Ascent of Humanity" page 183.

We're going to define this 'engine of progress'. The engine is also known as the trinity, it defines the building blocks of our consciousness and metaphorizes the Holy Trinity.

I start my story as if you never read the words above, and visited this blog for the first time, and remember...

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer.

We're in need of a new narrative...

2008-06-22T00:36:00.000-07:00

***

"Heaven and Earth are impartial;
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The wise are impartial;
They see the people as straw dogs." Laotse, "Tao te King" Verse 5

***

"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with it's several powers, having been originally breathed in by the creator into a few forms, or into one... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved" --Charles Darwin

The Question:

How can we integrate all we know today with the wisdoms and traditions of the past and come up with a sustainable all inclusive narrative that will guide us out of our insanity?

The Answer:

Can you accept that our creator is fallible, just like us?

Only when you accept that we are a product of millions of years of evolution you can see how it all fits together, how we were inevitable.

How it's all about surviving...

There is a new, or to put it in a better way; not yet seen narrative in our own histories and the history of Life on this planet. Our lives represent the story of Life Herself. So we can learn and survive.

Can randomness be proven?

Why should we stop with the notion that evolution of Life is based on random changes within our genes when we reproduce? The idea, or ideology (of the survival of the fittest), and of random changes is not scientific fact. It's an assumption, trying to adhere to scientific objectivity. I do believe that we are a product of millions, even billions of years of evolution. I do not however believe that it's all meaningless and by accident.

Until about 40 years ago we didn't know enough about Life's history to connect the dots.

This logical, simple yet pretty complicated explanation will be able to absorb the fundamentalist atheist as well as the religious fundamentalist.

With today's scientific knowledge and recorded human history, the Story is actually pretty obvious when you see it...

Surviving has always been and still is the problem.

The reason we humans are here is very mundane. In short: Life, you know, that evolutionary process that's been going on for over 3 billion years now (at least, according to present day scientific findings) created humans out of necessity. Without us humans She will not realize her goal: To survive. Her reasons and motivations lie in what happened to Her long before we arrived at the scene, many millions of years ago.

Yes, you heard me correctly, I'm talking about Life as a 'single' entity. An all-encompassing consciousness creating all Life forms. We're part of that huge conscious organism. The reason we feel ourselves to be individuals and at the centre of our universe is pretty easy to explain. We, each and everyone of us, represent Her story. The Story of Life on this planet: Being born, being dependant, experiencing pain and sorrow, pleasure and delight, fear of death... and eventually learning how to deal with all that.

Even though Life can be said to be androgynous, I refer to Life as Her, mostly because the actual assembling of our offspring happens within what we humans call the female and because God and The Son, in western Abrahamic religious traditions, have been designated to be male, being the opposite or outside of us. But the answers of course lie within.

"Wise men of old gave the soul a feminine name. Indeed she is female in her nature as well. She even has her womb" -The Exegesis on the Soul, Nag Hammadi Library

Evolution is not based on the abstract notion of survival of the species (no species survive indefinitely) but, more sensible: the survival of Life Herself. This evolutionary process is by no means blind or dumb. Just like us She is learning, failing and eventually, succeeding.

Life is an evolving consciousness, in which spirit precedes form. This contradicts the now prevalent scientific view on Life; as a mechanistic process wherein form (matter) creates a by-product like our consciousness. But when you apply common sense you know as well as I do that it cannot be the form of the animal that makes it survive but it's actions or behaviour. We'll find that form and consciousness define each other.

When we approach Life from a scientific point of view we can define the Life Force(s) and thereby the origin of our consciousness and, within the analogies, the (Holy) (T)trinity. Moreover, it will explain our overall purpose for being here, probably not very satisfying, even painful, but for those who value Life first, pretty comforting.. And, believe it or not, Life is eternal and so are we. Even though..., death still is a reality. Of course, reality totally depends on our consciousness.

We are, as so many animals before us, part of a strategy to survive.

Don't get me wrong though, surviving is a great pleasure and privilige, mostly...

The history of Life.

Myths and Reality do sometimes mix. It depends what you're aiming for...
There are many references in the Bible, Qur'an and other religious texts that tell of disasters like falling stars (hitting the earth) and other major global calamities. Most often they are attributed to (a) God. Most of these texts were written in days of old, before we scientifically discovered mass extinctions caused by major natural disasters.
-- This happened more than once in Life's history, although not all as large as this one pictured here. But there are up to 180 impact structures found on earth ranging in diameter from 0.0015km to 300km. And because of plate tectonics this number probably is just the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at our moon, you'll see the amount of impacts it endured. The earth is four times the size of the moon.

Bible, Revelations 8:10 "The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water"

Knowing we are relative newcomers in evolutionary terms, humans are also the only animal that has the capability to detect, avert and survive a catastrophe like the meteor-impact that, according to conventional thought, eradicated the dinosaurs. So, if it comes to survival… for now, we are the best and only option.

Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
. ***Roughly 252 million years ago, life on the earth nearly ceased to exist--as much as 90 percent of marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life died out. At around the same time, a vast up swelling of magma covered between one million and four million cubic kilometres of what is now Siberia. The eruption continued off and on for about a million years, with basalt lava and poisonous gases seeping up through cracks in Siberia's mantle. Now rocks from Italy may have linked the two events.*** -- "The Scientific American - "The Great Dying".

Mass Extinctions and the Interrupted Equilibrium.
When you take a look at Life’s reaction to mass extinctions, you will notice that some ‘rapid’ evolutionary changes take place. In scientific language this is called an Interrupted or punctuated equilibrium. This points to relative short periods of major genetic evolution, followed by very long periods of keeping the status quo. This means that we didn't really evolve over billions of years, slow and steady, but in 'short' bursts after which evolution becomes relatively in-active. Most of these evolutionary bursts happened after a major global catastrophe.

There are two major changes in Life’s behaviour that need more explanation than random events within our genetic reproduction process. The first and most obvious is sexual reproduction. This process started around 1.4 billion years ago, before that Life just copied itself. The second major deviation of ‘traditional practice’ happened more recently, 'just' 210 million years ago; the creation of Class Mammalia.

These changes point to more than blind luck, they point to the desire and need to survive.

This Will to survive is composed of the Life Force(s) (Charles Darwin referred to it in his quote I posted above). When we define these forces we will see what it is that is actually happening to us.

According to the Darwinian theory (Darwin himself couldn't believe it!) we somehow were randomly equipped with opposable thumbs, an upright position so we could use our arms and hands for other things than moving around, a voice box so we could evolve language and communicate. And to top it all off a brain bigger than any other that has the capability to learn and create amazing things.

But how random are these changes really?

Especially our ‘ability’ to believe in an ‘all powerful God’ somewhere ‘up there’ in the skies, is a major contribution to the creation of science and scientific thought. The fact that we now know about these mass extinctions and are already hovering in space, trying to define our universe has everything to do with our ‘irrational beliefs’ that time and time again clashes with reality.

Before we go on to define these forces Darwin speaks of, I'd like to share with you verse 42 from the Book of Tao. In this verse the Life Force(s) are summed up and explained at their core.

It goes something like this:
From the Tao came the One
From the One came the Two
The One and Two created the Three
All Three created the 10,000 things
To balance the life forces you create harmony

In this fragment of the verse we can find the answers to questions like: Why we are here, the origin of our consciousness, the essence of good and evil, and the answer to the age old enigma of the Trinity and/or the Life Force(s). All you've got to believe (as in leap of faith, that what I abhor, but have to accept here) is that we're part of a single consciousness, creating individuals in Her image...

In many major and minor religions and many philosophical and mystical writings, but also in all kinds of artistic expression, there are thoughts and theories that suggest we are part of an evolving consciousness, that Life Herself is our Creator -- not all powerful, but vulnerable, like us. And like us Life learns through experience.

"What is needed is a profound collaboration with the creative impulse or Life Force whose purposes are being realized in the evolutionary process. Shaw regarded his doctrine of the Life Force as an evolutionary theology. In his plays, prefaces, and speeches he identified the Life Force with God who is striving to make himself. God is affirmed to be not an infinite, omnipotent, and perfect being, but a finite power, limited to working through the process of evolution" - George Bernard Shaw. From: The Dictionary of the History of Ideas -

*******************************************************

C.G. Jung (1959)

"In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature ands which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix) there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists on pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents."

Charles Eisenstein, `The Ascent of Humanity` (page 176)

“Furthermore, the growth and spontaneous movement of living beings does not in any obvious way reflect simple, mechanical laws like the conservation of momentum. We do not behave as mere masses subject to forces, but initiate action on our own. Intuition tells us that this animation, this spontaneous movement and growth, is a key feature of life. Thales recognized as much in the 7th century BC when he said, `The lodestone has life, or soul, as it is able to move iron`, as did Aristotle in associating life with movement (`The soul creates movement`).

Now try to follow this logic...

The Life Force(s):

You probably have heard of this mysterious thing called the Life Force. Nobody has identified it, it’s shrouded in mystery and when you ask a scientist, at least one that adheres to the Darwinian theory, he or she will tell you there is no such thing as a Life Force. I beg to differ.

When we define the Life Force(s), we'll define the origin of our consciousness. The origin, of course, lies within.

Let’s take this Life force at face value. It’s a force and it’s responsible for the existence of Life. Now take the scientific definition of a force and take the accepted, but not so scientific, definition of Life.

Force:
“In physics, a force is a push or pull that can cause an object with mass to accelerate".
Or; A force is something that moves something else.

The commonly used and accepted definition of Life;
- Life has a metabolism;
- Life reproduces itself;
- Life interacts with its environment.

Or:
- Life feeds itself;
- Life reproduces
- And Life interacts with its environment (like feeding!).

To implement these two definitions we can redefine the Life Force as something that started to make Life ‘move’. Staying within the boundaries of scientific findings, Life started to move almost 4 billion years ago.

The question is: What did we do?

Here I have to start challenging the accepted version of our scientific community about how Life began. Even though all scientists know that the origin of Life is still a mystery, they do have an accepted and frequently used explanation for lay people like me and (probably) you: 'Life started out as spontaneous copying molecules'.

It seems logical, but it misses the point completely. There is a more logical and realistic answer. Simply this: Before the copying or reproduction started the feeding started. It’s an (wide) open door, really. To reproduce and increase in mass you’ll have to feed, first. Just copying without feeding would lead to lots of tiny molecules with a combined mass equal to that at the start of the process. To create a more complete picture of Life we will have to separate these two activities. ** The essential activity in Life is feeding.

So Life started out spontaneously feeding and then reproducing itself, hence the growth in mass. But even more importantly, it changes the idea that Life started out wholly independent of its environment. To feed means to interact with your environment, which points to a form of consciousness.

"Richard Dawkins’ 1990 book, 'The Selfish Gene', lucidly presents the prevailing view of biogenesis, conceived a hundred years ago buy Oparin and Haldane. Like the Neodarwinian theory of evolution, it hinges on two key features: random mutation and natural selection. The story starts with a prebiotic soup of the organic molecules that are the building blocks of life. The crucial event is the appearance, by chance, of a complex molecule with the very special property of catalyzing the formation of a new copy of itself. (…)

A sponsoring assumption in the “selfish gene” biogenesis story is that there is a clear demarcation between organism and environment. There are the replicators, which are distinct from one another, and there is the substrate. The key event in the origin of life is the appearance of a molecule, presumably a strand of RNA or something like it, that can ‘replicate itself’. The separate individual is seen as primary. How naturally this fits in with the beliefs of our own culture: that human beings are separate from nature, and that each of us has a distinct, separate existence independent of other human beings. How naturally it accords with the attitude that nature is a collection of recourses for us to use to our best advantage." "The Ascent of Humanity" by Charles Eisenstein. P. 179.
**

So Life feeds itself, reproduces and 'interacts with its enviroment' (like feeding, arguably the first interaction with 'the enviroment'.) This is what science gave us to work with up to now.

Let’s try to define these Life Force(s) based on logic and scientific definitions.

Just answer this question: Is there anything you know of that we might call a force and causes Life to eat?

The only thing we know and experience is that if we don’t eat we go hungry. And hunger means pain. But Hunger is only part of the experience. As we all know hunger doesn’t just pop up whenever you should eat, it takes time to grow. The revealing thing about hunger is that it actually starts out with a more pleasurable experience we call an appetite, which is a form of lust, in fact it is the original lust, lust for food.
***

Alan Watts, Baffled by hunger...

"That (when) an animal eats because it is hungry. What we’re really saying is, that it eats when it’s ready to eat. And, hunger is the initial stage of eating. It is a way of perceiving readiness to eat. And then again when we say it dies, because there is no food, if you look into this carefully, what you’re actually saying is, that when food is not in the environment, and therefore is no longer being transformed into the pattern of the organism, then that pattern isn’t there anymore. It dies. But, you see what is happening here, all we’re doing when we say because, is that we are describing what is actually happening more carefully. In other words; the organism dies because there is no more food. If we simply say; instead of this word ‘because’ we simply say; the organisms’ death is the cessation of food being transformed into it’s pattern. You see, we’ve eliminated the word ‘because’, and this is actually what we’re doing all the time when we explain things. We’re not really describing their causes, that seems to be what we’re doing, when we don’t know the full nature of the event. What we’re really doing is we’re describing the event that puzzles us more completely."

***

As you can see, and hopefully understand, our primary activity (and the primary activity of Life), eating, is empowered by a dualistic force composed of pain and pleasure. They come together, one cannot be without the other. If you don’t eat you’ll first get peckish, then you built up a big appetite, when you still do not feed yourself you will feel pain. And this pain represents the original pain: Hunger.

It’s not our world that is dualistic in nature, but we are. We experience high-low, big-small, good-bad, tight-loose… These things do not represent 'reality', they represent value. And what’s more valuable than Life?

The Life Force(s), hunger & lust, is (are) the original motive(s)* for acting, out of necessity or out of lust. The pain represents necessity and lust… well, represents lust.

* [It’s hard to decide if it’s Two or One]

When you first become aware of this dualistic force within you, you’ll inevitably will experience the third force, completing the trinity of our consciousness.

**
"Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die."
- W.H. Auden (1939)
**

Age Old Knowledge

Let’s return to the verse from the book of Tao which I quoted above. From the Tao came the One, from the one came the Two. We could say that we first experienced lust, or appetite and because that doesn't force us to do anything, after a while this Lust became hunger. The hunger (pain) is what first made us move (feed).

As soon as we feed ourselves the pain (hunger) disappears. When we feed before we are hungry we won't even feel any pain. From these two inseparable forces: hunger and lust the third force arose.

Well, as of course you've already guessed, the third force is Fear.

When you know pleasure and you know pain, and moreover you know they come as a pair, you'll have to be constantly aware of how you balance these two forces... You do not want to feel too much pain, right? Well, that, in a nutshell is Life's Herstory (do you mind...?)

Back in time...
So what happened after Life was born 3.5 or so, billion years ago?

Hardly anything happened during the first two billion years. Life was feeding and copying Herself, blissfully unaware of... well almost everything. But then, 'all of a sudden', 1.4 billion years ago Life started the process of sexual reproduction. This is when evolution, the creation of 'different' life forms really started on earth. But why this change after two billion years? It has to do with Life's experiences.

Even though we could count the individual organisms expanding along the seashores of Pangea, there was only one consciousness. What could have triggered Life to start the process of sexual reproduction?

During the first two billion years of Life on earth our solar system was quite busy with flying objects that would occasionally hit our planet. Luckily for us we have a big brother in the heavens above who more than once protected us against major impacts, this is brother Jupiter. Because of it’s size most of the planet destroyers heading towards earth would be pulled into the gravitational pull of Jupiter. But not all…

That’s what happened 1.8 billion years ago; a major hit of an asteroid threw Life’s cushy existence in disarray. After two billion years of relative pleasurable living, Life went hungry for the first time since a long time. The sun was probably blacked out, which was Life’s primal source of nourishment.

This is when the process of ‘survival of the fittest’ really started, based on the now ancient principle of eat your neighbour. To rid the hunger Life was forced into a cannibalistic habit. With this process diversification became necessary. Eventually this resulted in the process of sexual reproduction. To create ever more food supplies for an ever more expanding and diverse existence.

Life had experienced both sides of Her existence; the pleasure comes with the pain. Besides the pleasure and the pain She now was endowed with the third force mentioned in verse 42 of the Tao; the force that completed our three-dimensional consciousness. When you know that pain can come unexpectedly, you'll experience the third force.
***
Gnostic Scriptures

When I first found out about the Gnostic traditions and started to read some of their ancient texts I was amazed at how Gnostic mythologies can easily be ‘transplanted’ into Life as a evolving consciousness, learning, failing, changing, experiencing and surviving. I will use parts of these Gnostic texts, written 1500 years ago, to show you that when people write with ‘inspiration’ about Life, they’ll tell us the story of Life’s evolving consciousness. Like this one from the Nag Hammadi Library, ‘Authoritative Teaching’:

But the soul - she who has tasted these things - realized that sweet passions are transitory. She had learned about evil; she went away from them and she entered into a new conduct. Afterwards she despises this Life, because it is transitory. And she looks for those foods that will take her into Life, and leaves behind her those deceitful foods. And she learns about her light, as she goes about stripping off this world, while her true garment clothes her within, (and) her bridal clothing is placed upon her in beauty of mind, not in pride of flesh. And she learns about her depth and runs into her fold, while her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn, then, that she received in this world, she receives ten thousand times the grace and glory.

************************
Life.

History of Life. I added the mass extinctions. Click to enhance.
***

Animal behaviourists define four main activities they call (tongue-in-cheek) the four F’s, they are: Feeding, Fornicating, Fleeing and Fighting.

*** The Four F's***

So, here is my proposition: Hunger, Lust & Fear are the three forces mentioned in the Tao tse Tung. Or: Pleasure, Pain & Fear (Pleasure in front!)

They contain the Life Force: Hunger, Lust and are accompanied by a moderator; Fear. They reveal the basis of our consciousness, the real reasons we experience pleasure and pain. Furthermore verse 42 tells us that by balancing the Life forces, hunger & lust, we'll create harmony.

From these three Life Forces came all other feelings and emotions we experience. Imagine from fear emanating aggression, envy, jealousy, hate and if all that fails, love.

"19) The first form is darkness, the second desire, the third ignorance, the fourth is the excitement of death, the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh, the sixth is the foolish wisdom of flesh, the seventh is the wrathful wisdom. These are the seven powers of wrath."
- THE GNOSTIC SOCIETY LIBRARY

Lets translate: The first form is darkness. What does darkness represent? It's not fear, it's what we fear. The second desire. Desire = lust. And the third ignorance. Ignorance does represent fear.

“From it, there appeared a force, presiding over the darkness. And the forces that came into being subsequent to them called the shadow 'the limitless chaos'…” “Then shadow perceived there was something mightier than it, and felt envy; and when it had become pregnant of its own accord, suddenly it engendered jealousy. Since that day, the principle of jealousy amongst all the eternal realms and their worlds has been apparent. Now as for that jealousy, it was found to be an abortion without any spirit in it. Like a shadow, it came into existence in a vast watery substance.”

-- From "On the Origin of the World" -The Nag Hammadi Library--

This text, in my opinion, tells of the first contact of Life with God (Something mightier than it). Of course God is an unknown and, as He has shown, pretty powerful, maybe even all-powerful. If so, we have to know, we have to find out.

How about this ancient text:

"Seven appeared in chaos, androgynous. They have their masculine names and their feminine names. The feminine name is Pronoia (Forethought) Sambathas, which is 'week'. And his son is called Yao: his feminine name is Lordship. Sabaoth: his feminine name is Deity. Adonaios: his feminine name is Kingship. Elaios: his feminine name is Jealousy. Oraios: his feminine name is Wealth. And Astaphaios: his feminine name is Sophia (Wisdom). These are the seven forces of the seven heavens of chaos. And they were born androgynous, consistent with the immortal pattern that existed before them, according to the wish of Pistis: so that the likeness of what had existed since the beginning might reign to the end. You will find the effect of these names and the force of the male entities in the Archangelic (Book) of the Prophet Moses, and the names of the female entities in the first Book of Noraia." 'On the origin of the world' The Nag Hammadi Library. http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/origin.html

It’s Gaia that we’re looking for. Not Gaia portrayed as the so-called spirit of our planet, but as in the ancient Greek mythological figure of; Mother Nature, Life. It’s Zoë we’re looking for; Greek for Life.

Before I knew about these names, written over the ages, including Sophia (Wisdom), Pistis (Faith), I thought of Chloe. On the one hand it is an acronym for “Creates Her Life On Earth” and on the other hand Chloe is a pretty cousin of mine from Down Under. A very nice happenstance...

I'm pretty much convinced that we're part of a story that will eventually save us from extinction. For now it's the end of a saga...

Plato on the 'Demiurge':Plato has the speaker Timaeus refer to the demiurge frequently in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus circa 360 BCE. The title character refers to the demiurge as the entity who “fashioned and shaped” the material world. Timaeus describes the Demiurge as unreservedly benevolent and hence desirous of a world as good as possible. The world remains allegedly imperfect, however, because the demiurge had to work on pre-existing chaotic, indeterminate matter.** Plato's Demiurge, from Wikipedia.

When Plato talks about a deity that ‘fashions and shapes’ the material world, he means literary creating the material world by our conscious becoming aware and adapting to the material world.

Let’s recap.

Even though the term Life Force is a mysterious one, always seen as something magical, an enigma, when we take the term at face value and apply the scientific definitions to the terms Life and force, we can make a pretty good case for Hunger being the Life force. Not only does it make sense within scientific boundaries, it actually fits quite well into quite a few religious and philosophical thoughts, that the Life force and thereby the way we perceive the world is dualistic in nature; positive/negative, pain/pleasure; like Yin/Yang.

When we talk about our consciousness and where it comes from, Hunger makes a great candidate. The common and workable definition of consciousness is quite simple: how you perceive yourself within your environment. The feeling of hunger created the first distinction between me and not me, i.e. food.

**
"Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of Life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim". "Studies in Pessimism" Arthur Schopenhauer

Well, we can make a pretty good case that suffering is the direct and immediate object of Life.

Now let’s take a look at how we are built around these Life forces.

Coming Down To Earth

2008-06-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

"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? –

***

Life Force

2001-05-13T02:26:00.000-07:00

Lucretius (http://www.iep.utm.edu/lucretiu/)

Indeed in his effusive descriptions of the creative power of nature, effectively symbolized by the figure of Venus, he seems almost (like Bergson) to postulate an immaterial life-force surging through the universe and operating above or beyond raw nature.

Bergson’s early study of Lucretius obviously played an important role in the foundation and development of his own philosophy. In 1907 Bergson published Creative Evolution, outlining his bold, new vitalistic theory of evolution, in opposition to both the earlier vitalism of Lamarck and the naturalism of Darwin, and Spencer. It is hard not to see in the French philosophers’ concept of the élan vital a powerful life force akin to and strongly influenced by the immortal Venus of his great Latin predecessor.

Empedocles (http://www.iep.utm.edu/empedocl/)
Empedocles’ world-view is of a cosmic cycle of eternal change, growth and decay, in which two personified cosmic forces, Love and Strife, engage in an eternal battle for supremacy
On Natureas usually reconstructed seemed the work of a mechanist physicist which seeks to replace the traditional gods with four lifeless impersonal elements and two cosmic forces of attraction and repulsion, Love and Strife. (Pain & Pleasure)
Empedocles also posits two cosmic forces which work upon the elements in both creative and destructive ways. These he personifies as Love (Philia) – a force of attraction and combination – and Strife (Neikos) – a force of repulsion and separation.

---

Artificial Intelligence (http://www.iep.utm.edu/art-inte/)
In the beginning, tools (for example, axes) were extensions of human physical powers; at first powered by human muscle; then by domesticated beasts and in situ forces of nature, such as water and wind. The steam engine put fire in their bellies; machines became self-propelled, endowed with vestiges of self-control (as by Watt’s 1788 centrifugal governor); and the rest is modern history. -- Again, we always use these metaphors of hunger or lust to explain our motives.

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Daoism (http://www.iep.utm.edu/daoism/)
A central theme of the Daodejing is that correlatives are the expressions of the movement of dao. Correlatives in Chinese philosophy are not opposites, mutually excluding each other. They represent the ebb and flow of the forces of reality: yin/yang, male/female; excess/defect; leading/following;

---

Aztec

http://www.iep.utm.edu/aztec/
a. Teotl as Ultimate Reality and Root Metaphor

At the heart of Nahua philosophy stands the thesis that there exists a single, dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power, energy or force: what the Nahuas called teotl (see Boone 1994; Burkhart 1989; Klor de Alva 1979; Monaghan 2000; H.B. Nicholson 1971; Read 1998; Townsend 1972). Elizabeth Boone (1994:105) writes, “The real meaning of [teotl] is spirit — a concentration of power as a sacred and impersonal force”. According to Jorge Klor de Alva (1979:7), “Teotl …implies something more than the idea of the divine manifested in the form of a god or gods; instead it signifies the sacred in more general terms”. The multiplicity of gods in official, state sanctioned Aztec religion does not gainsay this claim, for this multiplicity was merely the sacred, merely teotl, “separated, as it were by the prism of human sight, into its many attributes” (I. Nicholson 1959:63f).

The Nahuas believed the human body serves as the temporary location for three different animistic forces, each residing in its own center.

Every human is the living center and confluence of these three forces. They direct humans’ physiological and psychological processes, giving each person her own unique character. All three must operate harmoniously with one another in order to produce a mentally, physically, and morally pure, upright, whole, and balanced person

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http://www.iep.utm.edu/chenghao/
While principle is the ontological foundation of ten thousand things, Cheng Hao emphasizes that, unlike Plato’s form, it is not temporally prior to or spatially outside of ten thousand things. This can be seen from his discussion of two related pairs of ideas. The first pair is dao and concrete things (qi). After quoting from the Book of Change that “what is metaphysical (xing er shang) is called dao, while what is physical (xing er xia) is called concrete thing” (Yishu 11; 119), Cheng Hao immediately adds that “outside dao there are no things and outside things there is no dao” (Yishu 4; 73). In other words, what is metaphysical is not independent of the physical; the former is right within the latter. The second pair is principle (dao, human nature, god) and vital force (qi). In Cheng Hao’s view, “everything that is tangible is vital force, and only dao is intangible” (Yishu 6; 83). However, he emphasizes that “human nature is inseparable from vital force, and vital force is inseparable from human nature” (Yishu 1; 10), and that “there is no god (shen) outside vital force, and there is no vital force outside god” (Yishu 1; 10).

What does Cheng Hao precisely mean by principle, which is intangible and does not have sound or smell? Although translated here as “principle” according to convention, li for Cheng Hao is not a reified entity as the common essence shared by all things or universal law governing these things or inherent principle followed by these things or patterns exhibited by these things. Li as used by Cheng is a verb referring to activity, not a noun referring to thing. For example, he says that “the cold in the winter and the hot in the summer are [vital forces] yin and yang; yet the movement and change [of vital forces] is god” (Yihsu 11; 121). Since god for Cheng means the same as li, li is here understood as the movement and change of vital forces and things constituted by vital forces. Since things and li are inseparable, as li is understood as movement and change, all things are things that move and change, while movement and change are always movement and change of things. Things are tangible, have smell, and make sound, but their movement and change is intangible and does not have sound or smell. We can never perceive things’ activities, although we can perceive things that act. For example we can perceive a moving car, but we cannot perceive the car’s moving. In Cheng Hao’s view, principle as activity is present not only in natural things but also in human affairs. Thus, illustrating what he means by “nowhere between heaven and earth there is no dao” (Yishu 4; 73), Cheng points out that “in the relation of father and son, to be father and son lies in affection; in the relation of king and minister, to be king and minister lies in seriousness (reverence). From these to being husband and wife, being elder and younger brothers, being friends, there is no activity that is no dao. That is why we cannot be separated from dao even for a second” (Yishu 4; 73-74). Cheng makes it clear that the principle that governs these human relations is such activity as affection and reverence.

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Freud

Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud’s account of the instincts or drives. The instincts, for Freud, are the principal motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they ‘energise’ the mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty

However, even here a crucial qualification has to be added—Freud effectively redefined the term ’sexuality’ here to make it cover any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from the body. Thus his theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energized or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure

The Buddha's teachings

2001-05-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

The teachings are means of getting the hearer to question their own cherished beliefs and view of life; when through investigation and insight the door to truth is opened, the teaching can be put aside.

Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,

even though they have been held in honor
for many generations and in diverse places.
Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it.
Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past.
Do not believe what you yourself have imagined,
persuading yourself that a God inspires you.
Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests.
After examination, believe what you yourself have tested
and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.

Buddha

Gospel of Mary

2001-01-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

Now, I know this is a lengthy text, but it actually talks about how we should approach ourselves within the whole of nature. I highlight the passages that I feel define my assumptions.

Gospel Of Mary:

"...will, then, matter be saved or not?" The Savior said, "All natures, all formed things, all creatures exist in and with one another and will again be resolved into their own roots, because the nature of matter is dissolved into the roots of its nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear." Peter said to him, "Since you have now explained all things to us, tell us this: what is the sin of the world?" The Savior said, "Sin as such does not exist, but you make sin when you do what is of the nature of fornication, which is called 'sin.' For this reason the Good came into your midst, to the essence of each nature, to restore it to its root." He went on to say, "For this reason you come into existence and die [...] whoever knows may know [...] a suffering which has nothing like itself, which has arisen out of what is contrary to nature. Then there arises a disturbance in the whole body. For this reason I said to you, Be of good courage, and if you are discouraged, still take courage over against the various forms of nature. He who has ears to hear, let him hear." When the Blessed One said this, he greeted all of them, saying "Peace be with you. Receive my peace for yourselves. Take heed lest anyone lead you astray with the words, 'Lo, here!' or 'Lo, there!' for the Son of Man is within you. Follow him; those who seek him will find him. Go, therefore, and preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. I have left no commandment but what I have commanded you, and I have given you no law, as the lawgiver did, lest you be bound by it." They grieved and mourned greatly, saying, "How shall we go to the Gentiles and preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of the Son of Man? If even he was not spared, how shall we be spared?" Then Mary stood up and greeted all of them and said to her brethren, "Do not mourn or grieve or be irresolute, for his grace will be with you all and will defend you. Let us rather praise his greatness, for he prepared us and made us into men." When Mary said this, their hearts changed for the better, and they began to discuss the words of the Savior. Peter said to Mary, "Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than other women. Tell us the words of the Savior which you have in mind since you know them; and we do not, nor have we heard of them." Mary answered and said, "What is hidden from you I will impart to you." And she began to say the following words to them. "I," she said, "I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to him, 'Lord, I saw you today in a vision.' He answered and said to me, 'Blessed are you, since you did not waver at the sight of me. For where the mind is, there is your countenance'. I said to him, 'Lord, the mind which sees the vision, does it see it through the soul or through the spirit?' The Savior answered and said, 'It sees neither through the soul nor through the spirit, but the mind, which is between the two, which sees the vision, and it is...'" "...and Desire said, 'I did not see you descend; but now I see you rising. Why do you speak falsely, when you belong to me?' The soul answered and said, 'I saw you, but you did not see me or recognize me; I served you as a garment and you did not recognize me.' After it had said this, it went joyfully and gladly away. Again it came to the third power, Ignorance. This power questioned the soul: 'Whither are you going? You were bound in wickedness, you were bound indeed. Judge not' . And the soul said, 'Why do you judge me, when I judged not? I was bound, though I did not bind. I was not recognized, but I recognized that all will go free, things both earthly and heavenly.' After the soul had left the third power behind, it rose upward, and saw the fourth power, which had seven forms. The first form is darkness, the second desire, the third ignorance, the fourth the arousing of death, the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh, the sixth is the wisdom of the folly of the flesh, the seventh is wrathful wisdom. These are the seven participants in wrath. They ask the soul, 'Whence do you come, killer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?' The soul answered and said, 'What seizes me is killed; what turns me about is overcome; my desire has come to an end and ignorance is dead. In a world I was saved from a world, and in a "type," from a higher "type" and from the fetter of the impotence of knowledge, the existence of which is temporal. From this time I will reach rest in the time of the moment of the Aeon in silence.'" When Mary had said this, she was silent, since the Savior had spoken thus far with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, 'Say what you think concerning what she said. For I do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are of other ideas." Peter also opposed her in regard to these matters and asked them about the Savior. "Did he then speak secretly with a woman, in preference to us, and not openly? Are we to turn back and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?" Then Mary grieved and said to Peter, "My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart or that I am lying concerning the Savior?" Levi answered and said to Peter, "Peter, you are always irate. Now I see that you are contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Savior knew her very well. For this reason he loved her more than us. And we should rather be ashamed and put on the Perfect Man, to form us [?] as he commanded us, and proclaim the gospel, without publishing a further commandment or a further law than the one which the Savior spoke." When Levi had said this, they began to go out in order to proclaim him and preach him.

** I highlighted the bit about speaking secretly with a woman, because life is in essence feminine. The male part only became important on an existential level when human kind was created.

The Absolute, Sri Aurobindo.

2001-01-01T02:43:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you stumble on great interpreters of life.

"Central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision is the evolution of human life into life divine. Writes he: "Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's process."

One of Sri Aurobindo's main philosophical achievements was to introduce the concept of evolution into Vedantic thought. Samkhya philosophy had already proposed such a notion centuries earlier, but Aurobindo rejected the materialistic tendencies of both Darwinism and Samkhya, and proposed an evolution of spirit along with that of matter, and that the evolution of matter was a result of the former.

Sri Aurobindo argues that humankind is not the last rung in the evolutionary scale, but can evolve spiritually beyond its current limitations to a state of spiritual and supramental existence. This evolutionary existence he called a "Divine life on Earth", characterized by a spiritualized, supramental, truth-consciousness-oriented humanity

He speaks of two central movements in the process of creation: an involution of consciousness from an original omnipresent Reality, manifesting a universe of forms, including matter; and an evolution of those material forms in creation upward toward life, mind, and spirit, reconnecting to their spiritual source. It is also a process of evolution.

The process by which the Energy of creation emerged from a timeless, spaceless, ineffable, immutable Reality, Sri Aurobindo refers to as the Involution. In that process the Reality extended itself to Being/Existence (Sat), Consciousness, that generated a Force - (Chit); and Bliss (Ananda)-- self enjoyment in existing and being conscious. Through the action of a fourth dimension, Supermind (i.e. Truth Consciousness), the Force (Chit) of Sat-Chit-Ananda was divided into Knowledge and Will, eventually formulating as an invisible Energy that would become the source of creation. Through its own willful self-absorption of consciousness, the universe would begin as Inconscient material existence from out of that Energy.

The process of existence emerging out of the Inconscient is referred as evolution. Initially, it emerges gradually in the stages of matter, life, and mind. First matter evolves from simple to complex forms, then life emerges in matter and evolves from simple to complex forms, finally mind emerges in life and evolves from rudimentary to higher forms of thought and reason. As each new principle emerges, the previous stages remain but are integrated into the higher principle. Humanity represents the stage of development of mind in complex material forms of life.

Sri Aurobindo's argues that Man is born an ignorant, divided, conflicted being; a product of the original inconscience (i.e. unconsciousness,) inherent in Matter that he evolved out of. As a result, he does not know the nature of Reality, including its source and purpose; his own nature, including the parts and integration of his being; what purpose he serves, and what his individual and spiritual potential is, amongst others. In addition, man experiences life through division and conflict, including his relationship with others, and his divided view of spirit and life.

Even more beautiful is that he admired a friend of his, a woman. He admired her so much that he gave her full reign as he retired. Much like Jesus and Mary in the Gnostic texts. He named her The Mother, her parents named her Mirra. Mirra Alfassa.

He wrote about her;

"The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence."

Again, it doesn't prove anything but....
The premise: life, driven by hunger, created us to adapt to an environment outside our immediate reach; space. Space, live has experienced, can be a hostile adversary. But even before space became our 'new' environment, the planet on which we live can be even more dangerous to our chances to survive. We, human kind, are a link in life’s' evolutionary process that will eventually create a being able to survive without our planet. If we won't reach that goal, this planet will be our end.

This poem of Sri Aurobindo in essence tells us what to realize on our deathbeds.. We are created in Her image.

The Absolute.

No mind, no form, I only exist;
   Now ceased all will and thought;
The final end of Nature's dance,
   I am it whom I have sought.
A realm of Bliss bare, ultimate;
   Beyond both knower and known;
A rest immense I enjoy at last;
   I face the One alone.
I have crossed the secret ways of life,
   I have become the Goal.
The Truth immutable is revealed;
   I am the way, the God-Soul.
My spirit aware of all the heights,
   I am mute in the core of the Sun.
I barter nothing with time and deeds;
   My cosmic play is done.

Though a far more amazing find is a song from one of my all-time favourite artists, Tuck & Patti. I've known this song for many years, and it overwhelmed me when I listened to it again, after my 'enlightenment'. This song actually told me for the first time that the answer to the life force was Hunger. Literally. Read for yourselves:

“Strength”
By Tuck and Patti

Years of tears Pain for breakfast
Lunch is longing Dinner never comes
Hunger ruled this lonely spirit. All the time.

Tears of yearning for a stranger Who would take the pain away
And ease the sorrow and the hunger and the longing...
But the stranger never came

She didn't understand that this was all arranged

She stays up late and studies
Though her eyes are red and she is weary
Sometimes she is afraid

She can't believe, still can't believe
he left her with these babies all alone

She sometimes feels she just won't make it
That she will shatter all to pieces Or just disappear
But there's a feeling in her spirit, when she is quiet she can hear it
And it gives her strength and courage to dry her own tears

Deep Ecology

2000-01-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

The phrase "deep ecology" was coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in 1973,[1] and he helped give it a theoretical foundation. "For Arne Næss, ecological science, concerned with facts and logic alone, cannot answer ethical questions about how we should live. For this we need ecological wisdom. Deep ecology seeks to develop this by focusing on deep experience, deep questioning and deep commitment. These constitute an interconnected system. Each gives rise to and supports the other, whilst the entire system is, what Næss would call, an ecosophy: an evolving but consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world, that embodies ecological wisdom and harmony."[2] Næss rejected the idea that beings can be ranked according to their relative value. For example, judgments on whether an animal has an eternal soul, whether it uses reason or whether it has consciousness (or indeed higher consciousness) have all been used to justify the ranking of the human animal as superior to other animals. Næss states that from an ecological point of view "the right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species." This metaphysical idea is elucidated in Warwick Fox's claim that we and all other beings are "aspects of a single unfolding reality".