Observe And Learn: Greetings, Your Madness
Greetings. We know where you are. Let us hope that enough of us will come together, and stay together, in order to enable this knowledge to survive and thrive.
There are many individuals out there who believe in intelligent design. There are others who believe in God in a more general way, trusting we were somehow made by Him/Her/It, perhaps not by sleight of hand but by force of divine presence. And there are those who believe we are just the products of something out there, something truly intelligent – the Demiurge – the architect – the alien and advanced entities that must inhabit some mysterious parts of the universe.
Then there’s those who believe in nothing, neither religion nor science, who either reject both notions in their own terms or use them selectively to their own end, like a person uses a battery to power a favorite electronic device. They do not care about who we are and where we come from and how we came to be. All they want to do is get on with their lives.
These distinct groups of people, divided as they are over what they believe or don’t believe, and historically at odds among themselves as to how to live one’s life and view the world, have one thing in common: the notion of something external, which may have created us, residing somewhere unknown, which they either embrace or reject.
But what created us may not be out there after all, it may be much closer. It may be right here, under our noses, in the midst of a creative bonanza taking place since time immemorial.
Look At Yourself
Let’s use sentient beings as an example to see how things get created. Take us, for instance, humans, biological beings. We have been designing things for millions of years: tools, ornaments, weapons, dwellings, you name it, we have been making it. We are what you might call naturally creative beings.
Like all creative beings, we started small, with things that had to do with our size, and which we applied to our scale of life. Over the ages we got better at handling the world, of course, and started upping the scales, building structures increasingly larger than us. After a while we improved exponentially, reaching a point where we could put together monuments, cities, entire civilizations. We broke the scales and created infrastructures so humongous and complex that our size among them became almost insignificant.
Having done all these things, and only after having broken these large-scale levels on the outside, did we turn around and start breaching the smaller scales. We got to work and went deep, reaching as far as the atom, then beyond, into subatomic reality, a feat which required a supreme level of technological skill to achieve, far more elaborate than what was needed to create something on the humongous scale.
Now here’s the question. What makes more sense? That we are the direct products, or even by-products, of something larger and alien, something out there and super-intelligent, which has delved into its micro-world with its own apparatus, which has come and gone, which has been invisible all along? Or that we are the creations and assemblies of something smaller than us, something of this earth, living inside us, making us up, just as we make up civilizations and organizations and structures entirely monumental and complex in size and function; something seemingly invisible because it is simply too small and impossible to consider purposeful and, dare we say, creative?
The answer is a bit of both. We are most probably the creation of both forces on both scales. But the small-scale forces are the ones that matter most, because they are closer to us and easier to identify. All we need to do is envision our bodies as civilizations, literally, each in its own right, then seek out the humans inside them. The humans inside us.
So far so good. The notion sounds great, but we must consider reality. What are these “humans” within, these ghosts in the machine, and what does it really mean to be powered by forces which we contain? Can we accept that something inside us contains consciousness – either soul, psyche, or plain awareness – and, therefore, agency?
It is a notion that is problematic. Monotheistic religions have separated humans from the rest of nature, maintaining that we are the only living creatures with a soul, an insight based on doctrinaire morality. Similarly, science has embraced the notion of consciousness as something predominantly human, only recently extending it to the realm of apes, dolphins, whales, crows, and other species, all the while drawing a line at “less intelligent” species, which, it claims, operate on “hardwired instinct” rather than consciousness as we know it. Evidently, humanity on the whole regards itself as the pinnacle and cornerstone of conscious intelligence, marking itself up as the principal frame of reference on what awareness is and, some insist, ought to be. Nothing grander and more intelligent than us has been discovered so far – and nothing smaller than us, or simpler than us, or more reduced than us, can match us. To regard our constituent elements as conscious in ways comparable to us is something everyone – the religious, the scientists, and most of all the majority of people on the planet, regardless of disposition – finds ridiculous.
Loot At Others
There are exceptions, of course. Buddhists and animists see a continuity through all levels of life, granting all tiers of existence a sense of agency; quantum physicists have begun to search for consciousness in proteins and micro-tubules; schizophrenics have always talked of something behind the curtains, as have poets and children. These individuals are few and far between, of course, and all of them are considered kooks by mainstream reality. The children are an exceptional case, more malleable than anything else, curable phenomena of naivety whose point of view never really matters anyway. It just gets molded into form by all-knowing adults.
It is a frame of mind that is narrowing the human scope down, ever so subtly, through the force of dogmatic religion and dogmatic science alike. Driven by indoctrinating premises, and aided by the frantic pace of life as we know it, which requires fast results and little waste of time, little examination of the underpinnings of this or that insight, the religious and technological dogmatists in play are displacing persons of faith and science, promoting an ever-increasing mode of seeing what we believe rather than believing what we see.
It is a tricky way to make progress, and a poor approach to seeking out god, or consciousness, or any meaningful answers regarding deeper reality. Especially when the imagination guiding our belief is predetermined and uni-dimensional, steering us straight into the limitations of our moral and economic preconceptions. Driven by dubious agendas, we more often than not end up proving what we want to prove and not what the facts point to.
In other words, it is a self-serving, self-fulfilling scenario that renders knowledge hostage to precondition, limiting human creativity to preconceived views of the world. Seeing what we believe is a dangerous way to go about things when whatever we see is driven by doctrine. The only way out of this mess is to suspend our prejudices for a moment and join the kooks. Their imaginative “madness” may have plenty to show us, complementing our malleability with true wonder and reminding us that the creative force of the universe lies not in heaven but here, on earth. All we need are some flashes of inspiration to put it to good use.
Thus concludes our journey into the force of creation. It has been an interesting and rewarding quest. We have located very potent creative forces here on Earth, inside us, and have faced up to them. In particular, we have identified ourselves as creators in our own right, using this insight to understand not only what we are capable of but also how creators, in general, start small and go big, creating wonders in the process. But it doesn’t end there. In the second part of this article, we shall seek and identify the creators inside us, who, for all practical purposes, are our architects, engineers, and, in all practical terms, gods, with whom we will attempt to connect.
Image sources:
http://sp1.fotolog.com/photo/1/3/109/ender_tikitaka/1221431059358_f.jpg
http://i10.photobucket.com
http://media18.onsugar.com/files/2011/05/21/3/1712/17122846/81/animalcell.jpg
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