A Great Surprise…
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
Sherlock Holmes (as told to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it
Albert Einstein
If the Yogic/Esoteric doctrine is correct, Man is essentially a non-physical being who incarnates into a suitable body in which to test his powers of choice (between acting selfishly or unselfishly) on his journey from frog to prince. The body is quite literally a vehicle for the evolving Mind. Thus:
Evolution is ultimately about Mind and not Body
…and life is actually a Mind School. This notion is such a break from conventional (ie Materialist) wisdom that I think a new term is needed. It makes sense to stick with the term ‘evolution’ for Darwinian body-form development, but I will call the higher form of evolution, the development of Mind…
‘DarwinPlus’ (D+).
§ I’m sure there must be a better name, but I can’t think of one. Perhaps a professor some time in the future will supply one?
Somebody once said that living with the male libido is ‘like being chained to a madman’. Thus, the incarnating Mind has a tough challenge ahead, as many of us know, trying to impose self-control over powerful emotional urges and demands.
This pattern would fit perfectly with the Karmic view of life and Man’s struggle towards perfect autonomy, being finally able to shake off all worldly temptations. Our outer monkey, like Satan before him, is thus our friend, who provides the resistance against which we test and develop our own inner purpose, will, patience, courage and persistence.
As an aid to this end, monks choose celibacy, while religions urge us to ‘sacrifice’ the animal pleasures of the physical world in order to further develop the lasting joy of Higher priorities, though they rarely explain it in ways that make sense to people like me. Check back to Chapter 19a for some thoughts on the dual brain system.
D+ says that our bodies apparently evolved from apes; but we, the inhabitants of the ape body, did not, at least not in the Darwinian sense. D+ allows a new perspective on the age-old philosophical issue of ‘monism’ vs ‘dualism’. Is Man a single ‘mindbody’, or a dual ‘mind + body’? People have come to blows over this. But surely, it just depends on how you look at it? Yes, he is clearly mindbody at the day-to-day Wet Fish Test level, but when the body dies, Man (as Mind) does not.
§ Let’s remember that Materialism insists that Life, Mind and Consciousness arose as by-products of mindless chemicals binding together, by chance, at odds of countless googolplexes to one against. These odds seem to be acceptable to Materialist Scientists who would never dream of entering a lottery at odds of a mere 14,000,000 to 1. Of course, if an event never happened then it is nonsense to ascribe odds for or against it ‘happening by chance’. The way to get rid of all those billions/trillions/gazillions of embarrassing zeroes is to accept that Life ‘never happened by chance’. Idealist logic requires this.
Materialists can explain something of the astonishing intricacy of the neuro-sensory system’s electrochemical processes, but not the personal sensation of the perfume of jasmine, the frisson of velvet, the elevating power of Miserere, or the sheer brilliant redness of vermilion.
§ And what about the existence of scientific Laws? If the Big Bang produced a bland super-plasmic yotta-flux of energy-goo, how did Law spontaneously create itself from this mess? [Yotta: the largest current metric unit: it equals 1024, or one septillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.] By what principle might Law create itself spontaneously from no-law? It’s the same paradox as ‘Life from non-life’ all over again. By contrast, a universe created by Mind, for a purpose, does not present a problem in principle here (cf Darwin himself requiring a ‘Creator’ to form the Laws, quoted in Chapter 3).
§ Further proof that colour does not come to us from the mechanical senses (eyes) is that we can remember a red balloon, in all its redness when no balloon is physically present. We can also make up a pink and purple striped zebra, such as does not appear to actually trot up and down the Serengeti. Colour comes from the Mind. This, I understand, is a fact already accepted by science.
Materialists also cannot explain how the visual process (see Chapter 19b) results in perception of a world ‘out there’. Neither can they explain the formation, storage and recollection of memory; or the cellular memory of organ transplants; or hypnosis or Intuition. But if we substitute Idealism and the Yogic/Esoteric Understanding that Mind lies behind everything, we can at least begin to explain all these phenomena. We can also cautiously add telepathy, levitation, ghosts, mediumship and channelling, clairvoyance, psychometry, Near Death Experiences, Out Of Body Experiences, voodoo, possession, obsession, sudden religious conversion, angels, shamanism, sorcery, ‘spiritual’ healing, the placebo effect, poltergeists, invisible friends, idiots savants, dowsing, exorcism, hauntings, stigmata, psychokinesis, inspiration, infant prodigies, the Ouija board, apparitions, deathbed conversions, automatic writing, prayer, curses, witch doctors, ‘death-greetings’, visions (as in the well-documented case at Fatima in Portugal in 1917), phantom limbs, hallucinations, bilocation, meditation, and many other ‘supernatural’ phenomena.
§ Stalin dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 1931. As soon as the USSR collapsed, planning started. The re-build took just six years. A million Muscovites contributed to the building fund. The urge to religion will not go away. Post-Maoist China is discovering the same thing.
(Freud called the ‘instinct to religion’ ‘a delusion’. As he had no proof of this, one might equally suggest that the ‘instinct to atheism’ is also a delusion.)
If evolution is primarily about Mind rather than body, what does this imply?
Straight away, it implies that ‘death’ is not what everyone’s so frightened of. It’s simply a matter of dropping the monkey-suit and moving ‘through the veil’, as the occultists put it, to the world we originally incarnated from.
§ A little innocent fun may be had with an atheist around this point. Something like this: ‘Well, sir, it seems that I expect an afterlife and you do not. Must we not then assume, sir, that one of us will be in for a surprise upon our demise?’ The atheist may not think carefully enough before he replies.
Another implication is that we can now accept the idea of teleology, which is another hopeless problem for Materialists. ‘Teleology’ just means ‘having an end or target in view’, and is closely linked to ‘intention’ and ‘purpose’. For a Materialist, there can be no question of evolution having any end target in sight, or for Man being ‘perfectible’ as he is just a random accident of slimy goings-on. This leads once again to paradox, as Materialists constantly require animals to do x and y ‘in order to pass on their genes’. But dumb animals don’t know what genes are. The phrase ‘in order to’ means purpose is involved, but animals don’t have that kind of purpose. How could they?
For Idealism however, man’s perfectibility has always been on the cards. DarwinPlus + the Yogic/Esoteric Understanding absolutely supports the notion that Man has an agenda, implemented via free will, and mediated by the Law of Karma. Hence, we can accept our own inner promptings that ‘Surely there must be some point to all this?’.
§ But please don’t make any dogmatic assumptions about what this ‘must’ mean. All it means here is what it says here. No more.**
And if we take D+ to its logical extension, that everything is mentally evolving (a claim central to Yoga: everything, from atom to Man and beyond, including all those entities I discovered in the Bible, Koran etc, even the stroppy ones) then we no longer have any problem with the strangely (sub-?) intelligent behaviours of animals and even of plants.
We might suggest that the power behind the genome inhabits the Other world, acting as a sort of collective mind or archetype for both the species in general and the individual in particular. This power might decide which genes are switched on/off, and when, while the human body develops from a single fertilised egg to scores of trillions of cells, of some 250 different types, from blood to bone, each final soma ending up with ten digits and two eyes, and not the other way round. The cause of gene-switching is a real headache for Materialists, as we don’t seem to have enough genes to do the job, never mind the problem of how purely chemical genes are able to coherently switch themselves on and off as they are incapable of organising anything at all because they lack all mental capacity (but see ‘epigenetics’ in Chapter 22).
§ Switching a gene on or off would be simple for the sort of SuperMind we are considering here. In fact, gene-switching would seem to be an elegant solution to the engineering problem of ‘How can we subtly tailor an off the peg monkey-suit to suit a particular incoming karmic need?’ The implications of this are interesting.
As a remarkable example of what gene-switching can achieve in terms of ‘simple’ anatomy, consider the transformation of egg to caterpillar to pupa to butterfly. Four entirely different physical forms derived from just one set of genes/DNA. How does that work? What decides which genes to switch, and when?
Another example: a mutant form of the Drosophila fruit fly beloved of biological researchers, is born eyeless, and has even lost the gene associated with eye-forming. But if allowed to breed among themselves for a few generations some eyeless flies are eventually born with eyes. How are the genes being manipulated? And by what? Similarly, if yeast is mutated to prevent growth, the yeast re-mutates itself to allow growth again. By what force and what process?
We learn by integrating (via Intuition, I suggest) new information arriving from the senses with our Understanding derived from previous experience. Our greatest ally here is ‘awareness’. The more aware we are of our surroundings the less harm we will come to, and in traditional Darwinian terms, the more likely we are to survive to breed, etc. ‘Awareness’ is very close to ‘intelligence’.
DarwinPlus (D+) in action: evolving by becoming smarter, via awareness, challenge, free will, and choice: via the Mind, and for the Mind.
An aware animal, too, is more likely to survive. This applies as much to predator as prey….
In other words, we might say that experience-integrated-via-Intuition is the vector of Evolution.
This is remarkably similar to Karmic theory: that we humans advance via how we choose to respond to challenges. Animals have (limited) choice as well. Freeze or flee? for example.
Runner beans are smart enough to climb poles. All plants seek light. There can be no thorough Materialist explanation for this sort of behaviour,
§ NB: Analysis and description of a process, even in very great detail, does not count as explanation of its purpose. A robot can strip a Ferrari Priapos to the last washer, but never have any idea of what it’s for: what it is.
…but D+ says it’s just Mind at work, albeit at a lower level than our own. Dung beetles have purpose in their lives. So do bees and termites. We may not understand how they comprehend their purpose but D+ does allow them the intelligence and purpose they clearly exhibit.
§ According to the BBC in May 2011, chimps use ‘at least 66 gestures to communicate with each other’. Purpose in action.
It will also ‘allow’ us to accept that animals have emotions. We know that cows and dogs show affection, so why not bees and termites too? Perhaps bees act in a deliberately self-sacrificial way when they sting in defence of the hive? Many animals co-operate: wolves, chimps, dolphins, lions. Mother love and altruism is well-documented in the animal world. Bower birds and magpies seem to have some aesthetic sense. Materialist neo-darwinists see this behaviour, and every other animal behaviour, only in terms of survival-adaptation and mate-seeking, but DarwinPlus would allow lower creatures a developing aesthetic sense, along with developing love and intelligence. It might even help to explain the thing that even Darwin flinched at: the peacock’s tail. Maybe lady peacocks just like bling?
All creatures, from humans to algae show awareness and discrimination. If they could not discriminate between friend and foe, or food and poison, they would not survive, and thus could not evolve.
§ Obviously an onion cannot choose where it roots; nor can it dodge a marauding onion beetle. But if we think in terms of ‘the collective onion Mind’ (or ‘Deva’ as some occultists would call it; see The Findhorn Garden by the Findhorn Community, or The Magic of Findhorn by Paul Hawken) then some sense may be made of this. Individual onions may ‘survive’ via multiple seeding, as an onion’s identity does not lie with the individual, but with the collective, and the Deva/Mind behind it. The onion has not yet reached the evolutionary level of ‘individuation’**. ‘Losses’ don’t count, as there is no loss: if the seed does not germinate, it provides nourishment for some other creature. There is merely a transference of ‘life-force’ (prana/chi/etc) from one life form to another in the greater economy of Life. As for discrimination, the onion’s roots must seek out compatible elements in the soil. It’s a start.
§ ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’ Charles Darwin in ‘Origins’.
One keeps coming across surprising quotes by Darwin doesn’t one? Why should we be surprised? Has Darwin been misrepresented? Well, yes, and by now I hope it’s obvious by whom.
D+ might also make sense of the recently discovered ‘Flynn Effect’, proposed by Professor James Flynn, of Cambridge and Otago, and recipient of Otago’s Gold Medal for Distinguished Career Research.
Prof Flynn noted in the 1980’s that IQ scores seemed to be going up more or less consistently around the world, at the rate of some 3% per decade, or roughly 10% per generation. This would mean that you are likely to be pretty much one third smarter than your great-grandfather. You may have trouble explaining this to him, of course. The effect has been tested by other experts and seems to be generally held to be true. Perhaps the most surprising element is that it seems to be independent of culture, schooling, or nutrition. So what’s causing it? Nobody seems to know (as opposed to ‘guess’).
A Yogi might nod and smile and say: ‘It is just the wheel of evolution at work. Learning and intelligence that has been earned by the few is slowly diffusing around to the many, possibly via what you call the ‘100th Monkey Syndrome’ or ‘morphic resonance’ as Dr Sheldrake might put it (see Chapter 29). Now please excuse me; I wish to be alone with the universe.’
>>> Read Chapter 21b on 15th December >>>
A Healing?
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
It is an Understanding of esoteric thought that Creations (as in Big Intelligent Bangs) occur as a regular cyclical pattern, each one being imaginable as a Great Wheel (see below: diagram thanks to Cait Russell).
