Other Implications of DarwinPlus (D+)
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Theories have four stages of acceptance
• This is worthless nonsense
• This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view
• This is true but quite unimportant
• I always said so.
JBS Haldane
Religion cannot be opposed to the intellect
Tolstoy
The less we believe, the more we are likely to discover
Chris Affing
My greatest headache in writing this book has been the problem of where to put what. So much of the material over-laps that I rarely feel satisfied with my placements. There are gaps in the flow, for which I apologise, and also some repetitions, for which I also apologise but less so, as it is often necessary to repeat a notion to establish its connection with another thread. Also, a bit of repetition helps a ‘new’ idea to integrate.
If I have explained DarwinPlus (D+) clearly,
§ Just to be sure….! ‘DarwinPlus (D+)’ claims that evolution is ultimately about Mind and not Matter, (based on the logical necessity that Mind must have preceded Matter, in absolute contrast to Materialism which claims that Matter created Mind.).
it may have struck you that this is a paradigm that will affect not only science, but the whole of society, as we and all our institutions, from the law to education, politics, criminology, economics, commerce, the arts etc, have all been thoroughly drenched in Materialism for so long (a score of decades) that it is considered normal.
So ‘normal’ in fact, that nobody even knows it’s there. I had to dig deep to discover its existence and how powerfully it imprisons our society. If a person or institution doesn’t know of this imprisonment, he, she, or it is likely to react to a liberating idea with incomprehension, disbelief, and scorn, in that order. I know… I’ve witnessed this process at first hand, even among intelligent people, when trying to explain the essence of this book. But liberation will come as logic and (relative) Truth, will eventually out.
What eventual effect will D+ have on our institutions? I suggest….
Religion
I suspect the answer will be ‘very little’ in the short term as people tend to become (fearfully?) fixated on Beliefs and see disagreement as heresy, rather than a chance to expand the Mind via the process of considered examination.
One problem for Religion is that its adherents ‘know’ that their Truth is the Eternal Truth. Thus, if it is eternal, it can not be changed. And they have a point, if their premiss is correct.
But if their premiss is only partially correct (as most premisses are), then there is what theologians call ‘wriggle-room’.
The key here is the basic principle of D+: that Man is evolving mentally.
Thus more ‘occult’ aspects of the Truth may be gradually revealed. Thus Religions can or must evolve and develop, to keep pace with Man’s own mental progress. The Desert Religions (which favour emotional Belief over mental Understanding) are not yet doing this, if indeed they are capable, which is why attendances are falling in the C of E for example, while Buddhist groups are growing. Buddhism speaks more to the Mind and Understanding than Christianity does, and Man (in Europe, say) is now ready for this.
Many C21 people feel both the ‘urge to religion’ and militant atheism unconvincing, or are simply more open to new expressions of ideas than their grandparents. I hope D+ will interest them, as it predicts a gradual move towards One Religion-Philosophy.
D+ accepts physical (somatic/body) evolution as a plausible fact, but does not regard this as terribly important, as the real issue is evolution of the Mind.. the Inner Man… the Ghost in the Machine… the ‘I’ and its awareness. The religiously inclined may be happy with this perspective on evolution.
DarwinPlus rejects the idea that Man ‘is’ an ape.
His body may be but he is not.
D+ also insists that, as Mind lies behind the universe, Man must, as religions have always claimed, live and breathe and have his being within that Mind, as there is literally nowhere else to be, live, breathe, etc.
§ I’m avoiding the word ‘God’ here, as it has so many dogmatic associations. Is there a ‘personal God’, as Belief-religions claim? Esoteric Philosophy is clear that intelligent beings on all levels are keen to help each other along the mental-ethical evolutionary path, and that there is an unknowable Ultimate Creator behind the whole set-up. With this in mind, we might make some sense of angelic support, visions, and the huge variety of positive paranormal contact that has been consistently reported for centuries.
What of Creationism, so called?
It’s not easy to make sense of the ‘debate’ between Religion and Science as it is often conducted via abuse or sneering, shouted through a megaphone, or a gigaphone if available. This is because both parties are absolutely convinced of their own self-righteousness, a condition that is never conducive to reasoned discussion.
§ ‘Great minds doubt; lesser minds spout.’ Chris Affing
D+ suggests that the problem lies in the unexamined dogma that both parties have lumbered themselves with. If they took time to check, they would see that there is no huge difference between their positions, if they drop the dogmas. Broadly, Science should drop Materialism in favour of logic; and Religion should get back to basics: ie, an Understanding
- that there is a Higher and benevolent Mind behind the universe and
- that the Golden Rule is a rational derivative and requirement of this.
§ The Golden Rule, of ‘Treat others as you would like them to treat you’ is central to Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, Taoism, and every other religious ism I’ve come across, including Paganism and Humanism. Confucius and Socrates were very keen on it too.
Everything else can be dumped, as toxic residue. What might a dedicated Muslim and an enthusiastic Christian have to squabble about if they accept these two basic principles, common to both religions, and dump the rest, or at least not wave dogma at each other as ‘proof’ of something that cannot be proved in such a way, and which is ultimately irrelevant anyway?
§ In medieval times, people got excited over such issues as Was Jesus the Son of God or only partly the Son of God? Or both God and Man? Or a sort of temporary manifestation that Tibetan lamas might call a ‘tulpa’? Or…..
Clearly, there could be no answer to such pedantic nit-picking until Man gained access to panmentia. And bearing in mind the fact that Christian doctrine holds that The One created The All… do any of those disputes have any point to them at all?
We seem to be less worried about such things these days, but other petty squabbles have replaced them, causing schisms and actual brawls amongst the ‘holy men’ of Jerusalem. Believe it or not, there is a ladder propped up against a wall of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that has been there since 1852 because the various Men of (the same) God can’t decide whose duty (or right?) it is to move it. Such disputes are simply a question of vanity versus arrogance.
Was Jesus a prophet or a Son of God? Was Muhammad the last prophet? It doesn’t matter. What does matter is their essential common message, and how we choose to act upon it. That’s it.
§ Please refer back to Chapter 12 if it seems important (The Koran thunders on about the need to choose to be nice; Jesus asks, rather more gently, exactly the same thing).
If religions can raise their eyes from their graven (or printed or chanted) images for a moment, and instead spend their energies on practising the Golden Rule, then Peace on Earth can be achieved overnight, through simple good manners, consideration, and kindness. The New Jerusalem, and Heaven on Earth, may thus be fulfilled, as soon as we… choose. We just need to remember that religion is a means and not an end.
§ I can hear your hysterical laughter from here. When did a zealot (or a bigot) ever drop a dogma? It’s the only thing they have to hang on to in their fearful lives. But some brave and thoughtful people will recognise the logic, and some of them will act upon it. That’s the best outcome possible. The world has always changed one person at a time, and always will, if each us is in charge of his own destiny.
‘Creationism’ covers a broad spread of Beliefs, but I hope D+ might help some Believers to realise that nothing is lost by admitting that not every word in the Bible is literally true.
All that matters for Christians is Jesus’s central message of
‘Choose To Be Nice To Each Other’.
That really is all that matters. It’s OK to accept that you can’t reconcile ‘an eye for an eye’ with ‘turn the other cheek’. It doesn’t matter.
§ But if you are a Christian it’s the New Testament ‘turn the other cheek’ which counts.
‘An eye for an eye’ is pre-Christian, and designed for more savage times.
And you don’t need to agonise over all the other contradictions in the Good Book. As just one example: if Adam and Eve were the first man and woman, how could their sole surviving child, Cain, have gone off to marry and found a city? Who could have been his wife? And a whole new city would require incest on well.. a ‘biblical scale’, would it not?
Something has gone awry at some point in the copying/translating/editing process (of which there was a huge amount in the development of the Bible; also heroic amounts of blatant forgery) in order to produce such a strange bit of script. But IT DOESN’T MATTER! Believing every word of the Bible has nothing to do with being a good Christian.
Christian is as Christian does…
..and that means following the Golden Rule… which means ‘taking up your cross’ and bearing the pain of self-responsibility, and abandoning revenge and selfishness of all sorts…. tolerating the prats and bigots (who are just people like you and me, struggling with their own karmic burden the best they know how; think of them as ‘karmic guides’, come to help you learn patience!)…. you get the drift…. And Bible-thumping is just a distraction.
§ There is a wonderful French proverb which should be stencilled on the forehead of every self-righteous bigot in the land: ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’. It translates as ‘To understand all is to forgive all’.
And it doesn’t matter that we now think that Genesis was written by three authors. One of them refers to God as ‘Yahweh’ (‘He Who Is’), and another as ‘Elohim’… which is a plural word, technically meaning ‘gods’. Mysteries here!.. but they do not need to concern a person of religion, whose sole purpose should be an ethical one. A person of religion needs only the Golden Rule and a purpose for the Golden Rule. D+ recognises this purpose and explains it (…’that we are all mentally evolving towards ever greater personal power, autonomy and awareness; and we are ultimately all aspects of One Supreme Ethical Being’.)
§ Remember Chapter 4 and the alternative translations for ‘Our Father…’?
Those alternatives tally well with DarwinPlus. I’m thinking of such concepts as ‘resonance’, as per:
‘If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration’ – Nikola Tesla
Perhaps one day someone will re-translate the Bible. If I had the money I’d fund them myself.
I hope D+ will help Believers of all sorts to regain some of their confidence which must have taken a battering over the past few decades of assault by noisy Skeptics and Fundamentalist Atheists.
I suspect that many ‘biblical fundamentalists’ know full well that every word of the Bible cannot be literal truth, and that many of the stories are metaphors to encourage the practice of the simple Golden Rule.
But when you are assaulted by huge institutions like Big Science, and its popularisers, the Big Media, and its unquestioning fans, like comedians, government, Big Business, novelists, Hollywood, the pop music world, pornographers, economists, columnists… it must surely generate a Back to the Wall mentality. The Alamo! Dunkirk! Stalingrad! We must take an absolute stand against the anti-Christ!
This is an understandable position, but it is, I think, based on fear and ignorance, which is not a good place to be. And most of this fear (and the ignorance) derives from priesthoods, not the message of Jesus.
D+ could help here, as I hope it shows that the Skeptics are simply factually wrong in their dogmatic Beliefs. Once Science accepts the principle of D+ the noisy Skeptics will begin thinking for themselves for the first time and stop the abuse.
A couple of points:
Darwin and Wallace’s ‘law’ of speciation via Natural Selection is not a Law proper, but a mass observation of Cause and Effect in operation: suitable environment leads to survival; unsuitable environment leads to extinction. Darwin knew he needed a Creator. He was not an atheist, and thus not a Materialist. Wallace investigated mediumship and ‘The Other World’. He was not a Materialist.
D+ supports them, declaring that evolution is the (teleological) purpose of life: but on a vaster scale than Darwin (but not necessarily Wallace) imagined (‘Ye are Gods…’ John 10:34). Mind.. Mind.. Mind.. upwards and onwards….
So I hope ‘Creationists’ might now be able to relax a bit, and admit that ‘evolution’ might actually be acceptable.
‘Evolution’ (as in ‘DarwinPlus’) does not mean Man is a monkey.
And I hope that scientists will admit that ‘Creationism’ is a quite separate issue from ‘Intelligent Design’. Each should be treated separately.
DarwinPlus agrees with Darwin that there must have been a Creation of some sort. Whether it happened precisely according to (our present translations of) the biblical version(s) is a separate issue. Some things are just unknowable this side of panmentia.
All the Designs of the universe and our own bodies are the Effect of Intelligent Cause, as Mind lies behind all forms and apparent realities.
While we’re at it, how do you understand the word ‘apocalypse’? Chaos and destruction? Mayhem? Aircraft carriers belly-flopping onto the White House? At least masses of fire and brimstone, surely?
No. The word actually means the gentle act of ‘unveiling’ or ‘revelation’ (from the Greek ‘kalyptein’ ‘to cover’).
§ The book of Revelation was originally called Apocalypse but, I was surprised to find, the word ‘apocalypse’ does not appear anywhere in the Bible.
This struck me as another extraordinary coincidence of ‘unveiling’. Remember the Yogic/Esoteric mention of the ‘veil’ that separates This world from the Other? And how bad LSD trips or occult experiments can lead to a weakening of this veil and frightening ‘psychic’ (Astral) experiences? And remember Dr Wickland treating scores of schizophrenics/psychotics as people possessed (ie, as people with weakened veils who have been elbowed aside by discarnate selfish people)?
What was most shocking to me when I first came across this was how our aggressive culture has distorted the original gentle apocalyptic act of unveiling a hidden (occult) Truth into
The End of the Goddam World!!
in Hollywood Orange flames and the smell of napalm in the morning.
§ Yes.. alright… the biblical Revelation set the trend…It’s not all Hollywood!
***
Established Religions have become such enormous and self-satisfied edifices that very little extra light will quickly penetrate them. The papal legates refused to look through Galileo’s telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter for themselves. ‘We know the truth; don’t go bringing facts into it.’ And poor old Bruno had been quite literally ‘a candidate for burning’. Things have changed, but only a little. Better is that the possibility of change has improved a little too.
§ The fastest growing sect in the world is Pentecostalism, which lays great store on people being taken over by the ‘Holy Spirit’, and perhaps ‘speaking in tongues’ and convulsing on the floor. This it shares with voodoo, which claims the possession is by gods. Note the word ‘possession’.
The ‘Alpha Course’ in Christianity is also keen on people ‘speaking in tongues’, without explaining why this is a good thing. D+ suspects that speaking gibberish and rolling on the floor has little to do with God and has more to do with weakening the protective veil and letting the riff-raff in. Or maybe God really does move in mysterious ways….?
A point of interest: every Christian ‘heresy’ I’ve come across, eg, Docetism, Arianism, Pelagianism and Gnosticism can all be accommodated within the D+ model…. but this book is already long enough.
Ethics
What is ‘evil’? The answer is very simple, according to DarwinPlus. Evil is caused by people not following the Golden Rule. Look at this list of offences, which go from the trivial to the ghastly and ask ‘Which of these acts are ‘evil’? And ‘At what point does ‘evil’ arise in this list?’
Not replying to an invitation
Keeping someone waiting
Dropping litter
Spitting
Vandalism
Speeding
Bullying
Robbery
Theft
Rape
Paedophilia
Murder
Terrorism
Genocide
DarwinPlus says ‘evil’ lies in all of these acts, in that they are all selfish.
‘Evil’ is selfishness.
If this is an idea new to you, try applying ‘selfish’ to any item on the list.
Not replying to an invitation is selfish. The sender might be depending upon a response from you, as part of a chain reaction, possibly involving a dozen or a hundred people. By ignoring the invitation you might be inconveniencing, or even harming them.
Keeping someone waiting says clearly ‘I’m more important than you are’.
Speeding: my desire to go fast (for whatever reason) matters more than the safety of you or your children.
Rape: my animal urges matter more than your right to consent.
And so on… right down to the abyss of terrorism and genocide: MY Beliefs and my utterly selfish desire for ‘Paradise’/World Domination, or my Aryan/tribal/religious/racist fantasy, matters much much more than your right to even exist.
Philosophy
You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in
Oliver Edwards
Western philosophy seems to be a sort of academic bull run, in which originality is all, even if one’s writings are incomprehensible to many people (especially me, obviously). While wrestling with Hegel I came across a Tibetan proverb: ‘It is possible to be so clever that you miss the point entirely’. Oriental irony? But the more I struggled with the great thinkers, the more the proverb came back to me as having literal truth to it; rather like our own version of ‘being too clever by half’.
Then another penny dropped: as there can be only one Ultimate Truth, then what matters is knowing how to access it, rather than getting bogged down in inadequate arguments for or against one inadequately sourced argument or another. Short of panmentia, all such discussion was bound to slide into humbug or vanity, or both. Or more likely, gook.
The backbone of the Yogic/Esoteric Understanding is very simple:
There is only one Philosophy.
It truly is possible to be so clever you can’t see the wood for the trees, meaning that the endless distractions and conceits of the world of Lower Mind obscure the Singularity of the world of Higher Mind.
§ I’m reminded of the Big-endians and Little-endians in Gulliver’s Travels who killed each other in the thousands over the vital issue of whether one should knock the top off the big end or the little end of the breakfast egg.
The Idealist/Yogic/Esoteric/DarwinPlus philosophy brings back the self-responsibility that Materialism abandoned on our behalf, which is bad news for all those who think that sex, drugs, profits, and rock ‘n’ roll is all there is, so self-indulgent bingeing and trashing of the Earth is OK, as quite literally ‘Who cares?’ And what possible reason could there be for caring? More on the appalling effect of Materialism on society later.
If D+ is correct, we will one day see professional philosophers move from the bottom-curve of individuality, to the upcurve of synthesis/unity (see the diagram in Chapter 21a) because, when you think about it, ‘originality’ is absolutely no guarantee of Truth, but is definitely a guarantee of confusion.
Other Implications of DarwinPlus (D+)
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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one
Albert Einstein
Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like
Lao Tzu
Do you think these predictions are rational and reasonable? If so, please discuss them on the www and with friends.