CopyRight @ 2004
This essay goes from gods to humans to Gods.
This essay is based on the assumption that there is a God.
What is a god? In ways, a god is like science. It is self defining. If a people
call something a god, that's what it is. Since that can and has included rocks, that basic
definition will be skipped. Still, this is a description for humans, so it will be in
human terms.
Humans usually have considered gods to be basically super-humans, such as the
descriptions of Greek Gods. So this description of Gods is a being with greater life,
power, consciousness and wisdom than humans have. All of these attributes need to be
examined.
The term life has usually been a comparison to the extremely mortal state of
humans. The immortality of gods has been everything from a few human life spans all the
way up to a life longer than that of universes and independent of time.
The term power refers to the ability to control all the things that humanity is
unable to control such as weather, earthquakes, plants, animals, the stars, disease, life
and death.
Consciousness might be called awareness or even what is referred to as
clairvoyance. That is essentially an awareness or perception using senses other than
sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste. It also implies that it is awareness at a distance. In terms of gods, this would probably refer to the ability to be aware of what they desire
to know at a distance.
Wisdom and knowledge are more problematic. People who are aware of the value of them tend to also to be aware of the difficulty of putting them to constructive use. All too often it is seen that wisdom and knowledge are overruled by desire, but what then is the use of wisdom and knowledge without a desire our goal. Also, wisdom and knowledge tend to be very limited in human and so only so much about them can be surmised by humans. Wisdom and knowledge are major part of what makes a god.
Archetypes
The next view is of archetypes, starting with Greek Gods and then progressing to current archetypes. Realize, a lot is skipped here. Gods are often a pre-occupation of humans and many must be skipped for brevity, but the important issues will be considered. Archetypes are a great tool of communication, organization and systemization of knowledge.
Greek Gods are notable for their humanness. They embody the power to control that which humans could not, life, death, seasons, stars, earthquakes and other things. They had power, but acted just like humans might if given those powers. That is, quite like juveniles. They were immortal gods of power, but no smarter than humans. The Zoroastans had Gods that were more philosophical and interested in humans. They had more wisdom and knowledge than humans, but there philosophy was quite immature. From there I will jump past many gods of many humans. Their natures and diversity mean nothing but lessons. In passing I will mention the mechanical god in the book Neutronium Alchemist by Peter Hamilton who had almost limitless power and knowledge, but knew it had very limited wisdom. In these same books was a comment about 'affinity', a psychic based communication ability. This is important in the context of this book here, because it allowed for a great deal of cooperation, something fundamental to this book. If I am going to refer to gods of history and literature, I should mention Olaf Stapelton, but only as another brilliant student trying to understand human potential. From there, I will jump to my first destination, Doc E. E. Smith. While the genre of speculative fiction that he wrote is called "space opera" or perhaps comic book science fiction, he made some important points and wrote stories that still have not been surpassed in their scope. The recent television series, Babalon 5 was taken from his stories. If one wants to examine human concepts of gods, his work is a good place to start. Remember, this is used as an archetype, nothing more.
Arisians were beings that had evolved in this universe over billions of years. They had developed to the point where they had no physical bodies. (I read these many years ago and really should check back to see if the author said that they had controlled their evolution consciously, but they were written before there was any real knowledge of genes, mostly before 1940). In any case, they were effectively immortal and lived as long as they desired. They were incredibly able intellectually ("from a glass of water, a truly competent mind should be able to deduce the existence of Niagara Falls". It’s probably a violation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but not an issue with this author). They had great wisdom, but that description is always tough for a human author. They also had great power of various sorts. They did not have a knowledge of the spiritual, which they assumed was something they would encounter after death. While they were what we would call telepathic, the basic model of their existence was still that of individuals.
The next point I would like to touch on is Gaia, a theory originally developed by James Lovelock, a NASA scientist. This is a more recent concept and is that all the biota of a planet work together as a super organism to regulate the ecology of a planet. This concept has been expanded to be a super-consciousness composed of some variation of everything in a planet. On earth, that would be the animals, plants and minerals all linked together, presumably telepathically, into a single super-consciousness. The problem here is not so much the communication method, but the organizational method of that communication to make a single consciousness. How would a decision be made or a conclusion be reached? It would be quite a networking problem. At the same time, this same problem exists in the plurality that is the human mind. The real and important difference to note here from the Arisian archetype is the change from individuality to the aggregate. Arisians worked together, but never lost individual identity... maybe. Still, the point is not to get hung up on the individual identity or singularity of a god.
Human Potentials
While we know almost nothing about what has been generally referred to as psychic abilities, they do seem to exist. (I've always thought it was a problem of complexity and information overload.) Evolutionary theory says that if something is useful to survival, it will be selected for. Still, that all mostly leaves questions rather than answers. I am assuming that something that is effectively telepathy exists, because I have demonstrated it. Surprisingly, I think I have experienced clairvoyance. That is not just perception over distance, but over time as well. Maybe that fits in with Einstein’s point that space and time are not exactly what we think they are and is why I think that psychic phenomena may be a problem of complexity. I have not seen any convincing or even good evidence of telekinesis, that is control of physical objects with the mind, but that would bring up some really interesting issues and it seems there is no reason it couldn't exist. It would relate to the biological issues called Energetics and Resources.
Telepathy is an interesting issue that has often been part of speculative fiction, but consider if telepathy suddenly existed in humans. It would totally disrupt all social systems. As humans are, we could not deal with telepathy.
This book is based on the premise that humans must consciously control and direct their evolutionary genetic development. I think it reasonable, at least on this page, that we should eventually be able to develop the genetic traits needed for telepathy and perhaps clairvoyance. It also seems reasonable that we could select for intellectual capabilities that we presently cannot comprehend. That would go hand in hand with a wisdom that we also certainly do not presently possess and probably couldn't presently comprehend.
Ultimately, and do not fall victim to short sightedness, there seems no reason that humans could not evolve into something like the Arisians. A key question will always arise in any examination like this. Why? Why would anyone do anything like this? This becomes overwhelmingly important at a point. The first answer to this though is to free humanity from the fears, ignorance and frailties we are so subject to. It is well within sight that using artificial selection, we could totally remove disease, frailty and ignorance. All people could have health, beauty and brains (and I do mean that there is a potential for intellectual ability that would be amazing). These seem quite reasonable goals that are easy enough to understand and are little different from many common goals of humanity through history and before. I have often said that loneliness is the commonest ill of humanity. Perhaps that is reason enough to develop telepathy, though I doubt it is really pertinent. Still if you follow this path, it is not hard to see why humanity would choose to develop telepathy and even clairvoyance. If there is a way to develop telekinesis, humans could potentially be freed of the earthly limits that have always defined biological survival, energetics and resources. It seems perhaps we could even put off death greatly (talk about something to adjust to).
There is still something missing here. Besides a major chunk of the pesky Why question, this makes no mention of the spiritual. If the spiritual exists, which I suspect, perhaps it can be found with science, intellect or psychic ability. We would certainly want to explore that and it seems reasonable that, in time, that could be a realm that the descendants of humans could be comfortable in. Still with or without that, humans could achieve many of the attributes of gods. It is best to touch this subject lightly to get fleeting glimpses of what it means, because if you try to grasp an understanding of this, your human limitations will surely slip. Still, there is more to go.
It seems that current knowledge of the universe suggests that this is a rather subjective place where reality is somewhat dependant on the consciousness of the observer. It also seems quite amazing how friendly to life the universe coincidently seems to be. My conclusion is that a species has already done all these things I have hypothesized. They were like humans. They controlled their genetics. They developed the ability to control matter and energy directly. They developed psychic abilities. Very importantly, they developed and solved the problems of the aggregate consciousness of Gaia, at least for one specie. They did this before this time and before this universe existed. Their universe developed randomly in the fullness of time, but they directed the development of this universe. We're still missing that Why thingy.
So assuming that there is a God... oh, you forgot that this was a logical construction, well whatever. Assuming that there is a God and that It (that is the last time I'll use that pronoun because the identity then would be both very feminine and very masculine and probably not it) created the system leading to humans as well as keeps track of humans and manipulates their destiny to His designs and goals, how does this fit with what we have observed in the previous examination of humans in this book? It fits in quite interesting ways. Following the order of the book, the first is just the world and universe that we live in. It's relatively friendly to life. The next thing to look at is genetics. Studying human genetics as I have, seeing the needs and especially the potentials, I am amazed. It's almost as if it was done intentionally. What we are now as tribalists, is nothing compared to what we can become with hybridization of the tribal genetic potentials. To survive to the next ecology, we must make an incredible jump, and the genetic potentials are there to do it. Philosophically and morally we will have huge requirements to survive. Luckily, it seems we have the basis of a morality that is cooperative enough that it could take us to the next ecology and funny thing, the guy that taught it claims that the message came from God. The basic teachings of Jesus, Love God and Love One Another, have almost limitless potential to create a philosophical basis that can solve almost any problem be it social, economic, genetic, psychic and probably spiritual.
Then this leads to another issue, physical death. If there is this being that has been described here, it doesn't seem at all far fetched that we have some spiritual device that is part of or linked to our individual identity. Call it a soul. It might be natural, but it seems more likely to be something artificial created by methods that God learned long ago when exploring the spiritual. When you die, that soul can be connected or re-connected to the aggregate consciousness that is God. Judgment would be on whether you can fit in and cooperate, something that requires learning lessons of love and cooperation. It may imply that God can be diminished or increased. His goal may be to grow. Think of the potential for consciousness and awareness this aggregate would have as well as a bunch of other things attributed to God over the ages. The intellectual and conscious potentials would be incredible for a being that is an aggregate of billions or potentially trillions of sentient beings.
Something interesting comes from this. If psychic phenomena are related to the spiritual, God may carefully regulate exploration of that. It might explain why it appears that psychic phenomena exist, but study of the psychic seems to not be able to show repeatability (the basis of empirical science). God may be much more interested in humans developing life in terms of biology, genetics, morality and faith, than in terms of spirituality. That is his domain. That is not to say humans cannot learn about psychic phenomena, but that God regulates it. A giant aggregate consciousness with a well developed knowledge of spirituality/faith could well do that.
Hey, I forgot to mention one other thing. There is this interesting question of Why? Why do this. Why do it at all? Why live at all? Oh, and I forgot to mention one other important thing though. Apparently love is all important to making this system cooperative enough to work, but there is another factor that I forgot about. That is Faith. It is more than faith in God or just belief in something that cannot be proven. Faith is the basis of the human survival instinct. It is the conscious choice to live, in good times and in bad, with reason and without. It is the Why. Even God has and needs Faith. It is why it is so important. It is not just faith in God that God wants of us. It is faith, the survival instinct. It is the belief, with no proof, that one should survive.
Well, that's it. Even I know what an ending is. That's more than 33 years of work. There's an interesting point to that. Why would I say it's 33 years of work? This study started with an examination of disease in a changing ecology and progressed by research and reason to this point. I was already focused on it well before I left high school and even then there was a completeness to the concept. That is very hard to explain how that was possible. Many parts of the concept just didn't exist anywhere but in my head then. Many of them certainly exist now. Well, it didn't strike me at the time because how could I have known when I started or what I was starting, but I do remember one time being more baffled than usual by some events. I said to myself that I would pay any price to understand how or why people acted the way they did. It was almost as if I heard someone say "ok". If this description of God is correct, it could explain the events. This whole concept is one large integrated meme. I have no more reasonable explanation for where I got this whole idea than to guess that God gave me the meme because he wanted me to put it into word. I figure that it doesn't really matter one way or another. The genetic and moral information will be necessary for human survival whether I or someone else comes up with them. The parts are continually being discribed by mainstream researchers. It is their time. I'm not extremely religious anyway, but I am moral enough to work intensely for human survival. It's just my way. If this meme is from God, he will be able to make sure that it finds where it is to be used. Another way for it to be judged, is whether it is integral or not. There will be missing parts and probably even errors, but if it is a meme the meaning will transcend my words.
This is a translation of a meme I was given. Do not be fooled by its simplicity. That is my own. This is what I say and is limited. Combined with the previous chapter, a human perspective of God, it can make sense.
Enjoy.