That is not such a silly question as you might think. If the ONLY wish of EVERYONE was for all things to come right, then I am absolutely certain that we would enter a golden age. It requires ABSOLUTE SURRENDER to the common good. This does not mean making the other person good, but on making oneself good. Politics is about making other people good, and religion is about making oneself good (but as we all know, religion has a habit of wandering into politics). Richard Dawkins is wrong to attack religion as the source of all evil. He should be attacking the wandering of religion into politics as the true cause.
Of course, zombie motivation pivots on 'getting what one wants' regardless of the common good. One cannot blame zombies for this. It is the essential mechanical tropism which has pulled, apparently by magic, good bodies out of the primal sludge. We call it evolution.
From a zombie point of view, consciousness has absolutely no useful purpose. It simply interferes with normal, selfish, zombie functioning.
Yet we who know existence also know this: without consciousness, the whole physical universe might just as well not be there.
What would be the use of a multifarious, complex, orderly universe, held like a hologram in the midst of infinite space and infinite time, if nobody knew it existed?
Now consciousness is in the picture, we need no longer be chained to the slavery of mechanical selfishness. Using our beam of consciousness, we can illuminate matter and chisel our local chunk of inchoate stone into a beautiful sculpture that comes alive.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Friday, 11 February 2011
Dream and Creation
Creation is not a single act; it is a continuous process. Everything has to be sustained, held in existence.
When we go to sleep and dream, everything can seem very real, especially if love, hatred, or fear comes into it. When we wake up we may feel foolish for having believed so deeply in the reality of what we just experienced. If you have ever dreamt, as I have, that you went to sleep inside the dream and dreamed a dream within the dream, then you may wonder if you comprehended the nature of waking up correctly. What if this is a dream? Is there an infinite series of wakings up? Will we go on waking up from different layers of dream for ever?
So what is so specially real about what we so smugly call 'the real world'? Well, you say, everything's much more consistent than in a dream. If you put something down on the table, it stays there if nobody moves it, until tomorrow. Then what about pain? If you have a really bad toothache, there is no way that you can see that as a dream. Sex, of course, seems pretty real (more on this later).
But what if dreams use different tricks on each level? What if pain, sex and consistency are unique to our level? There are hints of these even in sleep, but 'waking' life certainly has the edge.
And if we are dreaming now, whose dream is it? Yours or mine? Solipsism is a real danger here, but solipsism is not rational (as I have said before) because even my own liver is 'other' and the dreams I have when I go to bed are almost completely out of my control - I can hardly claim a right to talk about 'my' dream: I don't even know what is going to happen next. If you can do 'lucid dreaming' you might have a little more claim to being lord and master of it all, but even then, the fabric of the dream is provided for you.
There is even more 'otherness' in waking life. That is what makes creation on our level so beautiful: we can experience OTHERS, we have company and we are not alone. We know that the source is 'OTHER', and yet always present and close (holding us in existence). The things which we sometimes think should not exist, like enemies and pain, are the very things which compel us to accept and believe in the reality of otherness.
When we go to sleep and dream, everything can seem very real, especially if love, hatred, or fear comes into it. When we wake up we may feel foolish for having believed so deeply in the reality of what we just experienced. If you have ever dreamt, as I have, that you went to sleep inside the dream and dreamed a dream within the dream, then you may wonder if you comprehended the nature of waking up correctly. What if this is a dream? Is there an infinite series of wakings up? Will we go on waking up from different layers of dream for ever?
So what is so specially real about what we so smugly call 'the real world'? Well, you say, everything's much more consistent than in a dream. If you put something down on the table, it stays there if nobody moves it, until tomorrow. Then what about pain? If you have a really bad toothache, there is no way that you can see that as a dream. Sex, of course, seems pretty real (more on this later).
But what if dreams use different tricks on each level? What if pain, sex and consistency are unique to our level? There are hints of these even in sleep, but 'waking' life certainly has the edge.
And if we are dreaming now, whose dream is it? Yours or mine? Solipsism is a real danger here, but solipsism is not rational (as I have said before) because even my own liver is 'other' and the dreams I have when I go to bed are almost completely out of my control - I can hardly claim a right to talk about 'my' dream: I don't even know what is going to happen next. If you can do 'lucid dreaming' you might have a little more claim to being lord and master of it all, but even then, the fabric of the dream is provided for you.
There is even more 'otherness' in waking life. That is what makes creation on our level so beautiful: we can experience OTHERS, we have company and we are not alone. We know that the source is 'OTHER', and yet always present and close (holding us in existence). The things which we sometimes think should not exist, like enemies and pain, are the very things which compel us to accept and believe in the reality of otherness.
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