Illusion And Elysium (1)
Rube

 


The idea that the ‘soul’ is immortal is not a new one.
In ancient Egypt, one of the earliest large civilizations on the planet, the Pharaohs were obsessed with living forever. They were born in the highest class of society and were rich with wealth that was beyond the most extravagant dreams of people, even of modern times. They had a luxurious life free of work, they were adorned with expensive gold and jewel encrusted festoonery, commanded armies and personal servants. They were considered ‘God Kings’ by themselves and supposedly their people. But of course the Pharaohs were not ‘stupid’ in knowing what was of ‘real’ value. Forget Gold, power, sex and luxurious food, all this blessed fortune they realized, was superficial. Being ‘God Kings’ – ‘related to God’, to the Pharaohs meant that God would take them to a Paradise in the afterlife, to never ‘die’. You see, the Pharaohs, with all their wealth understood that nothing could ever really be ‘worth’ anything to them unless they could somehow exist eternally to continue to enjoy themselves. (The Fields of Elysium was described as a ‘Paradise’, and so I must assume they didn’t envision hard labour, or a job filing paperwork waiting for them there.)

The Pharaohs believed that the best way for them to prove their worthiness to ‘God’ so that they may join Osiris in the fields of Elysium was to build huge Pyramids that they (and their servants and pets of course, who would be put to death to join them when they died) would be buried in. The Pyramids would facilitate the transportation of their soul or ‘Ankh’ to Elysium where they would then enjoy an eternity in the afterlife. The Pharaohs of Egypt believed that they were born as kings because ‘God’ had ordained it to be so, just as many modern people believe ‘God’ has gifted them with the talent to sing pretty songs, paint nice pictures or survive a plane crash. The reasoning behind this is that if ‘God’ didn’t think they were better than everyone else, then why were they born to royalty, destined to be king? The logic was that slaves were born as slaves and would be treated as slaves throughout their life because if they weren’t meant to be slaves, ‘God’ would have made them born kings as well. (Strangely, many modern people are unable or unwilling to provide a more reasonable explanation, choosing to rather sing the refrain ‘God has a plan for us all’, of which I’m sure there was an ancient Egyptian equivalent.)

We as modern humans know that this is absolutely false; if there were such a thing as ‘God’, we can see that he does not choose who gets born where, and no person is inherently ‘born better’ than anybody else. We know that ‘God’ does not favour one nation over another nation and we all agree that the idea of building a huge pyramid to impress ‘God’ so that one might be guaranteed a place in heaven is ridiculous. Moreover, the idea that a person would apparently single-handedly choose to sentence multiple generations of whole populations of people to a life of never-ending work as slaves to build these monstrous, pointless constructions not intended to help the general population in any way is a crime against humanity of a proportion that towers over any natural disaster in history.

Modern humans of course applaud and marvel at the ancient Egyptians for their ingenuity in building the pyramids, and many believe that the Egyptians knew more about life and the universe than our modern scientists. These people search and hope for some secret in the pyramids that will allow us to contact aliens or grant us supernatural powers and don’t think it was wrong to enslave millions so that a handful of megalomaniac psychopaths would be able to ‘get to heaven’. Other ‘Ancient Egyptian apologists’ purport that the ‘workers’ weren’t slaves at all, and point out that they had communities to live and sleep in, and also that they believed that simply by building the pyramids they were also guaranteed a place in heaven.
However, the fact that they needed a place to live, eat and sleep doesn’t mean that they weren’t slaves in a broader but no less significant sense; it just means that they needed to eat, live and sleep – they were human after all – even prisoners of war in concentration camps have to sleep and eat, but this does not make them equal to their captors. The idea that they would ‘get the same chance to get to heaven’ as the Pharaohs is interesting and compelling, however that idea completely undermines the reason why the Pharaohs felt they had to build the Pyramids in the first place; if the slaves could get to heaven without being entombed in a giant Pyramid then why do the Pharaohs need to be? What we know about the Egyptians is that their culture and way of life did not survive and is wholly incompatible with our modern worldview which has naturally and rightfully – I would argue inevitably – evolved to hold the idea of ‘equal rights of man’ in a place of primary importance in deciding how we exist as individuals, societies, nations and the entire human world.

The Christian revolution is unique in a few aspects that most people choose to ignore. It was a ‘revolution’ in that it was not about one person – Jesus, or Moses or John the Baptist who was also executed but less celebrated, challenged the national religion and irrevocably intertwined system of rule at the time which we know was another rigidly class-defined system of control, designed by the ruling class to subjugate the proletariat and systematically undermine any organized revolt that challenged the existing class system. The movements revolutionary ideas, one of which was that all men are equal under ‘God’ regardless of class, race and gender was so attractive to a significant enough number of the population and so abhorrent to the ruling class that he and the ‘Christian movement’ (What it was called at the time we don’t know) was seen as so serious a threat to the status quo then represented by Jesus, that the rulers put a price on his head. Almost immediately he was surrendered by his own colleagues to the authorities who then tortured and put him to death just as swiftly. To put it in perspective, after his fatal decision of dedicating his life to working as a human rights activist he managed to survive roughly 3 years before being lawfully executed by the state.

People today actually celebrate his ‘sacrifice’ (his murder is often described in this way to encourage the impression that he chose to sacrifice himself, but his last few statements on Earth are not conducive with this view) believing that his torture and execution guarantee all who pledge allegiance to his ‘God’ will ascend to heaven and live eternally in paradise just like the Pharaohs of Egypt have, but without having to build any pyramids. But from a simple examination of what Jesus did accomplish it is clear that it was to introduce the idea that humans should be treated equally on Earth regardless of age, race, class and gender. He encouraged and counselled people to take care of the sick, the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. He implored people to act civilly in society and not to commit murder, adultery, theft, fraud, extortion, slavery and other anti-social behaviours. He and his group confronted the ruling class peacefully protesting that no man or group should be subject to any form of institutionalized discrimination: What I am pointing out is that from his actions it appears that he was far more concerned with reducing our physical, emotional and psychological suffering as a people on Earth than he was with ensuring ‘good’ people go to heaven. He was put to death, the revolution was skilfully derailed and in a masterful sleight of hand the ruling classes continued their expansion to global domination by eventually adopting the very tenets of the revolt that they had crushed. (It is hard to imagine Jesus riding an Abyssinian horse leading ‘Gods army’ into battle during The Crusades, or stoning women accused of witchcraft, but that is what Christian nations did in the name of his ‘God’. If that sounds too much like ancient history, then you should know that as recently as World War II the Catholic church acted to protect sizable investments in Nazi Germany fearing that the encroaching communist regime of the Bolshevik would raid their coffers in the private bank of the smallest country in the world, that tax-free haven we know as the Vatican City) It would be many hundreds of years later and only after countless hundreds of millions of further lives were destroyed or worse by slavery, colonisation, occupation, invasion, discrimination, persecution and genocide based on race, class and gender that Jesus’s original idea of ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ would come a shade closer to becoming a reality. And each tiny step forward would require more sacrifices, so many that Jesus in some ways represents the suffering and death of millions.

So as we can clearly see, the idea of ‘spiritual immortality’ in any form a does not ensure that people will act fairly or even empathetically to their fellow man, in fact it is often one of the contributing reasons why groups sacrifice human rights in the name of ultimate power, something that has happened in many ways repeatedly throughout history. And many people today don’t believe in any particular religion or sect and still believe in God as a ‘self’ or deity and some form of immortality. ‘Reincarnation’ is a very popular idea amongst people because it seems to be ‘more logical’ than the idea of a final paradisiacal resting place. The basic idea of reincarnation is that every living thing upon death is ‘assigned’ a life which is either an ascent to a ‘higher’ lifeform or descent to a ‘lower’ lifeform, judged by their actions in life. (Naturally humans are considered the ‘highest’ lifeform on earth.) The problem with this fantastic and seductive theory is that we have been studying people and animals for many hundreds of years and there has never been an instance in the observation of any individual animal or animal species be it insect, fish, mammal, bird or reptile where there appears to be some ‘residual memory’ (as is purported possible by past-life regression theorists) occurring in their thinking process or anything supernatural at all that changes their behaviour in any way either positively or negatively. In fact, on observation of how evolution works it is crucial and necessary that upon birth the lifeform knows absolutely nothing and rapidly learns behaviours so that it reacts appropriately to cues from its environment, group and automatic nervous system; any interfering influence (particularly something so random as behaviour learned in a ‘past life’) would be catastrophic to the ‘learning’ process and I imagine be cause for the outcome of an early death.

To those who say that the ‘soul’ has nothing to do with memory and is a simple, invisible and completely undetectable ‘life force’, like an ethereal floating spark I would say firstly that there is a profound lack of evidence for this, but fear that this explanation might be too scientific. For a more touchy-feely answer, I would say that The Universe has infinite potential energy for creating things, it has no need to ‘preserve’ anything but at the same time wastes nothing. The Universe has no need to ‘recycle’ things in a way that preserves their form in any way in fact it is very much the opposite in a spectacular and genuinely ‘amazing’ way; suns do not die and then are stripped down into a tiny invisible spirit form and travel to a new body being created for them; they implode into themselves and explode violently, spewing their radioactive innards across space: they are shattered into unknown billions upon billions of atoms and particles of matter which come to form tiny parts of new planets and minerals – so in a sense yes, nothing ever truly ‘disappears’ but a sun that dies will be gone and never exist ever again for the rest of the whole future of the Universe.
It’s like this quandary: Where does a bubble go when it pops?
We can see the bubble, it is real, floating there in front of us, and then it disappears.
We know that a floating soap bubble, when it pops, is reduced to a spray of soapy water and the air within it is returned to the atmosphere. Nothing is wasted. But the more profound observation we can make is that although we can definitely see and ‘know’ that it is a bubble, we also know at the same time that a bubble is not really a ‘real’ thing in itself, but actually a part of an often much more powerful process that causes bubbles to be created momentarily; for example a child blowing through a plastic bubble-stick, or gas escaping from an underwater vent up to the surface as a bubble. We have given a name to the ‘bubble’ part of the process because it’s the prettiest and most noticeable part of this process; just like other words for things that don’t really ‘exist’ as objects in and of themselves like ‘Sky’ or ‘rainbow’ which are simply the visible part of a mostly invisible process – anyone can see the sky, a rainbow and a bubble, but you could not hope to fully understand it or what causes it to occur by only observing the obvious and visible aspect of the process that we see. And like that bubble, Biological life is too part of one of the many processes of matter and energy in the Universe, but is by no means an important or significantly impactful one to anything other than itself and its own small and delicate environment.

Many people claim that they have first-hand evidence of the ‘soul’. Firstly, they point out that that they themselves exist, and this is enough to prove that they are a spiritual entity existing temporarily in physical form. Pushed for further proof by the plain fact that ‘existing’ is not proof enough that we can exist in spiritual form independent of our body they will claim that they have ‘astral travelled’.
This is another idea for which the time we have for rational consideration of without proof is up. If astral travelling is a reality, then how is it possible that such a talent is not commonplace amongst people? It is no ‘secret technology’ by any stretch of the imagination; we have all heard and read about it, so it is impossible that knowledge of it and techniques to perform it are being suppressed. If astral travel is real, then why is it that we haven’t utilised it to travel to the moon and mars, and rather choose to rather launch giant rocket ships and satellites to observe these and other heavenly bodies? Why don’t any organisation known to man that would be interested in gaining intelligence employ trained astral-travellers to conduct secret spying operations instead of undercover agents who physically put themselves in harms way to gain intelligence? Why has there never in the whole history of the world been a single instance where the use of it once ever influenced any event in any way and why hasn’t anybody who claims to be able to ‘astral travel’ ever proved it – which could be done with any range of extremely simple tests such as astral travelling into a locked room and upon waking correctly describing what is held within? Why do most (and all that I have personally read or heard of) accidental ‘astral travelling experiences’ happen when the subject is in the exact same sleep-state in which they would experience dreams or the very well-known ‘Kanashibari’ – the ‘iron bars’ in Japanese culture, otherwise known as ‘lucid dreams’ or sleep paralysis as it is described in the English across the world? Furthermore we have all had the dream of waking up multiple times and getting dressed to go to work only to realise each time that we are still dreaming. It is no stretch then to assume that we can also dream that we are ‘astral travelling’, can fly if we flap our arms fast enough or are invisible. That such a powerful and supposedly naturally accessible power has remained unproved and wholly unused in all of recorded history is enough for any rational person to accept that astral travelling is nothing more than fanciful imagining, and should be regarded as such until someone can prove otherwise.

Other ridiculous claims of proof of the soul by way of photography or video recording are even more illogical. The idea that our image-capturing devices are better suited than the human eye to pick up ‘otherworldly’ or otherwise invisible entities is a bizarre notion that crept into popular thinking almost the very moment that affordable cameras were made available to the public. It was a fundamental misunderstanding of the capabilities of this mysterious new technology that made people believe that cameras were somehow able to ‘see into another world’ that remarkably still persists to this day. The fact that many people were unaware that photography was and is a technology that is very amenable to doctoring and alteration in all of the various stages involved in producing a photograph allowed for countless hoaxes to be perpetrated on an unsuspecting, gullible or to be more kind, ‘open-minded’ public with increasing frequency.

So with no actual evidence for the existence of the soul or any evidence of any after life, we can look at the resulting idea of ‘God’: This supposed ‘God’ then, is immortal while we are mortal. All things within the Universe, galaxies, suns, planets and creatures ‘exist’ and as a result we as humans know that this also means with definite certainty that in some time in the future, they will ‘not exist’. There will be similar things constantly forming and breaking down, just like them but different.
This ‘Immortal God’ then, would be above the concepts of ‘self’, or ‘being’ – superior to things that merely exist, most certainly any lifeform intelligent enough to contemplate the concept of ‘God’ or ‘being a self’. The word ‘God’ is an inappropriate one to use to attempt to describe such a thing – we realise that what we are trying to describe with a name or term really cannot have a name because it is beyond anything that our language is designed to describe, which are ‘things that exist’. So clearly this thing that we are trying to give a name to is superior to life, death and existence, and therefore technically doesn’t exist in the way we do. All we can say with certainty is that it is ‘the Universe’ – whatever that actually ‘is’ – and it is the only thing that really does exist – it is so superior and so profoundly unchangeable by us that in fact upon consideration of it we understand that in many senses, things like planets and suns, animals and people don’t really exist in any terrible meaningful way at all by comparison. Simply put: Is there is something more powerful than life? You bet. But since you and I and humans can clearly see that we will die and never exist again, it is more reasonable to investigate what it is while we actually exist than to all too simply try and ‘make friends with it’ as if it was a ‘giant human soul’, and hope for it to finally ‘reveal itself’ and explain everything to us when we are dead.


Where do Bubbles go when they pop?

So this leaves us with what at first appears to be a very bleak reality: We are in many senses, just like that bubble; definitely ‘there’ but then rather suddenly we ‘disappear’. We leave traces of being there; our bodies, which are composted back into the earths’ topsoil – it’s what a large part of topsoil is comprised of. But the ‘idea’ of the person is gone! So like the bubble, where did it go? We know there is no soul, so what happened?
Well, like we know that the bubble is ‘there’, but at the same time know that a bubble is actually and more importantly part of a process, what we call the ‘separate self’ which we each experience ourselves and ‘see’ with our eyes to be other separate entities; a plant, a bird, a bee, a monkey, a human being, we know with our minds is not really a separate entity, they are part of a process of a species, usually but not always in a group which involves reproduction, competition and interacting with the environment in ways specific to the particular animal. Different animals have different intelligence and ‘minds’ which are created to serve the functioning of their bodies in their environment. Most mammal minds are furthermore a product of how these types of creatures exist in groups, the human being the most talented at this function, having ‘language’ to further facilitate it. Once a cooperative group develops language, the individuals will develop objective reasoning and a higher, ‘transcendent’ view of relativity that we express to a great degree as humans. Through this objective view of the self we gain a fuller, deeper understanding of amongst many other things time, evolution, the process of life, reproduction and death and we can finally ‘see’ with our minds that the ‘self’ is a naturally occurring illusion of separateness: nothing is really ‘separate’, such a thing cannot be, it cannot exist, yet that is how we persist to believe and explain how we are experiencing reality: as separate, sovereign beings, that mysteriously appear to ‘disappear’ one day. More than simply ‘allowed’ to see this way, we are ‘trained’ to think of ourselves as separate beings, working to meet our own independent ends in the course of ‘our personal lives on Earth’; We attend school so that we may pass our grades, we get an education to get a good job or start a company so that we may afford an expensive house. To us this is ‘normal’, and the only way that we can function as a species. The idea of ‘continued existence after death of the body’ as a ‘soul’ then, makes perfect sense to us and encourages us to think us ourselves as further independent ‘entities’. But the fact is that ‘education’ in all of its many forms is, and always has been actually a vital component in the evolution of human consciousness, and an absolute necessity in any functioning nation-group.

 

 

Go to part:2 

 

 

Copyright © 2015 Rube
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"