Illusion And Elysium (2)
As for the human self, one way to illustrate how the human self is an illusion is to imagine a human being alone from birth to becoming an adult human, which is completely impossible. I would probably describe it best with the following totally impossible, fictional example: Imagine a human baby just ‘appeared’ in the middle of the Ocean, floating on the surface. It doesn’t drown; it just floats on its back peacefully. It has no mother or father to take care of it, but it manages to survive by eating seaweed. It floats for years and years eating seaweed, drinks rainwater and has built up a resistance to the sun. What does it think? How does it think? Would it understand time? Days? Mathematics? Music? Again, it is impossible to know; to conduct such an experiment - to raise a child in complete isolation would be literally inhuman. You can however now reflect to the things you ‘know’. How much of that is actually ‘you’? What would you be like if you experienced nothing, heard, saw, ‘absorbed’ nothing? But you did absorb ‘you’. You learned from interactions - the same interactions that everybody learns from. You might have a ‘visual imagination’ coloured with shapes, colours, you can see Vincent Van Goghs’ vibrant oil paint strokes, Warhol’s prints, Walt Disney. In your mind there is a huge map of ‘people’ that are associated with ideas, music, places, history. It is the map in our brain of reality and it is filled with personalities. So how could the self – particularly and more than any other animal on the planet – the ‘separate’ Human self be anything less than an illusion, something constructed simply to facilitate the individual selves agency to ‘serve the group’, by way of trying to generate success for themselves. The Human self has been so good at group-coordination that he has run over the earth and threatens and causes discomfort to himself and others. That the consciousness necessary for this level of cooperation is self-reflective and objective by nature, it is good that he may restrain himself from his causing his own and others suffering while ‘the group’ continues to strive for permanent, exponential prosperity at all times. So this explains how it can be that these things we know to be so real – the ‘self’ can in fact, despite the strangeness of the idea, ‘just disappear’. It is counterintuitive to be able to contemplate this because it stands in direct contradiction to everything we have ever spent our lives working to achieve. Animals, even the most ‘intelligent’ pack group type animal, probably the Bonobo ape or Chimpanzee have no capacity to contemplate that they themselves will ever die, even though they witness the deaths of others with their own eyes. They do not possess the ability to ‘see into the future’ with the objectivity and with the personal relativity that we can. Our problem is not that we cannot ‘see’ that we will die, our problem is that we could not adequately explain how a self could just ‘disappear’, hence the age old belief from as far back as recorded history that we must be able to somehow ‘go on’ into another world – first a possibility reserved only for those born to highest of high royalty, but which soon became a free reality for all as long as we asked for redemption from a benevolent all-powerful creator. The problem with this notion is that it then introduces the concept of the ‘soul’ – a separate, sovereign entity that as humans, is a perception that is obvious to see with the eyes since that is how we appear to occur in a physical state, but a perception that we just as equally know to be an ‘illusion’ as described above. No, we cannot ever ‘see’ past this illusion with our physical eyes, but we can know that it is the true reality: simply put, the self is an illusion that will one day disappear, and will never exist again for the entire future of the Universe. Many people will despair and resist this truth, but that will not change their reality. To accept that one day you will not exist frees you to see without ego or agenda the infinite creative potential of the Universe, and the denial of it is the ancient hiding-place of modern human consciousness’s’ most deep and hidden aspects selfishness, uncertainty and fear. This is important because for a creature that is able to see the future, the creature is forced to make decisions about what he predicts the future to hold for him in order for him to make other decisions; what he understands about reality, he acts upon. In a world where people are encouraged to hold all sorts of colourful beliefs you could meet some amazing characters. But if we have learned anything from the bloodbath that is our mostly horrific global history, and our resulting current situation which at times seems to verge closely to being even more horrific than any of the worst atrocities of the past – we know that a world full of ‘people with all sorts of colourful beliefs’ has been a bumpy ride, and it isn’t getting any better. We can’t clearly tell the difference anymore – all we currently know is that more people than most of us would have suspected (I think I can count everybody I’ve ever met and myself in that number) are ‘psychologically sick’ in surprising, intriguing and very often dangerous ways to varying degrees, sometimes extremes, and that a few ‘trustworthy’ nations have the bomb and a pact to never, ever use it. I do not believe that people who accept that the self is an illusion and as a result accept that, to put it harshly, ‘death is final’ would cause the same confusion, the ego, the cycle of abuse, anxiety and obsession with materialism and wealth and greed that has plagued our world because of first believing that we were the centre of the universe, then that we were ‘ordained by God to rule the Earth’, then promised eternity and a means to ‘preserve the self’ and finally our current de-facto philosophy ‘It’s up to you, you free to choose your kooky beliefs about immortality – the truth is it’s all about money now anyways’. Apathy is an unfortunate but not surprising reaction to sustained confusion. Confusion stemming, I believe from the primitive, incorrect and ‘obvious’ but superficial observation that the self was real although to this day we have no explanation at all as to where the self would really ‘go’ if it was in fact ‘real’. We are unable to produce even the tiniest bit of evidence even with our most sophisticated modern technology of ‘entities that can exist independently of a physical or body’ – be it our own or any other. But we do know that there is something superior to human life. We did not ‘evolve’ ourselves, create the planet or even make a conscious decision to create a ‘language’ which now makes us ask these questions. It stares us in the face and makes itself openly plain for all who would to care look objectively and without personal agenda ‘see’. The laws and ‘shape’ of the universe; how all things occur is, and was not ever hidden from us. The laws of the universe are things that we know about from the effect that we observe them have on various aspects of physical reality. They can be laws like how if something can be said to ‘exist’ – for instance a planet like ours or Mars or any other, for that to occur there would have to be millions of planets, it would be impossible and conceptually oxymoronic for there to ever be one, or anything short of what can be described as ‘a possibly infinite number given the right conditions’. What we know as our sun is just one of millions of stars, all different in many different ways, but all essentially at a different stage of performing the same function. The same goes for how things occur as living organisms on planets like or similar to ours; a plant, an insect, and even the things that we create ourselves can only be said to exist if they occur in many different, infinitely numerous possible forms. They are the unchanging laws that shape planets, suns, galaxies. These laws and constants would, and does produce (we have evidence of at least this, we ourselves are an example of it), amongst an unknowable myriad number of other things, worlds that could probably produce life like ours. They are rules like for instance the rules that impede the movement of light, ‘time’ and gravity. How heat affects different matter in different circumstances. For these and the many other ‘constant’ reasons you can think of, life, and maybe or maybe not, intelligent life like ours (not that it matters – the self is not real, remember?) would have to occur, as everything does, in a large number of individual ‘selves’ as we have come to call them. They would form ‘groups’ for reproduction, co-operation and perhaps other functions while other types of creatures in the environment would be solitary for most of their lives, or live as a hive or colony and so on; ‘evolution’ would also be an universal occurrence. Sophisticated groups similar enough to that of the ‘mammalian species’ as we have named ourselves on our particular world who need to stay together for many important reasons indicate that a group similar enough to our mammal human group (any differences in physical appearance and biological specifics I don’t think I need to imagine) has the ability to develop and flourish – a close-knit, communicative group, one that is a necessity for the natural formation of ‘language’ – another ‘universal rule’ since its purpose is to accurately describe the nature of the universe, how reality ‘occurs’, which would be describing the same things that we humans have after a long time come to perceive reality to be. Existing in these groups with language would naturally cause the group members to evolve a morality appropriate to the ‘long term success of all members in the group’ (within which I must presume, there must at least some time exist an evolved, natural hierarchy or class system which naturally, I assume will likewise to our experience be challenged by some members for various reasons). But this I must stress: If this ‘alien life’ is intelligent like ours, it will too, gradually come to the conclusion that the self is an illusion, and that it would be pointless to suffer as a group for the purpose of expansionist ambitions of individuals or individual groups, since there is no ‘ultimate reward’ for life forms like us who ‘die’ and furthermore, as we witness with our own eyes, appear to ‘completely disappear’ and never exist ever again. So our modern perception of ‘self’ is simply a further-clarified idea that animals have; I exist, you exist, we are separate beings. But with an overwhelming amount of evidence and observation that continually asks us to re-evaluate this ‘natural’ and obvious perception, as well as our own experience throughout history as a species that has forced to re-evaluate ideas that have led to racism, tyrannical powers, war, economic catastrophe and other unnatural disasters, and restructure our societies The idea that the human world will go on unchanged indefinitely is an equally preposterous idea, especially (but certainly not entirely) because of our already large and rapidly increasing impact on our environment –for precisely those reasons of ‘unchecked ambition’ because of our shared, unchallenged philosophy of entitlement to prosper (with ‘Gods’ blessing of course) without restraint if given the opportunity – as individuals, families, companies, nations, religions, economic ideologies and species as a whole. We would do well to remember our roots: We, the ‘mammal’ are a creature that ourselves evolved in a massive, sudden and seemingly unpredictable gap left in the environment by the disappearance of unimaginably giant beasts who were completely wiped out by a devastating and quick series of world events and a global Ice-age, and also that the world was hot and unsuitable for our current adaption relatively recently and so we know is capable of significant difference in climate as a planet and volatility even just of itself but then also any number of things, knowable and possibly unknowable from the Universe. Again, this is something only the human could possibly know, a glaring horrific truth that we have found buried in the ground and assembled to show its true form in our museums, monsters from what was a completely different world that suddenly and swiftly disappeared because of seemingly very natural and violent world events, but of a scale of devastation not yet witnessed by man, and possibly mammals as a species. The question ‘What is the purpose of life on Earth?’ is a very human question; for the human is the only creature intelligent enough, or should I say ‘self-aware’ enough to ask it. It is of course a weighted question because humans evolved from animals and we have spent many hundreds of thousands of years using our human intelligences to obtain and rationalise our desire for the same things an animal would want to fulfil its ‘purpose’ on earth; to breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, create ‘waste’ which we hide from sight and not ever die if we can help it. With our minds, which have evolved to consider the future greatly we do this in ways that are an attempt to satisfy this consideration by ensuring a more ‘long-term’ success and exponential growth in our attainment or ‘industry’ in matter of food, shelter, the size and influence of our ‘group’, family and so forth. What we can simply observe is that ‘life’ does not affect other planets in our galaxy at any way at all. ‘Life’ doesn’t even affect our own Moon, but the Moon, through its gravitational influence on the tides has played an enormous part on how life on this planet was formed. So life is a period of time of very rapidly changing Earthly processes which involve ‘the reconstitution of matter’, a process of which requires organic life to appear in hundreds of millions (or I suspect quite likely an infinite possible number) of different forms and varieties, from the microscopic Prokaryote to Blue Whales or Dinosaurs. But of course more seriously and significantly to ‘us humans’, even though it is often to our own bewilderment, a short time ago our planet evolved ‘intelligent life’ that reconstitutes and – before really realizing where it was or what it was really doing – repurposes available matter in spectacular fashion and further mines metals and minerals and gases from the planet reconstituting these various forms of matter for any multitude of reasons from consumption to construction and builds massive infrastructures to support all of this activity in methods powered by various means of highly controlled explosive combustion, or harnessing the electromagnetic power of the Earth. We repurpose almost anything we can get our hands on, and make it something useful – for my favourite example cement, since we have built our very world with it. Cement is made using lime as a key ingredient which is composed of skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera; the skeletons of petrified animals. So we can observe that what is happening on Earth by way of human beings could be described as ‘an escalating re-composition of matter’ where the biological life formed on the planet increases exponentially in number and efficiency, in our case, us and ‘our animals’ – converting and adapting matter from what they would call ‘resources’ into usable forms for creating energy and building or making objects. Every process naturally produces a varying degree and volatility of what is to us often harmful ‘waste’. But remember that ‘waste’ is also energy. Plant ‘waste’ is Oxygen. Our de-oxygenated ‘waste’ is CO2. Animal waste is imperative for fertile topsoil. The Universe doesn’t seem to care much what energy it is, she just wants it back. Now I am not saying Nuclear Waste or pollution is a good thing for us, but what I am pointing out is that this is the contract we have with our material world and the Universe and it cannot be stopped. We have frantically begun a search for a ‘free and clean energy’ making bold strides ahead, leaving the search for an ‘expensive and clean energy’ at the post. I hope it will yield results for my own benefit, but I fear that a free and clean energy would lead to a massive spike in world population, which is I would suggest our human worlds’ most waste-producing resource. You might ask ‘So then what about our art, music, culture and religion?’ Again, this all facilitates a constantly evolving means by which the human can obtain a heightened sense of objectivity and relative understanding so that ‘he’ as a populace can communicate and understand complex ideas in great simultaneous number, itself facilitated by many countless means of communication, all based on ‘language’ be it human or the various computer languages. So clearly, being intelligent humans, we are able to see that each our own personal ‘ambition’ to succeed, a quality we have and do nurture and celebrate as a species and individuals is a powerful biological impulse – the opposite of the human ‘reflection’ which has given him the ability to ‘see’ why he has this impulse in the first place. Then there is the subject of ‘Genius’, which is a cloudy, nebulous term that also comes from primitive, old-fashioned ideas. We are all well aware that despite also possessing a great mastery of technique and knowledge in their field, be it Mathematics, Art, Music, Physics, Gastronomy or anything else, a person to whom we award the term ‘Genius’ is widely recognised for having produced work that influences that field irrevocably. We throw the term around, in truth it means nothing, but when it is applied in any possible attempt at a ‘serious’ measure we think of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Mozart and Picasso. All stand tall in their field of study and are revered for playing key parts in landmark discoveries, of which countless other intelligent people are paid little to no attention whatsoever. So the difference between a high level of intelligence and what we give the term ‘genius’ to comes down mainly to how influential and valuable their work is to the field that they contribute to. But for a clearer idea, let us examine the term ‘intelligence’. What types of animals are regarded as ‘intelligent’? We know Sharks are apex predators who are masters of their environment, able to detect nano-particles of blood in the water. But they don’t follow commands, mainly because there is no need in their entire lives for them to ‘cooperate’ with each other in any defined hierarchical group. So what animals do we consider intelligent? It is overwhelmingly if not entirely the highly group-oriented animals; Orca Whales, Chimpanzees, dolphins – creatures that can be taught to perform functions on command and trained to ‘operate as an agent’ for us in some capacity. In order to train these animals, we can’t just take them out of the wild and whip them until they obey us from fear, we have to create a ‘relationship’; we must form in their minds a ‘group’ to which they belong, and in which we are the group leader, a position we must maintain in their eyes, or face ‘insubordinate’ behaviour. It is taking advantage of this natural inclination of pack-animals to exist and operate within group structures that we increase their ‘usefulness’ and can show them to be ‘intelligent’. Now if you examine humans, ‘intelligence’ can be called ‘the faculty to understand and perform tasks in an adequate time and fashion’. Above-normal intelligence would be indicated then, by an ability to learn and understand more complicated tasks faster and more efficiently than a ‘normal’ person. Innovative people could be said to have a ‘creative intelligence’ – most people who are ‘good at what they do’ possesses a good balance of both but we can see that in many ways Human Intelligence is simply a dog performing tricks of its own design to impress its’ masters – the ‘group’. ‘intelligence’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘innovation’ are regarded highly in any field because we all understand that if you could do anything faster, better, at higher output and for less cost – or perhaps just make it appear so – this would allow you to able to undercut or outmatch the competition as long as you patented or kept secret any techniques or designs that made this possible. In the end though, all that is assured is that Mankind as a species is guaranteed to continually become more efficient and prosperous at facilitating more and more exponential growth, powered by our insatiable lust for personal glory. Why I think that it might be important that if I were to say to you ‘the self is an illusion that will one day disappear’ and that you would at least understand how I mean it is because, as I have explained, since all things – our physical selves included, occur as an ‘infinite many possible instances of the same thing’, ‘ideas’ in the human world can only exist if they are at least entertained by a large number of people. We now in the world as a majority accept many things that we didn’t necessarily have the knowledge to know many hundreds of years ago. A vast majority can at least count, read, or at least understand what reading is. Complex concepts like ‘Eternal life by way of redemption of the soul to God by accepting the Blood of Jesus Christ and accepting him as your personal saviour’ – parts of which have always, and still confuse me – have been quite easily introduced to and understood by populations of all classes and cultures, even the most remote and isolated tribes in Papa new Guinea; perhaps because they appeal to a part of us that hopes for the future but yet is aware of death – ‘successfully transmitting complex ideas’ is not and has never been the problem, it’s what humans do best. You won’t get this message – ‘an illusory self’ – coming from religious groups because it appears to diminish the reason for their existence or worse. This is also not in the realm of scientific study because science is not concerned with the ‘self’ and has thankfully never troubled itself to ask the question ‘what happens to us after we die’ and rather continues to explain how physical reality exists, how it came to be and all sorts of tremendously interesting and important things. It would never be a message from a ‘nation’ or ‘corporation’ because these groups will continue to exist as people live and die, people like you and I who are only temporarily employed in all these various roles needed to support them; in fact if these groups are not constantly growing and expanding we consider them to be ‘stagnant’. The philosophy for any venture that you wish to sustain must be ‘enthusiastic exponential growth without restraint’ as we have heard advertisers for national and multi-national corporate entities sugar-coat for our ears in other more palatable ways. So it is an easy to understand idea. But the question is what good does it do for you? The truth is that it can do nothing for you as an individual, just like knowledge of a ‘technology’ like ‘language’ is pretty much completely useless if it is only known by one person. The compulsion to say whether it is ‘right’ of ‘wrong’ is almost like trying to prove or disprove something that is completely beside the point. It is important for man to agree upon things, especially logical things that are real. What we believe as a ‘global group’ is wildly diverse and so naturally it can only be agreed upon that what we can expect from people and groups can only be described as ‘unpredictable results’, often very negative ones. At some point in the future the ‘glaring truth’ will probably become clear to most people, and I hope the idea is not expressed in a way that is reckless, uncaring or irrespective of human rights, but seeing as that is the way we have treated each other this whole time to the most extent I don’t think it would serve to make any things worse. To know reality and simply be forced to accept it – It is an inevitable consequence of language which is something we can agree is one of the very defining factors of ‘being human’. But as long as there is a stronger desire for success and exponential growth, our ‘purpose’ as humans will always be contrived by companies and organisations and the reasons supplied to us will always have blank spaces that we are meant to fill in ourselves with our own life-affirming philosophy; it our ‘responsibility’ that we have to these organisations even though it has always been up to us to restructure them, time and time again through the bloody history of our species, each time trying to force these entities to ‘be fair’ against their will, against the very principles of what they were designed to do which is survive as best they can in a rapidly changing world. Encouraging philosophical ideas about the illusory nature of existence and reflective consideration isn’t their job. It’s not even the job of Philosophers, psychologists or cognitive scientists who need to sell life-affirming books or write important papers about the nature of perception and try to make tenure, contribute to the field of research and so forth. In varying degrees in the case of all organisations and fields I would argue it could be said that it is their job, which we do for them, to take our minds off the idea – to obscure, alter, and re-contextualise any thought, idea or philosophical movement that might lead us to have the idea that although our homogenous unspoken agreement as nations, companies and very often individuals, is – and possibly may always be – ‘prosperity without restraint’, that as life-affirming as that sounds, might not be a logical philosophy in a world that an actual human being wants to live in, because that is simply not our reality. So it is down to simple human consideration of logical reality that any meaningful adjustment could ever be made, a simple idea. It would have to permeate our media and be ubiquitous in minds young and old. But that would require a person to be at all interested in something that doesn’t hold some sort of ‘value’ to them that might directly enrich their lives, like learning Italian or studying Graphic Design would. The idea that the ‘sovereign self’ is an illusion that will disappear is also too dark for many to want to consider but that is because knowing about the many evils of this world make us feel sad for people and animals that have died suffering terribly enduring these evils, they die alone and frightened in this world and being empathetic beings, we naturally wish that their suffering would end and that they would be in a better place. But if you really think about it, the most cruel, disturbing and large-scale cases of suffering and death inflicted on people and animals has always been at the hands of humans, people who were acting from a position that sacrifices the rights of other living beings in the name of growth without restraint, power, and many other reasons in different situations. One cannot blame the reality of ‘death’ for mankind’s alarming propensity for making it occur with alarming frequency, great number, often for poor reason and very often in a shocking and horrifying manner. The various types of ‘mental illnesses’ and psychological and emotional issues that only human beings have the capacity to suffer that range from depression, anxiety, sociopathy and ‘hearing voices’ all the way to full-blown schizophrenia, psychopathy and murderous or suicidal tendencies are made potent and exacerbated by our fundamental misunderstanding of ‘the Illusion of Self’ as a species; this is what will naturally happen when a creature who is able to see the future; his own inevitable death, is given no choice but to spend his life enthusiastically building something that he knows will not, and cannot spare him from death – in many ways we today still very much are like the slave Pyramid builders of Egypt, encouraged to always think ‘short-long term’ with phrases designed to encourage increasing our productivity such as ‘Where will you be in 5 years?’ while nobody ever ventures to ask the question ‘Where will everybody alive on this planet today be in 100 years?’ It is our modern belief that we are isolated, sovereign and separate beings who need to ‘take care of ourselves’ and ask ‘God’ for help if you are too ‘weak’ to ‘make it on your own’. Self-determination is ubiquitous and expected of us although no better reason than is given than ‘self-gratification’ or ‘self-gratification through the gratification of others’. This is how we are brought up by our well-meaning or sometimes not so well-meaning parents; it is what we are taught in school, is how we are treated and is how we are encouraged to think as adults. None of this is true, however – a human mind cannot ‘form itself’ in isolation – ‘language’, ‘objective relativity’, ‘ideas’ and ‘feelings’ are things that can only be evolved as entities within a group, and they are meant to serve us. But in this world of egocentric insecurities and self-entitled ambition our denial of the ‘illusory reality of self’ causes us to misunderstand or be troubled by aspects human perception because of our natural, necessary stance of psychological guardedness. As a whole, all that can be gained from the idea at the current time is I suppose, just a ‘philosophical wonderment’ at how the very thing that we use as a measure to see what is ‘real’ – our ‘selves’ is not real in the sense that one would think. And, once understood, it would then be on the person considering it to decide if it is true or false, I just hope to be able to explain the idea so that it may be clearly understood.
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