At heart I am an engineer, a scientist; I require, perhaps not proof, but consistency to a supposition. If you say that you can believe enough to make something happen (special or mundane) then you should be able to produce that result consistently for it to be truly real or believable. This is the way that anything of worth has been discovered or advanced. Someone proposes that, for example, combining two metals in the presence of an acid produces some sort of interesting tingling sensation that also happens to affect the nerves. Another person discovers that they can produce the same result, and also figures out that this tingling thing can be used to move objects around. Still more people figure out that this effect can be used to work all sorts of interesting things, and they figure out how to harness the effect and make machines that produce a massive revolution in human history, bringing us light, labour saving devices and eventually this thing that we are communicating on now. The discovery and harnessing of electricity.
If humankind can do that, then the spiritual realm should be peanuts to have figured out- especially since we have lived with it since time began for us; surely we should have figured it out by now if we have figured out the electron, the atom, hydrocarbons and fuels, how to fly, how to travel to space- all in the last 200 years. We’ve been living in the spiritual realm for more than 2000 years, and yet we still exist in much the same space that our ancestors of 2 or 3000 years ago did. If there was really anything more to figure out or discover, I skeem we would have.
So I don’t think its there. But our (well some of ours) desire for it to be there has not abated, so we still look for that greater meaning; that big plan; the deeper connection; the guiding principle; the universe’s thoughts; the complete interconnection; a purpose to it all; a power that has a plan to make sense of all of life….
Since we are capable of abstract thought we yearn for all of that; we can picture it and hold it dear- but take a simple step back and test the realities of all these beliefs, using the hard edge of logic that we muster for the rest of the ‘real’ decisions in our lives. Religion, spirituality and superstition are revealed as the sham that they are- a crutch to assist us in dealing with the harsh reality that, despite our ability to see beyond the here and now, we are confined to that here and now, and held in sway by its immutable laws.
The search for something beyond that is the same as those stories of the search for eternal youth, or everlasting life, which we quickly, and correctly, discard as nonsense and fiction. The seemingly sophisticated position of understanding that we find ourselves in allows us to discard ‘pagan’ and primitive nonsense such as looking at a chickens entrails, or the casting of bones; but if one wants to look at it dispassionately, then horoscopes, or the idea of indefinable ‘energies’, a sense of our life being ‘mapped out’, any sort of order ordained by something that we cannot lay any sort of logical sense to, are exactly the same things. They all follow the same desire to make sense of the big questions in life- where have I come from, why am I here, where am I going?
All of the faiths that require simple faith to answer these questions: I have a deep scepticism for these; they substitute an eternal, and magical, life to the reality that we see everyday around us. We will die, and whether it is just our bodies that die, we have to wonder what happens to the essence of who we are. We have built up a life and a history, most of which we can recall; how could we cease to exist given the history, perhaps wisdom, and imagination for the future that we have? Surely that essence of who we are must survive? And if it does survive it should, according to what we might desire, and anecdotal ‘evidence’, those essences of our lives be able to communicate with us?
But, taking it from a scientific point of view, how many people have existed since, say, ‘real’ humans have come about? I’m guessing here, but I think that it would number in more than 20 billion. A Google search says that we are at 6,775,235,421 (they must have person in every room!) right now. Taking even a steep, steep backwards gradient of halving the population every 2 years, it would take 68 years to get back to a population of 1, and in that time there would be around 8,130,282,889 who were ‘late’, ‘passed on’, ‘shuffled off their mortal coil’, ‘kicked the bucket’, ‘bought the farm’. Just considering those ridiculous figures, say divided by 2, there are around 4 billion people dead who could have figured out a way to talk to the living. Say 75 percent of them are just like their waking cousins, just not that interested beyond a good time (maybe it is really the land of milk and honey (I’d prefer beer and the company of mates and the holders of my heart myself- I was going to say beer and pussy, but good company and conversation beats the other anytime..)) we arrive at 1 billion who might have the desire to contact us. Lets say that half them have the ability to do so, that’s 500 million folks who are trying to get through to us. Not many people, although they do have a large audience; sort of like throwing bricks- you’re bound to hit someone sometime…
So if this great beyond really exists (and the rest of ‘more about life’ may be contingent on this, to push a point) why the heck do we not have many more of these “I’m in the next world” cats talking to us?
Perhaps they can’t talk to us from there- fuggit, we’ve figured out quite difficult things in the last 3000 years, why not that?
Perhaps they don’t want to? Read any popular magazine, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, etc, they all want to talk about whatever, why would that change? Where are all the fashion guru’s telling us how to die properly? Or how to live our life now? Or what to wear? What to do? Surely one of them could have consistently told one of us how to live forever, or how to get to Nirvahna/ Heaven/ Whatever by now? The masses remain silent. The masses have spoken.
I see no evidence, and perhaps that is too strong a word here, when dealing with the ethereal, but I cannot see any consistency that would lead me to believe that there is any path, beyond fantasy, that one can trust your heart to. Better to deal with the reality- and thereby touch and hold the beauty of life.
And thereby lies my lesson, my chickens, get on with loving the life around you; its the only one you’ll know…
Jay
Rawhyde's Blog- a subsection of HorribleHyde 
Hmm. We’ll talk about this at length, I think
fresh morning brain on – ready to tackle this…
“truly real or believable” Here is the first hole. In making an argument that you do (and in the way that you do) in this article, you cannot really have both of these on your side – are you arguing for objective reality, or belief?
The first has problems: our unique view of the material universe is very clever – just as clever as our clever brains, which have two serious handicaps to grasping an objective reality. Firstly, its arrogance assumes that humans have the capacity for a truly objective reality, forgetting that it really only has a human capacity. Where all information arrives at the cognitive centre of the human brain via the sensual apparatus of the body, we only receive the information calibrated to be taken up by our sensual receptors (like certain frequencies of light). That leaves a whole bunch of data that we simply have no natural access to – and it could be really pertinent to the understanding of the true nature of reality. Human scientists were rather surprised to discover that there were frequencies of light and sound undetectable by human senses, until they developed instruments to perceive them on our behalf.
Secondly, the way information arrives at the cognitive centre of the brain is mostly via the brain’s more basic and primitive bits – the bits that make us successful animals rather than successful men. So when the data reaches the cognitive bits of the brain, it has already been drastically sorted by our inner animal with an agenda other than cognitive cleverness (recall that the life-form here is the genetic continuity, not the individual human being). Much as the scientific method would like to lift man into the realms above animalhood, it is doomed to contamination because it is wielded by human animals who are often in denial about their basic animal nature.
The second might be instantly obvious to you when I isolate the word, “belief”. And though we have seen that this word has rained down tremendous folly and suffering on the human race, I would argue that, being a primary activity of all human beings (let’s talk about the nature of sanity shortly), it is a fundamentally human characteristic – one that most scientists I know display with objectivity-defying consistency. I think that the purpose of belief is to create a mental facsimile of a brand of reality that the human psyche can deal with while still remaining mentally and emotionally functional within a common (perhaps collective consciousness) reality. Probably every day we wake up and put on our current belief about reality like a garment, perhaps while still carrying the unsettling hangover from the weird alternative reality of dreamstate. Consistency in the material world reassures us that our world view is “correct”, until one day it doesn’t, because the “laws of nature” turn out to be mere propensities, or something in our own perceptive ability shifts and the data pouring into our brains is suddenly sorted differently.
It seems that so much about human behaviour can be mapped on a bell curve. We might like to say that the peak of the bell curve is the human norm (rather than the human mean). Fact is, our “progress” as a species (there’s that animal again) has been mapped by people at the poles, both right and left, though technologically primarily from the right. The bulk in the middle are watching sport on TV and reading the You magazine. Thankfully those on the far left are primarily to be found in some kind of institution.
So let’s take this bell curve and revisit the human brain. Clearly it is not an homogeneous organ across all individuals. Some can hear supersonic sound (obviously we all can but only some are consciously aware of it), while some are colour-blind and see a smaller range of light frequency than the average human. So, which model of the human brain is the correct one, the one that most truly grasps and reflects the nature of objective reality? I hope that it is not to be found in the belly of the curve, but the closer to the poles you move on the graph, the greater variance there is amongst its representative individuals, and a norm is harder to find. How shall we discriminate (in other words, replace with a cognitive function something that is normally done by more animal parts of the brain) between what is useful and what not?
I laud science for its ideals, but am practical about my expectations when it comes to reading out its “objective” results. Science, like every other human tool, is as clever as the people who wield it. And since statistically all of human history has been governed by systems of belief, I have suspicions that science might be a shiny version of a belief system.
The fact is also, that a system of belief that is consistently enough reinforced by a human’s real world experience, will quickly become his irrefutable handle on reality. We’re just made that way. We would rather build extensions onto our belief systems to accommodate unwieldy data in the form of an exception, than demolish the belief system and start from scratch because the data becomes increasingly uncooperative. A child who is born into a community which daily performs a sun-raising ritual might never doubt that the ritual is the causative factor in the rising of the sun until one day he becomes that sole survivor of a raid from a neighboring village, and is amazed to discover that the sun came up anyway, in spite of the absence of the sun-raising ritual. Humans are lazy, particularly when it comes to thinking.
To conclude this bit of back-chat, I’d like to present this idea – that it is more truly sane, and more scientifically correct, to handle ALL one’s beliefs about the world (including the mathematical certainty of a BMW engine), whether they have verifying evidence or not, as hypotheses that one is investigating.
PS Have you read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”?
Caro
Have only read the first paragraph or 2…so far. Where I differ fundamentally to you is that I feel it quite likely that there is more to this “feelings” side of life than meets the eye or the dick but we have only just emerged into a level of concsiousness that is able to grapple with really simple shit like mechanics or even the theory of relativity. We all find it difficult to realise that the ingenuity of breaking a coconut open with a rock is really not far removed from the fanciest fighter jet. We still don’t even really know what electricity is so your “2000 years and still know nothing about what our feelings mean” is entirely unsurprising to me.