Introduction
The greatest of all paradoxes is the riddle of human nature.
We humans are capable of immense love and sensitivity but we have also been capable of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war. This duality of what has historically been referred to as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has troubled the human mind since we first became fully conscious, thinking beings: are humans essentially ‘good’ and, if so, what is the cause of our ‘evil’, destructive, insensitive and cruel side?
The eternal question has been why ‘evil’? In metaphysical religious terms, what is ‘the origin of sin’? More generally, if the universally accepted ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless—ideals that have been accepted by modern civilizations as the foundations for constitutions and laws and by the founders of all the great religions as the basis of their teachings—then why are humans competitive, aggressive and selfish?
Does our inconsistency with the ideals mean we are essentially bad? Are we a flawed species, a mistake—or are we possibly divine beings?
The agony of being unable to truthfully answer this question of why we
are the way we are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has
been the particular burden of human life. It has been our species’
particular affliction or condition—our ‘human condition’. – Jeremy Griffith The purpose of a conscious mind is to understand, ultimately to understand ourselves—as the great Greek philosopher Socrates (c.469-399 BC) said, ‘the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance’, and ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’—but in the end a preference for ignorance and the associated need to oppress any examination of our lives, oppress any freedom to think truthfully, question and pursue knowledge, threatened to become the dominant attitude throughout the world. The danger for humanity’s journey to enlightenment comes from the increased levels of delusion and denial that we humans had to employ in order to cope with our increasingly insecure condition. To be truly free we have to confront and understand our condition, not escape it by adding more and more layers of denial (which blocks access to the truth). “While the greed of capitalism has caused immense suffering and devastation, that greed is not what has taken the world to the brink of destruction as everyone is told. Our society is being taken over by a desperate and madly behaved faction. It is a serious matter that is made doubly so, in fact terrifying, by the fact that almost no one is raising the alarm. Pseudo idealism has everyone intimidated and bluffed. Warnings about the real danger facing the world has only been raised by a rare few like Socrates, Orwell, Nietzsche and Allan Bloom.” – Jeremy Griffith |
1. Human Madness | 2. The Riddle of Human Nature | 3. Solutions
1. Human Madness
“I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible….except by getting off his back.” — Leo TolstoyDeaths by War and Oppression during the 20th Century is estimated between 167 million and 226 million
Here are a few atrocitologists who have made such estimates:
- M. Cherif Bassouni,”Searching for peace and achieving justice: the need for accountability”, published on Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 59: no. 4.
[http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?59+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+9+(Fall+1996)] (Citing Rummel and SIPRI)- 33 million “military casualties” ( military deaths)
- 170 million killed in “conflicts of a non-international charater, internal conflicts and tyrannical regime victimization”
- incl. 86 million since the Second World War
- TOTAL: 203,000,000
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century(1993)
- 167,000,000 to 175,000,000 “Lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage“:
- Including:
- War Dead: 87,500,000
- 33,500,000 Military war dead:
- 54,000,000 Civilian war dead:
- Not-war Dead: 80,000,000
- Communist oppression: 60,000,000
- War Dead: 87,500,000
- Including:
- 167,000,000 to 175,000,000 “Lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage“:
- Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism
- Victims of Communism only: 85-100M
- Milton Leitenberg [http://www.pcr.uu.se/Leitenberg_paper.pdf]
- Politically caused deaths in the 20th C: 214M to 226M, incl…
- Deaths in wars and conflicts, incl. civilian: 130M-142M
- Political deaths, 1945-2000: 50M-51M
- Politically caused deaths in the 20th C: 214M to 226M, incl…
- Not The Enemy Media [http://nottheenemy.com/index_files/Death%20Counts/Death%20Counts.htm]
- Killed through U.S. foreign policy since WWII, as of July 2003: 10,778,727 to 16,861,695 (1945-May 2003)
- Rudolph J. Rummel, Death By Government
- “Democides” – Government inflicted deaths (1900-87)
- 169,198,000 including:
- Communist Oppression: 110,286,000
- Democratic democides: 2,028,000
- 169,198,000 including:
- Not included among democides:
- Wars: 34,021,000
- Non-Democidal Famine(often including famines associated with war and communist mismanagement):
- China (1900-87): 49,275,000
- Russia: (1921-47): 5,833,000
- Total: 258,327,000 for all the categories listed here.
- “Democides” – Government inflicted deaths (1900-87)
- Matthew White, Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, 2010):
- Deaths by War and Oppression during the 20th Century: 203 million
Military | Collateral* | Democide | Man-made Famine |
Total | |
Wartime | 34m | 26m | 44m | 19m | 123m |
Peacetime | 0 | 0 | 40m | 40m | 80m |
TOTAL | 34m | 26m | 84m | 59m | 203m |
-
- * Collateral = civilian deaths that are generally considered to be an unavoidable, legitimate byproduct of waging war.
Source: http://necrometrics.com/all20c.htm
Politically motivated senseless slaughters are not limited to killing people. American colonists set out to exterminate the buffalo in order to deprive the hostile Indians of their primary source of food. This wholesale slaughter began in the 1870s and became known as the Great Buffalo Massacre.
Sadly, this was so successful that by 1889, a population of some 75 million buffaloes was reduced to a mere 540, a horrendous situation that led to the prairies being littered with the bones of the slaughtered buffalo. By the turn of the century, these few pitiful survivors were reduced to a mere few dozen.
Subject Related:
http://youtu.be/zIYJmjVn56Q
“The great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left” — Geoffrey Wheatcroft
LIE HUMAN LIE
by Charles MarcelloWhere does one begin to tell the tale of a lie human lie forced upon him from birth?
When does the truth shine through the lie human lie he once believed?
When does society teach the truth to save itself from the lie human lie?
I say no more, stand convicted of your crime you human soul.
You are a murderer of men, women, children, and all other creatures that walk on this earth.
Yet you lie human lie and pass it down to your children, along with the demons that will haunt your ancestors not yet born.
You are an animal full of rage and anger towards things you do not understand and or deny.
You are a beast caged inside your own mind behind the lie human lie.
I should pity the human soul, except I am ashamed, not of who or what I am.
I am ashamed that our society forces us to keep the lie human lie hidden, buried deep out in the open.
We tell our children we are good, peaceful, but the lie human lie ends there, it begins in our hearts and minds.
We are strong yet we weaken every generation after us with the lie human lie we force our children to learn on their own, and sometimes in the most horrific ways.
I am not ashamed because of the color of my skin, nor do I put value on any name that revolves around skin, for that too is nothing but a lie human lie.
I am ashamed because people believe some how they are different from the white, brown, yellow, red, black skin that surrounds them each day, in their cities, states, country’s, each breathing the breath released from those they claim to hate.
Oh they know the truth, but woe to he who professes the truth out in the open, and damn them to hell who passes that truth onto their children before the lie human lie can take hold.
Condemning yet another generation to be destroyed behind the already damned.
How dare you lie human lie as you deny what you are, the evil that is in every heart, every mind, every soul.
How dare you claim superiority over any other animal, when a bird, cat, dog, snake, and all other creatures act and teach their young exactly who and what they are.
While we the disgrace of Mother Nature dishonor ourselves with the lie human lie we deny out in the open.
The mirror, our reflection upon the water, the truth in every pair of human eyes.
We cannot hide it, so we lie human lie.
Every human is capable of murder, maim, rap, pillage, plunder, and yes a word called genocide.
Excuse me as I laugh at the word genocide.
That word is nothing more then a way for people to lie human lie about who and what we are.
We kill for power, glory, land, money, or just for the fun of it.
Do not deny you liar, you fake, you cowards.
Teach your children who and what we are, teach them before they discover the truth from the evening news.
Tell them what and who we are.
Don’t lie human lie and claim some higher authority, some higher civilized way of communicating.
Tell them the truth or you are damning them to be just like your ancestors before you.
The blood is not caked onto us, it flows within each of our bodies.
Do you not see how each lie human lie has begot another and another?
Am I to be hated because I am black, brown, yellow, white or red?
No that is a lie human lie.
I am hated because that is what we feel, that is who we are.
We know no other way because the lie human lie has been past down to us, while the truth is always learned to late, then hidden as quickly as possible.
We have courts that make a mockery of who we are, I say to you courts are but a way to make the lie human lie real.
While guns, tanks, planes, and ships are given free reign to do all the destruction they wish, and we praise them because they are our truth, yet we lie human lie behind a banner called nations.
We lie human lie behind a banner called religion.
We lie human lie behind a banner called civilized.
And I am ashamed.
Speak the truth my fellow humans so that way we deal with the truth of who and what we are.
We are killers, destroyers of men, women and children, do not deny that fact you cowards.
Stand up and shout you beast, you animal called human.
Tell all the children they are beasts as well, stand and be brave show them the truth.
Give them the knowledge, right now, while we can still protect them from the lie human lie.
Say unto them, child we are descendants of butchers, murders and destroyers of life.
Each man has the power to destroy another, and that power is so weak, so pathetically weak, we must teach ourselves to be stronger then who we are without the lie human lie.
To kill another man, is easy child, to love them when they have caused you pain is hard. To hurt another person is easy child, so very easy. To hug them when they have caused you pain, is hard and worth fighting for. Because we are natural born killers, I say to you child, know who and what you are, then work with your neighbors, your human brothers, and fight to live in peace of truth human truth.
Do not fall for the lie human lie regarding color of skin my child.
Know this truth human truth, we are all humans, and each is blessed with a skin color so we may learn to face our fears.
Do not ever hate something you do not understand or disagree with child, for that is weak.
Fight to understand all your fellow brothers and sisters, their ways their beliefs, and learn to be stronger then our greatest weakness, so you may pass this… our greatest strength onto all the children, so they may pass it onto theirs, only then can we throw away the shackles of lie human lie.
Now go child and spread the truth to all mankind, help them break away the chains of lie human lie.
To embrace who and what they are, so they may fight the demons that plague and harm this world, because we have been cowards to fight them within ourselves.
Go child and tell each and every human soul you come into contact with, the greatest lie human lie ever told, was us brainwashing ourselves into believing the lie human lie was the truth.
Be free from the chains put on us from birth, that was locked into our souls from the lie human lie past down from father to son, mother to daughter, sister to brother, friend to foe.
Teach them child, for I fear the hour is growing late. Do not fall prey to the demons past down to us from our ancestors child, for the lie human lie is strong.
I tell you child, all teachers are weak and cowardly when they say we are not murderers or destroyers of souls.
I beseech you dear child, please in the name of all that will come after you, embrace the truth human truth, and do not ever allow the lie human lie to take hold of mankind again.
Love has to start within, and that starts with accepting who and what we are.
Embrace the truth human truth, and deny the lie human lie, so we may all live in peace.
Now go child go, preach the truth human truth and help us save ourselves from the slavery within we have chained our revolving misery to.
Tell them child, we are the same, each of us, regardless of skin, religion, region or state.
We are humans and we must accept the truth human truth in order to live in peace, to stop all the hate, the war, the suffering, buried behind the lie human lie hidden in the open.
I hope it is not to late.
Please child, once you finish reading this, or hearing it read aloud.
Carry the new banner of light, for as the fable goes, truth human truth is the only thing that will set us free.
Or how about this… Why We Must Try To Love Like God.
This isn’t about God, or Jesus, or any other name that has been forced onto mankind by sword or death… its about choosing a new path, without asking for anything in return.
It’s about being sick of the way things are, and demanding no more.
Where we shout down cowards who claim morality or good and bad are subjective.
When the truth is that nonsense is only stated by those who are trying to hide their own guilt or it comes from those idiots who know nothing so they aren’t worth listening too anyway.
We must change or we will kill each other.
If you accept that simple truth, then stop complaining about how things were, and start finding NEW answers to bring humanity to peace.
–Charles Marcello
2. The Riddle of Human Nature
The Human Condition Explained
by Jeremy GriffithWe have been unable to ‘truthfully’ answer the question of why we have been divisively behaved because we have frequently used the excuse that we humans are competitive, aggressive and selfish because of our animal heritage; that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. Of course this cannot be the real reason for our divisive behaviour because descriptions of our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, deluded, optimistic, pessimistic, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, guilty, evil, depressed, inspired, psychotic, alienated, all recognise that our species’ unique fully conscious thinking mind is involved in our behavior—that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour. We have suffered from the “human condition”, not the “animal condition”.
Good or bad, loving or hateful, angels or devils, constructive or destructive, sensitive or insensitive: what are we?
Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide a truthful clarifying explanation.- For their part, religious assurances such as ‘God loves you’ may provide temporary comfort but fail to explain WHY we are lovable. So WHY are we lovable?
- How could we be good when all the evidence seems to unequivocally indicate that we are a deeply flawed, bad, even evil species?
- What is the answer to this question of questions, this problem of ‘good and evil’ in the human make-up, this dilemma of the human condition?
- What caused humans to become divisively behaved and, most importantly, how is this divisive behaviour ever going to be brought to an end?
When the fully
conscious mind emerged it wasn’t enough for it to be orientated by
instincts. It had to find understanding to operate effectively and
fulfill its great potential to manage life. Tragically, the instinctive self didn’t ‘appreciate’ that need and ‘tried to stop’ the mind’s necessary search for knowledge, as represented by the latter’s experiments in self-management. Hence the ensuing battle between instinct and intellect.
To refute the criticism from his instinctive self, early humans needed to understand the difference in the way genes and nerves process information. We needed to be able to explain that the gene-based learning system can, through natural selection, give species orientations to their environment, but that those orientations are not understandings. This means that when the nerve-based learning system gave rise to consciousness and the ability to understand the world, it wasn’t sufficient to be orientated to the world; understanding of the world had to be found. The problem, however, was that we had only just taken the first, tentative steps in the search for knowledge, and thus had no ability to explain anything. It was a catch-22 situation for the fledgling thinker, for in order to explain himself he needed the very understanding he was setting out to find. He had to search for understanding, ultimately self-understanding…
The gene-based learning system can orientate species to situations but is incapable of insight into the nature of change. Genetic selection of one reproducing individual over another reproducing individual (in effect, one idea over another idea, or one piece of information over another piece of information) gives species adaptations or orientations— instinctive programming—for managing life, but those genetic orientations, those instincts, are not understandings.
Thus when the conscious mind emerged it had to set out in search of the knowledge it needed to manage change. It follows then that when our conscious mind emerged it was neither suitable nor sustainable for it to be orientated by instincts. It had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage change, manage life. Since the conscious mind must surely be nature’s greatest invention, if it didn’t fulfil its great potential that would represent a failure of the whole story of life on Earth. The problem, however, was that when the conscious mind began to exert itself and experiment in the management of life from a basis of understanding in the presence of already established instinctive behavioural orientations, a battle broke out between the two.
Our intellect began to experiment in understanding as the only means of finding out the correct and incorrect understandings for managing existence, yet the instincts, being in effect ‘unaware’ or ‘ignorant’ of the intellect’s need to carry out these experiments, opposed any understanding-driven deviations from the established instinctive orientations.
The instincts in effect ‘criticised’ and ‘tried to stop’ the conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge. Unable to understand and thus explain why these experiments in selfadjustment were necessary, the intellect was unable to refute this implicit criticism from the instincts. The unjust criticism from the instincts upset the intellect and left it with no choice other than to defy the ‘opposition’ from the instincts. As stated earlier, this defiance expressed itself in three ways: it attacked the instincts’ unjust criticism; it attempted to prove the instincts’ unjust criticism wrong; and it tried to deny or block from its mind the instincts’ unjust criticism. Humans’ upset angry, egocentric and alienated state appeared.
The so-called Seven Deadly Sins of the human condition, of lust, anger, pride, envy, covetousness, gluttony and sloth, are in truth all different manifestations of the three fundamental upsets of anger, egocentricity and alienation. Significantly, while we could learn to manage our upset, find ways to contain, restrain and thus slow its pace, the increase in upset could only ever be stopped through finding understanding of why upset occurred. A terrible journey of suffering lay ahead for conscious humans because it took the human race some two million years of inquiry to finally assemble the liberating explanation of the human condition.
The human condition is shot through with paradox—to become happy we had to first endure unhappiness; we appeared to be bad but believed we were good; we are intelligent but we seemingly behave in a most unintelligent way. The human situation appeared to be so complicated and insoluble.
How could we possibly make sense of the seemingly impenetrable mystery of human life, and yet the answer—the ‘unlocking point’—seems so simple and obvious in hindsight. Recall Huxley’s famous response to Darwin’s idea of natural selection: ‘How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!’ [...]
The origin of so-called ‘sin’ has finally been
explained and it is science that made this possible because, after
centuries of discovery, science was able to reveal that while the
gene-based learning system can give species orientations only the
nerve-based learning system is capable of insightful reasoning, and
therein lies the explanation of the human condition.
3. Solutions
Understanding is the basis for compassion.
As was mentioned earlier, there has been much talk of the need to love each other and to love the environment, but the real need has been to find the means to love the dark side of ourselves, to bring understanding to that aspect of our make-up. And again as the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung frequently emphasised, ‘wholeness for humans depended on the ability to own their own shadow’—or as philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post said, ‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’ (Journey Into Russia, 1964, p.145 of 319) and ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of wars, cruelty, greed and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.24 of 275).True compassion was ultimately the only means by which peace and love could come to our planet and it could only be achieved through understanding. Drawing again from the writings of Sir Laurens: ‘Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another.
It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future’ (ibid. p.29). Yes, only ‘true understanding of the nature and origin’ of our species’ less-than-ideally-behaved condition could allow us to cross ‘the historical abyss’ that has ‘separate[d] us’ from a ‘compassion[ate]’, reconciled, ameliorated, ‘meaning[ful]’ view of ourselves. This ‘future’ that Sir Laurens anticipated, of finding understanding of our human condition, has now finally arrived.
The Australian journalist Richard Neville summarised our species’ plight perfectly when he said, ‘The world is hurtling to catastrophe: from nuclear horrors, a wrecked ecosystem, 20 million dead each year from malnutrition, 600 million chronically hungry…All these crises are man made, their causes are psychological. The cures must come from this same source; which means the planet needs psychological maturity…fast. We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’ (Good Weekend mag. Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Oct. 1986).
The DNA unit of inheritance is called a gene, and the study of the process of change that genes undergo has been labelled ‘genetics’. This genetic tool for Negative Entropy’s development or refinement of the order of matter on Earth was very powerful—it was able to develop the great variety of ordered matter we call life. From DNA (or its prototype RNA), virus-like organisms developed, then from virus-like organisms developed single-celled organisms, and from single-celled organisms developed multi-cellular organisms.
The next level of order to be developed or integrated by Negative Entropy was societies. Integrative Meaning & the origins of our Moral Soul & Conscious Mind or colonies or ordered arrangements of multi-cellular organisms. It was at this point that Negative Entropy (or ‘God’) encountered another impasse.
While genetics has proved to be a marvelous tool for integrating matter it has one very significant limitation, which arises from the fact that each genetically reproducing individual organism has to remain independent and thus selectable, struggling, competing and fighting selfishly for its own reproduction—because that variety or pool of reproducing individuals is the basis of the genetic developing or refining or learning process. Even though the Negative Entropy, integrative process is dedicated to integration and, in effect, would like to bring together or amalgamate or integrate reproducing individuals to form new larger associations or wholes of them, this can’t occur because were it to the natural selection process of, in effect, comparing the abilities of the various reproducing individuals to survive through time and where possible grow in size and complexity would be lost.
If the reproducing individuals are all integrated into one organism there is no longer the variety for natural selection to draw upon. What this means is that the truly cooperative behaviour that reproducing individuals have to be able to develop if they are to effectively come together/amalgamate/integrate, of the capacity for them to unconditionally selflessly consider the welfare of the integrated larger amalgamation or whole above their own welfare, cannot, as a rule, develop genetically. As has been emphasised, unconditional selflessness is the cooperative, loving glue that holds wholes together and as such is so fundamental to the development and maintenance of larger wholes that it is the theme of the entire integrative process that characterises all of existence, but the problem is reproducing individuals cannot develop this unconditional selflessness towards other reproducing individuals.
In this situation where each reproducing individual can’t become a fully integrated part of an amalgamation or integration of reproducing individuals and has to carry on as a separate reproducing individual fighting selfishly for its own reproduction, the most cooperation that can develop is that of reciprocity, where one individual selflessly helps another on the proviso that they are selflessly helped in return—which in effect means both parties are selfishly benefiting. Reproducing individuals can develop reciprocity because it is in essence still a selfish trait: it doesn’t give away an advantage to other reproducing individuals and therefore doesn’t compromise the integrity of the reproducing individual. Unconditionally selfless traits, on the other hand, do give away an advantage to other reproducing individuals—that being the meaning of unconditional selflessness, that you are giving without receiving—and therefore unconditionally selfless, self-sacrificing traits do compromise the integrity of the reproducing individual and therefore can’t, as a rule, develop.
The integrative limitation of the genetic refinement tool for integrating matter is that, as a rule, only traits that are selfish can be cultivated or ‘naturally selected’ genetically.
The result of this selfish individualism is that the reproducing individual members of a species end up competing relentlessly against each other for food, territory, shelter and a mate. The more social or integrated members become, the more competition develops between them, until the selfish, divisive competition reaches a point where no further integration is possible.
Importantly, even though selfishness appears to characterise so much of nature as a result of this situation, the truth is selfishness is only occurring because of the limitation of the genetic process of being unable to, as a rule, foster unconditional selflessness.
Source: World Transformation Movement, online Video: http://www.worldtransformation.com/IntroductoryVideo/
The horrific, awesomely heroic journey that humanity has now at last completed was perfectly summarized by the Nobel Prize-winning American-born, British poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), when he wrote, ‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ (Four Quartets, from Part 5 of Little Gidding, 1942). The human race emerged in an unconscious, unaware, unknowing, knowledge-less, ignorant, upset-free, prehuman-condition-afflicted, innocent instinctive state. We then, however, developed a fully conscious thinking, self-adjusting mind and had to suffer becoming corrupted in order to find the knowledge that would allow all our upset to subside and enable us to return to an upset-free innocent state once again, only this time in a fully understanding or knowing state. In finding the liberating understanding of the human condition, humanity has come full circle.
Genesis in the Bible similarly states that after ‘eating the fruit] from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (2:17) that was ‘desirable for gaining wisdom’ (3:6) and having to suffer being ‘banished…from the Garden of Eden’ (3:23), we ‘will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (3:5). Since God is the all-knowing state, when we find sufficient knowledge to explain why we became corrupted we ‘will be like God’, ‘knowing’ or understanding ‘good and evil’; upset Adam will be able to sit down with his innocent instinctive self and reconcile the two states. Our instinctive self will stop criticising and upsetting our intellect. Both sides will lay down their swords as it were and come in from the cold and embrace each other.
Buddha also recognized that ‘In the future they will every one be Buddhas [meaning in the future everyone will be free of psychosis] / And will reach Perfect Enlightenment / In domains in all directions / Each will have the same title / Simultaneously on wisdom-thrones / They will prove the Supreme Wisdom’ (Buddha [Siddartha Gautama] c.560-480 BC, The Lotus Sutra, ch.9; tr. W.E. Soothill, 1987, p.148 of 275). He could see that one day understanding of the human condition would be found enabling everyone to share understanding of the human condition and as a result become secure in self. Since our different personalities are largely a result of our different encounters with the human-condition-afflicted world, when reconciling understanding of the human condition arrives, as it now has, our different personalities, which are in truth our different states of alienation, will disappear. As Buddha foresaw, we ‘Each will have the same title.’
Selflessness is actually the theme of existence because it is the glue that holds wholes together; indeed, selflessness is the true meaning of the word ‘love’. The old Christian word for love is ‘caritas’, meaning charity or giving or selflessness (see Col. 3:14, 1 Cor. 13:1–13, 10:24 & John 15:13). ‘Love’ is cooperative selflessness, in fact not just selflessness but unconditional selflessness, the capacity, if called upon, to make a full, self-sacrificing commitment to the maintenance of the larger whole. However, the problem with this truth is that it confronts us humans squarely with the issue of the human condition. If the meaning of existence is to be cooperative, loving and selfless, then why are we humans competitive, aggressive and selfish? If the theme of existence is to be integrative then why are we divisively behaved? Despite it being such an obvious truth, integrative meaning has been so condemning of the upset human race that we have had no choice but to live in deep denial of it.
The simple fact is, for a larger whole to form and hold together, for matter to integrate, the parts must cooperate not compete, they must be selfless not selfish. But since the competitive, aggressive and selfish divisive behaviour of upset humans is the polar opposite of cooperative, loving and selfless integrative behaviour, this truth of integrative meaning has been the most horrifically condemning of truths for upset humans. No other truth raised the issue of the human condition, the issue of the lack of ideal behaviour in our lives, as completely as the truth of integrative meaning.
There is a law of physics that causes matter to integrate and that law is the ‘Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’ or ‘Negative Entropy’, which states that in an open system, such as that which exists on Earth, where energy can come into the system from outside it (from the sun in Earth’s case), matter integrates, it develops order.
So selflessness, especially unconditional selflessness or altruism, is the glue that holds wholes together. It is the theme or meaning of existence. And since, as mentioned, love means unconditional selflessness, love is the theme of existence; it is the meaning of life. Christ emphasised the unconditionally selfless significance of the word ‘love’ when he said, ‘Greater love has no-one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Of the biblical references to love provided earlier, Colossians 3:14 perfectly summarises the integrative significance of love: ‘And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.’ Unfortunately, while all the great truths are acknowledged in the Bible, in our everyday, resigned world we couldn’t explain what love actually is, we couldn’t admit that it is unconditional selflessness, until we could explain why we humans don’t behave lovingly, why we are selfish, competitive and aggressive when the meaning of existence is to be selfless, cooperative and loving.
The integrative, cooperative, loving theme of existence is actually what ‘God’ is the personification of. We recognise this truth when we say ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8,16). Monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, is an insight that goes back as far as 4,000 years ago to two very great denial-free thinkers or prophets, the pharaoh Akhenaton who reigned in Egypt from approximately 1,350 to 1,335 BC, and the Hebrew prophet Abraham who lived around 2,000 BC. With the human condition explained and our divisive state understood, all humans can now safely admit and recognise that there has only been one God, one all-dominating truth, and that is integrative meaning. Integration and the selflessness or love that enables it to occur is the theme of existence, is ‘God’, is the all-dominating and all-pervading universal truth about our world.
The problem has been that until we could explain why we have been divisive and not integrative we couldn’t afford to demystify our concept of God and explain that God is integrative meaning. We left the concept of God in a safely abstract, undefined state but now with our divisive, non-integrative behaviour explained we can safely demystify this religious concept of God and explain in first-principle, scientific terms who, or more precisely, what God is—specifically, the personification of the Negative Entropy-driven integrative, cooperative, loving, selfless, order-developing ideals, theme, purpose and meaning of life.
Although the truth of integrative meaning is extremely obvious, with evidence of the hierarchy of the order of matter everywhere we look, it was important for humanity that denial-complying mechanistic science found a way to deny such a seemingly totally condemning truth. This was easily achieved by the simple assertion that there was no meaning or purpose or theme in existence and that while change was occurring it was a random, purposeless, directionless, meaningless, blind process. Also, as stated, to cope with the imbued recognition of integrative ideality and meaning in the religious concept of ‘God’, science simply left the concept of ‘God’ undefined, maintaining it was a strictly abstract, metaphysical and spiritual concept unrelated to the scientific domain—an inexplicable deity seated on a throne somewhere high above the clouds in a remote blue heaven who we can worship as someone superior to us while avoiding any direct comparisons with ourselves. Religion and science were firmly demarcated as two entirely unrelated subjects.
‘The overwhelming impression is of order [in the universe].The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws. If one liked, one could say that this order was the work of God. Einstein thought so…We could call order by the name of God’ — Stephen Hawking (‘The Time of His Life’ by Gregory Benford, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Apr. 2002).
In his 1987 book The Cosmic Blueprint, the aforementioned Templeton Prize-winning physicist Paul Davies wrote about the denial of integrative meaning in the world of science:
‘We seem to be on the verge of discovering not only wholly new laws of nature, but ways of thinking about nature that depart radically from traditional science…Way back in the primeval phase of the universe, gravity triggered a cascade of self-organizing processes—organization begets organization— that led, step by step, to the conscious individuals who now contemplate the history of the cosmos and wonder what it all means…There exists alongside the entropy arrow another arrow of time [the Negative Entropy arrow], equally fundamental and no less subtle in nature…I refer to the fact that the universe is progressing—through the steady growth of structure, organization and complexity—to ever more developed and elaborate states of matter and energy. This unidirectional advance we might call the optimistic arrow, as opposed to the pessimistic arrow of the second law…There has been a tendency for scientists to simply deny the existence of the optimistic arrow. One wonders why’ (Chpts 10, 9 and 2 respectively). The reason ‘why’ ‘scientists’ ‘deny’ ‘the optimistic arrow’ of integrative meaning was because it was far too dangerous to acknowledge without first finding the biological reason for our divisive, apparently non-integrative, ‘ungodly’ human condition.
It is only now with understanding of the human condition found that we can afford to demystify the concept of God, explain what we mean by ‘God’. On the face of it, integrative meaning implied that we humans were out-of-step with creation—at odds with God no less—seemingly bad, unworthy, guilty, sinful, even evil beings. It is no wonder we have been, as we say, a ‘God-fearing’ rather than a ‘God-confronting’ species. We have lived in fear of the truth of integrative meaning and the issue of the human condition it raises.
Obviously the human race can’t hope to dismantle all these denials overnight. In fact, it will take generations to confront, dismantle and repair all our species’ psychoses and neuroses. The main thing is, once you know that this information has explained the human condition then you know that all the upset in the world and all the upset in you is now explained and defended.
In the case of making sense of your own life, it is true that you could use the explanation to retrace and analyze all the hurtful events in your life and replace all the defensive denials that you have had to employ with truthful, compassionate understanding of them—why your mother and father were preoccupied and unable to give you the reinforcement your instincts expected during your infancy and childhood, etc, etc.
To undertake such psychological therapy and dismantle all your psychosis and neurosis would require a great deal of time and supportive counselling, and, apart from extreme cases of psychosis and neurosis, it is not necessary. Instead you can leave the issue of all your upsets/corruptions behind as being understood, explained and defended now, and, rather than use time and energy being preoccupied with the past, simply take up support of the understandings of the human condition as the focus for your life.
Once you know this information is true, that the human condition—including your own corrupted condition—has been explained and defended at the fundamental level, you can leave the issue of your own and the world’s corruption behind as effectively dealt with and preoccupy yourself with disseminating this information throughout the rest of the world and to a fresh generation, and preoccupy yourself with supporting all the projects
that must be undertaken now to free and rehabilitate the world from the effects of two million years of living under the duress of the human condition.
Motherhood and ability to develop love-indoctrination
Olive Schreiner, and in the additional quote from a parent of today:‘They say women have one great and noble work left them, and they do it ill…We bear the world and we make it. The souls of little children are marvelously delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them, and that is the mother’s or at best a woman’s. There was never a great man who had not a great mother—it is hardly an exaggeration. The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer…The mightiest and noblest work is given to us, and we do it ill’ (The Story of an African Farm, 1883, p.193 of 300). A parent recently acknowledged that ‘The biggest crime you can commit in our society is to be a failure as a parent…people would rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ (Sunday Life mag. Sun-Herald, 7 July 2002)
Ho’oponopono – Taking Responsibility
A man in Hawaii healed the patients in a special ward, a clinic for the mentally ill insane criminals… And closed down the entire hospital.So how did psychologist, Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, do it?
At the time this Hawaii State Hospital was filled with individuals who committed murder, rape, and other serious crimes. People who worked there were so frightened of the dangerous environment and unpredictable threatening attitude of the inmates that staff would constantly call in sick. Nobody wanted to come and work in fear of being attacked by a patient-inmates. The employee turnover became so bad that many workers quit after a few months.
How did Dr. Hew Len change all that?
He practiced, what he calls, “Ho’oponopono“. It basically revolves around the concept that everything that you perceive or that happens around you is your own creation and take this…You are 100% RESPONSIBLE for it. No exception.
The main objective of ho?oponopono is getting to “the state of Zero, where we would have zero limits. No memories. No identity.” To reach this state, called ‘Self-I-Dentity’, one has to repeat constantly the mantra, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. It is based on the principle of 100% responsibility, taking responsibility for everyone’s actions, not only for one’s own. If one would take complete responsibility for one’s life, then everything one sees, hears, tastes, touches, or in any way experiences would be one’s responsibility because it is in one’s life. The problem would not be with our external reality, it would be with ourselves. To change our reality, we would have to change ourselves. Total Responsibility, according to Hew Len, advocates that everything exists as a projection from inside the human being. As such, it is similar to the philosophy of solipsism, but differs in that it doesn’t deny the reality of the consciousness of others. Instead it views all consciousness as part of the whole, so any error that a person clears in their own consciousness is cleared for everyone. This idea of an individual having the ability to benefit the whole indirectly can be seen in the theory of the Hundredth monkey effect. Source: –wiki
THEORY: We carry inside us as parts of the Unconscious Mind, all the significant people in our lives. (These parts of us often look very much like Carl Jung’s archetypes.) Ho’oponopono makes it “all right” with them. The process of Ho’oponopono is to align with and clean up our genealogy as well as to clean up our relationships with other people in our lives.
The Process of Ho’oponopono:
- Bring to mind anyone with whom you do not feel total alignment or support, etc.
- In your mind’s eye, construct a small stage below you
- Imagine an infinite source of love and healing flowing from a source above the top of your head (from your Higher Self), and open up the top of your head, and let the source of love and healing flow down inside your body, fill up the body, and overflow out your heart to heal up the person on the stage. Be sure it is all right for you to heal the person and that they accept the healing.
- When the healing is complete, have a discussion with the person and forgive them, and have them forgive you.
- Next, let go of the person, and see them floating away. As they do, cut the aka cord that connects the two of you (if appropriate). If you are healing in a current primary relationship, then assimilate the person inside you.
- Do this with every person in your life with whom you are incomplete, or not aligned.
The final test is, can you see the person or think of them without feeling any negative emotions. If you do feel negative emotions when you do, then do the process again.
Other Related Resources
Baraka (DVD)The word Baraka means “blessing” in several languages; watching this film, the viewer is blessed with a dazzling barrage of images that transcend language. Filmed in 24 countries and set to an ever-changing global soundtrack, the movie draws some surprising connections between various peoples and the spaces they inhabit, whether that space is a lonely mountaintop or a crowded cigarette factory. Some of these attempts at connection are more successful than others: for instance, an early sequence segues between the daily devotions of Tibetan monks, Orthodox Jews, and whirling dervishes, finding more similarity among these rituals than one might expect. And there are other amazing moments, as when sped-up footage of a busy Hong Kong intersection reveals a beautiful symmetry to urban life that could only be appreciated from the perspective of film. The lack of context is occasionally frustrating–not knowing where a section was filmed, or the meaning of the ritual taking place–and some of the transitions are puzzling. However, the DVD includes a short behind-the-scenes featurette in which cinematographer Ron Fricke (Koyaanisqatsi) explains that the effect was intentional: “It’s not where you are that’s important, it’s what’s there.” And what’s here, in Baraka, is a whole world summed up in 104 minutes. –Larisa Lomacky Moore
Product Description: FULLY RESTORED – The only movie ever transferred with an 8K HD Scan
Shot in breathtaking 70mm in 24 countries on six continents, BARAKA is a transcendent global tour that explores the sights and sounds of the human condition like nothing you ve ever seen or felt before. These are the wonders of a world without words, viewed through man and nature s own prisms of symmetry, savagery, harmony and chaos.
BARAKA produced by Mark Magidson and directed and photographed by Ron Fricke, award-winning cinematographer of KOYAANISQATSI and creators of the IMAX® sensation CHRONOS has now been fully restored from its original camera negative via state-of-the-art 8K UltraDigital mastering to create the most visually stunning Blu-ray ever made.
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment | UK orders
Ekhart Tolle
It’s no wonder that The Power of Now has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 foreign languages. Much more than simple principles and platitudes, the book takes readers on an inspiring spiritual journey to find their true and deepest self and reach the ultimate in personal growth and spirituality: the discovery of truth and light. In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present.
The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, “the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.”
Featuring a new preface by the author, this paperback shows that only after regaining awareness of Being, liberated from Mind and intensely in the Now, is there Enlightenment. Ekhart Tolle’s message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle’s clear writing, supportive voice, and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly “living in the now” means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container–more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.
We welcome your comments
PS: Quotes from Carl Sagan
Different Perspective on Life
”Look again at that dot. That’s here.
That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out
their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of
confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter
and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every
mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher
of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme
leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived
there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel
on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how
frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one
another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled
by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they
could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” — Carl Sagan
What is Love?
“Fireflies out on a warm summer’s night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower’s orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other’s nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives.To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? … For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?… Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned…sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.
‘The hen,’ said Samuel Butler, ‘is the egg’s way of making another egg.’ It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. … The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon–often within hours of spawning–they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.
They’ve served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.” – Carl Sagan
http://blog.world-mysteries.com/science/transformation-of-the-human-race/
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