Saturday, April 23, 2016

The individual lost its vital independence in the Devonian age

Seed beings

when time becomes real-time
There are little animals, each a single cell, who live happy chemicals lives, continuously creating amino acids, busily building the tiny stones of life, millions and millions of them in a few short moments.
Then comes dryness, a period of shrinking into spores, each one into thousands of spores - seed beings. Although seemingly dead they are merely in a waiting state of cryptobiosis or suspension of life, totally dried out. In this state of suspension outside of time a seed being can spend hundreds of years. It can travel, carried by winds, even through freezing winters, yes, even driven by solar winds across empty space, till the time comes when the sun shines on it again. Then, a drop of water added, and the old happy activity starts once more in a hundred new beings, faithful copies of the old.
instant soul
Psychologically speaking, we humans are also seed beings: souls asleep, frozen, desiccated, soul beings waiting for a drop of bliss, of ananda to awaken, to come alive. As soon as some joyful event happens, even a minor one, it permits us to enter real life, real time, ecstacy and instant soul that we are; in a few seconds a thousand blissful experiences occur, blooming activity starts, intense soul bliss, till again we fall into that state of psychic suspension we call ordinary life.

The superbrain


The first of the great syntheses on our planet took place 2,000 million years ago in the Precambrian age when a living cell united with another living cell to form the first multicellular being.
The second great synthesis took place in the Devonian age more than 1,000 million years later when multicellular insects cooperated to form insect states like those of the termites, the ants, the bees and the wasps.
The first synthesis was physical: cell was added to cell to form a single psychical body, in which each individual cell became highly specialised in its particular activity in that body.
The second synthesis was not somatic; each ant, each bee preserved its own independent physical body. The union was hormonal and effected by hormonal-chemical exchanges between the independent bodies so that they came to constitute a single vital being. What the individual lost was its vital independence, for each one now played a vitally specialised role: the egg producer, the water carrier, the soldier, the worker, the queen and the drone. Each had to play its specific role so that the hive could live and continously renew itself.
The third great synthesis is taking place in our time, and in it we are all participating. It is the synthesis of living mind, in which all the individual minds of man lose their capacity to function separately and alone. No human child could become a human being, a partaker in human culture, if it were left entirely to itself.
The communality of mind we call culture, and until our time cultures were still to be found in the plural. There were many on earth. But what we are now witnessing is the birth of a common culture for the whole of mankind. There is no longer an Arab chemistry or an Indian psychology or a Chinese astronomy. There is only one body of science from Tokyo to Cape Town, from Los Angeles to Moscow. And thousands of biologically independent individual scientists are forming together that great invisible body, the scientific community, which to their mind is as real as the anthill is to the ant.
This third great synthesis is still in the making. It is not yet accomplished; is has not reached adulthood. It is flexing its invisible muscles and slowly building its nervous body of electronic communication, its memory archives of electronic tapes, and it has started to create its own language, [...]
Now our children are still little beggars, searching hopefully in those dustbins of culture we call schools. But before very long failthful and skilled electronic teachers will present each child with the riches of his very own individual cultural kingdom. It is on the summits of this third great synthesis of life that man will really become homo sapiens. Then he will stand on the solid foundations of a cultural past, surrounded by the electronically accumulated and organised knowledge of the billions of men who have lived on earth before him. Thus he will be able to choose freely his very own cultural contribution to that great invisible hive: the superbrain of humanity.
Only then will each man attain to his luminous indiviudal summit, his own divinity of knowledge, bliss, love and consciousness, because each man will not only be aware of his own little biological body, but will be able to see with the awareness of the whole, to act with the knowledge of the whole, and to enjoy the bliss of the whole. It is in this single whole that each will find his soul and his immortality as well as a physical cradle for birth after birth after birth.
Life’s longing for the shining heights of being will have taken a new step forward, and when man then looks back towards his beginning as a unicellular being in some forgotten sea he may well feel that the most difficult part of his advance towards omnipotence and omniscience is already behind him.
He will have taken the greatest hurdle in the course of his evolution towards perfection, the hurdle of the ego, the ahamkara, the feeling of being a separate isolated being in a hostile universe, and will have gained the new security of being a perennial element in the conscious superorganism of planetary man.


=1 "Equals One" was a journal edited by Medhananda and Maude Pickett Smith in the early days of Auroville. See "=1 history". 

“Essentially there is but one single true reason for living: it is to know oneself. We are here to learn - to learn what we are, why we are here, and what we have to do.”
“To exceed ego and be our true self, to be aware of our real being, to possess it, to possess a real delight of being, is therefore the ultimate meaning of our life here; it is the concealed sense of our individual and terrestrial existence.”

The uncertainty principles of Heisenberg and Hurd
Benjamin Schonthal at The Immanent FramePerfect knowledge was impossible, Heisenberg theorized, because scientists changed the quantum universe through the very act of measuring it. Observers could not watch the universe voyeuristically, as though from the sidelines. To sight quantum reality was to alter it.
Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion introduces something like an uncertainty principle into the targeting of religion in international relations. In a manner not dissimilar to Heisenberg, Hurd argues that, in the process of singling out religion for support or censure, governments, lawmakers, advocacy groups and others alter the complex field of social relations that they purport to manage. They change religion through the process of sighting it. [...]
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle points to the limits of scientific observation; and to some extent, Hurd’s book does as well. What Heisenberg said of conventional language and sub-atomic processes, Hurd might also say of regulatory language and social processes: regulatory language is incapable of describing the complex processes occurring within societies. [...] For Hurd, more ominous implications follow from the distorting effects of expert knowledge. In Hurd’s narrative, expert religion and governed religion appear to be changing society in alarming ways. These forms of knowledge are actively remaking the social universe into a place of governed religion. And this remaking, Hurd persuasively argues, frequently increases the potentials for strife and conflict, while also diminishing the possibilities for reconciliation, understanding, or mutuality.

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