Saturday, May 27, 2006

Paradigm Shifting

Loss of meaning. When everything you've held to be true is suddenly brought into a new light. That's what I'm experiencing now. I thought I had it all figured out. God, life, my purpose, reality... I thought I had all the answers.

But, obviously, the wise man knows what he does not know. I was a fool.

The archaeology class I took last year destroyed my ideas of the evolution of the soul as independent from the body. The lovely "mind-body problem." How could it be possible for our bodies to evolve, as they clearly have and do, and our minds to evolve, as it appears they have done, independent of each other? Not possible, right? Logic clearly gives into this reality. So, are there no "old souls" or are we old, but simply by-products of the evolution of the brain?

The philosophy class I took this semester has made things even more confusing for me. If I try to synthesize my former beliefs with these new facts and theories, I come up with something like this:

God is energy. Energy is God. The "force" that people refer to when they speak of God, a Higher Power, the Universe, the Force, the Matrix... it's all energy. Oh yes, it exists. It has seemingly always existed and will theoretically always exist. It is the nature of energy to exist.

We have Newtonian physics to back this up. But then of course we have quantum mechanics, which says that this shit only works if things are big and slow. In the world of the very small and very fast, none of that shit necessarily holds true. Think about that. Sometimes it's true and sometimes it isn't. Huh?

Quantum mechanics tells us that, perhaps, every possibility actually exists, until, some melding of space and time chooses what is "real". For example, there's a cat in a box. The box is closed; you can't see or hear anything inside it. Is the cat alive or dead? You won't know until you open the box. Quantum mechanics says that the cat is alive AND dead at the same time. It's not until you open the box that one or the other must present itself and take over for you to perceive.

Another example. A tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it. Did it make a sound? Did it really fall? Was there even a tree?

Bingo. God's very nature. Don't question, just trust.

All right... on to the next paradigm.

So, if God is energy, and energy is God, then the world is probably more like the Buddhist line of thought than the Western metaphysical theories. We're all interconnected; there is no separate "I". We're all God, and God is us. Without us, there would be no god, and without god, there would be no us.

New insight into the biology of the brain (thanks to good ol' western science) tells us that our brains operate a half-second before we're aware of what we're doing. Put more simply: we operate on a half-second delay. Much like radio broadcasts are on a 7-second delay to edit out bad words before they're aired, our brain edits our reality for us. Maybe we'll be allowed to know about it; maybe we won't. Our brain has a half-second to decide. Which, for a mega-super-processing center like our brain, is a long time and a lot of data.

Wow.

That explains why you get such a blister when you touch the heating element on the stove or something. You think it just happened; really you sat there with your damned hand on the thing for a half-second before you were even conscious that your hand was there. Nice.

Brains have processing "modules". There are many different modules carrying on many different tasks simultaneously. No one module seems to be in charge.

Think about the implications of this for a minute.

If you think about the modules as members of a team, then the team plays games together. The games are played well and won in the hopes of winning the championship. The championship itself, many neurobiologists believe, is akin to consciousness--to the soul. It is the product of winning and losing certain games, but without the games, the teams, or the individual players, it is nothing.

What would your soul be without your body? What would your body be without your brain? How is your soul connected to your brain? Are we truly just energy?

And, if we are energy, if we are all one as energy is one, if there is no separateness except in our experience, then here's the next logical question:

Does energy want to exist in a form? Does energy want to be magma at the core of the earth, gravity to hold the planet together, rocks, mountains, trees, water, animals, viruses, insects? Why does it do this?

Which, I'll be damned, brings us right back to the same questions which began philosophy. What is God, what is life, what is real? What am I? Why am I here?

I think too much. I need something else to do.
Posted by Suzi Q :: 10:48 PM :: 0 Comments:

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