There is much debate about science versus religion, evolution versus creation, whether evolution or creation should be taught in schools. It is the wrong debate and a false dichotomy. The fundamental issue or question of our time is not science or religion, evolution or creation. The real issue is to understand and manage where we consciously exist and act, the mind and mental existence. The real dichotomy is between science and religion on the one hand, and understanding and managing the mind and mental existence as the place where consciously we exist and act on the other. The issue is saving the mind and mental existence from science and liberating them from religion.
The mind and mental existence is where we consciously exist and act, where we experience, become aware and must consider the conditions of existence, the world around us and how to deal with them. It is where individually we are in charge and in control, where we must actively be engaged and take responsibility for what takes place and what we do. The mind and mental existence is where we make choices and decisions, where we define aims, goals and objectives, and where we must consider, plan, organize and manage our behaviour and actions. It is in the mind and mental existence where we decide and govern how individually we understand, manage and conduct ourselves, how we relate and interact with each other, with the world around us, with nature and the natural environment. Problems and difficulties, errors and mistakes have their roots and beginnings in the mind and mental existence, and it is where answers and solutions must start and where change must begin.
It is a mute point whether we human beings are the product of creation or evolution. Either way we do not come with a manufacture's warranty. There will be no recall for a faulty product. There is no exchange for anything we do not like about ourselves or the world around us. The issue and question is how we manage what we have, how we manage ourselves within existing reality, regardless of how this reality came about, whether the result of creation or evolution.
The problems, difficulties and crises, conflicts and confrontations we face today as individuals, as societies and as a species are the results and consequences of what we do, how we understand and manage ourselves. They are the results and consequences of failings, errors and mistakes we make in understanding and managing ourselves within existing reality. They are the results and consequences of contradicting, conflicting with and falling short of the conditions, demands and challenges of existence and the world around us.
When we fail, make errors or mistakes, when we behave and act in harmful, counterproductive and destructive ways it is not the result of evil, evil forces or the devil, neither is it the result of selfish genes or faulty neurological wirings or workings of the brain forcing our hand. It is the result of failing to do the best with what we have, understanding and managing ourselves in meaningful, constructive and beneficial ways within existing and changing reality. It is the result of behaving and acting, understanding and managing ourselves in ways that contradicts, conflicts with and falls short of the conditions, demands and challenges of existence and the world around us. It is the result of failing to understand and manage the role and responsibility in our existence and development that are individually ours to understand and manage. Failing to understand and manage in the first instance where consciously we exist and act, where individually we are in charge and in control, where we must actively be engaged and take responsibility, the mind and mental existence.
For millennia as a species we have been looking for someone or something externally beyond ourselves, beyond where consciously we exist and act, to take responsibility for what we do and what we fail to do in the mind and mental existence. The problems, difficulties and crises, conflicts and confrontations we face are the results and consequences of abrogating responsibility for ourselves, for what we do and engage in, our behaviour and actions, for how we understand and manage ourselves within the reality, the conditions, demands and challenges of existence and the world around us. Trying to change the reality of the conditions, demands and challenges of our existence instead of managing ourselves within them.
The socio-cultural, political, economic-financial and human development problems, difficulties and crises, conflicts and confrontations of today are not the results of a failure of the promise of the Enlightenment to materialize, nor are they the consequences of disconnecting science from religion. They are the results and consequences of failing to take responsibility for ourselves, for what we do, for our behaviour and actions, for how we understand and manage ourselves. They are the results and consequences of failing to understand and manage where consciously we exist and act. Failing to be in charge, take control, be actively engaged and take responsibility for what takes place and what we do in the mind and mental existence.
The promise of the Enlightenment was only about better, more detailed knowledge and understanding and the ability to manage and manipulate the reality of our existence, the world around us, nature and the natural environment. It was to create the ideal external conditions of an ordered, stable, secure and predictable world around us of easy material abundance. It was not about understanding and managing where consciously we exist and act, the mind and mental existence. Reconnecting science and religion also does not lead to an understanding of the mind and mental existence.
Neither science nor religion offers a way to understand and manage the mind and mental existence. Knowledge and understanding of a supernatural-spiritual world does not provide an understanding of the mind and mental existence or how to manage them. Knowledge and understanding of the structure and workings of nature, natural forces, processes and developments also do not provide an understanding of what takes place, what we do and need to do, what we must establish, develop and maintain in the mind and mental existence and how to manage them. The mind and mental existence need to be understood and managed from the inside, from where we consciously exist and act, as reflected in our experience.
Within this context, whether we are the product of evolution or creation is a mute and rather irrelevant point. The debate about whether we should teach evolution, creation or a combination of both in our schools misses the point of what is required in education and training. What is missing in education and training is developing in the individual the knowledge and understanding, the abilities, skills and practices to understand and manage the mind and mental existence, where we consciously exist and act, where we are in charge and in control, where we experience and become aware of the conditions of existence, where we must actively be engaged and take responsibility.
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Being in control, via understanding and management, seems to be the central theme of A. D.’s post. Existing experientially as a mental construction, Reality is never directly experienced. The image that the eye forms on its retina is not what we see. We see a summation of immediate and past experiences. At first, an infant grasping its toe experiences the sensation of the object in hand and the toe being held as two separate and disconnected events. Many weeks may pass before the child conceptually knows that it is grasping itself, and many more before knowing that the hand and foot have a name and are “mine.”
To know that one can be the creator’s of their personal universe and have full power and authority over all of it, is beyond the ability of a child in the first two-thousand days of its life. Yet it is during this period that one establishes the foundations for their adult existence. Driven by instinctual dispositions, chiefly organized about survival mechanisms, strategies for avoiding discomfort are forged; some are acquired in the womb. In later years, perturbations may elicit infantile stratagems wholly inappropriate for their present age. These behaviors are often regarded as symptomatic of a severe mental disorder.
Fortunately, such behavior can be replaced with more appropriate ones once the conditions that have elicited the undesirable actions have been identified. Understanding the source of an unsuitable stratagem often facilitates its replacement. A. D. is correct in pointing out that neither science nor religion has adequately addressed the issue of ill-suited actions. Both look to external causes, deleterious genes on the one hand, evil entities on the other, for undesirable activities.
Public education, as we practice it in America, is designed to serve the larger adult community and not the individual in its charge. Its purpose is to prepare the masses for employment. Science merely seeks to manipulate the body, directly through pharmacology or indirectly through behavior modification. Only religion attempts to work on the mental level where one’s will exists. However, they too, seek to manipulate behavior, but through one’s emotions, chiefly through the use of guilt and fear.
Lastly we have the fields of psychiatry and psychology. Having little means of scientifically measuring the many mental functions, both have evolved from intuited theories, and both fall short of providing sufficient relief from mental suffering. The former now had become dependent upon pharmacology to relieve symptoms, and the latter is fractured into divergent philosophies. Both seem to be focused on the alleviation of undesirable behaviors and neither seems to be focused upon the evolution of higher consciousness.
While evolution of the species may be an irrelevant argument, evolution of the individual from the mind set of an infant to an altruistic adult is not. Barriers to growth of consciousness arise from habituated acting, thinking and feeling, much of which has been established before the first three-thousand days of life. Understanding this period of one’s existence will go far in expediting one's mental evolution.
The power to create resides in the Mind, but is executed by the hand, thought becoming Action. The mind occupies three universes. The Physical Universe is the most readily apparent. However, the connection is mechanical. That is, a biological interface exists between what is thought and what is actual. In the grossest sense, thought effects the actual. However, at subtler levels causality is reversed. Experientially, the thought appears to precede the action in either case.
The second universe is the Spiritual Universe. It exists in the physical world as eddies in probabilities, swirling about and altering manifestations; moment to moment, change is the only constant. It exists in the Mental Universe as conceptual associations with affective connotations. The reality of the Mind is a reflection of Reality as one dimension and Spirituality as a second dimension.
The third dimension is Consciousness. Unlike the other Universes, the Conscious Universe exists before and beyond the Now, to Origin and to the end of time. However, individual Consciousness begins wholly anchored in the Moment. Expanding Consciousness by broadening the sense of Now and adding past and future expectations moves the individual into the Conscious Universe.
Bill Hamer Copyright © 2008
(s.i.t.) ™ Copyright © 2008
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