The Chicken and the Egg

The ancient dilemma, though I hope Peter & Paul didn't have to worry about it. 

 Which came first?

Years have passed since I wrote an essay by that title. Anyone interested will find it in Beyond Religion vol. III. Hopefully, I have increases my knowledge since. Scientists, like ostriches, are hiding behind the minutia of atoms and ever smaller sub-nuclear array of particles, which obscure their vision of the big picture. Like the Universe, for instance. Or the essence of man.

They study the chicken having, apparently, no idea where the egg came from. I don’t been physically. They probable peeked. No. I mean they have no idea how can an egg, human or otherwise, possess all the knowledge to create a chicken—or a human being, for that matter.

They think that our brains generate our thoughts. And lots and lots of thoughts make up a mind, I suppose? They think that when we change our minds it is because the neurons have changed their relationship to each other, or the axons began firing along a different protocol. They always take the result as the cause.

They chicken always comes before the egg.

Now, for just a moment, let us forget about the chicken. Let us think of a human body… and the human egg. While still a fetus, a woman has more than 7 million eggs. By the time she’s born the number falls to 1 or 2 million, and by the time she reaches puberty, the number of eggs falls to about 300,000. But not to worry, she might well be able to produce more eggs after she’s born.

That’s not my point.

My point is that a human oocyte, or egg, in spite of the profusion of its numbers, is about 100 micrometers in diameter. That’s quite large as cells go, but try looking at it this way:

1000 micrometers = 1 millimeter

so 100 micrometers = 0.1 millimeters

Enough said, the egg is about one tenth of a millimeter.

Now take sperm. (Well, don’t take it, just think about it).. A man ejaculates, on average, some 280 million sperm in the hope that one of them will reach and penetrate an egg. It seems like a lot until we realize that while a mouse ejaculates only 50 million sperm at a time, a pig leaves us, humans, well behind with 8,000,000,000 sperm in each ejaculation. So when you hear that some men are pigs that is not true. It takes almost 30 men to match a single pig. Although, I am told, that our obesity has already surpassed that of a pig.

(In parenthesis, I wonder who took the trouble to count 8,000,000,000 pig sperm. Still, I suppose this is what scientists do).

Here, I must apologize. None of the above has anything to do with what I want to say. What I am leading to is that a single sperm the size of some 40 microns in length (a rat’s is 4x longer!), that’s 0.001574” for those imperially inclined, and a single egg of 0.1 of a millimeter in diameter, have all the knowledge necessary to build you and me, and every other human  being on earth. It doesn’t take much, does it.

Got it?

A smidgen of virtually invisible bit of biological stuff knows exactly how to build an Einstein, a Mozart, a Leonardo da Vinci and a 1000 other geniuses who all sprang from this bit of stuff. At least, the scientists would have you believer that.

Allow me to suggest otherwise.

As I already mentioned, the world is set on automatic. All women have eggs, all men have sperm (well, most of us). What those eggs and sperm know how to do is how to created a biological computer, which, thereafter, and under strict though subconscious supervision, the geniuses of our species can use to do their thing.

Otherwise we’d all be geniuses, and not stupid. Well, most of us. 

Are Men really Created Equal?

First, we must define ‘man’. Do we mean generically, i.e. men and women? Are we are referring to our ego—that trait of our personality that sets us apart? Or do we refer to our Self—that which makes us one. If we try to judge men on the first count, then all men (and women, of course) are born with divergent genetic traits, which make them extremely unequal.

If, on the other hand, we think of them as immortal entities individualized as Self, spending a brief stint in a condition of becoming, then, indeed, we are equal. We are endowed with the same, limitless potential, to fulfill the role we decided to perform while in a dualistic reality.

After all, as Self, “Ye are gods” comes to mind. There are no limitations of Self. An extraordinary proposition.

The roles we are to perform, however, are also unequal. They are dependant on Karma we acquired through the mischief or waywardness of our ego. We should never forget that a tad of ego is necessary for survival in a physical reality. All animals have it. But animals, other than human, conform to the dictates of nature, we don’t.

Problem? Not at all.

The difficulty lies in discovering why Self had picked a particular vortex of traits, which we can call ego, or personality, to advance Its becoming. When I first came to Canada, I read about an uneducated couple, settled on a small farm in Ontario. Apparently, they began adopting children some years before. By the time I read the story they reached 26 adoptees. Those children may or may not have been ‘created’ equal, but by the time they were adopted they all shared a single trait. They were all disabled. Everyone of them. In some form of another, ranging from paraplegic to blind, and everything in between. 

The adult couple didn’t ask for help. By the time a new child arrived, the previous adoptees were so imbued with love for one another that they took it upon themselves to help out. And so on.

No one will ever convince me that that couple, living on a small farm, hardly making the ends meet, were less advanced than a multi-billionaire who makes his billions by exploiting the child labour in the far-eastern countries. You might say that the couple is “far more equal then others”. I’m sure they fulfilled their Karma, whatever it was.

Though we may not always understand it, everything in our lives always happens at the right time, in the right sequence. Sometime we might succeed in disturbing that flow for a little while—but once left alone, it will right itself. We must never forget that we have our becoming in a very benevolent Universe. None of the above is an attempt at preaching. It is merely the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of observation.

Similar subjects are discussed in my Beyond Religion series; this particular one in Beyond Religion Volume II.

We are NOT Born to Suffer

How can anyone believe in a god, who/which would allow extended suffering of the innocents? The suffering of animals that feed on each other; humans, who murder other people; people who wage wars?

Well, ‘god’, doesn’t allow it. We do. The world in which this suffering supposedly takes place is not real. It only exists in our minds.

You see, we are not our bodies.

Once the self-awareness (our true Self) is withdrawn from a physical body, human or animal, no pain or suffering can be experienced. And even before, the Self is little more than an observer.

Just to illustrate this truth, we don’t feel pain when we faint; in extreme cases when we’re in coma. Our organism releases endorphins (endogenous opioid peptides produced by the pituitary gland), automatically, to protect us from pain. And we all experienced instances when we cut ourselves, and remained unaware of it until we saw blood flowing…

Consciousness is all. It is our life. Our physical body is only a consequence of the creative process. Like the physical Universe. It’s not real. It is essentially… empty space.

Nothing exists, even in our dreams, until we became conscious of it. The real Self, the I AM, never suffers. It cannot. It is not flesh and bones. And flesh and bones have only a rudimentary awareness necessary to sustain the image we created in our minds. That’s all. And even that is withdrawn soon after the Self separates Itself from its creation. Like a cockerel that soon ceases its dance after its head is separated from its body.

Of course we, humans, think we know better.

When our bodies are ready to be retired (and recycled), and our Consciousness is ready to leave, we resist. We even developed a name for it. We call it instinct for self-preservation. Only we’re wrong. There is no such thing. There is fight-or-flight built into all biological entities—it is necessary to sustain the illusion of physical reality. While the Self is immortal, indestructible, what we want to preserve is our ego. Our ‘personality’.

But don’t tell that to the medical or priestly professions, or to the scientists, who insist on treating us as physical entities. The same people wouldn’t dream of keeping a computer or a car that doesn’t run well any more. But dilapidated bodies?

Of course, that is ‘all’ we are, they say. Are we not our bodies, they ask? Are we not bags of water? Are we not farms for 100 trillion vermin doing their thing at our expense… sorry, at the expense of our bodies?

Give me a break!

Does this mean that we should not try to maintain the bodies we have created in a good working order? Of course we should. And we should always try to assist physical evolution to improve the instrument through which we experience our becoming. As long as our physical envelopes are the expression of our contribution to the Universe, to the Whole of which we are an indivisible part, we ought to look after them.

They are our mirrors, created in our image.

The Irrepressible Law of Hedonism

There is a secret, seemingly hidden from us, about a specific law of the Universe. If we, as in our ego, make ourselves useful to the Universe, in whatever way, the Universe will take care of us. All my life I have been doing almost exclusively that which has given me the greatest pleasure (I kept my Self happy). And now, I am comfortably divorced from the vicissitudes of everyday life, yet again doing what pleases me most. Writing.

You might say that I am in this world but not really of this world. I am a passer-bye.

We can all do that. Our prerogatives may change from time to time, but the essence is that we must do what gives us the greatest pleasure. If what we are doing is wrong, e.g. at the expense of another, the universe will soon cast us away. If not, if what we are doing is right, we’ll abide in peace and pleasure and we’ll taste the ambrosia of the gods, which the Universe will exude at us in her spellbinding generosity.

Of course, some of us might find my particular modus vivendi uninteresting, perhaps outright dull. Isaac Asimov said that he was happiest when holed up in his attic while his wife and children went on holidays to the seaside. Stephen Hawking has written: “Apart from being unlucky enough to get ALS, or motor neuron disease, I have been fortunate in almost every other respect”.

Fortunate in almost every other respect.

Well, so have I. And I don’t even have ALS. Note, however, that Stephen Hawking is, to my knowledge, doing exactly what gives him the greatest pleasure, regardless of apparent circumstances.

It seem that he knows the secret of the Universal Law of Hedonism.

The Universe is set on Automatic.

The universe is set on automatic and, as such, it evolved to protect itself in all its integrity. We can think of the Universe as a giant computer, in which the memory storage are the Universal Laws, and which correspond to our subconscious mind. Add all the subconscious minds—and I don’t mean just human—together, and you have the memory storage of the universe. There is no other. Remember, everything in us is a mini-version of the universe, thus the totality of the universe corresponds to the totality of the subconscious.

Now, why automatic?

The subconscious contains or stores everything that already happened. It is the past stretching back so far that the human conscious mind with its inherent limitations cannot conceive of such a distant history. We can think of it as stretching back to infinity. To a time before time came into being.

[If you can’t imagine such past, read NOW—Being and Becoming]

There have been countless races or even species before us, both incarnate and discarnate, which brought about evolution. While the subconscious is the law, none of which can be broken, it can be developed. It operates on the maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Hardly surprising considering how long it took to develop those laws.

But no one is perfect. Hence mutations or, in other words, us. We are the departures from the automatic. We endeavour (almost always unsuccessfully) to depart from the old and tried. But sometimes, just sometimes, some of us succeed. You might call those people the chosen ones. Although, I strongly suspect, they are the ones who interfered least with their destiny. 

The Universe is a continuous process of self-discovery.

When things go wrong as, for instance, with our climate, (or at the personal level: obesity, pandemics, inexplicable stupidity), the “universe doesn’t know” what happened. It notes and records, but it does not possess self-awareness. We, you and I, and countless individualizations of the Omnipresent Consciousness are the self-awareness of the universe. Self-awareness serves to give evidence of the consequences of any departure from the Universal Law. There is none other. We are the tips of icebergs, which are capable of seeing above the waters and, on occasion, saying NO. No, I will not follow the established route. We are and we create anomalies. We are the mutations, which veer off from what is normal. And thus we are also the indispensible entities, which assure evolution of the Universal Consciousness. Quite a job. 

E Pluribus Unum, or… the Biggest Clout

Since 1786, this beautiful and powerful maxim adorns the Seal of the United States, let alone many US coins. Now few, very few, know what the sentiment means. It proclaims in Latin what I  am sure the Romans would have liked to achieve in the days of Peter & Paul.

Pity. 

Also, many parts of larger political entities seem to harbor a desire for political separations from whatever unified entity they belong to at present.

Don’t they realize that the bigger you are the more clout you have? Economically, culturally, politically, militarily? Virtually, in every way.

I refuse to pass judgment on the USA, the European Coalition, the “freedom fighters” of Afghanistan or other countries. Their actions will be judged by generations to come. But, it seems to me, not one of them can justify the commandment: Love thy enemy, let alone: Thou shalt not kill. Not even those who have the Biggest Clout.

We are not really Christians, are we?  

Only these days there is a problem.

It takes only one man’s, or woman’s, little finger to press a button to make a home-made A bomb go off in the biggest cities of the world. At long last, we all have the power, the clout, to convert all our cities, the world over, into Sodom and Gomorrah.

A single man, or woman, created into the image or likeness of their God, or Satan, can convert our way of life into hell. In this Age of Aquarius, a single person has, or can have, more clout then all the governments put together. Those men and women need not account to anyone. They are free to kill, murder, in whatever name, even as those who, heretofore, had the Biggest Clout.

Some 2000 years ago a Man said: love one another. Even more so, love your enemies. We were asked to become good shepherds. Sheep symbolized our thoughts, emotions. We had to learn to control them.

Did we?

Perhaps that Man foresaw that soon, in just two millennia, a single man, hating, could destroy millions. Many millions. We have all been given the gospel of love—have we’ve learned anything? Did we stop killing each other?

Perhaps it is still not too late. 

Is there Death, or Isn’t there?

Death is a very misunderstood concept. Surely we know that everything that ever held a physical form must have also held previously a non-physical form. Anyone who ever designed anything knows that we must have an idea, then a mental concept, before we can make anything. Also, mental and emotional forms enjoy much longer shelf life than the physical. Just think, Buddha, Socrates, the Christ, have all left their physical bodies, but their ideas live on. They also inspire emotions in billions of people.

And it all happens in our consciousness. 

When our consciousness leaves our physical enclosure as e.g. in sleep while dreaming, we translate our essence (consciousness, awareness), our real Self, into a less destructible form, which nevertheless closely resembles the physical body we temporarily vacated. Why? Because the body we’ve just left is the image of the sum total of our spiritual, mental and emotional development to date.

It is the end product, a sort of impression we make on the matrix of the universe.

Some people can take charge of their dreams. Those are variously known as lucid dreams, soul travel, out of body projection, or by some other, more esoteric names. The funny thing is, whatever we believe in, we all do it. Dream, I mean. And we can all learn to have ‘lucid’ dreams. Why is it important? Because in our dreams, regardless what we dream about, we are immortal. Our consciousness outside our body, outside the confines of material shackles, is indestructible.

Isn’t it fun?

Just how rich is our existence outside our bodies you might discover in greater details in one of my novels: NOW—Being and Becoming.