Now “memes”, if you prefer, can either feed us or threaten us, and by assimilating key adaptive artefacts, we can deliberately engineer more complex or “enlightened” minds.
At this stage just above the contemplative, we come to see people of other cultures as really being our brothers and sisters in life. We deeply and viscerally recognize the potential that they expressed as being integrated in ourselves as well. We also see the same in our companion species.
I’m not sure I like the idea of enlightenment being complex.
I’ve heard that described as an outgrowth of Buddhist contemplative techniques.
Well, if it makes more sense at this stage, things become more “mythological”, similar to the work of Joseph Campbell and people like that. We use myth instead of having our behaviour dictated reflexively by unconscious archetypes or a poem.
When we fully adapt to living with our archetypes consciously, and engineering our society in such a way as to support the constructive presence and expression of these, we would move on to a stage of having an evolved “ecosystem” of mythological consciousness, each aspect having grown into its own symbiotic place, supporting the whole on a level that you might call “world unity.” Does this seem at all possible?
Perhaps an example. What would happen to cultures as they eventually migrate to colonize other planets? When small subsets of humanity come to live together in an initially cooperative way as would be necessary.
They would take what they know, and adapt it to the new surroundings, giving them continuity. Each would learn to either accept the differences, or adapt from the other’s culture what they feel works best. Continuity and integration. If the colonists were, say, a joint Chinese and English effort, familiarity and adoption of concepts that stem naturally from working with their partners in the effort, would lead in time to a culture that doesn’t really resemble either of the original parent cultures, and if that first colony culture splits into isolated groups … But this doesn’t have to be incidental or accidental. The effort doesn’t have to be slipshod does it?
Then you would have subcultures develop. Naturally.
Possibly based on smaller group dynamics, or goals. Specialized “organs” of the parent culture, and perhaps intelligently designed to optimize those intentions, and beyond this culturally “aware” world, we would have a society prepared to adapt their sentience to any frame of reference that might prove valuable or necessary. Perhaps some technologically devised substrate, or some much more biologically sophisticated and adaptable form.
Evolution… Darwinian theory. Well, I myself do not subscribe to the Darwinian model as such. In my experience and research, there is a process of epigenesis working under the entire world, sometimes smoothly, other times with serious distress or ecological upheaval. Thus evolution shows that pattern of “punctuated equilibrium” as they say.
Nature needs practice too? Excellent. That is basically true.
Could that be why the dinosaurs wiped out? Nature was practising. Yes, even the mineral constitution of our world has undergone an “evolution”, showing a complexity that only would have arisen with the presence of organic life and metabolism, and well, our DNA came from those same minerals.
Would nature include the whole universe and not just our earth? It does, and in fact, they have discovered that our solar system seems to have a spacial gravitic “membrane” if you will. The Voyager probe, I believe it was, is passing through it. So space itself seems to be perhaps just as orderly as our planet is.
Beyond that last stage I described, well, the multiverse is the limit… If we do discover that something could be inserted safely in the borderland of a black hole as they suspect might be the case, then that technologically transformed being in there could move beyond existing in a limited time and space as we know them. The orbit wouldn’t decay because an object vector doesn’t change beyond that horizon. Some theorize that we may even be existing in such a state right now, in a simulator.
No logging out though. Oh no, nowhere for you to log out to.
No “typists” sitting at keyboards outside the cosmos, then? Well, some say yes, others say no. In theory, we could be suspended in transit to another place, maybe even another dimension. It would still seem like an eternity while we are here.
That would be God? There is a source code perhaps, and everything else just being variations of that original source code, a metaphysical machine language.
So the next level of enlightenment is the super hacker? Yes, the non-returning one as Buddhists say.
I knew I should have paid more attention in IT class…
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~