HOW MANY UNIVERSES?
I like to imagine that, in many years, or stretching cycles of years, it will be possible both culturally and ethically to link all the inputs and outputs of our individual human minds in respectful dialogue. A healthy gigantic level of complexity would result.
Although we will be building increasingly common ground in our outlooks, we will not all have the same point of view, because we would have seven billion human beings experiencing and appreciating the world inside and the world outside of our individual organismic selves.
Toward this Utopian goal ( Remember that this is my imagination! ) we are already using the Internet and its many applications in spiritually humbling as well as uplifting ways. There are reverberating circuits of what we learn as individuals and groups of individuals, and what we find out through the Internet and other technological influences to come. There is respectful feedback to be tapped and shared.
Sometimes we must dig for this, however, when its discovery and enjoyment lie buried beneath deeply rooted acrimony.
Extremely valuable human minds have left us their wisdom in many forms. and handed down to us of all the great minds that have preceded those of us currently living; moreover, by both the genetic and the cultural route, our perspectives have been and are continually being shaped.
In my imagination the descendants of today's seven billion some day would all be investing in carrying on respectful dialogue. We would make it safe for each other to be vulnerable. Can you imagine what might pop into our consciousness, both at the individual level and at more complex levels when we become thusly aroused? The resulting mutually respectful runaway feedback might lead to what our prehistoric ancestors experienced as a humanwide culture of innate and acquired reciprocal altruism.
We, worldwide, have not realized together how having only one universe, instead of two or more, explains things much more sensibly and provides a pragmatically useful frame for organizing our faculties---being mentally healthy and having healthy relationships with ourselves, with nature, and with each other.
A pathetic consequence of the split is that further splits continue to occur ad infinitum, with increasing danger to the existence of all life in the form of organized violence and terror.
All the Kings horses and all the Kings men, infantry and cavalry, have tried in countless religiopolitical wars, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again---not surprisingly they have led and are leading, to even more splits.
Wars have not repaired anything, but have brought increasingly dangerous kinds of not only mental, but also literal fragmenting, as tools for destroying have become ever more powerful as the earth has become metaphorically increasingly small.
The fragmenting of mind, the fragmenting of matter and the fragmenting of relationships all are aspects of the same complex process. How ironic that destroying and creating are more coordinated than we as a whole are aware.
The main but not the only root reason for these countless wars is power and control. Who is going to be in charge of deciding who will be admitted to the postmortem universe, for which there is not the slightest smidgen of evidence? There is truly a huge market for another universe, and the brokers of other universes are working overtime to make their own the most attractive by making this one evermore frustrating and disgusting.
How are they doing this? They, the Brokers, are doing it at least in part by encouraging an increasing number of poor and undereducated, discouraging sex education, masturbating and birth control.
They have done nothing to foster the right to quality of life of those already alive;
moreover, in the late middle ages and the Enlightenment, nobility and other privileged previously heavy contributors invested their resources in the quality of their own lives on this earth. The brokers of the other universe discovered that they would do better financially by increasing the population of poverty.
They found that an ever increasing number of poor and undereducated human beings constitute a more fruitful financial base. The frustrated poor contribute smaller sums but more of them, to buy their ticket and that of their deceased relatives, into the other universe or heaven.
Moreover, having rooted the integrating of supernatural religion and political power, first dreamed of by Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, widely and deeply into this earth's populations.
These many problems have been pointed out by philosophers, poets, theologians and scientists, both gradually and episodically, over the past several centuries, but not with enough influence to bring the answers and their importance sufficiently into awareness in far enough reaches of culture, not just that of the United States, but of the entire world’s.
Our collective mind is hungry to be investigated and understood. There are already many relatively healthy minds connecting with each other and capable of bringing about the quality and extent of increasingly respectful and loving dialogue. In other words, there is the possibility of hope for optimal levels of goodwill, optimism,power and control,safety, trust, mutual respect, boundaries and limits, not only for us humans, but also throughout our context of Mother Nature.
The solutions are being found in recipes for ethical living at all levels of existence and for living with others and with yourself, at the human level.
The split in science has been much more recent, dating from the influence of Rene Descartes, who, using logic and sleight of word to separate his mind or soul from his body, which wore it like a suit of clothes. It is no coincidence that he presented his scientific thesis to the faculty of an influential and powerful university in Paris, representative of the same organization that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake, and sentenced Galileo Galilee to the same fate. And it is no wonder that Copernicus had waited until he was dying to publish his sun centered theory of what we now call the solar system.
Galileo escaped execution by saying in essence that he must have made a mistake in thinking that he had unmistakable evidence that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around, and that there were heavenly bodies that had other heavenly bodies revolving around them in our solar system. He recanted. He had really not seen and recorded what could have been a particular example of a more general pattern that pervaded the universe, as he viewed the four closest moons of Jupiter through his homemade little telescope. His sentence was changed to house arrest for the rest of his life.
Descartes, however, escaped the fate of both Bruno and Galileo. He was much more cautious in his ways of dealing with the faculty at The Sorbonne. He was a brilliant mathematician who is credited with having invented analytic geometry. He walked a thin line with what he ventured to expose of his ideas, since doing so would definitely have brought about his also serving as an example of the flavor of Hell. He gave a philosophical explanation for the relationship between his awareness of thinking and his corpus, one that fit right in with what the church expected and appreciated from him.
His soul, he supposed, was an immaterial substance that separated from his body at death, and went up or down or stayed in limbo. He got what he needed and the church got what it needed. Descartes died in 1650, but his ruse was discovered too late by the church, which eventually banned his book in 1663.
This idea of an immaterial substance was not embraced by the scientific community that followed several years later with the Enlightenment, in Scotland, England and France. With Empiricism The soul was swept under the carpet, in what became known as eliminative materialism. Along with the soul went the mind, including affective experience. Both are still formally lost, as far as mainstream reductionist science is concerned.
Science and religion are both suffering from blurred vision when it comes to seeing how the universe fits together. Religion is afflicted with diplopia and Science with monocular vision. Each desperately needs the other. All of nature, including humanity, is eager for this healthy relationship to begin.
Once again, an ecological perspective in an educated population, hungry to solve more of the tremendous and fascinating mystery available for all to experience and explore, to know evermore deeply and reverently.
