According to a statistical pie chart posted on the www.adherents.com
website, just 16% of global Human-ity self-identifies as "non-religious"
atheist, agnostic, secular humanist, or bearing no religious preference
whatsoever. Of that number, half consider themselves "theistic,"
though not necessarily religious, so really only about 8%, or around 520
million people worldwide profess zero belief whatsoever in any supernatural
dimension to reality. The remaining six billion of us are mostly
Christian (33%), Islamic (21%) and Hindu (14%), with the remainder split
between various schools of Buddhism, Chinese traditional religions, indigenous
beliefs, Judaism, Sikhism, non-specified "theism," as mentioned above,
and a few uncategorized "others." While these major and minor world
religions surely disagree on a wide spectrum of theological, ethical and
metaphysical propositions, nearly all share some version of one core conviction.
Whether accomplished by way of hands-on manufacture (i.e. the Biblical
In the beginning God created
), direct or circuitous divine parentage,
spiritual emanation, the coalescence into the physical realm of self-existing
cosmic awareness, or some different but equally willful supernatural mechanism,
life on Earth, or at the very least, human life, is almost universally
considered to be the direct product of an intentional act of "Creation"
on the part of God, gods and/or goddesses, god-like ancestors, angels or
other self-aware, divinely powerful supernatural forces acting on, in,
through or even in direct violation of the standard processes of Nature
as we know it. Even textbook Darwinian evolution by way of natural
selection is seen by many who accept its reality to be but a mechanism
by which God continually creates and shapes new species.
But is Creationism in any of its cultural variants true?
Can better than nine out of every ten people in the whole world believe
something and turn out to be wrong?
Since ancient times, most everyone believed the Earth
was the center of the Universe. Many considered it flat, as well,
since the Bible's Old Testament speaks of angels standing at "the four
corners of the Earth," and spheres don't have corners. Isaac Newton's
commonsensical 17th Century cosmology still holds sway over most modern
thinking, even though quantum mechanics revealed the Newtonian "clockwork
universe" to be a macro-level illusion (a convincing illusion, for sure,
but an illusion nonetheless) as early as 1859, though most directly in
the early 1900s, in the work of Max Plank, Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr,
et al. Illness was customarily attributed to witchcraft, curses,
bad luck and divine punishment until the 1860s, when Louis Pasteur proved
that microscopic germs are, in fact, the culprits.
So yes, long-cherished, universally-held beliefs can,
and, historically, very often do prove to be flat-out wrong. But
that doesn't necessarily mean that Creationism is one of those beliefs.
We have to dig deeper.
Are there other theories, beside Creationism, vying to
explain the origin of life on Earth?
We have already discussed theories of biological evolu-tion,
in which organic molecules present in the primordial ooze of the early
Earth are believed to have "come to life" usually, in standard Hollywood
treatments of the event, anyway, thanks to a random Frankenstein-like bolt
of electricity from the clouds. In modern laboratories, how-ever,
while scientists have successfully reproduced primordial ooze, and have
even convinced the raw chemicals to congeal into promising organic compounds,
the "leaping into life" part has so far evaded them, no matter how much
real or metaphorical "electricity" they feed to the mixture.
But, despite American Culture War posturing, Creationism
and Evolution are by no means the only viable propositions competing to
explain Life's origin. Here are just a few less publicized theories
(there are many more out there) that may be new to you:
Panentheism The physical Universe is essentially a single large, unified, living organic being, the "body" of the entity whose mind/spirit/soul we identify as God. The Universe is God, and God is the Universe. Rather than being the "building-block" creation of any transcendent deity, Life on Earth, or anywhere else for that matter, arises by a process more akin to blood flow or cellular regeneration, a natural, microcosmic expression of the organic workings of God's macrocosmic physical and spiritual existence.
Panspermia Life here began "out there." The chemical and biological processes of life are universal throughout the cosmos, and microscopic spores, bacteria, viruses etc. routinely ride comets, meteorites or other space debris to "infect" or "fertilize," depending on how you look at it, new planets with life. The "garbage theory" of the origin of life, advanced by Thomas Gold in the 1960s, suggests that Panspermia may result from the evolution of organic "bugs" again, bacteria, viruses, etc. left behind by careless ancient extraterrestrial explorers.
Directed Panspermia In 1973, Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick hypothesized that Life may have been purposefully spread throughout the Universe by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. He argued that the best, most effective means of ensuring the seeding of Life on distant, as-yet-undiscovered habitable worlds would be to fire small grains containing DNA in every direction from the Homeworld, and let Nature take its course. Life on Earth may well be the result of just such cosmic seeding.
Clay Theory Simply stated, Life comes from rock. Dr A. Graham Cairns-Smith of the University of Glasgow proposed in 1985 that complex organic molecules may "piggyback" into life by making use of the non-organic self-replication processes of silicate clay crystals. Peggy Rigou of the national Institute of Agronomic Research in Jouy-en-Josas, France, gave a boost to this theory in February, 2006, when she reported that those gene-like replicators, prions, have been observed binding to clay particles and migrating off again when the clay becomes negatively charged.
Self-Emerging Systems A variety of scientific studies related to Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize winning work on non-equilibrium Thermodynam-ics identify the emergence of Life from inorganic matter as a natural, and even inevitable, result of a fundamental self-organizing principle inherent in all matter. In self-emerging systems, simplicity breeds complexity, which collapses into a new simplicity, which breeds new complexity in a persistent, rhythmic dance responsible, not only for biological Life, but for all organization in the Universe including cognition, or mind, which appears to be a general property of all systems in Nature, and in no way exclusive to human brains.
Are any of these alternative theories of Life's origin
measurably truer or more demonstrably false than Creationism? Than
Darwinism? By what criteria might we even begin to reliably judge?
Human beings were billions of years from existing when
Life on Earth, however it began, actually did so. We may choose in
hopeful hindsight to believe that God created all Life (perhaps even human
beings in His/Her own image), that lightning animated the primordial ooze,
that the Universe is an organism and Life its inner workings, that accidentally
or on purpose, Life traveled here from space, or birthed from rocks, or
created itself
But until we invent time machines and travel back
to witness Life's emergence on Planet Earth for ourselves or become a
true space-faring species and observe, firsthand, Life's nativity on other
worlds (or even take an orchestrating role in initiating its spread throughout
the Cosmos) we will, and really can never say with certainty, it happened
thus. From our simplest creation myths, to our grandest theological
systems, to our most excruciatingly complex scientific theories, all present-day
human notions concerning the origin of Life, however contradictory their
details or implications, must always have at least one crucial characteristic
in common uncertainty. In lieu of empirical evidence, which we
simply do not have and won't likely soon get, the only honest reply we
can give to the question, Where does life come from? is We just don't know
It may turn out that none of our learned or revealed
premises amount to anything more than hope driving blind speculation.
Or perhaps, in reality, Life is so ubiquitous and efflorescent that it
happily emerges by all paths, cheerfully conforming to the will of supernatural
beings, grateful to be scattered willy-nilly by its biological progeny,
hitching its own ride where their machinations fail, organizing itself
where no outside agency conjures to bring it forth. Or perhaps Life's
origins lie entirely elsewhere, in processes we, in the brief 150,000 years
of our species' terrestrial journey so far, have never, even once, come
close to imagining.
Yet, according to www.adherents.com, nine out of ten
people, everywhere on Earth, in their identification with the teachings
of one or another religious belief system, express at least some degree
of certainty regarding the question of Life's origin. The number
is probably, in reality, a lot closer to nine and a half out of ten, or
even nine and three quarters, once the atheists and secular humanists who
accept the prevailing scientific view and pronounce the question closed
are factored in.
This is really a stunning statistic. Nine and three
quarters out of every ten human beings most everyone reading these words
necessarily included feel certain they know something that, at present,
can fairly easily be demonstrated to be objectively unknowable. Take
a few moments to consider the ramifications of that statement. In
just a few pages, we have demonstrated all scientific or religious pronouncements
regarding the process by which Life began if for no other reason than
that we simply were not there to observe it to be, at best, hypotheses
based on cultural tradition, wish fulfillment, and/or educated guesswork
based on unavoidably incomplete evidence. How Life began, and by
implication, what Life is, why it exists, the true limits of possibility
(if any) for living beings, etc., is among the most mysterious and promising
"open questions" confronting Humanity yet nearly all of us live as if
the issue were satisfactorily decided, once and for all, hundreds or even
thousands of years ago. For us, the question is closed. We
rarely think of Life's origin as a question at all, and almost never as
a true unknown.
And therein lays a crucial distinction. Life's origin
is, at present, unknowable. Therefore, all human pretensions to knowledge
on the subject are exactly that pretensions. Our most impassioned
cultural disputes on the matter Creationism VS Evolution, Eastern VS
Western VS indigenous religious views, etc. are, one and all, debates
about belief, and never fact. Perceived scientific or spiritual "facts"
(an example of a "spiritual fact" might be Scriptural references cited
as inarguable truth) may routinely be brought to bear in support of one
belief system or in attack on another, but what is being most fundamentally
contested in such Culture War clashes is far less any objective measure
of Life's actual unknowable origin than it is the raw politics of who gets
to control the greater context of our shared planetary dream for he who
decides how Life began defines what it means to be human.
How so?
Our speculations regarding when and how Life began profoundly
impact our present-moment personal and collective lives for the same reason
as do our expectations concerning the future destiny of our species and
our planet. Beginnings and endings conspire together to define what
is possible within the storyline we're dreaming, thereby setting and locking
into place the limitations we'll allow to bind us as we draw a straight
line between our imagined common past and projected future with our individual
lives. Just as belief in an apocalyptic, steady-state or ascended
evolutionary future drives us, in the present, to make choices aimed at
bringing these destinies into being, so a sense of certainty concerning
the unknowable past restricts our present-moment choices by defining
very often, as with religious beliefs learned in childhood, prior to our
personally collecting any significant life experience or encountering any
possible competing viewpoints exactly what sort of creatures we humans
are, why we are here, what thoughts, emotions and behaviors are and are
not morally acceptable for us, and precisely what labors we ought to be
about, moment by moment, over the whole course of our lives.
That's an enormous amount of psychic control stemming
from a single unquestioned belief! If we accept that we are Divinely
Created beings, we owe an a priori debt to our Creator of, if nothing else,
gratitude expressed in the lives of most sincere believers as a desire
to understand and, as best we can, fulfill His/Her Divine purpose for having
made us in the first place. We seek guidance from the Bible, Koran,
Upanishads or contemporary spiritual writings, and allow our identity to
be shaped by what we find there. We become Christians, Moslems, Hindus,
New Agers etc., and begin, choice by choice, to rework our lives and personalities
in conformity with our chosen Tradition. If we believe Life evolved
from primordial slime, we may study the elemental processes of Nature and
conclude that humans are nothing more than a few dollars worth of chemicals
purposelessly animated by chance mechanical forces. The word "spirituality"
loses all effective meaning for us, beyond describing a pervasive and,
historically, quite troublesome human delusion. Any alternative views
we embrace set similar psyche-shaping processes into motion, progressively
narrowing our sense of self, of Life, of human purpose and possibility
until we find ourselves restricted to the definitions and limitations our
adopted belief systems prescribe for reality. However dissimilar
the prospective answers around which we allow the vitally open question
of Life's origin to close in our minds, we get exactly the same result
a comforting rush of certainty followed by a transformative, and very
much to the point here, externally driven "reframing" of our understanding
and experience of our lives and selves. What we human beings are,
why we are here, and what is possible for us as individuals and as a species
are reduced within the context of our chosen beliefs to specific known
quantities, and we become personally bound by those definitions.
Our capacity to experience reality directly is compromised, and our ability
to express our full humanity derailed. We settle into the comfort
of manageably smaller worlds and forget we ever seriously pondered such
obvious questions as Life's origin. Of course God created Life, we
say with casual ease, It says so right here in the Bible (or Koran, Upanishads,
Torah, et al)
As described in Part I of this book, these are all characteristic
symptoms of memetic predation. That, in pretty much every religion
on Earth, they also describe the classic conversion experience is another
question best left open at this time.
Our individual and collective dreams create an artificial
context in which we sort and prioritize our perceptions, so as to create
a "small world" illusion of order and control memes use to pacify us into
accepting a much-reduced state of consciousness from what is natural for
human beings, making our excess psychic energy available for exploitation.
On both the personal and planetary scales, our dreams, and the stupor of
sleep in which they are embedded, are most deeply rooted in, and broadly
scripted by, our response to this one fundamental question Where does
Life come from? Any answer we accept, like a seed planted in fertile
soil, sprouts a world entire, a self-contained memetic story our lives
become destined to serve as it carries us toward its own predestined ends.
Freedom results, not from trading one set of beliefs
for another, but from profoundly un-answering the question of origins altogether,
reclaiming and celebrating the gaping yaw at the center of all our proud
pretensions to knowledge, and excavating the long-buried mystery of what,
in its most basic sense, Life is, how it got here, and what's possible
for Humanity and for individual human beings in a present and future unbounded
by limitations imposed by any imagined past. Accepting any answer
to this core seed-question of the dream ensures our continued personal
and planetary enslavement. But when we learn to reject all answers
and, instead, live the question, illusions find no soil in which to take
root, and we awaken with our feet firmly planted in reality.
KEY QUESTION EXERCISE #8
The Long, Dark Now of the Soul"
Plan to spend 24 to 72 hours in complete isolation. Schedule time
off work, arrange care for your children and/or pets, shuffle appointments
on your calendar, etc. until you have created a one, two or three day block
of time the longest period you can manage, but not to exceed 72 hours
this first time out with no obligations whatsoever to the outside world.
If you live alone, a bedroom with its own attached bathroom can be
used for this exercise. If you share your home, rent a hotel room
for the appropriate number of nights, preferably on an upper floor or other
part of the building where street noise will be minimal or nonexistent.
In either circumstance, prepare the room by stockpiling it with sufficient
prepared food (no cooking!) to last the length of time you will be in isolation.
Use draperies, blankets or other heavy material to thoroughly cover all
windows and other external light sources. If you are using a hotel
room with a refrigerator, be sure to loosen the bulb so it won't surprise
you when you open the door. Put duct tape over small LED/LCD lights,
such as on electrical outlets, light switches and smoke/carbon monoxide
detectors. Once the exercise begins, you will also use the duct tape
to seal the cracks all the way around the door but be sure, before you
do so, to hang the DO NOT DISTURB! sign on the outside doorknob!
Your goal is to create a space of total, unmitigated darkness, equipped
so that nothing short of a true emergency will call you into the light
before your scheduled time of reemergence. If you are in your own
home or apartment, take a cell phone or pager into the darkness with you,
so that you can be reached in case of emergency, but do not make conversational
telephone calls or initiate other human contact during your seclusion (no
ordering pizza, for example). Unplug the wall phone so as not to
be disturbed by sales calls or friends. If you are in a hotel room,
share contact info with one person assigned to get in touch with you in
case of emergency, and leave your cell phone at home.
Remove all clocks. Don't even wear a wristwatch. Arrange
for the front desk clerk or your one outside contact to telephone one to
two hours before your allotted time has expired, to give you time to ease
slowly back into light-world consciousness. Spend an hour or so carefully
orienting yourself to the layout of the room, the spacing of the furniture,
finding your way from the bed to the bathroom and fridge.
When the time of your isolation begins, seal yourself into the room
as described above. Cover the windows, tape the door, etc. Turn off
and tape down all light switches, until you are surrounded by nothing but
complete and total darkness. From now until your contact person calls
you, you may eat, sleep, bathe, think, meditate, pace, exercise, or jump
on the bed as much you please. But you may not:
Watch TV
Listen to the radio
Talk on the telephone
Listen to music or audiobooks
Attempt to read or write
Talk, hum or sing to yourself
Drink alcoholic beverages
Use recreational drugs
What, then, will you do, in total, enveloping darkness, with no outside
stimulation whatsoever, for 24 to 72 hours?
Be. Simply be present If, like most Americans, you suffer
from serious, long-term sleep deprivation, expect to spend 14 or more hours
the first day snoozing which is one reason why longer periods of isolation
are preferable, to get that first, inevitable "long, dark nap of the soul"
out of the way. Don't berate yourself for "wasting time" sleeping.
Falling asleep in and waking up to total darkness, with no mediating clocks
or alarms to regiment the process is, in and of itself, a remarkable experience
most of us have never had opportunity to sample. Sleep when you are
sleepy. Eat when you are hungry. Pee when you have to pee.
Buddhist Zazen or Insight meditation, Tai Chi, Yoga, etc. can be extremely
beneficial in the sensory-deprived environment of total darkness, but only
if you are already a practitioner of these disciplines. If you're
not a regular meditator or Yogin, don't pressure yourself to launch a new
program for this starter retreat, however "cool" you think these activities
might be under such surreal circumstances. Simply do what comes naturally
to you within the rules (no TV, etc.), remaining all the while, to the
best of you abilities, present in and to your own body and mind.
Don't mistake the word "present" in the sentence above for some vague
and meaningless New Age euphemism. Presence, in this sense, means
physical, observational awareness. Take a moment right now to perform
a minor role play: A friend you love and have not seen in ages is
searching for you in a crowded shopping mall or town square. You
see and hear him, but he has not, so far, seen you. He is moving
frantically through the crowd, asking strangers if they know where to find
you, shouting your name over their heads again and again. You catch
up with him from behind, spin your friend around, and hold both arms out
wide as if to give him a big hug "Here I am!" you shout excitedly over
the noise of the crowd. "I'm here! See? Here I am!"
The feeling of being in your body as you eagerly shout "Here I am!" is
presence in the sense meant in this exercise. It's a very solid,
physical sensation of really inhabiting your body, of being acutely aware
of your hands, feet, belly, buttocks, face, hair... Here I am!
We are rarely this physically aware of our bodies or minds in the course
of normal life, but try during this period of retreat from everyday existence
to stay as physically present as possible. Don't hypnotize yourself
or drift away into any half-awake trance states. Be here now.
After ten or twelve hours divorced from light, from environmental clues
like ticking clocks, TV schedules, etc., and from the non-stop bombardment
of visual and auditory stimulation our minds and bodies are used to absorbing
on a daily basis, cracks will appear in your personal reality simulation.
The glue holding your meme-dream together will soften. You may feel
buoyant, as if you are floating amongst the stars. You may be assailed
by fears of being lost or of having invisible walls close in around you.
You may sense unnamed presences in the darkness, experience visions, become
disoriented, wildly sexual or simply bored beyond tears. Don't take
any of these experiences seriously. Don't pursue them as real or
significant unto themselves they are, one and all, symptoms of "meme-slippage."
The dream, in the process of dissolving, is fighting back. Observe
its struggle, but don't be lured into the fray, don't buy into any of it,
or the process will stop. You'll be ensnared again and likely find
yourself running for the sunlight, jabbering on the telephone, or mindlessly
channel-surfing with no memory of having turned on the TV. In the
face of unusual or uncharacteristic thoughts, feelings, sensations or even
full-blown hallucinations, instead of allowing yourself to be distracted,
simply be here now. Observe. Wait patient-ly. Embrace
the darkness.
Once the psychic struggle dies down, and the dream has slipped into
a state of softness and pliability in which you can still be "you" if you
actively call to mind your life in the light-world, but trying takes some
real effort and feels more than a little bit forced or foreign, let go
of your "light self" altogether. Just be soft, borderless, dark.
Don't rush the experience. Really take your time with this phase
of the exercise. Stay present in this boundless shadow-state until
the anxious urge to grasp after the familiarity of your light-world personality
at least mostly passes away.
Only now while you are momentarily beyond the limitations of any
meme-driven storylines, free from all coerced beginnings and endings, and
released, probably for the very first time in all your life, from the prescribed
"purposes" such narratives hand down is it time to sincerely question,
"Where does Life come from?"
In Key Question Community groups, construct perm-anent "darkrooms"
on safe and private group property for use by members. Everyone should
work with this exercise at least once a year, gradually extending the length
of time spent exploring "The Long Dark Now of the Soul" until at least
the 72 hour timeframe is met by everybody, and longer as individuals desire,
up to about a week (in Tibetan Buddhism, darkness retreats often last a
month or longer, so don't worry about "overdoing" it!). Group retreats
can also be beneficial, but don't fall into the "church/zendo trap" of
thinking you have to have someone speak or teach or lead in order to legitimize
the gathering. No matter how many people are in the room, no stimuli!
Let darkness and silence be the teachers.
If the group wants to invest in full-blown sensory deprivation tanks
or similar equipment, as made famous by the 1980 William Hurt movie Altered
States, that would be fine, too, though a high-tech approach to "The Long
Dark Now of the Soul" is not better than a simple dark room. Full
sensory deprivation can be a fascinating experience unto itself, but it's
hard to stay floating in a sealed tank of water long enough for true dream-dissolution
to occur. Feel free to follow the high-tech path in addition to the
"old school" exercise described in this chapter, but don't substitute one
for the other.