How We Are Programmed for Life

Here we are approaching the end of the first decade of the 21^st Century. Our technology can pinpoint a bedroom window from outside the Earth’s atmosphere, see thousands of miles into space, look deep into our sub-atomic make up and map our genetic structure. Yet millions of us around the World can see no other answer to life than a story devised 2000 years ago by a group of comparatively primitive people. Like an indelible impression, the indoctrination of the human mind from an early enough age is capable of guaranteeing a permanent belief in almost anything, despite the many contradictions we encounter throughout life. If the viral spreads to a wide enough group of people, then it simply becomes fact. Even more curiously, without flinching from our fundamental beliefs, we are somehow capable of accepting changes to the very details they underpin through the guise of reinterpretation. This can occur even where new contradictions appear at the same time. Is it the case that we are just simply a mass of programmed objects with the delusion of autonomous control over our own destiny?

Discoveries regarding our genetic construction suggest that we are pretty much predetermined from conception. Dependant on our building blocks, we will be fat or thin, happy or unhappy, healthy or unhealthy… or any matter of things without recourse. Are we any different to ants or bees that as individual creatures probably feel as autonomous as ourselves?

Even observers of physics at a Sub-atomic level are now encountering phenomena that belie the very principles by which the Western philosophy of life is determined. Interestingly, these observations correlate with the mystical views and beliefs of some Eastern spiritual philosophies, views which until now have been belittled by Western science’s experiment and results principles. Using meditative techniques that require emptying the mind from all life’s boundaries and perceptions, they describe a reality where the entire cosmos is a single flowing energy to which we are all part. They talk of a nothingness that is not emptiness, a silence that is not quiet and an existence that is void of solid form and absent of ego. Their state of unknowing cannot be explained, it is simply oneness.

Physicists who have delved deeper and deeper into our atomic construction seeking that finite substance that everything is made from have instead discovered something completely different. Not the single, tiny incredibly dense and indestructible material they anticipated but a complex interrelating flow of energy, much like that described by Eastern spiritualists. They have also struggled to interpret this phenomenon using conventional methods not least because its manifestation is integral to and dependant on the observer and all surrounding forces. As such they have encountered a dilemma similar to that of the Eastern mystics and indeed one that rocks the very core of our Western views of existence. In this world of sub-atomic physics, a solid object such as a wooden table for example is no longer an independent, inanimate item separated from us by time and space. In fact, it is a manifestation of energy that is dependent on the forces around it. Indeed, space and time are themselves integral to the very same processes.

What is fundamental in both observations is that within the continual flow of energy, a process of creation and annihilation takes place constantly. Critically, in both cases annihilation and creation are simultaneous, non-distinguishable from each other, the Yin-Yang and it is meaningless to determine whether these processes represent life or death.

Ironically, prior to these sub-atomic discoveries, the philosophies held by mystics appeared less creditable than those of the established faiths e.g. Christianity and Islam where actual accounts written through the eyes of several individuals describing a similar experience suggesting a degree of evidence that such events may have occurred.

Getting back to the point, despite our perception of self-autonomy is it the case that we are simply part of an overriding programme in which our journey is a series of interrelated events. The case in hand is that within this universal process the actions we take, the feelings we have and the decisions we make are wholly dependant on the directional forces around and within us e.g. our genetic make up. Certainly, the apparently random and unpredictable nature of life is underpinned by much inevitability such as positives, negatives, good, and evil, right, wrong and ultimately life and death. Are we evolving along a scheduled path toward a higher Intellectual level? Do we live within a framework where religion acts as the control of our primeval instincts, science provides context to our learning and spirituality is the path to our truth?

So many questions and maybe not enough answers right now. But it feels to me that we around the corner from a significant step forward in our understanding.

Whatever your take, Keep the faith.