Oh, humans. Megan
and I have been thinking recently about how destructive they are, about how we
seem to just wreak havoc on nature rather than fully contribute to it. We don’t seem to have a place in it,
either. We’ve been watching a lot of
David Attenborough recently, and noticed every animal has a place in the world,
it contributes to the life cycle of the ecosystem. But humans aren’t a cog, they are right up
there at the top of the food chain.
When discussing this theory, we said “at the top of the food
chain” in harmony as we reached that thought together. This kind of psychic connection, that is
surprisingly common among close friends and family and yet strangely unspoken
of in a wider societal context, is so uncommon of other animals. Yes, many animal species do display groups of
them working synonymously with each other through seemingly psychic
connections, but it isn’t the same. I’ve
never seen an animal mentalist; no squirrel with a fully bandaged head save his
mouth, hastily reeling off the thoughts of random members of his squirrel
audience like Derren Brown, for example.
Then there’s the collective thinking we can do. Studies have shown that if you get a large
enough group of people together and have them form a connection, they can begin
to think alike. Only simple things like
all thinking of the same number etc., but it begs the question as to what else
we can achieve. After all, we all know
the old noodle about us only being able to harness 10% of our brain’s
potential. What if we could harness
more? Somehow strengthen the brainwaves
that form this connection with others?
We could reach conclusions that normally one mind couldn’t
reach alone, such as solving complex mathematical equations or scientific
theorem. In fact some studies may have
been conducted with results towards that effect, though I don’t know for
certain, only a vague memory of something I might have read once. The point is, get enough of us together with
enough brainpower and we could start to pick up on the thoughts of other
individuals.
This is a cool idea; maybe people would be able to help
amnesiacs recover memories. Use subtle,
subconscious psychic connections (for want of a better term, as ‘communicating
using the same neural wavelength’ isn’t as catchy) we could peek into the minds
of others and recover memories that would otherwise be blocked to the patient.
Either these kinds of connections are or should be linked to
Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere theory. Vernadsky theorises that there are three
phases of development of the Earth. The
first is the geosphere, which is essentially the four original elements; earth,
fire, wind and water. Then comes the
biosphere, which is of course all the biological life inhabiting Earth. After that’s done sorting the men from the
boys (too bad, dinosaurs) the noosphere emerges.
This is where I veer away from Vernadsky (who goes into
harmony with elements through nuclear processing) and err on the side of de
Chardin’s continuation. He supposes that
the noosphere is created through the interaction of human minds, a
subsconscious neural connection that we all share coming to fruition. He believes that as humanity strengthens this
connection through our ever quickening creation of social networks – and by
that I don’t mean Facebook, I mean making us more connected and reachable through
advances in transportation and communication, so slightly about Facebook – the noosphere
will expand in both strength and awareness, until eventually we essentially
ascend to a new plane of existence where our thoughts are all intertwined with
one another. He calls this the Omega
Point, otherwise known as “the goal of history”.
C. Lloyd Morgan, and earlier Henri Bergson, linked this with
evolution. He noticed that the most
interesting changes in living things were not part of the natural process of
evolution, and that rather than being gradual, evolution jumps every now and
then in increasingly complex ways. They
also describe an emergent form of evolution called “cultural evolution”, which
was sped up by the development of language to a point where cultural and
biological evolution will meet in harmony.
This cultural evolution would of course be the noosphere, the elevation
of our minds to a fully integrated, global hivemind.
Do excuse my language, but I’m going to discuss Scientology
now. To paraphrase somewhat, they
believe along the lines that some dictator alien culled his galactic population
by hurling them into a volcano on earth and created an atmospheric barrier to
prevent their souls escaping into the cosmos.
They sought refuge in the closest animals around, which where primitive
humans. These souls are what give us the
emotions we have today. This is a loose
recollection from what was shown in that South Park episode, but I think it
covers the basics as far as I remember them.
Thing is, when you wipe away all the
dictator-galactic-empire-population-cull bullshit and just focus on the “primitive
humans being granted intelligence” aspect, it doesn’t seem entirely ridiculous.
Ok, so run with me on this one.
Biologically, we have a lot of things in common with other
species on this planet. But the way we
think is so different to anything else.
We have a thirst for more of everything that no other animal has
shown. We always want to know more about
everything, we always want to explore further, we always want to create more,
build more, learn more. We are never
satisfied with our lot, as soon as we reach one thing we set our sights on
something else.
Why? Nobody
knows. We’re still looking. What do you think the missing link is? It was that trigger that caused us to veer
off from the typical evolutionary path; that made us sentient. Something happened that caused us to stop
thinking like animals and start thinking intelligently, thinking
intellectually. And given that the way
we think is unlike anything else on this planet, why can’t that be because it isn’t from this planet?
What is a soul?
Whatever it is, popular theory believes only we have one, nothing
else. Some people believe pets do, but
we’ll get on to that later. Either way,
you have to admit that it’s difficult to entirely brush it off as hokum. There is something special about us,
everybody has such a unique personality, such brilliantly different, complex
and incredible minds. Our memories, our
loves, our hates, our relationships with others, our relationships with
ourselves, our emotions; it is so hard to accept that these are just
electrical signals and chemicals buzzing about your head. It’s easy to believe, yes, science has well
and truly established the truth in it.
But just seems like there has
to be something more to it than that, there has to be something that makes us
us.
This is where my credibility will appear to go out of the
window, if it hasn’t done already, but keep reading and bear with me.
So, in the simplest possible terms because I honestly have
no idea what the details could ever possibly be, and because I want to make
sure what I say is clear and succinct – our lives are a test of some kind. Some extra-terrestrial initiation process for
something, I have no idea. It seems
crazy, it probably is. But the reason I’m
writing it down is, despite how ridiculous it sounds, it actually would explain
some things.
Below I’ll talk about the explanations. If I type anything like ‘this’, you can take
those marks to mean ‘for want of a better term’.
1)
We have souls
-
Our ‘soul’, whatever it may be and whatever it
may have come from, is placed into a ‘blank’ human being to form a ‘person’
-
This person then goes about their life as any
normal person does, growing up, becoming a douchebag, working for 50 years and
then dying
-
How they ‘performed’ is measured upon death, and
a reward or punishment is given, ranging in severity
-
Throughout this life, obviously, the person has
no idea they are an ‘alien soul’ in a human body; all their memories are ‘blocked’
2)
Heaven and Hell
-
Remember when I was talking about our ability in
large groups to think alike?
-
Remember when I thought maybe sub-conscious
connections like that could, with the right amount of people and/or brainpower,
gain access to memories that would otherwise be blocked?
-
Individually, as I said in point 1, we have no
idea we’re really alien souls; the memories are blocked
-
However, when we grew in number and were all
emotionally connected through the simple fact that we’re the same species,
maybe we started to subconsciously access memories from others
-
This would of course be emergence of the
noosphere – all human minds connected to one another, sharing thoughts and
ideas
-
Obviously the noosphere would have been weak
during the rise of religion, as there were far fewer humans then and we hadn’t
harnessed the brainpower
-
However, we may have had enough of a connection
for individuals to begin to access the idea of the reward/punishment we get
when our experience as a human ends, as also mentioned in point 1
-
As we only had the basic structure of this idea,
we had to fill in the gaps with our own interpretation
-
Thus the ideas of Heaven and Hell were created
3)
Free will
-
Simple really
-
We can do what we want because this is a test of
character
4)
Our place
-
As I said earlier, we don’t seem to have a place
on this planet
-
While everything else adds to the lifecycle of
the ecosystem, we just run rampant across the globe in a wave of destruction
and industry
-
This is because we don’t belong on Earth; it’s
just a testing ground to us, so we blindly do whatever damage to it that we
want because at the very very depths of our minds there is the slightest
awareness of what we really are
A further point Megan raised was that of
re-incarnation. A surprising number of
people have been said to recall ‘past lives’ that they lived. There was a BBC television programme a few
weeks ago about a boy who said he lived a past life with a family in
Wales. He spoke about his ‘other’
parents and ‘other’ life quite frequently and in impressive detail. The family decided to take a trip to Wales to
where the boy said he lived, and what they found seemed to back up a lot of
what he had said, particularly the house he used to live in.
Reincarnation speaks a lot of living past or future lives as
animals, and we thought this actually could stack up with the rest of the
theory. While generally animals,
especially when wild, seem quite autonomous and just going about doing standard
animal stuff, we do tend to notice characteristics in them, especially our
pets. Sometimes we even liken them to
things we as people do. And a lot of
people are of the view that if we have souls, then our pets must do too. All dogs go to heaven.
It’s generally believed or known, I’m not sure, that cats
and dogs found humans rather than the other way around. They came to us choosing to be
domesticated. As we began to share the
same space as them and form a connection through proximity, maybe they began to
form part of the noosphere too, or at least became a part of our souls’ ‘reincarnation
field’ (in other words, while their minds might not have been complex enough to
form part of the noosphere, some souls upon death may have inhabited pets if
there wasn’t a human body available – and you can count this entire bracket as ‘for
want of a better term’).
Maybe that’s why we see aspects of human personalities in
them, and why their behaviour has begun to change with domestication. Maybe that’s secretly what ‘domestication’
means – adding another species to the field of reincarnation.
Perhaps this means, then, that this is more than a test,
maybe it is a game or challenge where more players continue to join, and when
you die you simply re-spawn into another human.
Or maybe it is a test but a continual one, where the participants keep
going until the world is destroyed or some other kind of conclusion is
reached. Maybe that conclusion is the
forming of the noosphere. A completely
seamless network of 6 billion+ minds working together – that’s a lot of processing
power. Maybe Earth is just one planet in
thousands making the universe’s most powerful computer chips.
Whatever the meaning of life is, nobody is even close to
knowing it, so it would be unfair to debunk this theory purely due to how
ridiculous it sounds to us. I’m sure I must sound like some kind of
conspiracy nut, but I do a lot of thinking so some of it’s bound to end up
outlandish. But if this does turn out to
be just some crazy nonsense, I could at least put it forward as a religion.
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