Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Soul Power


Christmas and Hanukkah are deeply religious holidays yet joyful as compared to say Lent and Yom Kippur which being thoughtful and penitential involve some degree of bodily deprivation—particularly as it relates to the ingestion of food. Both Christmas and Hanukkah also celebrate miracles. In the case of Christmas, it’s the virgin birth and in the case of Hanukkah, it's the miracle of the Menorah which only had enough oil to burn for one night but still burned for 8. Believers and non-believers enjoy these holidays, but they ultimately make the theological assertion, if there are miracles, there must be a God. Miracle on 34 Street is a delight, yet it’s also an argument for divinity. And if there is a God, there must be a soul. But there’s the rub. If we look at life in an evolutionary perspective (and as a number of scientists have said, “evolution is not a theory, it’s a fact), we would have to accord the existence of souls to the whole of Noah’s Ark and even to lower forms, like one-celled amoebae. We may be acting a trifle like the medieval scholastic asking how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. However, is the soul of an amoeba the same as the soul of a man? Let’s say there are 50 or l00 trillion cells in the human body, does the amoeba then have a soul that is one l00 trillionith the size of man? Is the soul equatable to consciousness, with creatures lower down on the evolutionary ladder, with only vestiges of consciousness possessing fractional degrees of soul power? Children wake up on Christmas and run to look at the presents under the tree and as they excitedly unwrap the gifts that have been delivered from the North Pole by Santa in his sled, their parents are left with the responsibility for finding answers to the unanswerable.

2 comments:

  1. I suspect that birth and living are about separation and death is about unification. Unification with what? We don't need to call it God, we could call it the Big Kahuna, or the Biggest Kahuna, or Cosmic Consciousness. Something both out there and in us, which we feel to be true though we can't prove it...yet. As I write this experiments are running around the world to measure conscious energy levels (see "Through the Wormhole" hosted by Morgan Freeman) and figure out what exactly is going on.
    I wonder if the trajectories of quantum theory, string theory, and the 10-dimensional unified theory of energy will converge someday and we'll find that what we call consciousness has its own equation in the pattern, a home at last that we can measure and point to, validating with science the final unanswered question, and assuaging our fear of death. Death could be interpreted as a return of our borrowed conscious energy, transformed by our life experiences, to the Great Capacitor of the Universe.
    A bumper sticker in the year 3012 might read, "It's all energy, stupid."

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  2. Nice, Jylle, this is really cool. There was also this Candy Bar in the 50's, like a Milky Way or Snickers. I'm trying to think of the name but it's not coming back to me. I will let you know if it does. Anyway I think that center constituted a kind of Nirvana, a kind of intelligence. Everyone just ate it and took it for granted, but there was something pre anthropomorphic at the center of that chocolate bar. Back in those days you used to buy candy in these rackety old newspaper stores with LaPrimadora Cigar signs out front and the owners where these nervous major-domos who blinked a lot and wore gray cloth jackets and had names like Murray. They sold all kinds of things kids wanted from model cars and trucks and planes to baseball cards and they were stacked from floor to ceiling with this shit. I'm convinced that the one at 84th and Madison was the Godhead.

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