Matt Chait - Saturday, June 28, 2008

WHO DOES WHAT?

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

"Do you think that I know what I'm doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it's writing,
or the ball can guess where it's going next."
Rumi

Our mothers taught us to chew our food. But after we chomp down a few times on whatever it is that is in our mouths, we don't really digest that food, do we? It is done for us. And when we want to make a baby, those little gyrations that we do together, as profoundly satisfying and bonding as that experience may be, we are not really making babies are we? At most we are turning on the switch, or, perhaps more appropriately, plugging in the plug. It is done for us. Aside from the occasional times that we perform for our doctors, we don't really do breathing, and we certainly don't oxygenate our blood supply which is the result of that breathing. It is done for us. Really, we are being breathed. We don't circulate our blood and we don't grow ourselves. It is done for us. When we have an overwhelming desire for a piece of cherry pie, we don't put that desire in our bodies, that desire whose satisfaction simultaneously gives us intense pleasure and supplies us with vital nutrition, do we? It is done for us. And when we find the smell of that fresh baked pie absolutely intoxicating, we don't put those sensors in our nose that allow us to have that experience, do we? It is done for us. And when we race over to the pantry to grab a plate and fork and seat ourselves at the table, we don't provide ourselves with all that equipment (our muscles and bones and nervous system) that allows us to move wherever our desires take us, do we? It is done for us. And when we find the taste of that pie, as we are chomping down on it, to be too delicious to adequately describe, we don't put those taste buds in our mouths that allow us to have those sensations, do we? It is done for us.

For the last two hundred years or more, we have learned about many biological processes that take place in our bodies. Everyone now knows that we digest, we reproduce, we eliminate, we metabolize, we grow, etc., etc. But all of these are misnomers. We do not actually do any of the biological things that are happening in our bodies. We may, acting on our desires, do things that initiate certain processes. But even those desires, the ones that are integral to our survival, like the desire to eat, to drink, to sleep, to have sex, come from urges put in our bodies that we automatically react to. Everything that happens biologically within our bodies, is being done for us.

Now let's get much smaller. Our bodies contain one hundred trillion cells. And over the last one hundred years we have learned, thanks to the microscope, and many sophisticated forms of chemical analysis, about many biological processes that happen within these cells. One of the important functions of cells is growth. Our bodies grow as various cells replicate. But the cells know no more about how they biologically replicate than we know about how we biologically reproduce. It is done for them. And when they replicate the cells don't say, "I think I'll replicate now, because little Joey needs a bigger arm." When they replicate and how often is not coordinated by the cells, it is done for them. Cells don't really 'figure out' how to make anti-bodies to protect them and us from a wide variety of viruses and bacteria that might invade their cell walls and harm them, do they? Cells know no more about producing antibodies than we know about producing blood, sweat and saliva. It is done for them and for us. And enzymes are manufactured in the cells, enzymes that keep us alive and keep all our biological processes working. But our cells don't decide, "Hmm, I think Dr. Dawkins needs a little more glyoxalase. Let's see, where among these three billion genes did I put that glyoxolase sequence? Ah, yes here it is. I'll just copy it, move the copy over to my ribosome and manufacture a little." Cells don't really know how to manufacture enzymes, do they? It is done for them. And although all the ten quadrillion biological processes that are taking place at each moment in the cells of our bodies are all synchronized and coordinated, it is not our cells that are synchronizing and coordinating these processes with each other, are they? You don't think that same cell of Dr. Dawkins calls five hundred million of his neighbor cells on his phone (a cell phone) and says, "Listen Molly(or Dora, or Irving or Stinky) I was thinking of making a little glyoxalase this morning. Are you making any, because I don't want to make too much?" Cells don't communicate with each other. It is done for them and for us.

Cells have multitudes of molecules within them, just as we have multitudes of cells within us. Cells know no more about what their molecules are doing than we know about what are cells are doing. If we, who are the supposed pinnacle of evolution, know nothing about our cell's activities, how can we imagine that our cells, which are supposedly only the beginning of evolution, know anything about what their molecules are doing? They don't. The knowledge of our cells' activities and the coordination of our cells' activities are not known or coordinated by us. They are done for us. The knowledge of a cell's molecular activities and the coordination of those molecular activities is not known or coordinated by the cells. It is done for them and for us.

Now lets get a whole lot smaller than that. Thanks to the electron microscope, and ever more sophisticated instrumentation and analysis, including DNA microarrays, X-ray chromosome analysis and single molecule sequencing, we now know that each human cell contains some three billion pairs of nucleotides. Some twenty thousand stretches of these nucleotide pairs are arranged in codes which are recipes for enzymes; the basic building blocks of all the physical ingredients that make up our bodies. Do the nucleotides arrange themselves into codes so that the body can manufacture enzymes? No, of course not. Do letters form themselves into novels? Do numbers form themselves into equations? It is done for them and for us. Do these genetic sequences or the cells in which they are housed figure out when to copy these different sequences to provide the body with its moment to moment needs? No. It is done for them and for us. Do these nucleotides control the construction of our bodies, so that the enzymes that are manufactured are combined with other enzymes to form proteins and then shaped and imbued with function and purpose to create the organs of our bodies? No, of course not. Not even Michaelangelo could come anywhere close to creating and molding such precise shapes; how could we be insane enough to imagine submicroscopic pieces of nucleic acid doing any such thing. It is done for them and for us.

Modern science's understanding of life begins when a DNA molecule, or a molecule similar to DNA, containing a genome, an entire set of genes, which it supposedly had accumulated by an amazing series of fortuitous coincidences, including thousands of week long lightning strikes and its thousands or millions of organic components somehow bonding and staying in tact for millions of years; when this molecule replicated, or, as Richard Dawkins says, 'began to make exact copies of itself;' that was the beginning of life and evolution. But this, of course, is also a misnomer. A replicating molecule does not replicate itself. It is a molecule. It has no self. It does not replicate. IT IS REPLICATED. Replication is done for it and for us. Even if you accept Dawkins' perspective and his time line, you must say accurately, that life began when a DNA or a DNA type molecule was replicated. And if it was replicated, who replicated it?

Dear God, dear Allah, dear Cosmic Consciousness, dear Tao, dear Brahma, dear Atman, dear Great Father: please forgive our scientific brothers and sisters. In their enthusiasm to find out all the things that You have been doing on this physical plane, they forgot that You were the One that was doing them.



Please feel free to comment.

Matt Chait - Wednesday, September 17, 2008

REMEMBERING JERRY

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

In a recent issue of Newsweek Magazine (September 22, 2008) in an article entitled "Mysteries of Memory" I found the following:

"UCLA neuroscientist Itzhak Fried and his Israeli colleagues measured neural activity in the brains of 13 study participants as they watched short video clips of shows like "Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons." Afterward, while their brains were still being monitored, subjects were asked to describe whichever of the video clips came to mind. The same neurons that had fired as they watched a given clip fired again when they recalled that clip. In fact, researchers were able to predict which clip a subject was about to remember, as corresponding neurons flared up seconds ahead of actual remembering. The findings offer the first proof of a long-held assumption-that reactivation of the neurons initially involved in an experience forms the basis of human memory."

So if this is the first step toward understanding the 'mysteries of memory,' how far can we expect to go, using this method of research, toward unraveling these mysteries? Without wanting to appear like a spiritual killjoy, the purpose of this post is to try to explain the obvious limitations of this type of research.

The brain is matter. It weighs approximately three pounds and it is made up almost entirely of proteins. These proteins are organized into cells called neurons. The average human brain has approximately one hundred billion of these neurons. Neurons, like all cells, are amazingly complex, but neurons have one central function: they fire. When they fire an electric charge passes through them and that charge is transferred to another neuron through a connection called a synapse. Most neurons have approximately one to five thousand synapses, or connections, to other neurons; that means that there are roughly 100 to 500 trillion synapses in the brain and the possible number of paths that an electrical charge could follow through these various synapses is a number so huge as to be incomprehensible.

Now understand that no matter how many neurons there are and how many different paths through these neurons that a charge can take, what happens when each neuron is fired is basically the same. A charge, a measurable change in electricity, in voltage, moves through that cell. There are also some chemical changes that occur, but those seem to be relevant only as they stimulate or inhibit the firing of the neuron. Keep in mind that no matter what has been or will be discovered regarding neurons, subtle differences in chemical traces and electric charges, or the complexities of the firing patterns or the circuitousness of the routes of these paths, they will never be anything more or anything less than electrical and chemical changes.

The charge moving through pathways of neurons is commonly referred to in scientific circles as 'information.' When these neuronal pathways connect to the musculature and the electrical charges result in the contraction or release of muscles, or when they connect to the endoctrine system and result in the secretion of hormones, then the understanding of the charge as a transmitter of 'information' is clear (although the source of that information is not). But what about memory? What about thought? What about sights and sounds and tastes and touches? What about feelings? What about your entire moment to moment experience of your life? How do these electrical and chemical reactions relate to one's actual experience? As Fried and his colleagues continue to explore and tinker with these firing neurons will they eventually stumble upon Jerry and George? Will they run into microscopic electronic three dimensional and technicolor miniatures of Elaine and Kramer? Will they suddenly spy Newman and the Soup Nazi? I think we can say with confidence that they will not.

So, what is the relationship between this 'information' which is always, no matter how circuitous the path and how complex the timing of these firings, simply an electric current, and the endless variety, richness and texture of our experience? Obviously in relation to consciousness, neuronal firings are not information, in and of themselves, but they are part of a code. Perhaps that code, like computer code, consists simply of ON (high voltage) and OFF (low voltage) neurons, with each neuron functioning as a kind of brain pixel. Or, perhaps the code is also related to the timing of these firings and the location of the neurons in different areas of the brain. Again, as some scientists now think, it may be related to the electromagnetic field or cloud of energy surrounding the brain which is effected by all the firing neurons. The question is: How is that code, whatever it is, translated into the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touches and thoughts and memories of our actual experience? Where is the equipment, the apparatus, that does that amazing translation? That equipment has never been seen or detected by any scientific instrument. And science, which deals only in what is observable, will never detect that equipment. The reason that science is doomed to fail in this regard and the reason that you may consider me a spiritual killjoy (even though my message is joyous), is that the equipment that translates these patterns into experience and the experiencer of that experience is you and you are not part of the physical, observable world.

Now if that last sentence doesn't raise your materialist hackles, nothing will. But before you get too excited, just consider this idea for a moment. Your experience cannot be observed by anybody but yourself. (And what may be even more upsetting, from a materialist perspective, is that the self that is observing your experience is not observable even to itself!) You cannot be seen! Your body can be seen, yes. But what about you, that is experiencing your body, that looks out and observes the world from the vantage point of your body? You are not observable. Yet that is this very you that is the initiator and the doer of all your activities. The eye does not take in light by itself. It only lets in light when you want to look at something. It is your focus, not the eye's focus, which is based on your interest and needs, not the eyes interests and needs, that directs the eye toward where you want the eye to do it's job. The eye takes in the light waves that you directed it toward and translates them into patterns of neural firing, but the eye does not see. You see. The brain stores information coded in chemical and electrical patterns but the brain does not remember. You remember.

Let's suppose that brain research progressed beyond contemporary scientists wildest dreams. Let's suppose that they were able to 'crack' this code of consciousness in the same way that they have begun to crack the genetic code. Suppose they could look at these patterns of excitation in your brain and tell not just that you were observing something, but that you were observing something amusing. Suppose these researchers could even tell that you were watching a Seinfeld show and that they could even determine the specific episode that you were watching. Would they then be able to experience your experience? Would they then be able to think your thoughts or remember your memories? Of course not. They would still be relying solely on their own experience and memory of the Seinfeld show to make any sense of your experience of it. They would be no further along than if you had simply told them about it or written your reactions on a piece of paper. No matter how diligently researchers work; no matter how thorough their experiments, how complicated their calculations and how complex their equations, they will never get any further than the most subtle chemical or electrical interface between your body and/or brain (the physical plane) and you (the spiritual plane).

Let's go back for a moment to the beginning of this experiment. Thirteen participants were asked to watch video clips. Through various scanning devices the researchers were able to locate which neurons were firing when these clips were being watched. But why do these neurons fire in the first place? The scientific answer is that sensory neurons have a receptive field which is a space in which the presence of a stimulus will initiate or alter the firing of that neuron. Receptive fields have been identified for neurons of the auditory system, the somatosensory system and the visual system. But just as those patterns of firings that we discussed above are not really the end of the process (the process ends with your actual experience of the Seinfeld show), the stimulation of sensory neurons is not really the beginning of the process either.

The process begins when you want to hear something; when you want to touch something and when you want to look at something. This experiment really began when thirteen people decided that they wanted or were willing to watch these videos. The initial, the causal reason that those neurons lighted up was because those thirteen beings directed their attention to the Seinfeld show. Please really consider this. I am not just splitting hairs. The eyes do not see. The ears do not hear and the skin does not feel. Eyes, ears and skin are our equipment; they are the instruments we use when we want to see, hear and touch. We turn them on. They only work when we bring our attention, our focus, through our eyes, ears and skin because we want to experience something about the outside world. We focus our attention where we are interested in focussing our attention. Our desires and our focus are also not part of the physical universe. We may be able to get a sense of where someone's focus is by seeing which neurons are lighting up, but it is our interest that directs the focus that initiates the process. Interest and focus can be inferred or deduced by observing which neurons are firing and also by observations of our speech and behavior, but they cannot be observed directly with the naked eye or with any scientific equipment. Again, this is because interest, or desires, and focus, or attention, are aspects of you, of your self, and are not part of the physical universe. We direct our attention to an object or a person or a television show. That particular pattern of light is coming through our eyes because that is the object that we want to look at, or touch or listen to. This sensory equipment with its amazingly complicated system of neuronal firings is not working by itself. You are working it. It is serving you. It is the servant of your desires; and neither you nor your desires are part of the physical universe. They are unobservable and therefore never part of the equation when brain scientists or all biologists, for that matter, study the processes of the body.

To my way of thinking, the idea of studying memory without considering 'attention' is nonsensical. What we remember is a function of what we are attending to. Let's take the example of three people walking down a sidewalk in New York City. One is on his way to a jog at the local track. He looks up at the sky and notices that an ominous gray rain cloud that he saw earlier seems to have gotten darker and closer. He tries to stretch the muscles in his calves and shoulders as he walks along and wonders if he should have worn his sweatshirt. Another person, walking the same sidewalk at the same time, is someone who has lived in this neighborhood all her life. Today is her day off and she is on her way to the local coffee shop. As she saunters down the street she looks into the two Ukrainian owned shops (she is Ukrainian) and sticks her head in the doorway to say hello. The wife of one of the shop keepers (an old family friend) has recently passed away, and she notices that the shop keeper still seems to be in mourning even though he attempts a friendly greeting. A third person, a tourist, has never been to New York before. She has heard so much about this neighborhood (the East Village) and as she walks down the street taking in all the urban sights and sounds and smells, she thinks about all the poets and artists that lived here previously.

The point is that each person, walking down the same street, is having a very different experience and, of course, their subsequent memory of that street will depend on where their attention was as they walked down it. My wife is amazingly observant of her surroundings. We can visit a friend that we haven't seen in two years and she will walk into the house and say something like, "Oh, you re-upholstered your sofa. I love it." I, of course, would be hard pressed to remember that there ever was a sofa in that room, much less what the upholstery was like. On the other hand I may have a vivid memory of their cat and the distant and perfectly serene way that the cat observed us when we walked in the last time. Even when several people are attending to the same event, like the Seinfeld show, each person is watching a somewhat different episode. One person is a fan of the show and watches with enthusiasm. One person hates the show and the only reason she volunteered to be a subject in this research project was that her brother-in-law was one of the researchers. One person loves George and thinks that Kramer over acts. Another person thinks that Kramer is the best thing on the show and never takes her eyes off him when he is on camera, etc., etc., etc. Our attention goes where our interests and our desires lead us. This results in different experiences, different memories and different sets of neurons firing for each person.

Just as much as a person's interests are shaped by their experience, a person's experience is shaped by their interests. To my mind these interests are connected to a whole set of desires, of things that you want to or need to accomplish in this life. Your desires are not part of the physical universe but they are what connect you to the physical universe, and they precede our physical bodies. We choose our birth and we do that by choosing a set of genes that will develop into the body/brain that best suits what it is that we are trying to accomplish. Being born, from this perspective, is choosing to come from an unlimited, out of time and space experience, to a single space time continuum that is connected to a particular set of genes which develops into a particular body/brain. Even the intra-uterine experience is very different for each fetus depending on the interests and desires that the fetus brings to it. So it's not so much that you are the passive victim of the genes you happenned to be born with and the particular structure of the brain that you happenned to inherit. It's that you chose your genetic inheritance to accomplish whatever it is that you wanted to or needed to accomplish in this life. The neurons of the brain are simply neutral recording devices. You record on them the experiences that you are interested in and you imbue those experiences with the emotional meaning that you want to imbue them with. There is even brain research now that shows that we actually grow more neurons in the place in our brains that is associated with a certain kind of thinking or perceiving. If you are drawn to drumming, let's say, the more you learn, the more you are able to distinguish different sounds and rhythms and qualities of drumming. You actually grow more neurons or imprint pre-existing neurons with the impressions of these separate aural experiences that enable you to draw so many distinctions. Your interest also controls the growth and direction of the axons which lead from the neuron to a synaptic connection with another neuron. These axons can be very long (in relation to the cell body of the neuron) and can connect with any other neuron in the brain. Again, it is your interest, the way that you experience your experience that is causing the growth and direction of those axons and is imprinting not only these experiences but the way you connect them with other experiences. In short, then, a great drummer is not a great drummer because he happenned to have great drumming neurons. He's a great drummer because he arrived here with a passion for self-expression which found an outlet through drumming. In the process of pursuing his passion to become a great drummer, he grew and developed the great drumming neurons and synaptical connections that he needed to realize his dream.

Some people feel, in a sense, at odds with their brains. They are trying through therapy, or some other means, to restructure the way that they think or organize their experience. So how could they have chosen that? Because the lesson they learned or are now learning which brings them to this desire for change, is the very lesson that they wanted to learn in this life-time. And with patience and guidance and perserverance they can change pathways, grow new neurons and reprogram old ones. When we first made these choices regarding the kind of things we want to experience and accomplish in this life, we were not doing it from the encumbered place that we are in now. Our judgement was much different then. We were looking at it from a perspective outside of time; of endless time. And we were not dazzled by the superficial values of any society. We ultimately want to experience and understand EVERYTHING and we come to such understanding only through the experience and understanding of the negative as well as the positive. If you are wondering what it is that you are supposed to be accomplishing in this life, just look at your life at this exact moment. What ever it is that you are doing, whatever it is that you are wondering about or struggling with, that is exactly what you are supposed to be wondering about and struggling with. If your path does not yet appear clear to you, it is not yet supposed to be clear. If you know what you want but can't seem to reach it, the frustration that you are feeling at this moment is the frustration that you are supposed to be experiencing. You are the author of your experience. And if these words that you are currently reading cause in you a paradigm shift and alter the context within which you hold your experience, then that was what was supposed to happen; and if you reject these words, or if they do not make any sense to you at this moment, then that is what is supposed to happen, too. I am just doing my best to do what I am supposed to do.

Now let's look at the memory part:

"Afterward, while their brains were still being monitored, subjects were asked to describe whichever of the video clips came to mind. The same neurons that had fired as they watched a given clip fired again when they recalled that clip." The way it is explained it seems as though these neurons just happenned to fire by themselves and then they just happenned to fire again. But that is not the memory part. The way they describe it, it seems as if there is no memory part at all. The memory part comes because they (the subjects) were asked to describe what came to mind. Memory happens when they locate that same exact spot in their brains where the coded impressions of their first experience was stored. Obviously they are locating those neurons. It's not the neurons that are locating the neurons; that doesn't make any sense. Memory is their (not their neurons) act of location. Keeping in mind that there are one hundred billion neurons, the ability to re-locate those exact neurons is pretty amazing. When you are 'trying to remember' something, you are trying to locate those coded neuronal impressions. The brain with its one hundred billion neurons is a recording device, an amazingly complex and vivid recording device, but a recording device none the less. Memory is you locating where, among those billions of neurons, you stored that impression.

So at every step of this process: the subjects focussing on the show; the subjects translating the sensory neural firings into their actual experience of the show; each subject's unique way of experiencing the show and subsequently each subject's unique memory of that show; the subject's re-locating those firing neurons and the subject's once again translating these neural impressions into their experience; through all of these, the self with it's interests and attention is front and center. In fact with every biological experiment, the self is the elephant in the room (or the laboratory). It seems that the thrust of modern biology is not only to ignore this elephant in the laboratory, this self, but the long range goal seems to be to eliminate the entire concept of the Self. (Unfortunately for them, the self is not a concept. The self is that which is entertaining the concept that the self is a concept. Whatever you succeeded in eliminating, it wouldn't be the self, because you would need your self to eliminate whatever it was that you thought you were eliminating!)

Trying to look at or describe the process of memory in purely chemical and electrical terms without including the self is like trying to describe a baseball game without including the players:

A cork and rubber ball covered in cowhide flies through the air about sixty

feet where it comes into contact with a rapidly revolving stick. The ball

bounces off the stick in many different trajectories and eventually finds its

way to a leather glove. The ball then flings itself from the glove to another

leather glove in the vicinity of a white canvas square.

All of this is true, in a way, but the entire point is missed. The ball, the bat and the bases are not playing baseball. They are the equipment that the players use. It is the players not the equipment that are actually playing the game. And exactly the same thing holds true with memory, thinking and perception. The brain and it's one hundred billion neurons and it's many trillions of synapses are the equipment that we are using when we remember, think and perceive.

So, what am I saying? That all brain research is futile; that it is just the non-physical you that is doing everything, so why bother? No! Not at all! I am saying that our brains and our bodies are not us. They are our precious equipment and should be treated and studied as such. The brain and the body are the passive conductors of the ten quadrillion biological processes that enable us to experience the world through this brain and body. If we get clear on that, and that our health, our responsiveness and our sensitivity depend on the unimpeded flow of all these chemical and electrical processes, then the main thrust of our research will be on how this equipment works and what environmental factors, what foods and chemicals, and what ideas and emotional messages about the world and about ourselves, inhibit the flow of these processes and what factors enhance the flow of these processes.

But you, not biological processes but that which experiences these biological processes, are not observable, recordable or researchable. It seems that the thrust of modern research is to attempt to eliminate you, to make you explainable in chemical and electronic terms. This will never happen. The best that science will ever do is to get to the electrical or chemical interface between the physical universe and you. You will never be understood in those terms. Yes, we are seeing the electrical and chemical activity that supports our memory, our thinking and our consciousness, but we are not seeing memory, thinking or consciousness. We are at a strange point in our understanding of the world. We continue to learn more and more about the physical universe and how it operates, and in our enthusiasm we think all will one day be known and that the self and consciousness are delusions that will be dispelled as soon as we unearth the proper formula. We think of researchers in the same way we think of medical doctors, that they will eventually be able to diagnose love, consciousness and the self, to reduce these things to some kind of physical formula that will dispel any mystical notions that we may have about them. But the self has no physical bases what so ever. Whatever physical bases is found, the self is not this physical bases, but what experiences this physical bases. What we will discover, and what physicists are already further along at discovering, is that as you look more and more deeply into the world of matter it dissolves into the world of energy, and as you look more and more deeply into the world of energy it dissolves into the world of intention and as you look more and more deeply into intention you arrive at being; being which is the origin of intention, which creates energy, which creates matter.

Let's continue to investigate with great curiosity and diligence the physical universe in ways that lead us to improve our lives and enhance our experience; but let's give up this dark and depressing fantasy that research will one day explain away and eliminate the Self, the Creator and the creative mystery of life. No matter what we discover about the ways that neurons assist us, remember that we, not our neurons, remember Jerry.



Your comments are most welcome. Thanks.

Matt Chait - Tuesday, December 30, 2008

MIRACLES

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"We come spinning out of nothingness; scattering stars like dust."
Rumi

The miraculousness of an event is due to its origin, not its frequency.There are extremely unusual occurrences which cannot be called miraculous. Drawing a royal straight flush from the first five cards you are dealt from a shuffled deck may be, even for an avid poker player,a once in a lifetime experience, but it is not a miracle. Monkeys jumping up and down on keyboards may type out a poem; they may even type out the complete works of Shakespeare. (Although if you're in the laboratory waiting for this to happen, I hope you remembered to bring your lunch.) Looking at it at the level of statistics, these events are highly improbable, but still possible (of course for space purposes we must ignore, for now, the much larger issue of the probability of anything of coherent complexity on the order of monkeys, humans or keyboards appearing in a random universe in the first place; and the even larger issue of the probability of a precise, mechanistic universe obeying a whole raft of inviolable physical and chemical laws emerging from a consciousless, purposeless, meaningless void). Coincidences also, even the most unusual, can be explained in terms of probabilities. So, if on the same hand of five cards one person draws a royal straight flush, which is a probability of one out of twenty-three million seven hundred sixty-two thousand seven hundred and fifty-two, and another person draws a full house, which is a probability, by itself, of one out of two thousand one hundred and ninety-seven; it would probably give the loser little comfort to find out, after he bet and lost his entire life savings on his full house, that the possibility of those two events happening together would be a whopping one out of fifty-two billion two hundred six million seven hundred sixty-six thousand one hundred fourteen. A very unusual circumstance? Yes. A miracle? No.

The origin of an event determines whether or not it is miraculous. A truly miraculous event is one that is caused by a non-physical source, by something that cannot be observed or measured; something that is not part of the physical universe. An event that begins in the non-physical,the spiritual, and ends in the physical; that is a miracle. Most people think of a non-physical cause, if such a thing exists, as emanating from a divine being, so miracles are considered divine. But some people consider human beings and even all living beings, even though they inhabit bodies, as being essentially spiritual, or non-physical. From this perspective, anything that starts with an intention (Divine, human or otherwise) is miraculous since intentions are not part of the measurable, physical universe. Intentions, or desires, are the bridge between the non-physical world of being and the physical world of matter and energy. Within the non-physical realm I include the moment to moment experience of your life, which you experience but which no one else can either observe or experience; your Self, not your body or cells, or genes or neurons, or all the quadrillions of simultaneous biological processes that occur in your body at every moment, but that which experiences and benefits from all of these and which cannot be measured or observed by any outsider, including any scientist, and cannot be observed even by yourself. I also include the impossibly complex organization of living beings; not the matter that is being organized, but the organization itself, which is often referred to in scientific circles as 'the program' which governs the synchronization and organization of quadrillions of processes that deliver growth, replication, metabolism, digestion, elimination, and the ability to sense the external world. This 'program' and all the knowledge and intelligence needed to run it has never been seen by anyone or through any instrumentation, and it never will be. Will, intelligence and desire are also non-physical. They are experienced but not observed. And, finally, I include natural forces, like gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. I am not talking about the matter and energy that is affected by these forces, but the forces themselves. We know the forces are there because we can see their results, but we cannot observe them directly. How did they get there and does their existence have a material bases?

MATERIAL MATERIALISTS

Regarding attitudes toward miracles, the population can be divided into three basic groups. The first is what I call the material materialists or atheists. This group believes that there never is and there never was anything that can be called a miracle; that everything can be explained in terms of physical antecedents. Non-physical things are considered to be the result of matter. Consciousness is considered to be the result of the measurable electro- magnetic patterns surrounding the brain that are caused by firing neurons. You, or the self, is considered to not exist at all, but to be an illusion perpetrated by matter (the brain) to allow an organism to concentrate on one thing at a time (although if you are an illusion, who is it that is doing the concentrating?). Complexity of organization is considered to be the cause of intelligence, rather than vice-versa; and the amazing complexity of living creatures is considered to be the result of matter (nucleotides) arranged in genetic sequences. Also, the will to survive is considered to be the result of, to be emanating from, the DNA molecule. Supposedly this DNA molecule or some molecule similar to it suddenly emerged from the chance combination of chemicals armed with an unobservable but relentless determination to replicate itself that it was able to pass on, by itself, to its progeny from that moment forward to the present time, even though no molecule leading up to that moment had the least ability or interest or will to do anything at all, much less to replicate. Also, physical forces are considered to be the result of matter. For instance, electro-magnetic energy is considered to be emanating from and formed by electrons (or even tinier particles within the electron force field) and protons (or tiny particles within the proton force field); and gravity is considered to be the result of mass, and mass is considered to be the result of a theoretical particle which has not as yet been observed, but scientists are so sure that this mass conferring particle exists that they have already given it a name, the "Higgs Boson."

We will get back to all of these later in this post, but it should be noted that none of these causal relationships are known at this time. It is the belief of the material materialists (you didn't think that materialism meant the absence of beliefs, did you?) that these causal relationships will eventually be worked out and that the formulas and equations will be discovered that will enable us to understand and even replicate the processes whereby chemicals are turned into life, genetic material is turned into living bodies, consciousness and intelligence are created from electronic complexity, the will to survive is concocted from a combination of organic chemicals and the forces of physics are manufactured from sub-atomic particles. Rather than living in a miraculous world, material materialists live in a world that is completely explainable by observation of physical reality; or, really, that will be completely explainable as soon as the research is completed and the relevant equations and formulas are discovered. In the interim, which is now, none of it is explainable; but material materialists live in the hope and the belief that eventually, and perhaps even in their lifetime, it all will be.

I don't want to be a spiritual killjoy, but I know that none of this will happen. You cannot explain the origin of material by pointing to other material. I am not saying that there aren't sequential reactions, physical causes and effects that can be scientifically studied and observed. Of course this is true. The whole inanimate physical universe can be regarded as one gigantic sequence of causes and effects that began once precise physical laws were in place (it's the origin and make up of those laws that is the tricky part). Matter does not initiate anything and it does not experience anything. It merely reacts. Beings both initiate and experience, and the reason, ultimately, for the initiation of anything is so that a being can have a certain kind of experience. The initiation of anything by a being is called an intention, and the purpose of every intention is to manipulate matter or energy to provide an experience for that being or for other beings. Matter and energy are always the medium through which intentions are expressed, but matter and energy are never the origin nor the ultimate result of intention.

Let's put it another way. The universe is now being described in terms of a spacetime continuum and a fabric of space which bends and expands. This fabric of space is often likened to the surface of an expanding balloon. Although it has four dimensions (height, width, depth and time) it is considered to be all on one plane, like the surface of that balloon. When scientists study this physical plane and look for causes (how this or that happened to come about) they look for physical, observable antecedents within this plane. But all these answers to causal questions are lateral, in that the causes come from the same plane as the results. What if the entire plane was a result and the causes were elsewhere? What elsewhere could there be if the entire physical universe is encompassed in this plane? I am talking about something which is non-physical, which is no thing, which is beyond space and time and therefore, impossible to conceive. But for a conception that might be useful just as a way of trying to understand it, we could imagine, if we return to the image of the expanding balloon, that what I am talking about is the non-physical interior of the balloon, the endless surroundings of the balloon and the surface, itself, which is intersected at every point by this non-physical plane.

Although the non-physical plane (which is not even really a plane but encompasses and transcends all planes) is devoid of matter and measurable energy, it is, by no means, empty. I will talk more about the contents of the non-physical plane later in this post. What I should mention here is that most physicists, who are far more knowledgeable than I am about this spacetime continuum, do not realize that they, themselves, are not part of the spacetime continuum that they study; just as biologists are not the electrical, chemical protein mass that they study. We are not what we are studying, but that which is doing the studying. We are that which experiences that. We are not of spacetime, but we participate in spacetime. What we are transcends the plane of the fabric of the universe, although we operate within it. We, ourselves, are part of, are from, the non-physical plane.

Now I know that you cannot observe any of these things I am talking about, precisely because they are not things. But you can experience them. You can know the truth of them from your experience. If I say that you are not a thing, that you are the non-physical ground of your experience, and you are the non-physical milieu of your intentions or desires, you can give a knee jerk reaction and pooh pooh it as a fairy tale, or you can take it in, let it sit with you, and see that, although it doesn't jive with what you may have learned in biology class or Sunday school, it does jive with your actual experience. Are you your body, or are you that which experiences your body? You were once less than two feet tall and less than ten pounds. Were you that size or did you occupy a body that was that size. You were even once the microscopic size of a fertilized ovum. Was that you that was that size, or was that the size of the body that you were occupying? Do you experience yourself, not your body, as having any size at all? I am not asking if you ever entertain any thoughts about how tall you are or how much you weigh. I am wondering about the size, not of the body that you are thinking about, but the size of you that is doing the thinking. Do you, the thinker, have any height or weight? Also, your body ages, but do you age? I know you think different thoughts and dream about different things than you did when you were a young child. But you, not your thoughts, but that which is having those thoughts, not the contents of your experience, but the ground, the context, of your experience, have you aged, have you changed, or are you exactly the same context, the same observer, the same seer, the same thinker,the same listener, that you always were? Although in this life we are committed to this body/brain, we are not this body/brain. Our body occupies space but we do not. Our body changes and we call that rate of change time. But we do not change. Our body/brain is in spacetime but we are not. Spacetime with its physical contents was not created by itself. Spacetime is the result of intention and intention comes from being.

SPIRITUAL MATERIALISTS

The second group, regarding miracles, would be the spiritual materialists, or fundamentalists. This group believes that miracles once occurred fairly frequently, especially in the 'Creation' stage of the universe, and then the Creator (God) more or less finished His work and retired. Nowadays this God rarely leaves His Great Condominium in the Sky to intercede in human events and, when He does, it is not to settle wars, pandemics, ethnic cleansings or natural disasters. No, for some reason this God intercedes only at sports events. He (God) is supposedly male, although male being a relative term, there are no references to anyone or anything female in the divine realm that He would have an opportunity to be male with. This God also seems to have a penchant for the state of New York. So, He managed to avoid World War II entirely, but then arrived at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, New York in 1951 to help Bobby Thomson's eye hand coordination and to diminish Ralph Branca's pitching skill so that Thomson could hit "the shot heard round the world" and the New York Giants could win the National League Pennant. Then He completely overlooked Viet Nam, but in 1969 went, instead, to Shea Stadium in Queens, New York to guide the Amazin' Mets through their pennant race and World Series. And of course, there was the Divine intercession in 1980, this time in Lake Placid, New York, enabling the United States Hockey team to receive a gold medal in the 1980 Olympics. The goal , then, of many in this group is to coax the Creator out of His retirement so that He will return to earth not just for sports events, but to perform more serious miracles and not just in New York but throughout the entire planet and especially in the Middle East, that will save not so much the planet, but specifically those good souls that believed all this time in Him that He will call to His bosom just moments before the entire planet and all its non-believing inhabitants are obliterated.

Allow me to digress for a moment about this Second Coming that so many people are praying for. If I am expecting the arrival of an honored guest in my home, I get very busy cleaning it up. The more honored the guest, the harder I work to make my home immaculate. I may have a little time to pray that things go well during the visit, but most of my time and attention is taken with preparing and most of that preparation is cleaning. Now we are talking about the most honored guest of all, who is, supposedly visiting not just my house, but the whole planet. And, dear reader, I have to tell you that our planet is filthy; it's disgusting.

More than six million children under the age of five, an entire Holocaust, needlessly die on our precious planet every single year, by diseases that can either be prevented or treated. These include Aids, diarrhoea, malaria, measles, and pneumonia. Another four million children die every year before they are five years-old because of poor public health policies. More than four million die before they are one month old, largely because of preventable problems at birth. Another four million children die from diarrhoea or pneumonia. Malaria is responsible for one million deaths while HIV claims 300,000 lives each year. At least 100,000 children die from measles. (For those of you who are obsessed about the Holocaust, your mantra "never again," rather than keeping you more vigilant, has lulled you to sleep. There is a Holocaust taking place right now, right under your nose. What Hitler accomplished over twelve years with his insane malice, we are accomplishing every year with our insane neglect.)

A series of simple measures could prevent most of these deaths. Encouraging new mothers to breastfeed their children could save 1.3million lives each year. Breast milk can protect infants against diarrhoea and pneumonia by boosting their immune system. Encouraging mothers to start giving their children food as well as breast milk at six months, which would help fight diarrhoea, pneumonia measles and malaria, would save another 600,000 lives. A further 326,000 deaths from diarrhoea could be prevented if everyone had access to clean water and better sanitation. Spraying insecticides could help to save another 700,000 lives by protecting against mosquitoes, which are responsible for spreading malaria. Vaccinating against measles and haemophilus influenza type B (Hib) could save more than half a million lives. Providing children with antibiotics to fight pneumonia, malaria, dysentery and blood infections would save an additional two million lives, while giving oral rehydration therapies to children with diarrhoea would save 1.5million lives.

There is no need to wait for new vaccines, new drugs or new technology. There is no need to wait at all. Our governments spend countless billions of dollars every year to train and supply armies to kill each other. If we spent a fraction of that to train and supply armies to save each other the problem would be solved (and our foreign policy problems would be solved as well). We simply have to transfer what we already know into action, deliver the interventions we have on hand to the children, mothers and families who need them.

And for those of us who have managed to survive all that, we are grappling with epedemics of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Our rivers and our bloodstreams are filled with pollutants that diminish the health and vitality of our planet and our bodies and that are put there by commercial interests that put their short term profits above the health of their planet and their customers. What is lacking is will. But if you really believe God is coming, what are you waiting for? And I do sincerely believe, in fact I am absolutely convinced, that if we really did clean up the planet, if we really did treat each person and each society as if they were a precious and integral part of the divine fabric, then God would be here. We wouldn't be able to see Him, and He wouldn't necessarily be a He, but the presence of God would be felt wherever we went and we would, truly, create a heaven on earth.

I call this group of believers spiritual materialists, because although they believe in God, in a spiritual cause of creation, they believe that this God has a physical body; that He is a male; and that He has a name. That many of these spiritual materialists come from a Judeo-Christian tradition is very surprising to me. There are many references in the Bible to the omnipresence of the Creator. How could God be omnipresent if He were in a body that occupied one particular part of space and not the rest?

When I was a boy the translations of the Bible that I read began with these words:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

Nowadays the tenses have been tinkered with and current translations read something like, "When God was creating the heaven and the earth........" which means that during the time of creation, things began with a void.This grammatical adjustment seemingly resolves the question of how God could have first created the heaven and the earth and still be left with a void. It also, seemingly, resolves the issue of how God could have started with heaven and earth when Heaven (now capitalized) isn't created until the second day and Earth (now capitalized) isn't created until the third day. Taoists describing the act of creation, which they view as an ongoing event and not just a historical one, say "Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang."These two statements,"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth," and "Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang,"are not similar. They are identical! Heaven and earth, not as physical objects, but as forces (Father Heaven or Sky Father and Mother Earth or Mother Nature) appear all through the monistic dualism of ancient religions. It is through the interplay of these opposing forces that the world of matter is created.
The material materialists believe that the universe began with a Big Bang. They have worked out a detailed scenario that seems to fit with all the data they have accumulated about the universe that describes it as exploding out from a very tiny material center. But all their calculations are based on matter and energy following certain laws, or forces, like the forces of electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force and the weak force. If ancient religions have different names for these forces (yin and yang, in and yo, heaven and earth, vata and kapha, Tawa and Takpella), and if these spiritualists see two forces where the materialists see four, all of this is beside the point. The point is that in both perspectives there were forces that compelled matter to behave in very specific ways before there was matter; that matter could not have been created, and the Big Bang could not have occurred, if these specific forces or laws were not already in place. So it's not that the Bible had it wrong for all these hundreds and thousands of years, and we had to wait until the end of the twentieth century for our modern grammarians to work out the contradictions. There never were any contradictions. What the Bible is saying, and has always said, is that the universe started with two seemingly antagonistic, but really complimentary forces, and then the physical world happened.

From the void God says, "Let there be light!" What is a void? We may picture a bearded man shouting out in a fog enshrouded field, or floating over a foggy ocean, but is the void really like a fog, or a foggy field or a foggy ocean? This is the void that precedes the material world; so there is no fog and there is no field and there is no ocean, and there is no man, and there are no vocal chords that HE uses to shout out His pronouncement, and there is no one and no thing to hear Him if He did. Since we can only conceive in terms of matter and the movement of matter, it is impossible for us to conceive of this void which is the absence of matter. Although modern biblical grammarians have tried to gloss over it, you cannot avoid a void! (sorry) Because, although this void is absent of any material things, even absent of any molecules or atoms, of any gluons or quarks or bosons, it is not empty. The crowning achievement of Creation is life forms,and especially humans. But before there were life forms there was life formless. Life formless; not anchored to one physical body, one brain, one nervous system, one genome; is what we experience in a limited way as a life form. We each have our own little ration of consciousness, intelligence and will; but life formless is unlimited consciousness, intelligence and will. God is not standing in the void. God is the void. "Let there be light!"is not a statement made by divine vocal chords, but an act of will. The bifurcation of Infinity into two complementary and antagonistic forces and the creation of light, matter and a physical universe capable of supporting life forms, all came about because God (or life formless) wanted it to come about. The creation of the universe was and is an act of will.

The first thing that God creates, or the first result of this interplay of Heaven and Earth (of two complementary, antagonistic forces), is light. Einstein, looking at it from a material perspective said that the speed of light is the fastest speed that a thing can travel and still be a thing. But what if we look at the speed of light not as a cosmic speed limit, but as a cosmic threshold? Suppose that we say that the speed of light is the point at which matter or energy stops being a thing and becomes no thing. This no thing accelerating past the speed of light would achieve infinite speed because there would be no 'thingness' to limit its acceleration. No thing travelling at infinite speed would be everywhere at the same time, since it would take no thing no time to travel from one spot through the universe and return to the same spot. So no thing would be infinitely fast and absolutely still simultaneously. Also, there would be no separation between any one part of no thing and any other part. There would be no parts, since there would be no matter, no thingness, no boundary, to divide one part from the other. Therefore, no thing would both occupy all of space and take up no space. Whatever entered into no thing would enter into oneness with the entire universe of no thing. So, no thing is beyond space and time. Now instead of looking at it Einstein's way, as matter speeding up, let's look at it the other way, from the other side of light. If we were no thing (and we were and still are) and we were omnipresent and eternal and moving at infinite speed, and we wanted to create a physical universe of space and time, the first thing we would do is to slow down, and the first thing that would happen, the first thing that would be created, that would result from this slowing down, which would be the bridge between the spiritual world (no thing) and the material world (things), would be 'light!'

All this is to say that when you look at the Bible, or any great holy book that has been venerated for centuries, you should regard it as an instrument of enlightenment. That means that you respect the book and keep studying and thinking about it so that it changes and deepens your understanding of the world and yourself. In other words, you change your understanding to fit the book; you don't change the book to fit your understanding. This tinkering with the Bible to make it "modern," so that it fits comfortably with our shallow materialist understanding of the world, is as offensive as the use of the Bible, including even the teachings of Jesus, to support the most racist, violent and hateful beliefs of radical fundamentalists.

Many material materialists are of the opinion that they have progressed in their thinking beyond the foolishness and superstitions of their ancestors, as represented in the Bible and other ancient books. Certainly they have more facts than their ancestors did. Thanks to microscopes and telescopes and other instrumentation they now know more details about the physical universe. But are they wiser? Is their thinking really more evolved? Just like with other prejudices, people who have prejudices against 'ancestors' usually make an exception for their own ancestors, for the people they have actually known. In the same way that anti-Semites make exceptions for the generous Jews that they have actually known, and racists make exceptions for the obviously intelligent people of color that they have actually known, people with ancestor prejudice will say things like, "people were really foolish back then, although my grandfather was a brilliant man, and my grandmother was the wisest person I have ever met." If not our grandparents' generation, when was all this past foolishness? Was it their grandparents' generation? Do our grandparents remark about the foolishness of their grandparents or do they talk about them with the same reverence and respect that we talk about ours? How far back do we have to go before we encounter all this foolishness? Do we modern people really have a lot to teach Shakespeare and Plato about human nature? Have we really progressed in our understanding of the world, not in its material details, but in its spiritual essence, that far beyond Buddha and Jesus?

Each generation has a somewhat different fashion and style of expression as does each different culture. We each express ourselves in a different way and particularly when we are trying to express the ineffable. We use parables and symbols and examples from the physical universe to help teach truths about the non-physical spiritual universe, and, of course, we use those examples that would be most relevant and meaningful to whatever group we happen to be talking to. But what is always true is that the examples that are written are examples from the world of matter to give insights into the world of spirit. They are not to be taken literally; to materialize the inifinite. The older the book, the more out of fashion its style of expression may be. But there are universal truths, timeless truths, that outlive the fashion of the moment. If you are looking for timeless truths a good place to start would be in books and treatises that have been revered for thousands of years.

SPIRITUAL SPIRITUALISTS

But I am digressing. Let's get back to our attitudes about miracles. Finally, there is the third group; the spiritual spiritualists, or mystics. This group does not think of miracles as something necessarily infrequent or even unusual. If a miracle is any occurrence that starts without a physical cause, then, from their perspective, pretty much everything in the universe and the universe itself is miraculous in that it proceeds from intention. Intentions do not start from physical matter, from chemicals or energy waves, or even from molecules or atoms. Intentions begin with beings. And there are two types of beings. There are limited beings, like you, me and the goldfish; and there is an unlimited Being (life forms and life formless). All living beings are, at the same time, aspects of this One unlimited Being, and also separate beings with a separate limited consciousness and separate intentions or desires.

Beings are the milieu of intentions. Intentions originate with beings, not with physical matter. The physical universe has no intentions. It is completely indifferent. This may be clearer with the inanimate world than the biological world. Chemicals do not want anything. They react according to very specific laws, but they never initiate or experience anything. There is no consciousness there and no desire. If chemicals behave purposefully, like the gasoline in your car engine or the electrons in a pattern of computer code, it is certainly not the gasoline molecule's intention to get you where want to go, or the electron's intention to communicate the message that you are trying to send. Obviously, that intention begins in the beings that invented and built that car and that wrote that computer code and continues in you who is the being that is trying to get somewhere and trying to send an e-mail.

Living beings are purposeful. It is commonly accepted, even by the first group, the skeptics, that living beings are imbued with purpose. If nothing else, there is at least the purpose to survive. This is obviously, observably true. What may be a little confusing is that this purpose to survive does not start from the bodies of living beings. There is nothing in the proteins and certainly not in the fats or the trace elements of a living body that wants to survive. Again, we are just talking about matter that doesn't care what the temperature is, how many nutrients are circulating in that body, if it is serving a healthy, fully functioning being, or if it is a corpse in the process of being devoured by micro-organisms. The part of living beings that cares about the temperature, and getting enough to eat; that cares about survival at all, is not a physical part, but the non-physical being that inhabits that body. When the survival attempts fail, and we mourn the passing of a human being, we don't mourn the passing of a human body. The body is still there, in tact, at the funeral. We mourn the passing of the being that experienced things through that body and that imbued that body with intention. Certainly, the body is not in mourning. There is nothing in that body that could care one way or the other if it is being inhabited by a being or not, if it is preserved in ice, embalmed, decomposing in the earth or left somewhere to be eaten by scavengers. The desire to survive, or will, begins in a being not in a body. Our desire to survive is not a desire for the body to survive, but it is a desire to continue experiencing things through our body/brain and to continue to have our desires met, or to have the possibility of our desires being met, through our body/brain. If we feel that our body/brain can no longer deliver the experiences that we cherish and no longer has any possibility of fulfilling our desires, then we are ready to move on.

The Miracle of Willful Action

So how does it work? How does the physical universe manifest as a result of a non-physical intention? Let's start with a limited being, like you and me. Now at this point we are all somewhat acquainted with brain research that has been conducted over the past thirty years and we know that whatever we decide to do, or see or listen to, neurons will start firing in various centers of the brain related to thought or sight or listening; and these paths of neuronal firings will create a flow of electric current that can stimulate a muscle to contract, allowing us to move where we want to move. Light waves entering the eyes and sound waves entering the ears stimulate neurons that create a flow of electric current through the brain that helps us makes sense out of what we want to see and hear. According to brain scientists, it is the neuronal firings that initiate these sequential processes, and "the brain" is discussed, and "our neurons" are discussed as if they are the initiators of these activities, as if they have a will of their own. But neuronal firings are not causes, but results. What really initiates these flows of electrons, the cause of these responses, is not a stream of electrons or light waves or sound waves. What initiates these processes are your desires. You want to do, or see or listen to something and your desire (desire links the non-physical to the physical) stimulates the neurons that start the whole pattern of firing. Your eyes and ears focus on certain stimulations, on certain waves, because you want to focus on these waves. The neural stimulation leading to the elaborate patterns of muscular contractions that enable you to move across your room and open the book you want to read or to eat the snack you want to eat, was initiated by your desire to read and eat. I have emboldened these words because neither you nor your wants or desires have ever been observed by any scientist or by any scientific instrumentation; yet all of the things you choose to do or experience or think about or remember or build or create begin with your non-physical intention which begins with you, a non-physical being. So the fact that you are able to do anything at all, that you are able to intend to do something, and then do it (and I am not talking about starring in a Broadway show or winning a Nobel Peace Prize) even if it is the most quotidian of activities; like opening your eyes or getting out of bed and brushing your teeth; the fact that it starts in the spiritual and manifests in the physical, makes your entire life miraculous. A very unusual experience? No. A miracle? Yes.

And please don't take my word for it. After all, who am I but some anonymous jerk with a weird blog. If you question the miraculousness of wanting to look at something and then actually being able to see it, speak to a blind man. If you wonder what the big deal is about wanting to move across the room to turn on the television, and then actually moving across that room; talk to someone with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease). Take any of the countless things we accomplish every day, things that we completely take for granted, and talk to anyone who is not able to do them if you want to discover their real value. The fact that we can start from ourselves, from a non-physical place, and have a non-physical desire, and then have it manifest in the action and perception and behavior that we want, is miraculous. Everything that we choose to do and then actually do, is a movement from the non-physical to the physical, and these processes that biologists diligently study are the very processes that are initiated by our desires and serve our needs. Everything that we choose to do, experience or think about, is miraculous.

Can this be explained? Well, it is miraculous, so whatever explanation I can offer is limited and symbolic; a way of explaining it that merely gives some sense of how we could imagine it happenning. You have heard of psychokineses, or telekineses. This refers to the much disputed ability of the mind to cause movement in objects. Uri Geller, the famous paranormalist, has made a career of seemingly bending spoons and other metal objects simply with the power of his concentration. Popular movements like 'The Secret' claim that you can change not only the experience of your life, but your success in various endeavors simply by learning these 'powers of the mind.' All of this is hotly debated in the general population and probably scoffed at in scientific circles. What is not scoffed at is the obvious effect that one's undivided attention has on another human being. Athletes, statesmen, actors and musicians understand the palpable difference between rehearsal or practice and an actual peformance or game where a large group of people are in attendance. We are energized by people's attention.

Psychological studies have found that a vital factor in determining adult mental health is the extent to which that adult as an infant and as a child was the recipient of this focussed, undivided attention. Again, not so much attending to the child in an attempt to "parent" him or her, and irregardless of any 'lessons' you may impart, but just simply being in focussed contact results in that child feeling supported, connected and energized for who they are. It seems to me that this is a crucial point for the future of our society. At the moment everything mitigates against parents having this relaxed, focussed attentive time with their children. We are in an over heated, over competitive society. We are advertised at every moment of the day; the real message in all of these advertisements is that we are incomplete without a, b or c; that we cannot be fully realized or satisfied or comfortable or safe or sufficiently attractive unless we purchase x, y and z. Also, we find ourselves enmeshed in endless hierarchies of attractiveness, intelligence, athletic prowess, and personal wealth and we are continually concerned about where we and our children find ourselves on these hierarchies. All of this creates a restlessness, a nagging desirousness, which makes the relaxed, attentive enjoyment of each other next to impossible. Yet it is only through these peaceful interactions that a child is reinforced in the idea that he or she is lovable as they are and that the world is safe enough to allow intimacy and focus with another person and with the moment at hand.

Now we can do a little experiment at this juncture to reinforce the idea of the power of your focus. Sit in a very relaxed position, in a way that you could conceivably fall asleep. Now close your eyes and focus on a spot in your body where you are experiencing a little tension. Good. Now move to another spot where you are experiencing tension; and, finally, a third spot. (As a side note, when you were moving from your toe to your finger to lower back, what was it that was moving? If you were absolutely still, then nothing was moving, and certainly not your brain, which doesn't move at all. If you and your focus were moving and no thing was moving, then the only conclusion is that you and your focus are no thing. If you have not been too heavily inculcated in the materialist beliefs of our society to accept the simple conclusions of this experiment you should need no further proof that you are essentially spiritual and not physical. Now you may say, "that's not you; that's your nervous system." It is true that at each point where you are focussing you are at some place along your nervous system, but that doesn't mean that you are your nervous system. You are that which experiences and focusses on different points of your nervous system. By your tortured logic, if I was driving north on the San Diego Freeway, and was in San Diego at 10am, was passing Los Angeles at 12 noon and reached the San Francisco exit at 6pm; that would mean that I must be the San Diego Freeway!) But, getting back to the original purpose of this experiment: Focus on one of these spots of tension and try to melt that tension simply with your attention. It's important for the purpose of this experiment that you are not moving or doing anything muscularly. Try to describe that sensation of tension. How big does it seem to be? Does it seem to weigh anything? What does it seem to be made out of? Rope, or steel or electricity? As you continue to describe it, just will it to diminish and keep noticing how it gets smaller and lighter until it disappears or almost disappears. The longer that you stay with it the more success you will have.

Whether or not someone can bend a spoon without touching it is beside the point. The point is that if there is enough energy and power in the focus of a human being to relax whole sections of your body, it is reasonable to assume that this inner-focus, a much more subtle telekinesis, if you will, has the power to excite the neurons that initiate a path of reactions that lead to the satisfaction of our desires. So, if our physical equipment (body) is in working order and our environment is at least minimally cooperative, we get to think what we want to think, remember what we want to remember, look at what we want to look at and move where we want to move. And all of this begins with this subtle movement from the spiritual, the non-physical, focused by desire, to the excitation of neurons through a whole series of electrical and chemical and physical and emotional processes that wind up with us getting pretty much what we want.

The creation of the world of man made things is a movement from the subtle to the gross. On a physical level the awesome power of a nuclear explosion begins with the flicking of a switch, and the flight of a jumbo jet commences with the turning of a key. But backing up to the spiritual level, the nuclear explosion and all the equipment that delivers it begins with someone's desire to create something with that much destructive power and then someone's desire to use it; just as the jumbo jet begins with someone's desire to find a way to transport four or five hundred people quickly for long distances. Once the decision is made, these powerful processes are kicked off by a tiny movement which engages the power of these machines (nuclear fission in one case and internal combustion in the other). And everything we do on a personal level, whether it manifests in an enormous physical object or the subtlest biological process, begins with a desire which makes us focus on the neurons that will initiate this process and allows the power of our biological machine (metabolism) to kick in and help us reach the objective we desire.

The Miracle of Life Forms

If it is miraculous that we are able to use our equipment to fulfill our desires, what about the equipment itself? Our amazing body, with its ten quadrillion simultaneous processes, that responds to our desires and allows us to get our needs met; is the construction of our bodies, itself, miraculous? According to modern biologists and evolutionists, all of this complexity has a verifiable origin in the physical world; our genes. Aren't our bodies caused by our genetic sequences?

Scientists describe genes as recipes for enzymes, the basic building blocks of living bodies. The approximately thirty thousand genetic sequences in every human cell are recipes for thirty thousand different enzymes and in combination with each other, for the one hundred thousand different enzymes and amalgams of enzymes that make up our bodies. But wait a minute! Do recipes create meals? If I left a cookbook in a locked kitchen and was assured that no person had entered that kitchen since I had left; and then when I came back the next morning I discovered that every recipe in that cookbook had been translated into a delicious cooked dish, what would I think? Would I think that the cookbook had somehow figured out how to prepare its own recipes by itself? Of course not. We know that cookbooks are matter and matter doesn't have a self and cannot initiate anything. That is obvious. Yet, how have we come to believe that genes, which are also matter and are also a collection of recipes, can engender, by themselves, not only our bodies with their distinctive and inherited shapes but also all the myriad processes (easily ten quadrillion at every moment) that allow us to translate our non-physical needs and desires into actual physical activity and experience? And as far as we know, the genes are simply coded for enzymes, which are not even the recipes for limbs or organs or body parts; they are just the recipes for the raw materials that are used in the fashioning of limbs and organs and body parts. I am not saying that our genetic inheritance does not determine our shape and lots of our instinctive behaviors and the impossibly complex organization of our processes. I am saying that even though our genes may determine all that, they do not cause all that. In the same way I can push button number 4 on my channel changer and get the Jay Leno Show; that little button with #4 on it determines that I get the Jay Leno Show, but it does not create the Jay Leno Show. What creates that show are the unmeasurable, ineffable talents of numerous beings that know how to translate their desires to make something entertaining and efficient and attractive and profitable from a non-physical dream into a physical reality.

But what about our bodies? Keep in mind that the exact same set of recipes (genes) in every cell of every person manifests, depending on which genes are expressed and in what sequence and what amount, into a fetal body, an infant body, a teenage body, an adult body and a senior body. Also, from the exact same set of recipes (genes) again depending on which recipes (genes) are expressed, are manifested muscle cells, nerve cells, skin cells and stem cells. And all of this is continually shaped and reshaped with amazing precision to create our growing and constantly changing bodies. Who or what is it that is combining these recipes with such transcendent precision to create the myriad organs and structures and shapes and then to imbue them with the precise amount of energy and purpose to deliver at every moment a functioning human body? The truth is that no one knows! That is because the organizer, the planner and the decider of all this activity has never been observed by any scientist, either with their naked eye or through any instrumentation. The only things that can be seen are the results.
You may have read articles claiming that scientists have created, or are on the verge of creating, new life. How could they do such a thing if none of the actual creative details are known? In spite of what you may have read in sensationalist papers, no such thing has taken place. Even Craig Venter, the biological impresario, who is no shrinking violet when it comes to self-promotion, does not have the hubris to make such a claim. When Watson and Crick discovered the basic structure of the DNA molecule over fifty years ago, they thought that they had discovered God. What they had actually discovered was God's channel changer. Now Venter and his colleagues are figuring out how this channel changer works and have been able to take genetic sequences from one cell and implant them in another. What's important to understand is that, as precise and detailed as this work may be, they are doing nothing more than changing the channel. And, yes, when the channel is changed you get a completely different program, but how? They may know what to change, and they may even be able, after many trials and errors, to anticipate the results of that change, but how that change is achieved, how the new program or any program is conceived or executed, is completely unknown. It is very much like an isolated, pre-industrial tribe suddenly stumbling upon a working television. Some native may figure out that he can get very different results by playing with the channel changer, but how those results are created, where this programming is produced or directed or conceived of, and the logistics of how that programming is delivered, are completely beyond the understanding of that native changing the channels and completely beyond Craig Venter and his diligent colleagues.

After having scoured every micro-inch of every cell in the body and seen the results of this program and organization and magnificent intelligence in every corner of every cell; the program, the programmer and the programmer's intelligence are still nowhere to be seen. Only two conclusions are possible. Either there is no programmer and the cells, or the genes, are doing this themselves, which makes no logical sense at all (see post EVOLUTION); or the programmer, the program and all the intelligence involved in it, are there in every minuscule nook and cranny of every cell in the body, but are not observable, because they are not part of the physical universe. And this second conclusion makes perfect sense, at least to me, because my self, and my intelligence, and any thinking that I use to bring organization to the things that I am dealing with in my life, are not visible either.

Without ever seeing the program, the programmer or the intelligence behind the program, without ever locating it in space and time, scientists continue to talk about the program and even its origin and development. They tell us the program has evolved over many millions of years and has gotten more and more complex as we have learned more and more about our environment. Now it is true that evolution is certainly not just the accumulation of more genes (more recipes). That may increase the number of possible raw materials (enzymes) that would be found in an organism, but it would not, by itself, increase that organism's complexity. So, yes, the program for a human being would have to be much more complicated than the program for a microbe, but, again, where is it? With each program that I am familiar with, I can show you the disc where the program is inscribed, I can show you the computer that it runs on, and, with a little research, I can produce the name of the programmer who created it. With this 'living program' where is the soft ware, where is the hardware, and where is the programmer?

Also, scientists will tell us that over millions of years we have learned how to........(whatever the miraculous biological thing is that we are looking at). But who has learned this? Are we talking about the 'programmer." Yet, the whole point of modern evolution, as I understand it, is that everything has evolved by itself. So, are we the programmer? Have we learned how to do all these biological wonders? When? Where? I know of not one living being, human or otherwise, contemporary or otherwise, who has ever learned one biological process that takes place within the body of any living being. Do you know how to digest? how to eliminate? how to reproduce? how to grow? I am not talking about the few superficial facts that you may have learned in a biology class. You were growing, digesting and eliminating just fine way before you learned any of those facts or ever heard of the word biology. Where is all this learning going on? Do you think that your cells have learned how to produce enzymes? You're kidding! A little microscopic cell? If you have no idea what your cells are doing, do you really think that your cells have any idea what their molecules are doing? Do you think cells have any ideas period? And please don't say that genes, submicroscopic specks of nucleic acid, know anything either! What happens over and over in modern science is that scientists confuse location with agency. So, yes, metabolism and digestion and growth are going on in my body, but I am not doing the metabolizing or digesting or growing and neither is some mythical being called 'my body.' Yes, there are electrical processes going on in various areas of my brain every time I think about something or remember something or see something, but a being called 'my brain' is not thinking or remembering or seeing them. In the same way, there are a lot of ballgames going on in Yankee Stadium, but Yankee Stadium is not doing them. Yankee Stadium is merely the location where they are taking place. Likewise there are a lot of processes going on in my kitchen when a meal is being prepared, but a being named 'my kitchen' is not doing those either.

And what did we supposedly learn over all these millions of years? How to breathe? How to digest? How to grow? Please use your common sense. How would a life form exist for even a minute, never mind from generation to generation, if it didn't already know how to breathe, metabolise, digest, eliminate, grow and reproduce? No living being ever learned any of these things, EVER! The truth is that we are the recipients and the beneficiaries of everything that happens biologically in our bodies. We never learned how to do any of it and we never actually do any of it. And, of course, none of the little particles that compose our bodies ever learned any of it either.

In addition to creating mythical beings by infusing physical locations with the powers of agency, knowledge and desire ('our brains' want this,'our genes' want that) evolutionary biologists also create historical myths. There is an entire branch of speculation called 'pre-biotic evolution' which not only is nonsense, but has been proven to be nonsense over and over again, and yet it is still repeated and reprinted in textbooks and communicated as reliable knowledge. This is the supposed chemical evolution of organic material in Edenic tidepools on this planet for hundreds of millions of years leading up to the chance accumulation of DNA or a DNA type molecule which suddenly started replicating exact copies of itself, which means that not only the identical molecule was reproduced but the molecule's method of and commitment to replication was reproduced identically in a way that has continued, in tact, to the present day (no molecule, DNA, or otherwise, has ever been known to replicate except as part of a whole cell's replication). These ideas continue to be espoused even though it has been determined that the early earth was a roiling, boiling, exploding hellhole which was incapable of supporting any life what so ever, much less able to support the delicate structures of organic material that was supposedly floating around and staying in tact in these tidepools for many millions of years (in our bodies our organic material is protected from the elements by a cell wall, our skin, our ability to maintain a consistent internal temperature, etc. When I say organic material, think raw eggs outside of their shells). How long would such organic material last in a temperature above the boiling point of water, in an environment that is too base or too acidic, or too exposed to ultra violet light, or violent movement. Moreover, vestiges of microbial life that metabolizes, digests, eliminates, senses its environment, grows and reproduces has been discovered in abundance dating back over three and a half billion years to the very moment when the surface of the planet was cool enough to support any life forms (a temperature below the boiling point of water). And hundreds of millions of years before that there was hyper-thermophilic life alongside thermal vents in the ocean floor, that survived in temperatures well above the boiling point of water because of the extra bonding of their molecules. How could such creatures be 'accumulated' in an environment where any of their individual parts would break down as fast as you could boil an egg?

I say the following as both a mystic and a realist. I say it not because I want to believe it, but because my observation and my life experience leave me no other conclusion: Before there were life forms, there was life formless. Life formless is intelligence, love, creativity and will without limit. We have come to this life to participate in the world of matter and energy and we do that by making a commitment to a particular genome which becomes a particular body/brain. But we come from life formless, which is also called cosmic consciousness, which is also called God. And life formless, with its unlimited intelligence, will and creativity, is what provides and grows and maintains this miraculous equipment that allows us to participate with each other, to live this life of dreams and the fulfillment of dreams, of desires and the fulfillment of desires. Will, or the commitment to survive, which permeates every biological process in every living being on this planet, is the materialization of God's desire to have separate beings with separate consciousness and separate experiences. We are here in our physical bodies because God (non-physical) wants us to be here. So, living bodies: Very unusual? No. Miraculous? Yes.

The Miracle of the Inanimate Universe

The inanimate physical universe passively obeys very precise and consistent physical laws. The only exceptions to this passive obedience are machines that are designed to use energy to overcome natural forces in the service of an objective; including both natural machines (living bodies) whose objective is the survival of the relationship between the being that dwells within that body and it's body/brain and the fulfillment of any desire that that being may have; and man-made machines, which are also designed to overcome physical forces for the satisfaction of the desires of the inventor or the desires of the people that she invented the machine for. So what is the source of these laws that all matter must obey and that we have to build machines to expend energy to overcome?

We in the West have a materialist idea of the world. We think that these forces are somehow emanating from matter; that matter is the origin of force. We cling to this idea even though it is commonly understood that the Big Bang began with really a speck of matter, but with all these precise forces in place. This should lead one to the conclusion that these forces preceded matter. Nevertheless, electromagnetism is still considered to be a force emanating from the electron particle of the atom (the negative force) and the proton particle of the atom (the positive force), which begs the question "what was electromagnetism before there were protons and neutrons?" Recently, though, it has been discovered that the proton and even the minuscule electron are not really particles at all, but are force fields connecting much smaller sub-atomic particles. Are these particles, quarks and bosons and mesons, the ultimate fundamental particles or will these, too, be discovered to be unimaginably tiny force fields connecting unimaginably smaller sub-sub atomic particles? Are there any fundamental particles out there at all? Gravity, too, is supposed to be emanating from the mass of an atom, although that mass has not been detected among these atomic force fields. Scientists anticipate the discovery of a mass conferring particle which they have already named the Higgs Boson, which is also referred to as the God particle, and they are so convinced that they will discover it that they have spent twelve years and many, many billions of dollars constructing a seventeen mile particle accelerator to smash sub-atomic particles together at enormous speeds and see if they can discover the Higgs Boson in the residues of these collisions.

Traditional Easterners have a different perspective. Throughout Asia one encounters the idea of two opposing forces (complementary antagonists) that engender the physical world. These are often referred to as yin and yang, but they have many different names through many different cultures in Asia and throughout the pre-industrial world, both east and west. From this perspective, matter does not engender forces, but forces engender matter; in fact, matter is viewed as simply a more stable combination of these forces. (Look at the post YIN,YANG AND BEYONG!). Gravity is not considered a function of mass, because there is no mass. Rather, gravity is the force of yang which is inward and is strongest in the center of objects. What we call gravity is the pull of this yang force toward the center of the earth that we feel on the surface.
As I said at the beginning of this post, science explores the lateral reactions within the physical plane. All of this is fine until it comes to theories and speculations of origin. Western theoretical science is, in a sense, a search for supernatural particles that somehow engender all phenomena. Physicists search for the Boson and the quark with their supposed powers of generating forces and mass; biologists ascribe amazing powers and creativity to submicroscopic particles of nucleic acid called genes; and brain scientists and now psychologists believe that microscopic nerve cells called neurons do our thinking and remembering and perceiving for us and engender our whole conscious life.

From a spiritual spiritualist perspective, there are no fundamental particles. All particles are relatively stable arrangement of forces that give the illusion of solidity and permanence. But there is no permanence in things. Everything changes, including atoms, genes, neurons and sub-atomic particles. The only thing that doesn't change is no thing, and luckily you and I and God are all no thing. So our real stability, our real sense of permanence, is not in the material world but in the world of spirit. And a propos of this let me mention some old silliness from one of our foolish ancestors that you might be familiar with:

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and

rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for

yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,

and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure

is, there will your heart be also."

Regardless of which perspective, the materialist or the spiritual, that you subscribe to, what are these physical forces? Take away the matter that is affected by the law of gravity or the law of electrodynamics and what are you left with? You are left with a law. A law has no actual force and no physical existence; it's only force and existence comes from the agreement that beings make to create it and comply with it. There is no actual force emanating from stop signs that stops cars. There is no measurable force that prevents you from murdering or raping someone. It is just an agreement. The reason the force of any law has any force what so ever is that we have agreed to obey it. Human laws are there because we feel as a society that we need these agreed upon boundaries to function safely and effectively. But there is no physical reality to our man made laws, just as there is no physical reality to our natural laws. From my perspective, these laws were put in place because God, or the cosmic consciousness or life formless, realized that we could not ultimately have life forms without a physical world that had a certain consistency and dependency. So these perfectly precise laws (laws which, if they were altered the least iota, would have prevented the physical world from ever happening at all) were put into place to insure that eventual outcome.

It is at this exact juncture that someone of a scientific bent (if he is still reading, which is doubtful) will object that I am answering the question of 'who' created these physical laws when I should be asking the preferable scientific question of 'what' created these laws. Au contraire, my materialist friend. I remind you that we are talking about the origin of matter; we are talking about laws that pre-date matter. There are no 'whats.' We are talking about the creation of the first 'what.' But how, you say, can a who precede a what? Because I don't think of a who as a talking what. I think of a who like 'youwho' or 'mewho' as a who that has a what called a body that we play with and enjoy and through which we experience relationships with both other whos and other whats. But before there was a youwho or a mewho or a what, there was simply a Who. Mewho and youwho were part of that Who, and we still are, but we are enjoying this illusion and diversion of separation called mewho and youwho. And there is no joy, no excitement in mewho and youwho that compares with the sudden realization or momentary intimation that youwho and mewho are really whowho; and that mewho and youwho and even that lovely, if a bit passive, family 'the whats' are from whowho, too.

But whatever your thinking is about the ultimate origin of these laws, you cannot argue against the fact that they must have pre-dated actual matter and they have no physical bases. So once again we have a movement from the non-physical to the physical and, once again, we can say....Very unusual? No. Miraculous? Yes.

The Miracle of Consciousness

The final miracle that I want to mention is consciousness, the actual experience of your life, whether that experience, moment to moment, be thoughts, perceptions, memories, sensations or feelings. Now why do I consider that to be part of the spiritual, non-physical realm? Because although you experience your experience, no one else can either experience it or observe it. I know that you are looking at the same sunset that I am looking at, but whether or not what you are actually seeing bears any resemblance to what I am actually seeing is indeterminable. Even if our reactions to an event are similar, the way you actually perceive it may be entirely different from the way I do.

Now some scientists are saying that consciousness is tied to the brain and does not exist at all; that consciousness is the brain (Steve Pinker). As I have said in other posts, I can be tied to a pole. Does that mean I am the pole? No. In fact, it implies that there are two separate entities that are tied into some kind of relationship. It's that relationship that bears looking into. If you are looking at that same sunset and I am looking at a scan of your brain while you are doing that, you realize that I am not looking at your sunset, and I am not looking at any sunset at all. You realize that there is a huge difference between a pattern of electrons and sunsets; just as there is a huge difference between patterns of electrons and Beethoven concerts, and patterns of electrons and great Thanksgiving dinners. All of them are connected to paths of electrons, but how is it that we all experience the enormous variety and richness of our conscious life and, as far as the brain goes, it is always related to the same flows of electrons with even the same amount of voltage? Yes, the location, within the brain and the paths that these flows take, vary, but how does that correlate, how does that translate with the beautiful and ugly, loving and hateful, light and dark, soft and hard, poetic and mundane, delicious and repulsive, thing that we call our life?

Even more mysterious, in the exact same areas of the brain with the exact same current going through the almost identical neurons (except for their genes) one person sees Manhattan and one person sees the Kalahari Desert. Refiring the same sets of neurons one person conjures up her mother and another person conjures up hers; two completely different people. All the people and places and environment, the whole milieu of your life is completely different from another person's on the other side of the world, and yet when you think about your life, the same sets of neurons are fired with the same voltage of electricity that is fired when that far away stranger thinks about her very, very different life. In fact all the thoughts that created the entire contents of all the great libraries in the world on every subject and in every language were all accompanied by identical electrical flows through almost identical neurons.

The inescapable conclusion is not that we all have a Kalahari desert neuron and one person found it and the other didn't. The only conclusion is that we, not our brains, think and see and hear and smell and our brains are the equipment that we use to assist us with that. The so-called unconscious brain is where connections are made between firing neurons and muscles and glands that allow all the automatic survival mechanisms to operate (which is the fulfillment of God's or life formless' or the cosmic consciousness' objective that you have a sustainable existence in this body); but the conscious brain is mainly a recording device. When you experience something you experience it and God has given you a brain that records it, so that you can refer back to that experience and so that your present experience is informed by your previous experience. You know what things are. You know what is, for you, familiar and what is strange. You know, for you, what is safe and what is dangerous. And you know, for you, what is attractive and what is repellent. And you know their names. All of this knowledge you have encoded in your brain through previous experiences and it automatically gets fired and automatically effects your present experience whenever you perceive something that you have neuronally connected to that stored information. How you are able to do this and then to translate it back to the original experience you had, when you remember something, is God's gift. It is some kind of code that we all know how to use but have not even discovered yet. (That is not strange. We were all benefitting from the genetic code for a few billion years before anyone discovered that code either.) The problem for material materialists is that the we that is using the brain, that is causing those neurons to be fired, that is experiencing things and imprinting the brain with the memories of these experiences; that is seeing things and recording those sights in our brain and that is hearing things and recording those sounds in our brain; that we cannot be seen.

But if you accept the fact that we are not physical, as we demonstrated in an earlier experiment in this post, then a lot of the 'mysteries of consciousness' are cleared up. We can focus on any part of our brain or nervous system that we choose to. At any given moment we all have little pains and aches and discomforts that we can experience if we attend to them. Even intense pain can be attended to or not. People involved in championship boxing matches and football games, in battles and in life or death escapes, have reported being so focussed on their desire to win or to survive, that they completely ignored their sprains and fractures and wounds and did not begin to experience that pain until the emergency was over and they were in relative safety. What we call pain is a certain chemical and electrical activity in our nervous system that we only experience as pain when we attend to it. The body feels no pain. The nervous system feels no pain. We feel pain. Likewise, the brain does not remember. We remember. The brain contains electrical pathways and chemical deposits that we interpret as certain memories when we attend to them. All the information in the brain is not information at all. It is chemcial deposits and pathways that only become information when we fire those pathways and we attend to those traces.

Also, the brain does not see or hear. We see and hear. There is a little synapse behind the retina of the eye where the light image gathered at the end of the retina reaches across this little space and excites the neurons at the beginning of the optic nerve. Right there, in that little space, is where we are when we are focussed on seeing things. There is another little space at the end of the cochlia of the ear where the movement of the little hairs of the cochlia create a vibration that excites the neurons at the beginning of the auditory nerve. And it is right there where we go when we are focussed on hearing something. By the time those electrical impulses are going up the optical nerve and the auditory nerve, we have already experienced the sight and the sound in all the richness and diversity that a human eye and a human ear provide. Those electrical impulses connect through the cortex to other associations that help us ascribe meaning and feeling to what we are seeing and experiencing. So we know that the structure we are looking at is a house and that we live there, and that what we are listening to is a symphony orchestra and not a magpie or a leaky faucet. And, importantly, those electrical impulses, and the neurons that are fired and the chemical traces that they leave, record our experiences so that we can refer back to them by translating that code from these traces so that our knowledge and familiarity with the particular part of our environment that we are perceiving deepens over time. In other words, we (the ground of our experience) can move wherever we want to move in our nervous system and we are perceiving the world directly through our sensory organs and not by first interpreting electrical signals in our brains; and we are recording not what the brain wants us to record but what we have already experienced. Our conscious life has so much variety because we experience the world in all its variety directly through our sense organs and not through the intermediary of electrical signals.

Also, we, not our brains, are thinking. When we think about something we fire up all the related neurons and get back in touch with the previous thoughts that we had about this thing. But if we have a new thought, it is our thought and not our brain's thought. Our brain dutifully records this new thought and then we have access to it when we return to thinking about this same issue, but it was our thought and it is our thought and not our brain's. Scientists will never discover the 'intelligence' of the brain through their observations, no matter how sophisticated their instruments and how detailed their observations. It would be like trying to discover the genius of Isaac Newton by microscopically examining the ink and the paper of his original manuscripts, or trying to find the genius of Shakespeare hidden within the physical letters of his written plays. The intelligence of any equipment resides, non-physically, in the inventor and constructor of that equipment and in the user of that equipment. The unlimited intelligence of God, or the cosmic consciousness or life formless, created the transcendently brilliant structures of the brain and its ability to record our experiences; and the non-physical limited intelligence of human beings is what is able to use that equipment in order to think, create and understand our environment more deeply.

Our relationship to our brains, nervous system and sensory organs is like a child at Disney Land. Within ourselves we can travel to whatever part of the brain we want; fire whatever neurons we want and think or dream or remember whatever we want. If we choose to deal with the external environment we can see or hear or taste or touch whatever we want by focussing on whatever sensory organs we choose to focus on. Just like a child at Disney Land who can go on a variety of rides, meet a variety of characters, eat a variety of foods, we experience what we want to experience among these options wherever our desires lead us. What Steve Pinker and the majority of his material materialist colleagues are saying is that the child was created for Disney Land. What the spiritual spiritualists are saying is that Disney Land was created for the child. Once again, the appeal of mysticism is not an appeal to beliefs, but an appeal to common sense.

And who creates the organization of the brain? We do. If something frightening happenned to us at a certain location then we make a neuronal association between that location and the experience of fear. Depending on the intensity of that experience that association may last for a long time, or until we have a very different experience of a positive nature at that same location and the new association, especially if that, too, is an intense experience, begins to replace the old one. We get the impression that 'the brain' has a mind of its own because we are often at cross purposes to the way that we organized these recorded impressions when we were much younger. So, it is not us vs. our brain, it is us vs. our earlier selves, and especially our childish selves which received impressions and organized our experience in a way that no longer serves our current needs, but the residues in the form of these coded neuronal impressions are still there and still get fired when we no longer want them to.

We are consciousness. The contents of that consciousness are the products of our desires. We choose what we want to experience. We even choose this human existence and we choose to experience the universe through the filter of our human sensory organs. We use our neurons to help us remember and organize this experience so that we can have a richer, more comfortable, more defined and deeper relationship with our culture and our environment. Our conscious life starts with the non-physical (us and our desires) and goes through the physical (sensory organs and neurons) that help us create the richness, depth and variety of our (non-physical) conscious life. So consciousness starts in the non-physical, is assisted by the physical and manifests in the non-physical. Unusual? No. Miraculous? Yes.

CODA

You don't have to be very astute to have figured out at this point that I count myself as a member of the third group, the spiritual spiritualists. What you may not realize is that I did not come to join this group, and none of the people that I know have come to join this group because of any belief system that they had blindly accepted from their teachers or peers. They are members of this group for two reasons: One is that they have had an experience that has proven to them that they are not their bodies; that they are that which experiences their bodies. The second is that they have thought long and deeply about life and death, about matter and spirit, about who they are and why they are here, and their spiritual understanding is an inevitable result of that deep introspection.

Being a member of any of these groups affects one's attitudes toward a lot more things than miracles. One that I would like to mention in closing is one's attitude toward joy. For material materialists joy is the rational and short lived result of winning a competition and achieving a material goal: you got the job, you won the award or you were accepted into the school of your choice. Any joy that does not seem to have an external justification is dismissed by a biochemical explanation prefaced by the word just. It's just your endorphins. It's just dopamine. It's just your blood sugar. It's just a release of opiads. Spiritual materialists condone irrational joy but only in specific circumstances. Joy experienced in their church is considered a great blessing. Joy experienced in a different church is considered delusional and dangerous. Before passing judgement on any experience of joy, spiritual materialists want to look into it first; to find out the setting in which it was experienced and the manner in which it was achieved. Spiritual spiritualists live in a miraculous world. They consider joy to be the natural outgrowth of the recognition of this miraculousness and the recognition of the oneness that they share with whoever or whatever they happen to be relating to at each moment. Are all spiritual spiritualists always joyful? No. We live in a society that is dominated by materialism and a sense of separation. In that regard, there is no sense of a being, human or otherwise, or even any aspect of a being, that is beyond evaluation and compare. We are ranked and criticized and judged. We are told what is good and what is bad, and the good things are, by their definition, scarce and hard to come by. But what we have is the ability to step back from this society, from this age of endarkenment, and go inside ourselves where we always find the light. And we even try to spread some of that light into the darkness. I hope that has happenned with this post. Peace.

Your comments are most welcome.

Matt Chait - Thursday, November 29, 2007

THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

I am not a scientist and I am going to make some observations about life. This in itself seems an arrogant statement in our society. Knowledge of life has become the sole province of biologists and biochemists and anyone who has not spent years looking through microscopes, scanners and x-ray machines, laboring to understand the complex chemical and electrical processes that are revealed with the help of this equipment, is seen to lack the authority to make statements about them. I do, however, have nothing but appreciation for all the dedicated hard work that has been invested in the study of biological processes and I applaud the accomplishments of Western medicine and science. I have no qualm with any of the actual observations that are made; how can you argue with an observation? What is disturbing to me, and, I think, of great damage to the society as a whole, are not the observations themselves, but many of the assumptions and inferences based on these observations.

What you see when you observe the world is a function of the instrument that you are using to make your observations, and this, of course, includes the human eye. When you look at a part of your body with the naked eye, you see one thing. When you look through a microscope you see something very different, and when you look through an electron microscope at the same body part, you see a third, and completely different thing than either of the other two. One of the assumptions that I think is dangerous, is the assumption that when you see this new vista, thanks to the microscope, that somehow you are seeing a greater, or deeper truth than you were seeing with the naked eye; that with the naked eye you were seeing a result, but with the microscope you are seeing cause. Another possibility is that you are simply seeing another view, which is neither more causal, nor more fundamental than the first view. Another way of saying that would be that smaller biological things are not necessarily the cause of larger biological things, but that they simply coexist on different planes. A second assumption is that with the naked eye you are seeing some things, but now, with the microscope, you are seeing everything. This view was, of course, disproved by the arrival of the electron microscope which revealed whole new worlds within the microscopic world. This is not necessarily, however, the end of the line. New worlds and new discoveries could be there awaiting the arrival of new instrumentation. And there may be whole planes of existence that are simply not visible, but that affect, very profoundly, the processes that you are looking at. Even if, hypothetically, we could see everything within a human body, would we be seeing cause? Is cause something that can be seen? Is cause a thing?

And one final assumption of biologists that I would like to mention is that if something cannot be seen it does not exist. Now this is not the assumption of other scientists, including physicists and psychologists. No one would argue that gravity does not exist, but no one can see it either. Forces, which are the province of physicists, cannot be seen directly. They are measured by their effects on matter. And psychologists study feelings: love, hate, ambition, jealousy; all of which can be deduced from the statements and behaviors of others, but not observed directly. The study and measurement of intelligence has also become part of the province of psychologists, and this too, like gravity, electro-magnetism and emotions, cannot be seen, but must be deduced from a person's conversation, written responses and creations.

Let's look at some of the conclusions drawn from these assumptions. Now, the latest brain research is grabbing headlines in major newspapers and magazines. Steve Pinker, writing in Time Magazine offers this, "Scientists have exorcised the ghost from the machine, not because they are materialistic killjoys, but because they have discovered that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain." Does that mean that consciousness is the brain? I can be tied to a pole. Does that mean that I am the pole? In fact, just by saying that something is tied to something else, implies the existence of two separate things. So, yes, consciousness is tied to the brain; but, no, consciousness is not the brain. What they, the brain researchers, have actually observed, is that during whatever mental activity there is: thinking, dreaming, seeing, remembering, hearing, etc., some part of the brain is activated; there is some heightened chemical and electrical activity in a specific part of the brain, depending on the particular activity involved. So as you focus on the beauty of a sunset, a certain part of the brain, as recorded by certain kinds of scanners, will light up. When you try to remember something, another part lights up. If you are worried about that stain on your shirt, from where you spilled your coffee this morning, yet another part is lit. When scientists study the location of all these different processes that shift every time you change your focus, do they ever wonder where you are, who is not the processes, but whose shifting focus is creating all these processes?But even though you are the primary and most obvious truth of your existence, in terms of these scientific observers, you do not exist, because you cannot be observed. They have eliminated you from their investigations, theories and conclusions.

THE BRAIN

Now, according to the most advanced research, we know that the brain remembers, the brain sees, the brain hears, the brain protects us, the brain repairs itself, etc., etc. Each day, it seems we are discovering yet another wonderful thing that our friend, the brain, does. But, hold on! The brain doesn't do any of those things. The brain is three pounds of protein. The brain is no more than the passive conductor of these processes. Let's look at memory. When you try to remember something, it is you, not your brain, that is remembering. Your brain's contribution is that of a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet has no memory. It simply stores information, in the form of letters, numbers and pictures. You look through that cabinet and locate the desired information that you decode from those letters, numbers and pictures to help you get in touch with the experience that you were trying to remember. The brain doesn't remember, doesn't try to remember, doesn't care whether you remember or not. The brain doesn't even know you. The brain doesn't even know it's a brain. It stores and conducts chemical and electrical charges that we interpret as information, but it doesn't know that it is storing or conducting information. The only differences between a brain and a filing cabinet in the area of memory, is that a filing cabinet stores information in codes that we are consciously familiar with, i.e. letters, numbers and pictures. The brain stores information in codes that we do not yet understand intellectually, but that we, our self, automatically translates into various memories, in the same way that we translate other patterns of electrical and chemical responses into the experience of sights, sounds, smells, emotions, etc. Also, while we use our physical body to access our filing cabinet, we use part of our non-physical self to access the memory codes stored in our brain. This non-physical part is called our focus, or our attention. Focus, or attention, is so much an integral part of our experience, has so much more reality for us than any biological information gotten from a scanning machine, and yet, according to brain researchers, it, too, does not exist. Why? Again, because it cannot be observed, although the results of it can easily be seen by the shifting patterns of excitation as you watch any brain scan unfold.

When people say it cannot be observed, therefore it has no reality, what they really mean is that it cannot be observed by anyone other than yourself. In other words, if you experience something it has no reality unless it can be observed by others. That's a bit of a shame really, when you consider that your self, your focus, your feelings and everything that you experience, in fact the entirety of your life, cannot be observed by anyone outside of yourself. You can tell them about. You can write books about it. But since no one else can directly observe it, you and the entire experience of your life does not exist for modern research scientists. This, too, would be okay if these researchers confined themselves to talking about the chemical and electrical processes that they observe, but they do not. They equate these with life, as if these processes are life itself, and anything else, like the self, like focus, etc., are quaint, superstitious myths.

Then, since they cannot see the self, or consciousness, and they cannot see God, or the Cosmic Consciousness, they confer intelligence, will, desire, ambition and creativity on the things they can see, especially brains and genes. With all the articles written about what "Your Brain" wants and what "Your Genes" compel you to do, there seems to be no room for you, for the actual existence of the individual. We have become little bewildered specks being tossed about at the confluence of two mighty rivers, "Our Brain" and "Our Genes". Yet I have news for you. There is no such entity as "Your Brain". Talk about a quaint, superstitious myth, a being called "Your Brain" does not exist. Of course there are three pounds of protein that are sitting in your skull, and those proteins are the passive conductors of countless electrical and chemical processes that keep you alive and conscious, but they do not act as an entity. They do not form one living being. They do not have their own will, their own desires or their own agenda. You have those things. You decide, by where you place your focus, which part of the brain is being used at any time. You remember. You see. You desire things. The brain is the place where those processes, that assist you in doing those things that you want to do, are arranged in such a way that you, not the brain, can translate them into the actual experience of your life.

What, I think, has happened, is that as researchers have figured out the purpose of many of these complex electrical and chemical processes that take place in your brain, they have instinctively realized that there must be an entity, a being, that has those purposes. If the goal of these processes is to assist you in remembering, or hearing or preventing sensory overload, it is not the actual electrons or the chemical traces of these processes that has that goal. They, the researchers, have unwittingly, I think, ascribed these purposes to your brain, because they can see the brain. But it is not the proteins of the brain that are the ground of being, the seat of these purposes. It is not any easier to imagine proteins wanting to accomplish anything, or having an agenda, than to imagine a stream of electrons having an agenda. We instinctively know, if we consciously attend to it, that desires, ambitions and purpose begin in the non-material, not the material. Beings have desire and purpose, proteins do not. When scientists say "your brain wants..." they have unintentionally created a being called "Your Brain" that is not the proteins in your skull, but a non-physical entity that lives alongside these proteins. It is the point of view of this post, that the two entities, "Your Brain" and "Your Genes", that have been unwittingly created by research scientists, have no reality, and the two entities that they have replaced from the modern perspective, your Self, or consciousness, and God, or the cosmic consciousness, not only have reality, but, between the two, they are the source of, they create, your entire reality. The being whose purposes are served by the brain and its processes is not the brain itself, but you, your Self. And the being whose purposes are served by the genes and the genetic code is not the genes themselves, but is God or the cosmic consciousness.

From the perspective that all life is observable, it seems that those patterns on the surface of the brain are the culmination of life, the end of the process. What is not seen is the invisible process that translates those patterns into actual experience. If I am scanning your brain while you watch a sunset, I am not seeing that sunset, am I? When you are listening to Beethoven, I don't hear Beethoven when I look at your scan, do I? The culmination of life is not a brain process, for the satisfaction of the brain. The culmination of life is the conscious experience that you have when you translate those processes into actual experience. Sense organs in conjunction with nerves translate incoming light waves, sound waves, tastes and touches into electric and chemical brain patterns. The organ that translates these brain patterns into actual experience is not seen. It is not part of the physical universe. We call that organ 'you'.

INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLECT

And I should interject here a few words about the eye. Darwin describes at some length, and in a way that has become perfectly acceptable to most scientists, the manner in which the eye could develop, step by step, from the seemingly simple light sensitive membrane found in single celled beings to the exquisitely complex organ found in humans. But, hold on! The eye does not see. The eye separated from a living being is a lens with some gelatinous proteins attached to it. The eye in a living being, and in conjunction with the optic nerve, is the passive conductor of light waves and electrical impulses which form a pattern in the brain. The eye does not see. You see. You translate those brain patterns into trees and sunsets and friends and enemies, the actual experience of seeing. And you were the one that began the whole process of receiving certain light waves in the first place, because you, not your eye, wanted to look at something. What Darwin was talking about was not the evolution of life, but the evolution of the equipment that life uses. By what manner did this equipment evolve? According to Darwin it evolved step by step because at each step it gave a survival advantage. But a survival advantage to whom? To the eye itself? Of course not. It gave a survival advantage to the intelligent being who was looking through this equipment. How can you explain the evolution of an eye if you exclude the intelligent beings without whom the eye would have absolutely no use. Now you may object to the word "intelligent" since Darwin's whole point was to devise a scenario in which life could evolve without intelligence. But the ability to discern enemies from friends, food from poison, and safe environments from threatening ones, and to adjust one's behavior accordingly is, precisely, intelligence. If intelligence is not the reading of one's environment and the making of appropriate adjustments to it, then what else could it be?

Humans, using language and writing, have been able to extend this intelligence to the contemplation of other environments besides the one that is immediately at hand, including our attempts to understand past environments, to anticipate future environments and to understand environments other than our own. We also live in an environment of ideas and concepts that we try to understand, to 'read', and then to make our own adjustments, our "intellectual adaptations" based on this new learning. So humans may be the only species that has intellect, which is a form of conceptual intelligence, but all species, including plants and animals have intelligence. The being whose entire sensory equipment consists of the light sensitive membrane of one cell, may have a much more limited use of intelligence than a being who is blessed with the one hundred trillion celled human body with its dazzling array of sense organs, but they are both using intelligence. How can you try to describe this exquisite system of adaptation that you call evolution and then say that there is no intelligence involved, when adaptation is the entire point of intelligence.

Let me interject something to try to clarify the difference and similarity between intelligence and intellect. If you live near the seashore or have visited there, I hope you have had the pleasure of throwing bread crumbs into the air and watching the seagulls dive and swoop to catch these crumbs in their beaks. Sometimes they misjudge the texture and density of these morsels and they clamp their beaks down too hard and the crumb disintegrates, but they never miss. If there is a breeze blowing from the sea to the shore, they never miss. If there is a breeze blowing from the shore to the sea, they never miss. If there is no breeze blowing, they never miss.

To catch a crumb in the air when you are already flying in the air, requires a calculation of the velocity and the arc at which the crumb is thrown, a calculation of the wind and barometric pressure as it effects your current velocity and inertia and as it effects the amount of energy you have to exert on all the muscles of your wings and torso to change direction and velocity and the precise moment to open and close your beak. Now the fact that a seagull is doing this instantaneously without any conscious calculation does not mean that these calculations are not being made; they are just not being made in time. That is intelligence. Now a really skilled physicist with instruments to measure the weight of the crumb, the force and angle of the throw, the barometric pressure of the air, the velocity of the wind, the weight of the bird, and the anatomical understanding of which of those many muscles does what, and how much energy is required for each, could, theoretically, figure out what that bird has to do in order to catch that crumb. But by the time our beleaguered physicist arrives at his conclusions, the seagull will have already caught the crumb, digested the crumb and pooped it out all over his calculations. That is intellect! With the exception of the weird bubble that some of our intellectuals have been in for the past century or so, it has been commonly understood that the whole thrust of human intellect has been to slowly, slowly, baby step by baby step, come to an ever deepening understanding of the intelligence of the universe which surrounds us, pervades us and has been with us since the beginning of time. But to think that humans are in sole possession of the only intelligence in the universe, when the only measure of that intelligence is the extent to which we are able to understand the very universe that is supposed to be devoid of intelligence, is a feat of arrogance compared to which Aristotle's placement of the earth at the center of the solar system seems a minor faux pas.

GENES

From the same perspective, that all life is observable, in the same way that it seems that life culminates with the brain, it appears that life begins with the genes. The assumption is that genes are not only the starting point of individual life, but that genes began the entire evolutionary process of life. The theory is that genes, microscopic bits of nucleic acids called nucleotides, randomly came together by a kind of freak accident, in such a way that they formed a code, that no one ever invented, but which allowed them to start replicating themselves. I should mention that nucleotides and proteins are always made by a living being. All proteins are either animal or vegetable. There is no such thing as laboratory protein. There is no protein found on the side of the road or floating around in a pond, that was not part of a living body that was born, that grew and died and that was manufactured by the miraculous processes of metabolism and digestion. (If you don't think that these processes are miraculous, that they are 'understood', then please prove me wrong and create something that metabolizes and digests; and, of course, I know Miller/Urey type experiments where a few carbon compounds and amino acids were produced, all of which had to be immediately removed from the very atmosphere that created them or they would quickly break down. I am not talking about a carbon compound or an isolated amino acid. I am talking about a protein.) Yet, by this theory, nucleic acids and proteins created life, rather than life creating proteins and nucleic acids. Not only did these infintesimally tiny dots of acid create life, but everything that was created in the entire kingdom of plants and animals on this planet is attributed to 'discoveries' (always written in quotes) made by these acid particles, or genes. Genes 'discovered' how to build cells. Genes 'discovered' digestion. Genes 'discovered' consciousness. Genes 'discovered' photosynthesis. Genes 'discovered' how to build brains, etc., etc. Based solely on this assumption, we have nullified the concept of God, of a cosmic consciousness, because we cannot see it, and freighted our poor little genes, these microscopic bits of nucleic acid, with all the intelligence, will and creativity of a deity because we can see them. Yes, we know that certain combinations of genes will lead to certain traits and characteristics. We even have some sense of how the genes are involved in the manufacture of proteins. But the body is not just a puddle of proteins. It has a unique and incredibly precise and complex shape. We know that different gene formations result in different shapes, but what that process is, what hand the genes have in the creation of shape, is not known by Western science. Also, it is not just a body that is reproduced, is it? Are we as joyful at the birth of a still born baby as a live one? What we celebrate at birth is not just a new body, but a new being. That new baby is as alive, as conscious, as intelligent, and as willful as we are. A new combination of genes attracts a particular consciousness, will and intelligence along with a particular shape and a particular sequencing of protein manufacture. How is it done? This is not known, but the assumption is that the genes, themselves, are doing it.

Suppose we didn't deify these bits of nucleic acid that we call genes. Suppose we accept them for what they are, nucleotides. Then, first of all, we wouldn't have to create these tortured, impossible scenarios of how genes started replicating, by themselves, and how they discovered every miraculous aspect of life, by themselves. Richard Dawkins, in his book, "River Out of Eden" likens the genetic code to computer code as a way of demystifying it. If you think about it, it is a good analogy, to a point, but not the way Dawkins intended. Computer code is made from arrangements of high and low frequency electric charges, 1 or 0. Genetic code is made from arrangements of four nucleotides, A, T, C and G. The brilliance and creativity of computers, what caused the computer revolution, was not, of course, the high and low frequencies, by themselves. It was the brilliance and creativity of computer scientists and soft ware engineers that created arrangements of these codes to serve human purposes. Dawkins would like us to think that it is the microscopic pieces of adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, by themselves, that create a human body, never mind consciousness, will and intelligence. That makes exactly as much sense as saying that the high frequency and the low frequency of computer code got together, by themselves, and without the intervention of any intelligence, human or otherwise, created Microsoft, Dell and Apple Computers!

We actually have a pretty good understanding at this point of what genes actually do. Most of the time, in terms of observable activity, they do nothing. They sit encased with, in the case of human beings, three billion of their brethren, within the nucleosome of each cell in our bodies. Occasionally, when a particular enzyme is needed by the body, another enzyme opens a tiny hole in the nucleosome at the exact spot among the three billion genes, that will reveal the needed strand of code. Another enzyme, again, from the cell and not the genes, separates the needed strand of genes from its partnered strand (all genes are arranged in double strands) and presses it against the opening in the nucleosome. At that point an RNA molecule copies the exposed code. Another enzyme returns the strand to its partner and another enzyme closes the hole. That's it! That is the entire involvement of genes in protein manufacture. They are moved by an enzyme to an opening where they get copied, and then they are moved back. The genes are not initiating any of this. The genes are not manufacturing anything. They are not planning anything. They are not coordinating their activities with other genes. They are not figuring out what the body needs. They are doing exactly what you would expect microscopic pieces of matter to be doing, which is absolutely nothing. They passively participate in a process that they neither initiate, energize or control. And the same is true for replication. When genes replicate they do it in conjunction with the whole cell's replication. Replication begins in the outer cell and the genes start replicating at a certain point in that process after a signal has been received from the outer cell. The DNA molecule, containing the genes, does go through some complex gymnastics during replication, but that, again, is at the behest of signals and enzymes that it receives. Once again, it is neither initiating, energizing or controlling this process. It is simply, totally and completely passive.

WITHIN AND WITHOUT

Yet, obviously, the genes are connected in some way to all the biological functions of our body, to its specific shape and to the abilities and the emotional make up of the being that inhabits this body. How can the genes determine all this if they are not creating it? Because the genes, even when they are not doing anything, which is the great majority of the time, are receivers. They are attracting to our bodies the particular consciousness, will and intelligence that makes the whole thing work. This is a bit hard to grasp because even though we cannot see consciousness, will, and intelligence, we associate them with physical bodies, especially human bodies. From the spiritual perspective, consciousness,will and intelligence are not created by bodies, or by matter (genes, of course, are tiny bits of matter). Instead, bodies, including genes, are created by consciousness, will and intelligence. This may strike many as odd (though no more odd than the other way, from material to spiritual) because, normally, consciousness, will and intelligence are experienced as coming from within, and in our twenty-first century society with its materialist bent, "within" is considered to be deep within the body, and not deep within the spirit.

Yet, many of us have had unusual or abnormal experiences of consciousness, will and intelligence. These 'supernormal' experiences of consciousness, will and intelligence, are usually experienced as coming from without; as something received. Soldiers on the battlefield, fire fighters and police officers in critical situations, have had the sudden experience of an extra rush of energy, clarity and determination. No one is more surprised at their heroism than they are, and they describe that moment when that extra energy and determination overtook them with a kind of awe. They consider it something that came into them, something received. These are examples of being touched by the cosmic will that sustains us all at every moment, but usually works separately from our conscious will. Great writers, artists and scientists, as they labor at a problem, as they obsess on the same information, or the same scenario to no avail, pray for an inspiration (atheism does not diminish the artist's enthusiasm for prayer at this juncture). Inspiration literally means the intake of breath. They pray for a gift to be taken in, to be received. They certainly don't pray for an expiration, which means breathing out and is associated with death. Einstein wrote a fascinating account of how the idea, the insight, of the theory of relativity entered his body; how he could feel it coming up through his legs and into his brain, and then getting it. Archimedes, having received a thunderbolt of inspiration, lept from his tub shouting 'Eureka' as he ran wet and naked through the streets of ancient Syracuse. Horowitz, the great concert pianist, when asked what he did in the moments before an important performance, said that he just tries to relax and hope that the winds of inspiration blow through him that night. Moments of great insight, great heroism, great performing, are considered by the people that experience them to be, not their own, but gifts from without, some thing unseen, yet extremely tangible, in fact always among the most vivid experiences of their lives. And, of course, spiritual seekers, people in deep prayer, fasting, chanting and/or meditation, report being transported to a new level of consciousness, which led to a new sense of themselves. Not so much that something was received, but that a boundary, a sense of separation between their limited consciousness and the unlimited cosmic consciousness, was momentarily dissolved. They were still themselves, of course, but they had a much greater, more expanded sense of who they were; of being an inextricable part of something infinitely greater than their individual bodies and brains.

All this is to say that consciousness, will and intelligence are the foundation out of which physical life comes, not vice versa. This consciousness, will and intelligence that is not bound by a particular body, not even bound by space and time, is far beyond our power to understand or even conceive. We call it God, Infinity, the Tao, the Atman, Allah, Buddha, Christ, the Cosmic Consciousness, etc. Every culture has its own name, but the name is irrelevant. As Lao Tzu said, "The name that can be named is not the Nameless Name ". The spiritual perspective, and the only one that really makes sense, is that consciousness existed before physical bodies, that physical bodies grew out of the desire of cosmic consciousness, or God, to have a presence in, to participate and interact with, the physical universe. This cosmic will, or God's will, is the energy that drives the ten quadrillion biological processes occurring simultaneously in each of our bodies, and every biological process in every physical body of every being on this planet, toward survival and replication. Cosmic intelligence, or God's intelligence, is the amazing way that this energy responds, adapts and reconfigures itself at every moment, in response to it's changing surroundings. The genes, then, from this perspective, are receivers, God's channel changers if you will. They don't create life, but they attract, depending on their configuration, the particular cosmic will and cosmic intelligence to grow and maintain your body. They also attract a particular nexus of consciousness, will and intelligence. I have been referring to this nexus as you, or your self. It is also referred to in many religions as your soul.

If there are hierarchies of spiritual beings, of souls, and how, and the degree to which, they are separated from God, from the ultimate consciousness; whether or not these souls choose this new combination of genes, or whether it is thrust upon them; if this takes place at the moment of conception or thereafter; what the purpose is of this action, which results in a new birth and a new life; these are all valid questions, but they do not concern us here. The important thing for now is that out of the cosmic will, consciousness and intelligence comes three things that can and should be separated. There is life, which is experienced but not directly observed and which contains its own limited and seemingly separate consciousness, will and intelligence. There are biological processes, mainly electric and chemical, that support that life, and there is a body, mainly proteins, that conducts and transmits these processes.

If you have a different opinion, for instance if you believe that biological processes are life itself, that life was created by nucleic acids, that the highest intelligence in the universe is human intelligence, and that the ten quadrillion (not a hyperbolic but an actual and very conservative estimate) biological processes, that are going on at this very moment in your body as you read these words, are all conducted and synchronized with no intelligence, what so ever; all that is fine. But if you are a research scientist who studies these biological processes, then, in your professional capacity, make statements about biological processes. Don't make statements with the mantle of authority and science that are really conjectures, or unexamined assumptions about the nature of these processes, who is doing them and what their ultimate purpose is. Don't make statements, for instance, that imply that because you see a process taking place in some tissues in my skull that we call the brain, that, therefore, "My Brain" is doing these processes. There is a lot of cooking done in my kitchen, but a mythical being called "My Kitchen" is not doing them. And, please avoid condescending statements, such as, "I have been looking through a microscope for thirty years and I can assure you there is no such thing as a soul, a self or consciousness, based on the fact that I have never seen any of them". No, you will never see any of them, but did you ever wonder who it is that is doing the looking? As to that final observation, at the cessation of biological processes, please do not say, "She's dead." Much better would be "she's passed on," or "she's no longer with us." And if your beliefs in the supernatural powers of nucleotides and proteins are so rigid that you cannot bring yourself to say either of these, then, perhaps, you should just say, "I'm sorry."

If your statements about what you observed are actually that, statements about what you actually observed, then we will believe you, we will respect you, and we will accept your findings in good faith. If you start, intentionally, or not, to make inferences about the nature of biological processes, about why they are there, about who or what is doing them, and about who or what they are for, in other words, statements about life rather than biological processes, then you are conjecturing about that which you have no expertise and you are unnecessarily alienating people of a spiritual persuasion. In fact, you may be sorely lacking in expertise in this area, because you have accepted all the materialist assumptions of your society without questioning them. And it is entirely possible that there may be more to learn about actual life, as opposed to biological processes, by experiencing it rather than trying to look at it through a microscope.


Any comments? Please let me hear from you.

Matt Chait - Tuesday, April 24, 2007

CHEMISTRY,BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

Spiritual people are emphatic about their beliefs. They say that they are based on their strongest experiences. Those of a scientific persuasion say that these experiences are delusional. If you can't see something, it doesn't exist. Yet, is this a maxim that holds true for all scientists?

Chemists and biologists deal with the material, visible world. They look at non-organic matter and organic matter as basically two different types of essentially the same thing, "stuff" made up of atoms and molecules. Physicists, however, are different. Physicists study forces. Forces cannot be seen. Forces are inferred by their effects on the material world, from their effects on tiny bits of it, like sub-atomic particles, to huge masses of it, like galaxies and nebulae. Keep in mind that even though, thanks to modern instrumentation, much of that microscopic world and that mega world can now be seen, forces still cannot. They still can only be inferred. And the same is true with psychology. You cannot see a person's intelligence, ambition, motivation or feelings. These can only be inferred from the effects of these feelings and invisible traits on a person's body, speech and actions. No one questions the existence of forces, intelligence, feelings, motivations or other 'states of mind', but no one sees them either.

The problem comes when people whose entire training has been in organic chemistry and biology start making statements about life. Life, as anyone who has survived a lifetime of materialistic brainwashing knows, is essentially spiritual, not material. Of course we have a body, but it is not our body, but our experience of our body that is integral to our lives. Consciousness, love, desire, passion, curiosity, jealousy, ambition, etc., are the stuff of life and all of these are experienced but not seen directly, either in ourselves or in others. Even one's self is nowhere to be found in all the most sophisticated research. And all the slicing and dicing, the pushing and pulling, the dissecting and examining of the human body, with whatever instruments you like, will never reveal the self. This is simply because the self is not part of the physical universe. The self is not a content, but the context of one's experience. It is the non-physical bowl within which you experience everything that happens to you.

Let's get back to the essential problem of biologists and chemists telling us what life is about. In the giddy excitement following the discovery of some of the basic structure of the DNA molecule, Watson and Crick and many in their wake, such as Richard Dawkins, claimed that they had found the essence of life, that life was now understood. They had found God and God was the DNA molecule. Had they? What does DNA do, actually? According to these same scientists, the DNA molecule is a complex structure of sugars, acids and proteins, and contains genes that are nucleic acids, or nucleotides, and that they are arranged in long, long chains and these arrangements are coded for the manufacture of enzymes and proteins and that is it! End of story! DNA is nucleic acid. DNA guides the manufacture of enzymes and proteins and that is life, the whole story. In fact, they go on to say that the purpose of all of evolution and the entire development of the species in all its breathtaking complexity is purely and simply to create more efficient machines for the replication of the DNA molecule. This has to be the ultimate expression of materialism!

And people believe this! People who thought they were living beings with a soul, full of radiant consciousness, now believe that they are some sort of protein manufacturing center which oddly happens to talk, and which accidentally picked up, somewhere along the evolutionary line, the peculiar trait of 'consciousness', because it enhanced their ability to survive, which, ultimately, allows them to replicate more DNA. Wow!

Folks, WAKE UP! An acid is an acid is an acid is an acid. A protein is a protein is a protein is a protein. A life is a life is a life is a life. Look, if I could somehow learn the transcendently exquisite sequence of proteins that were secreted from the one hundred trillion cells in a human body and I built one hundred trillion microscopic spigots and poured all the exact right amounts of enzymes and proteins in exactly the right timing sequences, into a pot, do you think I would wind up with a human being? Let me tell you. I would wind up with a pot of protein. I would wind up with a lovely meal for a hyena, or a weekend feast for a jackal. That's it.

There is a wire to my stereo. When I plug it in, that wire serves as the conductor for all the genius of Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler and Bach, but when it's not plugged in, it's just a wire. All the proteins in the body and, yes, that includes the brain, when they are not plugged in to the nexus of will and consciousness and intelligence that is the essence of life, are meat, plain and simple.

All the great spiritual books that have survived for centuries: the Vedas, the Bible, the Book of the Hopi, the teachings of Buddha and Lao-Tzu, the Koran and the Upanishads, share the understanding that the subtle creates the gross, not the other way around. You are life, you are consciousness. You have a body which you experience and use. You did not come into being because a conglomeration of proteins, of non living particles, of microscopic little pieces of organic matter happenned, by chance, to get together, and suddenly congealed into an intelligent, living being that metabolizes energy, grows, replicates, senses it's environment, etc. And this is organic matter, by the way, that was supposedly, somehow floating around in our environment prior to the advent of life. So our basic belief now is that nucleic acids create proteins and proteins, or meat, create life; not that life creates proteins. Take away all the big words and that is what you wind up with. At some point, acids miraculously got together in a complex enough formation to start manufacturing proteins and this created life. Is this the ultimate in materialistic insanity? Are we meat that happens to talk and think and be conscious just to enable us to replicate more meat? Or are we living, conscious beings that have a body through which we experience the world? Is consciousness the result of material complexity or does the process begin with consciousness?

Let's look at will. Every process of a living body operates independently from the four forces of physics: gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force (holding the nucleus of atoms together) and the weak force (holding sub-atomic particles together). To energize these processes, every living thing metabolizes energy. And what is the purpose of this energy, this force? To survive. Every living thing, and in the case of multi-celled organisms, every one of the millions and trillions of cells within an individual being and the thousands of processes within each cell of that being, all these quadrillions of processes are synchronized to deliver the same result: the moment to moment existence of that being. This is observable, this is obvious. So, why can't the scientific community give the same respect to the force of will that they do to the force of gravity and electro-magnetism? Is it a delusion when every plant, animal and every microscopic being on this teeming planet are all working in concert to the same end? Will is the force that keeps evolution going. Beings live and replicate because they want to live and replicate. Will energizes the whole thing and yet evolutionary biologists do not even mention it. They speak nonsense about rivers of DNA and genes getting together through the centuries. There are no rivers of DNA. There is a river of will and determination. Genes get together because beings get together. Beings get together because they are drawn to each other by ineffable forces, because of the overwhelmingly powerful desires to survive and procreate and care for their offspring that are put, not in their molecules, but in their selves. The same ineffable force that brings us to procreation is the same force that brings the DNA molecule to replication. How could these little sub-microscopic dots of acid replicate by 'themselves'. They have no selves. They are passive matter. It is the force of life, it is will, that causes the replication and the evolution and the seeking of a better adaptation to life, and the seeking of a mate in the first place. The cause does not originate in material, it originates in the non material.

You don't need rabbis or gurus or priests to make this determination. Get a few physicists on the case. The problem is that physicists don't study living beings. Living beings have become the sole provence of chemists and biologists who look at the visible, physical world and search for answers exclusively within the visible, physical world. It would probably take a physicist all of five minutes to determine that there is a very different force going on within a living being, that the goal of that force, which could be tested an infinite number of ways, is the survival of that being, and whoever that physicist is that makes this revelation will probably get to name it. So, we won't be able to call it will any more. We'll have to call it Jablonski, which is fine with me, so long as we don't forget to glorify the force called Jablonski, that has sustained all life from the beginning and sustains us now as you are reading these words, when we glorify Jablonski, the physicist, who spent a few months researching his 'discovery'.

The subtle creates the gross. Let's look at it in terms of human creativity. Look at any invention, any construction, any work of art. There it is, very tangible in the material world. Yet before it was made it existed as a plan or a blueprint or a sketch. Before that it was an image in some person's mind, a mental picture of this thing that they had imagined. Before that it was an identified desire, like, I need to provide more shelter for my family, or I need to express this talent, or I need to honor this loved one with a gift, or I have to figure out how to get to work faster. And before, out of nothing, in other words an empty consciousness, came an itch, a nameless restlessness, which materialized into an identified desire, which materialized into a vision of a creation, which materialized into a more detailed plan which finally materialized into the thing itself. So with human creations it's easy to see that the subtle, the little restlessness, the little twitch, materializes into a house, a sculpture, the invention of the wheel, or whatever. It's obviously not that the house was created first and the consciousness from which the idea of the house came out of, follows later. That's pretty simple to see. What's harder to see is that our consciousness, our 'self', is part of a much larger consciousness, a cosmic mind or cosmic consciousness, that is the source of all natural creation in the same way that our limited consciousness is the source of all human creation. But more of this later.



Please feel free to comment.

Matt Chait - Friday, April 27, 2007

GENETIC CODE/COMPUTER CODE

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

Richard Dawkins writes in 'River Out of Eden', his popular book on evolution, "The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer-engineering journal. Among many other consequences, this digital revolution at the very core of life has dealt the final, killing blow to vitalism-the belief that living material is deeply distinct from nonliving material. Up until 1953 (the unraveling of the structure of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick) it was still possible to believe that there was something fundamentally and irreducibly mysterious in living protoplasm. No longer."

Does the fact that genetic code resembles computer code lead one to think that living beings are less mysterious, or more so? The accepted wisdom is that DNA sends instructions to the cells using genetic code, which consists of four nucleotide 'letters' arranged in myriad sequences. Computers use a binary code, just two letters, high frequency or low frequency, 1 or 0. Computers work basically like this: A person, a conscious, intelligent being, types a message into a computer, an elaborate machine invented and constructed by conscious, intelligent beings, which translates the message from a language (spoken code) to computer code, which then travels to another machine, created and constructed by conscious, intelligent beings, which translates the code back to the original language at which point it is received and understood by yet another conscious, intelligent being.

If there were two computers that grew from two microscopic pieces of plastic or wire, without any assistance by any human intelligence, one of which started sending, by itself, millions of coded messages to the other, in a code which they invented themselves, and the other, upon receiving these messages began building impossibly complex new machines, and they both, in their spare time, were replicating themselves, then, that would still be a very pale, very inept imitation of a human being. Are we back to being fundamentally and irreducibly mysterious yet, or have Watson and Crick figured out the whole thing?

Supposedly DNA uses genetic code to send instructions to the cell. But DNA is the code. Does that mean that the code is sending its own instructions? That would be the equivalent of the high frequency and the low frequency of binary code, getting together to decide how to arrange themselves to create software. What part of the DNA is formulating these exquisitely complicated coded instructions? Is it the proteins, the acids, the sugars? What sense does it make to imagine that the code itself is formulating messages? Do letters, by themselves, form into novels? Do numbers, by themselves, form into equations? Codes are created by intelligence to communicate intelligent purposeful ideas to other intelligence. The way modern science thinks of it, lifeless submicroscopic bits of nucleic acid (genes) by sheer accident formed themselves into codes which communicated messages that were read and executed by other lifeless pieces of acids and proteins out of which, accidentally, came replication, the will to survive, birth, growth, death, digestion, elimination, metabolism, ambition, love and consciousness. And if you dare to challenge any of these ridiculous materialist assumptions, you are either an out of date religious fundamentalist who refuses to acknowledge the 'findings' of modern science, or you are some sort of a 'weirdo' who has a problem accepting 'reality' as, of course, only they can define it.

The physical plane is not the causal plane even when it is viewed through a microscope. We accept the structure (too small to see) of long, long chains of genetic code stretching along the twisting ladder of the DNA molecule. If you took all the genes from every cell of one human body and arranged them in one impossibly thin string, they would stretch from here to the sun (yes, not the moon, the sun) and back. What are they? Scientists tell us they are instructions. The genes, consisting of four nucleotides, make up a four letter language that give myriad instructions to the cell. The information in these instructions is so detailed and complex that the amount of genetic information in a single bacteria exceeds the total amount of information in the greatest libraries in the world. When a cell needs a certain enzyme it locates the particular piece of code it needs from the nucleus of the cell, copies it and brings it to the ribosome which reads the code and manufactures the enzyme. This is seen. This is known. But what is unseen? How does the cell know what enzyme it needs and how to locate that precise piece of code among the over three billion genes in each cell? Who or what knows the exquisitely precise sequence of protein and enzyme manufacture involved in the development of a human body from a fertilized ovum? How does the ribosome 'read' the code and then manufacture the enzyme? Yes, dedicated cellular biologists have studied these mechanisms and can describe many of the molecules and enzymes involved in these processes and the way in which some of these molecules interlock with others, but how? How do they know what to do, where to go and when to do it, and how did they arrive at those impossibly complex and precise shapes that allow them to do these things? These same scientists continue to study the cell to understand more of the thousands of chemical processes that go on simultaneously within the cell and the exquisitely delicate structures of membranes and molecules that enable the cell to do it's work. Mind you, the cell is the 'beginning' of evolution'. The common wisdom is that evolution starts with a 'simple' cell and then gradually over billions of years becomes more and more complex. Yet generations of our most brilliant scientists still struggle to understand the workings of this 'simple' cell, and few dare say that when they see such an impossibly intricate design and when they have clear evidence that each of our one hundred trillion microscopic cells remembers, reads, and replicates with a transcendent intelligence, only few would dare say that some other transcendent power and intelligence, an unseen force that shapes and energizes the whole thing, could possibly be at work.

I have a pretty good assistant. If I give him twelve instructions he will probably do six well, three passably and forget about the rest, and the last time I looked my assistant was a human being, the pinnacle of evolution. Here we have a microscopic cell and not only is there a Library of Congress' worth of instructions in that invisible dot, but there is somehow the artistry and intelligence to receive and execute all these instructions and coordinate that with the one hundred trillion other cells in the body, each with their own Library of Congress' worth of instructions, to create one synchronous, living human being.

I have a channel changer for my TV. In my area, at least, when I presses #4 I get NBC. This happens every time. It's scientifically consistent. Press #4, night or day, weekend or weekday, I get NBC. Does this mean that the #4 or the little wire inside that button, creates NBC? Does it mean that that wire is responsible for all the writing, acting, musical and administrative talent involved in the creation of NBC? Does my #4 even want NBC or care one iota about it, or even know of its existence? Of course not. A wire is a wire, a protein is a protein and an acid is an acid. The programming of NBC is, of course, created by the irreducibly mysterious talents of thousands of actors, directors, producers, designers and executives. My little #4 merely attracts the products of all this talent and intelligence to it. Watson and Crick thought they had found God in the DNA molecule. What they found was God's channel changer.


Please feel free to comment.

Matt Chait - Friday, April 27, 2007

THE IMMACULATE REPLICATION

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Christianity starts with a seminal event that skeptics scoff at. How could a woman conceive a child, even the son of God, without a human father? Modern evolutionary theory begins with another seminal event, the replication of the first DNA molecule. In his preface to 'River Out of Eden' Richard Dawkins writes, "..when the ricochets of atomic billiards chance to put together an object that has a certain, seemingly innocent property, something momentous happens in the universe. That property is an ability to self-replicate; that is, the object is able to use the surrounding materials to make exact copies of itself....What will follow from this singular occurrence, anywhere in the universe, is Darwinian selection and hence the baroque extravaganza that, on this planet, we call life".

I am not a religionist. I am a mystic. I offer no opinion regarding the virgin birth. What I propose in this post is two things. The first is that the chance of all the microscopic components necessary to congeal, by themselves, into a molecular structure that is complex enough to replicate is so gargantuanly improbable, that it makes a virgin birth seem a commonplace occurrence by comparison. And second, even granting that all the materials could be in place, a molecule cannot possibly replicate, at least not the way it is described by Dawkins.

The DNA molecule, or any hypothetical replicating molecule, is made of nucleotides, proteins and sugars. The ricocheting atoms that Dawkins refers to must first ricochet into these organic compounds. This is a problem. Organic compounds are manufactured in living cells. They are not found on this planet outside of living things. A famous experiment done by Miller and Urey in the 1950's, whereby a reducing environment of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor, devoid of oxygen, was subjected to a continual electric current, produced some of the carbon compounds necessary for that first replicating molecule. The continual (for three weeks) electric current was supposed to be a simulation of the lightning that these elements might have been exposed to on the early earth. But is a constant current for that duration a reasonable simulation of lightning? Is a controlled atmosphere without oxygen or carbon dioxide, both of which would breakdown these compounds, a realistic recreation of the atmosphere on earth at that time, when volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide and water vapor were frequent occurrences, and when we know that water vapor photodissociates in the upper atmosphere into oxygen, and oxidized sediments from the pre-Cambrian era exist in large quantities? What we are talking about is a so-called chemical evolution of organic materials that supposedly took place over millions of years, from carbon compounds combining to make amino acids, amino acids combining to make proteins and proteins combining to make a replicating molecule. Keep in mind that these are organic materials that are not within the protective membranes of a cell, or part of a cell's commitment to survive. These are fragile compounds that breakdown if there is too much heat, too much cold, too much movement, exposure to oxygen or carbon dioxide, exposure to sunlight and exposure to many of the other products of organic combining like ethanol or isopropyl alcohol. Other variations of the Miller-Urey experiment revealed many more previously unconsidered problems, to the point that many evolutionists have rethought 'pre-biotic' evolution. Many scientists now believe that this process took place not in an ocean of organic soup, but in shallow tide pools. Others look to thermal vents on the ocean floor, while others argue for an anaerobic beginning to life deep below the earth's surface and others have come to believe that life, in an extremophile form, may have arrived here embedded in a meteor from another planet.

Where this supposed abiogenisis (the creation of life, by itself, from non-living matter) took place, does not concern us here. Let's grant that somehow there were ample quantities of all the organic ingredients necessary. The assemblage of all of these, by chance, to a form and level of complexity that would be able to replicate is so fantastically remote a possibility that it is likened to the complete works of Shakespeare forming from a random mixing of letters, or molecules of metals with the help of heat from volcanoes and pressure from landslides forming themselves into a fully working refrigerator on an uninhabited planet. These are the 'chance ricochets' that Dawkins refers to.

Next comes the "innocent property" that this molecule just happens to have, which is the property of self-replication. To say that self-replication is a property of a molecule is like saying, "that rock is small, that rock is large, that rock is white, and that rock does calculus." Understand that a molecule is not a living thing. It's like a wall, a brick or a plate. Self-replication is a miraculous biological event. Since the unraveling of the structure of the DNA molecule by Dawson and Crick, our greatest scientists continue to study the act of replication. It is still not understood. They know, chemically, how the two strands of DNA separate, and they know, chemically, what material is used to "synthesize" the copy of the isolated strand, but how does it happen? Can we call it a "synthesis"? No, because it doesn't result in anything synthetic. The copied strand is exactly as real and authentic, as willful and determined to replicate, as the original strand. As baffling and awesome as this still is, does it make any sense to say that the DNA is 'self'-replicating', that it is making copies of 'itself'?

What is a self? When we say the dog came down the hill by himself, or the young calf stood by itself, it implies the ability to execute an action without help from others. Of course, it makes no sense to say a rock came down the hill by itself, or the crowbar stood up by itself. Non-living things are passive. They do not initiate action. Of course they move, they expand and they contract, but it is always some force that is causing them to do that. Really they are being moved, being expanded and being contracted. Physicists say that all the movement of non-living matter can be broken down into four forces, gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force (which holds the nucleus of atoms together) and the weak force (which holds together smaller particles in the atom). Conventional wisdom has it that prior to this first molecular replication there was no life in the universe. That means there were no sounds, no sights, no thoughts, no intentions, nothing. There were only atoms and molecules moving in mindless obedience to gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force and the weak force.

The first life form, whatever that was, was also the first machine. Yes, life forms are machines, although I hate to use that word, because people start thinking that life forms are just machines, which is not only wrong but helps lead to the moral and ethical slide that we now find ourselves in, but more of that later. All the processes of a life form, the thousands of processes within each cell, between cells, the processes of digestion, elimination, growth, the sensing of the environment, movement, replication, all involve energy. This energy is expended consciously and unconsciously to one end, the moment to moment survival of that life form. In the human body there are literally quadrillions of processes going on simultaneously and all synchronized to that one end, moment to moment survival. An organism does what it does to enhance its survival and to avoid or overcome threats to its survival. The energy and the focus to do all these activities I call will. Will is the fifth force.

You might say that is too anthropomorphic of me, that surely the will of a human being to pass her bar exams is different than the will of an ant to climb a hill to get to a discarded candy bar. But why is it different? Will has no thoughts. We may have thoughts about will, about will power, concentration, discipline, etc., but in the meantime our hearts keep beating, our lungs keep breathing and all the quadrillion processes of our life keep motoring on. Does the ant consciously desire the candy? I think so. The ant has receptors that let it know that the candy is there, and the scent of that candy arouses something in the ant that drives it toward it. And every one knows that the strongest desires are felt in the body and the fulfillment of those desires are usually diluted and complicated, not enhanced, by thought.

We had to call a plumber to our house recently because the sinks and toilets were backing up. The plumber wound up snaking out the mainline drain pipe leading from our house to the city sewer line. What had happenned was a very common occurrence in our area. A tree, sensing water in the pipe, had grown a root around it and squeezed. After several years of squeezing the tree managed to create a hairline fracture in that cast iron pipe and shot a tiny rootlet through that opening. Once that root started feasting on the water inside the pipe it grew to the point where the passage was blocked. I told my friend about it as a testament to the will of that tree. She thought that was rather silly, because it couldn't be like human will, and shouldn't be called the same thing. Why? What is different about it? What does human will look like? Human will is not part of the physical universe. Like all the really important things in our life like love, attraction, knowledge and one's self, will cannot be seen. It can only be surmised by the result of one's actions. The entire theory of evolution is predicated on this will without ever acknowledging it. What is driving all these countless beings in their struggle for survival if it's not will. The outcome of the contest of the survival of the fittest may be arbitrary, but the contestants certainly are not. Each one, from the plankton to the whale, from the amoeba to the redwood, is a complexly organized, synchronous whole driven by one over arching thing, it's survival. The survival of the fittest contest continues only so long as all the individual contestants continue to strive at every moment to survive. If you object to the word will, then call it something else, but if you over analyze and start to make distinctions you drive a semantic wedge between the great bond that bonds human beings to all of life, the will and desire to live.

Back to the replicating molecule. As the enormous complexity of the DNA molecule has become more clearly understood, many scientists have theorized that the first replicating molecule was not DNA, but something simpler, because the random assemblage of DNA with its millions or billions of nucleotides seems inconceivable. Beyond assuming that it was simpler, no one has any idea what this replicating molecule might have been composed of, and the theory goes that it no longer exists because it was devoured by more efficient, or more evolved, DNA centered organisms. To get some sense of what replication might be like let's look at DNA because it is at the center of every cellular replication on this planet and is the only example we have. The replication of DNA is part of the process of the whole cell's replication. To accomplish this DNA uses energy metabolized by the surrounding cell. The complex movements of the DNA molecule during replication and the energy required to split the strands of nucleotides and for the actual replication is borrowed from the cell. It is not part of the four forces of gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force or the weak force. It is a function of will. This leaves us with only two options.

The first is that at the time of the first replication, that molecule was not a living thing, in which case it was a passive piece of matter subject to the four laws of physics. In other words it did not replicate, but it was replicated. And if it was replicated, who replicated it?
The second possibility is that at that moment it was a living thing and it did replicate itself. The question then becomes from where did that first will and that first self on this planet arrive?


Any feedback? Your comments are sincerely welcome.

Matt Chait - Sunday, January 6, 2008

FACTS & OPINIONS

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

Here are a few things I know. I will be using some gargantuan numbers. While no one has actually counted these things, these are modest and best estimates based on the latest scientific research. You have one hundred trillion cells in your body. Each of these cells contains membranes that separate one chemical process from another. Very modestly, there are at least one hundred electrical or chemical processes going on at each moment in these one hundred trillion cells. That means that at this moment, as you read these words, ten quadrillion processes are going on within the individual cells of your body. A quadrillion is a billion millions. Walking the earth at the present time are a bit over six billion people. That means that you have one million six hundred thousand biological processes taking place at this very moment for each of the six billion people on this planet. And those are just the processes that happen within the cells. Another myriad of processes is happening between the cells, because all of these processes are coordinated and synchronized to bring about your moment to moment survival.


Now who is coordinating and supervising all this activity? I asked this question of a friend of mine of a materialist, scientific bent. These startling numbers barely aroused her. She said, "the genes" and promptly returned to sleep. Now before you doze off and return to that perpetual slumber that we in modern society call wakeful consciousness, let me share with you a few facts about 'the genes'. In each of the one hundred trillion cells of your body lie three billion base pairs of nucleotides that make up all your coded gene sequences. That means that you have a total of three sextillion nucleotides. Here is something to help you wrap your mind around that number. An individual nucleotide is a tiny piece of a kind of nucleic acid. How tiny? Well, they are too tiny to be seen no matter what instrumentation one uses. You can imagine their size if you realize that over three billion are encased in the nucleus of each microscopic cell in our bodies. Now if you were able to disentangle each of these three billion nucleotides from the nucleus of every one of your one hundred trillion cells and arrange them in one impossibly thin strand; that strand would stretch from here to the sun (93,000,000 miles) and back!


So, are these three sextillion sequenced nucleotides coordinating and synchronizing the ten quadrillion biological processes happening within the one hundred trillion cells in our bodies? Absolutely not! These nucleotides sit passively (not that surprising when you consider that they are matter) encased in the nucear membrane of each cell. When a certain sequence of nucleotides, of genetic information, is needed, a protein molecule miraculously finds its way through a tiny passage way in the nuclear membrane and then, even more miraculously, finds the exact spot among the three billion tiny nucleotides where the exact sequence is located. Then, that molecule is, amazingly, joined by several other molecules which also find this exact location and they combine to make an RNA molecule which presses up against the needed sequence and copies it. Then the RNA molecule with the copied sequence miraculously finds its way out of the nuclear membrane and arrives, miraculously, at the exact spot in the cytoplasm where the protein is manufactured from the code. (How this manufacturing takes place is even more amazing and mysterious). But all that the gene sequence does is it allows itself to be copied. That's it! That is all the genes do! They allow themselves to be copied. They are not coordinating. They are not supervising. They are not thinking about your welfare. They are microscopic pieces of nucleic acid. They are sitting enfolded in the nucleus of your cells and the only thing they do is allow themselves to be copied, and they don't even willfully do that. That is done merely in response to an enzyme. So, not meaning to disturb your slumber, I must ask again, if we eliminate the genes, who or what is coordinating all this activity? Of your three sextillion nucleotides, forming thirty thousand genetic sequences, who decides which precise ones are needed at each moment and causes those precise parts of the code to be revealed and copied? I'll give you one hint. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary biologists and the whole cadre of 'clear eyed realists' don't have the foggiest idea.

I attempt to answer that question, as best I can, in a number of the other posts. For now, let's consider a few more facts. At the current measure, ninety-four per cent of the universe is invisible. This is not my nutty observation. This is astrophysicists' nutty observation. Oh, and by the way, they measured it. Because even though it cannot be seen, this invisible universe has an effect on gravity. Now if you are not part of the universe don't pay any attention to the following. But if you are a part of the universe, please listen carefully! The visible part of you, in other words, everything that you can see and everything that you learn in biology, and everything that Richard Dawkins is talking about, is only a small part of you. The rest is invisible.

Why is that strange? The self can't be seen; consciousness can't be seen; your entire experience of your life can't be seen by anyone other than yourself. Love can't be seen; ambition can't be seen; passion can't be seen; and intelligence can't be seen. They can, of course, be experienced, but they can not be observed directly by others, only inferred from the way they effect your body and your behavior. So at the same time that evolutionary biologists and organic chemists are merrily eliminating the notion of a soul, a self and a consciousness from our vocabulary, based on the evidence that they have never seen these things, astrophysicists are announcing to the world that ninety four per cent of it is invisible.

The tragedy of September 11 was greatly exacerbated because the police department was not communicating with the fire department. In fact, the whole episode might have been averted if the FBI had communicated with the CIA. Could the spiritual tragedy now being wrought by these insular evolutionists likewise be averted if they would lift their eyes from their microscopes and listen to, or even consider, the information that is being discovered by their colleagues, the astrophysicists? Because of their scientific training, we cannot reasonably expect biologists to give any credence to the spiritual experiences that people have been relating since the beginning of language, and writing since the beginning of writing. But how can they ignore, not the conjectures, but the measurements of their scientific brethren?

What evolutionists and biologists have discovered is a small part, and the least subtle, least causal part, of the tip of creation. They have discovered a tip of the tip. Based on these few crumbs of knowledge, they have pretended to have unraveled the mysteries of life. They have replaced awe with a feigned omniscience and gratitude with a mocking arrogance toward any one that still has a shred of reverence and humility as they contemplate creation; in fact toward anyone who would contemplate their existence at all, since contemplation itself has become obsolete because everything has now been seemingly discovered. What has actually been discovered is simply how some of this amazing equipment works. What has not even begun to be discovered is who or what is operating this equipment and who or what put it here. If this distinction is clearly understood, then the more levels of complexity that are revealed through our research, the more our awe and wonder at the Creator is enhanced, not diminished, by these discoveries.


Thanks for reading. Your comments are most welcome.

Friday, April 20, 2007

LIFE vs. TRAITS

http://beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com/

Darwin's groundbreaking book was called 'The Origin of the Species' not 'The Origin of Life'. Is there a difference between species and life itself? Darwin was attempting to explain the myriad ways in which life took different forms through the ages, but was he talking about life itself? Is there a basic patten, a describable essence that exists prior to this differentiation and is consistent through all these forms; all these phyla and species?

Supposedly life begins with single celled organisms. Viruses are considered a kind of quasi-life in that they must invade a living cell and hijack its DNA in order to replicate. The cell, then, pretty much every one agrees, is the first life form. What are the functions of this most primitive form of life? A cell grows, replicates, senses it's environment, takes in nutrients to give it energy and to continue to grow, eliminates what is useless or dangerous to it, and protects itself from threats to its existence. Is there anything in this that sounds familiar?

A few years ago, accompanying my daughter on her school field trip to the Scripps Ocean Institute, we looked through a microscope at a drop of ocean water. There were dozens of plankton in that drop scurrying frantically about. I thought, "What are they doing down there? What is all that frenetic activity?" Then I realized that what they were doing down there was pretty much the same thing that we were doing up here; trying to survive. They were looking for something to eat, getting away from enemies, finding a mate and trying to get their children raised. Isn't it strange that every life form, plant and animal, that has been created, shares all these functions with that original single cell? Not only are they doing these things but, using whatever genetic equipment they have, they are 'trying' to do these things. How is it that every single being and form of life, and in the case of multi-celled beings, every cell and tissue and organ within each being, is trying to survive? Can we attribute all this energy and determination to the DNA molecule's ability to 'self-replicate'? Modern evolutionary theory does exactly that. It attributes the entire development of the species to the creation of more efficient ways for the DNA molecule to self-replicate. All species, including humans, live to serve the replication needs of the DNA molecule. Can this possibly be?

Replication takes energy. Survival takes energy. Is it in the DNA molecule itself, in the sugars, the proteins and/or the acids, that this need and determination exists? Scientists assure us that it is blind. The whole thing is a blind, random matching of genes, originally begun by a blind, random collision of atoms. But why does it continue? Why don't we just give up? Humans may need a reason to live, and for me, the prosperity of the DNA molecule isn't quite sufficient. But foxes, oak trees, seaweed and amoebas don't need a reason, at least not a stated one. They just keep doing it. Is it just the replication of the DNA that makes them do it? Does the DNA even desire to replicate? Of course not. It's just a molecule. If the DNA had any consciousness, which, of course it doesn't, and it 'wanted' to replicate, I should think it would have been more than happy many millions of years ago. Amoeba, plankton, microbes, bacteria, all replicate like mad. There are billions and trillions of them, all containing DNA, and all replicating away in our oceans and soil. If the DNA molecule could have any 'needs' certainly they would be met the moment there was any life form whose birth rate exceeded its death rate. What in the world would DNA need from human beings on this earth teeming with microscopic life?

What about this blind, random matching of genes? This has to be a conclusion drawn by people spending too much time peering through microscopes. Genes don't combine by themselves. Beings (a term which I prefers to life forms) seek out other beings and their mating produces gene combinations. Beings are driven to seek out other beings by deep and ineffable desires. Does the will to live, to mate and to survive originate in the DNA molecule, or does it originate in the force that caused the DNA molecule to replicate in the first place?

Evolution is the history of traits, not the history of life itself. Traits are all the different ways that we take in energy, sense our environment, grow, replicate, eliminate, protect ourselves and move. Cilia, feet, fins, wings, claws and talons all are different ways of accomplishing the same thing. They all allow a being to move toward that which will enhance its survival and away from that which threatens its survival. The basic essence of life, prior to any differentiation, has the following characteristics: consciousness, in that every life form senses its environment to distinguish what is helpful from what is harmful; will, in that every life form is committed to using whatever evolutionary equipment it is given in order to survive and replicate; and intelligence, in that every thing it does, in the construction of the form of life, in the execution of all these processes and, above all, in the incredible system of genetic reproduction, it does with a searing, transcendent and awesome intelligence. This absolutely unique essence of consciousness, will and intelligence, is what we humans share with every single life form, plant and animal. Prior to genes, prior to bodies, prior to any physicality whatsoever. This is life, itself.