And Now A Little Essay About What We Are Doing Here...

What are we doing here? What is the purpose of this all? Where did we come from? Where did life come from? Where are we ultimately going?

Sentient and intelligent beings such as ourselves have been wondering about the answers to the above questions since the beginning of time. It is simply amazing that we would have come into existence by sheer accident as though we had won some sort of Grand Cosmic Lottery.

I don't know about you, but all my life I have suspected that it is not a sheer accident. Even when I was an avowed atheist, I was unable to quite buy into it. I may as well blurt it out here and now that I think there is some sort of Cosmic Intelligence that has been organizing this universe, as well as countless other universes.

For example, consider the fact that scientists, supposedly the most rational beings on this planet, assert that the universe runs according to certain basic laws or equations. Things always fall at a certain rate on a planet of a certain size. Light always travels at 186,000 miles a second, neither slower or faster. E = mc2. And so on.

This is pretty wild when you think about it. Why would a purposeless universe have any kind of law at all? Of course, this is usually swept under the rug by saying there is some sort of ultimate cosmological constant or grand unified theory that spontaneously came accidentally into existence when the Big Bang occurred. So if the rules are that loose, how come they can't be broken once in a while?

By the way, don't get me wrong here. I'm not about to pop this doctrine that some Big Man in the Sky did it all. I think we can go beyond that instead of regressing to the middle ages. I just think we need to reconsider what is going on here.

Here's my own idea: First of all, I think there is a Cosmic Intelligence. Next, I think this Cosmic Intelligence is making it all up as it goes along. It only has the vaguest idea, or perhaps it has a quite definite idea, of what it wants the final outcome to be. It has very little idea what it's going to do to get there, so it tries out different things through a process of evolution.

This might be compared to a writer who intends to write a book. The writer knows that the book is somehow going to have a happy ending. But it would be a very boring book, if the happy ending were done and nothing else. So there needs to be some struggles to get to that happy ending. The writer creates a lot of struggles, antagonists, and different characters who develop.

The writer then proceeds to try out one draft after another, doing sub-drafts of successive stages. If the writer is not satisfied, then he or she crumples up the whole thing and starts over again from scratch.

This is very much like how the Cosmic Intelligence works with the universe. This universe may be one of an infinite number of "drafts". The Cosmic Intelligence is using evolution as a tool for developing an unfolding "plot".

The Cosmic Intelligence is doing this not as some obsessive-compulsive dictate, as though it needs to come up with a perfect universe or else suffer. It is doing it because It has a lot of fun doing it. It is a bit like a bunch of kids who make up a game or play, then change the rules as they go along.

Now it must be emphasized that this Cosmic Intelligence is not some Gigantic Being Outside who is directing it like a play. It is within us, as it is within all living and "non-living" beings. It is nothing more or less than Pure Consciousness. We'll get into that bit later.

I admit I may be totally wrong about all of this. It is all quite hypothetical and cannot be "proven" in a laboratory. It can only be experienced. When any of us participates in a creative act, we are reflecting the Cosmic Intelligence which is Infinite Creativity.

Acccording to the vast majority of scientists who study evolution, evolution is a process of accidental mutation combined with competition for dwindling resources. First, this happened on the biochemical level, then it happened in the development of single cells, and finally it happened on the level of multi-celluar organisms (and a conceivable stage beyond would be between differing ecosystems - or even entire planets!). It can be succinctly stated as this: If an organism can survive to leave progeny, it is fitter than one who doesn't. The fitter organisms continue to survive as a species, while the others do not. The organism has no control over how it mutates; it either mutates in a lucky way or not. Mutation is a random, absolutely unpredicatble process.

Nobody has bothered to question this basic assumption. Although there are subtle differences of opinion, this is the primary pardigm of all evolution scientists.

In recent decades, there have been changes in this paradigm. For one thing, evolution is no longer perceived as a purely competitive process. In some cases, organisms have been found to cooperate with one another in an exhange of resources and strengths. The mitochondria in animal cells and cloroplasts in plant cells are believed to be ancient bacteria that formed a cooperative relationship with the original cells.

Also, there is an interesting process of coevolution. This means that organisms evolve according to what other organisms evolve. So if a frog develops a sticky tongue, the fly makes slippery legs. Coevolution is almost like a kind of cooperative competition. (One thing that is contradictory about the evolution hypothesis of the average scientist, is there seems to be something quite deliberate about how these creatures mutate.)

Mutation, in general, is still considered to be a purely accidental process, but there have been changes in the way of thinking about it. It used to be solely due to radiation hitting a few atoms in DNA here and there that was hypothesized to cause it, which is probably a messy way to go about it. Now scientists are thinking in terms of sexual combination and strands of DNA getting spliced and rearranged.

Anyway you go about it, thinking that life evolved by accidental mutation from some primal broth in the ancient seas into such delicate and conscious creatures such as ourselves, is like thinking a bunch of monkeys clattering away on typewriters would sooner or later type up the complete works of Shakespeare (or we could try it with a random letter generator on a computer). The way scientists sweep this under the rug is by saying billions of years are a pretty long time; sooner or later something coherent is bound to manifest. They are also coming up with elaborate theories with new mathematical models involving chaos and complexity. This seems rather ad hoc to me.

To date, scientists have not succeeded in making a complete cell from scratch in their laboratories. Sure, they've come up with some elaborate organic molecules and some cute computer models. If they can do this, I might begin to acknowledge they are right. However, there's one little problem here: Outside agents, intelligent human beings, are trying to make something deliberately. So this is not quite accidental, is it? The only way they could prove it is simply let the broth sit there for awile and allow it to spontaneously turn into life.

The attitude that life is an accident and it is based on sheer competition has some profound ethical implications. If I perceive my goal in life as survival of the fittest, I can see nothing wrong with stomping on you, the little guy, or even killing you, if it will enable me to survive better. Indeed, big businesses use this as justification for many of their practices, such as Laying off a bunch of long-term workers or destroying the environment. The Nazis used this as justification to wipe out the Jews, since they considered themselves to be the Master Race. The social services or governments can see nothing wrong with turning out poor people into the streets to slowly starve, since the administrators consider these people losers in the evolutionary struggle.

It also gives people a sense of profound despair: If life is an accident, what is the point of it all? Many turn to drugs and alcohol to cover up their pain of this despair. People develop a purely hedonistic attitude to get what they can, whether legally or illegally, before they get ground under by the competitive turmoil.

Seriously, how would it make you feel, if someone came up to you right now and said: "You are nothing but an accident. You simply came into existence by a bunch of atoms that happened to knock together the right way. There is no purpose to your existence other than to survive, get laid, and leave some copies of yourself to propogate your genes."

Do you really believe that?

What I want to propose here is:

(1) Life is based on cooperation, not competition.

(2) Organisms have the ability to mutate themselves according to what the environment and other organisms are doing.

(3) There is an implicit intelligence that drives it all.

(4) There is an ultimate goal to the process of evolution - to achieve increasing mobility, intelligence, creativity, and consciousness.

(5) The purpose of life is to playfully delight in our existence and continuously grow, not simply to survive and propogate.

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