Evolution Evolving

Tags

brain evolution, cosmic consciousness, evolution, God, growth, psychology, spirit

A few days ago, I had a surprise. A high school classmate who had “unfriended” me on Facebook, suddenly messaged me. In fact she sent two messages. The material she was so desperate for me to see, after a sentence of  so-called pleasantries, (hope you are having a joyous winter?) was a long and tedious bit of trite flotsam on the errors of evolution. It came of course from the usual literalist rag website, designed to buck up all the fundies of the world that their outrageous worldview is meritorious.

I sent back a rather hot reply, boiled down to “don’t waste my time with such chit. Oh, and hope you are having a joyous winter too.!” Yech.

Truly, I have no time for such nonsense. As Patrick Moynihan once said,  “you are entitled to your own personal opinion, but not to your own facts.”

Evolution is real, get over it;  it’s embarrassing to have a conversation with someone whose brain has ceased functioning.

We tend to speak about evolution as something that “has happened.” In reality, it of course is still happening, but from our short life spans as humans, we cannot “see” it happening. Brain research shows I think rather clearly that our brains are still a work in progress. But still, we are in progress, both as brains and as species.

There is plenty in the world to suggest that regression seems to be more our direction. One can speak to certain personalities such as the Palin, the Limbaugh, and such. Certain people dash into our viewfinders rather often with swill so silly and off the wall as to astound us all that humans ever left the cave.

Sarah wants Rahm Emanuel fired for using the “R” word, yet has her press secretary does everything but kiss Rush’s butt-kins lest he think that her words reflected on his rather overactive use of the same word. Tancredo urges that Obama was elected by a bunch of illiterate folks (white and black presumably) who can’t spell vote and what kinda name is Barack anyway for an American? Any day, you can find a good dozen of such gems just for the asking, perusing the blogging world and regular media.

Still, I hold to the proposition that despite the detours and abrupt halts and throwbacks to more simian brain power, we are moving forward. Since I am a believer, I also believe that at the heart of every person, whether they are aware, do it honor or shame, is a soul/spirit, that is always in perfect communion with the divine and the connected wholeness of God.

I believe in what is called by some a “cosmic consciousness” and this humanness is moving upward slowly,  imperceptibly but still upward.

I have to think that our increasingly world wide information dispersal must help in this raising up. It stands to reason. My notions may seem strange to even myself. I may feel alone with them. Odd. Bizarre. I might even feel that my thoughts are weird, fanciful and Utopian. Yet, through the power of the Internet, I can connect with thousands of others who think exactly as I do. That creates dialog and speeds up the process of movement upward. So I think at least.

The dangers are there as well. We all, bloggers too, tend to congregate around the water cooler whose conversation is agreeable with their own predispositions. Liberals read liberal blogs, conservatives read conservative ones. So it should come as no big surprise that the fringe nuttery tends to read and listen to those who support and validate their beliefs. Soon, they use these as their “talking points” and link up to “prove” they are right to unsuspecting others.

I like to think that some of us have the smarts  to not use each other as this kind of “proving” ourselves right. Rather, we bounce off each other ideas–with plenty of argument and disagreement–and slowly we come to a higher level of  “right.” Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part. But I do read conservative blogs, not a lot, but some.

I’ve noted that among the blogging, facebooking world, real friendships exist, people do make a point of meeting up with these new friends. More importantly we do reach out through prayer, and hands on “help” to each other. One blogger has sure stepped up to assist me recently. I feel blessed indeed. And I try as best I can to extend myself to others in the same vein. This kind of thing was not possible a few decades ago.  Our worlds were small, usually encompassing a few dozen miles. Now, our networks exist world wide in many cases.

It seems likely that our cosmic consciousness will grow exponentially as a result. So much more to draw from, so much to find support from, so many new ideas, new ways of living and thinking. New ways of being. If indeed our work here is to maximize our potentialities as humans, we have taken a major step forward.

At least I think so each and every time I reach out across miles, states and sometimes countries, to ask for help, and lo and behold receive it, offered with love. As we note more and more our commonality as humans, perhaps some of the hatreds and fears and suspicions start to retreat from our brains-in-progress. That’s got to be progress wouldn’t you agree?

Perhaps one day, we will all just suddenly agree that war is a waste and we have no more blood to spend on it.
Just sayin’.

Somebody’s Gotta Know

Tags

brain evolution, brain physiology, hominids, Human Biology, language, thinking

Okay, perhaps I have too much time on my hands. But this issue has been bugging me for a couple of years at least, and I have never had an answer from anyone. And I’m not particularly sure where to look anyway to find an answer, other than plowing through obvious tracts on brain physiology and evolution.

You see I got the idea from watching something or other on dogs and cats and how they think. And it occurred to me, that at some point in human evolution, hominids must have faced the same issue.

The question is exactly how do you think when you have no language? Ha! bet I caught you on that one. Have you ever thought of that? Do you have time in your normal lives to even contemplate such issues? Well, for whatever it means, I seem to. I fear this disease is catching. On the road today, the Contrarian in the midst of driving on the freeway with cars and trailer trucks zooming willy nilly left and right, he pointed to the glove box and said, “why did they call it a ‘glove box’ do you think? Why not the flashlight or tool box or map box or registration box?”

Well, that set me back a step or two. Like a gnat buzzing around my ear, interfering in my life, he drops this lovely little notion into my unprotected and not prepared for combat, ears, and I have to start contemplating that instead of the fine look of the passing cornfields. But we aren’t going to discuss glove boxes so just stop thinking about it if you were.

We are discussing thinking, in general, and thinking without language in particular. Now, I am firmly aware that all of us, at least those considered sane, and those not proficient in the meditative arts, are engaged in a general conversation with self all our waking hours. We chatter about the past, rerunning any number of old films about what could have been, what should have been, what didn’t happen, what did, and what we should have said, not said, and so on. We wander around the future in the same way, playing out plans and scenarios that we hope, want, plan, expect, are afraid, will happen to us or others we care about, love, dislike, hate, wish were dead in the near, middle or far future.

We chat along, as if there were indeed two of us, all the time explaining to self what the self is drudging up in memory. It’s all quite strange and odd when you come to think about it, but we all do it, and we don’t often talk about doing it. I don’t know if we are mildly embarrassed or what. We are somewhat curious about others doing it, since on occasion, we inquire, “penny for your thoughts,” or just the mundane, “whatcha thinkin’ about?”

Anyway, we spend a lot of time, and goodness knows how many words we might utter in this silent talk, if they were all written down. I’m rather surprised no one has done a dissertation on that, but of course, maybe they have. Given the output of the planet in terms of written material, I can hardly be expected to keep up with it all. It’s hard enough to keep track of the grocery list most weeks as it is.

So, there was a time before language. That seems obvious. Chimps don’t have a verbal language, and neither do the apes. We have a common ancestor, and we once were even more like them than we still are, so language developed from grunts and pointing, to grunts that had lilts and drops and became at some point multi-syllabic I assume. I assume, since I’m way too lazy to look all this stuff up. That’s what blogs are about, I trust somebody out there knows and can save me the trouble!

Anyway, when Oscar, (the hominid) had put the kid to bed in the cave, and the wife was tidying up the campfire, and Oscar was burping from a fine meal of mastodon, or cave lion, picking his teeth with a stick, and looking up into the night sky, he starts to wonder what that big old pock-marked grey thing is up there. How exactly does he contemplate it? How does he wonder? How does that conversation go with no words?

This drives me nuts to think of actually, since I spend some time every day, doing my darnedness to stop the yackety-yack of my head so I can ummmm, reach a higher plane of “being.”  Inquiring minds want to know!

The best answer I’ve come up with is what I came up with for dogs and other less intellectually stellar creatures, namely that their heads are filled with pictures, that flash one after the other. Now with animals it may function crudely enough that they can’t string them together in long “movies” if you will. Which is why animals seem easily distracted into new pursuits so readily. Perhaps we can string pictures together in our mind that tells a story of sorts, and is akin to “thinking.”

How else do we “figure” out how to shape a cutting tool, or a spear or throwing spear? We must be able to control the sequence of pictures in some coherent manner than allows us to progress in “thinking” through a  difficult problem with  some degree of sophistication. Anyway, the more I think of it, the more my head hurts. If you have an answer, why I’d be happy to hear it.

By the by, in closing lets go to something completely different: I’m wondering what you like, dislike, would like more of, less of on this blog. I write first for me, but also because I think some of you enjoy reading. Too much churchy stuff, not enough? More politics? More humorous nonsense like this post? More reviews of the news today? Something else you’d like to see? Can’t say as I’ll comply, because of course this is a personal thing first and foremost, but I’ll consider ideas certainly with great interest. Let me know!