thinkforpleasure.com

From the Theory of Universal Evolution we understand that humanity began it’s trek to intellectual awareness around fifty thousand years ago with just a few at first conscious of their existence and a gradual build-up over thousands of years until somewhere over a third of humanity was aware. That (slightly more than a third,) is apparently the “tipping point”. We reached that tipping point around seven thousand years ago and suddenly eighty-five percent of us were intellectually aware.

To understand the evolution of man after that moment of world-wide awareness, we have to understand the basics of the structure of man. Everything that happens to the species happens to the individual within the species, just on a different time-scale.

The basic structure of man is this: The first five years is a period when the individual is fully aware of it’s intellectual existence, yet completely unaware of the intellectual existence of anyone else. During the fifth year the individual suddenly becomes aware of the intellectual existence of others. During the eleventh year the individual just as suddenly becomes aware of the future.

The structure of the society is the same. When we became intellectually aware seven thousand years ago, we ‘by and large’ attained the first level of intellectual awareness, the knowledge of “self”. Gradually, over thousands of years, some of us attained the second level of intellectual awareness, the knowledge of “others”.

Then came another tipping point. Some bit more than a third of us attained that level around a thousand years ago and suddenly, all but a few of us were aware of others like us. There are exceptions, pockets of the second level, Greece comes to mind, but the society throughout the planet reached that tipping point somewhere around the start of the renaissance. A good marker for this is “The Decameron”, one of the first books written in the vernacular, and the second book printed by Gutenberg.

Today, our society at large is at another tipping point. More and more individuals have attained the third level, and now, society is rapidly attaining that third level of intellectual awareness, the awareness of the future. This is not to say that our society does not know that there is a future, but knowing it exists and understanding it, being aware of it internally is entirely different. Society at large is becoming aware of the future.

This does not bode well for civilization as we know it. Capitalism is based on a consumer that satisfies it’s immediate needs at the expense of it’s future and a shareholder that is only concerned with it’s immediate increase in wealth. A reasonable society will not be concerned with either of those.

But capitalism, corporatism, is the most regressive part of our society. The corporate mantra is “no one exists but me.” We can see that today, April 2008, when the worst thing that could happen to our very fragile economy is for jobs to be lost, and business laid off eighty thousand employees. No matter what happens, business will increase shareholder return. Tomorrow doesn’t exist.

There has to be a start to life. This is a given. The mud puddle and lightening bolt theory is pretty far-fetched. There must be a reasonable explanation, and my guess is that incipient life is just around the universe in a spore-like state. This is of course an educated guess; no-one can empirically answer the question.

When that incipient life finds itself in an environment in which it can survive, it will become active, as the spore of a fern or mushroom does, and evolve until it is satisfied with its existence in that environment. Then it will cease evolution and live in harmony with the environment, so long as that environment exists. That satisfaction, that desire to live in harmony with it’s environment, is the drive for evolution, and the major point of the existence of life.

When that environment changes so that life is no longer in harmony with its existence, or when even greater harmony may be reached, life will return to evolution. It will go through species-wide permanent changes until it is satisfied with its existence within that new environment. Or it will become extinct.

We see that on our planet. Four billion years ago, our planet was capable of supporting only single celled life. It wasn’t much satisfaction, but all the earth offered, so for three point six billion years, life consisted of bacteria, and probably viruses. Then, according to our geologists, around four hundred million years ago our planet cooled down to a point at which it was a fairly nice place for multi-cellular life to live, and there was a surge of evolution for some fifty million years. We call this period the pre-cambrian explosion because of the tremendous number of species that appeared over such an incredibly short period of time.

After the pre-cambrian explosion there was a period of no noticeable change for some forty million years, until something still unknown happened. Whatever happened caused what we call the permian die-off. The fossil record shows that life in general re-entered evolution, changing again, until it was in harmony with its new environment.
That period of evolution was followed by some fifty million years of stasis, with again no noticeable change. Then came what we call the K/T boundary crisis.

We’re pretty sure that an asteroid crashed into the earth around sixty-five million years ago. It truly was a disaster, causing sudden and severe changes in the environment, which in turn caused yet another evolutionary surge.

That was the last environmental change that affected the entire planet. The plants and animals that had reached stasis about thirty-five million years ago are pretty much the ones that are around now. There was no more Eohippus, but there was horse, zebra, donkey and the rest.

Three times there have been dramatic changes in the environment, and three times there have been evolutionary surges immediately following. Each surge has been followed by a long period with no evolutionary change observed.

This demonstrates the theory of universal evolution: When life finds itself in an environment in which it can survive, life will evolve until it is in harmony with it’s environment. When that environment changes life will evolve again until it is in harmony with it’s new environment.

Evolution must have a drive. Satisfaction, the desire for harmony with the environment, is the only universal drive and the only logical choice for an evolutionary drive.

THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

Let’s begin at the beginning. Four billion years ago, we were single celled amoeba of some sort, swimming among other amoeba, maybe like us, maybe not, and probably some virus guys of some sort, and we were happy, but not overjoyed with our existence.

We hung around like that ‘til almost yesterday, some 350 million years ago, when the planet cooled to where it could support multi-cellular life, and all of us were ready. We exploded into every kind of multicellular life you could find, over about fifty million years and, once we were in harmony with our environment, once we were satisfied, we settled down to a much sweeter life.

We in particular became sort of a salamander, kind of like the Hell-Binder native to Maryland. We populated the river deltas all around Pangaea. This was one of the most diverse environments and one where food was plentiful and of great variety.
This only lasted about forty million years, and then came the Permian die-off, when we think maybe something happened in the deep ocean which made it untenable, and each layer of life pushed on the one above it, eventually pushing us salamanders up on shore, and into evolution.

We were pushed up all over Pangaea but we all had the same general mind-set, so each group of us evolved into a mammal of some sort, reaching harmony and satisfaction in what seems to be a shorter time, maybe forty million years. We again in particular evolved into something small, the size of a mouse they like to say.

We stayed like that maybe forty-five million years, until the K/T boundary crisis, when much greater satisfaction was made available to us. As with great-grandmom the Hell-Binder, different groups of us evolved into different members of the primate family, while we in particular grew to maybe two feet tall and entered the trees in the leading edge of the forest where the food was most plentiful and most varied.

It rained for awhile every afternoon, cleansing us almost automatically, and the only predator was the snake. It was every bit as good as great-grandmoms life in the deltas. Then, again, something happened.

This has been harder to piece together. It took some deduction. No-one else has been looking, and most of my knowledge has come from scientific papers published, but I learned that the Rocky mountains rose up overnight around twenty-five million years ago and the four major deserts formed around that same time.

It’s not hard to conjecture that the chicksale of the Rockies suddenly rising tens of thousands of feet into the sky altered wind patterns worldwide and ended the daily rains in those four regions, turning our magnificent home into a hard-scrabble desert pulsating with predators in just two short years.

And the timing would be pretty much right. If we get better at evolving each go-round, then for the third go-round, twenty-five million years seems close. And we did have to evolve.

There seems to be a limit on physical evolution, and around fifty thousand years ago we began to evolve intellectual awareness. It began slowly of course, just a few people at first, gradually increasing the number over thousands of years. Then the number intellectually aware reached that point (usually called “the hundredth monkey syndrome” ) where suddenly, everyone became intellectually aware. This was around seven thousand years ago.

Then we became confused. We thought the feeling of dissatisfaction was individually based. We thought we had evolved.

We have to finish evolving. Evolution ends when the species reaches satisfaction, not individuals, and we’re going to continue to destroy the world until our species is satisfied, or until we become one of those evolutionary “dead ends” where the species just disappears from the fossil record.

Take a minute to think about that title. By “universal” I mean the entire universe. The entire universe is interconnected by energy and energy is intelligent.

By energy I mean every form of energy. Energy is “of a piece”, and every form of energy is an interconnected part of that piece. We are a form of that energy and we are interconnected with the entire universe.

This is where religion comes from. We feel that interconnection and want to know why. Religion is an answer to that question. Religion attempts to explain that feeling of interconnection.

Human beings throughout our world possess a sense of something within us that is more than us. Humanity has attempted to explain that conception by defining a spiritual and superior being that interacts and has control over our existence.

The human concept of god is that god is everywhere and within everything; that god is within humanity and is more than humanity. Every group of indigenous peoples we have discovered in four hundred years of searching has demonstrated an understanding of this and they have developed a concept of it that we call religion.

These have run the gamut from the terrible through the vindictive and jealous to the all-loving, they’ve been given different names and different attributes, but they all attempt to explain this feeling, this sense that we are interconnected with the universe.

The universe is energy. Our atomic physicists learned this when they started playing around with bombs. When they subjected matter to nuclear fission, they got energy and no residue. Their conclusion? The universe is energy. Energy is everywhere and everything.

Intelligence is pure energy. There is neither form nor substance to intellect. Our thoughts are shapeless and weightless. They don’t have space or mass. But they are intelligence.

We can’t say that only some energy is intelligent, and we can’t say that we are not intelligent. The universe must be intelligent. When we became aware of our intelligence we became aware of our universality. It is that intelligence of energy that human beings have been aware of since human beings have been aware of intelligence.

Religion is how peoples have explained the science. How they have explained that we are connected to the universe. That we are the universe, and the universe is more than us. The origin of the concept of “god” is our connection with the energy of the universe.

This is not philosophy or religion; it is a scientific statement. We know that the universe is energy. We know that our intelligence is energy. We know that humanity senses an interconnection with the universe. Now we know that the universe is interconnected intelligent energy.

Science needs to understand that our intellect is energy and energy is interconnected. If we accept this thesis as a premise, a lot of what we see will begin to make more sense.

I’m going to present two theses today. One on the scientific explanation of why man conceives of a god of same sort, and one on evolution and the evolution of man.

The Origin of the Concept of God

Human beings throughout our world possess a concept of something within us that is more than us. Humanity has attempted to explain that conception by defining a spiritual and superior being that interacts and has control over our existence.
The human concept of god is that god is everywhere and within everything; that god is within humanity and is more than humanity. Every group of indigenous peoples we have discovered in four hundred years of searching has demonstrated an understanding of this and they have developed a concept of it that we call religion.
These have run the gamut from the terrible through the vindictive and jealous to the all-loving, they’ve been given different names and different attributes, but they all attempt to explain this feeling, this sense that we are interconnected with the universe.
The universe is energy. Our atomic physicists learned this when they started playing around with bombs. When they subjected matter to nuclear fission, they got energy and no residue. Their conclusion? The universe is energy. Energy is everywhere and everything.
Intelligence is pure energy. There is neither form nor substance to intellect. Our thoughts are shapeless and weightless. They don’t have space or mass. But they are intelligence.
We can’t say that only some energy is intelligent, and we can’t say that we are not intelligent. The universe must be intelligent. When we became aware of our intelligence we became aware of our universality. It is that intelligence of energy that human beings have been aware of since human beings have been aware of intelligence.
Religion is how peoples have explained the science. How they have explained that we are connected to the universe. That we are the universe, and the universe is more than us. The origin of the concept of “god” is our connection with the energy of the universe.
This is not philosophy or religion; it is a scientific statement. We know that the universe is energy. We know that our intelligence is energy. We know that humanity senses an interconnection with the universe.
Science needs to understand that our intellect is energy and energy is interconnected. If we accept this thesis as a premise, a lot of what we see will begin to make more sense.

The Theory of Universal evolution

There has to be a start to life. This is a given. The mud puddle and lightening bolt theory is pretty far-fetched. There must be a reasonable explanation, and my guess is that incipient life is just around the universe in a spore-like state. This is of course an educated guess; no-one can empirically answer the question.
When that incipient life finds itself in an environment in which it can survive, it will become active, as the spore of a fern or mushroom does, and evolve until it is satisfied with its existence in that environment. Then it will cease evolution and live in harmony with the environment, so long as that environment exists. That satisfaction, that desire to live in harmony with it’s environment, is the drive for evolution, and the major point of the existence of life.
When that environment changes so that life is no longer in harmony with its existence, or when even greater harmony may be reached, life will return to evolution. It will go through species-wide permanent changes until it is satisfied with its existence within that new environment. Or it will become extinct.

We see that on our planet. Four billion years ago, our planet was capable of supporting only single celled life. It wasn’t much satisfaction, but all the earth offered, so for three point six billion years, life consisted of bacteria, and probably viruses. Then, according to our geologists, around four hundred million years ago our planet cooled down to a point at which it was a fairly nice place for multi-cellular life to live, and there was a surge of evolution for some fifty million years. We call this period the pre-cambrian explosion because of the tremendous number of species that appeared over such an incredibly short period of time.
After the pre-cambrian explosion there was a period of no noticeable change for some forty million years, until something still unknown happened. Whatever happened caused what we call the permian die-off. The fossil record shows that life in general re-entered evolution, changing again, until it was in harmony with its new environment.
That period of evolution was followed by some fifty million years of stasis, with again no noticeable change. Then came what we call the K/T boundary crisis.
We’re pretty sure that an asteroid crashed into the earth around sixty-five million years ago. It truly was a disaster, causing sudden and severe changes in the environment, which in turn caused yet another evolutionary surge.
That was the last environmental change that affected the entire planet. The plants and animals that had reached stasis about thirty-five million years ago are pretty much the ones that are around now. There was no more Eohippus, but there was horse, zebra, donkey and the rest.
Three times there have been dramatic changes in the environment, and three times there have been evolutionary surges immediately following. Each surge has been followed by a long period with no evolutionary change observed.

This demonstrates the theory of universal evolution: When life finds itself in an environment in which it can survive, life will evolve until it is in harmony with it’s environment. When that environment changes life will evolve again until it is in harmony with it’s new environment.
Evolution must have a drive. Satisfaction, the desire for harmony with the environment, is the only universal drive and the only logical choice for an evolutionary drive.

The Evolution of Man

Let’s begin at the beginning. Four billion years ago, we were single celled amoeba of some sort, swimming among other amoeba, maybe like us, maybe not, and probably some virus guys of some sort, and we were happy, but not overjoyed with our existence.
We hung around like that ‘til almost yesterday, some 350 million years ago, when the planet cooled to where it could support multi-cellular life, and all of us were ready. We exploded into every kind of multicellular life you could find, over about fifty million years and, once we were in harmony with our environment, once we were satisfied, we settled down to a much sweeter life.
We in particular became sort of a salamander, kind of like the Hell-Binder native to Maryland. We populated the river deltas all around Pangaea. This was one of the most diverse environments and one where food was plentiful and of great variety.
This only lasted about forty million years, and then came the Permian die-off, when we think maybe something happened in the deep ocean which made it untenable, and each layer of life pushed on the one above it, eventually pushing us salamanders up on shore, and into evolution.
We were pushed up all over Pangaea but we all had the same general mind-set, so each group of us evolved into a mammal of some sort, reaching harmony and satisfaction in what seems to be a shorter time, maybe forty million years. We again in particular evolved into something small, the size of a mouse they like to say.
We stayed like that maybe forty-five million years, until the K/T boundary crisis, when much greater satisfaction was made available to us. As with great-grandmom the Hell-Binder, different groups of us evolved into different members of the primate family, while we in particular grew to maybe two feet tall and entered the trees in the leading edge of the forest where the food was most plentiful and most varied.
It rained for awhile every afternoon, cleansing us almost automatically, and the only predator was the snake. It was every bit as good as great-grandmoms life in the deltas. Then, again, something happened.
This has been harder to piece together. It took some deduction. No-one else has been looking, and most of my knowledge has come from scientific papers published, but I learned that the Rocky mountains rose up overnight around twenty-five million years ago and the four major deserts formed around that same time.
It’s not hard to conjecture that the chicksale of the Rockies suddenly rising tens of thousands of feet into the sky altered wind patterns worldwide and ended the daily rains in those four regions, turning our magnificent home into a hard-scrabble desert pulsating with predators in just two short years.

And the timing would be pretty much right. If we get better at evolving each go-round, then for the third go-round, twenty-five million years seems close. And we did have to evolve.
There seems to be a limit on physical evolution, and around fifty thousand years ago we began to evolve intellectual awareness. It began slowly of course, just a few people at first, gradually increasing the number over thousands of years. Then the number intellectually aware reached that point (usually called “the hundredth monkey syndrome” ) where suddenly, everyone became intellectually aware. This was around seven thousand years ago.
Then we became confused. We thought the feeling of dissatisfaction was individually based. We thought we had evolved.
We have to finish evolving. Evolution ends when the species reaches satisfaction, not individuals, and we’re going to continue to destroy the world until our species is satisfied, or until we become one of those evolutionary “dead ends” where the species just disappears from the fossil record.

_____I’m alive. I know that. We all know that we are alive. I am encased in a body, as we all are, that is about three and a half months older than I am. Not too many people know that.
_____For the first trimester, the embryo in the mother’s womb is not yet alive. The moment we enter the womb is the beginning of the second trimester. (A trimester is three and one half months but, because the infant head would be too large to express at the end of the third trimester the child is delivered a month and a half early, which extends the third by one month so the child becomes aware that it exists two and a half months after expression from the womb, effectively making the “moment of birth” that moment when the child realizes it is crying.)
_____During the first trimester we are not there. We enter suddenly at what used to be called the moment of quickening, (before the medical fraternity said it was the moment of first movement, which is actually the end of the second trimester,) and go about the business of finding out who we are. For the next three and a half months we think and study non-stop, going through ancestral memory.
_____But enough of all that. This is a short essay on life and death, not on the structure of human beings. The point is that we entered these bodies when they had been under construction for three and a half months, and so, when this construction fails we will leave.
_____We will leave. It’s impossible to find out where we go, just as it’s impossible to tell where we came from, but we leave this body when it fails, when it ceases to function, to we know not what.
_____The moment we enter these bodies we are fully aware that we have arrived. I expect that I will be fully aware that I am leaving, as will anyone else that is fully aware. (There I go again, getting into the structure of human beings again. Ooh well. If one were properly structured one would be fully aware.)
_____So life begins when we enter the womb at the moment of the second trimester and life ends when we leave on the failure of the vessel, but we simply come and go. In some sense death doesn’t exist.
_____It’s funny that we feel as though we have eternal life physically and die intellectually when it’s the other way ‘round. That feeling of invincibility may well stem from the innate knowledge that we came here and so of course we’ll just leave.
_____Where do we go? The Buddhists, I think, believe we go to another life, reincarnate as something else, a bird, a fish, another animal, a tree maybe. I like that but I don’t know.
_____The Biblicists think we’ll go to a heaven if we obey laws put down by other humans. I don’t like that, especially since almost all joy of existence is outlawed, but I don’t know. No one knows. The most we can know is that we leave.

_____Let’s look at the Darwinian theory first. It can be stated in full in a few words: nature selects from random change. That is the Darwinian theory in full. There’s nothing more one can say. When, around five years ago, I heard it for the first time, I was shocked. It is so obviously wrong that at first I thought it was a young earth creationist attempt to confuse things. Then I discovered that that was the position science really held.
_____First off, it doesn’t fit the requirements of a scientific theory. It cannot be observed, tested, or proven in any way. It is a completely philosophical position of the exact same ilk as the young earth creationist theory. Both of them are impossible to prove or disprove.
_____Then there is the situation. We have determined that there have been three major evolutionary periods in the history of the earth. The first one is called the “pre-Cambrian explosion”. Suddenly, around four hundred million years ago, there began a vast proliferation of multi-cellular life changing constantly for some fifty million years.
_____At that point the fossil record began showing repetition, no more change, until the beginning of the second period, called the “Permian die-off”, when something terrible happened around 260 million years ago, and over a period of maybe forty million years almost all of those species disappeared from the fossil record and vast numbers of new species appeared for the first time.
_____Once again the fossil record settled down, no change to speak of until 65 million years ago, at what we call “the K/T boundary crisis”, when it is thought an asteroid crashed into the earth and brought about 30 million years of drastic change in the fossil record, no more dinosaurs along with a plethora of other creatures, to be replaced by other, different but related species.
_____It is impossible to fit the Darwinian theory into that situation although science has tried heroically for decades to shoehorn the situation into the theory with every imaginable twist. They refuse to accept that one cannot twist facts to fit philosophy. One must alter philosophy to fit facts.
_____Evolution must be accepted. Those three sets of circumstantial evidence are sufficient evidence for science to accept evolution. The only question is drive. It’s obviously not random. There is nothing random about the three periods except their happening. The change was a reaction, not a random stroke of luck. There just can’t be that much luck in this world.
_____Evolution is obviously driven. The question is simply what drives it. Again, let’s look at the situation. What are the facts of the matter?
_____Around four billion years ago, single-celled life appeared on earth. This life did not evolve until around 400 million years ago. What changed?
_____Geology tells us that around that time, the earth became a much nicer place in which to live. It cooled down considerably and volcanic catastrophe diminished greatly. It became, for the first time, a place where multi-cellular creatures could enjoy a satisfactory life and, lo & behold, there was an explosion of multi-cellular life.
_____In about fifty million years life reached satisfaction within their new environment, and evolution stopped. Life was happy, and no longer needed to change. This satisfaction lasted until that terrible moment some 260 million years ago when something yet undiscovered drastically altered the environment, causing dissatisfaction for all but a few species. This dissatisfaction caused them to once again evolve, in order to return to satisfaction.
_____Another stint of evolution, this one slightly shorter, and then life, albeit in a new iteration, was satisfied. Once again, life was happy and ceased to change.
_____Then, the asteroid. A repeat of the evolutionary scenario. Environmental change, dissatisfaction, evolutionary change, again shorter, maybe thirty million years, satisfaction, and the end of evolution.
_____The drive for evolution is satisfaction. When a species becomes dissatisfied with it’s environment it will evolve until it feels satisfied within that environment.

_____I just had a flash about race relations in america. I’d really like some feedback on this.
_____We owe the brown people of america reparations for the struggles they have gone through in the last four hundred years and are still going through today. When we pay them for all their suffering we will have a fully integrated society.
_____We need to give the browner of us education as though they were very wealthy, give them a reduction in cost everywhere, and do it for three generations. It will take us two generations to get over the anger at treating them as though they were better than us, but during the third generation we will see that they are as good as us, and they will gratefully accept brotherhood.

—–I am an old earth creationist. I believe that god created the universe and biological life in god’s image some 14 billion years ago and that god designed the universe and biological life to evolve. I believe that whenever biological life finds itself in an environment in which it can exist it will leave stasis and evolve until it is satisfied with it’s existence in that environment, then re-enter stasis. When the environment changes so that life is no longer satisfied within it life will again leave stasis and once again evolve until it is satisfied with it’s existence in it’s new environment, at which time it will once again enter stasis.

_____Theism is a belief that relates to god. There are four theisms: monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, and atheism.

_____Monotheism is the belief in a singular god. This is the belief of the biblical religions, of god in the shape of a male human being, with both good and bad traits of human beings.

_____Polytheism is the belief in more than one god. It was prevalent in ancient times and today exists in the biblical religions as satan, also a male and equal to god but harboring only the bad traits of mankind, and possibly in some eastern religions also.
_____Pantheism is the belief that god is everything and everywhere. This belief is common to most eastern religions and most “new age” religions of western civilization.

_____Atheism is the belief that god is non-existent. Many atheists hold that it is not a religion and use the word “nature” in place of the word god. The united states supreme court has held that atheism is a religion.

_____I’ve had two complaints about my use of logic.  See the first comment for one, but the other was directly verbal, and, in a sense, was right.

_____Logic requires three points: IF and IF, THEN.  I realized that I had concatenated the two IFs’.

_____Logically speaking, IF our scientists tested indigenous peoples consistently for their understanding of the existence of god, (and the scientists always inadvertently did), and IF these indigenous peoples consistently demonstrated an understanding of the existence of god, (and the indigenous peoples always did), THEN we must understand the existence of god.  It seems to me pretty cut and dried.

_____This does, however, not mean that any particular understanding of god is right.  It is and will always be impossible for humanity to understand what god is.  As scientists, we only need to understand that god exists, and we can leave what god consists of to the religionists.