Where Next?

From a simple thought in my head, I can will a 180-pound mass six inches into the air. That 180-pound mass is me, of course, my vertical leap is terrible, and these days I tend to come down with a resounding thud, but I trust I've made my point.

Forget about all the technological advances you are hearing about. The next great scientific breakthrough, I am convinced, will take place in the realm of the conscious. This can happen in a number of ways:

We can develop computers with conscious capabilities.

We can use computers to enhance our conscious capabilities (eg microprocessor implants in the brain).

We can upload our entire conscious minds into computer networks.

As we are better able to understand the operation of thought and conscious, we may well be able to identify it as the missing piece of the equation - the one Einstein was working on at the time of his death, the grand unified theory. No one yet has been able to reconcile the workings of the sub-atomic world with the laws that govern the expanding universe, but this may be due to the fact that we have not yet factored our own thoughts into the greater scheme of things.

Additionally, conscious may be the link between science and religion, between the material and the spiritual, and it may also figure very large in the next stage of our evolution.

We're nowhere close to knowing any of this yet, but that shouldn't stop us from searching or from speculating:

A billion years ago we crawled out of the primordial soup and later still the ocean. We shed our gills and grew limbs and climbed up into the trees. Then, having developed conscious capability, we no longer required the need to evolve in a physical way. We came down from the trees and spread out across the earth as human beings. If we wanted to keep warm we built fires instead of growing our own fur. If we wanted to eat meat we fashioned cutting implements rather than developing sharp teeth. We were still evolving, but in a way entirely unlike the other animals.

We can never go back to the soothing comfort of the warm soup from which we came, though our behavior as a species at times suggests this may be our fate. No, eventually our next step after climbing out of the soup and the ocean and the trees will be in climbing out of our own bodies. This may take place a million years from now by the graduated process of evolution or it may happen in a spectacular flash in the near future by a process that the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called "punctuational change".

Boom! Change! Just like that. Perhaps it would occur as a logical consequence of having created our own heaven on earth, after we have accomplished all we can, here on this earth.

Perhaps it will develop out of necessity as a survival tool in the next man-made worldwide cataclysm. As millions and hundreds of millions face extinction across the planet, some of us out of sheer desperation may actually develop the capacity to climb out of our doomed bodies and escape.

I, of course, prefer the former scenario. Having successfully climbed out of the trees, I dare to imagine a time and place in which our conscious has evolved to a point where a heaven on earth is truly attainable. Increasingly, as we perfect our human nature, we learn to become attuned to our spiritual nature. And, then, in our own good time, when we are ready, we will shed our bodies like a snake sheds its skin and enter into the next phase of our incredible journey, perhaps to find our way into the loving arms of God, perhaps to venture out on our own into a truly limitless universe.

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Discussions

Pat (Jan 15, 2002): In "Myths To Live By" (chapter 10, Schizophrenia-The Inward Journey) author Joseph Campbell quotes from a paper written by Dr. Julian Silverman on "Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia" which appeared in 1967 in the American Anthropologist.
"In primitive cultures in which such a unique life crisis resolution is tolerated, the abnormal experience is typically beneficial to the individual, cognitively and effectively; he is regarded as one with expanded consciousness." Further, "in a culture that does not provide referential guides for comprehending this kind of crisis experience, the individual (schizophrenic) typically undergoes an intensification of his suffering over and above his original anxieties."

Of course, this is quoted out of context and a full reading of the chapter gives a clearer understanding.

A thought - perhaps we are unable to understand madness because we refuse to believe there are other worlds with-in this world and that certain people, either consciously or unconsciously, step into realities that neither they nor we understand.

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John McManamy

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The missing piece of the equation eluded him.