What does it mean to be human?
Saturday 08 Dec 2012
What does it mean to be to be a human being?
In many ways there is arrogance in one person trying to answer this question because it is tied up with fundamental questions like --- "why and how are we born?" We are all connected and dependent on each other and there is no doubt that our individual self-consciousness is dependent as well, so we all have a stake in a question like this. Religious orders and philosophers over the millennia have tried to make the running in providing the answers. A spectrum of experience both forceful and passive has been employed. The forceful end, usually telling us to leave such questions to God alone (and the church elders) while at the other end we have influential atheists telling us to believe that there is nothing, enjoy this life but that is it! There has always been a group in the middle that have been more appealing to me. This group ranges from agnostics to those inviting us to develop and train our minds for internal investigation and scientists looking to investigate and find truth outside in the natural physical world. This middle area seems democratic and sensible to me.
Science over the years has sat relatively comfortably with this middle group but recently a small subset of very clever but hardnosed scientists and Medico's have invaded this middle area. They use hubris to confuse us while asking us to have faith that they can and will eventually find all the answers. They believe very much in the natural physical world and they believe "if you cannot measure it, it does not exist". This statement is applied especially to what they see as emotional thinking. In many ways they are stealthily becoming the forceful end of the spectrum and are gradually amassing a great deal of power to control to try and stamp this "woolly thinking" out. Of course this will never happen, because at some level humanity knows that the human condition is made up of head and heart, intellect and emotion. We know that just one side of this duality will never be enough to understand the big questions. Consciousness will never be understood fully without an equality of collaboration.
At the recent "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" held in Sydney a young man, Jason Silva was invited to show his talents as a Science film maker and science communicator to the general public.
When it all boils down what Jason Silva is forecasting is type of Psychic awareness age. An age of going forwards or backwards in time to live or to see what has happened or is happening. I am not sure what the previously mentioned hardnosed doctors and scientists, who are currently trying to ban new age "quackery" will make of Jason's vision, but it may be easier for them to swallow if it is being driven by science and technology. Science does have a history of appropriating earlier wisdom and redefining it along with the original emotion involved and claiming it as its own. For example aspirin was appropriated from ancient knowledge of willow tree bark for pain relief. Mindfulness is ancient Buddhist wisdom now being used by Psychiatrists. To be fair though, this ancient wisdom is generally improved upon and spread as the language around it gets better, however it would be nice if there could be more respect and acknowledgment of the interconnections of discoveries from the past to the present. It is a fact that there are some things we cannot measure today that will be measured routinely in the future when it is understood more scientifically. The big one for Science will be the discovery of conscious energy. We know it is there but as yet it is not measurable. When consciousness becomes easier to define in our language we will presumably define a measure for it, consciousness and sub conscious manipulation will then be even more apparent than it is today, then perhaps, some of Jason's dreams may be achievable.
Religions like Buddhism talk readily about moving around in the space-time continuum. Buddhist cosmology has always talked about mental and physical realms. Some of the heavenly realms spoken about by the Buddha can last for millennia filled with the most exquisite pleasure. The hell realms can also be long lasting, and are sometimes inhabited by depictions of hungry ghosts. These are unrealised beings with small mouths never big enough to be able to fill their large distended bellies, never able to be satisfied or content. The perception of these time spans is of course dependent on how they are seen by the viewer, so time is always a relative measurement. Buddha knew of this wisdom well before Einstein.
In telling you this story about mental realms, I am making the point that they are as conditioned as we know the physical realm is. Jason and the Science he is trying to communicate may well be able to get to a point where they can take charge of consciousness and forget about skin bags, but it is all still conditioned. Wisdom through the ages has always known this. This is the reason why good spiritual council advises developing moral a code that supports a balanced view that will allow us to see past and let go of our conditioning. The Buddha suggested that the human condition, skin bag and all, is one of the few conditions capable of understanding what needs to be done to be free of the continuous round of conditions. The evolution of human beings has developed into one of those unique places that allows this reflective ability. When free from the ignorance of an instinctual cycle there is just enough good and bad, enough pain and enough joy to be able to see the ignorance that binds us to the unsatisfactory nature of attaching to things. A hungry ghost can wander for lifetimes and lifetimes before realising he can let go, in the same way a heavenly being with karma such that they are granted there every desire can live lifetimes of delusion before noticing the unsatisfactory nature of its existence. By comparison a balanced human mind has the inbuilt ability to practice and see, and to realise deeply.
So this leaves us with the question we started with. What does it mean to be a human being? It means the possibility of being free, the possibility of going beyond the conditioned realm. The possibility of knowing the unconditioned and the peace that goes with it.
