Probably, this question will never be answered, but being only 23, I have barely began to experience the reality these authors seek to understand. I can live this reality and hopefully discover something worth telling others. Anyway, besides reading, Yoga and meditation have been my most direct experiences with the spiritual nature of the mind and universe. And just a few days ago I watched a video with Huston Smith. He makes me want to travel the world and experience other cultures. I have started reading his autobiography, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine. Smith appears to be a fascinating individual and I think that I have much to learn from him. Perhaps you have read Smith? If not, I highly suggest that you do.

In “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot” Gould explains the influence on Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection by several import philosophical and economic thinkers in England. This people included Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who wrote about the importance of the individual and competition for survival and success. Darwin saw these forces of competition directly in action while visiting the tropical parts of the world. In such places, the environment is extremely hospitable to life and natural selection occurs largely through competition. Even though Darwin explained that natural selection also involves cooperation between organisms, he never experienced the importance of cooperation in environments such as Siberia — where natural selection largely occurs through environmental survival ability.

Petr Kropotkin witnessed first hand the reliance on cooperation, or “mutual aid” as he calls it, in the frozen Siberian environment. Natural selection, he says, forces the organism to cooperate with his neighbors and relatives in order to survive such harsh environments. Organisms which work together to survive will be much more successful than organisms which compete with each other for individual success. In many ways, I feel that the entire ecosystem of Earth is such a cooperative network of organisms; working together to live on a rocky marble in the vacuum of space.

Gould provides a nicely written account of these ideas and displays how science can forget and ignore certain aspects of nature which do not agree or support widely held political or social beliefs. People in western societies tend to be so concerned with dog-eat-dog and every-man-for-him-self ideologies that they forget that some institutions exist as cooperatives, such as various churches, corporations, and higher education. Not to mention the fact that our body consists of all types of symbiotic organisms. For potential ideas on the subject of institutional cooperation see Greenleaf’s book, Servant Leadership.

Gould’s essay, “Justice Scalia’s Misunderstanding” made me realize that I sometimes forget what science really tries to do. Basically, Justice Scalia mistakenly views science as a sort of ideology; which attempts, as its goal, to explain the source of the universe and life. Instead, as Gould points out through the historical example of James Hutton, science provides hypotheses which attempt to explain empirical observations. It is quite obvious that no direct observations exists from the time of the automaton’s origin on Earth or the even the universe’s origin. All we can do is make inferences about the past based on indirect evidence. Any speculation on “who” or “what” created the universe is outside the realm of science — rather it is simply speculation. With regards to the question of how did life arise on Earth, science can provide various hypotheses of all kinds. But they are opinions and hypotheses until direct evidence can be found in favor of one or disproving another.

Justice Scalia believed religious opinions were equivalent with scientific hypotheses; an incorrect belief. I jot my ideas down when I have time and many of them deal with speculations on who, how and why the universe exists. Sadly, these are not scientific questions of any kind – rather, they are speculations which are most likely far from the truth. I do believe that these speculations can be shaped and formed into scientific hypotheses. For example, my post about future organisms on Earth incorporating human made materials such as plastic in their bodies can be rephrased from a speculation to a scientific hypothesis. All that is needed is a question to answer. Perhaps this question is: do there exist organisms which have changed their genetic structure in such a way to make use of a new material present in their environment? The is answer to that is obviously YES! All oxygen breathing organisms did so millions of years ago. Then I must ask, what does it take to make this change and how can we do it today?

Quote from Edgar Mitchell:

“I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge — it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy — a transformational experience.

(…)

The experience in space was so powerful that when I got back to Earth I started digging into various literatures to try to understand what had happened. I found nothing in science literature but eventually discovered it in the Sanskrit of ancient India. The descriptions of samadhi, Savikalpa samadhi, were exactly what I felt: it is described as seeing things in their separateness, but experiencing them viscerally as a unity, as oneness, accompanied by ecstasy.”

The previous quote from Mitchell reminded me that what we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell originated in a stellar explosion more than five billion years ago. However, I think we can look back even further; when all matter in the universe was in a single sea of energy. We are all of such form and substance. Can we look back even further?

But tracing back our origins to the first stars suffers as a mental process. The neurons in our brain store such information and understanding as electrical impulses. Neurons acting in complex patterns inside our brain produce such visions of the past. Our emotions stimulate their acceptance and development.  In effect, these thought processes only show our continual ignorance. Me, writing about this very idea seems to be in direct opposition to what I am trying to say. There seems to be an infinitude of ignorance and a strange loop of never ending information. For it seems simple to imagine the universe as only a manifestation of these information patterns. Perhaps the only solution is to accept ignorance and live. Or maybe there is a single source of information from which all information flows which we will eventually discover. Or, as I suggest, the only answer is to read Godel, Escher, Bach over and over until your eyes are sore. But, throughout history, spiritual enlightenment has been the provider of such answers. Living through a religion in ignorance provides the simple answer to the universe. A religion allows us to stop asking questions; to stop searching for the answer. This raises the question: Can science be considered a religion?

I have included some links to several videos related to Joseph Campbell:

Light on Yoga by B. K. S. Iyengar.

Every asana contains several pictures and a detailed description. Some of the asanas are literally impossible!

Check out the trailer here. Purchase the Blu-Ray here.