We all know that our cognitive thought processes seem to be disconnected in some way from the actual matter that makes up our physical being and the world around us. We all know that in our heads we still think and feel like the child we used be but feel compelled to become the adults we are supposed to be. Life seems to pass us by too quickly and we reach the point where, even though our minds are still willing, our bodies become incapable of facilitating their instruction. Couple that to the now, increasingly, obvious fact that our world of physical matter is definitely finite and our, increasingly, complex understanding of how this physical world works and how we can manipulate it to our advantage could be accelerating this process, we find ourselves in a bit of a predicament. The imminence of our potential apocalypse seems to be getting ever more real and seems to be becoming unavoidable as the threats we have to face are growing exponentially and have reached a point where they might be too far gone and too large for us to solve.
This could be a terrifying and very real worry or it could be the necessary end to this very simple physical world our minds have created to sustain us while we evolve enough to move to the next stage. The human spirit or soul – whatever we want to call it – is obviously hindered significantly by this short living, decomposing physical form that we all dwell within. A human’s lifetime is very brief and the relative time scale of our mental evolution to this point has also been, relatively, short and it does, now, seem that the constraints of our physical environment are going to kill us. With so much potential still to be realised, maybe this could mean that we are on the cusp of moving to someting much greater. Transcendence. Existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level.
No! That’s daft surely!
Think about it. Look at what quantum mechanics is starting to teach us. What we see, hear, feel and smell is a very simplified and subjective comprehension of the energies and forces that are zipping around us all the time. For centuries religion has tried to teach us that our ‘spirit’ goes on to a better place after it’s primitive meat vehicle breaks down. Now it seems like our whole physical environment is starting to break down.
French philosopher Rene Descartes theorised,
“…firmly implanted in my mind is the long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am. How do I know that he has not brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, while at the same time ensuring that all these things appear to me to exist just as they do now?”.
This led him to conclude that the only thing he did not doubt was his own existence because the reality of doubting and thinking about the reality of his perceptions was confirmation of this.
“I think therefore I am”
The Matrix films were based on this philosophical question.
You only have to look around you to see the crude limitations of our intellect being encased in a shell of biodegradable physical matter. We have to feed it for a start and some people struggle with that! We have to dress ourselves, entertain ourselves, transport ourselves around. We spend most of our time being either employees or consumers. In this current physical environment it is nearly impossible for us to truly experience existence in it’s purest form because of the constraints that stand in our way and the constant servicing that our physicality requires not to mention the incredibly limited time restrictions imposed on us because of the speedy molecular decomposition of ourselves and all of the things around us. The importance we weigh on our physicality is also hindering our mental evolution as we waste processing power on things like our physical appearance, our possessions, our pets, our gardens and, of course, our jobs. It seems entirly possible that our perception of the world around us could be created by our brain and our vanity and materialism is a metaphorical way of us trying to enhance and better ourselves in the only way we know how to in our current situation.
Could it be that the imminent end of our subjective and simple physical perception of what surrounds us is not something to be feared but rather the logical next step in the evolution of our complex, brilliant, inventive and inquisitive minds. Going to work to pay for things that we require to enable us to go to work seems like a massive waste of the potential that this miraculous consciousness, that we all have, is capable of.
It’s time for Neo to unplug.