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So if you spent all your time in the present you couldn’t accomplish that “mastery of the world.”
Well, I’m not sure I would call what we have achieved "mastery." But we are able to build knowledge, to see further because we can “stand on the shoulders of giants,” thank you Sir Isaac Newton for that wonderful phrase.
So if you live only in the present you can’t do those things.
Yes, and changing our world has its blessings, and also its curses. On one hand, so many of us have the leisure time to take up transcendent paths. On the other hand, we have been lax with our technology, poisoning our water and air. We also often waste our leisure time on television or other mindless activities. We fail to use that time for mindful activities.
So how does living in the present help?
Most of us do not just live in the present. Our ability to do the things we can do, is based on our ability to picture the future, to plan a direction in which to work. Remembering the past is important so we can learn from our mistakes. But our creativity comes from right now, the present. If you spend time being creative, whether writing, drawing, or making music, you are right here, right in the present. The world just disappears. When a scientist is being creative, the same thing happens, everything else disappears. All of our creativity comes from some level of recognizing Source. Why do two scientists at opposite sides of the world have a breakthrough at the same time? Maybe it was the right time for this to happen. Oh, you could say that the scientific background was developed to a certain point, just at that time, so that those scientists could make that next leap. But, I’m not sure that is the whole explanation. Source needed that information to be available to us.
Why did Source need that information to be available?
It is part of how we appreciate Source. The physical and spiritual worlds slowly reveals hidden knowledge. That is why we will never solve all problems. We can never answer all questions. Even if we could get halfway to knowing everything each time we leap. But as we leap, if we only get halfway over and over again, we will never get there. We can never quite reach utopia. If we did reach utopia--it would look like Source. Then Source could not appreciate itself. Also, part of our evolution is concerned with figuring out this physical world, the exterior. We try to elucidate the workings of our body to improve our treatment of the sick. We improve our knowledge of chemistry, so we can make better materials to build our world and perhaps make our lives easier. With increased knowledge of our physical world, maybe we could feed and provide shelter and energy for more people. Then more people could have more time for fun. And for some of us, more time to engage in a path toward spiritual evolution.
So thinking in the past, present, and future are all important?
Yes, but the past and future are very different from the present. When you are in the present you are in direct contact with Source. You are no different than Source. That is why the whole world seems to disappear. Then you say something like “I forgot where I was and then I woke up.” But, the integration of being in the present, and the creativity it allows, with our abilities to see the future possibilities and past mistakes, that integration allows us to manipulate our world.
So, enlightened beings just live in the present.
They could if they so chose. They have the ability to come back down to our level, and use the knowledge of the past and the future. They can do this since they transcend our usual level of functioning, they are existing at a higher level.
What are these different levels and how do you know what is higher?
Although the truth is that everything is Source, we humans partition our world in order to understand it. Reductionism has its merits. You can take things apart to see how they work. However, to be useful you must put stuff back together. And we do. We found out how to grow food more efficiently. We can harness energy to improve our communication with telephones and computers. We found that improvements in sanitation can extend life. Even modern medicine may have some contributions to our living better lives. Perhaps we will extend our knowledge of transcendent paths, such as meditation and movement, to integrate with traditional medicine to create new ways of treating disease.
You really get off track easily.
I just have too much fun with this. Anyway, Ken Wilber describes the partitioning we do to understand our world in terms coined by Arthur Koestler, the holon. Holons are whole/parts. Everything is a part of something else, but also a whole within itself. The easiest example to understand is atoms, molecules, and cells. Two atoms of hydrogen combine with one atom of oxygen to become a whole, single, molecule of water. Water is a critical molecule within a cell, but only one part. Other parts of the cell, other molecules, are sugars, proteins, and fats. The cell is another whole. Cells are parts of our bodies, another whole, and so on. The atoms are also made of subatomic particles, so atoms are another whole. So that’s the physical relationships of holons. This is also the explanation for why we constantly evolve to more complexity. What Wilber calls Spirit-in-action, the drive of parts coming together to form holons of greater complexity. A great example is the evolution of single-celled creatures to form multi-celled creatures. This is the exact opposite of entropy, which is the tendency for things to fall apart.
(footnote: A brief history of everything)
And there are spiritual holons?
Wilber also does a nice job of laying out the concept of the interior, or psychological / spiritual parts of self, where you must ask someone what they think. You can’t put electrodes on a person’s head and find out what they are thinking, at least not yet. The exterior, the physical body, you can dissect or use sophisticated molecular biology to see how individual molecules work together and see how the body or brain performs certain steps. But, that reductionist view can’t tell you if a person is a republican or a democrat. It can’t tell you where consciousness is located.
How do interior holons work?
We usually think about our world as divided into the psychological and the physical worlds. Again the brain / body split. And when you integrate the brain / body you form a holon, the centaur, an integrated self. To get to holons past this point you transcend the self. These stages are not usually described by western psychology. Yet, these stages are well described by the eastern philosophers. These higher stages always include and contain the lower stages. For example, an enlightened being can access all the “lower” functions and function quite well in the world. They can easily, also, hide their enlightenment.
So another part of evolution is spiritual?
Personal spiritual evolution is important. But, we must also evolve our interactions with each other. We must evolve our social exteriors. We seem to be much further ahead with our understanding of the physical world, than our ability to interact with each other. We have the capability of poisoning our world with enough radioactivity to kill all humans. We may have just enough social evolution to avoid that step. But that is not entirely clear. We haven’t reached the point where we would avoid even building such weapons. That is a sign that we are too far ahead on the physical side.
And you humans seem to make a mess wherever you go.
Yes. That observation, of our failure to clean up our environmental messes, is another indicator of our deficiencies in social evolution. Some of this stems from the creation of a new entity. The corporation. This entity can act as a collective person. One problem is that this entity, the corporation, does not necessarily have a conscience. Corporations exist to make money. Perhaps one of the next steps in our social evolution will be to give a conscience to corporations. Wouldn’t that be nice?
So how would an evolved corporation function?
A fully integrated, or evolved-enlightened, human cannot cause harm. I think it would follow that a fully integrated, or evolved-enlightened, corporation also could not cause harm. How can this be done? Some corporations already try to achieve goals of causing no harm, and even contribute to the evolution of our world. For the rest of the corporations, I assume changes must be made through the same way that corporations were born, through legislation. As an evolved society, we must evolve our laws. I’m not so sure that an evolved corporation would make any less money.
What if we don’t evolve our social exteriors adequately?
Then perhaps we will just kill ourselves off. Source does not care. Source will wait with infinite patience for the cockroaches to evolve and appreciate Source. And that’s not to mention what may be appreciating Source on other planets, or as other forms of life perhaps we cannot even imagine.
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