Evolution, devolution, and Davos Man. There's lots to think about in this week’s edition of “Beyond Ironic”.
Many decades ago, in my university anthropology class, I learned about our pre-human evolutionary ancestors—at least that’s what anthropologists suppose. There was Australopithecus and Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus and Cro-Magnon Man and Piltdown Man and…well, Piltdown Man turned out to be a scientific fraud. My, my, haven’t we become almost acclimatized to scientific frauds these days. But I digress.
Today, we are faced with the evolutionary miracle known as “Davos Man.” It’s certainly a novel evolutionary development. This creature has managed the collective amnesia of untold thousands of years of human evolution, to the point where Davos Man considers himself the master of the universe, like something out of a Marvel comic book. Ever since (what we think of as) the dawn of civilization, homo sapiens sapiens (Yeah, that’s what they call us. It's not a typo.) have understood that our existence is a mysterious blend of body, mind, and soul.
Surprising as it may sound, the devolutionary detour began about three centuries ago during what we perhaps paradoxically call the “Enlightenment.” Up until then, all human knowledge was counted together as, well, knowledge. Spiritual knowledge and scientific knowledge and engineering knowledge and historical knowledge and military knowledge, and you-name-it knowledge was all part of being an Educated Man—another almost extinct evolutionary branch on the human tree.
But during the Enlightenment, those who sought scientific knowledge decided to restrict their studies to only those things that could be perceived by the five physical senses. Perhaps they were also motivated by self-preservation. Being terrorized by the persecution of Galileo for peering through a telescope and deducing that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system, other scientists may have sought to erect a defense against pyromaniac ecclesiastical enthusiasm. But whatever their motivation, scientists separated “science” from all spiritual and mental phenomena and restricted their field of study to only physical phenomena. Thereafter, finding that evolutionary form of man that melded all fields of knowledge in one mind and soul become so rare as to deserve its own name, derived from the last era in which such men existed—Renaissance Man.
The idea had some merit and has led to a great explosion of scientific understanding and amazing technological developments. However, it also had a dark side. It led to the quasi-religion of Scientism, really an ideology. The Enlightenment scientists and philosophers were mostly men of faith—they knew God existed, they just didn’t use science to understand Him. Yet these were followed in the next century by an evolutionary branch of men that declared “Only physical things exist.” This bizarre idea had formerly only attached itself to Uneducated Man, since all truly educated men knew at least something of the spiritual mysteries and the existence of many realms of non-physical reality.
Philosophers came up with what we call “Philosophical Materialism,” which put the academic stamp of approval on the idea that only material things exist. Of course, they had to side-step what we call the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” This is the question, “What is consciousness and where does it come from?" This is a very hard problem indeed if you believe that only material things exist, since consciousness is so clearly non-material. So, they assumed that consciousness and the mind are chemical products of the brain, and someday we will understand the brain well enough to attach a specific chemical to the feelings of love and hate and anger; and the thoughts of peace and conquest and even the Pythagorean Theorem and the General Theory of Relativity and… You get the idea.
Philosophical Materialism, like many other sciences and social sciences, envied Isaac Newton’s explanations of the universe in terms of machines and forces and matter and gravity. Ever since Newton’s great elevation of physics, everyone has tried to turn their own little branch of “science” into physics. It is so beautifully neat and tidy and quantitative to understand the universe and reality in terms of a machine. It led to a mechanistic understanding of everything. All reality is just a machine, and we (humans) can tinker with the machine and make it suit our own needs and desires. There is no God, but we can become gods through our “tinkering.” This evolutionary branch of thought has brought us, today, to the advent of Transhuman Man.
But the hard question of consciousness is not so easily avoided. The assumption of philosophers and scientists remains, to this day, no more than an assumption. It is completely without evidence—and it is evidence that “science” so prides itself on adhering to. As the great neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, said, “Medical science has absolutely no idea how the brain gives rise to consciousness.” In fact, the brain does not give rise to consciousness.
When we look at the evidence of consciousness—scientific, personal, anecdotal, or any other type of evidence—it is clear that consciousness is not produced in the brain, is not confined to the brain, and is not even confined to the human body. There are physicists today who say, the more they look at the universe, the more its underlying principle seems to be, not matter, but consciousness. Consciousness seems to pervade all things, animate all things, and come before all things.
This is exactly what spiritual teachers have said since the dawn of time. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” To simply sweep all non-material reality out of your worldview is illogical, unscientific, and completely ignores a vast body of material evidence. It’s really beyond ironic how unscientific this scientism can be! However little we may understand it, there is obviously a large non-material reality. We would do well to investigate it rather than to ignore it.
Perhaps you think I have forgotten about Davos Man. Let me come back to that. You see, Davos Man is completely captured by this philosophical materialism and a mechanistic view of reality, of humans, and of the whole universe. Reality is simply not so. What they believe is a fantasy. Therefore, what they think and do are not appropriate responses to reality.
The truth is (even though it cannot be scientifically proven) that we are fundamentally spiritual beings inhabiting a human body. And regardless of what you think about your body, it is a perfect vehicle for your soul. Our best scientists know little about how our body really works because they ignore its connection to, and the operation of, our mind and our soul. Thus, they cannot possibly make beneficial improvements to the body through transhumanist machines. They can only make things worse.
The great modern mystic, Gigi Young, explains that there are two ways to degrade ourselves as humans. One is to degrade our consciousness and soul by continually allowing fear to dominate our consciousness. The other is to degrade our bodies through transhumanism. Both lead to devolution, not evolution, as Klaus Schwab and the WEF crowd believe. Transhumanism leads to a “human” body that is not refined enough to be able to host a human soul. Transhumanism separates your soul from your body. Only lesser developed entities will be able to inhabit these devolved transhuman bodies. You will lose your free will, your individuality, and your soul. Some would call this “hell.”
This is the devolutionary path that Davos Man is on. Each of you can choose your own path, but the Davos Devolution is not for me.
God Bless You!
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