Companions on the Journey
An Essay in Four Parts
6. Planting and Tending Life
My next point is to look at life itself as it’s planted and tended. So, where does life come from in this little Universe? We believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years of age. But we know that our planet is only 4.6 billion years old. And so, there are parts of this Universe which are literally three times older than Planet Earth. Do we want to believe that for two–thirds of the existence of this Universe nothing happened — and that life then began to breed only on Planet Earth?
For me, that’s ridiculous. I’m convinced that life started elsewhere long before it started on Planet Earth. And it became very complex long before Planet Earth was seeded. Later, life was planted on Planet Earth. By whom? And how? When Sir Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, was asked about this he said, “I believe it is through directed panspermia, that spores came from outer space and settled on Planet Earth and began to grow”. And when somebody asked him, “How could spores exist in inter–galactic space?” he said,” because they were sent here in specially designed capsules”. Now, I think, it’s a bit more hands–on than that.
I don’t think that some extraordinary extra-terrestrial civilization bombarded Planet Earth with capsules filled with spores of life, but rather that the ET’s themselves visited here. I believe that many different extra–terrestrial societies, much more advanced than we are, visited the Planet and treated it as a garden. And they planted the garden. And they’ve come back regularly. And they’ve weeded the garden. And they’ve fertilized the garden. And sometimes they’ve grafted new stuff onto it, and they genetically modified it. And then, finally, as we’ve read in the Scriptures, they created us in their own image and likeness. So, what does that mean? That they finally bred a life form that somehow resembled those who planted the garden.
Now, are these gardeners the ineffable Source? No, we are simply talking about some very advanced civilizations that literally planted, tended, fertilized, and genetically modified this garden and continued to look after it. We read in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the book of Genesis, that some kinds of “Sky Gods” made us in their own image and likeness.
And moreover, they got infatuated with the human beings and began to breed with them. There’s a very strange statement in the Book of Genesis, in Chapter 6, where it says, “The Sons of God found the daughters of men to be really attractive and they took them to wife as many as they wanted, and they created a great race called the Nephilim”. They give this race two names in the Hebrew Scriptures. Sometimes it’s called the “Nephilim”. Sometimes it’s called the “Anakim”. And according to the Scriptures, which we believe are the word of God, the sons of God— whoever they are— found the daughters of men — whoever they are — to be very attractive. And they took them to wife. And they bred with them and created a race called the “Nephilim” or “Anakim”.
And so, in the Scriptures there’s a lot of evidence that life on Planet Earth didn’t just happen. It was seeded. It was planted. And it was tended. And my belief system is that there were many such civilizations that visited. Now, the tendency is that when a very technologically sophisticated civilization meets a very primitive group, the primitive group always presumes that the others are Gods.
During World War II, when the Japanese and American air forces landed in the Polynesian Islands and brought supplies, the local population thought that they were Gods, and started imitating their rituals. They created runways and built model aircraft hoping that these “Gods” would come back with more cargo. That’s how they became known as “cargo cults”.
And so, I am convinced personally, that religion — as distinct from spirituality — is literally the false worship of advanced civilizations by primitive people. And we are the primitive people who continue to believe that some kinds of “Sky Gods”, who are just advanced civilizations, are in fact, Source. And we defer to this false Source.
7. The Grand Sweep of Evolution
Darwin would have us believe that evolution is predicated on three principles. First, spontaneous mutation — just any kind of mutation, most of which are useless — and that occasionally there’s a good one. And then, second, there’s a process of natural selection based on “Survival–of–the–Fittest”. It’s a dog–eat–dog world out there. And, then third, this process, very gradually and smoothly, morphs into more and more complex life forms. That’s the Darwin viewpoint. And I don’t agree with it at all.
I believe that there is an intelligence guiding this entire process. So, if you want to call it “Intelligent Design” that’s fine with me. Rather, I mean that God’s wisdom is built into evolution and that, therefore, there’s intelligence to it — that things are not just mutating randomly. There’s meaning to the direction they’re planning to take as they achieve more and more complexity. And, rather than claim that it’s “Survival–of–the–Fittest” and dog-eat-dog, I see much more evidence for cooperation and symbiosis in nature — all life forms helping each other to survive in their own particular niches.
And I do not see evidence for evolutionary gradualism. In fact, there’s no evidence whatsoever in the fossil record that evolution happens as gradual sophistication. Rather there’s evidence for what Stephen J. Gould called “Punctuated Equilibria” that every so often, there’s a Quantum Leap — and a whole new feature comes into being on Planet Earth.
So, it’s not this gradual ascent but instead there are punctuated jumps. If we were brought up in the Judeo–Christian model, we probably subscribe to the following tenets. That there’s only one Universe. That there’s only life on one planet in the Universe. And although we know that there are at least 150 billion galaxies containing about 150 billion solar systems in each galaxy, we claim that life is only on one of these planets. Then we claim that on this planet, there’s only one species that has a soul – the human species. And we claim that there’s either a chosen race or a particular religion that God particularly loves.
We think that we only get one shot at life. And then, at the end of this lifetime there’s a judgment and that we’re concerned that with the thumbs down we go to Hell. And with the thumbs up and we go to Heaven. So, that’s pretty much what most of us have been brought up to believe. That’s one model of cosmology. I see it very differently.
8. The Soul
Are we the only creatures that have souls? I don’t believe that for a moment. I think that every sentient being has a soul. And, I believe, there are different levels of soul. There are souls that inhabit human spacesuits, and they’re fairly sophisticated, but they are not anything as sophisticated as the souls that decide to inhabit and to vitalize, let’s say, a planet, or a galaxy.
So, I think, for instance, that Planet Earth itself has a soul. And that this soul volunteered more than 3.7 billion years ago, to inhabit the third rock from the Sun in our solar system and to breed life until it threw up a lifeform capable of experiencing and recognizing its own divinity and therefore the divinity of all else that is. So, everything — from spiders to elephants to daffodils — has a soul and they’re all precious to God. A banana slug is no less important to God than an Avatar, as far as I’m concerned. And there is not just one lifetime to accomplish this journey of evolution. We get as many lifetimes as we need.
9. Avatars and Buddhas and Their Relationship to Source
An Avatar is the transcendence of God reaching down into the immanence of God. It is the ineffableness of God revealing itself in the human story. And so, it’s like a downward–pointing triangle. And a Buddha means human excellence reaching toward the Divine. It is our humanness trying to align totally with our divine nature and finding its way back to the transcendence of God. It’s like an upward–pointing triangle. And, if you look at these two triangles intersecting, you get a Star of David. This is a beautiful symbol of what happens between the Avatar and the Buddha.
And so, the Avatar is where transcendence expresses itself in the human arena; and the Buddha is where an excellent human being — virtuous and aligned fully — reaches back towards innate divinity.
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