Spiritual people are emphatic about their beliefs. They say that they are based on their strongest experiences. Those of a scientific persuasion say that these experiences are delusional. If you can't see something, it doesn't exist. Yet, is this a maxim that holds true for all scientists?
Chemists and biologists deal with the material, visible world. They look at non-organic matter and organic matter as basically two different types of essentially the same thing, "stuff" made up of atoms and molecules. Physicists, however, are different. Physicists study forces. Forces cannot be seen. Forces are inferred by their effects on the material world, from their effects on tiny bits of it, like sub-atomic particles, to huge masses of it, like galaxies and nebulae. Keep in mind that even though, thanks to modern instrumentation, much of that microscopic world and that mega world can now be seen, forces still cannot. They still can only be inferred. And the same is true with psychology. You cannot see a person's intelligence, ambition, motivation or feelings. These can only be inferred from the effects of these feelings and invisible traits on a person's body, speech and actions. No one questions the existence of forces, intelligence, feelings, motivations or other 'states of mind', but no one sees them either.
The problem comes when people whose entire training has been in organic chemistry and biology start making statements about life. Life, as anyone who has survived a lifetime of materialistic brainwashing knows, is essentially spiritual, not material. Of course we have a body, but it is not our body, but our experience of our body that is integral to our lives. Consciousness, love, desire, passion, curiosity, jealousy, ambition, etc., are the stuff of life and all of these are experienced but not seen directly, either in ourselves or in others. Even one's self is nowhere to be found in all the most sophisticated research. And all the slicing and dicing, the pushing and pulling, the dissecting and examining of the human body, with whatever instruments you like, will never reveal the self. This is simply because the self is not part of the physical universe. The self is not a content, but the context of one's experience. It is the non-physical bowl within which you experience everything that happens to you.
Let's get back to the essential problem of biologists and chemists telling us what life is about. In the giddy excitement following the discovery of some of the basic structure of the DNA molecule, Watson and Crick and many in their wake, such as Richard Dawkins, claimed that they had found the essence of life, that life was now understood. They had found God and God was the DNA molecule. Had they? What does DNA do, actually? According to these same scientists, the DNA molecule is a complex structure of sugars, acids and proteins, and contains genes that are nucleic acids, or nucleotides, and that they are arranged in long, long chains and these arrangements are coded for the manufacture of enzymes and proteins and that is it! End of story! DNA is nucleic acid. DNA guides the manufacture of enzymes and proteins and that is life, the whole story. In fact, they go on to say that the purpose of all of evolution and the entire development of the species in all its breathtaking complexity is purely and simply to create more efficient machines for the replication of the DNA molecule. This has to be the ultimate expression of materialism!
And people believe this! People who thought they were living beings with a soul, full of radiant consciousness, now believe that they are some sort of protein manufacturing center which oddly happens to talk, and which accidentally picked up, somewhere along the evolutionary line, the peculiar trait of 'consciousness', because it enhanced their ability to survive, which, ultimately, allows them to replicate more DNA. Wow!
Folks, WAKE UP! An acid is an acid is an acid is an acid. A protein is a protein is a protein is a protein. A life is a life is a life is a life. Look, if I could somehow learn the transcendently exquisite sequence of proteins that were secreted from the one hundred trillion cells in a human body and I built one hundred trillion microscopic spigots and poured all the exact right amounts of enzymes and proteins in exactly the right timing sequences, into a pot, do you think I would wind up with a human being? Let me tell you. I would wind up with a pot of protein. I would wind up with a lovely meal for a hyena, or a weekend feast for a jackal. That's it.
There is a wire to my stereo. When I plug it in, that wire serves as the conductor for all the genius of Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler and Bach, but when it's not plugged in, it's just a wire. All the proteins in the body and, yes, that includes the brain, when they are not plugged in to the nexus of will and consciousness and intelligence that is the essence of life, are meat, plain and simple.
All the great spiritual books that have survived for centuries: the Vedas, the Bible, the Book of the Hopi, the teachings of Buddha and Lao-Tzu, the Koran and the Upanishads, share the understanding that the subtle creates the gross, not the other way around. You are life, you are consciousness. You have a body which you experience and use. You did not come into being because a conglomeration of proteins, of non living particles, of microscopic little pieces of organic matter happenned, by chance, to get together, and suddenly congealed into an intelligent, living being that metabolizes energy, grows, replicates, senses it's environment, etc. And this is organic matter, by the way, that was supposedly, somehow floating around in our environment prior to the advent of life. So our basic belief now is that nucleic acids create proteins and proteins, or meat, create life; not that life creates proteins. Take away all the big words and that is what you wind up with. At some point, acids miraculously got together in a complex enough formation to start manufacturing proteins and this created life. Is this the ultimate in materialistic insanity? Are we meat that happens to talk and think and be conscious just to enable us to replicate more meat? Or are we living, conscious beings that have a body through which we experience the world? Is consciousness the result of material complexity or does the process begin with consciousness?
Let's look at will. Every process of a living body operates independently from the four forces of physics: gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force (holding the nucleus of atoms together) and the weak force (holding sub-atomic particles together). To energize these processes, every living thing metabolizes energy. And what is the purpose of this energy, this force? To survive. Every living thing, and in the case of multi-celled organisms, every one of the millions and trillions of cells within an individual being and the thousands of processes within each cell of that being, all these quadrillions of processes are synchronized to deliver the same result: the moment to moment existence of that being. This is observable, this is obvious. So, why can't the scientific community give the same respect to the force of will that they do to the force of gravity and electro-magnetism? Is it a delusion when every plant, animal and every microscopic being on this teeming planet are all working in concert to the same end? Will is the force that keeps evolution going. Beings live and replicate because they want to live and replicate. Will energizes the whole thing and yet evolutionary biologists do not even mention it. They speak nonsense about rivers of DNA and genes getting together through the centuries. There are no rivers of DNA. There is a river of will and determination. Genes get together because beings get together. Beings get together because they are drawn to each other by ineffable forces, because of the overwhelmingly powerful desires to survive and procreate and care for their offspring that are put, not in their molecules, but in their selves. The same ineffable force that brings us to procreation is the same force that brings the DNA molecule to replication. How could these little sub-microscopic dots of acid replicate by 'themselves'. They have no selves. They are passive matter. It is the force of life, it is will, that causes the replication and the evolution and the seeking of a better adaptation to life, and the seeking of a mate in the first place. The cause does not originate in material, it originates in the non material.
You don't need rabbis or gurus or priests to make this determination. Get a few physicists on the case. The problem is that physicists don't study living beings. Living beings have become the sole province of chemists and biologists who look at the visible, physical world and search for answers exclusively within the visible, physical world. It would probably take a physicist all of five minutes to determine that there is a very different force going on within a living being, that the goal of that force, which could be tested an infinite number of ways, is the survival of that being, and whoever that physicist is that makes this revelation will probably get to name it. So, we won't be able to call it will any more. We'll have to call it Jablonski, which is fine with me, so long as we don't forget to glorify the force called Jablonski, that has sustained all life from the beginning and sustains us now as you are reading these words, when we glorify Jablonski, the physicist, who spent a few months researching his 'discovery'.
The subtle creates the gross. Let's look at it in terms of human creativity. Look at any invention, any construction, any work of art. There it is, very tangible in the material world. Yet before it was made it existed as a plan or a blueprint or a sketch. Before that it was an image in some person's mind, a mental picture of this thing that they had imagined. Before that it was an identified desire, like, I need to provide more shelter for my family, or I need to express this talent, or I need to honor this loved one with a gift, or I have to figure out how to get to work faster. And before, out of nothing, in other words an empty consciousness, came an itch, a nameless restlessness, which materialized into an identified desire, which materialized into a vision of a creation, which materialized into a more detailed plan which finally materialized into the thing itself. So with human creations it's easy to see that the subtle, the little restlessness, the little twitch, materializes into a house, a sculpture, the invention of the wheel, or whatever. It's obviously not that the house was created first and the consciousness from which the idea of the house came out of, follows later. That's pretty simple to see. What's harder to see is that our consciousness, our 'self', is part of a much larger consciousness, a cosmic mind or cosmic consciousness, that is the source of all natural creation in the same way that our limited consciousness is the source of all human creation. But more of this later.
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