The Clear Light of Evolution at Work

Back in the day, folks would sit around the tribal fires and roast marshmallows while discussing the serious conditions imposed on the universe by any number of goblins, spooks, jinn, ghosts, demons, angels, archangels and ass ended masters. Er, make that ascended masters.
     Someone with appropriate authority within the tribe would shake a bone necklace over the flames and smoke and invoke the name of the appropriate imaginary friend, whatever entity the tribe had chosen to consider as principle benefactor within the cosmic goofiness of the tribe.
     Sacred words, dreamed up long ago by somebody with nothing better to do, would be spoken with deep reverence and concentration, even if nobody knew what the words meant. Order and peace would be brought to the world and all the tribal enemies would shake & rattle in their penis gourds for fear that the surrounding tribal imaginary friends would be appropriately pissed off to do something bad to whoever.
     Like someone might die that very night, even as the bone necklace was being shaken. Or some child might start to sneeze and cry and come down with a deadly fever from the opposite tribes spooks attacking the other tribes.
     Such beliefs and such silliness and such superstition were once the way of the world, everywhere with everybody. There were local deities and their subalterns. There were local spirits in local trees and any tribe that shared a river or well knew that the other tribes use of the well or river might be a matter of contention.
     People would kill each other over whose spook or demon inhabited which bank of whatever river along which might live any number of tribes, each with their own special mysteries for the entire course of the river.
     The wind would blow, the rain would fall, the sun would set and the sun would come up under the influence of as many different delusional & imaginary friends as you or I or the next believer might believe in.
     The world was grand 'cause your god or my god was in charge.
     And if you didn't believe as I do, then I'm out to kill you.
     My god can't do it all itself, can it?
     Such is the way, after all.

Now we'll forget for a moment that all of the above goes back at least thirty thousand years, ten times the space between us and the end of the legends in the Judeo-Christian holy texts. We won't stop to spend much time on the concept of deep time, which is the inability of most folks to consider anything more ancient than where they bought lunch yesterday and left their credit card on the counter.
     Such things as time are outside the complex of this rant.
     Only one thing is important:

It has been over thirty thousand years since this insane & delusional ghosts & goblins childish "imaginary friends will protect me" garbage first got fleshed out of the mind of whichever homo erectus led to you and me being here.

     Thirty thousand years!
     Thirty thousand years.
     For thirty thousand years – at least – human beings have been dreaming up weird shit about imagined beings who control the physical world via whatever metaphysical means. Not only have we been imagining this that long, we've been sure all that time that whatever we do or say in a friendly and childlike manner to these beings, they will work in our favor if we say the right things and do the right things. And they will work against whoever it is we ask them to grind into submission.
     For this guessed-at and imagined subservience to these imaginary friends, we get nice stuff & good times and nobody who believes otherwise will ever cause us any harm . . . because Our Special Imaginary Friend itself will protect us from harm.
     And if the shit should hit the fan & we all get beaten or crushed or boiled in a sauce?
     Well, that's happening 'cause we somehow pissed off our imaginary friend and, well, our imaginary friend loves us so much that it has to show us how much love it's got. Or needs from us.
     That and money.

Now I am off on this tear because two things have happened to unbalance my world.
     First off, George Carlin, one of the most outspoken disbelievers & the natural successor to the ironic & somewhat bitter comedy of Lenny Bruce, has died. He was 71. The same age my father was when Dad died. Seventy-one years old.
     And you can bet that somewhere in some pulpit or church or mosque or temple, someone will be saying that George Carlin died because he didn't believe in god.
     Yeah, right.
     George Carlin died because he ran out of heart beats. He died because his body could not continue the processes of metabolism necessary for the continuance of life. The mind of the man may have cancelled out already, but ultimately, George Carlin died because it was time for him to die.
     He didn't die because he finally had pissed off whatever god is in favor to such an extent that the god in question cancelled George Carlin's subscription to the process of living.
     The second thing is pretty nicely tied to the first by the simple fact that, one way or the other, we're talking about superstition here. Good old fashioned belief in things that aren't there and for which there is either enough contradictory evidence for belief or for which nobody in their right mind would ever consider more than superstition.

So the second thing: I was coming out of the rest room at work and happened to pass by the office of another university functionary. This person, a woman with a long attachment to New Age "theology" (and we'll deal with that in a moment), was sitting in her office chatting with someone. All I heard were the words "archangels" and "ascended masters" and I was off screaming.
     "Make it stop! Please make it stop!"
     After years of hearing this prattle, every time it comes to ear, I am always immediately reminded of the howl and moan that associated the arrival of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ji to this country in the 60s. You may remember the ol' Maharishi as the Indian yogi guy who ministered to the Beatles. You may remember having seen him on TV or in the newspapers, pushing is own brand of Hindu/American mysticism, which came to be called "Transcendental Meditation." You may remember how this kinda scared parents and elders as the number of young Americans in those times went over to the Maharishi's side and began chanting mantras and dancing around in circles of love and transcendent joy from what the Maharishi had taught them or sold them.
     Maybe you remember.
     Over the nearly 40 years since the 60s hit my neck of the backwater, I've watched friends from that time do a couple interesting things as their ages advanced.
     The first was a return to Jesus.
     Normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s, folks who screwed and slept nekkid next to other nekkid people, generally of the opposite sex, folks who smoked dope and dropped acid and spent enormous stretches of time either giggling inanely or talking in raspy voices interspersed with giggling about god and light and peace and love and all that, well, they went back to Jesus. Became rock-solid member of their rock-solid faith in the Bible, in the saving blood of Jesus, amen & hallelujah.
     The former hippie libertines are now deacons and pastors and congregations of Christian churches.
     Next was a turn toward New Age hodge-podge of wherever the Maharishi left off and whatever was left of a brain burned on acid starts.
     Normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s, folks who screwed and slept nekkid next to other nekkid people, generally of the opposite sex, folks who smoked dope and dropped acid and spent enormous stretches of time either giggling inanely or talking in raspy voices interspersed with giggling about god and light and peace and love and all that, well, they went on to discover new and even more convoluted belief systems. Became rock-solid members of the Urantians or the Rosicrucians, or $cientologists or Knights of the Round Table or whatever.
     You know, wack-job cult members hoarding guns and gasoline in preparation of the outbreak of a war between the greens and the reptilian alien lords of the universe come back any day now to fix the world up so a good, law-abiding Ceti-reticulan can sit on the front stoop with the wife and kids and watch the UFOs go overhead without a care in the world. Them kindsa folks, them's was hippies once.
     Another group just sat back, looked at the joint smoldering between their fingers and figured it was time to go down to the drive thru on the Harley to get some beer before granny gets back with the grandkids.
     Normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s, folks who screwed and slept nekkid next to other nekkid people, generally of the opposite sex, folks who smoked dope and dropped acid and spent enormous stretches of time either giggling inanely or talking in raspy voices interspersed with giggling about god and light and peace and love and all that, well, they're still normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s to this day. Tell 'em you're lost & they'll tell you you ain't 'cause you're right where your supposed to be, man.
     And Dave's not here.
     Some of 'em believe there might be a god. Some of 'em believe outright that there is a god and some of 'em just don't care. But if you ask 'em, they're likely to say "Yeah, sure. Whatever," and be done with it.
     And then there's the gang who went through all that and came to the same conclusion I did: There ain't nothin' to believe in, not a god or a devil or a box of engrams held captive in some volcanoes or whatever. It's just the way things are and, from all we can tell, there isn't much more going on. Things happen. They don't happen for a purpose and they don't happen because of some grand celestial design and they don't happen 'cause there's a bunch of aliens controlling our every move with electrons and implants and anal probes.
     Out of all of that it comes down to three moves. First there's back to the Jesus that they almost rejected 'cause they were counter-culture fired up. And there's off to some new age nonsense 'cause it's counter-culture, in that they didn't want to be like Mom & Dad. And them's what, left to their own devices, maintained who they were then, either believers or not, but not that much fired up one way or the other. Christians, Mixtions & Who Cares?
     Still believers all the same.
     And then there's folks like me, people who went through all that process, Hari Krishna, Harry Kirchner, Holy Christ, Ass-ended Masters & Pick-up-the-cans, all that, only to realize at some point that it's all the same mumbo-jumbo not much different than having an imaginary friend watchin' out for us instead of just doin' the damn jobs ourselves. The last & most rational choice.

So here we sit, thirty thousand years after the ice finally melted – or at least finally started to melt quickly enough so as anybody'd notice – and we're still acting like the wind is driven by the blast of air from the mouth of an exhaling demigod or that the sea is calm because Neptune (or whoever) took his meds. We pray to somebody or something when we get sick even though we all know that medical science, even as limited as it is, is still a damn sight better than a poultice made from the ground up skin of a snow lizard. When the earth shakes we know it's because of geological activity but we still ask god to help us find our loved ones under the collapsed rubble. And damn sure betcha somebody will say that the earthquake somewhere killed all those children 'cause their parents didn't know about Jesus or turned the backs on Allah or whatever.
     Thirty thousand years.
     Don't tell me evolution doesn't work.