Friday, October 23, 2015



The logical inevitability of a cosmic predilection behind life and existence


The self evident element of creative CHOICE in nature

Bee hives, whether in African forests or in the Indian villages, have hexagonal pockets for storing honey. Does the brain of the bee species is wired with the geometrical figure of hexagon?

Similar cases of uniform, but mysterious life and behaviour patterns in the animal kingdoms are abundant. The closely woven nests of the weaver bird, or the tortoise siblings that hatch out only during a rain so that it could easily flow with water up to the sea - -the astonishing wiring of the life forms always tease human reason to think beyond the evolution theory. The hexagonal shape of the bee-hive or the closely woven nest of the weaver bird may not fit any easy story to link it with the ‘survival’ necessity, or one of  its adaptive techniques. An element of creative ‘CHOICE’ from the part of nature is self evident  in all these cases. The shape of the bee hive could have been triangular or plain spherical, and the shape of the nest of weaver bird could have been different in different continents!

If the root of existence is inorganic matter and its complex manifestations, we may have to stumble a bit for explaining the above element of creative choice, a not likely property of the dead matter. It definitely looks like the property of some kind of a ‘mind’ form. 

The hidden directives behind human instincts and emotions

We may be able to explain most of the animal drives and instincts as pure biological necessity - - -like territorial and mating related fights, fierce protective instinct towards the offspring, their food storing behaviour etc. . But when the same thought line is applied to explain all aspects of human behaviour, one stumbles at various junctures.

At some point of time, man seems to have totally departed from his animal ways. Was it a departure towards the direction of turning into a SUPERMAN in the ladder of evolution?

The most standing out development from the animal stage was his acquiring a ‘notional entity too’ other than the usual physical entity of animals. Ego lives in the notional worlds created by itself. Unlike the physical world, which can be said universal for every one, these notional worlds are subjective for every Ego. Hence, one can say that such notional world lives in man, than man lives in such worlds !

Though animals also are blessed with unique personalities, acquiring special mystery instincts for such notional entities was a marked difference. Some of such instincts that man’s ego entity has developed are:

a)     Glorification of such self
b)     The urge to excel
c)      The urge to expand
d)     The urge to seek order

Before briefly looking at each of the above mystery drives of man’s notional self, one is compelled to admit and realize that these drives have nothing much to do with his mere survival needs.

Glorification drive of ego: Like the gravity energy of earth and other heavenly bodies, man has this ferocious, irrepressible inner pull of his self-hood. He feels utterly responsible to safe-guard, as well as to glorify his entity as a person. If his external circumstances do not put him down too much, he always sense a kind of divinity about himself. This drive is what makes him go for heroic efforts in wars, sports activities, self-sacrifices to save other’s lives etc.
This particular trait of EGO is what urges man to control others; leadership urge included. Leadership urge is there in every one, but methods are very different. While for some one it is sharing what one knows and helping others also to develop and improve, for some others it is imposing one’s ways upon others by force. The second type many a times end-up in making tyrants, or religious fundamentalists, whose idea of self mounts in such way that, he or his group wanted to bring-in the entire world under their control, submission and total hegemony.

Natures plan behind such tendencies in some men might be the awakening of the subdued ones; when oppression becomes unbearable, such people always react, even at the cost violent wars, violence and even massive blood-shed and revolution. Lesson world and mankind must learn from such frequently observed phenomena in history is that, never ever put other men and groups under excessive control and submission !  History is bright proof that, every tyrant and oppressive leaders in history had met defeat and destruction, and FREEDOM and LIBERTY were the winners always !
                                                      
This often takes its extreme negative course also. Suicides are such negative acts, where one’s will to live becomes zero.This negative course of Ego is what often takes the 'terrorism' and criminal route. Instead of blaming 'own self' for one's sorrowful state, many a time, the blame falls on 'others' and the 'world'as a whole. Such people are carefully chosen and targetted today by terror organizations and leaders, for achieving their special needs. These victims have already lost sense of difference between life and death, so directing them to be suicide 'bomber' etc becomes very easy! This gives them a temporary 'meaning' and 'sense of purpose' in 'life'!  In our existing Capitalistic order, we all know that almost 70% of the population do not enjoy 'belongingness' to the mainstream world. So, chances of individuals losing meaning in life are simply massive!  

Urge to excel: Though this is closely related to the drive to glorify, the difference is all about excelling over one’s fellow beings. One always experience the inner pull to be better than the other. Competition of all sorts can be understood as manifestations of this particular urge.

Urge to expand: This special drive is what compels him to go for artistic pursuits, an urge to seek one’s hidden colours and feathers. This is an urge to go beyond the known. Hence, writers, painters of repute, singers, and even philosophers and scientists live in worlds beyond the very grasp and reach of ordinary men.

Love urge as the manifestation of the urge to expand :

Even man’s urge to venture into love relations can also be understood as a manifestation of this enigmatic drive. Though materialistic world defines and understood love only as a prelude to reproductive instinct of man, it has many yet not identified dimensions. The partners in love often experience an expansion of their known selves - -both finds themselves in never before known colours, freedom, and loosened and un-inhibited behaviour patterns. What they experience is their newer selves, unimaginably different from their previously familiar forms. The ‘other’ here becomes a special tunnel, a fascinating channel for the one in true love to know much more about himself. Reality is all about what the other perceives as real, here one’s  entity as an unknown enigma to him self. Until now, what one thought about himself was mere fiction. These fictions becomes real when one’s love partner acts as the one who share, and co-experience such fiction, and transform it into the realm of reality!

The more the partners are able to express and expand their selves in the love act, the more expanded become their entities in the matter of notional content. Such enhanced selves when come in contact with the outside world, the colour and nature of such interactions also becomes very different, adding up to the total personality of the person.

We need to seriously study what exactly was Hegal's idea on Spirit; if my understanding is right, he also was hinting at the same theory, ie. God created the whole for finding self-expression of Himself! We might be able to peep into the mystery WHY question,linking all these ideas!

A Stanford University page on Hegel has this statement on the above: "The peculiarity of Hegel’s form of idealism, on this account, lies in his idea that the mind of God becomes actual only via its particularization in the minds of “his” finite material creatures. Thus, in our consciousness of God, we somehow serve to realize his own self-consciousness, and, thereby, his own perfection"

Try any hard, it will be difficult to offer a better explanation than what Hegel had offered.It makes real sense! 

Among other modern philosophers,only the American one,C.S.Pierce was found recognizing the existential relevance of LOVE;He says in his essay 'Evolutionary Love',:

 " Love,recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful,gradually warms it into life,and makes it lovely.that is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay 'the law of mind' must see that synechism calls for....growth comes only from the ardent impulse to fulfill another's highest impulse" (He offers explanation to St.John's philosophy of love as sacrifice)

Hence, the most enigmatic emotion of LOVE is truly a manifestation of man’s mystery urge to expand by self expression...

The urge to seek order: In the degree of specialty and mystery, this drive to seek ORDER tops other ones we have already familiarized.

What saw man’s civilizational and knowledge wise rising up the present level of life was predominantly due to the most mysterious urge of seeking ORDER hidden in man. Though man understands this urge as his ‘faculty of Reason’, a special faculty that, according to him,  distinguishes himself from the animal kingdom, he is yet to fully realize all its yet unknown dimensions and features. It is without doubt, a seat, or a sensor of existential ORDER that nature has kept hidden in man.

What guided him and helped him to make his innumerable theories, inventions and discoveries was this sense of Reason. It helped him to go from the signs of the ‘order’ he has found in nature, to the other hidden realms of ‘order’, based on the assurance provided to him by the previously seen mystery sensor of order.

What other faculty helps man to relate a past relation or a sequence with a present complex fact, and be convinced of its truthfulness? Reasoning is nothing but this creative faculty of man in relating a current fact with an already proven past relation or sequence. This seat of order has its own independent sense, that many a times it warns him of truth and falsehood even without any past precedents!Otherwise, how does man now fully realize that despite all his unimaginable scientific discoveries, his knowledge about life and existence is incomplete?  Or, he is still short of a unified theory for all his known forms of energy?

Though man is yet to admit anything beyond dead matter at the root of everything that exists, he had no hesitation to claim ownership of this mystery faculty of Reason for himself  - -something he would never succeed to explain as a  property of matter.

The hidden directive of this seat of order: Reason often acts like an instinct, say, like the instinct of sex. It compels man to seek order and consistency in whatever he does, especially in the fulfillment of the other directives of the ego that we have seen above.

 He gets restless when faced with disorder. Injustice in front of his eyes forces him to intervene till justice is prevailed. A photo-frame tilted to a side on the wall disturbs him. Beauty of any kind, whether it is music or an architectural marvel, or a golden sunset, relaxe him. Reason forces revolutionaries to revolt and bring-in freedom.  It makes spiritualists to seek truth, ('order' about life and existence) and scientists to seek answers for the same questions in a different way. Yes…this faculty of Reason works on principles similar to the other instincts of man - -it makes him act, or seek answers in a particular direction.

The PRISM like function of Reason keep on splitting any newly arrived conclusion into its constituent further possibilities and sub-ideas, thus upsetting the balance and the truth of the previously arrived conclusions. This makes man restless again and again for seeking further truths. This goes on as a unchanging process, like the natural direction of rivers. This process act  as if it has a pre-set direction !

This specific directive of Reason, when read with the other above observed urges of man’s Ego, compels our sense of Reason to conclude that  all these are devices to carry man towards some mystery goal/direction ? This mystery seat of order relentlessly convey to mind that without having a ‘why’ dimension for life and existence, the ‘how’ dimension can not be explained in totality. Hence, such a directive, if closely analyzed, lead us to the conclusion that it wants to drag man out of the four walls of his ego,and seek realities outside its closed domain.

The stand alone reality of the ‘ego’ is like a cubicle in the free space. It has only its observed realities to define itself, with which it's Reason domain is not contended with. Reason compels man to place his self at more truthful, more consistent and more logically acceptable platforms. Hence the eternal search of man for ultimate reality with his scientific, as well as religious pursuits!

The inevitability of a 'cosmic emotion' behind existence: Properties of matter can be there without the involvement of any emotional content. Oxygen atoms when united with required number of hydrogen atoms, water is the result. It is a stand alone law within the bigger, wider reality of existence. We can not apply the certainty of such isolated laws to infer on the nature of the whole scheme of existence, as the latter includes the kind of very distinct and clear 'mystery directives' in human psyche that we have observed above. 


The element of ‘choice’ that one observes in these directives as well as in many other aspects of existence, has already been explained in above paragraphs. Moreover, the element of the ‘directive’ that we have seen, is what really distinguishes a living entity from a purely ‘inorganic’ substance. A living micro organism has the directive to multiply itself, resist the forces that aims to annihilate it etc. whereas a pure inorganic entity do not have any such natural directive. At microscopic level, to distinguish a life form from a pure inorganic form is a really difficult philosophical problem for scientists ! When one add this 'directive' aspect of life form also to the context, solving this problem would easier.  

The element of ‘choice’, that often looks ‘creative’ in nature, can not be a property of inorganic matter, as such a property, even if science forcibly attribute to it, can not stand the test of the ‘sense’ of Reason that we have clearly seen above.  It violently revolts when asked to accept such inconsistent forms of relations.


Hence, here man’s reason has no other option but to imagine and attribute some kind of an emotional element too in the scheme of existence, besides its natural forces and energy sources that science had already identified.  Without attributing such an emotional content, it is impossible to unite our known stories of science to explain the phenomenon of existence sensibly.  

Is our faculty of Reason an internal 'sense-organ', that Existence has instilled in man, to 'sense' her 'predisposition', the ultimate stuff of the world?

We have said above, that Faculty of Reason acts as an instinct. But, if inferred by all the might of our inherent sense, we will have to conclude that, yes, our faculty of Reason is an 'internal sense organ', specifically instilled by Existence for man 'sense' the ultimate stuff of her, her predisposition, her emotional predilection!!

Kant was very specific; man's external sense organs give him only 'phenomena', not the 'in-itself' reality about the world. Though he said, he is able to grasp this 'in-itself' reality by 'intuition', he had not elaborated it to make a system of it. By every Logic imaginable by man, it does not make sense at all to believe, that Existence had left us here only with our 'phenomena'making device, our mind. She must have definitely kept a door opened for us to know her!! Knowing her means, knowing her emotional disposition, not an EQUATION about her structural design.
  
 Though science is reluctant to identify her stand as a 'dogma' about the inorganic base of life and existence, it can always keep its doors open towards above possibilities. Moreover, science is not all about her already found laws –it is all about her openness about all new source of knowledge. That was her original predisposition, her essence!

This propositions, when read with the propositions that contained at our write-up on Reason at blog spot : http://thesparkleofhumanreason.blogspot.com/, and http://philosopherskorner.blogspot.in/ , will give us a very different 'wholesomeness' about man’s life and existence.

The 'why life' and 'Existence' question gets a very sensible answer here; Phenomena was devised by Nature as the 'space' or the 'world' of the Ego. Its role is that of a womb, or placenta.It is meant to carry a fetus, a future fully realized, a fully conscious man! Once he reaches this intellectual or spiritual stage, like a child who abandon his childishness once he attains adulthood, abandons it, and start living like a fully matured being, fully conscious of his miraculous status in Existence! This development stages are explained in the following link:http://metaphysicsofthehumansoul.blogspot.in/2013/


Abraham J.Palakudy 

He is an ardent seeker and researcher in areas like Mind and Reason, philosophy, Spirituality, and polityE.mail:ajoseph1@rediffmail.com
His profile and other blogs:https://www.blogger.com/profile/14249415589712707293 
Twitter : Voice of Philosophy@jopan1      

Ps: His self-published book ' Is reason a sense organ ? A super-mind above the known mind? (amazon.com link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008NOEE9I  touches how man could sense, or get to know the emotional predisposition ,or predilections of nature/God.


2 comments:

  1. After downgrading Reason as a Sense, God's Consciousness is made to depend on our consciousness! What a wonderful discovery?!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are totally wrong on your understanding of Reason as a sense-organ. Will share a tweet with you, to try to make you understand.

    ReplyDelete