We are on a pilgrimage; moving out of ignorance, out of the darkness and cold, feeling our way, stumbling along towards enlightenment. We come into this world knowing nothing - learning each day, gaining insights and experience, solving some problems, encountering new ones - yet knowing that we still ultimately know little.
Driven by curiosity, we are a part of the great unfolding of the Universe. We see this process happening around us, we observe its ever-changing nature. Our understanding - personal understanding as well as the collective understanding of us as a species - inches forward. But is it growing fast enough?
Humanity progresses in fits and starts. Centuries of stasis, then bursts of rapid development. We're developing faster than ever before in our history, and that acceleration is set to grow. Many have predicted that we'll come out of the pandemic to witness a period of transformation as great as the Renaissance (which followed the Black Death) and the Enlightenment (which followed the Great Plague). I am convinced that Homo sapiens will make two steps forward - before making the inevitable step back a century or two later, only to make another two steps forward again.
The road before us is eternally long. Looking back, things are better than they were 100 years, 200 years ago for most people on this planet, compared to how their lives would have looked living in the same place back then. But what's that on a scale of 13.8 billion years from Big Bang or 4.5 billion years of Planet Earth? Catastrophes cosmic, man-made or natural notwithstanding, the odds are that that the next 100 years will be even better for us as a species. But we'll not be around...
Our biological selves won't. Our egos won't. But for the curious, the observant - the sensitive to the tides of time - the old souls who want to see - might just possibly will themselves back for another crack at this marvel called life. Flashes, glimpses of this live might pervade their consciousness in the next; familiar yet anomalous memories, atavistic visions and 'desires to return'... OK, many of us don't experience this, but I predict that coming generations will have more such 'old souls' among their numbers.
My generation, brought up in the West on a blend of Christianity and Newtonian materialism, is far less likely to buy into any notion of reincarnation than anyone growing up into Hinduism or Buddhism. And future generations whose science lessons will include that which we don't know (reconciling quantum mechanics with the Theory of Relativity, the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the nature of consciousness - is it an emergent phenomenon or an intrinsic property of matter?) will also be more open to the metaphysical and supernatural.
The vectors for consciousness are therefore of supreme interest to me. Are our consciousnesses - our souls - locked into one short-lived body, or can they return to forever (to quote the name of the band of recently-deceased jazz musician Chick Corea) to experience life again? I think so - on the basis of my lifelong and frequent exomnesian experiences.
If science begins to open up avenues of research that go to show that consciousness indeed pervades the Universe as a basic property, then it is entirely possible that it can exist in more than one biological form. But how do time and entropy fit into all this?
One life is not enough. If you seek, it is possible that your consciousness - stripped of ego - shall indeed taste it again.
This time last year:
The Secret and the Hidden
This time three years ago:
Afterlife - a myriad possibilities, after the Magic has returned
This time four years ago:
Warsaw photo catch-up (Rotunda going down)
This time five years ago:
Conscious of being conscious
This time six years ago:
New road and retail
This time eight years ago:
Warsaw's Northern Bridge - its name and local democracy
This time ten years ago:
What's Polish for 'commuter'?
This time 11 years ago:
Four weeks into Lent
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