“How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter?…How do you know that in 10,000 years one will not consider it more likely that matter has emerged from life?”
-Louis Pasteur
According to popular modern Darwinian thinking, the human species as we know it is the result of various chemical combinations undergoing random developments over a very long period of time. These developments have insured our survival ability so far. Survival ability is built into us by nature, like airbags and other devices are built into a car. We are Survivor Machines.
Survivor Machines; that may not sound very inspiring, but what an inspiration that could be for people who compete on a survivor TV show! I once gaped as I watched contestants who were challenged to cross a deep tank, climb a series of thirty foot tall slippery floating triangle shaped obstacles, balance precariously on top and slide down the other side while being pummeled by fire hydrant blasts of water. Those who survived the arduous course most efficiently, defeated their opponents and won a prize.
Certainly the material world is a place where most of us have to tough it out. School, job, family, roof over your head, food in the mouth; all these require sometimes heavy sacrifices. However I don’t think this world was created as a place where optimum survival is the greatest possible achievement of a living being.
Why are Americans so hard-wired for survival these days? Do we secretly harbor fears about having to return to bare necessities due to nuclear devastation or global warming? Is it because for the last hundred years we have widely propagated the belief system of natural selection and survival of the fittest in nearly every science journal and classroom?
Oddly enough, the majority of human beings choose to participate in what could be called “artificial selection.” We choose arbitrary artificial selection for other species as well as our own. A few examples:
A sick seal washes up on a beach and a government subsidized Marine Animal Protection Agency dispatches a vehicle to rescue it, nurse it back to health and return it to the ocean. Millions of hybrid dogs are bred generation after generation until the strain’s original quality is compromised so we can enjoy cute little pets. Ambulances race throughout the city saving people who are on the point of expiring and they are nursed back to health in hospitals for days, weeks, months, and even years. Special Olympics participants are charitably financed to train the handicapped to shoot hoops or swim one hundred meters thoug fate has not provided them with all of the physical or mental attributes that normal athletes are endowed with.
Any layperson can understand that the material body minus consciousness is a dead body, and this consciousness cannot be revived in the body by any means of material administration. Therefore, consciousness is not due to any amount of material combination, but to the eternal spirit soul.
Very unscientific!
Though we have proposed survival of the fittest as a top ranking answer to the mystery of life, we human beings go around trying to save everything we see. We feel deep, complex emotions for our children or for other’s, as when we see a poor child on a hunger campaign poster. Comforting a dying man or coming to the aid of a stranger who is being attacked is certainly not to the advantage of our internal organic chemical survival mechanisms! What is that seemingly unlimited reservoir of human empathy for another that wells up inside of us whether or not it is to our advantage to be moved by such feelings? Moreover, what triggers us Human Survivor Machines to relish art, music, dance, literature, a beautiful sunset or a baseball game?
There is a finer awareness in all of us. Sometimes we notice it. (It is not something which is the subject matter of survivor shows.) It comes from a place where stress is a stranger, where happiness is a given. That finer awareness we experience from time to time is only the dawn of the opportunity to experience the Self. The Human Survivor Machine is actually an external mechanism which is like a suit of armor for the most important feature of our existence: the Spiritual Inherent Quality. Yes, there is spirituality deep in every one of us, and that conscious spiritual spark is never an accident of nature participating in a harsh competition for survival. (Stones and rocks have got us beat by a long shot if tough survival is the bottom line.)
Feelings for another? Love of puppies, seals, babies, Grandmas — It’s all good, because all creatures possess the Spiritual Inherent Quality which is attractive to us.
Certainly the material world is a place where most of us have to tough it out. School, job, family, roof over your head, food in the mouth; all these require sometimes heavy sacrifices. However I don’t think this world was created as a place where optimum survival is the greatest possible achievement of a living being. There is absolutely no question of the Spiritual Inherent Quality needing any material combination of traits to insure its survival.
As SrilaPrabhupada explains in his Bhagavad-gitaAs It Is,
“The very small spiritual spark is the basic principle of the material body, and the influence of such a spiritual spark is spread all over the body as the influence of the active principle of some medicine spreads throughout the body. This current is felt as consciousness, and that is the evidence of the presence of the soul. Any layperson can understand that the material body minus consciousness is a dead body, and this consciousness cannot be revived in the body by any means of material administration. Therefore, consciousness is not due to any amount of material combination, but to the eternal spirit soul.”
The greatest possible achievement of the living being is self-realization, or realizing one’s self as a spiritual portion of the potency of the Supreme Soul. Survival of the species is a less intelligent, primitive miscalculation of what is the authentic struggle. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is teaching us the worthy struggle for the survival of the soul.
In his popular book “Life Comes From Life,” Prabhupada explains, “All living beings possess the required intelligence to execute four principles: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. These four principles exist even in the atom. The only difference with the human being is that they have the extra intelligence with which they can understand God.”
Feelings for another? Love of puppies, seals, babies, Grandmas — It’s all good, because all creatures possess the Spiritual Inherent Quality which is attractive to us. We are not meant for the impersonal slaughterhouse farm factory, weapons manufacturing, abortion clinic “culture”, cut-throat, back-stabbing, get-ahead business enterprises, etc., that have only contributed to the devolution of human spiritual consciousness. This is our unfortunate inheritance, courtesy of modern science.
In his popular book “Life Comes From Life,” Prabhupada explains, “All living beings possess the required intelligence to execute four principles: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. These four principles exist even in the atom. The only difference with the human being is that they have the extra intelligence with which they can understand God.”
Human survivor machines we are not, yet we are brainwashed by scientific atheistic education to think so. Our brains need re-programming.
