~R~

I’m reading John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler’s anthropocentric universe tome right now but the latest update is the “biocentric universe” model, arguing that measurement of time is subjective to the type of perception of the organism.

Or as Gurdjieff told Ouspensky: “Remember Time is Breath.”

Which brings me to Yogananda’s “breathless ecstasy” claim that humans have the chance of reincarnating as extraterrestrials on planets with a better or more sattva guna.

Yogananda disses the philosophy of Sri Ramana Maharshi who in turn dissed the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. I find this conflict of views in Vedanta fascinating. Aurobindo was such an influence for social “evolution” (via Julian Huxley) that his ashram is now part of UNESCO. Yogananda was a follower of Ramakrishna who reached fame through the Freemason Vivekananda, calling science the “external path.”

Nevertheless I go with Sri Ramana Maharshi who was considered an avatar of Shiva. Universal Mind is Female, as the Taoists teach also. Sri Ramana Maharshi stated very radically:

“There is no evolution.”

The secret of random spontaneous symmetry breaking from universal mind is actually “randy ohm.”

What I was trying to suggest was that there may be an “intelligence” inherent in matter, and that we sometimes try to assign something approaching what we think of as a will or thought process to it. That does not make it any less remarkable.

Thanks, though I expect that not everyone will take these comments philosophically. Nothing I can do about that.

If you’re interested, you might take a look at Daniel Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. What evolution has going for it is it works as a heuristic with massive amounts of time(millions & millions of years). When one uses the word chance it seems to imply an image of intelligence arising in a compressed period of time. Intelligence as manifested as the arising of homo sapiens took a really long fu….ing time.

Having said that, I find it hard to swallow that chance alone can account for all the complexity of the biological systems around us, even given millions of years. While evolutionary processes no doubt happen, I can’t help thinking that there is an intelligence guiding it along in places. We humans, with all our intelligence, can’t match the complexity that supposedly occurred by chance.

But the idea of a bearded, white-haired God sitting on a throne doesn’t make much sense to me either. I think that image only serves as comfort to people who have trouble identifying with a non-human creator.

And He/She may love fooling round too…