Got my headphones on just listening to some sweet tunes. A bit of insomnia but I don't mind. Music is an amazing thing. Sometimes I like writing to the beats, feeling the rhythm and unlocking some hidden or normally inhibited part of my soul through the combination of words and sound. Stories are weaved in the dead of night, some forgotten past where everyone feels at home. The night surrounds the glare of my dimmed screen. There's a curious moth, it sits on the screen for a moment and then flutters away. An artificial focal point that different insects and my brain are drawn to and I sense their life and wish them well. Feel a sense of deep connection to the earth, probably the music, but that seems to just be the key to uncover deep hidden memories of a time long ago when the earth was first born. Maybe those memories are deep in our DNA, and sometimes things unlock them and we remember stuff. Do we carry the memories of all our ancestors? Each of us holding the knowledge of millions of years of evolution, perhaps it may even be possible to go far back to the first single celled life-forms, could the memory of that time be buried deep inside that double helix strand somewhere? We are all related, all creatures great and small, all the different species of life on earth are our kin; if we go back far enough we can all trace our ancestors back to that very first organism.
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Life is kin
Friday, 19 Oct 2018, 01:12
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Edited by Richie Cuthbertson, Friday, 24 Dec 2021, 21:57
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Nope. When the sperm and egg meet, there is nothing like enough data embedded in the combined DNA to contain memories, and memories are stored as inter-cell connections rather than in the DNA. Instinct is in the DNA, which is damn clever.
What you are feeling is empathy. All predatory mammals seem to be good at empathy. That makes it easier to turn other animals into muscle and energy.
See the bacon sandwich. Feel the bacon sandwich. Be the bacon sandwich. Be the essence of the bacon sandwich. Imagine yourself as the bacon sandwich. The squareness, the softness of the bread, the squidge of the ketchup. The firmness of your crust, the exposed vulnerability of the cut surface. Feel the coolness of the plate, feel the cooling of the bacon, the molten butter gently setting again. The warm bread resting against the plate, bending, conforming to the curve. Feel the elation of being lifted, the exquisite agony of being bitten into.
Damn, I'm hungry.
Being a bacon sandwich is not in your DNA, but you can create a memory of being one.
As for deep memories, I can't remember what I had for dinner last night.
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Maybe, but there does feel like there is something more, more than just what physics, chemistry and biology tells us. We aren't just machines programmed to behave in a certain way. I feel like there is something deeper than this mundane civilisation we've created and the elementary reality we're taught at school. There's something I can't quite put my finger on that enters my awareness every so often, only briefly, like a passing nostalgia that I can't hold on to.
I don't think Darwin tells the whole story, just one aspect of it. Even Darwin I think believed that altruism was a higher state of evolution. (Although you might want to check that, my memory could be leading you down the garden path on that one ;)
I believe we humans are due for a new way of thinking that evolves passed the old fashioned thinking of the enlightenment era. With the end of religion there comes a responsibility to teach ethics in society and to hold altruism as perhaps the highest ideal. No belief in God required for such things. We can all love one another whatever our beliefs.
It's not easy, changing ourselves is difficult, but through gentle persistent training of the mind I think humans can evolve passed our self-centred natures and look beyond all this violence, greed and ego and become much greater beings, beings who instead of choosing violence to solve their problems, choose love. Not the cheesy greeting card kind of love, I mean the sort of love that is not self-seeking, something compassionate that wishes all other beings well and wants to tread carefully in this world and be a good gardener that doesn't just garden for its own sake, but the sake of all living things. Even the complete psychopaths who say they don't feel anything, lost in their dark egoic mental states. I believe even them could learn to love, though it may take them more effort than some, but perhaps through long persistent training of the mind they could become loving beings too.
Science is always being dazzled by new discoveries that many didn't believe could be possible. And science still has much left to discover. Old ideas often get shaken as new ones emerge. Humans have a very limited understanding of the universe. I don't think humans will ever be smart enough, even with the help of computers, to ever fully understand it. For a start we cannot see beyond 3 dimensions, we don't really know what happens at a quantum level, because we can't measure a particle at the same time as knowing its location, there's a huge amount of uncertainty in our models of the universe. There's still much to learn. Not that I'm belittling human achievement so far, but I think people need to think for themselves as well and question everything, even what profressors tell us. Nobody knows all the answers. gently challenge old beliefs that no longer fit in this 21st century.
Like that fella in the 'Life of Pi' who preferred to believe in the story of the Bengal tiger. I prefer to think about love and peace for every living thing, however laughable that may sound. I like to weave my own stories about the universe and add something extra to the cold almost machine-like textbook narratives we're all taught to believe at school. The stuff I was taught at school felt empty at times. I think there was something missing. I've always felt that, perhaps why I rejected education in my youth. There is more to us humans and the natural world than we are taught to believe. Many more suprises to discover, maybe an infinite number of them. Nothing is set in stone, there will always be mysteries, always jobs for scientists (;
I'm not a predatory mammal anymore, I'm a vegan. Although I doubt any plant particularly wants to be eaten, but I just can't bear the suffering that farm animals go through and the damage the meat and dairy industry does to the planet.
Don't worry I don't judge others for eating meat, I dislike the industry, but if people want to eat meat that is their choice and I'm not an annoying self-rightous vegan. At least I hope I'm not.
Vegan bacon is actually not that bad though, it is pretty darn close to real bacon (: