Most of my friends will know that when the evening gets a little late (sometimes not even that late) I love a good good deep chat. We all do I reckon… if not then why not???
I’ve never had religious beliefs ever, it will sound blasphemous but at school when we were being fed stories from the bible I always thought that they were man-made and never came from some divine magical place (I did enjoy singing the hymns though).
My reasoning at this young age was simple and it came from the greek myths (which i absolutely love). I still remember my teacher explaining to my class at this tender age that the ancient Greeks didn’t understand the world fully, so in an attempt to piece it all together they used these ‘myths’ to explain how everything works. Atlas holds up the sky to stop is from crushing us, Pandora released all the evils in the world by opening a box and in ancient Egypt Ra rode a chariot which carried the sun around the Earth… simples.
Its too late now love…
We now scoff at these ideas in our enlightened 21st century, so I thought surely people in 1000 years will be scoffing at us. ‘Haha they believed god sent them a son who turned water into wine and who died but came back again anyway.’ (I must apologise if I sound offensive, I’m just trying to explain how I viewed things, I don’t mean to sound so negative, In my book people can believe whatever they want, If it makes you happy then I’m happy!).
Well when I got to about 15 I had the sudden realisation that, if I don’t believe in god then I probably don’t believe in an afterlife. This hit home hard, When you’re young you think you’ll live forever. It took me about a week to lift the cloud, my mum was actually really helpful and I chatted to her about it loads over that week. I genuinely would love to have a faith and believe in a higher purpose. However I think everything is kinda random and you should just enjoy it while you can. A few years ago a friend recommended that I read Richard Dawkin’s ‘God Delusion’. I still haven’t read it to this day, I’m worried that after reading it I will be a complete atheist (It sits on my book shelf taunting me!).
Consciousness is something however that I find fascinating. Our brain stores memories and these memories define us. If you lose the memories i.e. die, then surely we cease to exist and more importantly are consciousness essentially evaporates away into nothingness???
Well there is a new interesting theory which looks at this in a completely different way. Its called Biocentrism (I promise you its a real theory and not the plot from a bad B-movie), this states that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around. It sounds crazy and it does pander to that hope we all have in that we want to believe in something bigger and the whole after life malarkey that entails.
Its not complete hocus pocus though as it aligns itself strictly with the laws of quantum mechanics and some of the stuff that comes out of that seem crazy at first. Propagation of energy is one that still baffles me, the idea that on a microscopic level every action we make in the world resonates with every particle in existence is mind blowing (thank you Brian Cox for that nugget of knowledge).
The guy who writes all this stuff is called Robert Lanza. Hes not some nutjob, he is actually considered to be one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
The theory implies that death of consciousness does not exist. It only exists as a man made idea because we identify ourselves with our bodies. We believe that when the body perishes, then consciousness will disappear too, because the body generates consciousness. But if the body actually receives consciousness then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle. In fact then consciousness must exist outside of the constraints of time and space? Consciousness is able to be anywhere. in the human body and outside of it in other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.
It is all still just a theory, but a very interesting one at that, if not simply because it challenges the way we preconceive things.
Thats me done for today. In an effort to lighten things up, here’s a song I’ve been listening to loads recently (although David Cameron did say he likes them, so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t listen).
Philly out!
Image credit from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora
One man's adventures in the big wide world! 