hi steven... first of all, i take it that we agree that neither of us can
prove the existence of a unified spiritual essence (that i contend is our
true nature), or disprove it.... esp. not in this e-mail forum... that
being the case, i wanted to quote something from the book Stranger in a
Strange Land by Robert Heinlein... of course it doesn't prove anything, but
i find it interesting and possibly persuasive... in other words, i couldn't
have said it better myself... :) so anyway, here goes...
"The Universe was a damned silly place at best... but the least likely
explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the
conceit that some abstract somethings "just happened" to be some atoms that
"just happened" to get together in configurations which "just happened" to
look like consistent laws and then some of these configurations "just
happened" to possess self-awareness and that two such "just happened" to be
the Man from Mars and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself
inside.
No, Jubal would not buy the "just happened" theory, popular as it was
with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a
sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not
sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself."
spirit
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Bissell <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, November 10, 1998 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: gentlemen?
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bryan Hyden <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Monday, November 09, 1998 6:00 PM
>Subject: Re: gentlemen?
>
>
>>>If we are "not of this earth," what are we of? "Transcend the physical
>>>world"? How? Sorry, but you've really lost me here. Are you talking
>>>trascendentalism as in eastern religions or what?
>>
>>well, we are not our bodies... if you get your hand chopped off, you are
>>still the same person... we are not our emotions or our thoughts... we
>>are aware of HAVING these things, but we are not these things.... it
>isn't
>>necessarily eastern religion, but it is very similar to it... (snip a
>lot)
>
>My position is that we *are* our bodies. If you get a hand chopped off you
a
>different person, by a factor of exacly one hand. We evolved on this Earth,
>we are of this Earth, we are inseperable from this Earth. Our brain is the
>organ of awareness, awareness is not outside of the functioning of the
>brain. The existence or not of a God(dess or Gods) is essentially a
question
>of astrophysics, if they exist, we'll find them some where, some place,
some
>time.
>
>My dog and I sit outside at night sometimes looking at the stars. I see the
>same stars as my dog, but my awareness of the stars is different from the
>dog due to different types of brain function, not because I'm "higher" or
>"superior" to my dog. The dog smells stuff, not stars, in the yard of which
>I'm completely unaware. The dog does this because of different brain
>function, not because it's "higher" or "superior." We are just different
>inhabitants of the same Earth, different evolutionary histories.
>
>I also think that just as the dog cannot be aware of the nature of stars,
>there are probably a lot of things of which I cannot be aware due to the
way
>my brain functions. But, my brain and my mind are the same thing, or I
>suppose, the mind is an invention of the brain.
>
>Steven J. Bissell
>http://www.du.edu/~sbissell
>http://www.responsivemanagement.com
>Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal
>in a social, omnivorous niche. Our demography is one of
>a slow-breeding, large, intelligent primate.
>To shatter our population structure, to become abundant
>in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological
>relations with the rest of nature, it sets the stage
>for our mass insanity.
> Paul Shepard
>
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