Survival and Salvation: Observations
I am thinking, ‘If I were an alien observer and investigator who had been sent to study the people of earth, say over several millennia, and allowed to interview them at random, from the most “important” of their kind to the absolute lowest levels of surviving Earthian life possible, what would I have recorded? What would I have heard?’
Alien or not (moot point) I have enough past lives in memory, and enough insight from this one life, to have some idea what my observations would contain, what my reports would say about the people of Earth. In all the chaos of Earthian thought and in their deeds, what are the common denominators in all of them? What truly matters to Earthians, regardless of where they find themselves, what language they speak, what their economic or social status happens to be?
This is what my record says: survival and salvation. If I sift through all that I have experienced myself, as a sincere practitioner of “Earthianity” over the centuries as I “jumped” across time from one era to another, I always come back to this: the people of Earth want to live; are willing to go to any length, to commit any sort of atrocity, to achieve this. Also knowing that despite all their efforts to survive no one gets out alive, they want some kind of guarantee that if they are designed to cheat death in some form: as spirits, or as souls, that they will be saved, meaning that they will go on to enjoy a new, trouble-free existence in some other world. Concurrent with the idea of spirit/soul salvation, is the concept of reincarnation as well. While this does not guarantee a new life free of problems, it at least guarantees a new life, i.e., continuity. This is called salvation.
My record would also show that in recent years a growing number of Earthians have chosen to believe that their personal life ends with their own physical death. Scientific realizations coupled with the inevitable philosophical conflict between science and religion, along with the great anti-religion revolutions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries gave birth to a growing population of atheists and hedonists. These people reject the existence of deities, or of a single all-powerful and all-controlling deity and claim that one physical life is all there is – and within the available resources of their belief they can prove this. To these people, longevity and a lifestyle that produces the most pleasing results to the five basic physical senses is what matters. This is called survival.
Quite apart from the interesting and endless discussions that would derive from looking at these concepts, I suspect that the reason I was sent to investigate what makes people tick is to correlate that information with Earthian social developments; how they came to be here from there; what they did on their way to the here and now. Having created a comprehensive computer analysis of this social movement across the millennia, (never mind the extreme temptation to run programs to show what would have happened “if” any course had changed, for example, Neanderthal man had evolved naturally and there was no “missing link” or any sudden evolutionary leap for man; the Hebrews had successfully conquered all of the “Promised Land” and continued on to absorb the entire known world into their own empire; the Roman empire had not collapsed – or never happened; the Axis Powers had conquered the planet, etc.) the computer would then be programmed to extrapolate that information to create a believable “future” for mankind.
Assuming that man does not (cannot?) evolve beyond his basic modus operandi of survival and salvation, how does that shape the future? Where will the energetic, the driving force, go? The one thing it does is increasingly pit science (survival) against religion (salvation). Extrapolating current conditions, what happens?
If society’s driving force goes to science, the planet is inexorably pulled into survival mode. Science fiction, too often emulated in “real life” to make anyone comfortable, has shown that those who rule will want to control man and natural resources. That means despotic rule planet-wide; the culling of billions of Earthians considered of no value to the global economy and the enslavement of the rest. It means control over reproduction and likely all new Earthian life grown in vats – custom built Earthians to serve the specific needs of the controlling elites. Everything will be measured and counted and programmed. No Earthian will possess any form of personal freedom. Hope for human development on earth will be extinguished.
If the driving force goes to religion, to salvation, the scenario changes drastically on the surface, but the results are equally damning. Religion is the least forgiving force on this world. Where religion rules, people suffer. That’s a given. The New World Religion will not allow non-conforming lesser religious groups or communities to exist. They will be absorbed or they will be destroyed. Hedonists and atheists will be forced to become “believers” or they too will be destroyed. A global religion police will hunt down and systematically destroy its enemies. The world will be awash in terror and bloodshed and man will be plunged in the darkest of dark ages he’s ever encountered. No one will be able to express a personal thought that disagrees with the ruling religion’s dogma. To do so will mean exposure, arrest, interrogation and finally death by torture. As was the case during the Spanish Inquisition, there will be no higher court to appeal to.
Because man’s driving force is survival and/or salvation, then it won’t matter if a form of state or global government runs the office, or a form of monetary system, say, capitalism, runs the bank. In terms of survival or salvation, neither of these lesser powers can function without support from science or religion. Because man is locked into his basic “SS” program, he must bring about his own enslavement; possibly his own destruction. No one, according to my observations, is “immune” to the basic survival/salvation programming. Surprisingly, while apparently inimical to each other in polemics, they run concurrently side by side, without any conflict at all. They are what Earthian man is programmed to be.
The question that would be put to me upon delivering the results of my observations is, “Can the survival/salvation program be broken? And if it could, then by whom? And what would replace it?”
I know the answer to that. Do you?
Science is not a villain in any way unless it becomes some sort of religion like Scientology. Science only seeks to uncover the truth, however difficult that is. So science does not lead to a robot society, but a more enlightened one because knowledge is power, even though it is often suppressed by ignorance.
At this stage, we know that we are mammals. By looking at the behavior of other mammals we find both curious and altruistic behavior like different species nurturing young and seemingly cruel and violent behavior with battles over territory and even life between alpha males and warring tribes of the same species. Since we are also evolved in the same line, we naturally have these primitive behaviors and instincts imprinted in our brains as part of our survival. It is only recently, within the last 10,000 years or so, that those instincts and behaviors have been altered by speech and writing. Our world is much different now, but those primal thoughts still run our world, often to our dismay.
Spiritualism may exist in other animals, but it is not expressed, at least in a way that we can yet understand. Throughout most of our existence as hunters and gatherers, only the strongest and most resourceful survived and had offspring. Brutal behavior like a mother cheetah abandoning a sick cub, may have been practiced by our ancestors to have enough food to make it through the winter or a drought. Spiritualism brought about human sacrifice in the same vein.
To sum up, survivalism is far older than spiritualism and spiritualism is only possible with communication between individuals and abstract thinking because spiritualism has no survival value. Our survival now no longer depends upon hunting and gathering, but in science. It is only with science that the human species will be able to overcome the great obstacles that the natural world (and the so-called "civilized" world) will throw at us in geological time.
Ron
Love ya!
Jane
As with everything else these days, the Internet is becoming the major influence in social structure, replacing hierarchies with networks, perhaps networks of hierarchies. I think it is a question of whether we are heading for total democracy or total anarchy. Of course, either success will be the end of the other.
All I'm saying is that the current times are unprecedented in human social history. You and I need a look at the report that your objective observer records in the coming couple of centuries. Alas, we suffer the same constraints that many another future gazer from the past has suffered: mortality will interfere with our fervent wishes.
Best regards,
Leland