Now that my mother is feeling a bit better, I can get back down to some abstract thinking (on a recreational basis; hey, whatever floats your boat, right?). My topic for today is one I’ve pondered in various ways over the past few years; and that is whether we humans are purely physical phenomenon; or is there an additional ontological dimension to the universe, which somehow weaves its way into us and thus makes us something more? The whole question seems to revolve around “being” and our awareness and love of being (and our usual fear of the opposite). “Being” seems so simple at first; it merely means “in a state of existence”. But then what is “existence”? Ultimately it means . . . . to be. It all gets a bit circular. The only thing that breaks the short circuit is our own awareness of being, and our desire and struggle to maintain and preserve our own being.

The evolutionists (and I generally consider myself an evolutionist; I’m not a fan of so-called “creation science”) say that our “desire to be” (aka “will to live”) isn’t hard to explain. They explain that it couldn’t have been otherwise; by some trial-and-error process over the multi-billion year history of life on earth, living systems with the most propensity to struggle for survival became the ones to propagate the genetic accidents that gave them their zest for life. Creatures born without the drive to fight and survive didn’t contribute much to the genetic pool.

But a problem arises when we humans act in ways that run counter to the “stay alive at all costs” heritage of the simple Darwinian rationale for our “being fetish”. Perhaps it’s just a quirk, but over the centuries, those having perhaps the greatest appreciation and love for “being” (not just self-being, but the being of the community, of society, and of the world) have at times offered up their own being as to protect the “higher” principals of “being”. You wouldn’t think that a purely Darwinian machine would even have the capacity to ponder such a “higher principal”, as it wouldn’t be expected to enhance survival and reproduction. (Unless you argue, as some evolutionists do, that the capacity to think and act socially was “selected” by the process in highly developed species like humans because such cooperation enhances the survival of the species as a whole; much lower life forms, like ants and termites, had also developed extremely social forms. However, such behavioral programming did not carry forward into the mammals and higher primates, for whatever reason).

In my opinion, humans are able to comprehend “being” beyond what a Darwinian machine would be expected to do, even granting that evolution sometimes creates superfluous abilities and interesting side-effects in its products. We are able to appreciate the nature of “being” far more than any other combination of matter, energy and information could. And it is that appreciation that drives us crazy. It makes us depressed, it makes us kill others and kill ourselves, it makes us into artists and musicians. And on rare occasion, it makes us into saints. It makes it equally foreseeable that humankind will eventually wipe itself out, and that humankind will eventually find the key to peace, harmony and balance for everyone.

The game that our species is playing seems well beyond anything that Darwin and his successors described. Evolution certainly did get us this far, but something else kicked-in somewhere along the road. The scientists have no way right now of getting a handle on this with their present means of measurement and analysis, so they deny that it exists. Religious people believe that it does exist, but are too tied up in ancient myths to do any fresh thinking about it. And the philosophers, who traditionally tried to walk the fine line between these two groups, now seem extremely fearful of criticism by the empiricists. So it’s hard to find a good, honest discussion on the subject (and admittedly, it’s harder still to get a grasp on it!).

But hey — ya can’t give up. “The Principal of Being”, in the broad sense of a universal force or fundamental dimension, is a “know it when you see it” proposition. And I recently saw my mother struggle back from a near-deadly medical condition; I have no doubt that I was viewing the power and reality of whatever this “BEING PRINCIPAL” is.