Celebrating Immortality
Chris King, 9.32011

What is the antidote to the existential dilemma and the ultimate
answer to the meaning of life? I am going to unravel the trillion
dollar question to the life the universe and everything in a
nutshell! This is practical, exciting, urgent, necessary and the
biggest challenge any of us could face. It transcends and encompasses
all forms of religious belief in a greater reality that is also
completely at one with the scientific revolution.
This is something we all need to come together on, and form a
movement, to safeguard the future together, with an enthusiasm that
outshines all traditional religions, because it is the way of life's
incandescent conscious future. To do this we need to integrate nature
and spirituality in a new way.
People turn to religion to try to find the ultimate answer to the
reason for conscious existence. However, because religious ideas
haven't caught up with the scientific revolution, we end up stuck
with the invention of the woolly-haired moral deity and notions of
heaven and hell, to try to build a moral firmament around the
vagaries of human existence.
However the revolution of science is sweeping away our preconceived
notions and bringing us face to face with a universe of stunning
complexity, which our forefathers and mothers couldn't have even
dreamed of. At the same time, the spiritual and conscious dimension
has remained fixed in traditional religion with some New Age
fantasies thrown into the cauldron of cultural beliefs, from Eastern
mysticism to shamanism, and a revival of the fertility Goddess. The
spiritual dimension needs to catch up, if we are going to save the
planet from a mass extinction and threats to our own survival and
good health, driven by relentless human impact and lack of long-term
foresight.
So what is the galvanizing raison d'etre that brings us all together
as 'one' to save the world and bring about the immortal age of paradise?
There is a two-fold key: (1) Central to the secret of existence
driving the religious impulse is that the universe is conscious and
we have also come to understand that (2) consciousness arises through
the living species, and so far as we know only the living species
(not God or an angel in the heavenly vacuum) - i.e. the biota - and
thus becomes conscious of itself and comes to understand itself ever
more deeply.
If you like we are collectively 'God' in a state of becoming through
the conscious passage of the generations.
Essentially this is a complementary cosmology. Although we discover
our individual consciousness seems to be a fragile product of our
biological brain state, we know that our subjective consciousness is
the only actual experience we have from birth to death, with the
physical universe witnessed only through our conscious experiences,
so consciousness remains complementary to our natural bodies and
physical existence. This is a manifestation of the fact that the
conscious brain is the most highly evolved expression of the quantum-
cosmological laws of nature in the known universe and probably in the
entire universe.
Humanity has already evolved to the point where we are able to
experience both that we are living biological beings and that we are
conscious beings witnessing the paradox of incarnate sentient
existence. We are able to define in meditative contemplation a deep
relationship between our individual consciousness and its archetypal
basis in what one might call cosmic consciousness.
Despite the rule of tooth and claw, humanity is a climax species of
the evolutionary process with a long and blessed lifespan if we use
it wisely. We have become blessed with a capacity for self-
consciousness, the experience of free will and the capacity to change
the course of history, the ability to invoke culture, art, music and
science, maintaining a creative record of our emergence and
development in an evolving state of future shock at the changes we
have been bringing about on the planet and to one another, the
ability to love and be loved and to experience the ecstasy of being-
in-love, and to have a sense of conscience and empathy with others,
which makes it possible for us to stand on the threshold of a cosmic
awakening into our ongoing role in the universe and its future.
However, although humanity is a climax species there is no evidence
that this is the end of the road. The relentless potential of life
that has resulted in our evolution as an intelligent self-aware
conscious species still has the potential to reach even greater
heights of awareness and greater depths of conscious meditation,
unless we, in our selfishness and folly, allow ourselves to destroy
the potential future, by inflicting serious long-term damage on the
future viability of life on Earth.
Traditional religions teach us that we are fallible mortals,
potential or actual sinners, who without the support of the fatherly
creator God would be destitute and helpless. Hinduism, and the Judeo-
Christian Islamic complex all share this sense of human frailty and
flawed as all nature is deemed flawed and cursed partly for its
essential sexuality. This leaves us as supplicant beings, cursed with
original sin in the Christian paradigm, and child like, dependent on
God, al-Llah, or Jesus as Lord and Savior, unable to take full
personal responsibility for our fate, or for the impact humanity is
having on the planetary future.
Buddhism attempts to address the suffering of human attachment to the
physical through renunciation, again perceiving the natural world as
a gross manifestation of an essentially conscious reality, in which
all living organisms are merely conscious beings and a rare
threatened species is no more valuable than a common rodent. Thus
although many Buddhist paths lay claim to protecting life and
respecting nature, the vision is unbalanced and in effect a
patriarchal vision of consciousness supreme over flawed matter.
The twin notions of apocalypse, or the covers being thrown off
reality in the unveiling, in a tumult of future-shock and the fall
from paradise, through a falling out of sexual relationship into a
male-dominant hierarchy in which woman is cursed as the devil's
gateway, or unclean, are an archetypal description of our own
cultural emergence, departure from the gather-hunter lifestyle into
patriarchal city states, the tumult of conflicting civilizations amid
war and the rumors of war, running through to the invention of
nuclear weapons and a potential mass extinction of life through
unconstrained human impact.
With the growth of science, the explosion of the human population to
potentially unsustainable levels, the invention of weapons of mass
destruction, including nuclear Armageddon, and the ever increasing
human impact causing planet-wide habitat destruction, climate
instability and depletion of non-renewable resources, driven by the
emergence of a multi-national world culture spanning the entire
planet, there is an urgent need for our survival, for us to now come
of age to the point where we can each accept personal responsibility
for the fate of the planet, and do what is necessary to safeguard the
future generations of humanity and the diversity of life.
These concerns continue to take second place to business as usual,
the struggle for economic endless growth, the greed of short term
investment and a tragedy of the commons driven by winner take all
venture capital, the accumulation of vastly disproportionate wealth
amid near or actual starvation, and claims to intellectual property
such as entire genomes, which are the endowment of the planetary
heritage. Many of these features share characteristics of the
spermatogenic reproductive strategy resulting from the patriarchal
dominance of our traditional world cultures.
However the golden lining is that the future is not simply a repeat
of the past. The future is absolutely nascent and unfolding before
our eyes. While we do have the capacity for cosmic consciousness, we
have at this point in time no idea of the full potential of the
evolutionary process to give rise to even deeper and more
illuminating forms of consciousness than we have experienced to date.
Thus saving the planet and the future of life is not just a question
of a banal life of more of the same, playing guitars under the
coconut trees, but is an unfolding sacred task capable of invoking
paradises we have not conceived of, or hells as bad, or worse, than
we have triggered in genocidal war and nuclear holocaust and
potentially of a vastly longer duration. Genetic damage to the
planet's evolutionary heritage is irreversible and could take
millions of years to recover from.
This means that the specters of heaven and hell are not just
contrived fantasies, but destinies we could end up bringing about, in
both physical and conscious form, if we don't have the foresight to
understand the portal role conscious beings play in the ongoing life
of the sentient universe. Seeking the afterlife, or immortal
individual existence, is a fallacy of perspective that comes from a
lack of empathy with all conscious beings and a misunderstanding of
the way sexuality provides for endless conscious variety within the
cosmic underlying basis of consciousness itself. So although we are
mortal, we are one in spirit and if we do the right thing and make
true meaning of our lives we become part of the immortal web of
consciousness - the universe coming to know even also as we are known.
The purpose and meaning of life in the present is that we are the
portal guardians and protectors of an even greater potential future,
in which conscious life will discover ever more deeply the nature of
existence, This is an immortal process, in which we all become one,
in giving to the unfolding of the passage of the conscious
generations, becoming in effect the eyes of divinity coming to know
and understand itself and ourselves, through the sentient biota of
the planetary biospheres.
This fidelity to conscious runs deeper than humanity as a species,
and deeper than Earth as just one planet. Life may surpass the Earth
and spread beyond, and life may also evolve beyond humanity as we
know it.
However, because we all share sentient conscious existence, we are
each in the likeness of the cosmic source. Each of us is a focal
point of the universe, discovering more deeply its own relationship
with existence over the entire time the universe evolves. By becoming
one with the unfolding passage of the generations, in giving our best
to cherish and replenish the Earth's living viability, we gain the
sense of meaning and connectedness with life in the passage of the
generations. While we are alive we then gain the free lunch of being
able to witness the extraordinary nature of conscious existence, to
love, to procreate, to have visions and to sample in our inner
contemplation, the deepest essential nature of conscious experience
on a cosmic footing.
The experience of the universe of itself is an eternal process,
extending throughout space-time, uniting all sentient beings who come
into existence, wherever and whenever they arise. In the cosmic
nature of consciousness, complementing the evolving state of
biological life of the biota, lies the timeless moment shared by all
sentient beings that have ever lived and currently living and shall
ever come into sentient existence, throughout the length and breadth
of the universe in space-time, from alpha to omega.
So the eight-fold recipe for the meaning of existence is as follows:
1. Life is good and our personal incarnations as conscious beings are
here to help the universe become super-conscious and fully discover
its deepest mysteries.
2. Consciousness is a complementary cosmological manifestation to the
natural universe, which comes through living species - the biota - as
the most completely developed forms of the fundamental laws of
physics and cosmology.
3. The purpose and meaning of life, in each generation, is to act as
the guardian and portal for a potentially even more awesome conscious
experience of reality in succeeding generations, while enjoying the
paradox of sentient existence to the full in our own lifetimes.
4. Sex is good and essential to the fertility and diversity of
conscious life. Our role as sexual beings is central to the
expression of the life force and it is from sex that consciousness
emerges rather than sex being a degeneration of conscious purity. In
the paradox of sex and courtship each sex finds its meaning and
creative fulfillment in gaining the acceptance of the other so that
neither sex is dominant in the evolultionary race of super-intelligence.
5. We need urgently to gather together to express this reality of
living guardianship with enthusiasm in pagent and celebration, both
because it makes us one together in the incarnate process and makes
everything we do worthwhile, because it is the meaning and the only
real path of value, and because we need to parry other forces, both
of religious fundamentalism, which could damage the planetary future
and personal greed and exploitation, which also blinds people to the
greater good and the needs of the long-term future.
6. This can be given fertile expression in all the rites of passage
of life, from birth, sacred partnership to passing away, in the
festivals of the seasons, in sexual coitus, in the art and music of
human creativity shared in a celebratory setting and in social and
environmental activism to cherish the Earth and replenish it.
7. We need to do this consensually as egalitarian coinhabitants, not
following leaders or an established priesthood or any other form of
bondage to our autonomy as conscious sentient beings. The natural
sacraments of the biosphere are the living visionary species, and
their various molecular variants, which along with meditative
techniques, and sexual fulfillment, provide all humanity with a
capacity to witness first hand the immanence and transcendence of the
conscious mysterium tremendum.
8. We need above all to protect the living diversity of the planet,
its species diversity, its genetic diversity and the genetic,
cultural and creative diversity and viability of our own human
species. This requires having a very astute inscrutable understanding
of genetic processes and the human impacts upon them.