Playful Utopian Ponderings
A philosophical view on the (near?) infinite multitudes of consciousness.
Good and Evil exist in uncountable manifestations. We are only able to endure the sheer extent of evil, because we experience it from one limited, individual point of view, not all at the same time. It’s the same with the good. Complete understanding of infinite beauty would also be unbearable for our finite being.
Illumination begins with the acceptance of the limitation of this — our — point of view. Our physical form contains certain sensory abilities, with which it perceives the environment surrounding it. Many people do not believe in a transcendent increase of this perception, because they have never encountered it themselves, have forgotten or repressed it. The multitude of all possible variations to live in and experience our world, seems to indicate though, that these known to us are just a fraction of the potentially universally existing consciousness.
An example for this is the legendary sense of smell of a dog. An even simpler example would be the dog itself. Whoever is able to imagine to be a dog for just a moment, doesn’t have to go on pondering to understand that my own — egocentric — perspective of being is completely different from that of other creatures. How many creatures are there? There are humans and dogs and cats and horses and squirrels and rhinos, dwarf otters and wild Tibetan lowland bullocks, eagles, clownfish, turtles, tortoises and more and more and so many more… from each one these animals there are female and male, young and old, healthy and not so healthy… and from each of these there are thousands, millions, maybe billions and more individual personalities that perceive their environment in a distinctive way.
And only now do we get to the surreal numbers, that some of us know by name, but for which none of us has a real understanding. Who knows exactly how much a quintillion or even a nonillion really is?
If we also count insects, bacteria, plants and — dare we say — beings that live on subatomic quantum levels to “creatures that exist and are able to experience being in some sort of unique way”, we could start now listing every single version of it and if we should ever finish (spoiler: we would not), we’d have completed the longest book ever written. Probably even the longest book ever written, if you combine all other books and count them as one.
Other planets. Assuming that in this seemingly infinite universe there is life on other planets as well — and this is probably a good time to come to terms with the statistical probability of this possibility — how many distinct perspectives of reality exist in all?
It looks like numerically only those micro (and micromicromicro) organisms can keep up here. Or can they? Where do more living beings exist? At the macro level or the micro level?
At first glance the answer to this seems clear: at the micro level of course, since every macro consciousness carries nearly uncountable micro consciousnesses within. But what if every micro creature is another macro creature for a myriad of even smaller micro creatures? And where does macro start and where does micro end? Where do we begin to count? And where — if ever — do we conclude?
It sounds complex, has — however — a fascinatingly simple conclusion:
If so many forms of consciously perceiving the environment already exist around us, it seems rather unlikely that those known to us, are the only possible options — for us as well.
Why then is it so difficult to think outside the box and admit that the explainable world is just a fragment of a potentially obtainable for us? Have we gotten so used to our way of living that we believe that something else might be conceivable, yet shy away from it out of comfort, instead of taking the first steps to move towards it?
All the good and all the evil that exists in everything is inconceivable for us.
That is a good thing too, since mere human consciousness would instantly go insane, should the filters ever fall, without us being prepared for it.
How many people live with diseases of the mind, mental blockages, depression, how many driven to madness, how many broken people are there, because the veil sometimes collapses?
I would claim it’s all of them.
Some might disagree and say all of that is genetically inherited. Our DNA is guilty of all human afflictions. Where exactly though does our DNA come from? What journey have our genes undertaken to arrive at the point they are at now and what have they endured on it? Did it change them? Because if DNA does not change, how can it be that it continuously does so anyways and through this change within itself only ever makes a living beings evolution possible?
We carry inside us the heritage of all our ancestors before us, and whatever they experienced, what they perceived, thought, felt and what they did, still influences us today in the most recent incarnation of this genetic material.
Particularly having a look at our western world and the ancestors who created it, we have to close our eyes quite thoroughly to fail to notice the blood and hate, the greed and violence, the frustration and fear which for centuries has been stuck on the hands of those whose tainted genes we carry.
Yet we are no slaves to our DNA. It is our nearly unlimited consciousness which allows us to break our chains and decide freely which direction we are going to choose and what kind of genetic fingerprints we are going to leave for the following generations.
If we actually achieve this freedom, we will feel like so many before us, who have been constrained for a long period of time. We are terrified of this newfound independence. We yearn for the cold, yet familiar bars of our cages. So many paths and each one will be built on the responsibility of our own decisions. Responsibility not just for ourselves, but for the start into life of our children, children’s children and all generations that will ever follow, for we are just another link in the chain which will ultimately unfold and carry on the biological, emotional and mental heritage of our original roots.
Self-conscious through self-reflection, we are the ever swinging, yet always constant present, which utilizes, digests and transforms the treasures and the pollution of the completed past towards a potential future which builds upon itself.
This future is what it is all about. If we only focus on creating an optimal world which I-I-I can still experience, the impossibility of this task overwhelms us, before we have even started. “Go ahead and build Rome in one day”, said the stressed out mayfly to its dead mother.
The secret to the completion of Utopia lies in the acceptance of never being able to experience it yourself…
… but we have to do something.
So we might as well start putting down the foundation right now.
