Evolution: Expansion of the degrees of freedom
Darwin set us on the path to believing that what we are now is a result of millions of years of evolution from non-organic matter and everything erupted by chance. The life forms that exist at present are a result of a phenomenon called survival of the fittest. The fierce competition amongst living beings gradually shaped the life forms by making them more and more intelligent to survive the harsh conditions. The humans are supposed to be the pinnacle of that evolution. Does the human evolution stop here? Do humans evolve to something else and if yes then when, how, and to what?
No doubt intelligence is improving from a dog to a dolphin to a human but intelligence is not the cause rather it’s one of the effects of evolution. Aspects other than intelligence are also evolving as we move ahead in the progression of evolution. The physical aspects like body parts are also improving which allows a being to utilize it more specifically. The ability to feel different feelings is also improving. In short, The faculties involved in operating the body, feelings, thoughts, and intelligence are improving with evolution.
We can ascribe the improvement in two dimensions i.e. the degrees of freedom and the quality within a degree of freedom. The body of an ant can move only in one straight line but a frog can also jump above the ground. An ant may feel distress on exposure to harmful stimuli but don’t feel pain. A frog on the other hand very well feels pain. Ants’ thoughts are limited to completing their allocated tasks within the ant society whereas frogs can think to hide when attacked by another being. Similarly, the intelligence of a frog is more evolved to enable it to find its prey, safe place, and mate on its own whereas an ant has no intelligence to survive on its own.
The attributes of body, feelings, thoughts, and intelligence are evolving in terms of gaining more ways of expressing freedom as well as getting more depth in the existing freedoms of expression. From Amoeba to insects to fish and millions of other forms until it manifests itself in the form of humans. The body of a human allows it to become free through all sorts of movements to any desirable place. A plethora of human feelings allows it to feel in so many different ways that were unfathomable in its previous evolutionary forms. Thoughts and intelligence have allowed it to discover the facets of life as well as non-life even outside our planet.
Consciousness: the subject of evolution
The four attributes described earlier i.e. body, emotions, thoughts, and intelligence are the discernible objects to a certain subject. Imagine the body of a dead person where there is no subject to experience it or due to a neurological condition there is no experience of any emotions. At the core of these attributes, there is an experiencer(subject), that uses the apparatus of body and mind to experience the senses, emotions, thoughts, and intelligence. This subject is called consciousness.
Consciousness is the most fundamental concept of existence. At the same time, it is the most complex thing to comprehend. Consciousness is the phenomenon that makes us aware that we exist. It makes us aware of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Although in the form of our thoughts/imaginations, consciousness is also responsible for making us aware of the feelings of others as well. In that sense, it is the most fundamental thing as any thought, feeling or action is attributed to it. It is the most complex thing to comprehend because we have no explanation for it in our ordinary form of existence.
Further defining it as lower or higher is also challenging within this obscure ambit. Let us try to understand this from the point of argumentative extrapolation. Every being including ourselves can be seen to possess it and is concerned with the individual’s awareness and its respective functions. A dog’s consciousness is concerned with its feelings of getting hungry, impulsive sexual desire, human affection, and so on. A dolphin’s consciousness involves feeling empathy, joy, sadness, etc. A human’s consciousness is more evolved in terms of problem-solving, imagination, and creating things.
Materialistic views of the world are such that they believe consciousness to be a derivative of matter. Consciousness is believed to have been popped by chance out of the inorganic matter and gave way to organic matter and since then it has been proliferating. Consciousness thus is just a product of the brain. The higher the capacity of the brain, the better its ability to conceive things. Ultimately, intelligence is what dictates consciousness then. The more the ability to imagine and to memorize, the higher the consciousness.
The materialistic view limits evolution beyond matter and intelligence. It doesn’t allow any further freedom from the finitude of body and mind. The restrictions imposed upon the consciousness based on the senses and thoughts are considered insurmountable. Yet, there is an evident struggle by individuals to break free of this finiteness without a clear comprehension of what they are trying to achieve. The consciousness drives the body and mind toward infinitude, but the body and mind without any prior intelligence of what that means go through its gradual process of gathering knowledge and exploration. The materialistic view has been far left behind by 1000s of sages and saints in the pursuit of their spiritual exploration of consciousness.
Upon close observation, the game of this universe would start to reveal itself. It would become apparent that the consciousness is trying to free itself by slowly improving its degrees of freedom. In other words, evolution is how the consciousness becomes aware of its limitations and progressively frees itself from that limitation till it becomes aware of the next one. The cycle continues till it breaks free from all possible limitations. The human form seems to render consciousness the maximum freedom but the truth is the game is not over yet.
Acknowledging Finitude
All the efforts of humans can be placed under different categories of maximizing the degrees of freedom in all these four attributes. For some the efforts may lie in maximizing the degrees of freedom of the body, for some it may be feelings and yet for others, it may be thoughts/intelligence. Not necessarily the maximization happens only in one attribute but may be in a varied combination of more than one.
Does that mean that if humans are somehow able to express their freedom through all these four attributes to the maximum extent possible then the game of consciousness is over? Not exactly because the human body as well as the mind is limited. It is still finite. In the backdrop of infinity where limitlesssness is still a conceivable possibility then no matter how gravely a human can express within the finitude of its body and mind, the consciousness is still under the bounds. Consciousness has not yet experienced or reached the state of boundlessness.
What is this boundlessness and why we normal humans can’t conceive of it? It is because the bodies, feelings, and thoughts don’t know of it. Human intelligence is somehow capable of conceiving it upon reading or hearing stories but there is no experience to say firmly what it is like to break all finitudes. Even in some cases, intelligence has not yet evolved to conceive even the shores of the infinite sea. Until and unless it is experienced by the first person it essentiates otherwise, it’s just a heresay. The purpose of consciousness breaking free completely is in no way achieved by intellectual exercises.
From our own experiences as well as from intellectual capability we come to appreciate that no matter how great one becomes the physical body will always be limited. We can’t be present at two places at the same time. Mind which seems to be more vast than body, is still limited. We can’t have the first-person knowledge of what another being is thinking. So how does one break these barriers of body and mind to become infinite? Does this happen within the lifetime or it is only reserved to be true after the death of the body?
Logical analysis of the materialistic world is entirely dependent on the apparatus of sensory organs that comprise our body and mind. The bounds of the physical senses that comprise the body, in their gross forms, can never capture the essence of ‘Brahman’ in their objects. Of course, they have evolved but they have been solved only to a certain stage of capturing the gross material essence of the universe. Science can aid them in magnifying the capturing ability or the depth of the existing degrees of freedom but can’t enrich them with new degrees of freedom.
The binding link between finite and infinite
In its current state for most humans, it is the sensory organ of the mind, to whatever minute extent possible, that acts as a binding link between the gross materialistic world and the subtle domain of infinitude. The regular form of mind primarily deals with knowledge and inquiry about the material world but in a few rare cases, this same knowledge and inquiry transcends the origin of the phenomenal world, either in the form of natural or sometimes induced spiritual experiences. It is not uncommon that these experiences are refuted to be purely imaginary. It is self-contradictory when the agnostic materialistic world, claims that nothing can be known beyond the senses and yet invalidates the supra-physical experiences often as hallucination, claiming that it knows about it.
A component of the mind which can be termed as the higher mind, is establishing this association between the finiteness of the senses and infiniteness of the absolute. The existence of a higher realm necessitates a link to conjoin it with the lower realm. If there is no possibility of a higher realm then there is no need for this link altogether. From time immemorial, the human inquiry into the possibility of a higher self, though resulting in different forms of interpretation, has always rendered the same truth that there is something beyond the substance of this material world. The occasional onset of spiritual experiences has been perfected by tens of thousands of people in the past through practice and is a testimony that the picture is far from complete within the ambits of body and mind.
Welcoming Spirit: The essence of ultimate freedom
It becomes essential now to introduce the concept of spirit. On top of the four attributes of body, feelings, thoughts, and intelligence, the introduction of spirit would enable us to comprehend more about the consciousness game. Although extremely difficult to extract information on the spiritual experiences of animals, there has been some research that has established that spirituality also exists in animals. The degree of freedom in the spiritual attribute is also enhanced with evolution. In animals, the extent of expression of the consciousness may be limited, which is certainly hard to say, but in humans, it is not so difficult because of the direct self-realization experiences of thousands(known) and innumerable unknown, who have passed on this knowledge through scriptures and teachings.
Spirituality brings the missing link for the consciousness to be able to completely free itself from all the shackles and become infinite. The means to transcend the circumscription defined by our body and mind seems revealed to us. Only when one steps into the realm of spirituality, then alone he/she understand the subtle construct of life by stepping away from the gross construct. With experience and practice, the larger set of the universe of which the gross body, mind, and phenomenal world is just a minute subset becomes evident. The experienced being’s ascension to a higher degree of freedom gets established.
The onset of spirituality results in a paradigm shift of the mindset to visualize the world around us from a witness perspective rather than from a doer perspective. It allows the experiencer to observe any act around not as something happening to affect him/her but as an independent act of nature. The earlier mindset which was attracting all the attention towards itself and considering itself to be the center of all the experiences has now learned to become a non-reactive witness of all the phenomena. A deeper sense of inclusive awareness emerges that doesn’t view the happenings around itself to be something distinctive of itself.
There could be pages written about these witness experiences and how the faculties gradually develop toward mysticism. There are 100s of books already written by many yogis, saints, and mystics on these that can give the first person experience on these accounts. But the essential point is that spirituality dawns upon us a new degree of freedom to take us beyond our body and mind, to erase the boundaries of norms, to defeat all fears, to overcome all judgments, to smile at all the originating anger, to empathize on jealousy raising its head, to accept and take care of lust as a parent of an ignorant child, to become a bold protector of the fear, to guide ego as a friend, and to become a teacher to the attachment.
The depth of freedom in this unprecedented realm keeps expanding with practice and effort. The game of consciousness to free itself gets its wings and they just get stronger and bigger as it tries to flee further. No longer the form and construct of the human body and mind can contain it. It has found its way to be united with the infinity again. What a play it has been! To explore every form of limit at its minute level, experience it, acknowledge it, work to overcome it, transcend to the next level, and keep going on and on.
What can be more blissful than the consciousness of experiencing the ultimate freedom? All forms, names, time, space, causality, and whatever can be conceptualized through language dissolves into the absolute, even this ultimate freedom arises from the dissolution of the concept called freedom. The game called Life comes to its end and there is not only one path to reach the end point. There are numerous paths discovered by remarkable persons throughout the ages, who reached the endpoint and came back to teach others to elevate them from the sufferings of life. More can be read here.
Sooner or later each one of us shall be drawn towards this new degree of freedom in its pure form, which transcends hatred towards other paths, other viewpoints, other beliefs, and other ways of life. It shall be evident how silly is it to continuously engage in condemning others and see clearly that every one of us is traversing in our journey towards the ultimate freedom at our own pace. When that happens an unprecedented calmness and peace shall dawn upon us that would not only allow us to accelerate our journey to freedom but also elevate others around us. All of us will be united because, in its truest sense, we all are the same consciousness exploring different stages at different paces and marching to become one again.
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