We are only able to see as much as we need to see in order to survive. We need to find food, protect ourselves from enemies and find a partner. Our eyes have not evolved to sense infrared light simply because we don’t need this ability to get by. This is the biological point of view.

Our eyes can sense red, green and blue. Birds and insects are able to sense also ultraviolet light. Radio waves, X-rays and infrared light are invisible to all of us.

So, what we can see is only a small fraction of the whole spectrum.

Similarly, we can only understand what we need to understand in order to survive. We need to find food, protect ourselves from enemies, find a partner and have some fun. Our brains have not evolved to understand much more than this.

However, some people are not satisfied with what they have and what they can understand. They want to know it all. They want to see it all. They want to understand what they are not able to understand. Are there many more universes out there? Are there angels out there who protect us? What is God like? Is he a he, really? Maybe he is a she. Is the brain a prism that filters the universal consciousness or is the brain like a radio receiver? This is the spiritual perspective.

Most people are not interested in understanding things. They are like old people with bad hearing who only hear what they want to hear. They try to turn off as much as they can of the world. They put blinders on, and head sets. They live in very, very small worlds, like cage birds. This is the mainstream point of view.

I have arrived at this: Scientific speculations or spiritual speculations are the same to me. It’s fun with wild speculations. I love to read about cutting edge science, spiritual exploration and philosophy, but it is not that important. It is a pastime.

It’s so much more important with what I can understand, what I can see with my own two eyes, how I live my life and how we ought to live here on earth.

Is it really necessary with war and competition? As far as I can see, it is not. The idea that war and competition is important is an idea propagated by those who like war and competition. They believe that without war and competition there wouldn’t be any evolution. This is a justification, a thought, a mental construct.

We are not baboons. We are not chimpanzees. We are not living in caves anymore. We are not peasants filled with superstition. We are not living in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries any longer. We are living here and now, in this time period, after the Second World War, after the Vietnam War, after the discoveries made by the quantum physicists.

 

Beliefs

Beliefs can make you cynical and bitter. Beliefs can make you think that life is totally meaningless. Beliefs can make you think that you are a complete idiot and that life is not worth living.

However, beliefs can also make you happy. And beliefs can make your life worth living even under terrible circumstances.

It was a common belief in Germany in the nineteen thirties and the beginning of the nineteen forties that the German people was a superior race and that their destiny was to subjugate other inferior “races”. Those beliefs made the Germans feel self confident and strong. Those beliefs gave them a meaning to life.

People in England had similar beliefs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were deeply convinced that they were superior to Africans, Asians and Native Americans. Most people in Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Holland were also filled with such ideas. Slave trading and stealing other peoples land was not a crime to them.

They were also, somehow, able to reconcile their beliefs of superiority with their Christian faith. The various Christian churches saw no problem with this. The slave trade and the stealing of other peoples land and possessions were completely in consistency with The Bible according to the theological authorities.

It can be enormously liberating to realize that a belief is just a belief, a crazy idea, an illusion. It can be like waking up from a nightmare realizing that it was only a weird dream.

 

Social programing

Things in life are not just enfolding. We make hundreds of decisions every day but we are seldom aware of it. The decision-making is taking place in our subconscious mind.

The first unconscious decision we make in the morning is usually if we shall get out of bed or not. This first decision of the day makes us jump out of bed and do what we have to do in order to get to work in time.

When we sit in our car on our way to work, we are often not even aware that we are driving a car. We are somewhere else, listening to the morning news on the radio or lost in a daydream. Our subconscious mind is doing the driving for us. Isn’t this weird? We act like programmed robots. We are, it seems, to a very large extent programmed robots.

Anyway, life gets too complicated if we begin to question what we are doing. This is probably why we avoid the questioning. To question what one is doing is to throw a spanner in the works.

I have had many crazy ideas in my life and I have taken many decisions from this confused state of mind. I have been driven by stupid ideas, laziness, egotistical ideas and other people’s ideas. Those ideas took me to California, Mexico, India, Africa and many other places. Those stupid ideas have also showed me many interesting synchronicities, which to me is proof that there is a mystical dimension operating from underneath or outside my conscious and subconscious mind. This level of consciousness has also a finger in the pie. Isn’t this strange? Maybe delusions, self-deceptions and stupid ideas serve a purpose after all.

Transitions

The herd instinct in is very strong in human beings. We follow the herd. We have an inborn desire to belong to a group. We feel lonely and miserable when we don’t have a group to belong to. Some people can to do almost anything to be accepted by a group.

You feel safe and more relaxed when you have found a group who accept you; a group with a set of ideas and beliefs to fall in with, a gang, a pack, a religious or spiritual community, a political party, a bunch of pot heads, a bunch of activists, a bunch of would be artists, a bunch of down and outs, a workplace, a company, a family, an identity…

However, the flock behavior looses its grip over us when we grow older. Older people are no longer desperate to fit in. We loose interest in dress codes and social codes. We need a group who accepts us, yes, but not at all costs. We don’t need to become something anymore. We don’t need to prove how good we are. We don’t care too much about belief systems any longer.

Some older people, though, hold on too tightly to their beliefs and outdated worldviews. They have a problem with the transition. They have been conservatives, racists, or social climbers for so many years and they believe that there is nothing else in life to live for but status and money. It is similar to when teenagers have a problem with the transition to adulthood. It is like when thirty years olds act like teenagers.

It is similar to when 10 years olds still believe in Santa Claus.

It is also similar to, for example, when the Catholic Church refused to accept that the earth was not at the center with the sun and the moon revolving around it. The scholastic authorities refused to even look through a telescope. Galileo was wrong. If he was right, their worldview would fall apart and this was of course impossible. The church was infallible. The Catholic Church kept Galileo’s books on astronomy on the index of prohibited books until 1835.

Religious and political fanatics, mainstream fanatics, sports fanatics, criminal gangs, drinking buddies, there are so many different groups of people we can end up with and which we eventually have to abandon in order to grow.

It can be very hard, though, to abandon a group, a sect, a worldview, a false belief, a political opinion or a religious misconception. It can be as hard as it is for an alcoholic to give up alcohol.

We have to face it. Either we keep on drinking or we don’t. Either we keep on trucking, or we don’t. Either we wake up or we don’t.

No self in Buddhism

 

Reflections and shadows do not exist, if nobody is there who sees them. They do not consist of anything. They have no weight and no fixed shape. You cannot touch them or smell them. They are immaterial.

The sense of being here and now, awake and conscious, is like a shadow or a reflection in the sense that it is immaterial; it does not consist of anything. However, a reflection of a birch tree in a pool of water is a reflection of something. The sense of being here right now is not a reflection of anything. Or, maybe it is? Who knows?

A birch tree consists of something, molecules, atoms and whirling electrons, but it is not really a tree until someone is there who notices it. Physicists say, “If the nucleus of an atom were as big as a pinhead, the atom would be as big as a football stadium”. Also real stuff consists of practically nothing. The observer is necessary to make reality real.

Maybe the observer, the sense of being here, noticing the world, arises not just because of a number of neurons are firing. This sense of being here, right now, awake, is maybe also a reflection of something. Without firing neurons, no sense of being here would emerge, of course, and without a sense of being here, noticing the consciousness of being here, there would be no firing neurons. There would be just empty space with a few vibrating particles here and there, and electromagnetic fields between them.