As a fan of Eckhart Tolle I’ve always liked his description of Consciousness (or ‘Being’ which seems his preference) as “No Thing.”
This separates “Being” from the world of form, and puts it into the area of what Tesla called “nonmaterial reality.”
I’ve generally thought of this reality as (an) Infinite Mind (again as opposed to “God”) to take out the anthropomorphic bias which seems to permeate organized religion. Political Christianity and some other groups seem to relish an angry and vengeful God to keep the parishioners paying. But when you step away from beliefs that are easily debunked you are still left with a fact.
We seem to be thinking.
Of course, it was Descartes who famously equated thought with Being, which has led to all sorts of issues that Eckhart Tolle describes well in his work. When we identify with only our thoughts, we have narrowed our focus and reduced reality to labels.
But the reality of thought persists. What is it?
Is Thought Electricity in the Brain?
Neuroscientists seem to have identified the presence of thoughts in the brain through various instruments that can pick up electrical signals in parts of the brain and between synapses.
But so far, I don’t believe they can “download” these signals and decode them.
When we observe our thoughts, we can see that they seem to be comprised of “words”. In fact, I’ve had the experience of thinking in languages other than English (my native language is German) and of course, the thoughts come as words – sometimes in cogent sentences or perhaps just one word.
So, I was musing, what about ancient humans? Did they need to form a sentence in their brains to warn them that a lion might be in the bushes?
If you’ve ever experienced trauma, you know the answer – our limbic system activates, putting us in “fight or flight” well before any thought ever happens.
I would suggest that a primal, lower frequency of Mind operates in our limbic system, before thought and language.
So, when did we start thinking in “words”?
According to my AI friend,
“scholars believe it [language] originated at least 100,000 years ago during the Middle Stone Age. The development of language is linked to the increased complexity of human culture and cognition.”
Maybe a tribe of hunter-gatherers developed a sound for “lion” and it became a warning cry. Then perhaps “big” lion or “many lions”.
We know that our ancients memorialized beasts in petroglyphs of various kinds to communicate but the next big breakthrough was when the words, sentences and thus concepts were able to be preserved.
Writing Was the Big Game Changer
AI tells us that
“Writing systems were invented independently by different civilizations thousands of years ago as a means of recording information. The earliest writing emerged around 3,500-3,000 BCE in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Chinese writing developed around 1,200 BCE.”
So now I will do what they do on Ancient Aliens, which is take a speculative leap based on the foregoing.
It intrigues me that the cultures that seemed to “create” writing all have a version of the Prometheus myth – crediting the “Gods” with giving them the gift of higher knowledge.
To connect this to the beginning of writing seems to make sense, as we have precisely these myths in Mesopotamia (Annunaki) and Egypt.
And it seems clear that with the onset of the written word (and mathematical notations) great leaps in human progress came almost in quantum intervals. We got the printing press and eventually our modern technology.
We might speculate that it is likely that Mind has been with us forever, but that thought evolved and expanded dramatically with the beginning of writing – and that writing could easily be seen as a gift that transformed human civilization.
There May Have Been Consequences for Teaching Humanity
It is also very plausible that any entity that conveyed such a gift to humanity may well have angered other entities that wanted to keep humans in check.
Cuneiform tablets from the Sumerians describe how one “God” Enki created humans in the image of the Annunaki and gave them knowledge – but most of the humans were wiped out by his rival Enil in the great flood. We now have evidence in the geological record that such a flood happened about 12,000 years ago.
But just this little thought experiment can vastly expand our sense of our place in the cosmos along with providing a much-needed dose of humility.
What if we did not simply “evolve” with natural selection but received assistance in an area we are now beginning to understand – genetics? This would indicate a profound connection to the cosmos in a way that is disregarded by our current society.
It is also worth noting, as my AI explains,
“There is evidence that around 250,000-300,000 years ago there were some key genetic changes in early humans that contributed to increased brain size and advanced cognitive abilities compared to other primates.”
Where these came from or how they came about is still a mystery.
And now that it seems apparent that some visitation by “entities” from the sky is not likely fiction but a reality, it may help to broaden our understanding of Nature and how we got here.
My AI friend makes another statement which I think is exactly backwards:
“Some key developments that enabled writing include the evolution of symbolic thought, the invention of systems of counting, and the emergence of urban civilization needing record-keeping.”
Clearly, it was first language, and then writing and math that led to this evolution of our brains, not the other way around. Our original brains would have needed to expand to accommodate our first language which took us beyond the limbic system to labeling, and ultimately writing which led us to sharing ideas and thinking “symbolically” – using groups of letters as words and then sentences to convey increasingly complex concepts.
My own experience with neuroplasticity confirms that new uses for the brain expand its capacity, creating new pathways and neural networks. People who keep learning seem less susceptible to dementia.
Opening to the possibility that our evolution was “jump started” by extraterrestrials changes the narrative from chance and natural selection to a more profound connection to the universe in areas that our current science has mostly yet to penetrate. (Nonmaterial reality).
A Clue that Space Is Not Empty
But technology in particular seems to point us in the right direction – it was the offspring of the printing press – the computer – which eventually led us to a huge breakthrough in our awareness of the nonmaterial or seeming empty space as being potentially much much more.
When we developed WiFi suddenly the information encoded in words, thoughts and sentences could travel through space. So who knows what other information or Mind stuff has been around us all along?
Because Mind is everywhere and at the heart of Nature.
