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CA2D My Cellular Automata Application for Mac

2012-01-06T03:14:00.000-08:00

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Does Christianity have a Future in the Genetic Age?

2011-12-22T01:19:00.000-08:00

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Nature, Science and Religion in the Genetic Age

Christianity remains the prevailing religion of Western culture, but is it up to the challenge of acting as a spiritual and ethical guardian of human society into a third millennium? While science has flourished and evolved into a unified description of reality and we have become technologically advanced and globally interconnected, world religions remain archaic, divided and involved in partisan utopian struggles, leading towards lethal conflict, possibly on a planetary scale.

This is particularly dangerous as we enter an age of human impact, a mass extinction of living diversity and possible human-induced threats to our own viability through climatic tipping points. It is also a manifestly inadequate basis to consider the huge implications of an age of genetic technology which could have vast and irreversible impacts on our future as a species.

While science has thrived on the skeptical principles of questioning assumptions and testing theories against the natural evidence, and social systems have moved from autocracies towards egalitarian democracy, in which government is, at least in principle, a dynamic expression of the will of the people, religions, for all their claim to being the sanctuaries of higher spiritual and ethical consciousness remain resistant to change and adamantly opposed to fundamental innovation of the kind that has accompanied the quantum leaps of our scientific revolutions, particularly fundamental renewal of the religious paradigm.

To pass any test of validity in our global planetary future, religions need to be able to pass both the kind of natural reality check scientific theories have to, and prove themselves to be a willing and autonomous democratic expression of the conscious experiences and will of each generation looking towards their own futures and those of their descendants. But for all the tendency to religious belief permeating even the most liberated secular societies, traditional religions seem to be manifestly failing on both these acid tests.

In the toxic centre of the cyclone of religious dysfunction, despite being the loved and cherished mainstay, are the central notions of having to have faith and affirmative belief, as the foundation of religious experience, both of which strike at the very heart of natural validity, as they a priori confront nature and the universe with unswerving prejudicial conviction.

Humanity has yet to discover how to come to terms with a sustainable planetary culture and avoid a hard landing caused by our own human impacts on the Earth's living environment, which could raise the oceans, deplete non-renewable resources, including energy, chemical resources and natural habitats, and wipe out up to a third of living species, in a triage reminiscent of the bitter waters of Revelation. Far from being confined to a few natural curiosities, this could cause economic collapse and widespread famine. We are also entering an era where major genetic questions interpenetrate with human survival. Is religion, and in particular Christian religion, able to cut the mustard to achieve a sustainable future for humanity and the biosphere?

Monotheistic religions are particularly unsuited to this task, because they are desert religions founded on utopian apocalyptic principles, in free flight towards tumultuous final conflict, the triage of all life, and the victory of one religion or another in a day of judgment in which the whole of the planetary biosphere is conceived as being laid waste in a rapture of the late planet Earth. This is about as far from a sustainable future as one can possibly imagine.

Even in the most technologically and scientifically developed societies of Europe and the US, a sizable minority, to a frank majority of people continue to believe in God, hold to religious convictions, and remain in a state of frank denial about basic scientific issues, from biological evolution to the age of the universe. Is this a manifestation of the undeniable reality of religion, or is it an archaic throwback from coercive patterns of belief, which people are too dependent on and frightened of any alternative to, to set aside?

Could it even have a genetic basis in 4000 years of human social selection, in which monolithic religious belief systems have been the strongest single force shaping the military ascendance of dominant societies, driven by their moral suppression of internal conflict? If so, does this verify that religiosity is paradoxically enshrined in evolution, or is it a startling example of how selective breeding can result in insidious and potentially lethal characteristics?

In this discussion, there are two complementary threads. One is the innate tendency of people to reach towards religion, and in the Christian context, belief in God, as an existential prop to cope with ultimate anxieties about life, death and suffering in the physical world, to give us comfort, even if delusory, and make some ordered sense out of a seemingly chaotic existence of tooth and claw.

The other is the specific nature of Christianity as a religion, its fundamental tenets, its historical genesis and the degree to which it is founded on real people and historical events, as opposed to fantastic myths or contrivances which become less and less credible, as we discover more about nature and the universe around us.

If Christianity is going to cut the mustard as an influence shaping human destiny into the future, it needs to face acid tests of its validity and capacity to address the changes human culture is likely to face over the third millennium. So how does it stack up? To answer this we need to wind back to the very origins of Christianity and understand how this tradition of belief came about.

This is going to be a convoluted historical detour, but it is essential to set the groundwork for assessing the Christian heritage in the kind of terms necessary to pass the acid tests of authenticity and viability.

The Nature and Mission of Jesus

In the first instance this comes down to a scrutiny of Jesus as the centre of the Christian cyclone. We will assume here that Jesus is an actual historical figure who walked the Earth as an incarnate human, despite conflicting claims to his being God the Son by his gentile Christian apologists, or merely a figment of myth and fable by some of his detractors.

Actual records of Jesus' life are lean at best, coming principally from three sources, the four orthodox gospels, written long after his life and death by proponents who we have no real evidence actually experienced the events they describe first hand, with manifest religious political agendas; a few gnostic sayings in the Gospel of Thomas; and a few derogatory remarks in the Talmud decrying him as one who led the people of Israel astray. Even the brief account of Jesus in Josephus' history is considered to be a later Christian insertion to add substance to his historical existence.

While he is the Son of God to gentile Christians, he was a false messiah to orthodox Jews. The Lexicon Talmudicum and Talmud babli Sanhedrin 106b, 43a, 51a and the Toldoth Jeshu refer to Jeshu-ha-Notzri [Jesus of Nazareth] by mention of the wicked kingdom of Edom, since that was his nation... he was hanged on a Passover eve... He was near to the kingdom. Balaam the lame was 33 years old when Pintias the Robber [Pontius Pilate] killed him... They say that his mother was descended from princes and rulers but consorted with carpenters.

The personality and divinity of Jesus show sharply divided descriptions between the synoptics, Mark, Matthew and Luke on the one hand, the dark and light firebrand semi-gnosticism of John, and the altogether different account in Thomas, more that of a paradoxical sage, inducing the reader to fulfill their own discovery of "the kingdom", which 'lies before you but men do not see it'.

While the synoptics have Peter declare Jesus to be the chosen messiah anointed, in Thomas he disclaims that he is not the messiah but the catalyst:

Mark 8:27: And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? And they answered, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.

Thomas 13: Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out."

The fact that many of Jesus' sayings in The Gospel of Thomas are in a root form, which appears to predate the more embellished versions in the synoptics, attests both to its authenticity and to the fact that Jesus saw discovering reality in terms of gnosis or 'knowing', rather than belief, particularly the belief in a divine Lord and saviour that Christianity later became, as noted in Elaine Pagels' (2003) work "Beyond Belief". Thomas is variously dated to 60 - 110 CE, with some of the material certainly coming from the first stratum, which is dated to 30 - 60. The Oxyrhynchus fragments date to as early as 130.

The sayings which cast Thomas as Jesus' twin brother, inviting us likewise to be twins with Jesus; in 'knowing', convey an atmosphere closer to that of an Eastern sage or a nature shaman than an anointed divine Lord. The first three sayings of Jesus in Thomas set out the core of the gnostic path of self-fulfillment in knowing in oneself, in the first person, the experiential condition of the All, and that the Kingdom is right here in this world, once we come to understand the nature of existence:

(1) "Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death."

(2) "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all."

(3) "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

Even when Jesus appears to say things which might be interpreted as claiming to be the divine source, we are also one and the same in gnostic awareness, manifest in everything from an overturned stone to a newly split piece of wood:

(77) Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will I find me there."

On the other side, the synoptics would have him declare that some standing before him would not pass away before the Kingdom would come in Power, giving the church a claim to being a temporary steward, or guardian, before the Lord's return in glory, although the fulfillment of this engagement has receded ever further away, as the centuries have passed unrequited.

It is clear in the light of history that the nature of Jesus' mission set it apart from the Hebrew tradition, which led to him being declared a false messiah by the Jews, despite having a small following among the Hebrew Christians under the banner of the desposyni, James the Just and Jesus' immediate family.

Among these are blasphemous claims to performing nature miracles, including curing people of maladies, causing 'evil spirits' to enter a herd of pigs who ran in demented horror into the sea of Galilee to the consternation of their owners, calming the waters and walking upon them, climaxing in revitalizing Lazarus. The nature miracles are not part of the Hebrew tradition although some prophets performed them, such as Moses mythical parting of the waters of the Red Sea. Profligate miraculous dread is the characteristic of Dionysian legend, as the dark god of altered states, who is the original 'true vine' who turned water into wine on the same epiphany, or advent, and in particular Dhushara of neighbouring Nabatea, at its height in Jesus' time, who achieved immortality while wearing a theatrical death mask (Glueck 1966).

One should also note with caution that these 'miraculous' powers were ephemeral, so that the synoptics note comments like "physician heal thyself" intimating at the lameness mentioned in the Talmud, the disciples thinking of deserting him after the episode of the 5000 loaves but having nowhere else to turn, suggesting the performance was less than convincing to them, and his frank failure to perform any convincing good works in his home town of Nazareth.

The final episodes leading to the crucifixion, including his elaborate advance preparation for the event, including his raising of Lazarus, his anointing to his burial, pre-booking a venue for the last supper, riding into Jerusalem as the Palm King, turning the tables and passing the sop to Judas as in a prearranged pact (Pagels and King), likewise read as an act of Dionysian tragic theatre, raising ultimate questions over his rapid 'demise' on the cross and subsequent medicinal treatment by the women with aloes and spices provided by Joseph of Arimathea. These ambiguities have led to repeated claims that Jesus may have survived the crucifixion (Schonfield) and was variously seen in Rome (Graves ad Podro 1957), traveled to India and was buried in Kashmir and even that he became a rice farmer in Japan and his remains lie in a shrine in Aoomori.

There is also a continuing series of central events in his mission that read as a classic sacrificial rite of a fertility cult. He was anointed by a woman rather than a high rabbi, as all the other Jewish messiahs, from Solomon to Bar Cochbah were, and anointed in a very strange manner for his burial in the manner of kings sacrificed to Inana and Ishtar, a female anointing without which the title of messiah could not apply. Also highly irregular was the dependence of Jesus' mission on the support of women 'out of their very substance', followed to his demise by the women who came down from Galilee, and later discovered as an apparition in the garden by Magdalen, having been privately 'embalmed' with aloes and spices by the women, when the disciples scattered like the sheep of the foolish shepherd of Zechariah.

Both these key aspects of Jesus' mission, and the cataclysmic crucifixion, where he is supposed to have been killed, harrowed hell and risen again on the third day, come right out of the fertility religions of Sumeria, Babylon, and concurrently with his own life, of Nabatea. Even if we accept that the gospels are mythical accounts written with a Hellenistic gloss long after Jesus' death, it is very unlikely the misogynistic Christian forefathers would have inserted these themes of their own accord.

Finally we have the vein of pure gold that makes people love God and Jesus to this day and that is the completely novel idea that instead of a God of jealousy and retribution, as Yahweh is portrayed as being, as a totemic deity of the bride Israel, Abba is deemed by Jesus to be a loving, forgiving father, who will even right in the moment forgive us all our sins if we believe in him. This also leads to Jesus, reversing Rabbi Hillel's silver rule "don't do to others what you would not have them do unto you" when asked to recite the Torah standing on one foot, to the affirmative and slightly more evangelical golden rule "do unto others what you would have them do unto you".

Finally we have the command of total forgiveness to turn the other cheek and bless them that curse you. One has to take caution about this, because evolutionary game theory has shown that tit-for-tat, or an eye for an eye, is one of the most effective evolutionary strategies of survival, because it cooperates with cooperators and punishes defectors, but it is prone to cycles of reciprocal retaliation. Always cooperate is a lethal sucker's game and one could really only advance this in an apocalyptic belief that the world is transitory and a new Kingdom is about to emerge, nevertheless it is infectiously appealing. It is these sayings above all that have led Christians, over many centuries of church corruption and diabolical bloodshed against its own people, to continue to believe in God and in Jesus as Lord and Saviour.

Thus it becomes ever clearer that Jesus, in his mission to the lost sheep of Israel, had a wider, much more ingenious conception, of generating a root paradigm change, encompassing the wider Near Eastern religious cosmologies of his time, as well as turning the apocalyptic tables on Judaic traditions in the persona of the eschatological Son of Man coming in Power.

In this, Nabatea plays a key role, as Josephus makes clear. In the account of the beheading of John the Baptist, in Mark (6:14-29), Salome dances before the generals in what is clearly a dance of the seven veils of Inana, and Ishtar, at her mother Herodias' behest, claims the Baptist's head (as a sacrifice of Dumuzzi, or Tammuz as he came to be called in the Hebrew temple), when Herod, as was done to Haman in Esther, offers her even half the kingdom. This event occurred at Macherus on the Nabatean border, with Herod's generals present, because Herod, whom the Baptist had accused of marrying his brother Philip's wife, and his own cousin, had jilted the Princess of Nabatea, who ran in fear of her life to her parents Aretas IV and Shaqilat II the conjoint King and Queen, sparking a war between Nabatea and Herod in the neighbouring Tetrarchy of Perea in which Herod was defeated.

In a strange echo, in supposedly taking up John's mantle, (although the Baptist's surviving Sabean followers in Southern Iraq vehemently disclaim Jesus teachings), Jesus also died anointed to his burial by a woman variously claimed to be Mary of Bethany and/or Magdalen and a 'sinner' caught in adultery.

He is also claimed in the Gospel of Thomas to have come up on Salome's bed:

(61) Jesus said, "Two will rest on a bed: the one will die, and the other will live." Salome said, "Who are you, man, that you ... have come up on my couch and eaten from my table?" And Jesus says, "I am he who is from the One, and the things that belong to the Father have been given to me." Salome replies, "But I am your disciple", and Jesus answers, "When the disciple is united he will be filled with light, but if he is divided he will be filled with darkness."

The natural founders of the movement following Jesus' crucifixion are James the Just, Peter, and as we shall see in a more subterranean way, Mary, Martha and Salome.

The immediate end result of Jesus' blasphemous mission was a small religious following centered around the Jewish Christians or Nazarenes as they were called in Jerusalem after Jesus' birth place of Nazareth. It is clear the Nasarenes revered James and the desposyni. The Gospel of Thomas also asserts Jesus appointed James rather than Peter to be his successor, in apocalyptically glowing terms:

"The disciples said to Jesus: We know that you will depart from us; who is it who will lead us?" Jesus said to them, "Wherever you have come from, go to James the Just, for whom heaven and earth came to be."

The little we know of James portrays him as a very devout man. Hegesippus stated "that he was a lifelong Nazirite, abstaining from animal food and strong drink. He neither shaved nor cut his hair, never anointed his body with oil or used the public bath. He never wore woolen, only linen garments, and prayed constantly in the Temple for the forgiveness of the people." In 62, immediately before Vespasian's attack beginning the siege of Jerusalem, he was murdered at the temple variously cast down from the pinnacles at the behest of the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus, or falling from the steps. In Eusebius' words they cried: 'O just One, whose word we all ought to obey, since the people are led astray after Jesus, who was crucified, tell us what is the Gate to Jesus?' And he answered shouting out loudly, 'Why do you ask me concerning the Son of Man? He is now sitting in Heaven at the right hand of the Great Power and is about to come on the clouds of Heaven.' The Christian commentary has seriously injured James cry out: "I beseech Thee, Lord God our Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." just as Luke claims Jesus did as lots were cast on his garments. A Rechabite priest then shouted: "Cease, what do ye? The just man is praying for us," but he is then struck on the head by the club a fuller used to wring out wet garments with.

The brief Epistle of James does not state it is written by James the Just, but simply a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes, although Christian writers do attribute it to him. Other authors see it as a later pseudo-epigraphical or composite edited work, or a work of wisdom literature in the guise of an epistle. However it does contain a passage which exposes an area of significant conflict with Paul's Hellenistic teaching, claiming how you actually carry out the eventual acts is the key, and not faith alone - the dissonance between salvation and justification:

'What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But some one will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.'

Peter is equally enigmatic, although he is the 'rock' holding the keys to the golden gate. Paul assigns him to leading the mission to the circumcised, but history suggests he taught in Antioch and moved to Rome where he was martyred by Nero. He also undertook a missionary journey to Lydda, Joppa and Caesarea, becoming instrumental in the decision to evangelize the Gentiles. The only potentially genuine remnant of his teaching is the brief first Epistle of Peter, which is notable in suggesting Jesus taught the 'imprisoned' in hell.

Even though virtually all we know of Jewish Christians or Nazarenes is sourced through subsequent gentile Christian detractors, the little we do know of Nazarenes, such as the Ebionites, paint a very different picture of the emergence of Jesus' following in the first century form the Pauline version, he entitled Christianity.

During the first centuries of the Christian Era, the Ebionites or 'deserving poor' regarded Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish religious law and rites such as circumcision. The Ebionites used only one Hebrew Gospel, revered James the Just and rejected Paul as an apostate from the Law, as did the Elcesaites. Epiphanius states (Panarion 30.16:9) that some Ebionites gossiped that Paul was a Greek who converted to Sadduceean Judaism in order to marry the High Priest's daughter, and then apostasized when she rejected him.

It has to be remembered that the Jewish messiah was always considered to be a human, not a God - a Jewish prophet or king, who was anointed in recognition of bringing about an epoch of long-term future goodness, as Solomon did, despite his many strange wives. Even with the growth of apocalyptic Judaism such as the Essene movement, who followed the Teacher of Righteousness, and the notion of the eschatological Son of Man, or Son of Adam, there is no parallel for the messiah being identified with God in the gentile Christian manner.

The Ebionites accepted Jesus as the Messiah, the greatest of the prophets, but not as the 'virgin born' Son of God and considered that he had normal human parentage. By virtue of his righteousness, he was chosen by God to be the messianic "prophet like Moses". He became one with God in the baptism and remained so until his crucifixion. They did not view Jesus' death as a bloody act of atonement. They rejected Christ's pre-existence, divinity, virgin birth, and physical resurrection. One Ebionite story does have Jesus eating bread with his brother Jacob ("James the Just") after the resurrection but this can be considered a miraculous happening in line with other prophetic miracles. They practiced a rigorous asceticism and stressed the binding character of the Mosaic Law. Epiphanius stated that they interpreted the Eucharist as a memorial of Jesus, substituting a chalice of water for the chalice of blood, and became vegetarians, rejecting the temple animal sacrifices, although it has been suggested this applies rather to the Elcesaites.

Of the books of the New Testament, the Ebionites only accepted an Aramaic version of the Gospel of Matthew, referred to as the Gospel of the Hebrews, as scripture. This version of Matthew, Pauline Christian critics reported, omitted the first two chapters (on Jesus' virgin birth), and started with Jesus' baptism by John implying they held an Adoptionist view.

Adoptionists assert that Jesus was fully human, born of a sexual union between Joseph and Mary, and only became adopted as 'God's son', later at his baptism, because of his sinless devotion to the will of God. Adoptionism probably arose among early Jewish Nazarenes seeking to reconcile gentile Christian claims that Jesus was the Son of God with the strict monotheism of Judaism, in which the Trinity and a divinity in human form was unacceptable, and may date back almost to the time of Jesus.

After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, the Ebionites settled at Pella in Transjordan, but remained outside the mainstream of Christianity. Eusebius summarizes this from his perspective in that they "had poor and mean opinions concerning Christ. They held him to be a plain and ordinary man who had achieved righteousness merely by the progress of his character" (Ranke-Heinemann 1992 173, Wilson I 154, Grollier).

The Hellenistic Transformation of Jesus into Christian Deity

Paul, who had never had direct contact with any of the historical events is the inventor of gentile Christianity, as opposed to the Jewish practices of the Nasarenes. It becomes a Hellenistic travesty of Hebrew traditions, leading to fantastic notions, from Jesus' divinity, and Mary's virgin birth, to a rapture in which the elect float up into thin air in the apparent annihilation of the living planet.

Despite Ebionite claims he was a Greek apostate, Paul was, in his own words, "of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee". He was also Saul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen, persecuting Christians.

He then claimed , a few years after Jesus' crucifixion, that the resurrected Jesus had spoken to him on the road to Damascus in a great light, and that he was struck blind, but after three days his sight was restored by Ananias of Damascus. He began to preach that Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish Messiah and the Son of God. Paul was thus the first born again Christian in the modern sense, having no direct connection with Jesus' life, except through an apparition similar to Marian and other apparitions people occasionally experience today and he carried on his mission and declared his gospel exclusively on the basis of this ephemeral connection.

Paul asserted that he received the Gospel not from any person, but by the direct revelation of Jesus Christ and assertively claimed almost total independence from the Jerusalem community. It was fully three years after his conversion that he first went to Jerusalem, where he met James and Peter: "Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother." He emphasizes this is no lie as if it is somehow scandalous.

He claims to have subsequently received their approval for his teachings in a second meeting in Jerusalem 11 years later: "when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do." Whether this 'poor' means the 'deserving poor' Ebionites who decried Paul as an apostate remains enigmatic.

A vital meeting between Paul and the Jerusalem church took place some time in the years 48 to 50, often referred to as the Council of Jerusalem. The key question raised was whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised. It is noted than in John, Jesus says "Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision; (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers;) and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a man."

It is claimed it was agreed gentile Christians were not obliged to keep most of the Mosaic Law. According to the account, Peter remonstrated "Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood."

Paul claims that at this meeting, Peter, James, and John accepted his mission to the Gentiles. However it is clear that James remained concerned that Paul had not fully kept this agreement, in particular over non-kosher meat from the markets, in their final meeting in Jerusalem.

However there were continuing tensions over keeping the Jewish Law, for gentiles who had converted from fertility worship, leading to the incident at Antioch: "But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy." Evidently Paul was on the offside, because he left Antioch never to return, although Catholic tradition claims he and Pater eventually taught together in Rome.

Since the Pauline letters are the earliest texts in the New Testament, dating from around 51, this casts a pall of doubt over the later compilations of the four New Testament gospels, which likewise contain a mix of sayings, miraculous claims, frankly implausible divine birth accounts and careful reconstructions of Hebrew scripture to make the whole event look like it was prophesied. Moreover, as Elaine Pagels (1995) has made clear, they also contain partisan polemic discrediting the teachings of other groups who had emerged, for example decrying Thomas Didymus's account as Jesus' twin brother in the doubting Thomas episode, implying Thomas's gnostic teachings didn't fully embrace Jesus' divinity and resurrected corporeality.

Eusebius notes that Papias, the second century bishop of Hierapolis said that "Mark was the interpreter of Peter and wrote down carefully what he remembered of what had been said or done by the Lord, but not in the right order" (Ranke-Heinmann 1992 219, Graves and Podro 1953 37), quoting John the Elder (Fox R 127), presumably the disciple, suggesting Mark contains retellings of accounts witnessed by Peter. The earliest hypothetical fragment of Mark is the Qumran fragment 7Q5 dating to 68, but its relationship to Mark's gospel is rejected by nearly all authorities.

Matthew is variously regarded as originating from a Jewish-Christian source, but has had editorial ornamentation later. The earliest Magdalen fragments of Matthew are attributed to c 70. Both Luke and Matthew are believed to have derived partly from Mark and a hypothetical synoptic sayings source "Q", so as they stand are later reconstructions. Luke confesses at the outset that he was not present during Jesus' lifetime.

John claims to be the elusive 'beloved disciple' and is sometimes referred to, along with Peter and James in early Christian accounts (1 Cor 15.3-8). John also contains references to an older compilation of miracles, suggesting it is likewise a redacted compilation and the passage about the woman caught in adultery appears to be a later addition. The Rylands fragment of John 18:31-4 dating from c125 AD in Egypt confirms the Gospel of John's existence by a date of perhaps 90 AD.

We need to take into account here, that the founding gospels of the New Testament do not appear to have envisaged Jesus as the divine Son of God. The early Jewish-Christian Gospels make no mention of a supernatural birth. Rather, they state that Jesus was begotten at his baptism. According to the Church Fathers, the first gospel was written by Matthew, called the Gospel of the Hebrews and was adoptionist in nature. The Gospel of the Hebrews has no mention of the Virgin Birth and when Jesus is baptized it states, "Jesus came up from the water, Heaven was opened, and He saw the Holy Spirit descend in the form of a dove and enter into Him. And a voice from Heaven said, ‘You are my beloved Son; with You I am well pleased.’ And again, ‘Today I have begotten You.’ Immediately a great light shone around the place".

Scholars also see Adoptionist theology in the Gospel of Mark. Mark has Jesus as the Son of God, occurring at strategic points, but the Virgin Birth of Jesus has not been developed. The phrase "Son of God" is not present in some early manuscripts at 1:1. This omission supports the notion that the title "Son of God" is not used of Jesus until his baptism, and that Mark reflects an Adoptionist view.

Critical parts of Mark containing the encounters with the resurrected Christ may also be later additions. Mark 16:8 stops at a description of the empty tomb, which is immediately preceded by a statement by a "young man dressed in a white robe" that Jesus is "risen" and is "going ahead of you into Galilee." The last twelve verses are missing from the oldest manuscripts.

The theology of Adoptionism fell into disfavor as Christianity left its Jewish roots and Gentile Christianity became dominant, was declared heresy at the end of the 2nd century, and was rejected by the First Council of Nicaea.

Gnostic Undercurrents

From the earliest times, an exceedingly diverse spectrum of gnostic followings (Pagels 1979) also sprang up, from the Valentinian groups of Alexandria, to the Ophites, and Phibionites. In trying to reclaim something of the founding tradition, we need to appreciate the diversity of these gnostic cosmologies.

The various Ophite sects, according to the accounts of Christian detractors, believed in the serpent of Eden and Moses, considering Eve worshipped the serpent as the giver of wisdom and new life, and saw Jesus as either a pretender to the serpent's power, or an emanation of it.

The Naassene Ophites claimed to have been taught their doctrines by Mariamne, a disciple of James the Just. The retention of the Hebrew form shows that their beliefs may represent the earliest stages of Gnosticism. Every temple shows by its title that it is intended for the honour of the serpent naas as "the Moist Essence," of the universe, without which "naught at all of existing things, immortal or mortal, animate or inanimate, can hold together. All things are subject to Him, and He is Good, and has all things in Him ... so that He distributes beauty and bloom to all that exist according to each one's nature and peculiarity, as though permeating all."

They gave to the first principle the names First Man and Son of Man, calling him in their hymns Adamas: The First Man the fundamental being before its differentiation into individuals. The Son of Man: the same being after it has been individualized into existing things and thus sunk into matter. Thus Jesus becomes 'the True Gate', through whom the Perfect Man enters. They represented their "Man" as androgynous; and hence one of their hymns runs "From thee, father, through thee, mother, the two immortal names." They declared that "the beginning of Perfection is the gnosis of Man, but the gnosis of God is perfected Perfection." The Garden of Eden, in the Naassene system, is the brain, and Paradise the human head.

The Valentinians envisaged a more complex cosmology than orthodox Christianity with the pleroma, 'light or fullness', containing a primal bythos, 'the depth', who after long contemplation emanated sexually dyadic aeons, one of which, Sophia suffered from curiosity, leading to the creation of the material world by a demiurge identified with the Jewish deity. Humanity, possessing both spiritual and material nature, achieves redemption through gnosis (personal spiritual knowledge) rather than worship of a saviour. The Valentinians held to a sophisticated ethic which allowed those who had achieved gnosis to waive the strict moral prescriptions of traditional Christianity.

The gnostics also claimed roots that went back to the women present at the embalming. The gnostic teacher Marcellina traveled to Rome to represent the Carpocratian group,' which claimed to have received secret teaching from Mary, Salome, and Martha. Tertullian commented: "These heretical women how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and, it may be, even to baptize!" However , according to Occhigrosso, Tertullian became a turncoat. Montanus led an ecstatic movement rather like Pentecostalists today. "Many of Montanus's followers were women, who were allowed to teach, heal, and exorcise demons. Their most famous adherent was Tertullian of Carthage (c. 203), the great early Christian theologian, who first attacked the charismatic movement and then joined it."

Even non-Christian writers in the 2nd century were aware that some tradition existed of secret teachings passed down from "Salome the disciple", to sects such as the Carpocratians. "There are Christian sects named after Marcellina, Harpocratian Christians who trace themselves to Salome, and some who follow Mariamne and others who follow Martha, and still others who call themselves Marcionites after their leader, Marcion."

On another tack, the Phibionites were said to engage a form of sexual sacramentalism, including smearing of hands with menstrual blood and semen, and consumption of the same as a variant of eucharist and wee even accused by their detractors of consuming the aborted fetuses of sexual religious rituals.

Marcion, while not strictly a gnostic held to a docetic view. According to him, the god of the Old Testament, whom he called the Demiurge, the creator of the material universe, is a jealous tribal deity of the Jews, whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice and who punishes mankind for its sins through suffering and death. Contrastingly, the god that Jesus professed is an altogether different being, a universal god of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy. Marcion held Jesus to be the son of the Heavenly Father but understood the incarnation in a docetic manner, i.e. that Jesus' body was only an imitation of a material body.

By the time of the burying of the Nag Hammadi texts (Robinson 1990), around 340 for the Gospel of Thomas, the gnostics had been forcibly suppressed by the conservative bishops, leading to the establishment of Christian orthodoxy, which survives to the present in the divided Catholic and Orthodox churches, and their many Protestant and evangelical splinter groups. However, gnosticism was to reappear in the middle ages as a 'spiritual contagion' of the Crusades, leading to the violent suppression of the Cathars, Albigenses and others, along with many Christian mystics, assumed witches, and the Free Spirit movement, in a 600 year Inquisition as diabolical as the Crusades themselves.

The Kingdom is a Long Time Coming

Between the death of the 'saviour' and the immortal kingdom was said to be a prophesied turbulent age called the Pangs of the Messiah. From Jesus' own words, this was meant to take no longer than one generation:

Mark 9:1 "Jesus said unto them, 'Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power."

Luke 21:23: "But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory."

Luke 21:32 "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth."

Matt 24:29 "Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken."

However Jesus himself claimed not to know when the Son of Man would arrive:

Mark 13:32 "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. ... Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping."
This uncertainty of the time is echoed in Luke 12:40 and Matthew 24:44 as Christ coming as a thief in the night:

"And this know, that if the goodman of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and not have suffered his house to be broken through. Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not."

The earliest Christian writing is 1 Thessalonians, dated circa AD 50. In it Paul's message is to wait and not slumber, for the son of man shall come at any time hence, in the Rapture in the air

1:10: "And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come."

3:13 "... to stablish your hearts ... at the coming of Jesus Christ with all his saints ... "

4:16 "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. ... Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober."

This immediate urgency of the Kingdom remains central to Paul's teaching in 55 AD:

1 Corinth 7:25 "Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment ... that this is good for the present distress, I say, that it is good for a man so to be. ... But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none; And they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; And they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away."

However by the time of the final compilation of the New Testament, a threatening heresy had arisen because the end and salvation had not occurred and the pseudo-epigraphical Second Epistle of Peter attempts to finesse the problem, explaining that God has delayed the Second Coming so that more people will have the chance to reject evil and find salvation. It calls on Christians to wait patiently for the parousia and to study scripture.

Despite his fierce opposition to the gnostic 'heresies' Irenaeus remained fully committed to the prophecies of Revelation and the belief in the end of days. However Origen threw a spanner in the works by claiming the eschatological condition was essentially in the mind - occurring only in the souls of believers. This fitted well with the Hellenistic imagination of "spiritual progress begun in this world and continued in the next".

Once the Christian church became officially adopted with the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, it became "a powerful and prosperous institution functioning to a well-established routine, and the men responsible for governing it had no wish to see Christians clinging to out-dated and inappropriate dreams of a new earthly paradise" (Cohn 1957 29). Early in the fifth century Augustine propounded in the City of God that Revelation was to be understood as a spiritual allegory, and as for the millennium, that had begun with the birth of Christianity and was fully realized in the church.

This way it becomes possible for the gentile church to have its cake and eat it too, claiming it is a steward guarding the world for the second coming of the Lord, while at the same time never having to relinquish control, because Christ is the Son of God whom no mere mortal can emulate or become a successor to.

Irascible Squabbles and Corruption among the Church Fathers

The orthodox history is equally as bizarre as the gnostic. From the time of Paul, Christianity ceased being a Hebrew religion, or the teachings of Jesus, and became a Hellenistic religion, with strong pagan motifs, gaining an immense popular following from Egypt, through Ephesus to Greece and Rome, appealing to the sentiments and superstitions of cultures involved in polytheistic fertility religions and their mythical heros and heroines. Jesus became a heroic man-God fusion and Mary became a virgin mother. Many of the key festivals, including Christmas and Easter were effectively hijacked from the solstice of Mithras and the festival of the European Goddess Eostre, noted by the venerable Bede, whose ovum remains central to this day, although Christians claim this comes down to an egg that turned red when Magdalen either saw the risen Jesus or declared "Christ is Risen" to the Roman Emperor. Key elements of the communion were derived from the immensely popular worship of Isis, whose archetype as the sacred mother was inherited by Mary.

Rather than the covenantal religion of its Hebrew origins, Christianity became a sacramental religion, in which the bloodthirsty soma and sangre of the heroic demi-God becomes the Eucharist - the central communion with the risen saviour, who died to save us from our sins, under the filicidal banner 'without the shedding of blood there is no remission from sin'.

Having successfully repressed the gnostics, the church fathers then began to indulge in angry disagreements among themselves about the exact nature of Jesus as a divine Son of God, rather than a prophetic innovator, and argue about his exact relationship with God the Father and the Holy Ghost, who now seems to have also become responsible for Mary's pregnancy. These became so vehement that a series of conventions were called to settle the matter of Jesus' contradictory corporeality and divinity, driving out docetic notions along with the Arian and Nestorian theology which then became an heretic anathema.

Docetic notions shared by Marcion and some gnostic teachings (and later the Quranic view of Isa who was deemed to be taken up by al-Llah without suffering, leading to all manner of Islamic suicide bombings) center around the idea that Jesus was a pure spirit and that his physical body and crucifixion were an illusion. To gnostics who saw matter as evil, it was natural that Jesus could not have his eternal spirit tainted with matter, however this contradicted the resurrection of the dead and the intrinsic goodness of God's creation in the orthodox view.

But even orthodox notions that differed in minor ways from dominant view became cursed. These contrived notions continued to cause a great deal of friction.

In Arianism the concept of Christ is that the Son of God did not always exist, but was created by - and is therefore distinct from - God the Father, so although Arianism embraces the same entities, it is not truly trinitarian. Of all the various disagreements within the Christian Church, the Arian controversy has held the greatest force and power of theological and political conflict, with the possible exception of the Protestant Reformation. By 325, the controversy had become significant enough that the Emperor Constantine called an assembly of bishops, the First Council of Nicaea, which condemned Arius' doctrine and formulated the original Nicene Creed of 325.

Later the First Council of Constantinople 381, set out in its most unambiguous form the orthodox party line about creation, God, Jesus' divinity and Mary's role in the piece:

"We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets. In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen".

This statement leads to many of the central fallacies in Christian teaching as core fundamentals, in conflict with and violation of the natural order. It declares that God, rather than being a unity, is a Trinity oddly composed of a male Father and Son and a Holy Ghost of undefined gender, while Mary, despite being Jesus' mother, is somehow just a virgin vessel appendage. From the statement, it appears that Mary's pregnancy and Jesus' humanity results from fertilization, or direct manufacture, 'made' by the Holy Ghost. Jesus is of one substance with Abba and so both are inseparably God although Jesus was crucified as an incarnate being. Jesus is no longer a prophet, or a wise sage, nor even a demi-God, but consubstantial with God himself.

It is easy to understand, in the light of Genesis, how God the Father is deemed to have created heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible even if we now know nature has taken a more subtle and complex route, but the status of Jesus being begotten not made stands at the contradictory nub of his mythical divinity. Rejecting the docetic notion, it is clearly stated that Jesus' was crucified, suffered and was buried as a physical human being would, who then miraculously on the third day of the beborn sickle moon, ascended into heaven, just as in the older astral religions and is now consubstantial with God.

Nestorius, in a second heretical conflict with Cyril of Alexandria, tried to find a middle ground between those that emphasized the fact that in Christ God had been born as a man and insisted on calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos "God-bearer", and those that rejected that title because God, as an eternal being, could not have been born. Nestorius believed that no union between the human and divine were possible. If such a union of human and divine occurred, Nestorius believed that Christ could not truly be con-substantial with God and con-substantial with us because he would grow, mature, suffer and die (being transient while God is eternal) and also would possess the power of God that would separate him from being equal to humans.

The Emperor Theodosius II (401–450) was eventually induced to convoke a general church council, sited at Ephesus, itself a special seat for the veneration of Mary, where the theotokos formula was popular. The Emperor and his wife supported Nestorius while Pope Celestine I supported Cyril. Cyril took charge of the First Council of Ephesus in 431, opening debate before the long-overdue contingent of Eastern bishops from Antioch arrived. The council deposed Nestorius and declared him a heretic.

But while the council was in progress, John I of Antioch and the eastern bishops arrived, and were furious to hear that Nestorius had already been condemned. They convened their own synod, at which Cyril was deposed. Both sides then appealed to the emperor. Initially the imperial government ordered both Nestorius and Cyril deposed and exiled. However, Cyril was eventually allowed to return after bribing various courtiers.

As if to put the final punctuation on these conflicts the Latin church added the filoque "who proceedeth from the Father and the Son". Easterners have argued this is a violation of Canon VII of the Third Ecumenical Council, since the words were not included in the text by either the Council of Nicaea or that of Constantinople.

Specifically Canon VII states "When these things had been read, the holy Synod decreed that it is unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different Faith as a rival to that established by the holy Fathers assembled with the Holy Ghost in Nicæa. But those who shall dare to compose a different faith, or to introduce or offer it to persons desiring to turn to the acknowledgment of the truth, whether from Heathenism or from Judaism, or from any heresy whatsoever, shall be deposed, if they be bishops or clergymen; bishops from the episcopate and clergymen from the clergy; and if they be laymen, they shall be anathematized."

What has become abundantly clear is that the divine nature of Jesus is not a fact or even a valid belief but a product of the imagination of irascible church forefathers. It is not a product of Jesus' own teachings, or even of those who witnessed his mission, but a later invention, arising from the Pauline view of Christ based on his born again conversion, then ornamented into other gentile Christian New Testament accounts, passing through the gnostic controversies to finally be defined in irascible debates between conflicting orthodox clergy, centuries after his death.

Original Sin and Natural Virtue

The final nail in this eschatological coffin is human fallibility. If Jesus was actually a human in flesh and blood, at least until the Baptism, how does Christianity now view the capacity of others to also take up the challenge of primal innocence in our own visionary nature and thereby replenish the root tradition? One cannot leave this arena without mention of Augustine, who formulated the doctrine of original sin that has for centuries left humanity with a pathetic fallacy of intrinsically flawed existence.

Augustine (396-430) took up Tertullian's idea of concupiscence (or sexual desire), with all the enthusiasm of a 'twice-born'. He had at first rejected the Christianity of his childhood and lived for fifteen years with the first of his two concubines, by whom he had a son and from whom he felt a 'sharp and searing pain' when he had to reject her in order, on his mother's insistence to make a proper (but unfulfilled) marriage. He first espoused Manichaeism, a form of Iranian gnosticism, which saw light and dark locked in permanent conflict, and the soul, a spark of light, seeking to escape the darkness of the physical world. Later Ambrose introduced him to Christian Neoplatonism and the writings of St Paul, leading to his conversion in 387.

Adopting the thesis, that Adam and Eve had fallen from a state of 'original perfection', Augustine insisted that Adam, through succumbing to temptation, misused the free will given him by his Creator, and as a consequential punishment, had acquired a moral debility, concupiscence, which was transmuted through physical heredity to his descendants, who were thus rendered a massa damnata. Death had come upon all human beings by their union with Adam, and they also shared in the responsibility for the Fall; he thereby denied that humanity had a free moral choice. 'For we were all in that one man ... who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him' (Haskins 76, Jones 222).

Th monk Pelagius also held that the Fall had come about through God's gift of free will, but denied that the sin of Adam and Eve had been passed on to their descendants and thus rejected St Paul's pronouncement in his letter to the Romans. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned (5:12 )" Pelagius argued that man had free-will and was liable for all his deeds, whether good or evil.

Augustine disputed with Pelagius and claimed that humanity had no free will, but was doomed to transgress because original sin was congenital and universal. To allow man freedom to decide minimized the role of God and the power of the Church. Two councils of bishops in Palestine had declared Pelagius orthodox but two in Africa, led by Augustine opposed them and persuaded Pope Innocent to support them. The next pope first declared Pelagius orthodox and then after 'vehement protests from Augustine and the Africans' excommunicated him. Augustine openly courted the emperor's support, using Nubian stallions as bribes. The emperor Honorees condemned Pelagius ordered him fined, expelled from office and exiled along with his supporters. He died soon after (Pagels 1988 129-30).

Augustine's epiphany was tautological: he was powerless to control the penis because free choice is an illusion. Augustine tells us that before the Fall, Adam had been capable of moving his sexual member with as much control as over a finger. But, infected by original sin, the sexual organs functioned with no regard to their owner, in retribution for their sin of disobedience - the curse of sexual arousal. In response to Augustine's destruction of Pelagius, Julian of Eclanum challenged Augustine back. Julian responded that 'natural sin' does not exist. No physically transmitted, hereditary condition infects human nature, much less nature in general. In counter to Augustine's reading of pain in childbirth he pointed out naturally that [pagan] village women with good childbirth practice had easy deliveries. Elaine Pagels (1988 134) comments that Augustine denies nature ... for he cannot think of the natural world except as a reflection of human desire and will. Julian's greatest feat was to correctly realize that the fall is the existential situation that arises when we fall into the sin of separation from the whole and make the world harsh through our selfishness (Pagels 136-8).

The Paradigm of the Fall and the Tree of Life

The purpose and function of religion is not to bring about a messianic apocalypse, or to bring about a scorched earth Armageddon in a day of judgment, but to help ensure the survival of humanity and the biosphere over cultural and evolutionary epochs. Although many religious believers are coming to understand the necessity for the greening of religion, the current direction of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition remains targeted towards a dangerous utopian fallacy of a totalitarian rule achieved through competitive scorched-earth violence and ultimate threats to the diversity of life.

The Fall from Eden is a message ingrained in our collective stream of consciousness that shows us that the entire religious paradigm has come about through a falling out of sexual relationship between woman and man, accompanying our retreat from intimacy with nature in our gatherer-hunter origins, in which men have blamed women and cursed them in the name of God out of a fear of female sexuality and female reproductive choice.

The invocation that we must all suffer death as a consequence, and that women must go in pain of childbirth, obedient to their husbands commands, cements the patriarchal religious paradigm in place, leading to a retreat from unity with nature and loss of communication with the transcendent as well, as acknowledged in the retreat of the Shekhinah, or indwelling feminine manifestation of the transcendent on earth in matrimonial concord.

In the unveiling, which apocalypse means, we must all needs come face to face with the reunion of woman and man, and feminine and masculine, in the reality of the Tree of Life as the vital cord connecting past and future, in sustaining the living planet. The Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world, in the Edenic story, is at once the tree of evolution to ourselves as a conscious sentient species and the tree of biological diversity, in which humanity survives and can survive as a species only by mutual coexistence, and interdependence with our sibling life forms, strengthening the capacity of the planet to sustain itself in the uncertain vagaries of an all too chaotic universe.

The evolutionary place of humanity, having come to this point, is to act as guardians of the diversity of ongoing life, both to ensure our own survival as a species and to provide for the emergence of new forms of sentient conscious beings. The role of science and technology is to provide vehicles to make this process as inscrutable and successful as it can possibly be. Any form of religion in frank conflict with nature and natural survival or with scientific objectivity is thus a tragic fallacy.

The Mysterium is a complex Phenomenon, not an isolate Personality

We have already seen in the previous posting "Evolution IS Intelligent Design" that the genetic algorithmic processes underlying evolution act as a supercomputer which is more versatile and even more powerful than the fastest computers on the planet, and has been proved capable of generating organismic brains and the human conscious brain over evolutionary time scales. The distributed genetic algorithmic process is thus the root creative process capable of generating the designer and their individual personality - aka the conscious brain.

Just as Christians have made a fundamental error in thinking God created life in a process of so called "intelligent design" analogous to human manufacture, so the very concept of God having an individual personality possessing emotions such as anger or jealousy, analogous to a human or animal organism, is fundamentally flawed. Neither is it remotely plausible that God somehow resides in the heavens, the galactic core, black holes, dark matter, or the sweeps of intergalactic space, where the forces of nature do not reach their climax fulfillment, involving gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces together forming the complex supra-molecular structures of tissues we find in organisms, and ultimately living conscious brains.

Moreover if we look to what might complement the physical universe, we find it is consciousness itself. All the evidence points to a cosmology in which sentient consciousness complements biological existence. This is the stuff of religious experience, of heaven and hell and of prophetic visions, and this is consistent with what we know about the hard brain-mind problem in science. It is also consistent with the dilemma of free will and may be an essential property for the universe to resolve the super-abundance of the infinite number of parallel universes that arise from quantum reality, the way we find the cat alove or dead, rather than both in Schrodinger's cat paradox.

In such a cosmology conscious sentience is a collective property of the biota. It is not a single personality acting as a creator or designer, which corresponds only to an individual transient organism. Neither, as mentioned, does it correspond to other physical phenomena such as the weather, the interior of stars or black holes because the brains of biota are the most complex and sensitive physical systems in the universe and the only ones we know are capable of subjective consciousness.

Therefore we need to come to understand the process of conscious life in similar terms to the way we understand the collective power of evolution. That is God consciousness is a collective attribute of subjective consciousness manifest in the biota of the universe across space-time, which is manifest individually in each of us, which we can come to know and understand through exploring our own conscious abyss.

One can understand this in terms of the universe evolving conscious sentient life, and through the sentient consciousness of the biota, in our case humanity, the universe becoming able to become more deeply aware itself over space-time. In this sense we are the eyes and ears and a thought in the mind of the cosmic becoming.

Reproductive Sex is Sacred. Social Sex is a Human Right

Major religions, including Christianity, are centrally concerned with life and death and the ongoing process of life in fertility and reproduction. The Judeo-Christian heritage has taken a patriarchal position, fallaciously accusing women of being the 'devils gateway' due to Eve seducing Adam into eating the fruit, to be seen and not heard, to live in pain of childbirth in obedience to their husbands. The basis of this is a deep innate male fear of paternity uncertainty, which lies at the core of attempts to treat women as inferior, and the violent penalties such as stoning for adultery which still plague women in the Islamic world.

This is a fundamental and tragic error, because women are the principal bearers of new life, giving birth to live young, lactating, and being pivotal in early child care. In all mammals, which give birth to live young, the investment of the female in parenting is paramount and female reproductive choice is essential to evolution, while the males are investing in competing sexual fertilization - sewing wild oats. Humans, despite their cultural emergence, stand at an extreme of sexual polarization biologically, in which human females have a massive and risky out front investment in pregnancy an often difficult childbirth due to the large human head size followed by long years of child nurturing in a very slowly maturing highly social species, and so womens' role in the procreative process needs to be respected as sovereign and sacred.

Christianity, particularly in its Catholic form, has created a distorted sexual environment in which Mary continues to be touted as a virgin to God, a couple of centuries after the scientific discovery of the human ovum by Karl Ernst von Baer in 1827, although Herophilos (335-280 BC) also lays claim to the discovery. Priests are required to be celibate men, resulting in rampant sexual abuse, while for lay folk sex is supposed to be only for procreation and not for sensual pleasure, or social bonding, and is denied as a sacred avenue for spiritual and religious discovery.

In an era of frank population explosion in which epidemic diseases such as HIV are rampant the Catholic church still takes a self-serving and highly corrupt position banning the most basic forms of contraception and disease protection, on the fallacious basis that sex should be procreative, or abstinence should prevail, even though this has always been a transparent ploy for religious domination through a demographic flood on the part of Christians and Muslims alike.

Sexual pleasure and sexual relationship is the glue and foundation of human culture and family life, sine qua non. It is the central social bonding activity in humans essential for keeping the peace. Reproductive sexuality is the gateway of new life and consciousness, which humanity and religious and secular society and the diversity of life depend on for our very existence. It is a complete fallacy to infer that sex, even if some of its effects on society are chaotic and stress our emotions of jealousy and fidelity, is evil, or degenerate. The dance of Tantra shows us that in a fundamental sense, the entire universe is a sexual union between consciousness and the material universe.

Nevertheless, even though some 99.9% of sexual engagement is social and only 0.1% actually results in pregnancy, reproductive sex and sexual fertility between a woman and a man. Both human society and Christian religion is going through a period of reassessing sexual relationship and the rights of same sex couples to engage fully in the social process in terms of civil unions, surrogacy and adoption and taking clerical religions positions.

To function as guardians of future generations of humanity, it is essential that we understand the primary and sacred role of reproductive sexuality between a woman and a man as the foundation of the passage of the generations, while having an open view of the right of individuals to chose their sexual partners as they see fit. We thus cannot simply equate social sex with reproductive sex, or union between a woman and a man with same sex unions without reducing the life force from which we all came to an exercise in sensual gratification.

Future Synopsis

We have found that orthodox Christianity has dealt us a double edged sword, both deifying Jesus without valid cause and crippling humanity with the doctrine of original sin, leaving us no option but to put our faith in God, depend on the teachings of the church and believe in Jesus as Lord for our salvation, without which we would be helpless like little children. The messianic path, by contrast, is one of coming of age as an adult, taking personal responsibility both for one's incarnation and for the fate of the world in which we live, in cherishing and replenishing the life process.

Jesus, as the divine Son of God, is a pagan Hellenistic contrivance, which is neither part of his own teachings, nor is it part of the founding tradition of his followers, but rather an invention of Pauline gentile Christianity. The concept of the Trinity is a corrupt notion in frank violation of any plausible cosmology, which achieved dominance through bribery by Cyril of Alexandria. Likewise the concept of human fallibility in original sin is a corruption of nature, with no genetic basis, again foisted on the tradition by Augustine's bribery.

If we are going to bring this tradition into any sort of correspondence with reality, in a form which is going have any hope of being a beneficial influence on our planetary future, the tables are going to have to be turned, and things are going to have to change from the bottom to the top.

As we enter the genetic age, where science and technology are providing more and more avenues to play God with our own futures, we need to develop social, ethical , moral and spiritual traditions which are up to the challenge of dealing with the unknown future in a way which preserves human and planetary viability and doesn't subject us to a futile endgame or an apocalyptic armageddon through our own lack of sensitivity and foresight. The Western tradition of gentile Christianity can only play a part in this future through a revolution of outlook at the most fundamental level.

Three key principles are:

1. Sensitivity to nature and scientific knowledge

Any valid spiritual social movement needs to be sensitive to checking its assumptions against all the tests of nature and physical validity. The standards are thus even higher and more stringent than for scientific discovery, because religion purports not just to discover the nature of reality but to guide humanity. Religion cannot afford to confront nature, or attempt to overturn scientific discovery through literal interpretations of ancient scripture as fact. Denying evolution as a basis for life's diversity and the emergence of humanity is a tragic error, as is insisting the sabbatical creation is an historical fact, rather than a beautiful metaphorical and mythological account.

2. A democratic living tradition manifest through the personal experience of the participants

Any valid spiritual social movement needs to be a product of the evolving conscious experiences and wisdom of each generation in which it has an influence, with a view to safeguarding future generations. No pre-existing religious doctrine can validly be imposed on any generation. Religious viewpoints need to be a product of the people alive at the time, and not an imposed doctrine based on past messiahs, or church fathers. Spiritual experience needs to be first hand, through inner meditation, or conveyed directly through the wisdom of a living person's experience, or the veracity of other people's written experiences and accounts, rather than through literal interpretations of scripture, prescriptive rules and taboos, or requiring affirmative belief or unquestioning faith in a past saviour or Lord. The first step is bringing Jesus down from the Cross so that we all can live in freedom from bondage. The natural destiny of sacramental religion is in the use of psychotropic sibling species to facilitate spiritual consciousness, rather than a cannibalistic feast of flesh and blood.

3. Respect for the Feminine and living fertility

The ongoing process of sexual procreation is fundamental to the future of humanity and of the diversity of life sustaining the planet. In this, women play the key role, in providing the continuity of life through pregnancy, live birth, lactation and infant child care. The women in each generation need to retain the sovereignty be able to make the best reproductive choices possible for the children they will bear, without fear of religious threats or penalties devised by males out of their fear of paternity uncertainty, so that both sexes can look to the long term future of the diversity of life, to ensure their offsprings' offspring will also be able to survive.

Book References

Cohn, Norman 1957 The Pursuit of the Millenium , Paladin, Granada, London.
Fox, Robin Lane 1992 The Unauthorized Version, Alfred A. Knopf, NY.
Glueck, Nelson 1966 Deities and Dolphins, Cassel, London.
Graves R., Podro J. 1953 The Nazarene Gospel Restored, Cassel, London
Graves R., Podro J. 1957 Jesus in Rome, Cassel & Co., London
Haskins, Susan 1993 Mary Magdalen Myth and Metaphor, Harper Collins, London
Jones, Steve 1996 In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny, Harper-Collns, London.
Pagels, Elaine 1988 Adam Eve and the Serpent, Random House, N.Y.
Pagels, Elaine 1979 The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage Books
Pagels, Elaine 1995 The Origin of Satan, Vintage Books
Pagels, Elaine 2003 Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Vintage Books
Pagels, Elaine and King Karen 2007 Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, Viking Press
Ranke-Heinmann, Uta 1992 Putting Away Childish Things, Harper, San Francisco
Robinson, James ed. 1990 The Nag Hammadi Library, Harper, S.F.
Schonfield, Hugh 1965 The Passover plot : new light on the history of Jesus, Hutchinson, London.
Wilson, Ian 1996 Jesus The Evidence, Weddenfield and Nicholson.

Virgin Mary's Pregnancy Test

2011-12-18T22:51:00.000-08:00

Christmas billboard for St. Matthew in the City, Auckland NZ

From the remote quarter of St. Matthew in the City Auckland NZ, the notorious Christmas billboard depicting a shocked Mary looking at her positive pregnancy test has made it to the Huffington Post, and rippled on to the BBC, where the equally controversial 2009 billboard "Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to Follow" briefly became the most read BBC article on 15 Dec 2011, despite being two years out of date.

The poster raises a fundamental question about the divine union. What IS the status of Mary's pregnancy? Is it real? Is it a woman's pregnancy giving birth to a real son? And if so, how can it be conceived without the sperm of a biological male?

The reaction of local Catholics has been equally revealing. Arthur Skinner, A Catholic activist, already known for defacing the Virgin in a Condom in the Wellington Art Gallery promptly took a 'knife', or rather a pair of scissors, to the image, later bringing in a demonstration of 100 or so people in the name of a group calling itself Catholic Action, carrying on site a Virgin Mary altarpiece, as well as an image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe - the equally ironic Catholic adaption of the pre-Colombian Goddess Tonantzin, later used by Miguel Hidalgo as a totem in the Mexican Revolution against the Conquistadors.

It was all very well when men, in the shadow of patriarchal Greece, thought women were mere vessels of mens' seed, but we have now known for a couple of centuries, since Karl Ernst von Baer's discovery in 1827, that women possess ova, and that pregnancy results from fertilization of the ovum. In fact the discovery has been traced back to Herophilus (335-280 BC) so the church fathers have absolutely no excuse.

Fertilization of the human ovum

In lower vertebrate species, from sharks to certain reptiles, occasionally parthenogenesis occurs, but is not known to occur in any mammals in the wild, and has been achieved only once in mammals in a cutting edge genetic engineering experiment involving two ova, one of which was masculinised by switching off a gene silenced in males.

So has the concept of the virgin birth undergone a seismic shift from 100% God's work to 50% God and 50% Mary's ovum? In either case what is the significance of the pregnancy test to how she conceived and why the wild Catholic claims that this is questioning her "fecundity" - as quoted?

If she conceived by God, would the pregnancy test, which looks for the fertilized embryo's human chorionic gonadotropin, be any the different? If Jesus is just a docetic apparition, it mightn't but if we assume the crucifixion and bodily resurrection it should. Is she shocked because she is pregnant to God or because she has gotten herself up the duff by an unspecified male, as Matthew declared:

"Then Joseph her husband, being a just man,
and not willing to make her a publick example,
was minded to put her away privily".

And where does Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera the Roman soldier some commentatos have suggested is the father come into the piece?

Anyway how was God going to do this magic? Vertebrate parthenogenesis involves only reproduction of clonal females, except in one rare instance of snakes, where the offspring are both female and have only half the mother's set of genes. God is at least going to have to put an SRY gene into Mary for Jesus to have a foreskin to become a circumcised male messiah, even if anointed to his doom by another vastly less chaste Mary.

Do we, in the genetic age, expect God to perform a high tech piece of magic which is a piece of extreme high class lab engineering? If not what? Blow some dust up her dotty and cry "whoopee", as he did in the creation of Adam in Eden's all too Yahwistic fable? And how can the pregnancy test be an affront to Mary's "fecundity" either way? On its own it certainly doesn't mean she is a 'sinner' except through guilt by association with the incriminating item in her hand.

In true fact, the only blasphemy about Mary has been the Christian Catholic notion that a woman is a mere vessel for man's divine seed, not to mention that she is the Devil's gateway incarnate!

The 2009 Christmas poster

The 2009 poster posed an equally sexual dilemma, brilliantly expressed in the nuances of Joseph's and Mary's faces, one dejected and the other unfulfilled. So is 'getting it on' with God a truly ecstatic experience, which no mere mortal man can hope to deliver, to a woman's satisfaction?

Again this was attacked within hours and defaced by emotionally distraught Christians of other denominations.

The poster now reflects Mary's shock at the Catholic knife attack on her person

In response, to the desecration this time, St. Matthew has decided to keep the Mary poster as it is. The church believes the billboard still carries the initial message of Mary's shock, but now also carries a second message of intolerance towards those who dare to differ. In fact for a day or two it has become a little like the religious struggle in Northern Ireland some to haunt God's own country, or 'godzone' as we are want to call it.

Scissorman Arthur lauds his actions while Mary looks on in shock

So what do we make of Arthur's scissor attack and what it means about Christianity and it's future? In a forthcoming article I will reveal all about the fate of Christianity in he sustainable future, but for now let's look at the history of Christians defacing controversial works religious of art.

Portable Marian shrine on the demo with a Virgin of Guadeloupe

There are three notable forerunners to this vandalism. The most direct is the virgin in a condom, an art work by Tania Kovats consisting of a crucifix inside a condom, poignantly expressing the Catholic contradiction between virginity and uncontrolled male fertility, and population explosion, along with lethal epidemic STDs, which denying the condom results in. This was again vandalized several years ago by the same Arthur and his extremist Catholic contingent.

"In 1998 an artwork exhibited at Te Papa (the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) in Wellington attracted religious protests. It was a statuette of the Virgin Mary in a condom. MP John Banks attempted to prosecute the museum, but Solicitor General John McGrath ruled that a prosecution should not proceed due to the freedom-of-expression provisions enshrined in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990." It had already been stolen earlier by a visitor to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

Virgin in a Condom

On a wider world footing, among art crimes, we have the defacing of Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" in Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, forcing the closure of the exhibition. This is a crucifix immersed in the artists urine and photographed in a golden religious light creating another contradiction between biology and divinity.

Finally, we have the Nigerian and Trinidadian artist Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" which was again defaced with paint. This work is controversial both because the artist makes regular use of elephant feces, including this one, and because it contains pornographic images of womens' 'booty'.

Now the real paradox here is that forgiveness of sins revolves around the other Mary Magdalene, who by the combined accounts of Luke and John was a 'sinner' who was taken in adultery and stands as the forgiveness of sins for her sins because no man was without sin to condemn her. This Mary also of Bethany who was declared in Mark and Matthew that "wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her".

Woman with the 'nard' jar

A couple of centuries after Jesus, the church fathers decided this unchaste woman was too much to handle so they resuscitated mother Mary, who did little after telling him to make water into wine at Cana and whom Jesus later disclaimed in the stead of his throng of followers - "My mother and brothers are those who hear God's word and put it into practice" - when his mother and brothers came - his 'own kind' who had sought to avoid him becoming 'beside himself'.

Really this frenetic sense of Catholic vulnerability about Mary is a very old thing that shows just how archaic the sentiments are.

Just as Jesus has become the Dionysus and Adonis man-God alien to Hebrew religion and a crafted object of neo-Greek Christian legend by the early forefathers, Mary has become the Greek Virgin Mother in the old paradigm of the woman as empty vessel, to be seen and not heard, as a kind of servant vessel of Abba the Father and his divine only-begotten Son whom the Father has nevertheless ordained to be murdered to save humanity from our sins.

The Future of Human Evolution

2011-10-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

!Kung-san family

Where is Humanity Heading?

Naive opinions about the current status of human evolution follow two stereotypes - the "Big Brained Boffin" and "Evolution is dead! Long live evolution!" The actual picture is very different and shows evolution is ongoing apace, but with warnings for human culture, and its reproductive attitudes and technologies.

In the first scenario, it is assumed we will become ever more intellectualized, leading to individuals with huge brains and small bodies, possibly having to be born by cesarean section and likely selected by IVF as well, in a brave new world utopia. Some writers suggest that we might even become partly integrated with machines in a kind of cyborg fusion although this is biologically far-fetched science fiction.

The humpty-headed scenario is in obvious conflict with the fact that brain size has actually been getting a little smaller in the current epoch, despite our cultural explosion, after swelling from around 450 cc to 1500 cc with the emergence of early Homo species, with the reduction to a little over 1400 cc on average, possibly as a result of increases of overall efficiency of the brain's existing developmental plan and adaptive wiring.

In the second scenario, it is assumed that the advent of culture and medical science, with most people living to reproductive age, combined with contraception, has meant that any changes are a product of individual choices rather than natural selection and that cultural evolution has superseded natural evolution.

This is fallacious because it is clear that the capacity of prospective parents to determine the sex of their offspring, let alone avoid implanting embryos which might have genetic defects, or any characteristics the parents might find undesirable, or to seek embryos with genes that might be identified with anything from high intelligence, or good teeth to sexual orientation.

Moreover, it is clear from international demographics that contraception has led to extreme unevenness in reproductive rates with some populations, such as those of Taiwan, and Japan in impending rapid decline due to reproduction rates far below replacement, while in other countries such as Italy native European populations are failing to replace themselves due to career and lifestyle choices, while some immigrant populations are rapidly expanding due to much higher birth rates.

The role of religion and religious fundamentalism is also causing severe distortions to reproductive rates with Catholicism fighting a losing battle against contraception, while Muslim populations strive to populate through large families and in some cases multiple wives giving some Muslim men over 20 children and literally hundreds of grandchildren. To the extent that religious conservatism, or any other cultural trait, might also be partly based on the genetics of brain function, one can see that culture can both radically influence genetic selection and act as a feedback factor amplifying genes predisposed to cultural attitudes which promote reproduction in an era of contraception.

Since the Human Genome Project, our ability to get decisive data on human evolution has exploded, enabling us to not only trace our origins in gatherer-hunter populations of Africa and following the radiative diversification of human peoples, but also to discover key evolutionary changes, both confluent with the emergence of culture and accompanying human migration to new habitats (Sabeti et. al. 2006 Positive Natural Selection in the Human Lineage 312 1614-20).

In a study of genetic markers in 270 people from four groups Han Chinese, Japanese, Yoruba and Northern Europeans Henry Harpending and John Hawks found at least 7% of human genes had undergone evolution in the last 5,000 years, including the ability of adults to digest milk, the LARGE gene conferring resistance to Lassa fever in Yoruba , partial resistance to other diseases such as malaria, changing skin pigmentation, including changes that assist survival in northern latitudes through improving vitamin D generation in the skin. They estimate the contemporary evolutionary rate to be as much as 100 times faster than at any time since the split of the earliest hominin from the great apes (Ward, P 2009 What will become of Homo sapiens? Sci. Am. Feb).

Indeed many genetically derived medical conditions in current human populations appear to be adaptive responses to epidemic disease or environmental stress. High cholesterol, like light skin enhances vitamin D production, since vitamin D is made from light splitting steroids. Hemochromatosis, the accumulation of too much body iron, is related to white blood cells, which happen also to regulate iron intake, that may have adapted to increase resistance to plague bacteria which enter and attack the immune system through the iron metabolism of these white blood cells. By losing its iron regulation, the immune cells protected against the entry of the plague but also through their lack of iron ended up signaling to the rest of the body not to excrete any iron. This scenario has been made somewhat notorious in a popular book (Sharon Moalem Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease). It was paradoxically confirmed when Dr. Malcolm Casabadan died while researching a strain of yersinia pestis weakened by disabling its iron metabolism. The argument goes that, when introduced into his body, through inadequate laboratory protection, the weakened iron-deficient strain feasted on his disproportionately iron-rich bloodstream.

Sickle cell anemia, a recessive condition that appears in African and African American people carrying two copies of the defective gene, likewise confers resistance to malaria in individuals carrying a single copy of the allele. A notable example of a selective sweep is the gene variant discovered which gives Tibetans living at high altitudes better adjustment of red-cell production, which spread through the population in the last 3000 years (Xin Yi 2010 Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude Science 329 75-80).

Despite the advent of medical science, it is likely that disease resistance will continue to shape human evolution. Unless and until an effective vaccine is found for HIV there will be selection pressures favouring the survival of more resistant individuals and emergence of resistant genotypes. The continuing risk of multiply antibiotic resistant epidemic diseases from TB to gonorrhea could likewise lead to the emergence of new genotypes. If the world population remains as long-lived as currently in developed countries, it is likely that we may also see increased resistance to cancer emerge. Although senescence is not usually accompanied by reproductive procreation cancer is becoming an increasing mortality factor in all age groups as other diseases become controlled.

Many of the genetic changes which have taken place during human diversification were due to changing habitats with migration, that in addition, subjected populations to new diseases, and to major changes with urbanization, with new assaults due to poor sanitation, often inadequate diets and epidemic diseases, and reproductive changes that may have accompanied the emergence of culture, including language proficiency and social impacts on reproductive rates caused by cultural forces.

Modern society is tending to homogenize much of the diversification which occurred as human groups spread out across the Earth, forming new cultures and adapting in different ways to new environments, so is it undoing the evolutionary process that accompanied our adaptive radiation?

A more extreme version of the "evolution is dead" scenario asserts that contraception is promoting evolution in reverse, because people unwilling or unable to cope with contraception are more likely to conceive. People with genetic damage that was once fatal, or prevented conception, are now able to live and have children. More endowed individuals, who seek higher education and careers, tend to put off having families, while less endowed people, who pay less heed to contraception, or long term family planning, reproduce early and prolifically. However there is little real evidence that overall intelligence is decreasing in societies where it is measured.

Nevertheless, some conditions which we do find socially disadvantageous could easily become more common in the current social evolutionary climate. It has been controversially suggested by David Comings, that Tourette's syndrome and ADHD have become more common because women with these conditions are less likely to attend college and more likely to reproduce.

On the other hand, some people have gone so far as to claim that intelligence is not heritable because it is a product of a large number of small genetic differences and cannot easily be selected for, but this argument is completely fallacious, as social intelligence is the trademark of our species and a dominant portion of measured human evolution consists of small changes in a large number of interacting genes having a cumulative effect, rather than rapid selective sweeps of one, or a few genes, which alone confer a marked increase in the viability or number of offspring.

A selective sweep results when a single gene, or a small collection of closely linked genes which would travel together as 'hitchhikers' with meiotic crossing over of nearby chromosomal regions have a significant selective advantage in the next generation. This can result in a gene which start out at say 1% frequency growing over a small number of generations to say 99% frequency because all the offspring which possess it have say a 10%increase in their offspring, causing an exponential rise. Such a selective sweep would take about 200 generations or around 5000 years. For example the lactase gene that allows adults to digest milk rather than switching off when a child is weaned spread in the dairy farming populations of Europe in 5000 to 10000 years. A parallel rapid evolution in lactase has independently occurred in African dairy farming populations.

However the evolutionary evidence coming out of recent genetic analyses shows that, although there are a few outstanding examples of selective sweeps, most of the evolutionary changes are multifactorial, involving a large number of genes conferring only a small selective advantage, taking a much longer time for such evolutionary change. Many of the changes discovered happened earlier in the human spread out of Africa in response to local environments, such as the genes favoring lighter skin, and were then carried to other places only slowly being changed by relatively neutral evolution as changing circumstances altered selection pressures (Pritchard J. 2010 How we are evolving Sci. Am. Oct).

In a study of 1000 individuals, from around the world, investigating single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which indicate selective pressure when random variation in a population is suppressed into one or a few dominant types by natural selection, selective sweeps appear to date from three distinct events. The first is the immediate aftermath of the radiation out of Africa, when human populations were still confined to the Middle East around 60000 years ago. There are two further sweeps, a West Asian series occurring at high frequency in populations of Europe, Middle East, Central and South Asia, but not elsewhere, and a further series confined to East Asian, Native Americans, Melanesians and Papuans both occurring around 30000 to 20000 years ago.

Moreover, genes which earlier conferred selective advantage and became common in selective sweeps have not reappeared when the same conditions occur in other migrating populations. For example the SLC24A5 gene conferring lighter skin colour in people of Northern Europe is not found in significant quantities in East Asians where in Northern climates other genes promote skin lightness.

The genes which show greatest contrasts between populations indicating selective adaption do not show the hitchhiking signals of neighbouring regions common in selective sweeps, but rather the gradual propagation over tens of thousands of years associated with multi-factorial gene effects involving tens to thousands of interacting genes which confer only a small selective advantage on any singe gene.

This is characteristic of many significant features of human evolution from height to intelligence, yet the fact that pygmy populations of African rain forest adapted to become small demonstrates that selection changing the frequency of individual genes by only a few percent but changing many genes simultaneously can have a significant adaptive effect.

At the end of this section are three sections looking in detail at some of the key findings concerning human evolution and genetic changes as a result of the human and other genome projects in relation to our (1) human differentiation from the apes, (2) our differentiation from and occasional interbreeding with sister species such as Neanderthals and (3) the detailed divergence of modern human groups in the migrations out of Africa. These give a more in depth insight into the diversity of genetic evidence that has emerged in these key areas of discovery and include several examples of genes hypothetically linked to human intelligence and the emergence of culture.

So what of the future? In modern society where medical science can compensate for many of the effects of disease and environment on life expectancy and fertility, one would expect selective advantage to be operating most acutely on factors which effect human reproduction, or on genes which affect social attitudes to reproduction, including those affecting social intelligence.

Stephen Stearn and his team have identified six different heritable traits in women that are associated with higher lifetime numbers of children, including being slightly shorter and stouter and having a late menopause. One of the central genetic explanations for male homosexuality, giving a 14% genetic basis on its own, is the fertile mother effect - that a gene which confers increased fertility in women also carries an increased likelihood of male offspring becoming homosexual, but not enough to offset the increased fertility (Stearn S et. al. 2010 Measuring Selection in Contemporary Human Populations. Nature Reviews Genetics 11 611-622).

Heritable characteristics affecting attitudes to reproduction could also be pivotal in determining human evolutionary futures. Religiosity has been claimed to have a 40% genetic component, which can be explained readily as an adaptive response enabling the formation of larger more dominant societies through reducing intra-social defection from the group. Major religions, especially the Judeo-Christian-Islamic nexus all have a primary aim of encouraging unconstrained reproduction to further the utopian aims of the religion. There is room here for substantial concern that cultural and genetic factors are combining to have an undue strategic influence on the human genetic and evolutionary future.

A second social factor which is highly significant to human evolution is sexual rather than natural selection. Geoffrey Miller has drawn attention to the beneficial effects of sexual selection and mutual mate choice in driving the emergence of art, music, science, culture and the evolution of super-intelligence in Homo sapiens, through sexual selection, particularly by astute females selecting partners with good husbanding, bringing home the bacon, or an antelope in good hunting, telling stories and jokes around the camp fire and adroit musicianship, as genuine indicators of genetic fitness (Miller G The Mating Mind).

In our work (Fielder C and King C Sexual Paradox: Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence http://sexualparadox.org) we extend this idea to look at the effects of patriarchal dominance on sexual selection on a variety of contexts, from hypergamy and the dowry, through to sexual imbalances caused by invocations against female reproductive choice and selective female infanticide. The dominance of patriarchy has also led to significant changes in adaptive advantage, for example favouring higher testosterone women in high-born places who give birth to more male children, and the opposite in low born populations where marrying up a daughter to a high born son carries more advantage.

Venus of Laussel attests to the importance of fertility, understanding of the menstrual period (13 notches on the moon horn) and an emphasis on the feminine as sacred in early human populations.

Patriarchy may also be inhibiting some of the central features of mammalian evolution by inhibiting female reproductive choice, often by dire punishments such as stoning for adultery, which is usually selectively aimed at female indiscretion and loss of honour. Only three percent of mammals are socially monogamous, largely due to the fact that they bear live young thus causing the females to have a massive investment in parenting, while the males tend to invest primarily or exclusively in sexual fertilization. In many ways Homo sapiens is at at extreme with a massive pregnancy straining the females resources and carrying significant risks of mortality so female reproductive choice should be at a premium in our species.

This is compounded with X-Y sexual determination, which means that, particularly in terms of intelligence bearing genes, males express a unique X in their brain while females express a tortoise-shell chimera of paternal and maternal X. Thus female selection of well-endowed males serves as a principal selective factor for X-linked genes associated with brain function, of which there are several, confirmed by the greater variation in natural intelligence in human males than females.

The relentless discovery of genes which not only cause medical conditions, but also affect our behavior is exposing us all to the desire to avoid disadvantageous genes in our offspring and select offspring through IVF and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) that have favored chosen characteristics. Millions of baby girls are already aborted as a result of ultrasound scans in countries where people favor boys over girls, leading to serious sex imbalances.

While we have tended to leave human selection to individual choice humanity has for centuries been involved in directed evolution of our food plants and domestic animals, so it is only a matter of time before we enter into an era of selective breeding and germ-line engineering of the human species as well. In a sense religious prerogatives to 'go forth and multiply' have been a form of socially induced selective breeding that has become more pronounced since the advent of contraception.

All of these prospects bring with them major pitfalls. Many species we have applied selective breeding to have lost critical viability factors such as disease resistance and sexual viability. Cauliflowers have lost natural resistance to mosaic virus and Cavendish bananas have become almost monoclonal. Bulldogs have become dependent on Caesarian section birth and world salmon stocks are becoming contaminated by genetically-modified salmon farming varieties (GM Salmon Muscle In on Wild Fish When Food Is Scarce Sci. Am. 8 Jun 2004).

Humans are entering a phase where cesareans, often for cosmetic reasons, are rising upwards towards 40% of live births, compromising the future capacity of humans to give live natural birth. IVF combined with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is resulting in transmission of sperm defects which would render a man infertile from fathers to their sons. We need to take heed from the mistakes we have made with other species and not commit humanity to threats to our viability as a result of the over-technologization of human reproductive capacity in a Brave New World utopia.

At the same time, genetic testing is placing new pressures on human viability in terms of withholding of medical insurance on the basis of a propensity to chronic or terminal disease. There are also implicit dangers in society entering into genetic control of human reproduction. Societies which have embraced eugenics have almost without exception resulted in atrocities and massive human injustices.

Central to the future of humanity, as an intelligent species, is ensuring the capacity of women, who are responsible for bringing the next generation into existence, to choose their partners, free of religious or paternal pressures, and giving them encouragement and the cultural values to make these choices carefully and astutely, by choosing male partners to sire their children who can demonstrate the mental and physical prowess which accompanies a good functioning set of genes, as well as socially conscious attitudes and resourceful parenting.

Finally we should respect human diversity and avoid aiming for any single Brave New World utopia and resist religious and social prerogatives that attempt to flood the world with believers, or cause massive imbalances in reproduction rates, and are in their essence, both selfish and distorting.

We are in an era where the human population is cresting to unprecedented levels and the resulting impacts on the Earth's capacity to sustain us. Long term human viability is being threatened by climate change, non-renewable resource depletion, species and genetic loss and habitat destruction. Far from a technological utopia, the pressures of economic decline in an era of post peak oil price spirals, humanity could find itself again facing a struggle of tooth and claw amid pressures of world domination by fundamentalist reactions to poverty and hardship and a necessity to cope without the luxuries of advanced medical care as many people struggling in developing countries still have to do today.

We thus need to limit human population to sustain future human viability and share this duty of care between religious believers and rationalists and the well-endowed and otherwise. The lesson of the Neanderthals is that genetic diversity coming from individuals we might think are 'inferior' may be essential to the viability of our own offspring.

Primate mating patterns and concealed or advertised ovulation.
Pink and white discs indicate overt and covert ovulation, half-shaded slight signs.

Evolutionary Features of Human Emergence that Differ from Apes

Genes involving disease resistance, reproduction (seminal protamines and seminogelins), and nocioception (awareness of pain and toxic substances) stand out as rapidly evolving. Gene evolution is faster on rearranged chromosomes 1, 2, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18. Rapidly evolving gene clusters are associated with immunity, host defense, chemosensation and inflammation. Hominid lines show increased divergence of genes associated with ion transport, neruotransmission, sound perception and reproduction by comparison with murids. Large gene families such as those involved in immunity and olfactory are harder to test but are also subject to accelerated divergence.

Six regions of low diversity have been noted, consistent with linked genes hitchhiking on strong selective sweeps in recent human history. In addition one region containing several high diversity-divergence scores contains genes noted for selective mutations, FoxP2 involved in speech ( Suite of chatterbox genes discovered New Scientist 11 Nov 2009, Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08549), as well as CFTR (connected with asthma resistance). Other selective sweeps have also been discovered in recent human evolution putatively associated with brain size determining genes microcephalin and ASPM (see below).

Looking at regulators and genes which have been lost in the human lineage one prominent one removes a forebrain subventricular zone enhancer near the tumour suppressor gene growth arrest and DNA-damage inducible, gamma (GADD45G)11,12, a loss correlated with expansion of specific brain regions in humans. (McLean CY et. al. 2011 Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits. Nature 471/7337, 216-9).

Many brain genes are more strongly conserved than other genes, although brain evolution may be affected by new alternative splicing arrangements in a small subset of genes, and strong selective sweeps made by new highly selective genes. Gene conversion with a pseudogene for example in the human line has altered sialic acid expression in brain tissue so that only human microglia express sialic acid.

A detailed map of human evolution is emerging from comparison between the results of the human and chimp genome projects (Chimpanzee sequencing and analysis consortium Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome Nature 437 69-87). The discoveries so far are summarized below:

The single nucleotide divergence between chimp and human is only 1.23% (35 million base pairs) of which 1.06% corresponds to fixed fixed divergence between the species once 14-20% of intra-species polymorphisms are taken into account. The correspondingly higher divergence of the Y of 1.9% and lower of the X of 0.94% indicates the male mutation rate is 3-6 times the female rate. This mutational discrepancy between the sexes supports the necessity of female reproductive choice in all hominins, including humans.

Regarding mutation generally, CpG (cytosine-guanine) bases are prone to deamination to TpG and constitute the dominant form of chemical damage, causing 25.2% of mutations but only occurring in 2.1% of bases. Mutation rate variations between sexes are not CpG correlated because chemical damage is time related as opposed to replication errors from the 5-6 fold higher number of cell divisions in spermatogenesis. Mutation rates also vary with location with 15% more near the ends of chromosomes, with higher local recombination rate, high gene density and high GC content. This effects the shorter chromosomes more significantly. Dark bands which are gene poor have a 10% higher mutation rate. Telomere regions have a higher rate rate in hominids than in murids, suggesting less selective pressure.

Insertions and deletions are rarer individually than point mutations but are larger, so 1.5% of the euchromatic differences are species specific, a larger difference than point mutations. Overall indel divergence is about ~45 Mb in each species or about 3% of the genome dwarfing the single nucleotide divergence. Most are very small, but the total contribution is 73% from larger over 80bp indels. Over a third of these come from repetitious micro-satellite and satellite sequences, a quarter are caused by transposable elements, with a residue coming from deletions in the other species. 8.3 Mb of these in humans contain 34 exon regions indicative of new genes.

Orthologous proteins are very similar between the species, with 29% identical. Recombination is limited by a low cross-over rate with 1kb only having only ~1 crossover every 100,000 generations, or 2 million years.
Estimates of the effects of natural selection, neutral evolution and other factors can be gleaned by examining KA the amino acid substituting mutations, KS the synonymous mutations and KI the non-coding mutations. KA is 37% higher in the most distal 10 Mb than in proximal regions so careful averaging across the genome is needed. Both KA/KS and KA/KI are around 0.23 <<1 indicating significant purifying selection. This value is 35% greater than for murids (rodents) indicating either greater positive adaption or fewer evolutionary constraints. There is also weak purifying selection on silent sites in exons compared with introns In terms of gene evolution a KA/KS of 0.23 indicates 77% of amino acid substitutions are sufficiently deleterious to be eliminated by natural selection. 4.5% of human-chimp orthologues (585/13,454) have KA/KL<1 indicating strong selection, however because of the low divergence between the species, about half could occur by chance variation among genes. The high KA/KS for these genes also shows that 25% of amino acid substitutions contribute to the current human genetic load. The KA/KS for human polymorphisms of 0.20-0.23 is very similar to that for human chimp divergence, indicating little positive selection across the genome driving evolutionary divergence, because positive selection would cause many selective sweeps and reduce polymorphisms, indicating fewer evolutionary constraints in the hominid lines than in murids. X has KA/KL = 0.32 skewed high and low with higher selection on testis-related genes. The median is similar to autosomes indicating a skewed subset with very high evolutionary selection. Many low values indicate greater purifying selection consistent with being genes expressed in the hemizygous single X state in males, and high values could also result from positive selection from adaptive hemizygosity of the X in males, particularly if a substantial proportion of these genes are recessive.

Transposable elements are now known to play a significant part in evolutionary change. The history of transposable elements differs significantly between the species. Endogenous retroviruses have died out in humans except for HERV-K with 73 human insertions (of which 66 have only the long terminal repeat remaining, indicating old insertions) This occurs also in chimps 45 insertions (44 LTR only) but chimps have other active ERVs. PtERV1 has over 200 copies over half of which are full length indicating active insertion. SINEs in particular Alu has been 3 times more active in humans (7000/2300 lineage specific insertions) mostly due to two new subfamilies (Ya5 Ya8), but baboons are 1.6 times higher still. Old Alu elements lie in GC rich gene-rich regions but newer ones are in AT rich gene-poor regions where LINEs also accumulate, consistent with L1-based retro-transcription. There is similar L1 activity in both species (~2000 insertions), as well as 200 human and 300 chimp processed LINE-related retrogenes (pseudogenes). SVA an Alu repeat with a CpG island and potential transcription factor binding sites occurs (~1000) in both species. 3 human genes show SVA insertions resulting in species differential transcriptions. There are also 612 human and 914 chimp Alu-Alu deletions, 26 and 48 L1 deletions and 8, and 22 LTR deletions, none involving exons of human genes in chimp. There are also larger scale inversions and fusions. Chimp chromosomes 12,13 now called 2A,2B fused to make human chromosome 2. There have also been pericentric inversions.

According to initial genetic analysis, Neanderthals diverged from homo sapiens ~500,000 years ago. There has been no major interbreeding, but possibly some transfer of genes e.g. from human males to Neanaderthal females, although candidate human genes conferring natural advantage do have a profile consistent with transfer from Neanderthals (Green R,et. al. 2006 Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA Nature 444 330-336. doi:10.1038/nature05336, Science 314, 1068-71).

Divergence from and Interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovians

More recent comprehensive investigation of the Neanderthal genome (Green, R. E. et al. 2010 Science 328, 710-722., Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.225) suggests that there was a period of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans in the Near East around the time of the first migration out of Africa, rather than more recently in Europe, as the putative sequences are shared by non-African French, Han and Papuan, but not by the African Yoruba or San. It is estimated that among the former, 1-4% of the genome derives from Neanderthal sequences, although there is little evidence for these corresponding to the specific genes suggested by Lahn's team. Other transfers could have occurred but are not apparent in the research.

The "Out of Africa" hypothesis may be consistent with a degree of regional development involving some sexual interbreeding with Neanderthals and Homo erectus. Specific genes such a s PDHA1 consist of two families with the last common ancestor 1.8 million years ago, and microcephalin variants appearing 40,000 years ago (p 105) also have differences suggesting an original divergence 1 million years ago suggesting 'introgression' from Neanderthals (Jones, Dan 2007 The Neanderthal Within New Scientist 3 Mar.). An even more ancient divergence in the pseudogene RRM2P4 in East Asian people suggests interbreeding with Homo Erectus. Some evidence from skeletons is also consistent with this picture. However more recent sequencing of the Neanderthal nuclear genome (Callaway E 2010 Neanderthal genome already giving up its secrets New Scientist 06 May) suggests little or no interbreeding with Homo sapiens and has cast doubt on the existence of the microcephalin variant in Neanderthals, as well as a gene associated with increased fertility in Icelanders also attributed to transfer from Neanderthals.

However, research in 2010 into microsatellite variation in the human genome suggests that there have been two interbreeding events with other hominid species, one about 60,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean after the emergence of Homo sapiens from Africa, and the other about 45,000 years ago in eastern Asia (Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.194, Krause, J. et al. Nature doi:10.1038/nature08976 ).
More recently we have the discovery of remains of Denisovians (Callaway E 2010 Fossil genome reveals ancestral link Nature 468, 1012 doi:10.1038/4681012a, Finlayson C 2010 All change: Theories of human ancestry get an overhaul BBC 31 Dec ) a further species branching off from the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of the remains indicates a significant interbreeding specifically with Melanesian people of some 6% (Reich D, et. al. 2010 Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia Nature doi:10.1038/nature09710).

Migratory interactions with Neanderthal and Homo erectus

More recent investigations show that interbreeding with other hominins was critical to the globalization of Homo sapiens. Human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), a family of about 200 genes that essential to our immune system also contains some of the most variable human genes: hundreds of versions - or alleles - exist of each gene in the population, allowing our bodies to react to a huge number of disease-causing agents and adapt to new ones. One allele, HLA-C*0702, is common in modern Europeans and Asians but never seen in Africans; Peter Parham has found it in the Neanderthal genome, suggesting it made its way into H. sapiens of non-African descent through interbreeding. HLA-A*11 had a similar story: it is mostly found in Asians and never in Africans, and Parham found it in the Denisovan genome, again suggesting its source was interbreeding outside of Africa. This tallies with interbreeding giving Homo sapiens pivotal resistance to non-African diseases. While only 6 per cent of the non-African modern human genome comes from other hominins, the share of HLAs acquired during interbreeding is much higher. Half of European HLA-A alleles come from other hominins, says Parham, and that figure rises to 72 per cent for people in China, and over 90 per cent for those in Papua New Guinea (Marshall M. 2011 Breeding with Neanderthals helped humans go global New Scientist 16 Jun, Neanderthal sex boosted immunity in modern humans BBC 26 Aug 2011).

There is also suggestive evidence for up to 2% interbreeding with another hominin species, in ancient African populations of Biaka Pygmies and San Bushmen (Human ancestors interbred with related species Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2011.518, Hammer, M. F. et al. Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1109300108) although this is based only on statistical divergences in some loci, and lacks a sister species reference sequence, it suggests interbreeding around 35,000 years ago with a population that originally diverged from the Homo sapiens line some 700,000 years before.

Genetic Diversification of Modern Humans

Chromosomes contain a variety of markers that can be used to compare diverse populations and infer an evolutionary relationship between them. These include the slowly varying protein polymorphisms of coding regions which are useful for long-term trends, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and non-coding region changes (mutation rates about 2.5 x 10-8 per base pair per generation and useful for reconstructing evolutionary history only over millions of years) insertion and deletion events (about 8% of polymorphisms, extending from one to millions of nucleotides), particularly those driven by transposable elements such as the LINEs and even more frequent SINEs such as Alu, non-coding micro-satellites (mutation rate 10-5 - 10-2 due to repeat slippage) and mini-satellite regions of repeating DNA (mutation rates as high as 2 x 10-1 due to meiotic recombination in sperm) that both evolve rapidly and are not subject to the strong selection of coding regions which can differentiate changes over the much shorter time scales of modern human migration (See: Sexual Paradox The Entanglements of Biological Sex http://sexualparadox.org/biology.htm).

The insertions and deletions of the million or so Alu elements in the human genome are particularly useful, as the most active sub-population of about 1000 Alu is actively transcribing and undergoing rapid change. A subpopulation of Alu are capable of generating new coding regions (exons), when inserted into non-coding introns between spliced sections of a translated mRNA, because one base-pair change within Alu leads to formation of a new exon reading into the surrounding DNA. This is not necessarily deleterious because alternative splicing still allows the original protein to be made as well. We have the highest number of introns per gene of any organism, and thus have to have gained an advantage from this costly error-prone process. Alus may have given rise, through alternative splicing, to new proteins that drove primates' divergence from other mammals. Recent studies have shown that the nearly identical genes of humans and chimps produce essentially the same proteins in most tissues, except in parts of the brain, where certain human genes are more active and others generate significantly different proteins through alternative splicing of gene transcripts. Our divergence from other primates may thus be due in part to alternative splicing.

Highlighting unique features of human genetic evolution, are two key genes whose mutations cause microcephaly, consistent with increased brain size, whose rapid spread through the human population may coincide with spurts in human culture. Microcephalin appeared ~37,000 years ago (Evans,P; et. al. Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans Science 309 1717-20) coinciding with the birth of culture and ASPM spread from the Near East around 5000 years ago (Mekel-Bobrov, et. al. Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens Science 309 1720-2). However studies linking these variants have failed to find differences in intelligence and results remain highly controversial (DOI:10.1126/science.314.5807.1872). Nevertheless, these results are consistent with an overall examination of linkage disequilibrium in single nucleotide polymorphisms (Moyzis R et. al. 2005 PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.0509691102) which indicate that about 7% of our genes have been subject to selection in the last 50,000 years, a figure similar to domestication of maize, including genes for protein metabolism, disease resistance and brain function.

The persistence of polygyny is also manifest in the greater divergence between human groups in the X-chromosome than other chromosomes, caused by women possessing double X and men only a single. The diversity arises because some men don't get to pass on their genes, while most women do. When Michael Hammer and his colleagues sequenced DNA from 90 people belonging to six groups: Melanesians, Basques, Han Chinese, as well as three African cultures: Mandenka, Biaka and San. Hammer's team discovered more genetic differences in the X chromosome than would be expected if equal numbers of males and females tended to mate, over human history. The only explanation for this pattern is widespread, long-lasting polygyny (PLoS Genetics DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.100202).

If we consider the likely effects of the out of Africa hypothesis, we would expect that founding African populations not subject to active expansion and migration would have greater genetic diversity and that the genetic makeup of other world populations would come from a subset of the African diversity, consisting of those subgroups who migrated.

In the case of mitochondrial mtDNA (mutation rate about 2.5 x 10-7) and its hyper-variable D-loop (mutations rates as high as 4 x 10-3), which is transmitted only down the maternal line (see Tishkoff Sarah, Verrelli Brian 2003 Patterns of Human Genetic Diversity: Implications for Human Evolutionary History and Disease Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 4:293–340 for caveat) and the non-recombining majority of the Y-chromosome which is transmitted only down the paternal line, each with no recombination, we would expect greater diversity going deeper into the historical tree of divergence, with certain existing groups who have retained the founding patterns of survival and have not undergone rapid population expansions to retain an increasingly diverse source variation. All these features are broadly observed in the genetic data to date.
 

(a) MtDNA tree for African groups showing haplotypes of !Kung, Mbuti and Biaka as well as the line coming out of Africa (Chen Y, et. al. 2000 mtDNA Variation in the South African Kung and Khwe - and Their Genetic Relationships to Other African Populations Am. J. Hum. Genet. 66:1362–1383). (b) Diagram of world migration and regional differentiation of successive mtDNA haplotypes (Gilbert Tom 2003 Death and Destruction New Scientist 31 May 32). (c) mtDNA distances between founding African groups including Hadza (clicks) Khwe is from (Knight A, et. al. 2003 African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages Current Biology, 13, 464–473). Recent mtDNA evidence suggests a first wave of migration down the coast of Asia all the way to Australia (Forster P., Matsumura S 2005 Did early humans go north or south? Science 308 965-6).

Most studies of non-coding regions of autosomal, X-chromosome, and mitochondrial mtDNA genetic variation (which are desirable markers because they are not so subject to selection and thus have relatively neutral drift) show higher levels of genetic variation in African populations compared to non-African populations, using many types of markers. Although some studies of Y-chromosome variation have observed higher heterozygosity levels in non-African populations, the African populations have higher levels of pairwise sequence differences, consistent with these populations being ancestral. High levels of diversity in African populations alone do not prove that African populations are ancestral. A recent bottleneck event and/or colonization and extinction events among non-African populations, or a more recent onset of population growth in non-Africans, could also cause a decrease in genetic diversity (Tishkoff and Verrelli). In fact the complete inter-fertility of all human populations and the relative lack of genetic divergence by comparison with the few remaining chimp colonies in the wild (Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer 1999 Mother Nature : A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection Pantheon New York 183) does indicate a significant bottleneck. The genetic data is consistent with a human emergence from a population of only 10,000 around 100,000 years ago. This is also consistent with the delayed maturation, long birth spacings as a result of prolonged lactation and high infant mortality seen in gather-hunter populations such as the !Kung. At such low growth rates a population of 100 would take 50,000 years to reach 10,000 (Hrdy 183).

Patterns of male migration. The Genographic Project - a partnership between National Geographic and IBM - will collect DNA samples from over 100,000 people worldwide to provide a high-resolution genetic map of human migration.

However studies of protein polymorphisms as well as mtDNA haplotypes, X-chromosome and Y-chromosome haplotypes, autosomal microsatellites and minisatellites, Alu elements, and autosomal haplotypes indicate that the roots of the population trees constructed from these data are composed of African populations and/or that Africans have the most divergent lineages, as expected under a recent African origin rather than a multi-regional emergence model. Additionally, studies of autosomal, X-chromosomal haplotype and mtDNA variation indicate that Africans have the largest number of population-specific alleles and that non-African populations harbor a subset of the genetic diversity that is present in Africa, as expected if there was a genetic bottleneck when modern humans migrated out of Africa. Analysis of genetic variation among ethnically diverse human populations indicates that populations cluster by geographic region (i.e., Africa, Europe/Middle East, Asia, Oceania, New World) and that African populations are highly divergent. The mtDNA studies hypothesize a primal female ancestor - the African Eve - around 150,000 years ago (Chen et. al. see earlier) while the Y-chromosome Adam is more recent, at around 90,000 years ago (Underhill P, et. al. 2001 The phylogeography of Y chromosome binary haplotypes and the origins of modern human populations Ann. Hum. Genet., 65, 43-62) consistent with the greater reproductive variance of males than females. Differences between the Y- and mtDNA distributions indicate how migration, intermarriage and female exogamy have affected the gene pool. The genetic patterns of both these and autosomal microsatellites (Zhivotovsky, L., Rosenberg N, Feldman M 2003 Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers Am. J. Human Genetics May) are consistent with founding African diversity with migratory radiations to form other world populations, with deep founding radiations to the forest people such as the Biaka and Mbuti, Khoisan click-language speaking !Kung-san bushmen of Botswana and the Sandawe of Tanzania, and possibly the Hadzabe, as well as the forest people such as the Mbuti and Biaka 'pygmies' who have adopted the Bantu languages of the farming neighbours with which they now share semi-symbiotic relationships. Along with some Ethiopian and Sudanese sub-populations, these groups may represent some of the oldest and deeply diversified branches of modern humans.

Genographic project study of mitochondrial origins shows a deep split separating Khoisan mitochondrial inheritance from other groups, including those migrating out of Africa, and a deep division between two Khoisan types L0k and L0d going back 140,000 years, suggesting a separation of some 100,000 years possibly caused by long term drought in Africa (Behar et al., 2008 The Dawn of Human Matrilineal Diversity, The American Journal of Human Genetics , doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.04.002).

Such recent genetic evidence has laid bare the relationships between some of the founding human groups spread across Africa from the 'Cushite' horn of Ethiopia to the southern Kalahari. Mitochondrial DNA studies have highlighted the ancient origin of the !Kung San and of pygmy peoples of the Congo Basin such as the Mbuti and the Biaka.

Y-chromosome studies have shown the !Kung share a most ancient haplotype with sub-populations from Ethiopia and the Sudan. According to an overall survey of genetic research by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland, the most deeply ancestral known human DNA lineages may be those of East Africans, such as the Sandawe, who share many phenotypic features and a click language with the !Kung. This suggests southern Khoisan-speaking peoples originated in East Africa. The most ancient populations are now believed to also include the Sandawe, Burunge, Gorowaa and Datog people of Tanzania. The Burunge and Gorowaa migrated to Tanzania from Ethiopia within the last 5,000 years consistent with an ancient founding population in this area. Echoes of the earliest language spoken by ancient humans tens of thousands of years ago may have been preserved in the distinctive clicking sounds still spoken by some existing African tribes.

The persistence of polygyny is also manifest in the greater divergence between human groups in the X-chromosome than other chromosomes, caused by women possessing double X and men only a single. The diversity arises because some men don't get to pass on their genes, while most women do. When Michael Hammer and his colleagues sequenced DNA from 90 people belonging to six groups: Melanesians, Basques, Han Chinese, as well as three African cultures: Mandenka, Biaka and San. Hammer's team discovered more genetic differences in the X chromosome than would be expected if equal numbers of males and females tended to mate, over human history. The only explanation for this pattern is widespread, long-lasting polygyny (PLoS Genetics DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.100202).

Highlighting unique features of human genetic evolution, are two key genes whose mutations cause microcephaly, consistent with increased brain size, whose rapid spread through the human population may coincide with spurts in human culture. Microcephalin (Evans-Gilbert et. al.) appeared ~37,000 years ago coinciding with the birth of culture and ASPM spread from the Near East around 5000 years ago (Mekel-Bobrov et. al.) However studies linking these variants have failed to find differences in intelligence and results remain highly controversial (DOI:10.1126/science.314.5807.1872). Nevertheless, these results are consistent with an overall examination of linkage disequilibrium in single nucleotide polymorphisms (Moyzis et. al.) which indicate that about 7% of our genes have been subject to selection in the last 50,000 years, a figure similar to domestication of maize, including genes for protein metabolism, disease resistance and brain function.
 

(a) Non-recombining Y-chromosome evolutionary tree (Underhill P, et. al. 2001 The phylogeography of Y chromosome binary haplotypes and the origins of modern human populations Ann. Hum. Genet., 65, 43-62) (b) Geographical distribution showing the ancient haplotype shared by the San and Ethiopian and Sudanese sub-populations. (c) Genetic distances between Khoisan and forest peoples sharing M112 a Y-chromosome allele common only in these groups showing great genetic distance between Hadzabe and San peoples (Knight A, et. al. 2003 African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages Current Biology, 13, 464–473) . (d) Autosome satellite analysis confirming ancient divergence of San and forest peoples leading to migration from Africa (Zhivotovsky, L., Rosenberg N, Feldman M 2003 Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers Am. J. Human Genetics May). 

In a counterpoint to these studies, Rohde and coworkers (Rohde D. L. T, Olson S. & Chang J. T. 2004 Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans Nature, 431, 562- 565, Hein J 2004 Pedegrees for all humanity Nature 431, 518-9) estimate that the repeated spreading of family trees by sexually recombining mobile populations and differences in reproductive rates leads to an estimate of the most recent common ancestor of our global populations existing just 3,500 years ago, excepting these most isolated groups.

Human divergence trees calculated by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) top left (Jun Z. Li,et al. 2008 Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation Science 319 1100 DOI: 10.1126/science.1153717) bottom right Jakobsson et. al. (Mattias Jakobsson et. al. 2008 Genotype, haplotype and copy-number variation in worldwide human populations Nature 451 998 doi:10.1038/nature06742). Trees for haplotypes and copy number variation between populatons (Jun et. al.).

Celebrating Immortality

2011-09-28T03:44:00.000-07:00

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 evolutionary 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, as well as a proactive program to sustain biodiversity and natural habitats. It also requires adequate contraception to address the impact of overpopulation on the planet.

The Voice on the Wind

2011-08-31T02:02:00.000-07:00

The Voice on the Wind in mp3

I hear your voice on the wind
whispering, ever so softly,
echoing through the deepest canyons
of my vagrant heart

I didn't know, how could I realize
that they would cast a curse upon you,
incarcerating you in the darkness,
tearing us all apart?

If you're locked in the shadows then how can we see you?
If you only can whisper then how can we hear you?
If you never can touch us how can we be near you?
How can we come together as one?

I sat in the springtime watching the showers.
I stood in the summer surrounded by flowers.
I lay in the moonlight counting the hours,
but now bitter winter has come.

Now I can see it'll take a commotion,
a revolution to set love in motion.
We're really going to have to throw off the covers
and tear down the walls that divide.

You know you have always been my beloved,
my comrade, my partner, my nemesis other,
my enigmatic, mysterious lover,
my song, my communion, the raison d'etre
of my very essence, your living presence
fills me and thrills me to the bone.

I hear your voice on the wind
endlessly, speaking so softly,
echoing through the hills and valleys,
down to my restless heart.

I still can't believe it,
that they would seek to subjugate you,
holding you hostage, in bondage to their honour,
trying to keep us apart!

I hear your voice in the wind,
rippling sounds of distant laughter,
longing, happiness, keeping our innocence,
singing in my aching heart.

I keep hearing your voice on the wind
calling, pleading, murmuring gently,
sharing the sweetest moments of love,
stealing my feckless heart.

Reflowering the Western Spiritual Paradigm

2011-08-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

Genesis forms a counterpoint to apocalypse. The Bible is a bow, the Crucifixion being the arrow of violence,

suspended between Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life re-emerging in Revelation.
Both ends of the bow are verdant - immortality in paradise. Apocalypse is the [bridal] unveiling reunion.

Since the Renaissance, Western cultures have seen themselves as the central crucible of cultural liberation, scientific discovery, democratic emancipation and social progress. However, underlying the world view of much of Western culture is a Christian notion of an ordered universe manufactured by a fatherly creator God, in which worldly affairs are but a foretaste of an afterlife in heaven or hell, which despite the advances of modern science into every dimension of reality from the origin of the universe to the human genome, is still believed in by a significant proportion of people.

Either this is frankly a collective delusion, or it has some genuine basis in the unfolding nature of existential reality. There are of course potential evolutionary and biological explanations. Propensity for religious experience could be a serendipitous consequence of the close proximity between the amygdala and temporal lobes - parts of the brain evoking ecstatic emotional fulfillment and intense semantic significance. Conservative religion could also be a quirk of evolution of the brain to make us susceptible to beliefs which facilitate larger more dominant social groupings, through envisaging a moral deity looking over our affairs, which serves to reduce intra-social strife in favour of ascendance over other societies, something which is clearly evident in both Christian and Islamic history and cultural attitudes.

Our spiritual and religious roots underpinning this world view, contradict its Renaissance ideals in many ways. The Christian tradition, far from being the basis of democracy, or scientific discovery, sought throughout the dark ages to impose an often corrupt totalitarian conservatism on its population, through internal crusade, witch hunts and inquisition, even denying its followers access to the very religious texts it claimed were the divine word of God, such as the Bible itself. Christianity is not originally Western either, but comes from a mixing of cultural ideas stemming from more ancient cultures strewn across the Middle East, fused with some lingering beliefs dating back to old Europe. It entered the Western institutional mainstream only when Constantine converted to the Christian faith after blood-curdling and obsessive episodes of martyrdom under emperors such as Nero.

Nevertheless the Western cultural tradition holds on to a notion of enlightenment based on Christian notions of brotherly love, turning the other cheek, forgiveness of sin, charitable kindness to others and a belief that our actions in the world have a moral and spiritual dimension, in which they will eventually be held to account in the life hereafter. This despite the fact that its priesthood frequently hasn't adhered to these principles and Christian societies have frequently engaged in genocidal war and ruthless conquest of other cultures.

If we hold up a mirror akin to that of scientific discovery to the Western religious tradition, many of the central tenets of Christianity look to be contrived beliefs concocted by early church fathers to craft a neo-pagan religion in frank denial of its roots based on cobbling together early orthodox Christian teachings with existing popular 'pagan' beliefs turning Jesus from a Jewish prophet into a born-again only begotten Son of God and Mary from an incidental player into a replacement for Isis and Diana.

Many of the central beliefs look to be fantastic fantasies with no basis in natural reality, or social history. The Trinity of Father, Son and a gender-exorcised Holy Ghost is a polytheistic contrivance alien to the formless abstract Jewish God. The ideas of the physical resurrection and virgin birth are biologically ridiculous fantasies reflecting an attempt to weld early Jewish Christian practices with the popular cults of Isis, Mithra and other deities, from Diana to Adonis. Neither Christmas nor Easter are genuine dates because the former was chosen to coincide with the solstice festival of Mithra and the latter with the fertility festival of Ostaria or Ēostre, a kind of European Ishtar, for which the Easter egg still stands in memory of.

The idea of a 'loving' yet vengeful father God, who is prepared to sacrifice his 'only begotten son', so that our sins would be forgiven if we believe in him looks like a throwback to neolithic thinking. The Eucharist celebrating the gruesome sacrifice of eating his flesh and drinking his blood - the central soma and sangre of Christian communion - is likewise a cannibalistic rite disconnected from Jewish tradition. Is this neolithic sacrificial principle that "without shedding of blood there is no remission from sin" any part of a genuine creator deity's modus operandi, or is it a dark carry over from customs of human sacrifice? Isn't the sacrificial principle that Jesus has to die to save us from our sins something from the dark days of older jealous tribal totem deities and those seeking to placate natural fertility, where sacrifice is deemed to renew the harvest by returning blood and bone to the fields?

There are deep confusions here about what the nature of a creator God would be. Why would a God which created the whole universe and all of nature in the magical diversity we now know it to be then set up a narrow moral human paradigm and a system of diabolical punishment in the afterlife? We know from nature that all niches, from plant to animals which consume them, from herbivores to carnivores which devour them, and from hosts to diseases which parasitize and sometimes kill them, is an integral part of the climax diversity of life. Life thus transcends morality. Moral systems have meaning only in so far as they emerge as a natural part of social evolution of a species to permit social integration. Therefore any God which created life as we know it would defeat his own purpose by ending it all in a simplistic day of judgment over human moral issues.

There are also deep confusions about the nature of the heroic messiah, with Jesus becoming the only begotten Son of God, who then drips blood endlessly on every crucifix and every church statue, despite the fact that it is 2000 years since it was claimed he would return in power in the same generation as those standing before him.

How do we rationalize whether there is actually a core of genuine understanding in this tradition and separate the wheat of some genuine knowledge of our inner life and destiny, from closely held, but completely fallacious religious notions, which hold us back from discovering what conscious life is all about?

Jesus occupies a central place in Western belief, yet his life and sayings are somewhat contradictory, between apparently genuine source gnostic sayings such as those of the Gospel of Thomas "I am not your master but you have drunk from the bubbling stream I have measured out", to the synoptics, which have been later overlaid by the mythical narratives of the authors, claiming Peter acknowledging Jesus is the chosen messiah and ornamenting the history with manifestly fabled accounts, including the Bethlehem birth narrative.

None of this goes anywhere towards notions like the only begotten Son of God, assumption into heaven or bodily resurrection. Nor did Mary have a significant role in Jesus' mission, except perhaps at the beginning in Cana. Later Jesus was to ignore his mother and brothers when they sought him and in John his brother derided him, although later James and desposyni, or blood family of Jesus became the first Jewish Christian following. Mary in a patriarchal moral twist was only later elevated to semi-divine status by the Pauline church fathers to overturn Magdalen's sexually questionable position as Jesus' emissary and complicit partner - in his own words "everywhere my name is mentioned they shall also speak of you".

Jesus' mission also launched him into an ambiguous position, encompassing both the firebrand apocalyptic desert Nabi of John the Baptist and even Zealot viewpoints regarding the establishment, to indulgent fertility worship, from his anointing by a woman, through his mission being supported by the women 'out of their very substance', to the women of Galilee coming down to see him off, and the motifs of the true vine, the winebibber and turning water into wine, all of which echo Dionysian rites, as does his advent on the epiphany and the nature miracles, such as calming the storm and walking on water. This is why the Jewish mainstream see Jesus as a false messiah and why he is referred to as such in the Talmud.

Although some of these pagan notions may be later synoptic ornamentations, it is consistent with Jesus attempting to make a very innovative messianic cross-cultural synthesis of the prevailing beliefs in Israel and neighbouring Nabatea, which was at its cultural peak at the time, and goes a good distance to explaining why Christianity became so popular in the pagan world, although this was also partly a redrafting by people from Paul on, in terms of a miraculous semi-god in the traditions of Adonis, Ba'al, Dionysus, Melcarth and Mithra.

The traditional notion of the Jewish messiah is not a man-god but a human hero that brings about an epoch of long-term future goodness, associated with David, Solomon and Cyrus the Mede, who assisted the Jewish return, and later in such human figures as the rebel warlord Bar Cochba a century after Jesus and the apostate Shabbati Zevi in the middle ages. Traditionally a mashiach is 'anointed' by a high priest rather than a woman of dubious virtue. The Christian idea of an only begotten messianic Son of God is a complete breakaway from this tradition into fertility worship heroes.

Looking deeper into this situation, one can ask in terms of the cultural stream of consciousness and wider religious traditions, are there underlying patterns or archetypes, in the sense of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, which have driven the advent of not only Christianity but other heroic religious movements, and are these a valid expression of subterranean currents in evolving human life and consciousness?

Central to many aspects of Jesus' mission was the idea of apocalypse - that world history was hurtling towards a tumultuous falling-out, ending in an ultimate clash between good and evil in which the day of judgment would come about. Originally Satan had been merely a kind of tester and the after life in old Hebrew ideas was just the underworld, or Sheol. However, Zoroastrian notions of cosmic renovation by trial of fire in the conflict between the light of Ahura Mazda and the ignorance of Angra Mainyu became the model for later Jewish notions of the day of judgment and the division between those going to heaven and those purged in the fires of hell. Jewish prophets by the time of Zechariah had adopted this apocalyptic view in various forms, also shared by the Essenes and other desert ascetics.

It is this view of tumultuous apocalypse in a free fall to an Armageddon-like day of judgment, an unveiling in which all the covers will be thrown off reality, that haunts us down through history to this very day.

At the opposite end of the Biblical epoch we have two very quaint, absorbing mythical origin stories, the 'Elohistic sabbatical creation and the Yahwistic Eden story, between them giving us complementary views of our mythical beginnings in Genesis, in what may have originally been separate and conflicting Northern Israelite and Southern Judaic accounts.

Genesis forms a counterpoint to apocalypse. The Bible is a bow, suspended between Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life we see reemerging in Revelation and such works as the Book of Enoch. Both ends of the bow are verdant - immortality in paradise. At the centre is the Crucifixion, the arrow of violence, the war of dark and light. The apocalypse is, in its own word, the [bridal] unveiling.

The sabbatical creation is a very beautiful iconic account, but it has manifest contradictions which could come about only in a flat earth view, in which the sun, moon and stars are little more than earthly features on the firmament above. The plants get created, not only before the animals, which are made in steps from sea creatures to land, but also before the sun, moon and stars, clearly an astronomically impossible and naive earth-centric viewpoint. Nevertheless it is this charming brief mythical account which creationists and intelligent design proponents are prepared to place against all the predisposing evidence of nature, genetics and evolution showing a dangerous and slavish literary idolatry to the text, turning it from a charming mythical allegory into a fundamentalist confrontation with nature.

This situation deserves a moment's thought. Evolution is not just an alternative hypothesis to creation. The notion of creation is a two page mythical opening account written around 500 BC that was never intended to be a literal scientific description. The growth of scientific knowledge has taken place despite relentless opposition from the church from Galileo on down, one of whose turning points was the discovery of the ovum, which meant that children were not just the seed of men planted in their mother's wombs, rendering Jesus' virgin birth genetically impossible.

Each step of discovery of the natural universe has come through overthrowing preconceived notions by diligent searching to find patterns that completely transcend naive ideas, from the quantum theories of the forces of nature and the cosmological evolution of the universe, to the intricate mechanisms of molecular biology. Evolution has been confirmed in action in diverse phenomena, from disease resistance to cancer. Its imprint is clear in all the genetic evidence that has emerged from molecular sequencing including the human genome project and its offshoots. We now understand the evolutionary tree of life in intricate genetic detail, yet Christian advocates are still relentlessly trying to subvert the educational system, by demanding that creationist and intelligent design ideas be taught alongside evolution. Not only does this violate scientific integrity, but it runs against the command not to make graven images of Genesis 1.

Moreover, there is nothing we can find in the miasma of cosmological phenomena we now know the universe to contain, which in any way suggests it was externally created by a separate personality, or deity. The very idea of creation is a human concept to do with manufacture and the most elegant complex system in the universe, the human brain, is self-generated interactively in embryogenesis in a way which it is impossible to 'create' by external manufacture. Thus the jealous, father god looks increasingly like an outmoded cosmological concept, neither necessary, nor sufficient to explain the material universe, nor our subjective consciousness within it. Moreover it is a sexually imbalanced notion, possessing the all-to-human attributes of personality, sexual jealousy, vengefulness and forgiveness but only in masculine form, when the diversity of life is founded on female and male sexes interacting in complementation together.

The Eden account has a different resonance, declaring many of the jealous and vengeful aspects of Yahweh right at the outset and portraying the whole of human history as a fall from the grace of paradise in what is also a sexual falling out between woman and man, in which patriarchal obedience of wives to husbands, amid sexual undertones, through Eve's seduction of Adam, via the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil at the behest of the serpent, causing mortality, the travail and pain of childbirth, and living dust to dust by the sweat of the brow, cast out of the gates of paradise by a flaming sword.

This theme of falling out has deep cultural resonances, running right back to the emergence of agriculture around 10,000 BC and the transition to patriarchal culture we also see in Genesis in the transition from the ways of Laban to those of Jacob. It is a theme which one could easily understand in terms of a recurring creation myth retelling our falling out from integration with nature, as gatherer-hunters, to form patriarchal civilizations, amid the tumult of war and rumours of war. In a more general sense, it is an account of the human stream of consciousness, of future shock under rapid cultural change, heading inexorably towards a tumultuous and uncertain denouement.

There is another deep theme in the Fall from Eden towards apocalypse and that is in the discovery process of consciousness itself and the idea that all the covers will be thrown off reality, rather than through a naive innocent view of paradise, nor through a glass darkly in the intervening period, but in the end, face to face with reality, we will discover what existence is all about, very much as the explosion of the scientific world view has brought about in the last few centuries.

However apocalypse also comes with dire warnings of tumult of the war of civilization and belief system against civilization and belief system and of the Earth being shaken into a state of genocidal triage in the process, in which a third of all living things expire.

Many fundamentalist Christians believe they can shake off the entire natural order in a mythical rapture, in which the elect all float up into the heavens and reunite with God casting away the entire beauty and complexity of the natural realm as little more than a husk or mere detritus of a flawed realm, despite the fact that we now know the 'heavens' are the astronomical vacuum of outer space lethal to planetary life and not a simple firmament of God in which winged angels can fly effortlessly between the clouds. This brings out the worst in Christian fundamentalism taking no responsibility for caring for this 'transient' world or how far it is abused in the dominion of man over nature, while looking to a potential armageddon of 'the late planet Earth' in bringing about the advent of the kingdom of God.

Islam like Christianity has just such a distorted fantasy life. The prophet, despite his own remonstrations about Jesus' and Mary's deification, has become effectively deified as the 'last prophet' so that Bahai's, Ahmadis and others are persecuted and killed for believing in a more recent prophetic figure and others are summarily killed even for merely depicting the prophet's face. Yet Muslims also look to a final victory of Islam in the day of judgment and some would hasten to bring it on by military and political strategies. Shi'ites believe the Mahdi, a Muslim messianic figure of the second coming will appear and teach Jesus, while some Sunnis demur that there is no Mahdi but Jesus, confirming the continuity of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

While the Christian heaven is populated with sexless angelic winged beings, the Muslim paradise is crafted exclusively for the sexual pleasure of men, with 72 black eyed virgins made anew each morning to wait on a man's every whim, let alone their many wives from the earthly realm. This sexually imbalanced patriarchal view is a biologically untenable contradiction as are the winged angels of Christianity. The idolatrous devotion to the book by fundamentalists on both sides reduces any wisdom either religion might have to naught.

Rather than a rapture, what we are witnessing is a dangerous transition in which human impacts on the planet are becoming more and more damaging and the combination of sheer human population pressure, combined with reckless consumption of the Earth's non-renewable resources are precipitating climate change which could raise the oceans and make many areas inhospitable.

At the same time we are destroying natural habitats on a global basis so that we are coming to witness the sixth great extinction of the diversity of life, not at the hands of a supernova, a volcanic eruption or an asteroid or cometary impact but simply at the hands of humanity's unrestrained lack of long-term sustainable outlook.

It remains unclear whether humanity will have a soft landing and be able to make a satisfactory transition to a sustainable global culture or whether our lack of long-term foresight and short-term greed will lead to a hard landing with dire consequences for our future survival.

So one could say that the apocalyptic paradigm is a real warning to our existential condition and that the messianic heroic quest is a journey we all need to take to avoid the hard landing and bring about the sustainable epoch of planet earth for the future generations of humanity.

Could Christianity survive in any recognizable form in this situation? The Christian church was meant to be a steward to guard the Earth until the second coming, but what has actually happened is that the deification of Jesus has been used as a token to perpetuate the reign of the church and effectively prevent any transition to a new epoch, by making the church the permanent guardian of a pagan fallacy that sees this supposedly deified figure caught in an idolatrous trap, dripping with blood in churches throughout the world.

This means no real flesh and blood messiah male or female can hope to bring about a natural paradigm shift to the sustainable age without overthrowing this pagan fallacy, designed by the clergy to ensure the perpetual reign of Christianity, in contradiction to the throwing of the covers off reality in the apocalyptic awakening into the epoch of the tree of sustainable life.

If the Western spiritual tradition were redeemable, it would become a very different entity, celebrating the living presence in each and every one of its participants, in restoring and protecting the natural diversity of paradise on Earth for the future generations of humanity and of all life, while practicing the ethic of selfless love for all in bringing about the blessed condition of existence we all know is possible.

Rather than lamenting the blood of the savior, it is the life blood of the generations, celebrated in the the key rites of passage of birth, loving partnership and passing away and the passage of the seasons and their bounties, with the reflowering and sustenance of living diversity forming the natural cycle of celebration. Ironically this brings us back closer to the Jewish mother tradition in which spirituality is a vehicle for celebrating the ongoing life and life-blood of the people to go forth and multiply, to cherish the Earth and replenish it, rather than original sin, sexual guilt and hungering for a heaven which sloughs away our biological existence.

Its natural sacraments, rather than the empty cannibalistic vessels of soma and sangre encompass the diverse living visionary sacraments of the biosphere, from the sacred mushroom teonanactl, flesh of the gods, through San Pedro and peyote, to ayahuasca the vine of the soul.

It is also much more sexy, because conscious sentient life of the human species is sine qua non essentially sexual. While our individual incarnations are mortal, the sexual web of the generations of life is immortal. Rather than the patriarchal eternal sky god exhorting women to be faithful to men, the feminine 'goddess' aspect of spirituality again becomes ascendant and sacred, because it is the females who bear live young and nurture the next generation into life. Rather than rejecting sexuality as part of the flawed material realm of bestial lust, as Christians do, based on the fallacy of original sin, sex is the central mystery of immortality of the generations. So spirituality and sexuality come together as one, and in the place of the bonds of patriarchal marriage, we have astute choices of loving partnership in liberation between women and men.

This is why the Song of Songs made it way into the Bible even to become the holy of holies, the inner sanctum of the mystical communion with the divine, because it contains within it the secret coda of immortality in fertility.

Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:
 for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, 
and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; 
whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

The emphasis is on a fulfilling and beneficial incarnation in this lifetime, through good actions nurturing the world around us, leaving it wherever possible a better place than we came into while celebrating the best experiences of life, rather than looking to an imaginary afterlife for redemption without taking full responsibility for this life. The emphasis is also on the original evolutionary virtue within us, that makes us able to love and to be in love, and to compassionately care for others we are not even related to, rather than the disabling fallacy of original sin, which leaves us as broken beings, helpless without the imagined savior's intervention. This is a critical phase of our cosmic coming of age in planetary awareness, in taking responsibility for our own fate and our destiny in the universe.

On the Epiphany (left). Reciting the anointing with Jane (top right)
Celebrating the Millennium Eve dawn on Mt. Scopus (lower right).

To fulfill this transition in terms of a rite of passage to the new epoch, I journeyed to Jerusalem with Jane over the second Millennium to pronounce the epoch of the Tree of Life in sexual reunion at a 12 day workshop at the Academy of Jerusalem, with the warm support of liberal Jewish hosts, which included an all-night vigil with 100 or so people on Mt. Scopus on the night of Millennium Eve and a second rite of passage on the Epiphany (my birthday), from the ascension site on the Mt. of Olives, via Gethsemane, pronouncing the opening of the Gates of Mercy and sacred reunion in the Song of Songs at the Wailing Wall.

Apocalypsia Celebration Millennium Eve (YouTube)
Opening the Gates of Mercy on the Epiphany

Gaia Anointing
Video

The spirit of God is upon us
the spirit of Gaia is within us
because they hath anointed us
to sing good tidings unto the meek
they hath sent us to bind up the brokenhearted
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and the opening of prison to them that are bound

to proclaim the acceptable year
to comfort all that mourn
to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion
in Palestine, in in Sidon, Syria, Arabia and the world
to give unto them beauty for ashes
the oil of joy for mourning

the garments of love for the spirit of heaviness
that they might be called trees of compassion
the planting of the divine
that all might be glorified
in the abundance of wisdom

and we shall renew the old wastes
and we shall restore the former desolations
and we shall repair the waste cities
the desolations of many generations

they hath clothed us with the garments of salvation
and I as a bridegroom decketh myself with ornaments
and I as a bride adorneth myself with jewels
for as the Earth bringeth forth her bud
and as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth
so shall harmony and fulfillment spring forth
among all the nations

this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Is there a pattern connecting events which leads to the unfolding of an apocalyptic stream of consciousness? There is nothing in the scientific description of reality which confirms or denies the possibility of conscious experiences having a collective dimension in relation to fundamental changes in our planetary situation over time epochs.

One interpretation of the evolution of conscious life forms is that this is the sentient cosmological conscious of the universe coming to know itself through us knowing ourselves - that our individual conscious experiences are capable of entering into a rapport with a more oceanic conscious sensitivity. Many of the elements of Eastern mysticism point towards a state of contemplation, or samadhi, in which individual consciousness becomes one with archetypal, or cosmic consciousness.

A central aspect of the evolution of sentient beings may be to fully explore and experience such states, which may become a web of conscious experience reverberating throughout space-time connecting generations vastly separated in both space and time into one self-fulfilling experience of the universe compassionately knowing itself, even as if we are the 'mind of God' becoming complete in our own liberation. In this sense it is the biota of the universe which become the pinnacle of molecular complexity and conscious sensitivity, so it is in the consciousness of the biota, rather than the heavens that we should expect to find the mysterium tremendum of the 'godhead'.

The existential cosmos appears to be a complementation between the objective physical universe composed of quanta, atoms, molecules and their accumulation into biological and geological forms, and into astronomical bodies of planets, stars and galaxies, and the subjective stream of consciousness in all of us, which is subjective rather than objective, and thus complements all objective phenomena, and stands as the central Cartesian theatre of existence, without which we would never have access to experience the physical universe, despite appearing to be merely a manifestation of our fragile, excitable brains.

It is this conscious aspect of a complementary reality that has driven spiritual and religious paradigms and their quest for meaning in a conscious life which might continue to exist after physical death, as well as the phantasmagorias of heaven and hell, with all their delights and furies. It is the conscious dimension in which religions find their supernatural plane of existence and which makes people prepared to die for their religion as martyrs, and unfortunately in our age, to kill innocent victims in suicide bombings.

In the dance of Tantra, Shiva as the inert conscious aspect engages with the feminine Shakti spawning in the dance of maya of illusion all the material phenomena of existence. Likewise in the Tao of nature the feminine receptive yin complements the masculine creative yang.

Both subjective consciousness and the notion of intentional (free) will remain enigmatic in the objective scientific description of reality and it is through the agency of these two that our conscious experiences of intentional life and our accountability to fate unfold. The universe is neither random nor predestined. Future states remain indeterminate through quantum uncertainty and the unpredictability of chaotic processes. While, in the quantum world, all outcomes remain probability superpositions, in our conscious experience, Schrodinger's cat is either alive or dead. This suggests that subjective consciousness plays the role of collapsing the wave function of superimposed states of the universe, reducing the probability multiverses of quantum reality to the historical process of perceived reality we experience.

Consciousness thus looks like a cosmological phenomenon, in which we are evolving participants. If there is hand-shaking quantum entanglement between future and past, as quantum experiments like the Wheeler delayed choice experiment imply, it is even possible subjective consciousness may form an eternal web throughout space-time, extending even after the immortal web of life on Earth may have become extinguished, as the sun swells into a red giant, heralding the demise of our solar system. Whether or not humanity spreads beyond our solar system to spawn the galaxy, the consciousness we experience may thus take us right to the core of the cosmological condition.

Healing the Western spiritual tradition in a reflowering of nature could become the pivotal complement to the scientific revolution, in bringing about a sustainable paradigm enabling sentient consciousness to come of age in its discovery of the deepest nature of cosmic existence, but only if we can escape the bondage of our spiritual tradition to the long expired persona of Jesus and the frankly pagan fallacies of the Son of God caught forever dripping blood on the sacrificial cross and the neolithic notion of a father god who saves by killing his only begotten son, as if the good of redemption from sin can come only through weighing out a lethal dose of homicide.

But is this a realistic scenario? Can we really redeem an utterly flawed neolithic blood cult, in which we have dressed some of the more admirable virtues of selfless and brotherly love? Wouldn't it be better to just start afresh with a new beginning? That depends on whether the spiritual tradition can let go of its rigid stranglehold on our perceptions of reality and open to an evolutionary transformation of its own identity, in the nascent unfolding universe.

In Praise of Reproductive Sex

2011-08-08T00:46:00.000-07:00

Coital Maithuna in the Upper levels of Lakshmi temple Khajuraho

In Praise of Reproductive Sex

Homo sapiens is a species renowned for our social sexuality. The average person making love an average of say 3 times a week throughout a reproductive lifetime of around 25-30 years for a woman and longer for a man can be expected to have sex some 4700 times while reasonably expecting to have no more than an average of 2-3 children. Despite the appearances of monogamy in this time each sex might have an average of between 5 and 20 partners.

Social sex has evolved in humans to be a principal means of bonding and forming the close intimate ties between partners that cement together the human family with its long-term child rearing, and human society as a whole..

Despite being dominantly social, sex is essentially reproductive and remains charged with undertones of emotional infatuation, jealousy, infidelity and betrayal, because who you become intimately involved with will affect your immediate partner(s) and their offspring, and paternity security in the case of men, and resourcing commitment in the case of women.

This is not to say that humans are socially monogamous, despite the Western heritage of Christianity's excessive dependence on enforced monogamy as a result of Yeshua's quip that divorce was a violation of Adam and Eve's monogamous partnership - a notion ignoring Jewish folklore's claim that Lilith preceded Eve in the marital union only to fly off when Adam tried to assert the missionary position.

In fact 85% of traditional human societies practice effective polygyny with about 10% of better-endowed men supporting more than one 'wife', and even in Western society, serial monogamy leads to effective polygyny when older men divorce and couple with a younger nubile partner to sire a second family. Nevertheless human pair-bonding is a real and potent aspect of human family relationships, lasting for at least the 4-5 years it takes for young children to become semi-independent.

Only 3% of mammals are socially monogamous, for a pivotal reason - females have a major 'choosy' parenting investment in giving birth to a limited number of live young, for whom they need the best genes and resources they can muster, creating a major polarization between the sexes, in which males have a primarily sexual investment seeking as many partners as they can fertilize. Even socially monogamous species such as prairie voles and colonial birds try to optimize their genetic investments by having occasional liaisons on the sly with partners of superior genetic fitness.

In many ways human pregnancy is at at extreme of mammalian evolution, with women facing a huge out-front commitment of 9 months of increasing vulnerability, often with existing young children in tow, significant risks to their survival in birthing a baby with a large head, years of breast feeding, and caring for small dependent infants for at least four years before human children can walk and talk and survive reasonably independently within their extended family.

Consequently women are traditionally choosy about their partners and tend to seek 'husbands' who bear sufficient resources to support and sustain a family and protect them from intruders. Hence we find the well-known themes of women often partnering with older established men and men in turn seeking out young nubile partners of peak fertility. Many of the themes of love and courtship, from good hunting, through story-telling, jokes and art and music stem from men establishing both their genetic fitness and resourcefulness as potential partners in the sight of women.

By contrast, men are want to sew wild oats, while keeping a very jealous eye on the women they do impregnate out of fear that another man has done the same. Women may also opt to sire by a clandestine partner on occasion as well if they cannot find a mate with both the best genes and good resourcing leading to endless suspicion of women's infidelity on the part of their men folk.

Thus while most sexual encounters don't lead to pregnancy, the implications of pregnancy drive our deepest emotional urges and jealousies of a sexual nature, even in an era when contraception is widespread, if only as effective as individuals make it, and genetic testing can lay bare all the subtleties of who has sired who.

Throughout history, paternity uncertainty has played a major role in shaping human societies. Most of our patriarchal heritage, from paternal lines of inheritance, which serve to compensate for the obvious certainty of maternity, through traditional marriage, in which a women is exhorted to be faithful to her husband, to religious and social laws, which violently punish women for infidelity, while allowing men to sew wild oats, as long as they aren't caught polluting another man's wife is founded on compensating for this uncertainty.

Eve is cursed for seducing Adam, women are to suffer the pain of childbirth, to be obedient to their husbands, to be stoned for adultery, or losing the tokens of virginity, doomed to be sequestered and veiled and only half the value of a man in law in Islam, genitally mutilated from Africa to the Amazon, abducted, trafficked and treated as the devil's gateway, so that sex becomes an evil of earthly temptation for men who seek to escape their mortality by pledging their allegiance to an eternal sky God of the day of judgment.

While this male fear of women is all very understandable, this form of patriarchal dominance, over the last 4000 years, is not conducive to evolution of intelligence because, like all animals that bear a few large eggs, or live young, it is female choice of male genetic and resourcing prowess that is the principal selective factor in ensuring the future viability and evolution of the species' gene pool.

The indications are that longer-term human evolution, and the emergence of language and culture, was accompanied by neither sex having strategic dominance, with each running a sexual Red Queen race of burgeoning intelligence, through courtship, in which female reproductive choice played a pivotal part. The ecstatic nature of human female orgasmic sexuality, and the lack of a penis bone in humans forcing men to display a genuine indicator of sexual fitness to reproduce, both attest to a significant degree of female reproductive choice, based on a lunar menstrual cycle, concealed estrus and social sexual bonding throughout human emergence.

Looking deeper, we can see how sex and mortality became inextricably entwined in the burgeoning diversity of ever more complex life. All multi-celled organisms are sexual, with a very few exceptions. Where parthenogenesis occurs in a few species, sometimes to aid rapid colonization, it is at the cost of declining resistance against (sexual) parasites in what is known as the Red Queen evolutionary race - that the immediate advantage of sex compensating for transmitting only half our genes is the immediate increase in disease resistance it provides, because sexual diversity means parasites cannot evolve to attack a single parthenogenetic clone.

The result is that to have evolved as conscious beings at all, we are inevitably saddled with individual mortality, because we are endlessly varied and can transmit only half our genes to the next generation. Dyadic sex may have even been invented by a 'selfish' jumping gene, which ensured its immortality, transmitting 100% of its genes, by providing the apparatus for sexual recombination and exchange, in which we each only transmit 50% of ours.

The result for our view of the world is that we are conscious beings caught in the mortal coil of birth and death, with no respite, because of the endless variety of sexual recombination which makes us each unique and different (except for identical twins) and which dooms us to expire at the end of our days, because we are sexual rather than parthenogenetic beings - a doom which it is said God cast upon us for disobeying his instructions not to eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, in Eve's carnal enticement of Adam, causing the fig leaf - an unfair un-biological judgment cast on sexuality by the male religious forefathers.

What we need to understand here is that sexuality is the manifestation of the life process potentially heading towards even greater heights of sentient existence, if we don't damage the enchanted loom and threaten the living viability of the planet. So, far from being evil and 'dirty', sex is good, as life is good, and our individual conscious existences, along with our sexual desires and fear of death, are a bountiful product of the immortal sexual loom of life.

It is thus to sex and the sexual paradigm that we should stoop to worship in devotion, not the loneliness of an imaginary godhead, just as Shiva courts Shakti in the Tantric dance of creation, and Yin and Yang form the Taoist completion of nature. Reproductive fertility is also the nascent theme of the Song of Songs, the grail of courtly love and the ideal of romantic love that echoes through the airwaves in popular music and is written into our literature from the Song of Inanna in Sumeria to Mills and Boon. Being in love and falling in love are not just manifestations of social sexuality but our evolutionary heritage. It involves the whole sexual cosmology of meeting the other in the full flush of fertility incarnate, with all its passion, tenderness and explosive potential for new life.

Christianity has sought to go further and violate the holy grail of love by assigning to sexuality only reproduction without pleasure, with social sexuality having little more than a bestial function of concupiscence, sexual desire or lust, to be avoided like the plague, as a diabolical influence. Augustine went so far as to curse the spontaneous arousal of his penis and Origen castrated himself in the shadow of Matthew 19:12. This is as perverted as all the manifestations of sexual deviation known to man and leads to denial, and sexual exploitation and degenerate behavior, as has riddled the celibate Catholic church and fueled the witch hunts and Inquisition and European crusade, when the Albigenses insisted Jesus and Magdalen were lovers.

An integral feature of the evolution of the humanity is that, unlike many species, where fertility and reproduction are driven by chemical cues and sex takes place only in estrus, when the female is ovulating, humans, and some of our sister species such as bonobos, have adopted the use of social sexuality as a medium of social bonding. In humans social sexuality is absolutely essential as a sensual glue that holds together conjugal couples in long-term relationships and provides much of the social bonding in society at large, that reduces violence and makes us sensual and lovable people.

Khajuraho - the lower layers. Rear entry, bestiality, fellatio and cunnilingus

However there are other manifestations of human social sexuality, which if not understood in relation to reproductive sexuality, begin to spawn a confused, if not perverted fulfillment of our sexual desires. These include a wide spectrum of erotic phenomena, many of which may be natural in one social context but forbidden in another. For example the Bible has invocations against masturbation and homosexuality, both of which are regarded as choices of consenting adults in modern Western society, although sodomy is regarded as unnatural in many Muslim countries and parts of Africa. Certainly masturbation may be essential for male sexual fitness and cannot be reasonably deemed to be harmful for females either, but the spread of social sexual gratification extends down to almost any deranged stimulus of boundary-breaking the mind can encompass, from extreme coprophilia and bestiality to rape, snuff movies and serial murder.

While Western society currently regards incest, bestiality, paedophilia and sexual violation as criminal derangement, it accepts cunnilingus, fellatio, both homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, as well as sadistic, and masochistic sexual acts and human bondage and prostitution as integral to social sexuality as long as it is between consenting adults.

This however comes at a frank cost. While women are increasingly enjoying the right and ability to watch female-oriented pornography, a large swathe of pornography is simply catering to male sexual fantasies veering towards exploitation of women as sexual objects of gratification.

Given the ancient nature of social sexuality and the endless male drive of boundary-breaking sexual curiosity it is likely that some women throughout history have been strategically compelled to give their man everything he might desire to ensure securing his commitment to her, even if this is sometimes painful or degrading. While it is true that some women enjoy all manner of erotic experiences, from fellatio to sodomy, many women find sodomy painful and mixing sodomy and coitus carries health risks. It is hypocritical for heterosexual men to treat gay men homophobically when they themselves are indulging in exactly the same kinds of sexual act.

Confusing social and reproductive sex also alters the whole balance of the mind set, so that non-reproductive forms of social sex, such as fellatio become a central social norm of petting, while coitus itself is something more special for a more developed relationship, or even regarded as inferior to other forms of sexual gratification and self-stimulation, or unsatisfying to females entirely.

We also end up with highly distorted views of the role of sex and sexual bonding in society as merely social on the one hand, encompassing any form of erotic concourse and sexual orientation, but treat it as entirely reproductive in traditional and religious terms and in parenting and families, where reproduction is central.

This means that we drift into seeing eros purely in terms of sexual pleasure and gratification, demeaning it to a subservient role rather than a defining spiritual dimension through which we and the whole of life comes into existence. This dooms it to a similar fate that Christianity has doomed it in its fear of sexual power casting it down into a purely lustful level below the waist-line, when it place is nature is the holy grail of immortality.

This doesn't mean that by respecting the fertility of sexuality we will completely resolve all the problems of jealously, betrayal, infidelity, infatuation, unrequited love, and sexual violence that make pair-bonding an endless round of the cooperation, defection and tit-for-tat exchanges that characterize the prisoners' dilemma in action because evolutionary selection of the future of humanity is at stake and there are no global simple solutions that will put all partners in the ideal relationship they would desire.

Nevertheless, having a clearer view of the formative role of sexuality in life does lead to a profoundly more astute and successful love life and family life. Since the dawn of gatherer-hunter history, mothers have been teaching their daughters how to be both attractive and astutely choosy to make the best sexual choices they can under the limited and complex circumstances they find themselves in, and to fall for a guy only if he can bring home some good meat from the hunt and tell good stories round the camp fire, as well as showing sensitivity and respect to his partner(s), rather than going for the most pushy delinquent bully boy who is prepared to drive his car off the cliff to play chicken with every other guy in sight.

While we make what might be called social 'strides' in accepting the right of same-sex couples to marry and even to raise families through surrogacy and insemination, we seem to have become blinded to the needs of children to have close parental examples of both their own and the opposite sex, and to understand the distinction between social acts of erotic love and the fertility of the passage of the generations we all come and came from.

We need to understand that the highest peaks of sexual fulfillment, of deep bonding, of orgasmic intensity, and sexual and sensual meaning, come not just from social erotic gratification, but from the full flood of sexual fertility in coital embrace in love between a man and a woman, as the Song of Songs declares - the Tantric dance of male and female principles - of Shiva and Shakti - in bringing the entire sentient-material universe and the diversity of conscious life into being.

The temples of Khajuraho have a revealing perspective on this, with the higher levels of the Lakshmi temple consisting of couples with attendants practicing maithuna, or ritual coitus, while the lower layers include all the variations of fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation, bestiality and sodomy.

While we can sustain the diversity of social sexuality as long as it is non-exploitative and between consenting adults, we need to realize that we can't substitute social gratification for the sexual life force from which we all came, and which gives us the capacity to fall in love, to form loving relationships and to procreate new life.

In this respect, sexuality is inevitably a meeting of opposites, and fertility is and has always been that shared between a man and a woman, whether or not we define marriage in this way.

Homosexuality is a perfectly legitimate aspect of social sex, but even though same sex couples can form committed loving relationships and rear children through surrogacy and artificial insemination, they can't celebrate the fertility of life without serious violation of the genetic machinery, by making genetic modifications to human reproduction to turn eggs into sperm or directly fertilize nuclei as some same-sex oriented scientists have already attempted to do, although we know sexual imprinting of genes is essential in development especially of the brain.

It also needs to be remembered that sexual orientation is a mix of genetic and social factors, with social factors still highly significant. For example direct genetic factors affecting male sexual orientation, namely the fertile mother effect and the serial brother immunity effect account for only a 21% genetic contribution to sexual orientation and even identical twins share only around 50% orientation, indicating that, even with identical genetic makeup, social choices are still important.

Given that sexuality and the continuity of life depend on the fertility of man and woman, it is specious and counter-productive that parenting of a child of either sex can be deemed to be blind to the sexuality of the real, or foster, parents. Neither is it fair, or realistic, to deny growing children access to experiences of natural sexual complementation which they will need as adults to have a full opportunity to express their own fertility.

The sieve which sorts the wheat of ecstatic fulfillment from the chaff of sexual deviation is the reproductive fertility of sexuality and the understanding that the role other forms of social sexuality play are subsidiary to it and find their place ad meaning only in relation to it.

Murder Blues

2011-08-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a new song I've just produced as a dialogue in a betrayal between two close friends:

Murder Blues

You can listen to and download all the Niño tracks and read the lyrics here.

Winter - Blue Murder
1.

I saw you in the street today,
but you were standing so far away
and then you turned your back on me
and wouldn't look me in the eye.
You said "Do you know you that have betrayed me?"
I replied "You might consider that you've done the same!"
You insisted we can't stand in the same room together,
so who is it now to blame?
2.
It's so true. Feeling blue.
In a stew. Out of skew.
What a screw! Shame on you!
Blame on you, murder blues!
In the winter, frozen all over,
skating on thin ice, sliding helter-skelter.
Is this a falling out, a casualty in motion,
or a static fixation, close to oblivion?
I've had it all, yes I've had enough,
of murder blues shame on you.
3.
I hear you been whispering dark insinuations,
in intimate moments, venting your outrage,
all puffed up with your indignation,
clinging to the moral high ground.
Is this a cause you really can stand up for,
or has just it become a personal affliction?
In holding a grudge that you take to the graveyard,
nothing can ever be gained.
They say the whole country is frozen right over.
There's snow from the mountains down to the plains,
but where is the thaw in this frigid existence,
where the losses outweigh the gains?
If you can't bring yourself to accept your involvement,
in setting the scene, in casting the die,
how can you ever assume responsibility,
or heal the emotional lie?
You know we have always been fellow travelers,
comrades in adversity for so many years,
so why cant you see you are burning the bridges,
of our sensibility over your fears.
There is no one who cares about all of these problems,
they are angels dancing on the head of a pin.
There is nothing we need to unravel the tangle,
no reason for the state we are in.
So why can't you see that its time to move on now
time for forgiveness, time for rapprochement,
time to be living the good life together,
so that it all comes around.
4.
As the nights grow long, I shall call upon
this elegy to you, Murder Blue.
As our life is sweet. As our time is fleet.
As our pain is real. Murder blue.
Is this where we all belong caught here in this endless song,
an anthem to you Murder Blue?
Shame on you, Same upon you!
A case of blue murder, screams the news!
Shame on you, Murder Blue! Same on you, Murder Blue!
We can cast our share of blame on Murder Blues.

Cancer Treatments and Anti-cancer Substances

2011-07-23T18:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to my folio of articles on cancer treatment and anti-cancer biodynamics in food and medicinal plants. It's pretty huge, but I thought it would be helpful to lots of people to put it all together on the net:

Cancer and Anti-cancer Treatments

I have another food article linked in the above one - The Chemical Complexity of Food, which has all the biodynamic plants and foodstuffs and their active molecules listed and discussed.

Abstract:

This page contains a collection of news articles in pdf format on advances in cancer treatment and the anti-cancer properties of specific fruit, vegatables and other foodstuffs. Many individual foodstuffs have differential anti-cancer properties and some are cancer causing. Choosing a good combination of dietary factors can make a significant collective difference to human survival rates and cancer avoidance.

Cancer is in some ways a disease of the embryogenic pathway ( 1, 2, 3), so involves faulty cancer stem cells (1, 2, 3, 4) which may play a role in the spread of more malignant forms and also incite tissue transfer through secreted growth factors.

Cancer Immunology: It also involves a breakdown of the immune system in which malignant cells are not recognized soon enough, resulting in the cancer adapting and producing adaptive mutations which shield immune signatures. Both of these mechanisms are targets of novel treatment.

The links are in no way comprehensive, but simply form a record of articles noticed and listed for future reference and a starting point for further research. Many of the foodstuffs are located under specific cancer types but could be active across a spectrum of cancers.

There is a more comprehensive discussion on foodstuffs in The Chemical Complexity of Food .

Representing a sweep of abstract L-Functions

2011-06-26T04:08:00.000-07:00

A variety of abstract L-functions including those of elliptic curves
and higher genus surfaces as well as the modular form delta.

I have extended the paper "A Dynamical Key to the Riemann Hypothesis" in the previous posting, to include a sweep of abstract L-functions including Dedekind zeta and Hecke L-functions of the Gaussian integers Z[i], L-functions of a spectrum of elliptic curves and higher genus surfaces and those of certain modular forms.

In combination, these give the best overview I have been able to find of what these mysterious functions key to analytic number theory and the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and encrypting information about the Riemann Hypothesis actually look like and the close relationships between them.

Taken together in their diversity this spread of L-functions shows how different types of hidden primal relationship from a set of encrypted keys to the lock of the Riemann Hypothesis whose master key is the Riemann zeta function itself.

A Dynamical Key to the Riemann Hypothesis

2011-05-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

Riemann zeta function and a series of Dirichlet L-functions
followed by a naked non-L function with zeros off the critical line.

I've just completed a new dynamic paper on the Riemann Hypothesis with movies.
A Dynamical Key to the Riemann Hypothesis
using a new generation of my Mac RZViewer application, which now portrays diverse L-functions and makes dynamic movies of the zeros varying as the functions are transformed:
Riemann Zeta Function Viewer 1.5 Flight Manual

The new paper sets out a dynamical basis for the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function being on the critical line x = 1/2. It provides an explanation for why zeta and the Dirichlet L-functions do have their non-trivial zeros on the critical line and why other closely related functions do not. It suggests RH is an additional unprovable postulate of the number system, similar to the axiom of choice, associated with the limiting behavior of the primes as tends to infinity.

Fractal Geography of the Riemann Zeta Function

2011-03-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

I have just completed a ground breaking monograph exploding all the wonderful, puzzling, enigmatic and fascinating features of the fractal and chaotic dynamics of the Riemann Zeta function.

Fractal Geography of the Riemann Zeta Function

The quadratic Mandelbrot set has been referred to as the most complex and beautiful object in mathematics and the Riemann Zeta function takes the prize for the most complicated and enigmatic function. Here we elucidate the spectrum of Mandelbrot and Julia sets of Zeta, to unearth the geography of its chaotic and fractal diversities, combining these two extremes into one intrepid journey into the deepest abyss of complex function space.

Cosmology of Consciousness

2011-01-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

Here is the link to my latest cosmology article (now in two versions:

Cosmological Foundations of Consciousness: An Overview Short Explanatory Version
http://www.dhushara.com/cosfcos/cosfcos.html
Cosmological Foundations of Consciousness Full Research Monograph
http://www.dhushara.com/cosfcos/cosfcos2.html

How the biological brain generates subjective consciousness remains the principal abyss in the scientific description of reality, a problem complementary to the cosmological theory of everything, and equally as challenging, because it takes the scientific model beyond the confines of objective reality.

This paper examines the cosmological basis of consciousness and subjective experience in biological organisms. It draws on principles of symmetry-breaking and interactive non-linear dynamics to establish the cosmological status of biogenesis, and biological tissues as fractal forms of interactive symmetry-breaking. It then investigates the Archaean genetic expansion as a source of the envelope of functional machinery forming the basis of neural activity, based on the universal excitability of all living cells. Finally it examines the biophysical basis for consciousness, both in single cells, and in the human brain and its ‘Cartesian theatre’ of consciousness, to elucidate cosmological principles underlying the mind-body relationship.

The Nature of the Transcendent

2010-12-10T02:55:00.001-08:00

The Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt

I would like to give a positive view of the transcendent nature of the universe and our position within it.

In the previous "Evolution IS Intelligent Design" and "Holy War against Science" postings I have defended evolution as the natural process by which sentient existence emerges and highlighted the tragic fallacies of the traditional view of God creating fixed life forms as a projection of human fantasies based on our own industrial technology, but this leaves us in a position of wondering what it is all about, what the universe is for, why we are conscious and what the meaning is in our mortal journey.

The answer to this is that the actual nature of existential cosmology is both profoundly more exciting and challenging than either a raw pessimistic materialistic account of blind forces and terrifying energies, or a God-created clockwork Eden doomed never to flower to new heights of its own would suggest, and it also places us in a much more personally responsible position, closer to the center of the cyclone as agents of this process. It is this emergent aspect of nature and consciousness which is the portal to the transcendent nature of the universe and its greatest challenge is that it is an ongoing process.

Perhaps we can make excuses for ourselves, in our phase of cultural emergence for bowing down before stones and worshiping jealous Gods of written commandments, as would small children in early childhood, depending on a father or mother figure to give us a sense of security and meaning, but now we are coming of age and beginning to witness the universe as it actually is, we need to come to terms of acceptance of what nature is and how it actually relates to our conscious existence.

Armenian Tree of Life Jerusalem

Here are a few pointers to this situation, which I will expand on in future blogs:

1. Life is Cosmological: The diversity of life, and with it sentient consciousness of 'brainy' organisms is an evolving consequence of cosmology. The complex chemical systems which spawned life and which gain increasing complexity and consciousness evolving over vast time scales, of the same order of magnitude as the universe itself, are not just blind accidents, but the interactive result of the symmetry-broken cosmic 'mandala' of the four forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces - in full and complete interaction as molecular matter in tissues irradiated photosynthetically on a planetary surface. The biota are the completest expression of the four forces interacting hierarchically and the brain is the most complex integrated condition of these processes.

2. Transcendence emerges from the Biota: The one place where we know sentient complexity and consciousness exists in the universe is in the biota, not in the skies, nor in the winds and storms nor in the heavens which are just the vacuum of outer space, nor the centers of stars, nor black holes or dark matter, all of which present only some of the fundamental forces of nature interacting in simpler forms. We thus cannot look for God in the heavens , which, along with angels and houris, are a projection of the mental realm of subjective consciousness, rather than actual physical reality. We thus need to learn to take full and complete personal responsibility for our existential condition and our actions, and their impacts on the planetary future, to ensure nature is sustained and the passage of the generations can fulfill their conscious destiny.

3. Transcendence and Sexuality: Sexuality is central to the way the cosmology of the universe works, as a symmetry-broken complementarity, from mind and body, through wave and particle, boson and fermion to female and male, both as sperm and ovum and as organismic woman and man. This extends to the strategic complementation of defection and cooperation in the Prisoners' Dilemma and is expressed in the Tantric origin in the complementation of subjective consciousness and the myriad phenomena of the physical universe. Sexuality is also central in our mortality, because it makes us all different and unique and is pivotal in enabling the capacity of complex life to exist and evolve, through the endless varieties of sexual recombination. Sex is the most altruistic invention of nature because it commits us to transmit only half our genetic heritage shared with the partner rather than reproducing ourselves parthenogenetically. Even animals which are capable of parthenogenesis still need sexuality to adapt to changing conditions. The result is organismic mortality, but evolving species immortality. Without sex, complex life could never have evolved, so we owe it our very existence.

4. Transcendence vs Moral Imperative: Because we know that the diversity of life and evolution depend on openly exploring available niches, from plant to animal, from herbivore to carnivore , parasite and disease, we cannot assume any cosmic conditions which violate this freedom of expression to the fullest. In particular, however much it is convenient for large societies to depend on moral forces for their internal cohesion and hence external dominance, the notion of a moral deity, or morality-based religion is a corruption of the natural order, except in so far as morality is itself an expression of social evolution to produce fair and compassionate, caring societies.

5. Transcendence is Open-Ended: The purpose of conscious life is itself an open-ended exploratory process, not limited by moral imperatives, the universe discovering itself, which our time in the mortal coil is here to play an integral part in, by ensuring we discover the nature of conscious existence as fully and deeply as possible, and strive to ensure the world is left a better more sustainable 'paradise' for future generations to continue to ponder and discover the nature of existence. We are already at a point that we can learn a great deal about the depths of conscious experience, cosmic consciousness if you like, but future generations will discover more and we owe it to them and to the entire web of life, to preserve the planet and life beyond if we move beyond the planet, so that the universe can fully discover what it is, and we who we are, during the paradisiacal phase of our becoming during the vast epochs of life on the cosmic 'equator' of the universe in space-time. There is no one-track apocalypse in the existential cosmos.

6. The Quantum Universe and 'Free Will': The quantum wave-particle complementarity of the universe also leaves it open to complex forms of entanglement, in which future and past states are coupled in a way which provides a loop hole for the conscious experience of 'free will' to become manifest in physical action. Our brains' dynamics are attuned to this entanglement in their sensitively chaotic parallel distributed processing representations of the world around us, giving rise also to an internal reality of dreams, memories, reflections, contemplations and psychtropic vigils. Consciousness and the physical universe are thus complements in the existential Tao.

7. Eternal and Immortal Relativity: Although our mortal existence is transient, in the envelope of relativistic space-time, all sentient beings form an integral part of the eternal matrix of conscious existence and even though we pass on, by giving to the diversity of conscious life during our incarnation we take our place among the immortal generations.

Evolution IS Intelligent Design

2010-12-01T15:06:00.001-08:00

Evolution IS the Intelligent Designer. The DNA code is the physical manifestation

of open-ended evolutionary design as a heuristic genetic computational algorithm.

See also my latest on this: (1) Celebrating Immortality: A Manifesto (2) The Future of Human Evolution

I have already written an extensive posting on the contradictions of intelligent design and the religious assault on science but having been plagued by an intelligent designer for the last week I thought it would be good to take some light relief in how others see this attack on the sanctity and creative potential of life, the scientific pursuit of knowledge, and of course, the integrity of education in the face of religious subversion.

So here goes for a mix of cartoon humour and a short statement of the tragic fallacy of intelligent design.

The tragedy of intelligent design is that it robs us of understanding the most important, complex, creative and exciting processes in the universe - life, consciousness and intelligence. All of these processes owe their complexity to their self-generating adaptive anticipation. They are not fixed by their design, they do not run down but upward into more complexity and consciousness. Were they designed they couldn't have become what they are and they would have no open-ended future either.

However there is one respect in which evolution is clearly and unambiguously its own intelligent designer. Anyone who looks anywhere in the universe to try to find out the designer of complex life has to come to the realization that the most complex and efficient computer known in the universe is the collective genomes of the biota on Earth.

This computer is functionally in the process of weaving evolutionary adaption through the modular architecture of genes, sexual recombination, mobile genetic elements in our genomes, horizontal transfer of genetic information between organisms and species, through the immense parallel computing capacity of its genetic algorithms and the fact that it is a parallel computer on a truly molecular level, which is open to heuristic adaption through occasional mutational change, the collective genome is precisely adapted to be the intelligent designer of evolution.

The fact that it doesn't have a central computational system like the brain in no way means it lacks the functional capacity to generate new and more complex forms of adaption. In fact a brain-like form of centrally organized designer is nowhere nearly as suited at solving the dispersed adaption problem of discovering new 'degrees of freedom' in ecological and environmental niches as the massively parallel distributed genome is.

To give a very rough idea of the computing power of the combined bacterial genome alone, taking into account bacterial soil densities (~10^9/g), effective surface area (~10^18 cm^2), genome sizes (~10^6), combined reproduction and mutation rates (~10^-3/s) gives a combined presentation rate of new combinations of up to 10^30 bits per second, roughly 10^13 times greater than the current fastest computer at 2 petaflops or about 10^17 bit ops per second. Corresponding rates for complex life forms would be much lower, at around 10^17 per second because they are fewer in total number and have lower reproduction rates, but they are still vying with the computation rates of the fastest supercomputer on earth.

Moreover they are physically manifest in the right place at the right time, unlike the hypothetical ephemeral external 'intelligent designer', which is nowhere in sight anywhere in the physical universe. The modular architecture of the genome combined with all its symbiotic mobile repetitive elements provides exactly the substrate to enable this open-ended process to generate life's complexity and we can see this in action in any of a host of studies of genetic sequence relationships in evolutionary trees, running from the dawn of life to the relationships between chimps, neanderthals and humans - the transition most abhorred by the religious.

(Left) Archaean genetic expansion around 3.3 billion years ago generated most critical genes common to life (David and Alm 2010)
(Right) Evidence of ubiquitous horizontal transfer of genes between bacterial species at different trigger levels (Dagan et. al. 2006).

The Tree of Life: Tangled Roots and Sexy Shoots
Tracing the genetic pathway from the first Eukaryotes to Homo sapiens
Chris King 26 July 2011 Genotype 1.1.7

About a week after first writing this blog, one particular evolutionary tree was published which gives a great deal of insight into this supercomputing process and confirms the idea actually happened surprisingly early on Earth. This shows that the major genes catalysing the central metabolic pathways emerged in a burst called the Archaean Expansion around 3.3 billion years ago - six times longer ago that the Cambrian radiation. It confirms the idea that genetic creativity occurred very rapidly supported by horizontal transfer of genes and that it essentialy solved the intractable protein folding problem of forming the 3-D conformations that make protein enzymes the potent catalysts they are.

Two views of the intelligent design proponent as degenerate evolution

BBC Article: Can religious teachings prove evolution to be true? July 2011 Attempts at 'scientific investigation' by intelligent design proponents to establish that God created each type of animal (e.g. cats) with only minor mutational change since, by looking at the fossil record, look like they are proving evolution to be true because of the large scale interconnectedness of dinosaur evolutionary fossil record.

We understand our brains are encoded by our DNA. We can't put a designer into the argument because it is not evolution taking place, but the genetic program of embryogenesis which, despite its complexity, is structurally stable, so that the vast majority of the time we develop into humans, rather than still-borns or mutant monsters. Nevertheless the brain is far from a fixed program. It develops dynamically during the growth of the fetus, through chaotic excitations of its neurosystems, starting from the retina and ending with the cortex, and the brain retains neural plasticity into adulthood, so that brain regions for seeing can become adapted for spatial hearing in blind people. It is clear the same genetic algorithms that can generate the brain of our offspring in nine months based on our own genetic codes, are also a mutable and adaptive process, fully capable of presenting new genetic combinations which can adapt to and take advantage of emerging niches.

Research in the cosmological basis of the conscious mind:

The Central Enigma of Consciousness - Cosmological Foundations of Consciousness

Evolution is not just a theory but how the cosmology of nature comes about

When coming to how replicative life emerged and the evolution of complex life, we are dealing with the most complex generative process in the universe. The emergence of life from the chemical soup is slowly becoming understood and is the final interactive result of cosmic symmetry-breaking in molecular complexity. It is thus as complex as the cosmological TOE, or physical theory of everything, to unravel.

Research in the cosmological foundations of biogenesis:

Biocosmology a Research overview of the cosmological origins of life

Three wise monkeys can't be wrong

Evolution looks simpler to understand (and criticize) being based on replication, mutation and selective advantage, and occurs over long time scales, but this doesn't mean it is just a theory, or an alternative to a religiously inspired shadow of an archaic God, in the form on an 'intelligent' designer making dead end products like we make machines.

Intelligent design is a product of human industrial design

It is the tragic fallacy of Christianity that it keeps trying to demolish the wonder and generative power of life's future by subjugating it to the feudal, jealous totalitarian designs of a Hebrew watchmaker from a time when only sundials existed.

Deceitful pretense that the agenda is not religion

A quid pro quo. If intelligent design is to be taught in school, evolution should be taught in church.

Fingers in the pie of religious contradiction. If God created the intelligent design - which God?

I would take a position about intelligent design that it is like incest. It's a fundamental anti-life perversion of sexuality in the name of an Oedipus complex with a fantasized creator who we love because of our fear.

No it's not. People espousing this cause are committing a form of celestial incest subjugating
the exogamous nature of sexual evolution to an incestuous relationship with God the father.

Understanding the science is one thing but the maths is another!

Cutting through the Enigma of Consciousness

2010-11-09T03:28:00.001-08:00

The inner space of consciousness is sometimes able to perceive kaleidoscopic

'mindscapes', as if they are genuine perceptions of a 'world out there'.
How does the brain evoke these realities and what is their status,
by comparison with the subjective experiences we have of the real world?

Chris King © 9-11-10

This article is an exploration of where discovery about the human understanding of consciousness might be headed and why looking for answers may require a completely novel approach to understanding reality, different from anything we have encountered so far.

Supporting Research Article: The Central Enigma of Consciousness

The Scientific Lesson for Subjective Consciousness
In scientific terms, subjective consciousness remains the one phenomenon for which the description of physical reality has at this point not even the beginning of an explanation for. Although we know our subjective experiences are somehow a product of our brain states, we really have no idea of how a bunch of neurons firing off electrical impulses can come to generate all our conscious perceptions, dreams, memories and reflections of the world around us with all their diverse attributes, each of which is as indescribably different as a kaleidoscopic pattern of colour or a living landscape is to a musical symphony or even a complex cacophony of natural sound.

However the lesson of the scientific revolution shows us some important potential features of the quest for understanding consciousness that may be key to making real progress. The scientific revolution didn't come easily, because nature revealed itself to work in subtle ways that violated the simplistic assumptions of traditional, and particularly religious thought. It turned out that the Earth was neither flat, nor the centre of the universe, which, rather than being an airy heaven, in which angels with feathery wings could dwell, has turned out to be a maelstrom of black-holes and galactic collisions, in which life can take a foothold only on the surfaces of small rocky planets around small sun-like stars.

Even more perturbing, all life, far from being created by God, like clockwork toys in his image, appears to have emerged spontaneously from the slime, in a de-novo chemical synthesis, followed by the hit-and-miss process of mutational evolution, with humanity gracing the planet in a tortuous sexually-procreative journey of successful mutation through fish, reptiles and monkeys, a scenario which remains to this day the bane and nemesis of religious fundamentalists.

To cap the bag, we now understand the universe to be created almost from nothing, in a symmetry-broken cosmic inflation, whose mathematical complexity defies our imagination and ingenuity, despite many valiant ongoing efforts. As well, fundamental physics has entered into the mysterious territories of quantum uncertainty and quantum entanglement, altering forever our classical notions of temporal causality and physical reality.

We need to learn from the lessons of science's attempts to discover the nature of the real world, which has challenged our best minds through the centuries, and open ourselves to the possibility that consciousness, as we know it, is at least as unfamiliar to our preconceived notions as the physical universe has proved to be.

The Existential Dilemma and its Traditional Approaches
Nevertheless, the nature of consciousness is an urgent question which plunges right into the crucible of our psyche, because it leads to the ultimate existential anxieties: "What happens to me when my physical body dies?" "Is there any meaning in life if there is no after life after death?" "Is there a God looking after our fate?" "Am I a tiny part of a cosmic mind?" "Is there anything out there that cares, or are we just ships passing in the night alone, despite our delusions of love and togetherness amid frank exploitation of one another and of the natural world?"

For all the apparent solidity of the physical and biological world description, we are and remain throughout our loves conscious sentient beings, and it is only through the conduit of subjective consciousness that we come to witness the physical universe at all. And it is the stream of our subjective conscious impressions of reality that are all we have and that in which all our dreams and hopes and fears are enmeshed, despite the world we consciously perceive around us.

Dreaming can evoke bizarre realities which, despite seeming to be physically
impossible, are palpably real (Oscar Dominguez "Memory of the Future" ).

This brings us rapidly back to the traditional answers to the existential dilemma, which present themselves most dominantly as religious beliefs. The monotheistic myth goes roughly as follows: "Yes there is a God - in fact the one true God of reality acting in history, unlike those other pagan idols, and who, despite being the creator of the entire universe, is also a moral deity who is 'jealous' of our fidelity to Him and might cast us into hell fire if we stray from unswerving belief in His power, majesty and commandments.

Despite the protestations of religious believers, this model of conscious existence is fatally flawed, because we now know that morality is a social manifestation, which takes root in a species as an evolutionary strategy which enhances inter-group dominance by reducing intra-social strife. In no way can any culturally-derived or revealed doctrine of moral causality be dominant over the reality of evolution and the wide variety of ecological niches evolution fills, from nutrient-giving plants through herbivores and carnivores to parasites and diseases.

The idea of a God which created nature and the entire universe stipulating any sort of moral imperative, let alone a final eschatology, is in complete contradiction to the open-ended indiscriminate mutational exploration and sheer creativity of the evolutionary paradigm, just as is the idea of a God creating the entire physical universe being in any way jealous of our fidelity is a contradiction in terms.

While the notion of a moral deity is a false projection of human cultural, sexual and social imperatives, the notion of a fall from paradise culminating in an apocalyptic awakening, amid heroic redemption, is a valid part of our collective emergence. The fall and awakening are to a considerable extent a real time description of our collective falling out, across the generations, from gatherer-hunter interdependence with nature, through the rise and fall of civilizations amid tumult and discord, to the present explosion of scientific knowledge (and technological and commercial exploitation of the planet) - a process of continuing culture-shock, arriving on the horizon at a greater understanding of our place in the universe.

Religious visions of heaven and hell are not real physical worlds, but projections of the mind realm.
They contain a confused and delimited mixture of real world impressions of people,
with mythical figures of paradise and monsters, with the heavenly host falling somewhere between.

By contrast, there is another major theme that comes out of Eastern mysticism that is considerably different. The idea goes as follows: In some sense, we, as conscious perceivers caught in the mortal coil of a physical body, are also in some sense manifestations of the cosmic mind, and if we enter into deep meditation we can learn to become one with the Atman, or the Buddha mind, or the Upanishadic 'Self' - the universal seed spark within all sentient beings. In some sense we than become avatars of the one cosmic 'Self', just as the Hindu Gods and Goddesses are in some sense archetypes of the existential condition.

This comes closer to being a valid exploration of the conscious condition and has some root insights, but like the monotheistic myth, it suffers from intractable contradictions, including the notion that nature is merely a delusory gross manifestation subservient to mind, in an overarching moral imperative which causes lustful humans to be reincarnated as animals and vice-versa, and the entire natural world becomes relegated to being merely a cyclical process to refine the (human) ego to the vacuous purpose of attaining oneness with the void and thus escaping eternal suffering. The is a mind dominant fallacy that fails to respect that the diversity of nature, far from being a mere illusion, generates the entire physical basis for our conscious existence.

The meditative quest for 'enlightenment' through becoming one with the cosmic "self' or void

It also introduces the notion of karma in everyday affairs, suggesting that you might end up suffering a nasty accident, or catching a disfiguring disease as a punishment for your egotistical bad actions. This again is a moral causality that clearly runs counter to the needs of life to survive uncluttered by a fantastic causality that runs counter to survival of the organism and the evolution of its genes even when expressed in predatorial and parasitic behavior - for carnivores to ruthlessly hunt and kill and even sometimes to torture their prey in honing their hunting prowess.

There are of course many other descriptions of sentient existence, spanning the creation myths of diverse cultures and the shamanistic and prophetic experiences of their various medicine men, diviners, seers, mystics and visionaries, each with their own stories to tell of the vision quest of conscious existence and its relationship with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the world at large.

At best, these become first person accounts of personal experiences and mental voyages, which take us into the territory of the sensitivity of consciousness to apparently supernatural, or paranormal influences, in which one might sense the death of a relative, encounter unpredictable coincidences of fate, or dream prophetic dreams which later appear to come true in real life. At worst they become distracting and delusional fantasies that gain all the features of superstitious beliefs, and cargo cult like mystification.

Where is the Consistency in the Visionary Theatre?
This leads to a basic question. If there is a collective conscious reality out there, shouldn't it be reflected in some way in our mental condition, in our inner meditation and reverie and in our prevailing collective beliefs? If there is 'life' out there in the conscious realm, why are our descriptions of it so idiosyncratic, conflicting and contradictory?

There are a host of reasons for this, some practical and biological, to do with brain function, and others to do with cultural imperatives. We need to take stock of all of these before coming to a synthesis of how we might approach the question of consciousness.

Some mental constructions, such as heaven and hell moral fantasies, are culturally derived from the strong influence major religions have as forces shaping the moral destiny of a culture, quite independently of, and in obvious contradiction to, their truth as a description of the transcendent. Both Deuteronomy and much of the Qur'an deals with unabashedly worldly moral and legal issues, in particular the desire of men to have reproductive control over their women folk and to set them in a partially subservient relationship, as well as driving the formation of powerful large societies of believers, who can gain dominance over perceived enemies and infidels.

Other mental phenomena arise as a reflection of the needs of brain function biologically to compensate for the pressures of daily life and its potential threats to existence and survival. Dreaming remains an enigmatic source of many prophetic and visionary experiences. The nature and rich hallucinogenic content of dreaming remains mysterious, despite extensive scientific investigation. Virtually all of us have had dreams whose richness and power appear every bit as real as waking life experiences, although often much more bizarre, and indeed the only way to subjectively distinguish dream and reality is often a tortuous set of reality checks, such as turning off the light switch and finding the room is still illuminated. Otherwise dreams can seem every bit as real as daily life.

Clearly sleep and the rich REM phases of dreaming have something to do with processing of waking events, either setting down long-term memories, or responding to existential crises which might affect our chances of future survival, but none of this explains the rich, unpredictable and completely bizarre experiential content of many dreams. Dreaming teaches us that almost anything that could be synthesized in the Cartesian theatre of consciousness can appear in dreams, from effortless levitation, to being sucked into the mouth of a giant medusa, or being lost on another galaxy or in another universe, with no clue as to how to find the way back to Ixtlan, or the real world we are familiar with.

Likewise, various drug and plant induced psychedelic states can manifest visions it would be impossible to experience in the physical world at large. These include kaleidoscopic synesthesias, as well as visionary scenes, sensations of going beyond one's bodily confines, as well as a feeling of conscious interplay with the natural world and its psychic subtleties.

Huichol nierika or cosmic portal through which the voyager
can pass during a peyote vision quest

Again these may be a function of altered brain dynamics, so that one becomes able to perceive in conscious form the dynamic modulations across the cortex induced by these agents, and some of the processes by which the senses are synthesized in consciousness. Thus cultures which use psychedelic species as sacrament tend to explain their existential cosmology in terms of visionary portals or doorways through which one is transported to another reality by the sacramental experience.

Similar considerations apply to a variety of forms of meditation and contemplation, which may also involve stopping the internal dialogue by mantras and/or involve complex visualizations of mandalas not dissimilar in kind to psychedelic kaleidoscopic visions.

These techniques also extend to sensory and/or physical deprivation and so called near death experiences in which people see their life flashing before their eyes, and may claim to meet a luminous entity which is at once themselves and at the same time the 'cosmic mind' meeting them. Again this may be real, but it may also be explained as the product of the extreme, yet living brain state the person was in. Likewise some people report journeys out of the body, which are probably a form of hypnagogic trance on the border of sleep, as they show similarities to levitating dreams, except that they appear to be in the real world environment of the observer, rather than a fantastic dream scene.

(Left) Brain activity associated with language and (right) local parallel processing of color and motion in vision.
Although brain scanning has made it possible to associate specific regions of the cortex with specific aspects of conscious
thought and experience, these are just correspondences between biological brain states and perceived conscious events.
We still have no idea how the brain actually generates subjective consciousness.

Subjective Consciousness and the Objective Brain
One of the ways science tries to explore consciousness is to do experiments eliciting certain brain states while a person is having their brain scanned, either electrically by EEG or MEG encephalograms or physiologically by fMRI or PET, which use magnetic resonance or radioactive scintillation imaging to picture changes in blood flow or nutrient consumption in specific areas. These tend to show what kinds of brain activity or activation are associated with certain kinds of conscious perception, thought or emotion. It can then become possible to see how changing brain activity parallels changes in conscious perception and it can lead to some general hypotheses about how the brain might generate conscious experiences.

For example the gamma frequency band of the EEG has been suggested to be the excitations the brain uses in active conscious processing and it has been suggested that those networks which rise and fall together 'in phase' constitute conscious processes when they tie together various regions of the cortex into a consistent global dynamical system, by contrast with local processing, which is believed to be unconscious or subconscious.

However these sorts of investigation leave unanswered how the brain makes these global excitations into the internal model of reality which we experience subjectively and identify with the real world around us, or indeed how or why subjective consciousness exists in addition to the computational capacity of the brain as a neuro-system. Because no simple chemical explanation seems to have the right existential status to deal with subjective experience, the problem may need to be solved by examining more exotic physics in the brain, such as quantum entanglement, which might lead to new forms of physical interaction which might solve the problem of existential subjectivity.

Subjective Consciousness as the Existential Complement of the Physical Universe
Critical to the investigation of consciousness is that it is existentially completely different from the objective physical world description, being experienced directly only by the subject, and not being subject to the same criteria of replicability a physical world experiment has. Also the observer cannot control their consciousness objectively in the same manner a physical experimentalist can their equipment, because any attempt to change consciousness carries the observer into a new conscious situation as well. In this respect the exploration of consciousness has similarities to quantum measurement. This renders all forms of introspection made as if we are looking at consciousness objectively, completely, or partially invalid.

It also means that attempts to imagine or model subjective consciousness, or the mental realm, based on objective concepts derived from the physical universe, are invalid because the fundamental properties of the subjective and objective realms are complementary, as opposed to identical, through the symmetry breaking between mind and body. While the physical universe is a process of wave-particle complementarity, in which particulate matter is divisible into real world objects, mind is 'indivisible' in the manner of a 'wave complement' in the sense that it remains the integral field of view embracing all perceivable phenomena, continuous, or discrete. Likewise it is participatory and private in a way which renders objective investigation inoperative.

The exploration of consciousness is thus not the same kind of process as that of the physical world. It is a journey, not a destination. It is a subject experiencing, not an object of investigation. Thus it is not appropriate to try to 'examine' consciousness in the manner of an observation of the real world, but rather exploring it is a 'trip', as the first LSD users, and the sacred mushroom shamaness Maria Sabina, alike have put it, which is where the vision quest of shamanism also takes its journey.

(Right) San painting of the healing or trance dance Lonyana Rock Kwazulu-Natal.
Shamanic trance dancing (centre) in which each participant can witness
the world beyond the real world goes back to the emergence of human culture.
(Left) San use of dagga or cannabis smoking from a hole in the ground.
Other ancient pygmy forest cultures utilize the hallucinogenic iboga plant.

One very positive feature of sacramental shamanism is that it is a visionary experience that can in principle be entered into by anyone in the first person, removing all the disconnections, confabulations and mystifications between the religious follower and the numinous mysterium tremendum that occur with religions governed by gurus, priests, bishops, ayatollahs and muftis, which, rather than being an exploration of the numinous, lead to corrupt religious hierarchies espousing doctrines calculated to preserve their own hegemony.

However, like the previous attempts to understand whether consciousness has any absolute collective nature, we need to remain cautious about the products of psychedelic vision, because these have also led to their fair share of frankly delusional and occasionally violent notions and no definitive conscious cosmology has emerged from many centuries of cultural use of hallucinogens. Nevertheless they are pivotal natural catalysts in the empirical exploration of subjective consciousness.

The Evolutionary Foundation of Subjective Consciousness
To better understand consciousness and the limitations on any speculative ideas of the cosmic conscious connection, we need to ponder how consciousness came about through evolution, and the evolution of the brain.

A likely explanation is that consciousness is an indirect manifestation of the chaotic excitations we see in the electroencephalogram and that it arose in evolution as an offshoot of chaotic excitability in single-celled eucaryotes, which would have provided a multi-sense organ, through the sensitivity to perturbations chaotic excitation provides. A chaotically excitable cell would thus become sensitive to all forms of quantum perturbation of the cell membrane including those of primitive vision, audition and olfaction, as well as electric fields in the medium.

The evolutionary idea of consciousness is that this excitability aided the organism in anticipating threats to its survival, as multi-celled organisms evolved from simple nerve nets, as in hydra, to central nervous systems. Notably many of the critical neurotransmitters involved in changes in consciousness in humans are spread widely across the metazoa down as far as the slime mold, and indeed have distinct psychotropic effects, for example on the web building behavior of spiders.

A critical aspect of this is the idea that such excitations aided anticipating future threats to survival suggesting consciousness is integrally coupled with the notion of free will, or intentional will, which forms another paradox about human activity and existence. All of us feel we have a basic autonomy of choice over our actions and indeed all the provisions of the law, as well as all moral and ethical precepts, revolve around the notion of personal accountability that we can understand the consequences of our actions and can exercise personal control over our affairs.

However this leads to the notion of free will, which appears to be in frank conflict with the idea that our behavior is purely and simply a product of our brain state and its neuro-chemistry and that the notion that we have any purely conscious control over our physical brain states is a delusion. However this need not be true if the brain itself uses exotic quantum physics involving uncertainty in generating consciousness and in the sensitive transitions from chaos to order that may accompany insight learning and decision-making.

Central to an accurate description of subjective consciousness in the universe is the fact that it is, so far as we know, exclusively a product and property of the living biota. In fact the brain forms the most complete interaction of the four fundamental forces of nature in global interaction. There is nowhere else in the universe, from black holes, to dark matter, or the center of stars, that we can plausibly expect to find the physical support for subjective consciousness that we find in the brain of humans, and by extrapolation those of other organisms which possess chaotically excitable brains.

This means that religions posing God as an external agent consciously interacting with humanity, in lieu of humanity's own direct interaction with existential consciousness through our brains, is a fundamental dislocation of reality, removing the direct responsibility we have in participating in consciousness decision-making in our own brains and in taking responsibility for the effects of our actions on the planet, transferring it instead to a physically unrealizable contrivance, in which we become trapped in a moral causality, at the same time passing personal responsibility for our critical decisions on to the will of God.

Even if God is posed as an entity beyond space-time and the universe, the reality is that it is consciousness itself which forms that natural complement to the physical world description. As Indian philosophy, the Tantric origin and Taoist cosmology put it, the cosmos is a complementarity between subjective and objective reality. Thus the conscious mind, which is the only veridical avenue we have to experience the world around us, may have a cosmological status complementary to the physical universe, despite being manifest in physical terms merely as the excitations of our fragile biological brains.

This symmetry-broken complementarity between the diverse natures of consciousness and matter - personified in the dance of Shiva as observer and Shakti as phenomena - is endlessly reflected in other symmetry-broken complementarities, between wave and particle and boson and fermion in physics, and female and male in biology, something we have termed the cosmology of sexual paradox.

While we are standing today, with the benefits of brain science, combined with traditional contemplative techniques, and a diverse array of psychotropic substances, at the threshold of a great exploration of consciousness, which may be the cosmological free lunch the universe is destined to achieve over space-time, we need to realize that many preconceived notions of the purpose of consciousness, or collective consciousness cannot coexist with life as we now know it to be.

For example, it is reasonable, however far-fetched it might seem, to imagine that consciousness might give us access to a form of super-causal quantum future-anticipation which might complement computational brain function to aid survival, but it is not reasonable to suggest that consciousness is there to make us subject to a moral conscience defying evolution's capacity to fill all viable niches, nor to engage in psychic materialism - subjecting conscious experience, by analogy, to constructions derived from the objective world, except in so far as these might be realized in brain function.

Consciousness Arises from the Survival of Natural Life
This brings us full circle to the ultimate questions and quest of conscious exploration. Why are we conscious? What is the meaning in conscious existence? Is there any connection out there with the cosmic mind or any other form of extra-corporeal dis-incarnate from of consciousness?

One thing that is essential to this exploration is that life is sufficient unto itself as it stands without needing either the notion of an after-life or some connection of cosmic consciousness to justify it. We got here because the life force is forthcoming of itself. Although people vary and some people experience depression, partly as a result of genetic variations in brain chemistry, we exist at all only because the web of life has kept an unbroken chain all the way from when the first cells emerged. Life is therefore ultimately productive of itself and is worthwhile simply because it is. The fact that sentient life is also capable of being conscious of itself is a bonus which gives us the capacity to wonder, but it is invalid to turn the tables on life by requiring an after life in heaven to justify the mortal coil.

The key to this is that we are not alone as conscious human beings. Although we have an evolutionary proclivity to procreate and reproduce our genes so that the generations of life continue, we all come to understand that our conscious existence is finite and bounded by our physical demise.

Nevertheless we don't possess our consciousness but are simply conscious of the world and of ourselves. This consciousness is in a fundamental sense a cosmological attribute which we manifest and which is manifest in each and every one of us in various ways due to individual difference but to a great extent consciousness is shared and in common.

This is reflected in the abundance of so-called 'mirror neurons' in the brain which ensure that we are able to consciously experience situations the way others experience them and even feel another's pain. It is also reflected in the oneness that comes from sexual relationship, which is life's antidote to the mortality of the sexual being, in the procreative process and the family.

Because we are mortal, caring is real, not just for the sexual beloved, offspring and kin, but for all mortal beings. Although some people may be violent, psychopathic or selfish, because we are all going to die one day and can't take our possessions with us, the reality of caring for others is what makes both the world, and our consciousness of it, real and worthwhile for each of us. We also leave behind us our humor, art, music and the products of our ingenuity and toil, so the more we contribute to the welfare of the world as a whole, to make it a richer and better experience for all, the better we will feel about life, death and mortality.

This leads us to another fallacy promulgated by traditional religions, which is that the real world is somehow just a flawed secondary realm and that the real existence that makes it all worthwhile is in the after-life. This in turn brings about a sense of futility that if we are going to eventually die, the whole material quest is meaningless dust to dust and ashes to ashes. This is a false description of reality because life is not made worthwhile only because it is eternal, since the web of life is immortal over the vast epochs the planetary environment remains hospitable to life and we each share resonance with conscious existence. We need to keep a perspective of consciousness as a process occurring in space-time, in which the universe is becoming aware of itself through us becoming aware of ourselves during our sentient existence.

Telling Stories Round the Camp Fire
Sentient life is an open-ended awareness whose reality is maintained through the future passage of the ensuing generations of conscious life, so we need to respect preserving the robust fecundity of the planet and its living diversity as a primary task in furthering this quest, in contrast to the linear scorched-Earth eschatologies of monotheistic religion, which risk planetary catastrophe.

Even if the earth is finally vaporized as the sun becomes a red giant and all life is extinguished the conscious quest in the all-embracing envelope of space-time was still the discovery process the universe was able to make to know itself in the alpha-to-omega of all reality space-time is.

In some of my more mystical moments on natural sacraments, I have experienced cosmic consciousness as the bundle of life, as if we as incarnate mortal beings are in eternal communion with all conscious life throughout the universe, from beginning to end, and that when we can for a moment escape the knot in the bundle which our individual survival and ego hold tight and loosen the fibers, we too become one with the cosmic mind.

However, rather than this becoming a description of consciousness, the way for us to move forward is to experience such potentialities for ourselves and keep the description process to personal anecdotes we tell, as conscious participants in the unfolding history of the universe, rather than setting it in stone, as some kind of objective description of how things are out there beyond our personal experience. This is the way people have told stories round the camp fire for the first 100,000 years of human emergence and it serves us well in the electronic age to keep the covenant with the ongoing flow of consciousness between us and among us all to celebrate it personally in our concourse together.

Two very different TOEs attempting to integrate the forces of nature illustrate the intrinsic complexity
of the cosmology of the physical universe. If cosmological attributes of subjective consciousness
are a basis of how the brain generates mind, they may have an even more complex basis.
This is not to suggest that the model would be like the physical TOE if it exists
but that it might have complementary attributes to it.

The Intrinsic Complexity of Consciousness and the Ultimate Theory of Everything
But there is another critical aspect to the nature of consciousness which is akin to the difficulty of discovering the theory of everything for the universe, and is so precisely because the conscious brain is the ultimate expression of the four forces of nature derived from the symmetry-breaking of the theory of everything. It requires all the forces acting in order of their symmetry-breaking energies to develop molecular matter, and their most complete complex interactive expression we know of is in the human brain.

If the brain uses exotic properties of physics, embracing quantum entanglement in brain states in generating subjective consciousness as part of anticipating future risks to survival, these would be the ultimate interactive structures generated by the symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature in the universe.

Understanding consciousness would then place it as the hard problem complementing the theory of everything, which would require at least as much ingenuity to resolve and therefore cannot be underestimated in the surprises we may find within it.

Asia and World in 90 Days

2010-10-16T03:14:00.000-07:00

Check out the two travel blogs which I am currently spending most of my time working on. They come with high resolution images, video clips and commentary.

Currently I'm in process of producing (so far to Lhasa):

Intrepid Asia in 90 Days with Flashbacks: A comprehensive photo and video blog of our intrepid journey in 2006 running from India, through Nepal, Tibet, China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

We have just completed:

A Chaotic Orbit of Planet Gaia in 90 Days: A photo blog of our journey this year starting from Chile and ending in Bali, spanning Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, the US, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Istanbul, Jordan, Jerusalem, Mumbai, and Bali.

Jerusalem Millennium

2010-09-25T05:08:00.000-07:00

You can find a very good flashback of the unique rites of passage we performed in Jerusalem in our world in 90 days photo blog posting: Jerusalem Millennium.

The Cosmology of Sexual Paradox and the Fall

2010-09-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

Fig 1: The mind-brain relationship remains the unfathomed abyss in the scientific description of reality.

Fine printable PDF

This is the article that came out of our talk in Jerusalem, while on our 90-day orbit of the planet. It is an in-depth and wide ranging review supported by cosmological science and human cultural and genetic history with significant implications for religions and the future of humanity.

1: Sexual Paradox of Existence - Mind and Body

Our experiential universe remains poised on a paradox, so acute, that neither the scientific description of reality, nor the religious cosmologies of history have succeeded in revealing its inner nature.

From birth to death, the only avenue we possess to knowledge of the world around us is not through the physical universe and objective reality of the world at large, but through our subjective conscious experience. In all our experiences of the everyday world it is our private subjective consciousness which is doing the experiencing and this consciousness can take on many forms, spanning dream, memory, reflection, and hallucination.

And despite the fact that we all have physical brains, the relationship between brain states and conscious states remains the abyss in the scientific description of reality, for which there is as yet no convincing explanation. In a sense although many of us think of the physical world as the primary reality, our understanding and acceptance of the objective physical universe comes about only indirectly, through the consensual agreement of our subjective conscious experiences of the everyday world. Thus in a sense all we know is conscious experience.

Nevertheless, the scientific era has brought about a new understanding of the physical universe which has come about only through applying skeptical principles that a theory is never proven, but only gains validity when critical experimental attempts to disprove it fail, and applying stringent tests for refuting fantastic and incorrect theories, by careful examination of inconsistencies and replication of experimental results. The end product is our extraordinary scientific model, in which we have come to understand that the dynamics of physical processes and the future of life around us depend on microscopic forces and the generation of fundamental wave-particles that give rise, through their interaction, to the atoms and molecules which comprise the world around us and govern its reactions, structures and changes.

This has led to an explosion of scientific knowledge, which has literally overturned our preconceived religious notions of the universe and taken us to the brink of a cosmological description, which is penetrating beyond our wildest dreams, reaching back to the cosmic origin and weaving together the great cosmological events shaping the universe at large with the microscopic forces that makes us the molecular organisms we have discovered ourselves to be.

However this knowledge is and has always been gained indirectly through experiments which ultimately change our subjective conscious experiences, for example through witnessing the strips of dark and light chemicals that decode a DNA sequence, or the dark or light resonance bands in the hydrogen spectrum which can tell us the universe appears to be flying apart at close to the speed of light.

No one knows how the brain generates conscious states, which are our complete and only avenue to experiencing the physical world, or even if it is a meaningful question to ask, since brain states are objective molecular events and conscious experiences are entirely subjective and do not have the same existential status as physical events, being the ephemeral miasmas of dream, memory and reflection.

For the purposes of brain science it is convenient to think of the conscious mind as an internal model of reality constructed by the brain to carry out its central integrated decision-making tasks, but this begs the question of how it can generate extra-physical impressions, such as the incredibly detailed experiences sometimes accompanied by vivid dreams or the kaleidoscopic landscapes of psychedelic reverie, where alternative realities, as real and palpable as waking experiences of the world around us, are invoked in similar detail.

Indeed Indian philosophy sought to reverse this relationship between the physical and the mental, considering material forms as grosser than the finer mental ones, so that mind could not be described in terms of physical forms and structures. On the other hand, we all know that if we are hit on the head or cut our wrists, we may lose consciousness or may even expire, so the primacy of the physical world cannot be taken in doubt, even though it is experienced indirectly through our subjective consciousness.

We thus end up in a paradox, because neither the physical, nor the mental world description on its own can adequately describe our existential cosmology. Moreover they are complementary to one another, evoking together the complete dynamics of conscious existence in the physical world, and they are symmetry-broken in the sense that their properties are qualitatively different from one another in such a way as to comprise a complementary whole from their fundamental differences. This is the state of symmetry-broken complementation leading to paradox, we refer to as sexual paradox.

Fig 2: Sexual paradox in physical cosmology: Top-right Wave-particle complementarity. Top-left symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature, invoking boson-fermion or matter-radiation complementarity. Bottom left: Cosmic evolution is a reflection of this symmetry-breaking. Bottom right: Despite the idea of super-symmetry between bosons and fermions, the pivotal group E8 believed to be at the core of the cosmic design shows symmetry-breaking between its bosonic and fermionic roots.

2: Sexual Paradox in Physical Cosmology

The quantum universe consists entirely of wave-particles - that is quantum entities display both the properties of a traveling wave and a moving particle - sometimes manifesting as one, and at others as the other, but never both in the same situation. For example, in a double slit interference experiment, as in the top right hand of fig 2, photons are released in localized particulate units from excited atoms, but then radiate as waves through the apparatus before reappearing as particles with bands of statistical density following the wave amplitude, when they are reabsorbed by the detector.

The wave and particle aspects are both complementary and symmetry-broken topologically in the sense that the wave and particle aspects form discrete and continuous descriptions of the quantum dynamics. They are also robustly sexually paradoxical. Any description attempting to derive from one aspect only, implicitly carries the other aspect within it. For example in quantum field theory, although the fields are described as an infinite collection of interacting particles acting as force carriers, the particles are still transmitted according to a wave propagator function .

There are also a further series of complementarities emerging from quantum reality. Wave-particles come in two types: The bosons, such as the electromagnetic photon, which have integer spin, and mediate forces and exists as radiation because they are able to infinitely superimpose, as in lasers. By contrast, the half-integer spin fermions can only enter the same wave function in magnetically complementary pairs of opposite spin, thus forming incompressable matter.

The standard model of particle physics involves a highly symmetry-broken divergence between both the four fundamental forces of nature and its bosons and fermions. In particular the bosons and fermions occupy very different classes, although both respect the internal symmetries of the forces. The complementary and opposite positive and negative energetics of the bosonic and fermionic components has led to the idea that nature must be super-symmetric - i.e. that for each boson, there should be a corresponding fermion partner so the positive and negative energies almost perfectly cancel, except that this symmetry is broken by one or other of the partners gaining a very high mass so they would only appear at high energies e.g. in the LHC.

However super-symmetry may also be discretely broken in a way which might mean the overall contributions of the bosons and fermions cancel, but there are different numbers and arrangements of each. The group E8, which is central to many super and string theories attempting to unify gravity with the other forces, carries within it a discrete symmetry breaking, which nevertheless generates the entire 240 dimensional root system for E8 from an asymmetric distribution of 112 'bosonic' root vectors with integral components and 128 'fermionic' ones (with half integer coordinates), as in the lower right of fig 2.

Complementing this is a cosmological description of the origin of the universe derived from it, in which an early rapid inflation, caused by the high negative-energy of the symmetrical state of the forces, traversed into a shower of hot fundamental particles with attractive gravity, as the symmetry-breaking occurred, knitting the evolution of the universe as a whole into the same process. We thus end up with a gigantic universe whose kinetic energy of expansion is just balancing its gravitational potential energy, leaving it on the edge between expanding forever and ending in a big crunch. A more subtle symmetry-breaking is being searched for, e.g. in the weak force, which can help explain the preponderance of matter over anti-matter which is essential for a material universe to exist without annihilating itself back into pure radiation.

There are further manifestations sexual paradox in the partially conflicting assumptions of relativity and quantum theory in their treatment of space and time.

Fig 3: Biological tissues (right) display a fractal architecture on ascending scales from the molecule to the organism in a manner reminiscent of the Mandelbrot set (left). This may be more than a mere analogy. Symmetry-breaking results in symmetry-broken structures - atoms - in which positive nuclei are orbited by negatively charged electrons. The resulting interaction between the electromagnetic force and the electron's charge distribution is highly non-linear resulting in chemical bonding. These non-linearities are not resolved by covalent or ionic bonding, giving rise to a chain of cooperative weak-bonding effects, which enable the action of large protein enzymes (lysozyme with substrate centre) and the formation of supra-molecular complexes and cell organelles. The architecture of tissues is thus a consequence of the symmetry-breaking of the fundamental forces.

These symmetry-breakings are essential for conscious life to exist, because the asymmetric arrangement of matter results in a complete symmetry-breaking of electromagnetic charge with respect to the nuclear forces, which is subject to highly non-linear energetics as a result in the effects of distributed charge on wave orbitals, resulting in the chemical bond. It thus gives rise not only to atoms, but molecules, and molecular complexes. The non-linear nature of chemical bonding means the forces are never fully resolved at any stage and display a spectrum of cooperative weak bonding effects. These are able to generate the fractal molecular structures of biology from cell organelles to whole tissues, and ultimately to the conscious brain, making it a final interactive result of cosmic symmetry-breaking.

Fig 4: Human sexual symmetry-breaking at the single celled level (top left) and organismic level (top right).
Symmetry-broken prisoners dilemma matrix (bottom left) and cusp catastrophe (bottom right).

3: Strategic Sexual Paradox and Human Evolution

If we come back for a moment to the biological realm, at a single celled-level we are profoundly symmetry-broken. The fertilization of an ovum by one of a multitude of sperm is reminiscent of the wave particle complementarity of fig 1, and this may reflect more than a mere analogy and represent a deeper quantum complementarity in biology. Sperms have evolved to become little more than motile particulate DNA with almost all their organelles digested to avid cytoplasmic warfare. By contrast ova, while also containing a full complement of DNA are solely responsible for cytoplasmic inheritance and the continuity of the cytoplasm itself and have evolved to make a split second wave excitation-triggered fast reaction to discriminate the statistical rain of prodding sperms into a single wave-particle fertilization event at least reminiscent of reduction of the wave packet.

Here we are talking only about binary fusion sex, but there are other forms of pan-sexuality and sexual paradox in the biological realm, from bacteria and viruses, up through fungi, which demonstrate the versatility and universality of the principle, running back to the source of life itself. Bacteria and viral elements share an ecosystemic relationship, where viruses and extra-chromosomal plasmids act as sexual agents, promoting active conjugation and the exchange of genetic material through viral transfer, even between different species of bacteria. Fungi also have forms of conjugation sex, which can permit up to 22 different sexual strains, instead of the mere 2 of fusion sex. The gene which precipitated fusion sexuality may also have been an autonomous 'jumping gene' which, unlike the two sexual partners, who can contribute only half their DNA to their offspring, managed to contribute its entire genome, to cause sexual determination, just as mitochondrial genomes continue to do in the maternal line.

The Prisoners' Dilemma is a famous strategic paradox in game theory which arises, when two agents are caught in a situation where they can both gain a moderate benefit from cooperating but because of the high payoffs for successful defection, each is tempted into betraying the other, resulting in both receiving a negative outcome when both spill the beans implicating one another. The classic situation is two prisoners who are tempted to betray one another to get off a serious charge, but it also applies to situations from nuclear confrontation to evolutionary competition, and in particular the polarized reproductive strategies of the two sexes of a species, neither of which can escape the other, but each of which is evolving to take advantage wherever possible. When modeled dynamically, the Prisoners' Dilemma results in unstable dynamics on a cusp between cooperation and outright defection, as shown in the lower right of fig 4.

In all higher animal species, each is also running an evolutionary Red Queen race (running while standing still), just as occurs between parasites and their prey, because, while one sex is evolving to pursue a strategy to replicate their own genes as effectively as possible, given the sexual prisoner's dilemma of sharing half your genes, the other sex is doing the same, leading in many species, from fruit flies to sea urchins, to outright genetic warfare, where the male may literally try to poison the female to cause her to be able to bear only his current offspring, or to strategically break through the egg's defenses, with compensating reactions from the female in each case.

The reproductive strategies of female and male organisms are also as significantly symmetry-broken as sperm and ovum. From the moment the two gametes became polarized to avoid cytoplasmic gene warfare, the investments of the female organism became fundamentally different from the male because the larger size and smaller number of her eggs causes the female to have a much higher reproductive investment per offspring then the male. In live-bearing mammals, whose females get pregnant and lactate and thus have a huge parenting investment in a small number of offspring, this difference is at a peak.

Time lapse video of pregnancy shows just how symmetry-broken the human sexes are.

In all animals, because of the higher investment of the female in reproductive parenting and the greater investment of males in fertilizing as many females as possible, females tend to be choosy and try to select males with the best genes. Female reproductive choice is thus paramount in humans as it is in all mammalian species, although given our strong pair bonding, mutual mate choice is also a major player.

In mammals the XY form of chromosome-based sexuality results in XY males with unique expression of a single X, while XX females collapse one or other of their two X's in all somatic cells including the brain, to avoid poisoning the non-sex cell lines, resulting in a chimera of brain X-expression, just as in a (female) tortoise-shell cat's patchy coat. Partly due to their unique X expression, male have a much higher variation in natural intelligence. This puts mammalian females in the best position to select males with good X genes, many of which figure in brain development, as well as good genes on the other chromosomes.

In humans, mammalian sexual polarization has reached a further climax, due to the massive and risky nature of human pregnancy and the long term parenting required for human development. Thus, despite our lip service to being culturally defined by a common intellectual endowment, the reproductive strategies of the two human sexes are maximally polarized, by comparison with just about all animal species.

This state of sexual polarization may explain both the evolution of human super-intelligence and the emergence of human culture, art and intellectual discovery. The unstable dynamic of the cusp on which the polarized prisoner's game of sexual paradox occurs, is where reproductive choice has its most powerful effect. The Red Queen race of mutual mate selection, biased by female reproductive choice may have put Homo sapiens in a position where choosy females favouring good hunting, art and music, story-telling, and supportive and resourceful parenting in their men folk, repeatedly selected for the best genes for emergent super-intelligence, the female generations retaining the same genes in a way which may have promoted their own astuteness of choice, leading to a runaway peacock's tail of intelligence and social complexity.

Fig 5: Top-left Male (left) and female (right) language areas show differing degrees of lateralization. Bottom-right: Difference in stroke locations causing aphasia (language loss) in men and women. Top-right: Differences in gray and white matter utilization indicative of different cortical couplings. Bottom-right: Differences in amygdala expression when faced with a fearful scene suggesting male targeted and female context-related focus.

There is also evidence for sexual symmetry-breaking in brain function. Men tend to have superior targeting and mental rotation and females better recognition by landmark. Female humans also tend to have less lateralized speech areas, more connections between the hemispheres and greater natural capacity for early language acquisition and may have originated human speech through common gathering, following the grape-vine of gossip about sexual relationships essential for reproductive success, and 'mother-talk' with their infants, while men spent more time in silent vigil, hunting. Brain lateralization has a deep evolutionary basis in distinguishing predator and prey strategies, is driven by testosterone and correlates with greater male involvement in hunting for sexual favours.

These considerations eliminate from human emergence both 'Flintstones' man the hunter scenarios where men secure women by clubbing and abduction, and patriarchally enforced marriage choices under threat of dire penalties for adultery. These by contrast inhibit the evolution of super-intelligence, because the male sex, which should be subject to primary selection, is preventing evolution taking place, by repressing female reproductive choice. There is a deep reason for this - paternity uncertainty. Men do not produce live young, as women do, and thus, in addition to their heightened sense of mortality from not bearing live young, they fear the offspring of a female partner may be another man's child, so they are liable to attempt wholesale defection against female reproductive choice through gaining control of institutions of culture, society and religion.

Fig 6: Several religious creation cosmologies involve sexual paradox, including (a) Tantra (top left), where the universe is a coitus of mind and body that has become fragmented into the plethora of phenomenal existence, the Tao (lower left) where nature is the complementation of creative yang and receptive yin and 'the way that can be told is not the countless way', the 'Elohim of Genesis 1 creating humanity 'male and female in our likeness' (modern rendering centre). However the Eden creation story (right) begins a tragic defection, setting a lone God in conflict with the primal human pair over their presumed sexual transgression, leading to the fall from paradise.

4: Sexual Paradox and its Breakdown in the Religious Imperative

Several of the key religious creation cosmologies agree with the sexually paradoxical origin we have seen in the first two sections.

The Tantric origin conceives the cosmos as a deep coitus between Shiva as the observing cosmic mind and Shakti as the integrated material universe. As the coitus disengages, and the experience fragments into maya, or illusion, this cosmic consciousness becomes divided into separate conscious beings observing the plethora of phenomena of the world around us.

The Tao is likewise a cosmology of nature, in which two inter-dependent principles receptive yin and creative yang lie at the source of all phenomena and any attempt at fully explaining it lies in paradox because in Lao Tsu's own words 'the way that can be told is not the countless way'.

The 'Elhoistic origin ('Elohim is the [male] plural of God) in Genesis 1 is also sexual in archetype, since Adam and Eve are made male and female 'in our likeness' implying the godhead is a sexual dyad in partnership, as in polytheistic religions, from Sumeria to Hinduism, as it is in the creation stories of many ethnic peoples.

Fig 6b: The Fall from Eden like the Tantric origin begins in a state of sexually paradoxical union.

In the 'Yahwistic' origin in Eden of Genesis 2 also begins with a sexually paradoxical union, as Adam and Eve are separated from one flesh, which Jewish folklore suggests was a kind of Janus with both female and male attributes.

This is similar to the soul mates presented by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, according to which humans originally consisted of four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces, but Zeus feared their power and split them all in half, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half to complete them - a kind of reverse Tantric origin undoing the Fall.

The Red Thread of Fate legend of China and Japan that tells that the gods tie an invisible red string around the ankles of men and women who are destined to be soul mates and will one day marry each other. The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of time, place or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.

However in Eden there is now an emerging tragic sexual breakdown in the cosmology. The now lone God YHVH patriarchally makes Eve out of the rib of Adam, subjugating Chawa, the Mother of All Living, to a secondary existence. YHVH then curses humanity and throws them out of paradise, ostensibly for eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, which Eve mistook for the wisdom of the Tree of Life. However we can see from the fig leaves, that this is actually because of their sexual transgression in the act of carnal knowledge, for which both are cursed with mortality, with the woman henceforth doomed to the pain of childbirth, and obedience to her husband, just as the man is doomed to obedience to God by the sweat of his brow.

There a fundamental change in God's nature from beneficent creator in partnership to a jealous moral deity and wishful lover of the bride Israel, who curses the people if they stray from worshiping Him and Him alone, despite the fact that in Proverbs, Hochmah or Wisdom declares she was with Him from everlasting before his works of old - i.e. in the very cosmic origin.

The role of the moral deity has several functions which can also be though of in social evolutionary terms. By making everyone obliged to worship an unseen God who is claimed to be able to see into our very souls, it strongly encourages moral action towards one's co-religionists, discourages internal defection within a society and enables a society to become robust and dominant in the face of external competitors, leading to large conservative societies which convert or annihilate their competitors. While religious cultures have certainly acted to impose such processes, they may also arise from a genetic component which is reinforced reproductively by the imposed cultural constraints.

The societal role is coupled with a more insidious and frankly diabolical role, in repressing female reproductive choice, because religions, particularly monotheistic religions of the 'one God' have also set in place patriarchal marriage laws and dire punishments, such as stoning for adultery, which are generally aimed at punishing women for their perceived transgression, in exercising any degree of autonomous reproductive, or partner choice, in the face of imposed patriarchal laws. In several major religions these imperatives are also designed to encourage demographic expansion of the religious following by unmitigated reproduction.

Contrary to the claim that, unlike the false pagan idols, the abstract God of creation acting in history is the one 'true' God, we shall see shortly that this idea is neither new, nor a 'superior' development.

Fig 7: Sabbatical creation of Genesis 1 (centre) surrounded by Christian (above) and Muslim (below) views of the supernatural demonstrate that these are products of the mental realm sharing affinities with imagination, dreaming, prophetic vision and hallucination, rather than being descriptions of any form of objective physical reality.

Religious descriptions of the greater cosmos including heaven and hell share features which clearly place them in the mainstream of conscious mind constructs, rather than physical world descriptions. While the sabbatical creation can be forgiven for its flat Earth cosmology with the 'Elohim placing stars in the dome of the heavens, and evoking the plants before the sun and moon, later descriptions of paradise, heaven and hell in Christian and Muslim theology have much closer affinities with the dream time and visionary imagination than any model of reality consistent with the physical world.

Both show compensatory attempts to resolve sexual contradictions in their imposed beliefs. The Christian heaven is permeated by sexless angels, as a reflection of the belief that the carnal sin would be undone in eternal life, who instead sport large feathered wings, which lost all meaning when Galileo demonstrated the Earth orbits round the Sun and we discovered the upper atmosphere converges towards the lifeless vacuum of space and would provide no lift for such airy appendages. By contrast the Muslim paradise is packed with seventy-two black eyed houris made virginal every morning for the insatiable sexual pleasure of men, again violating the procreative essence of sexual existence, and the equally biological nature of women. Both in turn look to a hellish day of judgment when the final cookie crumbles and the moral deity exerts his terrible final accounting, launching the moral imperative from social evolution to fully fledged cosmological catastrophe and with it promoting one evangelical path or another as the final rulers of the planet and its people.

These extremes of apocalyptic utopia amid violence and tumult, demographic inflation, and the frank repression of female reproductive choice, present a significant risk to the future of humanity and the fecundity of planet Earth. They represent a fundamental break down of sexual paradox, to form a fascist rule of order in frank contempt of the sustainable continuity of life. It is essential for the world to address the fascist utopian aims of world religions to engender a world where ecosystemic survival and the continued survival and evolution of the human race will be fostered instead of end-of-day conflict.

Many features of Western society from economic short term boom and bust, winner take all venture capital exploitation, rape of the planet in tragedy of the commons type resource exploitation, and the vast differences in wealth between the rich and the poor all appear to derive from the types of gain and advantage of spermatogenic reproductive strategy, risking mortality to achieve disproportionate competitive fortune, in the absence of any countervailing long-term out-front female reproductive investment strategy that protects successive generations of offspring and the ecosystems in which they have to survive.

To see how this situation may have arisen and to help us gain a more sustainable long-term solution to the problem, we need to look deeper into human evolution over the last 150,000 years and the emergence of human culture and religion from the smaller social groupings of ancient gatherer-hunters.

Fig 8: (a-c) Three evolutionary trees of the root of the mitochondrial evolutionary tree of humanity
which is the basis for the "Out of Africa" evolutionary Eve hypothesis (d).

5: Human Evolutionary Origins, Sexual Paradox and the Religious Quest

One way of testing the idea of human cultural explosion through sexual paradox in reproductive choice is to examine the history, cultural practices and genetics of some of our most ancient gatherer-hunter populations, whose social patterns have changed little over tens of thousands of years. Good candidates for such investigation are the !Kung-San Bushmen of the Kalahari and some of the Pygmy peoples of the Congo Basin, both of whom have an ancient presence close to our African origins and a genetic footprint and history that places them close to the root of human cultural origins.

By a variety of measures, the !Kung appear very close to the root of our evolutionary tree. Mitochondrial measures which first advanced the Out of Africa hypothesis genetically, consistently show the !Kung-San as closer than any other group to the common root of the African Eve. Further refinements of the mitochondrial tree have exposed an ancient division in !Kung mitochondrial evolution involving a deep split separating Khoisan mitochondrial inheritance from other groups, including those migrating out of Africa, and a deep division between two Khoisan types L0k and L0d going back 140,000 years, suggesting a separation of some 100,000 years, possibly caused by long term drought in Africa. This is thus consistent with a continuing !Kung presence in Africa going back up to 150,000 years.

Fig 9: Human divergence trees calculated by single nucleotide polymorphisms top left , bottom right.
The remainder are trees for haplotypes and copy number variation between populations.
San are very close to the common root.

Other genetic measures, including autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms, haplotypes and copy number between populations also put the !Kung very close to our evolutionary root. Male inherited Y-chromosome studies show a more complicated picture with some evidence for cross breeding with an Adam genome deriving from the Ethiopian region, consistent with human migration in which migrating males take local wives.

Given these genetic measures and the long lived, slowly changing, demographically static nature of the !Kung way of life, which has preserved the high mitochondrial diversity of the !Kung female population, it is pertinent to examine the patterns of !Kung socio-sexual interaction, and their cultural and religious traditions to see how they reflect on our vastly more recent cultural developments from the time of the Sumerians on.

Fig 10: Nisa in old age

When the gods gave people sex, they gave us a wonderful thing.
Sex is food: just as people cannot survive without eating,
hunger for sex can cause people to die!
Kung saying - Nisa.

Fig 11: Fulton cave drawing 1000 BC celebrating the first menstrual rite, Drakensberg Mountains, Natal

Paradoxically at the end of a long period of patriarchal repression of women's rights and choices in major civilizations over the last 4,000 years, !Kung women have been noted to have retained a similar degree of reproductive choice to modern Western women, although there is some physical abuse by their men folk and the male elders try to exert a degree of influence over marriage and sexual relationships by endeavouring to define culture and set rules about marital disputes. Although they follow a nominally patrilineal inheritance, it is recognized that women will traditionally go to the maternal household to assist with their first birth. The personal accounts and experiences of a !Kung woman pursuing her various sexual relationships in !Kung society are eloquently recorded in the book 'NISA' by Marjorie Shostak.

As an indication of the ancient influence of women over sexual favours, southern Bushmen women last century were reputed to refuse sex unless given meat, forcing the men to end up becoming arrested for rustling cattle.

Fig 12: Modern Eland ceremony celebrating a girl's menarche.

The !Kung retain respect for menarche as a sacred process of immense ’spiritual’ power, rather than being ‘unclean’, celebrated in the Eland ceremony, whose records go back as far a Fulton's Cave 1000 BC, in which the woman is conceived as being so powerful that if a young warrior sets eyes on her he may be magically put off his hunting prowess.

!Kung religion embraces abstract deities with consorts which belie the claim that the notion of an abstract creator God acting in history is a new and superior development, or any evidence that such a God is thus real and absolute or part of a destined progression from native ignorance to religious enlightenment. They embrace their deities metaphysically in contrast to the compulsive, superstitious rule and fear-based worship of modern world religions, such as Christianity and Islam.

Bushmen believe in the existence of two gods: a greater god manifesting the creative force and a lesser god invoking the malevolent forces of uncertainty and misfortune, each with a shadowy consort.
They have many names, but the !Kung Bushmen most commonly call them Gao!na and //Gauwa. The Bushmen do not see these as a good and bad god. When a missionary inquired into a Bushman's ideas of good and bad he was told it was 'good' to sleep with another man's wife, but 'bad' if he slept with yours.

Gao!na, the !Kung Great God, using one of his seven divine names, created himself: "I am Hishe. I am unknown, a stranger. No one can command me. I am a bad thing. I follow my own path.”

Then he created a Lesser God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives for himself and for the Lesser God. Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen, was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life.

Their creation story reads poetically along very similar lines to the Sabbatical creation of Genesis ...

But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the source and custodian of all things. He created the earth with holes in it where water could collect and water, the sky and rain both the gentle 'female' rain and the fierce 'male' rain thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He created the animals and painted their individual colours and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for themselves.

Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the very beginning and Gao!na ordained that when they died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all things, each in accordance with its own rules.

The !Kung also practice mystical union with the unknown in ancient trance dancing rites which are also recorded on rock drawings and currently consume cannabis in a manner similar to Indian sadhus. They thus carry both a tradition of abstract religion with a sophisticated philosophical streak as well as a mystical shamanic tradition of direct contact with the ineffable. There is thus no evidence that modern world religions constitute a progression from primitive beliefs and more of an implication that such aspects of religious experience and practice may have a genetic component.

Fig 13: Modern !Kung family.

The picture of human sexual relationships conveyed by !Kung society strongly suggests that human cultural emergence did indeed arise from a social climate in which each sex retained sufficient autonomy over reproductive choice, so that each had to run while standing still resulting in the evolution of super-intelligence from a state of sexual paradox.

This is also supported by deeper evolutionary traits in Homo sapiens, indicative of evolution driven by female reproductive choice, including a lunar coupled sexual cycle involving menstruation, rather than declared estrus, concealed ovulation depriving males of any easy opportunity to know when a female is fertile, pronounced ecstatic female orgasm and the loss of a bony penis in men requiring male sex to demonstrate a genuine indicator of genetic fitness.

Archaeological evidence from southern Africa also points to an early cultural emergence up to 150,000 years ago and to cultural patterns consistent with both jewelery and make-up consistent with women being free and able to make themselves beautiful and attractive to the opposite sex. While there is no evidence how these were used or by which or either sex, the use of ochre is consistent with the need for women to appear nubile and healthy and is associated also with the menstruation.

The prominent appearance of both beads and ochre contrasts completely with the repression of women's adornment in conservative burqa and niqab clad Muslim societies, where any attempt by a woman to ornament her beauty is regarded as punishable by whipping or arrest.

This implies that such religious sexual repression, which has also been shared to varying extents by other patriarchal religions as well as Islam, is a modern aberration caused by male defection against a more ancient pattern of female reproductive choice to which we are indebted for the evolutionary emergence of human super-intelligence, culture art, music and good husbanding and parenting, and must needs respect and preserve into the future for our species to survive and prosper.

Fig 14: Ancient beads and marked ochre. Left: Ostrich shell beads Yoilangalani river Serengeti National Park (c 40,000 - 110,000)
Centre: Scored ochre block. Blombos (c 77,000). Ochre use dating back to 164,000 years has been found at Pinnacle Point in South Africa. Right: Pea-sized Nassarius kraussianus shells pierced and showing wear from leather thongs. Blombos cave (c 75,000).

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has also dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior that could be called religion. The finding comes from a cave in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local San people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods. The 6m rock bears a striking resemblance to a snake, including a mouth-like gash at the end. Hundreds of small notches are covered the rock. Entrants to the cave apparently made these markings to enhance the snake illusion by creating the impression of scales and movement. Snakes feature prominently in the traditions and the mythology of the San, sometimes called the Bushmen.

Fig 15: Tsodilo Hills Cave

The Song of Songs and the Living Universe

2010-04-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

The Song of Songs and the Living Universe

Chris King

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Collective Messiah and Beneficent Futures

In Eliyahu’s words above the Mount of Olives during our all-night celebration on Millennium Eve: “we are together the collective mashiach and our vision here tonight will spread peace in our hearts and peace on the city of peace below Jerusalem - and be a light for peace in the whole world, and in the whole universe”.

This vision of the collective messiah coincides closely with the description of the messianic dream manifest in children in Rabbi Adin Steinsalz’s ‘The Messiah Complex’ : “Therefore school children are all "my messiahs" [Chr 1 16:22], each one of them is within the category of a small messiah. And if he is not a messiah, whether in his present capacity or in his potential future, at any rate he belongs within the category of small messiah through the power of his will, the power of his dreams. From the inner Jewish world view it is possible to say, that each member of Israel has in him, in some way, a messianic spark.”

One of the most poignant and enjoyable aspects of my meeting with Yitzhaq in Jerusalem was the ability of people of different paths to sit around the table together and discuss their beliefs and traditions, as one shares a bottle of good wine, and one’s idiosyncratic cultural treasures, in a spirit of equitability, each learning insights from the others, in a way which brings mutual wisdom.

A particularly fertile aspect of the Jewish concept of the messiah is that it is a natural process inspiring living human beings to seek the long-term future goodness of humanity in a personal heroic vision quest. Again Rabbi Adin Steinsalz’s words: “A Messianic complex is not just the general wish - be it overt or covert - to redeem the world or to improve the conditions of the world, but it includes another component just as important. The messianic wish is not merely a general wish for improved conditions and for changes for the better, but the wish of that private person to become personally the redeemer of the world.”

It is a central tragedy of Christianity that this natural vision of redemption has been stolen from the living people by the pagan crafting of the heroic identity of Jesus as man-god Lord and savior, so that the spontaneous original virtue that resides in the messianic quest has been supplanted by an original sin which leaves humanity helpless except through the semi-divine intervention of the Lord in a Second Coming which Yeshua stated would occur in his own generation.

Part of the reason mainstream Judaism sees Yeshua as a false prophet and the Talmud Sanhedrin refers to ‘Balaam the Lame’ is that Yeshua’s pretensions to wild natural miracles and espousal by female patronage to his own sacrificial demise are more characteristic of the contemporary Dionysian fertility worship of Nabatea than of the Pharisaic traditions of Israel. And it is these very features, which also caused Christianity to sweep across the pagan world.

Apocalypse: Bridal Unveiling versus Patriarchal High Noon

In a deeper sense, both the notion of an apocalyptic unveiling and the messianic quest can be seen as a cultural imprint on the emerging human stream of consciousness, in which we have faced tumult and future shock in the process of coming from gatherer-hunter bands, through conflict of civilizations, to an awareness of the closing circle of planet Earth and the greater cosmological scheme in the scientific age.

Thus the founding myths of Genesis, to which Yitzhaq frequently refers, form an axis beginning with a falling out of relationship with nature and with the depth of communion with the ‘divine’ and a sexual falling out between woman and man in the patriarchal ascendance, leading down the corridors of history to the final unveiling in the age of apocalypse we all now face.

Apocalypse means ‘unveiling’ - something unmistakably associated with the veiling of women and with marriage. In Jewish tradition, unveiling has a deep connection with the struggle against matrilineal patterns we find in Laban’s kin. Jacob thinks he is marrying Rachel, but finds, after failing to unveil her, that he has been tricked into marrying Leah, leading to his seven year vigil, finally escaping the clutches of his matriarchal in laws to found the patriarchal tradition of Israel, albeit still punctuated by matriarchal inheritance of the Jewish line through the mother.

Hence in Jewish marriage ceremonies, the bride is unveiled for a period before the religious consummation, both to allow the power of her radiance to shine forth through Shekhinah - the feminine face of God - and also critically to make sure who she is to avoid Jacob’s plight. Muslim women wearing the Burqa take the warning - you are treading on ancient ground - the requirement to unveil for ID checks in public is older than both Islam and the modern age!

However, in the patriarchal tradition of monotheism, apocalypse is associated with tumult and discord in the culmination of the messianic age in which each path sees its ultimate destiny in becoming the sanctified of the supreme dominant faith of the true God ostensibly throughout the entire world. The apocalyptic way of the one God has thus led to some of the most serious strife facing the planet and a real risk that monotheism will bring about, not an era of long-term future goodness, but the hellish destruction of military, nuclear and ecological Armageddon upon us all.

Abrahamic Syntheses and Divine Contradictions

Part of the seeking to unify the mythical, and in a sense historical, peoples of Abraham is a striving for a unity of viewpoint between Israelites and Arabs and between Jewish and Islamic religions, each of which on their own are liable to an apocalyptic high noon of ultimate diabolical supremacy.

However one fundamental difficulty with the stress on Abraham is that it doesn’t carry over to the gentiles of Christianity, nor to the non-Semitic adherents of Islam, neither of whom trace their roots from Abraham except in so far as Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad are variously perceived to originate from the covenant that Abraham made with El. However El is a significantly different entity from the God of Moses, or of Jesus, or of Muhammad, who may, from the intimations of Harran and Ur in the Bible, and many of the nomadic Benjaminite names around Sumerian Mari, be anything, from the ancient Moon god Sin, to El the old father god of Canaan.

James Tabor, in his summary ’Principles of Abrahamic Faith’ , describes the common relationship: “There is One Creator God, YHVH, the One Who will be, is and always was, beside whom there is no other. He is the Great, and Mighty, and the Awesome One – merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loyal love and faithfulness. To Him alone we offer our deepest love and highest devotion.”

He then proposes a fusion of the prophetic, Christian and Jewish ideas of the messianic culmination: “The Kingdom of God is the goal and meaning of history... In that Day YHVH Himself will dwell with humankind, the will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven, violence among men and beasts will cease, and the knowledge of YHVH will fill the world as the waters cover the sea. YHVH will be King over all the earth ... Human beings will be able, at long last, to reach their full potential as creatures made in the image and likeness of their Creator God. … ushered in by His prophetic Messiahs / Anointed Ones, as His chief human agents who prepare the way for His coming."

Here we can already begin to see the pathological signs of God’s nature emerging as a monarchial, implicitly male Lord, ruler and creator. But this is only the good side – the rosy future. Somewhere we have lost sight of the violent jealousy and retribution of YHVH the forsaken lover of the bride Israel, and the homicidal Father Abba who sacrifices his only begotten Son in a twisted tale of guilt and the war between light and dark, fit only for the blood rites of the pagan religions Christianity sought to annihilate as false teachings, echoed in Ester and other dark Old Testament passages used by Christians to justify the messiah who has to be killed for us all to live.

So what is the relationship between the messianic quest and the identity of the abstract nameless God of 99 names, acting in history and destiny, variously referred to as Abba, al-Llah or YHVH? Is God an essential element of the messianic quest, or is the quest for collective redemption a natural manifestation of the existential condition of biological mortality, and the struggle for full understanding and reconciliation, while God is a cultural construct, or even an evolutionary trait, whose purposes are more adapted to the emergence and control of large societies?

Deity and Cosmology

To understand the nature of God, we need to look a little more carefully at what we now know about how life, the universe and everything actually comes about. At every stage of cosmological discovery, revealed religion has come into collision with the emerging scientific discoveries of the universe in which we exist, from Galileo’s excommunication for discovering the Earth orbited the Sun, to the rejection of Darwin’s discovery of biological evolution as the basis for life’s complexity.

Rather than existing on a flat Earth, with the firmament of Heaven above, we find the universe appears to be self-generating through a paradoxical series of complements. The cosmological form of the universe as a whole is intimately connected to the diversification of the infinitesimal forces of nature. The mathematical form of this is ultimately challenging and confounds our intuitive ideas of space, time and classical causality. It is intimately pervaded by chaotic processes on huge energy scales, unconceived of by even the most hyperbolic Biblical author. All of these processes appear to be self-generating and there is no hint, or indication of any kind, of an external creator, or the need for external intervention in the process of cosmic emergence.

Rather than an ordered cosmos emerging by an act of God from the chaos of tohu vohu, existential reality presents as a series of symmetry-broken complements - wave and particle, body and mind, female and male, as well as chaos complementing order in the generation of complexity, in a manner much more closely mirroring the Tao of yin and yang, the Tantric origin of Shakti and Shiva retreating from intimate coitus, and the fertile overflowing of the Song of Songs, than the seven day act of Sabbatical Creation, full of manifest endearing contradictions, such as the Earthly plants coming into existence epochs before the Sun.

If we look around the universe, from the annihilating maelstroms of black holes, through the nuclear furnaces of stars and elusive shadows of dark matter to the freezing wastes of outer space for a place where God might exist, we are inexorably led back to the biota of living planets and to the conscious brain, which for all its fragility and mortal ephemerality, is the perennial interactive culmination of all the forces of nature in complete integration, from the quark through protons and neutrons to atomic nuclei, atoms and molecules, through proteins and nucleic acids and on to the fractal structures of organelles, cells, tissues, organs and organisms. Thus, in our search for God, we find ourselves back at ground zero, the very source of the messianic quest - our own selves.

Moreover the informational deluge of the genetic age following the human genome project has shown us irreversibly that life evolves, and does so based on extremely subtle and complex physical laws, which no attempt to finesse the bogey of creationism into ‘intelligent design’ can hope to model, let alone understand . This is a fundamental folly, coming from the application of human ideas of industrial design to God forging the entire universe in the same classical way we make bridges, automobiles, computers and watches, none of which are alive, or conscious, or capable of generating living systems. The very notion of creator God thus smacks of human projection of a very limited kind.

We now see the heavens we thought were up in the sky are a radiation-filled vacuum, and that most, if not all, of the cosmological ideas of religion are willfully imaginative human fantasies. This holds equally true for evolving ideas of the afterlife from the old Hebrew idea of Sheol, through the sexless Christian heaven with angels bearing feathered wings to fly in the airy skies, to the hyper-sexed Islamic heaven full of black-eyed virgin houris, created anew every morning for the carnal pleasure of men, let alone the diabolical intimations of hell fire used to make us cower into submission.

This means that if we are going to understand the mysteries of consciousness and the claimed spiritual dimension of the existential condition, let alone our cosmic origins, we may have to approach this quest with something more like the radical transformative spirit of skeptical inquiry of science and look for vastly more paradoxical, complex and subtle solutions, than the legislative feudal Lord riding the apocalypse on a white horse, the Shi’ite Mahdi trying to attract him to worship at Mecca, or the demiurge cosmocrator in the guise of an old man with white woolly hair.

Also hidden in the patriarchal divine fantasy is the repression of the intrinsic sexuality of the universe as evil, and the subjugation of the feminine aspect to God. In contrast to the ‘Elohistic account of the sabbatical creation, expressing God in the plural, with man and woman conceived in ‘their’ likeness, consistent with the congregation of the mighty of the Psalms, and with the presence of the Asherah and Heavenly Host in Hebrew worship, in the Eden genesis, which appears to be a Judaic account, we find YHVH wandering alone in the garden. He is so incensed by Eve’s deceiving Adam into eating what she thought was the fruit of life-giving wisdom, but was actually the fruit of dark and light division, that Eve was cursed and Adam was cursed and they were both thrown out of paradise by a flaming sword, to live as mortals under pain of childbirth, with woman now firmly under the rule of man, as man is under the vengeful thumb of God.

We can see this as a founding stream of consciousness description of falling from the arboreal gatherer-hunter wilderness into patriarchal urban empire and conflict, just as the unveiling is the final stage of this process of culture shock. Nevertheless this creation myth results in oppression, with man ruling over woman, as God rules over man, in the assertion of an inequitable regime of pure dominance, just as dark and light become warring opposites, fractured from the healing wholeness of the immortal Tree of Life - the very process which the Zohar declares caused the Shekhinah to retreat until her return in sparks or shards in the unveiling.

Moreover the feminine sacred was demoted and shattered - Hochmah of the Proverbs, who cried out that she was there with Him from everlasting, before his works of old, is relegated to mere practicality. Shekhinah retreats de-sexed of her power to become merely the feminine face of His presence on Earth. Asherah, symbolic of the immortality of the Tree of Life, is cast out of the Temple and burned with the bones of her priests and priestesses in the Vale of Kidron, in the shadow of Deuteronomy - that apocryphal text ‘discovered’ in the Temple, for whom the prophetess Huldah was maneuvered by a posse of men into acknowledging as ‘genuine’, thus making women to blame for their own plight, in such punishments as being stoned for adultery for not crying out when raped, or not possessing the tokens of virginity, thus cementing male reproductive rule outright and showing that the whole process is driven, not by divine law but by the incessant paternity uncertainty, not shared by women, that drove the transition to patriarchal marriage.

This is a violation of the central cosmological principle, of complementarity, which also lies at the source of the emergence of human culture. Human super-intelligence appears to have arisen through neither sex having the strategic upper hand in the reproductive prisoners’ dilemma, so that each has had to run a Red Queen race to succeed in courting the opposite sex, particularly in terms of bright men possessing intelligent and witty minds, good creative skills, melodious music, accurate targeting, and good domestic and fathering skills being selectively favoured by astute women in the highly polarized reproductive process human pregnancy, lactation and child rearing involves, in which women have to make massive and risky long-term investments in parenting, while the men are prone to sewing wilds oats and yet fear paternity uncertainty with jealousy and violence. As a result of strategic sexual paradox, genes for cultural intelligence have swept rapidly through the human population. To the extent that either sex gains a fully dominant position reproductively, as patriarchal marriage laws seek to enforce, this would act to inhibit the very essence of human culture and intelligence.

YHVH and the Mysterium Tremendum

The central claim of monotheism, despite its incessant factionalism and the endless spectre of religious war, conversion by the sword, and the genocide of jihad and crusade, is that, unlike the cyclical iconic fertility deities of pagan ‘false’ religions, the nameless, faceless, abstract God acting in history is the ‘true’ God of creation, not a mere stone idol, who, despite displaying the turbulent reactive emotions we associate with human personalities, including jealousy and retribution, fit only for a totem deity, is different because He is absolute, omniscient and omnipotent. However the proponents of iconic religions have always understood these to be metaphorical symbols of a transcendent entity, just as Christianity does today in its endless figures of Jesus and Mary.

It thus serves us well, in coming closer to understanding the nature of the numinous reality behind the mysterium tremendum, to recognize that the very best of the meditative tradition of inner vision has come, not from monotheism, but from the traditions of the implicitly iconic male and female Hindu deities. It’s is the rich interaction of these, from Brahmanic Indra, through ancient Dravidian Kali and Shiva, whose origins go back to the Indus valley planter cultures contemporary with the Sumerians, that the meditative depths of insight of the Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jain thinking came about.

It is here that we can begin to see a deeper avenue to understanding the mysterium and the whole religious spectre of the quest for the supernatural in the inner journey in meditative repose to the ultimate interior cosmic ‘self’ or ‘void’ of the Buddha mind, and with it the philosophy that mind is ‘finer’ than the gross accretions of matter and thus forms a complementary realm to the physical universe.

It is in the mythical allegories of Vishnu dreaming the history of the universe, with Brahman appearing in the lotus emerging from is navel, that we come to understand how the religious quest is a manifestation of inner consciousness as a dream-time, rather than a false physical heaven in the sky generated by a legislative personality who will love us only if we obey him, but curse us in his jealousy and condemn us to hell fire if we are unfaithful.

Furthermore the god acting in history is not new. If we go back from Abraham to the gods of our African Adam and the even older African Eve, we find for example in the ancient culture of the Bushmen, whose maternal mitochondrial genes form twin human Mariana trenches of some 100,000 years separation across the Kalahari (Behar et al.), both the shamanic vision quest and abstract creation deities, whose roles in relation to humans are refreshingly subtle and paradoxical, and also reflect heroic personalities with miraculous attributes.

Bushmen believe in the existence of two gods: ≠ Gao!na a greater god manifesting the creative force and //Gauwa, a lesser god invoking the malevolent forces of uncertainty and misfortune.

≠ Gao!na, the !Kung Great God, using one of his seven divine names, created himself:

"I am Hishe. I am unknown, a stranger.
No one can command me.
I am a bad thing. I follow my own path."

Then he created a Lesser God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives for himself and for the Lesser God. ≠ Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen, was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life. But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the source and custodian of all things. He created the earth with holes in it where water could collect and water, the sky and rain both the gentle 'female' rain and the fierce 'male' rain thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He created the animals and painted their individual colours and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for themselves. Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the very beginning and ≠ Gao!na ordained that when they died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all things, each in accordance with its own rules.

However the Bushmen do not see these as good and evil in the manner of YHVH and Satan. When a missionary inquired into a Bushman's ideas of good and bad he was told it was 'good' to sleep with another man's wife, but 'bad' if he slept with yours. Still lamenting the Bushman's ignorance of absolute morality, he later asked the man, whom meanwhile he had discovered 'was in the habit of smoking wild hemp', what he thought was the most wonderful thing he had seen. The reply he was given was that no one thing was more wonderful than any other and that all the animals were the same.

We need to take a deep teaching from this evolutionary perspective on life, for the lessons of evolution are that disease and predators, just as plants and animals are integral to the diversity of life and a critical feature of the climax diversity that makes conscious life able to come into existence. Therefore our notions of absolute morality are flawed. While there may be a beneficent role for a greater collective consciousness expanding love and peace in the universe, we need to view this in a context founded on respecting the evolutionary diversity of life as both a natural and sacred process, with all its teeth and claws and the contradictions of sexual fidelity and betrayal.

Significantly, although the culture of Bushmen such as the !Kung-San is nominally patriarchal and male elders like to consider themselves definers of lawful arrangements, according to the accounts of Marjorie Shostak’s ‘Nisa’, women have retained a considerable degree of reproductive autonomy and relationship choice, comparable with modern society. A woman will return to her maternal family to help with at least her first birth and early child rearing and the first menstruation is celebrated as a joyful rite of immense feminine power, which can destroy a male hunter’s prowess if he inadvertently witnesses it.

Pivotal to the discovery of the immanent numinous is the profound difference between monotheistic prayer and contemplative meditation, which shares attributes of personal vigilance and autonomy with the older shamanic vision quest pervading world cultures. While Zen koans are paradoxes and the mantra Om Mane Padme Hum is a verbal recitation of a single concept designed to make the mind one-pointed and to stop the train of extraneous verbal thought, prayer is a formal verbal recitation to an unseen personality in the place of an actual vision quest. It is not a direct path to empowerment and self-transcendence, but passing off one’s own autonomy to an entreaty to a higher being.

While the Jewish tradition has had a continuing current of confirmation of the life force in its people, the Christian tradition has degraded our integrity because humans are perceived to be intrinsically fallible and can achieve redemption only by appealing to the Lord Jesus Christ because of the biologically false doctrine of original sin.

Again, while the Jewish tradition has had a continuing current of mysticism in the followers of the Zohar, the Christian mystics from Meister Eckhart to Marguerite Porete have been largely suppressed and even burned at the stake, and the Sufis, whose founding traditions run back to the time of Jesus, have been variously crucified or hermetically sealed, as merely the ‘inner garment’ in a society of dominant Islam which condemns all future prophets to death because Muhammad is considered the final prophet of the monolithic world age.

Many, or even most, religions, despite their treasured sacred texts, have thus acted as much as barriers to communication with the mysterium tremendum, as conduits to it, by placing obstructions in the way of the process of discovery, aided by the intervening roles of the priesthood. The prophets crying in the wilderness have more often than not been cursed and killed, despite being the visionary link between the people and the divine, formative and essential in the emergence and development of religious traditions, while the priesthood have enforced the orthodoxy, as often through torture, murder and incarceration as through insight and spiritual wisdom. And this is not just a problem of corruption of the upper echelon, but intrinsic to the very nature of the priesthood and the fascist nature of religious social control.

The God Spot in Evolution and Brain Science

So where does the nature of God stand in evolution and in the workings of the conscious brain?

Firstly there is a fundamental contradiction in the very notion of a moral creator deity. Although we know that life has evolved through mutation and selective advantage, because the evidence is clear, both from the fossil record, and from the genetic sequences of diverse species, even if we don’t presume this, no God who created life the way it is, with its climax diversity spanning both predator and prey, and parasite and host, designed it on the basis of the moral obedience of any species, however dominant, let alone a riveting focus on any particular one of the countless planets orbiting myriads of stars and galaxies in the universe as we know it. Even if God had a particular affection for planet Earth, or a deep desire to see conscious life become morally and ethically aware of its own existential predicament, devising the biota to survive adaptively by tooth and claw, is in complete contradiction to demanding the very opposite as a consummation - that the lion lie down with the lamb, as Isaiah fervently hoped and that all forms of dissention would cease to exist. No creator deity would intentionally give the power to make free choices, only to command his creations not to disobey him under pain of eternal damnation. All such ideas are a grotesque sadistic product of oppressive human patriarchal logic designed to perpetuate and control large dominant human societies through fear and oppression particularly of the female.

Secondly the dynamics which have been used to associate religiosity with evolution and the brain come in two opposing forms, reflecting the prophetic and orthodox currents above. Some twin studies have shown that religiosity has an up to 40% genetic basis, regardless of the cultural environment of the person concerned. However what this constitutes depends on the experimental measures used, from self-transcendence through to measures of religious conformity. These differing measures highlight two very different currents.

The brain scientist Ramachandran first highlighted an area which popularly became entitled the ‘God-spot’ on the boundary between the temporal lobes and limbic system centres such as the amygdala, which serendipitously lie alongside one another. The idea of this, gleaned partly from episodes of temporal lobe epilepsy, was that primary mystico-religious experience is often associated with a combination of peak emotional fulfillment and overwhelming significance - associated with mutual hyperactivity of each of these neighbouring areas. A natural conclusion could be that evolution has arrived at a human brain attuned to mystical insight. However, although this may be true to a certain extent, people endowed with such faculties have often been rejected, treated as lunatics, or even killed by the societies from which they came or at best given guarded, somewhat isolated existences, as shamans, healers, witches, prophets or other intermediaries with the unseen world, so it remains unclear such traits on their own are a selective advantage, although they might be genetically linked with other traits such as creative insight which might compensate.

A completely countervening evolutionary trend is the one toward religious conformity and the propensity for belief in a moral deity, with powers of punishment of transgressors, on the basis that such traits enable larger more dominant societies of believers to survive and prosper. Thus an evolutionary trend, in which people seek simple ordered belief systems enforcing a moral regime, may aid the survival of large societies, despite the fact that it reduces the autonomy and capacity for religious discovery of the individuals who possess this trait. This is consistent with the biological theory of morality as a means to reduce intra-social strife to enhance inter-social dominance. Many of the central elements of monotheistic worship fit closely with this idea. An invisible moral deity, who is omnipresent, and aware of our thoughts and desires, demands fidelity on a national or global scale is optimally suited to influence our actions in a way which will reduce our likelihood of exploiting at least other members of our own religious following, even if we consider it a divine duty to annihilate the infidels in the name of God‘s divine plan.

Research into a variety of religious practices, from Carmelite nuns, through Buddhist monks, to young university students in a variety of settings, supports a diversity of such components of religious belief spanning these two opposing currents.

This brings us back to the avenues of conscious exploration humanity has discovered access to embracing prophetic vision, meditative contemplation, the shamanic vision quest, the use of trance states induced by psychotropic and psychedelic plants and fungi, and the varied states of lucid to ‘precognitive’ dreaming and finally related deep conscious states, such as so-called near death experiences. Although many of these involve unworldly experiences, in which a huge variety of situations can occur, from sweeping visionary panoramas, to witnessing a deep connection to all life across space-time, they all appear to be accompanied by the activity of a conscious biological brain, so until we can fathom exactly how consciousness is generated it remains unclear whether such visionary experiences can transcend the biological reality in which we are embedded.

Before coming to any conclusions about God or His moral or ethical covenant with humanity, we need to explore the varieties of conscious experience without preconceptions, or predilections, in the same skeptical spirit of truth the scientific inquiry engages with the physical universe.

Shulamite Apocalypse: Free-will, Living Redemption and Sexual Destiny

The quest for the cosmic redemption of life is thus a fundamental attribute of the existential condition, which has much deeper roots than the Abrahamic epoch. Indeed it is a fundamental aspect of the way conscious beings find themselves in the mortal coil and thus have no option, as sexual beings, but to give their best to the ongoing future of their progeny and to life as a whole.

Just as Rabbi Adin Steinsalz speaks of the children of Israel, so children the world over find themselves facing a situation where their voyage of life is pitted against the vagaries of fate and its true redemption lies in making the vision quest of the mortal condition to help bring about a greater unveiling for the generations of life to come.

This existential quest is deeply embedded in the complementarity of body and soul we find at the root of the existential condition and is the one true panacea for all the travails of selfishness and exploitation, which of themselves can do no good for us because, no matter what fame and fortune, or temporal power we attain, we can’t take it with us when we go.

Whether there is a disembodied conscious afterlife or a deeper principle of conscious relativity which unites all conscious beings as one manifestation of the universe coming to discover itself in its own maha-samadhi apocalypse over space-time, doesn’t really make any difference, because it is what we do now as biological beings which will bring about the redemption of existence around us, or let it slide into oblivion.

In this respect, it is the tenuous thread of personal autonomy we call free will, which is our critical asset in being able to make any difference to the world around us. The core reason evolution has arrived at the conscious brain, is because it provides life’s best chance of anticipating threats to survival and giving us all a chance to live another day. So in regard to the notion of future destiny, which Rabbi Soloveichic in ‘Destiny, not causality, governs Israelite history’ , suggests is paramount, we need to understand destiny is neither fixed by causality, nor is a future preconceived by divine will, nor even set, like an apple in the eye, by the national psyche, but generated consciously through the paradox of free will expressed in each and every one of us, as sentient beings shaping history together. We thus have little choice but to take personal responsibility for the world situation in which we find ourselves, because it is the messianic quest which lies at the very core of our conscious being.

The messianic quest is thus real and leads naturally to our redemption, even though the many spectres of God acting in history could well be a cultural, or even an evolutionary aberration. Just as we can’t afford to take the baggage of spiritual materialism with us, neither can we afford to corrupt our intrinsic virtue to false assumption of divine providence. The future of the universe remains our personal responsibility as long as we continue to exist in the mortal coil.

This is also extremely pertinent for the future of Israel and Palestine, for the Middle East, for humanity as a whole and for the ecological future of planet Earth, because it may be that, only by descending into the abyss of tohu vohu and realizing the universal nature of the messianic quest common to all people, and the suppressed nature of the feminine, which in the prisoners’ dilemma of yin and yang, contains the keys to the long-term investment in future offspring that secures the stability of humanity from the boom and bust mortal risk-taking of patriarchal reproduction, will the world become a safe, sustainable place for life to flourish.

But the unveiling is also finally the end of the messianic era - even the messianic quest of world redemption has become tainted with the patriarchal imperative, as a predominantly male quest - so we are being drawn into the primal chaos of a sexual reflowering, in which the Song of Songs between woman and man again becomes a true Holy of Holies, and the Shulamite bride returns from the wilderness to reclaim her sovereignty, as co-conceiver of world futures, under the tree of all life, in a true marital unveiling beyond our wildest dreams.

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon,
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?
Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee.
What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.

References
Behar et al., The Dawn of Human Matrilineal Diversity, The American Journal of Human Genetics (2008), doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.04.002
Fielder, Christine and King, Chris (2002-2010) Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence

A Splash or Two of Precognitive Dreaming

2010-03-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali

Today, when I got up, I commented to my partner that I had had a bizarre dream that I was back in in a Maths Dept meeting, although I have now retired.

At lunch time I sent my coffee cup flying by accidentally poking my fingers into the rim as I was turning at the table, nearly drenching the keyboard and splashing myself down the trousers, with an uncanny feeling this was becoming a bad habit.

The next cup of green tea, which I have with orange juice to enhance the anti-oxidant epicatechin gallate, I caught the orange juice container, which had a loose lid, against the fridge door and sent the lid flying, scattering juice over the floor, but caught the container in mid-air. Then suddenly it all came back to me!

In the middle of the dream, in which I was making comments which everyone was reluctantly tolerating, because I was retired and shouldn't have an opinion anyway, (actually it was weirder than that - I was talking in a chirpy voice and they couldn't hear me as if I was a ghost - which is a signal of the deeper dreaming stratum), anyway in one of those dream disconnections, this was suddenly interrupted by me getting up scattering my coffee cup on the floor, when I stabbed my finger accidentally into the rim! Not only that, but when I went to bend over to try to pick it up, the entire coffee urn, which was a large chromed boiler on three legs, fell all over the floor as well and couldn't be uprighted because the legs had become rubbery wires, dysfunctional, like the cardboard orange juice container with the unglued screw cap.

So the dream has two splashed containers just as the day has, I reported the dream occurrence hours before the events happened, and it was only when the second splashing became real that the whole weight of the four mistakes reminded me of the full content of the dream and the uncanny implications ...

This harks back to the first precognitive dream I had when I dreamed two nightmares that I was being stung, told my young wife as she arose to feed our newborn daughter, and an hour later was stung wide awake in bed by a wasp that had flown in the window my wife opened after she got up.

My son's response was "of course it might be that the dream primed the events", but this is as much a violation of causality as precognition. Both the real events were accidents, not intentional acts, so priming suggests that dreaming something, particularly in these deep intense hallucinogenic uncontrolled phases of dreaming, might affect future outcomes, not just cause an imprint leading to the person acting out the dream later.

This is of course what quantum theories of dreaming and consciousness might be about, namely anticipating future events which could have significance for the survival of the experiencer. If one dreams a plane is about to crash and one is about to fly, perhaps the dream is priming towards a set of probability futures, or parallel universes, in which these experiences have a non-zero probability of occurring. The dream then leads to a capacity on the part of the experiencer to anticipate disaster and hopefully to evade annihilation.

If so, this anticipatory capacity is not necessarily confined to dreams, but may be the founding property which has caused brains to evolve to become subjectively conscious, namely to anticipate chance happenings beyond the organisms control - perhaps in waking life just in the immediate future of the 'quantum of the present' enabling one, through a degree of foreboding to jump out of the way of the tiger just in time, or on a slightly longer-term basis to intuitively help us decide which shady path ahead the tiger might actually be on.

This would appear to link the unstable and unpredictable properties of a brain state critically poised in self-organized criticality of edge-of-chaos dynamics to respond to quantum sensitivity of its own butterfly effect to generate a form of quantum entanglement that becomes sensitive to the potential future states of the whole system. This would then become the crack in the cosmic egg, in which consciousness has room to utilize Carlos Castaneda's cubic centimeter of chance to good effect.

Finally here is one that happened a couple of months later that shows the same reporting veracity as the stung dream. Last night I dreamed that a group of women had a newborn baby together and they turned to me and threw it out of their van, claiming they had had trying to look after it, claiming was actually mine. I caught it in mid-air and went to look after it but it had strange glutinous transparent white bowel motions. When I woke up I told Christine about it. Then tonight we were watching "House" and the first episode was "Maternity". It began with a couple with a newborn baby which then began to burp up its milk and had an intestinal blockage. Then it became a viral epidemic and second lesbian couple lost their baby. So there were the two elements together in the dream, a women-only group with a baby losing it and a baby with intestinal troubles emitting white glutinous liquid.

Reproductive Passion, Tantric Completion and Polyamory

2010-03-24T00:45:00.000-07:00

My second menage-a-trois was a time of both sexual adventure and domestic bliss.

Sexual Paradox - our website

Polyamory as the Spice of Fidelity

I was a shy, only child become a willowy male who met a mysterious beatnik American expatriate girl who was way ahead of me in the love stakes, having already had a string of heady relationships and sexual experiences, when I was still a gangling somewhat jealous virgin.

We married on the somewhat paradoxical basis that she could have other lovers should she wish later - an option encouraged by her father. Things were relatively idyllic for three years and we had our first two offspring, a son and a daughter.

Then she fell in love with one of our best friends. she was the experienced, confident, independent party and I was the anxious, dependent, paranoid party and it dragged our relationship down to the point where we split up for a short period, just as I began to have my first exploratory polyamorous relationship with a younger music student, who was a brilliant pianist.

My first double partners

Then the three of us came together again partly as a way of keeping the children together and looking after them as a family and we lived for a year and a half as a menage-a-trios. This led to a crazy period in the seventies where we held open free love house to a number of our hippie friends and pursued an ever increasing number of casual and intimate relationships, in a kind of race towards the full sexual charisma of loving or being loved by just about everyone we knew. Those we the innocent days when the worst disease we suffered was genital herpes.

It was at this point that I met Christine and she became an integral partner in my second double marriage, and we proceeded to have one, and later two, children together. My wife as the 'leading lady' was highly ethical about her relationships with both the other women and relations were friendly and conducive to a resourceful and positive family environment for our children. Four and a half happy adventurous, but chaotic, years ensued in relationship terms, in which we brought up the children together while pursuing a variety of strange affairs that eventually led to the breakup of all three of us.

My wife became involved with another of our close associates and became pregnant to him with whom she later had a second child all of whom have become an integral part of our extended family of adult offspring. Christine also became involved with another associate, just as I was heading off alone on my first sabbatical to wander India as a sadhu, and do research in Europe and the US - the ultimate full circle back to solo existence.

The simultaneous split ups with my two familial partners were very painful, but we agreed above all to look after the children together, with them able to come and go freely between us on neighbouring blocks of land, on an equal time-shared basis, after I returned from my year overseas. This kept the overall family intact and enabled it to become an even larger extended family, all of whom share a deep bond of love and commitment to one another, even to the third generation.

I continued to be polygynous by choice and entered into a third double relationship for 15 years or so with Christine and another partner. This was also fraught with tension caused by the two partners' reluctant and at best partial acceptance of one another, even when we sometimes had other male partners in common, leading after a couple of years to each having separate domains with me going to and fro between. This is an endless problem of polygynous marriages.

Eventually, after Christine and I had my fourth child together, my relationship with my other partner ended in overt terms, only to become a long drawn out smouldering clandestine affair - a decision I made after continuing tension, made to confirm my commitment to the partner with whom I was rearing a family, while still being faithful to the principle of being lovers with my other partner, as opportunity provided.

Eventually this situation led to separation, but was followed by a consensual open partnership with Christine, where it was possible to negotiate to have an outside sexual relationship, but only if ring fenced with total care for our health, by having 'pre-nuptial' STD tests of any potential outside partners to protect existing partners who could be harmed. This was an essential reaction to the HIV era and something we have never been prepared to compromise on since for all the casual habits of swingers, the tortured lifestyle choices of devoted polyamorists, let alone the unprotected clandestine affairs of more conventional people.

I have since had a small number of outside relationships to further a creative psychic and physical relationship with another person, not for the fulfillment of polyamorous sexual desires, but to live out fully an intimate creative relationship with a member of the opposite sex with whom I have had an emerging engagement.

The critical point in favour of open polyamory is that it makes it possible to be honest that you are entertaining an affair and to gain some acceptance of it from ones existing partner, establishing some trust around what is often a painful situation if only one partner is actively seeking a new relationship. Conventional monogamy has the almost inescapable pitfall that it leads to deceit and betrayal in the affairs of love and often the health of the affected parties, leading to divorce settlements, and acrimonious contests over custody.

Finally, for the last seven years, Christine and I have entered into a period of creative monogamy, in which we are each giving our full energy to our sexual relationship with one another and making it into a passionate saga of unforgettable experiences, whose ultimate peaks we are continually in the process of scaling to mutual oblivion. This has proved for both of us in our sixties to be the unleashed sexual high point of our whole lives. I am still inherently polygynous, as most men are liable to sew wild oats by evolutionary trait, but I sublimate this, through using mild pornography as Tantric exercises towards another bout of creative sexual reunion with the beloved.

Reproductive Passionate Love as the Holy Grail of Eros

We have a highly heterosexual view of sexuality that prizes Tantric complementation of female and male energies as manifesting the full completion with the alien exotic other. This is not just sex as erogenous gratification, but more of a cosmic fusion and annihilation, in which both the woman and the man play an active creative part in the inner mounting flame of love, as forthright as Krishna is to Radha and as topsy turvy as Kali is to Shiva.

Willendorff Venus meets Green Man

It also holds, as its full quintessence, reproductive fertilization, and the implicit capacity of sexuality to emanate the life force both psychically, energetically and in the capacity to get physically pregnant and to give birth to new life.

It worships the sexual differences between the two sexes, as fully manifesting the complementary nature of the Tao in its totality between wave and particle, mind and body, female and male, chaos and order and so on.

While it is true that many of the Tantric temples of India and Nepal, such as a the Lakshman temple at Khajuraho, have lower freezes depicting all the sexual postures and erotic perversions of which humanity is capable, from bestiality to anal and oral sex, the higher pinnacles depict the union of Shakti and Shiva, not just of two unisex people, gay, lesbian or coincidentally heterosexual, performing any act from sodomy to cunnilingus without discrimination, but the intimate complementarity of female and male cosmic principles, in reproductive lingam-yoni coitus, often surrounded by a supporting group of attendants.

Khajuraho upper and lower friezes

In today's epoch of consenting adult eros and the pursuit of simple gratification by any means, there is only a limited difference between heterosexual and homosexual eroticism because both engage the same spectrum of perverse erotic acts unrelated to the reproductive quest. There is a poetic irony in that heterosexual pornography is as engaged as gay male voyeurism in non-reproductive sexuality, from exploitative deep-throat fellatio to sometimes violent sodomy, as an expression of male sexual power.

It may well be that this is ancient - that some women throughout history have been prepared to subject themselves to any form of sexual concourse to give their man everything he desires and thus to hold on to him by letting him possess them utterly and completely, but it is rarely for their own sexual fulfillment or sexual autonomy that they do this. Female eros and particularly astute female reproductive choice takes a very different direction of its own, more likely to very discretely seduce and attract the most genetically endowed and capable man in sight on her own terms of ecstatic enticement.

Eros only makes sense if integrated into creative relationship with the deeper unifying truth of the fusion of the complementary principles of which the universe is composed in the burgeoning of the diversity of new life. This doesn't mean neglecting contraception, or denying women the right to reproductive choice. In fact it is founded on the principle that women, as the principal bearers of new life, must have reproductive sovereignty over their own autonomy and a degree of sexual choice that can't be made subject to male control.

The strategic preservation of female reproductive choice is why females have evolved to possess an ecstatic orgasm even though it is unnecessary for fertilization, why ovulation is concealed, and why women have become sexually attractive at all phases of their reproductive cycle.

It is because my beloved partner has pendulant flowing breasts which I have seen and tasted running with milk and an aromatically delightful copulin-filled vagina and I am fertilizing her fullness with my manhood to my oblivion with all the poly-orgasmic manifestations of the abundance of life flowing forth that affirm the sexual complementation is complete. It is also because the sexuality is implicitly reproductive that it fosters long-lasting meaningful relationships, related to family, the passage of the generations and thus the immortality of ongoing life.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing;
whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

It is not self-love, or the love of self-natured sexuality, which is forever limited, because it ultimately seeks sameness and is thus narcissistic, even when one or other in a uni-sex relationship assumes the stylized roles of butch or doe, but the worship of the complete other in the overflowing fullness of their natural abundance.

The seeking of the complementary 'other' is at the evolutionary source of all sexuality, because in sexual reproduction we communicate only half our genes in an intermingling with the other's, and it is through the genetic differences between the two parents that each generation gains its adaptive strength and resistance to disease. This is why women are pheromonally attracted to men with complementary histocompatibility genes and resist the incestuous advances of close male relatives.

It is also a completion, by contrast with the sexually stereotypic extremes of male-exclusive or female exclusive sexuality, which despite its pretensions to a more overarching gender encompassing identity, tends to extremes of runaway male promiscuity or female nesting.

"There's a joke in the gay community that goes like this -
'What does a lesbian bring on her second date?' - 'A U-Haul'.
'And what does a gay man bring on his second date?' - "What second date?'

Reproductive passionate love is not in any way homophobic - it has no need to need to be for the very reason that it is complete, but it IS all-consumingly and overflowingly heterophilic, as Tao and Tantra, and as the Holy of Holies - the Song of Songs declare:

Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:
for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.