Multi-Level Evolution

Like G.B.Shaw I am personally attracted to evolution especially of the Bergsonian variety. I am certainly not attracted by deterministic doctrines of original sin redeemed by repentance and unmerited grace. I find materialists have an irrational need to reject all values except survival of their species, their personal genes, their class, their race, their nation or even their own bureaucratic institutions of dogmatic believers. Their arrogant superficiality, specialist stupidity and blind destruction of delicate and vital ecosystems horrifies me. I am far more at home in the company of magicians, gurus, artists, musicians, and devout religious believers, so long as they possess a toleration of ambivalence and an affectionate sense of humour.

 

It is through recognising that the universe has evolved through a series of sudden catastrophic and utterly unpredictable qualitative upgradings that we can find an alternative meaning system which is not predicated on repressing the fear of death. I do not want to die just as I do not want to suffer but I have no desire to live for ever in Heaven or, even worse, in Hell. Heaven might be wonderful for a few months or years but for hundreds of years, thousands of years, millions of years? The film “Zardoz” is centred on a group of the intelligentsia who live in special environment where they live out gruesomely extended superficial lives and they have reached the point where they are begging for death. Nor can I find comfort in projecting my ego into what happens after I die. Fame, fortune and power in the present maybe, but since I will be not around to enjoy it and would have no idea of what is going this is no compensation for dying. Maybe it will turn out that all I held dear and have achieved is seen as quite wrong or even worse, ridiculous, by future generations.