http://www.5min.com/Video/How-Evolution-Happens-4804307
At the end of the above video which cutely shows the history of evolution from germs in soup to nuts around a campfire, there is a sense of these proto-humans being at a tipping point. One thing is certain: what we call transcending cannot exist without the DNA what we gots. There has to be chemical mechanisms that provide the foundation for this ability of our nervous systems. Let's call them the "Awareness Gene" [AG] Now as the above video portrays, there are many ways for an animal to evolve -- appendages can turn into fins or fingers, depends on which butterfly flapped a wing somewhere. And, so, perforce, it must be valid to consider how the AG -- a physicality -- evolved from a having a hint of being able to model "self" all the way to having robust ability to model self. Or more!!! That's what I'm introducing here: more awareness than you or I have might be merely the product of having a better AG. Hang on, I gotta lay some groundwork here, but I promise an embodiment of this better AG that might surprise you. Hint: nutjob notion ahead. Maharishi supported the notion that the cognizers of the Ved had to have a pure lineage of father to son teaching, and that daddy's genes were needed -- can't teach just any kid how to see the living Ved. I believe this concept still. They say anyone who thinks all men are created equal never met a man on a horse in the woods, and I say, all of us are delightfully unequal in wondrous particularity, and that this individuality is as present in any species. You've got your smart fish and your short bus fish, your grey parrot that can pick out a "blue cube" and your parrot that still needs a stiff wind to get off the ground, and you've got your standard chimps, your Turqy bonobos, and that chimp on youtube that pees into its own mouth. Darwin harped about this, of course. We surmise now that cosmic rays etc. smashed off some phosphate from a bio-complexity, and voila!, a new creature with longer hair, or color vision or whatever pops out. So think about this. Imagine the above video's hairy crew at the end -- they too may have had an array of micro-differences, and we know that some of these creatures evolved into full humans and others branched off into chimps, apes, monkeys that didn't so much care to slouch to Bethlehem and the greatness that is George Bush. But still others may have, oh so long ago, gotten a different notion about how to tip into the future. (I tease. Vaj taught me.) Okay, one more foundational concept before I whack ya. We all have heard the stories from Yogananda and Ram Dass about the saints not just living in caves, but saints that are bricked into their caves and live there for a year without water or food, then the bricks come down, the devotees do a puja, and back up goes the brick wall. Like that. Amazing stories that are not so unbelievable given that you can find a guy on every street corner in India who stands on one foot for his entire life, or who hangs a boulder from his ball-sack, but you get my point. Might just be some yogis in them those caves who just need a couple pine nuts and a dew drop to survive a year. They got yogis for every occasion, ya know? Guys who can sleep in the snow like it was a sunny day at the beach. Why not, eh? There's simple bacteria that can shut down into spores so tough they can get splashed off the earth by a meteor strike and survive until the chunk of rock they're on hits Mars and they start living there. It's called panspermia. The point is that our DNA must also have the instructions for such miraculous adaptability, cuz ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, donchaknow. So, at last, here's the deal: imagine the early hominids hunkering around a campfire. One of the hominids just lurves fashioning a giant leaf into a ten gallon hat, another is fascinated with how ash and grease get dirt off fingers, and yet a third is content to gaze into a small stream and how it flows. This third ape is why I'm writing here. This third ape got an AG that's a bit more aware, and guess what?, this guy will find a female who got the same AG, and these two early-hippies will wander down a path and start a tribe all their own, and the next thing you know, you've got another new species that has evolved by "sponsoring" their AG, and have cultured awareness, and bred themselves into, wait for it..... wait for it..... bred themselves into enlightenment. Oh, now it gets better: let's just suppose that they never lost their hairiness, and that they found that "just staring at a cave wall" was, well, a form of entertainment not unlike the Super Bowl -- I mean, a couple pine nuts, a bit of melted snow, a cave wall, and a super evolved AG, and you've got your first Yeti. An enlightened ape, that lives on nothing, has no great need to go anywhere, loves just sitting in awareness, and every now and then takes a walk and might, hey, just might get caught on camera striding through the woods. Bigfoot as AG meister. Think about it. It would explain all the Bigfoot stories. They're not in the fossil record, cuz they only have one kid every 1000 years, and they scatter around the globe in the high places where the prana is just right, and they can sense a ten gallon hat type human (me for instance) from up to thirty miles away by the psychic wavefront that proceeds before me -- such that it is simple for them to avoid me no matter how quietly I try to sneak up on them. Maybe Yogananda's Babaji is hirsute to the max. I'm just sayin'! Edg PS: a great poem that hardly pertains to the above: Slouching towards Bethlehem W.B Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert. A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
