Years ago the American Negro College Fund ran a series of promotional spots featuring this memorable slogan : "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste". I remember agreeing with the slogan, but the wisdom behind it never really resonated with me until last year, when I began to realize that the tragedy of a wasted human mind might be not only the cornerstone of what we call Metaphysics—it may be foundation for the Next Great Leap Forward in human evolution.

The Energy Of Intelligence

What’s so special about the Mind is not so much its composition, but its ability to generate thoughts, ideas, paradigms, philosophies. The functioning brain requires energy; what it produces is also energy, but it’s also a whole lot more. Add in the remembered fact from high- school science that “energy is indestructible”, and suddenly the output of a single human mind takes on a dazzling potential, opens up a vast panorama of possibilities. The energy construct that we call human intelligence is an evolutionary step forward, but it is only one step in a series of steps that will go beyond what most of us can imagine.

In a way, the idea of Metaphysics itself is an evolutionary step forward -- it's the moment when human intelligence, realizing that it is too valuable to waste, begins to wonder about purpose, about the limits of our scientific knowledge, about forms of energy we can sense but cannot measure. We logically wonder about our ability to endure after death.

But so far we've been playing a passive game. The next step for us metaphysically is to switch from a passive game to an active game. We have to stop worrying about whether we "endure" after death and start planning on how we can persist after death. Human Will, like Human Intelligence, is also a terrible thing to waste. And we've been wasting it for far too long....

For example, we can will ourselves to stay healthy...to a point, of course. We can even will ourselves to live 30, 40, 50 years beyond today's human life span....perhaps a whole lot longer than that. I have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated the common cold from my life by willing it out of existence just hours after the first symptoms appear. Most, however, prefer to subscribe to that disturbing Slogan of Resignation: "Life sucks, and then you die." In that case, your life sucks, and you will die....a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Combine human intelligence, human will, science, medicine, and what little we know about the spirit world, and you're looking at what may well be the next giant step in evolution. We are not merely energy constructs -- we are energy generators, energy dynamos...perhaps even Spiritual Energy Synthesizers. It's part of what George Bernard Shaw called Conscious Evolution, but few paid enough attention to what he said, possibly because he let his Socialist leanings pepper what he wrote...

When we decide to use the power of the Human Will and the power of the Human Mind to enhance ourselves physically and spiritually -- instead of building nuclear weapons and gunning each other down -- then we will collectively move forward at warp speed. But right now it's just a few of us, a very miserable few of us. And there’s so much progress to be made…

The Spirit Candle

Recently I read about a long-term series of manifestations that took place in a country house in the UK. At first the apparition, that of a young woman, was bright, almost luminous...then, as the years passed, the apparition became dimmer and dimmer until, a couple of years ago, the spectre was barely visible.

I'm not so much concerned with the validity of this "haunting"...but the whole business really made me think about a spirit's persistence after death.

A spirit may be like the flame of a candle: it has form and it gives off light, but like any other energy-utilizing phenomenon, it may run down if its battery or energy source gets low. While we are alive, we are in essence "charging our spirit batteries" so that, when our physical bodies finally give out, our spiritual essences will live on. But what happens to those whose spirits have little or no charge when they die? And for those whose "batteries" are highly charged, how long will their spirits persist?

Which brings up another issue: if a disembodied spirit can find a source that can be used to "recharge", then theoretically that spirit can endure forever, or at least as long as the source holds out. What enables a spirit to tap into the "divine ground" to continually recharge itself? And what can we, the living, do to keep this divine force strong and sustaining?

It's at this point that we turn to the religions that we've developed to this point, hoping to find the way to "make the connection" with this Divine Ground, this God Force, this Ubiquitous Spirit Battery.....

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© Sassure (a.k.a. Dan Gallagher)
The Vanilla World View
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