IS CHANGE ALWAYS GOOD?

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species"

In terms of imperative our environment is God and in a chaos of change, slams the emergent organism with a blizzard of demands. It is only the most highly mutable genome that can adapt and survive its bombardment.

Some of the bedraggled earmarks of human adaptative responses to change can be seen in the rapid growth of current our version of reality found in the 24/7 Network Society. Our frantic efforts at response and adaptation can be seen the frenzied looks of humanity now caught in the explosions of informational fallout upon the senses: the loss of identity, the diversity of spiritual paths, social confusion and technological misdirection.

In a society driven by unending schedules and informational overloads we find a lack of time/space orientation and the need for a fulfilling concept of "being" that is applicable to the NOW. In the concept of a NOW space, one can find comfort in something that frees them, albeit intellectually, from the dissonance of this storm of information that blurs the edges of what is real.

The God of yore that was identifiable in terms of a "outside" readily attainable entity, who guided us and could be reached through intercession or prayer, has slowly dissolved and replaced by philosophy and ideas that attest to our need for mental, emotional and spiritual direction.

Perhaps we have turned away from this 'outward' source, or parochial God that we knew from simple tribal states when information was minimal and reality was simple, because and in response to this surplus of information from "outside" sources. The God of change we leaned about in Biology 101 who taught us all we needed to know through stimulus/response, has fallen in the light of informational overload, and our reaction can be seen in this tendency of mankind to trash the environment, as if in retaliation for the additional chaos that has become far too much to bear.

Could it be that humanity is at war with God?

In this input from 'outsourcing' we find in the informational age of the 24/7 Network Society, can be found the fallout of intellectual arrogance and its partner, disharmony. The consequences of this bombardment from our top intellectuals is revealed in the lost, vacant eyes of our youth now far from the country home of yesterday, hooked on Ipod, and the endless quest of adults haplessly searching through media streams, sheep who have strayed far away from the master—sheep who have become shepherds and who have stolen the keys to the Garden of Eden and laughed in the face of its maker.

How far and when will humankind return and by what route, are the next questions that need an answer. Can an escape from the vortex of the 24/7 Network Society's informational time stream save us, or will it simply bog us more deeply in the blizzard of informational chaos that now seems almost insurmountable?

Right from the beginning of the book, its introduction, even the concept of 24/7 lends itself to an overload of detail that leaves us struggling for meaning in the wake of its swift passage:

"First it seems worthwhile, no matter how appropriate or taken for granted the term 24/7 may seem, to try to define or explain what it means. The designation turns out to be of uncertain provenance. Google wasn’t much help to us in trying to clear things up. With characteristic overkill it located some 171,000,000 pages of possible relevance (in 0.17 seconds). After sifting through the first ten results, however, we were already discouraged. Predictably, perhaps, most of the results were related to media companies who for one reason or another had 24/7 in either their company name or as an indication of the time frame in which they promise to deliver their product or service. The only exception to this commercial rule was 24/7 Prayer (http://www.24/ prayer.com), which offers “non-stop prayer’” across the nation."1

This remark and its obvious suggestion, clearly accentuates the desperation in terms of identity loss and spiritual misdirection that is the direct result of an informational overkill!

Many blessings~Nahu Lanham

1-24/7 Time and Temporality in the Network Society edited by Robert Hassan & Ronald E. Purser 2007 Stanford, University Press.

RIGHT THINKING PRECEDES RIGHT ACTION!

Society is a macrocosm of the individual spirit. If there is no changes within oneself, then all the cleaning up "outside," like the newly pressed out wrinkles of wrong doing in our behavior on the surface, means nothing.

A good analogy can be found in the pseudo "rehabilitative efforts," of clever prisoners made to get out. For example, a lot of inmates discovered that all they had to do was tell the "man" they have changed, had a spiritual revelation, were now ready to alter their life. After that, they took a training course and went up in front of the Parole Board and automatically were freed.
But strangely, after getting out they suddenly were back in trouble and had returned. The prison boards wondered why their carefully developed programs weren't working and discovered after careful scrutiny that the inmates had learned how to con the system--that is, to give society what they wanted to see, rather than really change.

The moral of the story:

Change, or rehabilitation from wrong action, must take place within oneself. Unless that change is real, deep and sincere, all the retraining and programming in the world won't be effective.
The truth is we must "will" the change in ourselves. Not just open to receive a new way of thinking, but actively involved in willing that change in ourselves--followed next by right action.

To change the world we must must first "CHANGE OURSELVES" and really mean it!
Nahu Lanham.

ARE OUR GENES GOD?

Are we, as Richard Dawkins suggests, sacrifices to our genes, or do we have a choice in the matter? The question that arises is how far do we take the sacrificial equation? For instance Dawkins portrays us as: "Survival machines--robot vehicles." The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Great Britain, 1990.

But isn't that a double entendre? After all, if we are 'robots' doesn't that negate self-awareness?
Dawkins wrote: "We are survival machines--robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." My question is, what does this say about Dawkins' sense of self-awareness and control? Perhaps he is the robot who feels controlled by a power beyond himself--dare we call it a genetic God? His comments all seem to hint that "the devil made me do it," the deus ex machina, the ghost in the machine that is responsible for his behavior and somehow is keeping him from acting responsibly to address his own issues on will.

This idea sets a dangerous precedent, because if we buy into it, the right to "free will" must be thrown out the window. Let's face it, altruism requires action on our part--to change the world in a constructive manner, takes persoal action. If we are controlled by a selfish gene that demands sacrifice without compensation, then the results of the sacrifice would be in vein. Would you not agree with this contention?

Dawkins does not include, as far as I know, any recognition of the importance of numinous transformations of consciousness and the Maharishi effect, that encounter with the Divine which produces an epiphany and changes our direction in life from a selfish mode, to one that produces extreme acts of selfless-sacrifice to others or to the world as a Whole.

In its place he writes about a male mantis that is eaten by the female during copulation to insure the continuation of the species. Unfortunately, this example doesn't include any participatory insights into the male's consciousness of the role he plays in the act. In fact,the interpretation almost comes off sounding suspiciously anti-female--

More specifically, the ultimate question that unfolds, is what part in our genetic evolution do we play? Isn't there something positive in us that influences the future to change the course of human history--wasn't that trait implicate in Darwin's assumptions that evolution has a goal; that of survival--survival for what and at what price, seems the bigger quest.

What is the ultimate implication here, that we change just for our individual self-fulfillment or is it ultimately that the species AND THE PLANET as a WHOLE, is assured?

Somehow I think that beneath it all, God has managed to survive in this Wholeness we have managed to assign to our own demands.

With human conscientiousness~
Nahu Lanham