What we’ll be discussing in this article:
What’s going on?
What we’re taught
Ancient teachings
Parmenides & The Buddha
What does God say?
Angles and light
What’s going on?
Did you ever get to wondering about why we’re here?
I know I certainly do although I probably used to do it a bit more as a teenager. No word of a lie, as we’d say back in Ireland, but it used to cause me sleepless nights as a teenager.
I’d just be lying there with my head wrecked, trying to figure out not only my purpose in the world but all of our collective purposes and why it had all come about…I was a bit of a weird teenager, I’ll be the first to admit that.
What we’re taught
Thanks to my Catholic upbringing I’d thought that it was about ‘being saved’. I was taught we were born with sin, we were just inherently bad, right from the beginning, even before we’re born and that being baptized was a way of fixing it. You can imagine my horror when I learned that unbaptized babies had to spend eternity in limbo, not Heaven or Hell or even Purgatory. They used to teach us some mad stuff lads, I’ve got to tell you.
There are two ways to battle the question then. I can either take what I’ve been told to believe and believe it, or I can use my own powers of reason and logic to figure it out.
Ancient teachings
And, I guess, it was from reading up and learning a good bit about two ancient sages that I started to see the answer. I dabbled in Buddhism there for a while and I read up quite a bit on Buddhism’s head honcho, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, and the ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides.
Interestingly, both walked this earthly realm around the same time. Parmenides is said to have been born in the late 6th century BCE, dying in the 5th, while the Buddha was born either in 563, or 480 BCE.
Parmenides
Parmenides’ main idea was that we cannot trust our senses. We should pay attention to them but we need to look beneath them to find the true meaning. For example, you get angry with a shop assistant because you thought she was rude but on reflection, you realize you’re not angry with him at all, it’s because of some childhood issue you had with a parental figure who dismissed your opinions and belittled you.
Parmy’s ideas went on to become Plato’s Form and Carl Jung’s archetypes.
But if we ask again, where do we come from and why are we here? Then, using logic and reason it’s a simple case of cause and effect. My parents had sex and I was conceived. That’s it. Why is my life the way it is? Because of past decisions and circumstances. It’s blunt but it’s true.
The Buddha
The Buddha said in the “Cause and Effect Surta”:
In our myriad deeds, whatever we do,
We reap our own rewards, it’s true.
Who can we blame for our woe in the hells?
Who can there be to blame but ourselves?Don’t say that cause and effect is unseen.
Look at you, your offspring, heirs, and grandchildren.
If you doubt the good of pure eating and giving,
Look around and find those enjoying fortune.
Having practiced of old, they now harvest abundance.To cultivate now will bring blessings anew.
Those who slander the cause and effect in this Sutra
Will fall and have no chance to be human.
Those who recite and uphold this Sutra
Are supported by Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
OK, so we kind of know why we’re here but where are we going? Many religions say there’s a heaven, some say there’s reincarnation. The Church teaches Heaven but the Bible says something different.
What does God say?
In the Book of Job, Chapter 7, Verse 9, God says:
As a cloud vanishes and is gone, so one who goes down to the grave does not return.
He will never come to his house again; his place will know him no more.
So, there you have it, we’re not going to be saved, we’re just going to die. Oh well, I mean it makes sense, I’ve known 100s of people that have died and they’ve not come back. Just like clouds, we disappear. To be honest that makes me put more value in the life I’m living.
But, maybe let’s have a look at what Jesus said. This comes from Matthew 22: 30–31.
At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead — have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’. He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”
Hmmm, so Jesus is saying God doesn’t really care about the dead, he’s only interested in the living. OK, I can accept that but what piques my interest is what he says about angels.
Angles and light
Now, angles have always fascinated me. These ethereal beings of light that come down upon the earth from time to time to give out a helping hand. Apparently, they’re so scary looking that you’re likely to need a change of underwear after meeting one and I’m sure you’ve already seen pictures of what modern artists think angels look like, according to the Bible. If not, feast your eyes on this:
But, let’s apply some human logic here. If angels are beings of light that bring messages, well, aren’t they the same as photons?
Photons are:
the messengers of electromagnetic interaction
Physicists Phyllis and Mallard, while working at CERN, showed how messenger particles carry interactions between particles of matter.
Now, that makes a lot of sense to me. When we die, our bodies return to the earth (ashes to ashes, dust to dust). So, we change from one form of matter to another. So where’s this light?
I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that it’s consciousness. And it’s this tiny bit of light that’s within us that stops us from just being reactive and instinctual beings but ones that use logic and reason and feelings, i.e. consciousness, to figure things out.
We know that consciousness doesn’t come from our parents in the way that their union made us.
You can see what I’m getting at here. There’s something that’s not human inside of ourselves that, in a paradoxical way, makes us the humans we are. As Luke said in the Bible:
The Kingdom of God is Within You
And this light that’s inside us, well it has many names, the Silent Knowing, the Noos, Ruach, spirit, soul, etc.
I’ve pretty much become convinced that this thing that’s inside us, that we don’t know where it came from, is the thing that drives us and makes us curious and makes us the seekers of answers and it pulls us in the directions it knows we should be going in.
But, we have to learn how to listen to it.
Hi, I’m Paddy. Thanks for reading my article about consciousness.
I’m a counselor and spirituality teacher.
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