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Pagans All Around Us
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Thoughts on Conjuring Spirits
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Thoughts on Cultural and Spiritual Appropriation
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Greed, Power, Witches, and the Inquisition
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From Christian to Pagan (Part III)
My Wiccan Ways...
July 6th. 2014 ...
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Everything's Alright, Yes: Mary Magdalene
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Witchcraft vs. Religion
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Moral Relativism and Wicca
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May 18th. 2014 ...
Finding the God (From Christian to Pagan -Part II)
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Visits from the Departed
May 11th. 2014 ...
Breaking the Law of Return
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The Sin Concept
May 4th. 2014 ...
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Goddessy: Sorceress Speaks On Beauty
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The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity
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Article ID: 10027
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Author: Ezra the Cosmic Prankster
Posted: March 18th. 2007
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The Role of Spiritual Energy in Evolutionary Science
I came upon the websites of The Darwin Project and The Club of Budapest recently, which are groups of evolutionary scientists who are trying to find ways to use evolutionary science to help solve problems in the world. There have been a number of monumental discoveries made in evolutionary science over the past decade, which shed a lot of light on the origins of problems that humans are creating in the world and possible solutions. Of course, like so many other people who claim to know things about the world that conflict with traditional Western beliefs, these scientists are besieged by fundamentalist Christians…
The biggest problem the scientists face is that they don’t have a Theory of Evolution to work with yet that’s simple enough to readily memorable to the public or that seems to serve any use in people’s lives. Without attracting public support, these evolutionary scientists can do very little to solve problems facing all of humanity. I was shocked to find such large groups of leading scientists still wandering lost in the dark about how to move forward, because thanks to the universally inclusive Pagan definition of spiritual energy, I found a way around those problems a year and a half ago.
Evidently these scientists have overlooked spiritual energy because it seems like religious superstition at first glance. When one religion believes a certain thing to be true, that’s scientifically meaningless. When every religion believes a certain thing to be true, and has discovered that thing independently of one another from a variety of different directions, that’s a strong indication that there really is something out there. It still doesn’t prove that any religion’s definition of it is true, but it does suggest that something exists that affects humans universally, simply because people all over the world have noticed it.
(In the same way, the science now exists to measure the wavelength of yellow and blue light, and to predict that mixing yellow and blue paint can create green paint. The people of every civilization of the world that had yellow and blue paint already knew how to mix green paint, because they saw it happen when they tried mixing yellow and blue paint together. Despite what some people insist, the fact that something isn’t yet scientifically measurable doesn’t prove that it isn’t true. Scientific explanations have always lagged behind initial observations, for the simple reason that you can’t very well measure something before anyone has even noticed it exists, now can you?)
Spiritual energy is to evolutionary science what dark matter is to astrophysics. It is a force that can’t be observed directly but whose existence is indicated by a lot of unrelated evidence. If accounted for, it suddenly makes evolution make a lot more sense.
This article is a Paganized version of the article I’m sending to the Journal of General Evolution. By accounting for this yet-unmeasured form of energy, I really have combined the Theory of Evolution with the Theory of Relativity, and broken evolution down to a single equation of energy efficiency: whichever individual animals or species of animals harness energy most efficiently survive and reproduce the best. That’s already well understood regarding plants using sunlight to process water and soil nutrients, and regarding animals using food energy to support their biological survival. If spiritual energy is accounted for among humans, that equation for humans becomes fairly simple.
Suppose spiritual energy is a literal form of energy (which I don’t think should be much of a stretch of the imagination for anyone here). If so, it is a form of energy that (ordinarily) pushes people’s decision making in the direction of maintaining the survival of our species.
Energy is the fundamental unit of logic in evolution, just as it is the fundamental unit of logic in astrophysics and quantum physics, simply because all life depends on energy. That makes energy the fundamental unit of Life, the Universe, and Everything. With me so far?
In every religion in the world, people are aware of a form of energy that exists within everyone, and that connects them to a higher power that serves their best interests. This energy guides the people’s actions one way or another, the people can access it intentionally to help them make decisions, and they can focus it intentionally to bring about metaphysical effects in the world. Just for two examples, Christians call this energy the “power of faith” while Pagans call it something more like “natural willpower”.
According to the universally inclusive Pagan explanation for metaphysical affects people can have on the world, people focus their spiritual energy on bringing about a specific effect in the world, either by channeling that energy through themselves directly or by focusing their spiritual energy toward that goal by praying to a god who will (supposedly) make that thing happen as a result of his follower proving himself worthy through his power of faith.
All of those universal principles of spiritual energy apply directly to evolutionary science. Spiritual energy functions as the scientifically immeasurable dark matter of evolution because it is a form of energy that pushes people’s decision making in the direction of maintaining the evolutionary survival of our species. It exists within everyone because it is a product of human evolution. It is a force greater than ourselves that watches out for our survival, simply because anyone who didn’t have this force coded into their DNA died out long ago. This energy force guides people’s actions because it leads them to make decisions that promote the survival of our species.
People have to use their intelligence to figure out how best to act upon it or it will lead them astray, because this energy source, along with the rest of humanity, evolved in the wild to deal with life in the wild, and humans lifted themselves out of those living conditions with the development of agricultural civilization (which is a topic for another article). It is conceivable that this spiritual energy, which is scientifically unmeasured but that scientific evidence indicates to exist, could be harnessed by a person intentionally and directed outward toward the world. That would enable that person to make things happen in the world that science had no way to explain.
So the score so far: I can make the Theory of Evolution work well enough to win the public support the scientists need to solve a lot of problems in the world if I can use evolutionary science to prove the basis of magick to evolutionary scientists. Now watch this:
All animals, including people, have instincts for survival and reproduction. The survival instinct is stronger than the reproductive instinct simply because if the animal doesn’t survive, it can’t reproduce. Since animals require energy to survive, wasting energy would threaten their survival instinct. That’s why any time you read National Geographic magazines or watch Nature on PBS you’ll notice that everything animals do in the wild serves some important purpose in their lives, even if they’re just walking to exercise their muscles or playing around when they’re young to develop their muscles and coordination and practice skills they’ll need as adults.
Any animal that devoted all of its energy to its own survival would be able to survive the best, but wouldn’t reproduce at all, because reproduction requires energy also. If another animal devoted some of its energy to reproduction, it would pass along its genetic material to future generations, while the first animal wouldn't. If one animal devoted some energy to reproduction but another animal devoted more energy to reproduction, the animal that devoted more energy would be more successful at passing along its genetic material.
Carried to its logical extreme, if every animal devoted all its energy to reproduction in mating season, each animal would give itself the best possible chances at reproduction, and the animals who were the strongest would be the most successful at reproduction, because their exceptional strengths would enable them to devote the most energy to reproduction out of any of their species.
That would result in the strongest genes being passed along to future generations, and the future generations of the species becoming as strong as possible, which is exactly what happens.
In order to make devoting all of its energy to reproduction from time to time instead of devoting it all to survival, which is exactly what happens among all animal species in mating season, something has to happen within the animal’s mind to make reproducing suddenly seem more energy efficient to the animal than survival. Something that could do such a thing would be an amount of energy being applied in the direction of reproduction that would require the animal to expend energy to oppose that force, thereby making opposing the force and surviving less energy efficient to the animal than devoting all of its energy to reproduction.
This can be seen in any number of studies that have discovered that people who live or work in stressful or otherwise emotionally unhealthy environments often feel physically exhausted as a result, and often become more susceptible to illness due to their bodies diverting energy away from maintaining their immune systems. The question that raises is: Where did all that energy go?
Human emotions are humans’ equivalent of animal instincts, even though human emotions seem a lot more complicated (which is a result of human intellect affecting them, which is a topic for another article). Emotionally unhealthy environments are ones where people’s survival or reproduction is threatened no matter what they do, and the only choices the people can find are in what they can do to suffer the least amount of threat—there is no decision they can make to escape threat altogether.
For one simple example, children who live in abusive households are faced with the choice between suffering a threat to their survival by staying there and being abused, or running away from home and suffering a threat to their survival living out on the streets. For another, a parent who is stuck working long hours at a low paying job to support a family faces a choice between a threat to their reproduction due to not having time to spend raising their children, or a threat to their reproduction due to not having enough money to support their children.
Let’s assume that the law of Conservation of Energy applies here, as it does in all other branches of science, which states, “Energy can never be created or destroyed, it can only change form.” It’s best known in its original form as Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
If people who live or work in environments that threaten their emotional instincts have to expend physical energy to force themselves to stay there, there must be some form of energy trying to push them away.
Another indication of spiritual energy can be seen in differences between cultures. As Dr. Jared Diamond shows in this 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the people of every culture in the world always figure out how to make the best use of whatever material resources they have available, and the differences between cultures are caused by the differences in material resources available in each part of the world.
In any contained environment, people always satisfy themselves with their lives. In all the tales that early European explorers told of making contact with indigenous people all over the world, not once did they mention meeting a tribe of people who sat around perpetually bummed out about the fact that they had to make all their tools out of stone, wood, and bone because they couldn’t figure out how to forge metal.
In every encounter that Europeans reported with indigenous people, they always reported the same things: People who didn’t think their lives were missing anything because they were making the best of all the material resources they had available. (Of course, early European explorers usually phrased it more like, “savages who made everything they owned out of base materials because they didn’t know any better, ” but the basic idea was there.)
As Dr. Diamond illustrates in Guns, Germs, and Steel, contrary to what Westerners have traditionally believed, the Europeans didn’t conquer the world because they were inherently better people than everyone else, they did it because their ancestors happened to settle in the part of the world that gave them the most favorable combination of material resources. With that combination of material resources they were able to develop the most productive agriculture and the highest level of technology, which enabled them to build the largest, most physically powerful civilization in the world.
Suppose a European farmer can produce two pounds of food for an hour’s work, while a pre-colonial Native American can produce only one. Both people are evolutionarily equal members of the same species, so presumably both of them are equally willing to put forth work energy toward their survival, both have equitable abilities to put forth work energy toward their survival, each produces a different amount of food due to their differences in material resources, and each feels equally satisfied with his life.
The Native American was essentially identical to the European; he expended the same amount of energy, produced half as much food, and through his expenditure of energy became equally satisfied with the results. So again that raises the question: Where did all his extra energy go?
The answer that suggests itself is that the Native American directed a greater amount of his energy inward to content himself with the material resources he had. The European would’ve felt less of a need to do this because he had more material resources. The Native American worked equally hard for material resources, which implies that he valued them as much as the European and would’ve produced more if he’d had the means to do so. If, say, he could’ve gotten a steel knife from a European somehow to enable him to produce more food for the same amount of energy than he could with a stone knife, that’s exactly what he would’ve done, and that’s exactly what all the Native Americans did. (If you need proof, let me ask you: Out of the 2,000,000 Native Americans who live in the United States today, how many of them do you think prefer using stone knives over steel knives now? See what I mean?)
Since this Native American didn’t have the means to produce as many material goods as the European, he would’ve directed a greater amount of his total energy inward because he would’ve felt a greater need to do so. In addition he also would’ve been taught cultural values by his parents and tribal leaders to help make up the difference. These include being taught ways to direct his spiritual energy more efficiently than the European was taught, and also having fewer children than did the European due to having fewer material resources (food, in this example) with which to support a family. This example is supported almost verbatim by numerous statements made by Native American chiefs, that the White men were weak individually, but there were so many of them that the Native Americans just couldn’t compete.
Another example of this can be seen in the American folk wisdom that Blacks have more soul than Whites. Since Blacks have traditionally had less material resources than Whites—in addition to all the other hardships they’ve had to face that Whites haven’t—they had to develop more in the spiritual realm to satisfy themselves with their lives.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to this manifestation of spiritual energy directly in his I Have a Dream speech, when he said, “We must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” How many people heard him say “soul force” and knew exactly what he was talking about, even though such a thing wasn’t scientifically measurable? It could be said that the civil rights demonstrators wanted to be free and the opponents of civil rights tried really hard to stop them but failed. However, in theory it also would be possible to measure the total number of foot pounds of force that the opponents of civil rights directed against civil rights demonstrators with clubs, fire hoses, and attack dogs.
A demonstrator marching down the street carrying a sign exerts a certain amount of physical force in the direction of his march, and fire hoses proved able to exert a far greater amount of physical force in the opposite direction, which pushed the marching demonstrators backwards and knocked them off their feet. However, that amount of physical force was not enough to make the demonstrators stop wanting the same opportunities in life as Whites.
Assuming that it is true that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and that the total number of foot pounds of physical force directed against the civil rights demonstrators failed to stop their desire to be free, their desire to be free must’ve been driven by a more powerful force. That force drove millions of people to risk physical injury to improve their long-term opportunities for survival and reproduction, and that force existed within all the people who took those risks and understood what Dr. King meant when he called it “soul force”. So what was that force and where did it come from?
And those are just some of the most obvious clues that point to the existence of spiritual energy.
There are certain people in the world who insist that the world’s resources must be infinite, because an all-loving, all-powerful Heavenly Father couldn’t possibly create a world that didn’t contain enough resources for all his children. If spiritual energy is counted as a resource, then the world’s resources are indeed infinite, because for all of human existence, people all over the world have always found ways to harness spiritual energy to make their lives complete, regardless of how many material resources they had or didn’t have.
It follows from this that because the Western world has always been so much more materially prosperous than every other culture in the world, Westerners have naturally developed a culture that values the expenditure of physical work energy for material reward more than the people of any other culture.
It also suggests that the people of every other culture in the world have something crucial to the future of the world, but which is being eroded by Western culture being globalized and teaching (or forcing) everyone to work for material reward in the way Westerners are accustomed.
Does that mean that the people of every culture of the world have what they need to start building spiritual energy reactors to help solve the global energy crisis, and to boost their own economies? Well… maybe. How much supernatural phenomena would that involve? I can’t say. One prospect of spiritual energy as a power source of the future that is measurable scientifically is that the people of every culture of the non-Western world have something Westerners need: less dependence on material resources to make their lives feel complete.
Any culture in the world whose members feel satisfied with their lives has some kind of qualities that make that possible. Some cultures of the world have advantages in material resources, while other cultures of the world have advantages in things that aren’t fully appreciated in the Western world… yet.
I’m hardly the only evolutionary scientist to realize that the more people learn about how the world works, the blurrier the lines separating science, religion, philosophy, and spirituality are becoming. (However, I am probably the only evolutionary scientist with the audacity to explain evolution in terms like these.)
There are already people all over the world who believe in the dark matter that makes evolution theory very simple, who are looking for the answers the evolutionary scientists are trying to give them, and who don’t base their perceptions of the world on science anyway. While that blurring of the distinction between science and spirituality could create problems for making the accurate scientific measurements that separate science from superstition, that blurring also proves a valuable asset in relating evolutionary science to the ways that non-scientists already perceive the world.
To a lot of people, that blurring between science and religion is simply a sign that scientists are finally catching on to what everyone else has known all along.
The Darwin Project: www.thedarwinproject.com. They have free books that can be downloaded from their website for anyone who wants to learn more about evolution.
The Club of Budapest: www.cobusa.org. They're a group of scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, artists, teachers, and activists who are finding ways to spread evolutionary science to the public.
Guns, Germs, and Steel—The Fates of Human Societies: Jared Diamond (Norton)
Emotional Intelligence: Daniel Goleman, M.D. (Bantam)
The Blank Slate—the Modern Denial of Human Nature: Steven Pinker (Viking)
Copyright: Copyright Ezra Niesen, 2005
Ezra the Cosmic Prankster
Location: Tempe, Arizona
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Bio: Ezra Niesen is an artist, teacher, philosopher, and theoretical scientist, which means he compiles the discoveries of other scientists and draws logical conclusions among them (can you tell?) . He has recently self-published his book 42—A Practical Guide to all the Evolutionary Science You Need to Justify Doing Your Own Thing and Getting Along with Other People (see website) , and is looking for a regular publisher. He is also working on a version for the scientific community titled The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity—Human Evolution as a Function of the Efficient Transfer of Energy; and its Application to Social Evolution.
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