The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship... Bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level.
Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human... Is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human.
The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.
Why so few?
Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress... but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes?
No greater values have developed.
So what are these barriers that keep people... From reaching anywhere near their real potential?
The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this:
Which is the most universal human characteristic - fear or laziness?
If we’re looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism... and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life... perceived through the hominid... coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you’re looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological - development of the cities, cultures - and cultural, which is human expression. Now, what you’ve seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that's involved here - two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, years for mankind as we know it-- you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm.
And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at years, years, years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself... within our lifetime, within this generation.
The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist... as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. Okay, independent from the external. And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and the desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process... where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle... because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence.
As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until you reach a crescendo in a way... could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It's sterile. It's efficient, okay? And its manifestations are those social adaptations. You're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay?
Uh, war, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These would be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. That is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice.
They say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Can't you say the same thing about life? A lot of us out there are mapping that mind/body relationship of dreams. We're called the oneironauts. We're explorers of the dream world. Really, it's just about the two opposing states of consciousness... which don't really oppose at all.
See, in the waking world, the neuro-system inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. This makes evolutionary sense. It'd be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator... to be mistaken for the memory of one and vice-versa. If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we'd be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought. So you have these serotonic neurons... that inhibit hallucinations... that they themselves are inhibited during REM sleep. This allows dreams to appear real... while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality.To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action... and actually the waking perception and action. I had a friend once who told me... that the worst mistake that you could make... is to think that you are alive... when really you’re asleep in life's waiting room. The trick is to combine... your waking rational abilities... with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. 'Cause if you can do that, you can do anything.