Evolution

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
- Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, 1951

At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.
- Matthew 24:11

There are hundreds of religions, denominations, sects, subsects, and even cults that guide the world's population today. But the gist of it all is constant. We are all in search of the Truth. The Truth about how we got to be here. The Truth about the World around us, how it works, and why it works that way. The Truth about an Afterlife. The Truth about how our children and our children's children will end up in the next hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years.

After the boom of technological advances in the last century, who can guess what's next? How could we have known that man would one day walk on the moon? Construct towers that reach the sky to mock the gods? Watch a box that transmits images from distances farther than you can imagine? Play music anytime and anywhere they go? Hear each others' voices over a span of a million miles? Fly in the air? Produce babies in test tubes? Create clones?




Now, the future is more indefinite than ever. What will be the next step? Will the cure for AIDS and cancer be discovered? Will a vaccine for every existing disease be found? Will illiteracy, hunger and poverty one day come to extinction? Will we find extraterrestrial life visiting our planet? Or will we be able to find them in theirs? Would borgs roam the earth? Would automobiles one day fly and eradicate traffic? Would we be able to build teleports that transmit our entire bodies on telephone lines across distances in a span of a minute? Would we be able to alter our descendants' genetic makeup to produce a highly evolved species? Would this genetically altered population rule the earth, or would machines take over, in time? Would there be a third world war and who would it be between? The Rich and the Poor, Good and Evil, or Man and Machine? Would there be a New World Order? Would we finally end the quest for immortality and find that all-sought-after Elixir of Life and Fountain of Youth, both of which we deem unattainable at present? If so, how will we use it?

They say that if the future we see turns out not to match any particular scenario that we try to imagine, this is an early indication that history has taken a turn. But how are we to know until the Future becomes the Present itself? The Cultural Revolution has taken so many twists and turns throughout the decades, and we have evolved into a people highly different from those of our ancestors. We think, act and even need differently. What once was regarded as luxuries or wants have become necessities in our patterns of living. What was once thought wrong are now established facts, such as a Copernican solar system. Our idealists now undermine--not women, not animals, not the poor, not the colored, and not even the lepers--but the illiterate and uneducated. Knowledge is now the true Power that twirls the World around its little finger. Ignorance and bliss are far apart as ever. Knowledge is not just a Privilege, but a Right each of us are entitled to. It is a manner of life. Something we live by, and something we live for. Truth indeed, seeks for Answers.

We have found ways to circumvent the odds of nature. Odds as low as one to a million is not an Impossibility anymore. Every Chance is an Opportunity, and every Opportunity is a Possibility. We have learned to look past discouragement, past nature, and past barriers that our forefathers would not have dared look past on. We have learned to conquer our fears of the Unknown. We have, after all, learned to create miracles. Now the only thing that the Gods of Olympus hold against us is Immortality. And perhaps we're not even too far off from that.

Demonstrations of the just-barely-impossible have given us higher expectations of Mankind in general, and of ourselves as individual units of society. We dare not be stymied beside the technological contraptions that we run and own, or that run by themselves because we have made them to. In some ways, somehow, we should still be above all that. We are still the Creators, who or what would dare challenge that? But with the curve of Exponential Change running almost vertically off the charts, we have slowly been losing control. Control over society's culture and values. Over what we deem Right and Wrong. Over what matters should be delved deeper into, and what must be left alone. Have these not-so-concrete things become impervious to human intervention? How do we harness the catacylsmic power we now yield?

The Future now lays abstract. History indeed has taken a major turn. But for all we know, this turn may signify a sacrifice of Humanity. We have learned how to Think, but at the same time we have forgotten the true essence of being human: possessing the ability to Feel. We have entered an era of spiritual vacuum, wherein our investments and interests have exceeded our wariness of their repercussions. How does this so-called "progress" affect us?

Yes, we started out with goals that made evolution possible in the first place, but with it came the burden of responsibility. Let us consider the existence of an Event Horizon wherein all of us are nearing that End that will eventually suck us all helplessly into a chaotic spiral of technological hype and economic progress. Does it not echo of emptiness? There is a possible Future that speaks of information and technology, far more detached than the world we barely even know now. The beginning of an era of Artificial Intelligence is the End of Humanity as we know it. For a long time now, Humanity has been disintegrating, slowly losing its Heart and Soul. The Truth we so desperately seek for will turn out to be Failure. Failure to find the meaning of life, because we have searched for it in all the wrong places. We do not find ourselves in what we make, what we own, or what we run. We do not find ourselves in the hustle and bustle of our everyday routines, and definitely not in the race for higher technology.

We find ourselves by understanding that we are still separate from the tech-dependent world we have created around us. We are separate from the forms of gadgetry and patterns of living that have found ways to creep into our hearts, rendering themselves as necessities that our ancestors managed to live without. We find ourselves in the Silence that surrounds us when we are in harmony with nature and the cosmos. We find ourselves in every second we take a minute. From the chores and the responsibilities, from the guilt and regret of times gone Past, and from the worries for a Future that's impossible to predict.

We are human. Our ability to feel is what separates us from every other creature, droid, borg, or robot. We feel because as humans, we are supposed to.

Transcendence is measured in the achievement of harmony between intellect and emotion. An integration of mind, body and spirit is essential. We must learn to integrate our abilities to create as demigods, with our abilities to feel as humans. Funny that we are carried farther and farther away from that point because of the world we have built around us.

We have entered an era that relinquishes spirituality on our quest for the Truth. But have we ever considered the possibility that maybe the Truth is in our spirit?

by Nat Casuela

(c) 2006