Letter 1.12 - What is a human being?
Dear Benoit,
My NDE experience got me thinking. I must change my conception of a human being and I don’t like that. I don't like it at all. On the other hand, I cannot go through life without asking myself what is a human being. This is not going to be fun but we have to do it.
What is a human being?
Let’s assume that you enter an operating room. There is a body on the operating table. No blood pressure. No heartbeat. No breathing.
Against the ceiling there is a being that can see, hear, think, understand, move, observe, remember…… Where is the human being? Is he on the table or against the ceiling?
I liked to think of a human being as whatever was under his skin. In this case, what is under his skin is an empty shell on the operating table that the surgeon is ready to send to the morgue. The way we think about objects may not be adapted to our thinking about life. This is what had to change and I did not like to change the way I think. Scientists say that matter is condensed energy. The being close to the ceiling could be made of energy that is not condensed. This is the real human being. The body on the table is nothing more than a small part of that energy that got condensed like the moisture of the air gets condensed on a cold window.
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Can you think of heat without something being hot?
You could compare this being against the ceiling with what happens to heat. We know that heat can move from place to place. It is not attached to one object or another.
When we talk about calories, we talk about heat without something being hot. I have problem with that. That does not seem to bother the scientists and their Big Bang and their heat without matter being hot. I am not a scientist and it bothers me. Can we talk about a human being without talking about a human body?
The NDE experience is telling us that we are souls and souls don’t always need to be attached to a body. Astronomers say that they are looking for life on other planets. In fact, they are only looking for bodies. They could be more successful looking for souls without a body. That could make a good horror film, half-way between fiction and reality. When we sleep, the body is in bed but it is obvious that there is nobody home. Where could we be when we are not in our body? What would you think of the souls of Martians ‘walking’ among us in their sleep? I am desperately looking for a proof that this is pure madness. It is terrible to be in doubt.
This is really weird. It makes a human being look like somebody driving a car. The body represents only the car made of solidified matter. The main part is a driver who can leave the car and is now free to walk, run, climb the stairs, swim, go up and down a mountain….
We are not human beings
having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings
having a human experience.
Teilhard de Chardin
There is also the question of reincarnation. Two thirds of the people believe in it. On third does not. I don’t see any obvious reason to believe or not in reincarnation. That would change the way we look at the death penalty. As long as the murderer is in a body, we can keep it in jail and protect the public. The death penalty turns him loose. He could reincarnate and go back to his mischief. Is it what we want?
I tried to find, for you, a clear definition of the ego and a clear definition of the soul and how they interact.
I expected this to be something very basic that can be found in any school book.
It was a disappointment. I searched the internet and found a few things like:
In psychological terms, the ego is the part of the psyche that experiences the outside world and reacts to it, coming between the primitive drives of the id and the demands of the social environment, represented by the superego.
I am not sure that this is what you are looking for. Because adults know many details about many things does not mean they master all the basics. You will hear a lot about "love" but don't ask them "What is love?". If an adult pretends to give you a lesson about "life" ask him what "life" is. They will tell you that everything happening on earth is governed by the energy we receive from the sun. That does not mean that they know what "light" is. When I was at school, one day, the teacher asked “What makes the glass transparent?” A boy said: “Because it is empty”! Don’t laugh. Humanity has used many different ideas to explain why the glass is transparent. We have used the distance between molecules, the freedom of the electrons, magnetic fields and many others. At the time, we believed in those explanations. We used them to get closer and closer to the truth. Today we think that the light is made of photons. When those photons have a certain amount of energy they are absorbed by the electrons and move those electrons to a higher level of energy. When the photons are absorbed by the electrons they cannot get through matter. Sometimes those photons don’t have the right amount of energy. They cannot be absorbed by the electrons. They can get through the glass.
This is our latest explanation. Maybe, someday, we will find an even better one. Any answer is temporary.
I am worried that mother nature could be preparing something.
There is a sharp increase of the world population.
In the last six million years nature gave birth to the Homo Erectus, the Homo Neanderthal, the Cro-Magnon and many others. She tries one species and abandons it for another. She is difficult to please.
You know the way she proceeds. She makes thousands of seeds to select one that will make a flower. The salmons lays 3000 eggs and a few years later only two of them come back to the same river to lay eggs. She used thousands of spermatozoa to make your body!
It seems that nature wants to explore many possibilities before making her selection. She may be shopping around for a few good people. Is she going to separate the grain from the tares?
She could decide that the Homo Sapiens are a mistake. It was a dead-end worth exploring but the time has come to move on. She could lower the natality rate, like she has already done in Japan and in Germany. That's the gentle way but there is no guaranty that she will be gentle. She could increase the ambient temperature or wake up a few viruses. She could dump on us a bucket of hate and let us kill each others with atomic bombs. Our intensive agriculture is depleting the soil of the minerals our body needs. That could bring about new illnesses. She could speed-up the process and let us starve - overweight and malnourished. If she decides that there is something worth saving in humans, she could change the place of the poles. She has done it before. She could do it again. Human evolution could proceed with a few survivors. Whatever happened to the dinosaures could happen to us! In short, we are not in a very good position to negotiate.
We live in an over- simplified world.
We are limited to two dimensions instead of using all three of them.
The Milky Way is flat, like a disc. Our solar system also is flat. There may be some galaxies where our discs are replaced with clouds of many different shapes. Inside these clouds their solar systems could move in all directions, like mosquitoes flying in a cloud of mosquitoes. In each solar system the planets may turn around an ellipse, like ours, but their ellipse could be turning around their longer axis, or around the shorter axis, or around a combination of both. Their north pole may be changing every day and the seasons may come in any order.
Do you realize how lucky we are? To survive in such galaxies our brain would have to be as sophisticated as our body- maybe even more! We see the universe like colorblind people see our planet earth. What we see is correct but it is extremely limited. We are missing one dimension.
Don't get discouraged. Human beings are improving:
There is hope. I found some clues that human beings are improving. The news did not come from scientific research. I found them in You Tube. More and more people have exceptional abilities. For instance you could start with the Top 10. Most of them were born with a big problem and surprising abilities. You would not want to be born that way but it is interesting to discover what can be implemented in a human being. This is only the top 10. You will find many more on You Tube such as Daniel Tammet and many others. Then came people who acquired those abilities during their life time, such as Jason Padgett. He became a savant by being kicked in the head. This is not a technology I would recommend. There is no guaranty of success. However it is interesting to see that we are getting closer and closer to opening the doors of a new and marvelous world. We could be reaching the last stage. More and more children are born with exceptional abilities without problems. For example click here. This is only a beginning.
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There is a message here. What we know is only a tiny little part of what is surrounding us.
Benoit, you may live an important period of human history. It is a time where we discover that unsuspected abilities can be implemented into human beings. Look around you and you will find more and more clues that big changes are coming.
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Pepe Brainjuice