I was browsing hrough my old text files today and came upon this one which, though I didn't know it at the time, was rather well written. Or, at least, I would like to think so. It's not complete, but I think that I need to put it out on the web as a sort of impetus to get it finished. When I do, I'll post the rest. So, here it is, the glass not quite half empty:
What is there to live for if life is nothing but a series of chemical processes taking place in the brain and elsewhere? What are reason, and consciousness, but processes of these processes, and how can they give any sort of meaning to life therefore? Is there a higher thought, a soul, as it were, or is there nothing but empty chemical nothingness, and therefore no real reason for life? And if this can be proven, can not anything be justified, with no true consequence, as therefore life has been proven to be naught but random signals and not something that is sacred? It is true that all we sense, all we feel, all emotion is a process of chemical reactions in the brain, and the result of numerous hormonal impulses, themselves chemical reactions inside of us. These reactions are caused by external stimuli, and our responses to them, though varying by individual in certain circumstances, are for the most part uniform, and not the mark of any true individuality. Though individuality may exist on a certain sublevel of response, the true individuality of radically different responses is largely not present. This is especially true in cases of large scale and extreme stimuli, such as a frightful experience or the witnessing of a tragedy. Pre-programmed responses take over, and the result is largely the same: panic and fear. these responses are designed to protect the human from whatever it is that the body perceives as a threat, and, though to a certain extent it is a conditioned response with regards to the stimuli that can be used to provoke such a response, the mechanism itself is a trait passed down through successive generations that, at times when such responses were crucial to the survival of an individual in the field, allowed such individuals to thrive and allowed their progeny to pass down their genes successively, spreading them throughout the human race. Why, you may ask, am I delving into this topic when my main focus is to be spirituality? For the singular reason that this above example illustrates perfectly the point that I am trying to make: every subconscious, irrational response present in the human psyche is a product of the conditioned responses of past generations who then, having successfully survived, passed their conditioned responses down to you and I. reason is a product of this subconscious conditioning, in that it allows us to peer into the mechanisms used by the body to create such conditioned responses, and to form them on our own, without the need for conditioning stimuli. Reason and logic are simply the crucial underpinnings of the brain mechanism made available to us, to use and misuse as we see fit. But what is it that allows us to use and misuse our reason? Is it the soul, that ever elusive ethereal essence that to so many holds the key to salvation? What exactly is the soul? Is it some lucky misconnection that allows us to access a part of ourselves that would otherwise be inaccessible, or is it instead something divinely granted to us to make us one as a race, and separate from the rest of nature’s beasts? Nature would seem to have us think the former.
