Enlightenment

So, this book I’m writing is all about a guy who is seeking enlightenment, like millions of people around the world are seeking enlightenment and, in that respect, it’s sort of a modern Siddhartha but it’s all mixed up with his everyday trials and adventures and travels and the people he meets in the very real, very current world.

It’s going to be an interesting book.

As I was writing today, I thought of how millions of people around the world are seeking enlightenment and following one cult after another and for the most part they are sincere, well intentioned people but, just as with conventional religions, the vast majority of them must be completely misguided because each group cancels out the other and if any are right, all the rest must be wrong.

Then I thought “What if it’s not an individual quest? What if it’s the next step in the evolution of our species?”  Like, in the beginning, there was the void, a big nothing stretching out and out forever and then there was the Big Bang and massive waves of energy everywhere, just moving in waves according to the natural physical laws of energy and then some of that energy coalesced into matter and there were stars and planet and moons and comets and asteroids, still all mindlessly obeying the pull of gravity and stuff like that and then there was a planet, our planet, with water lying in shallow pools on the surface and somehow a ray of sunshine zapped some chemicals and life was born, cells which self-replicated but they weren’t really conscious and then the cells bumped up against each other and became multi-celled organisms and then some of those cells started to specialize and higher life forms, like fish and plants and dinosaurs and cockroaches began to involve and some of them did have some actual consciousness, enough to seek food and avoid becoming food, to feel hunger and fear.  Then mammals evolved, helped along a bit by an asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs who would have killed us long before we had a chance to evolve into what we’ve evolved into,  and then primates, and homo sapiens, which is not just consciousness, but intelligence, an ability to analyze and control our environment.  That’s where we are now.

Maybe enlightenment is the next step and maybe attempts to take that stop individually are just evolutionary experiments and someday we will take that step as a species  and we will all be enlightened.  Wouldn’t it be nice?