[ The article itself can be accessed by clicking here. ]
This article was actually written several years ago, but underwent a re-writing this past week for publication with AC.
It was a difficult article to write, not so much because of the subject matter itself (or because I'm scatterbrained, although that didn't help either), but because it holds a more or less central theme with my own religious beliefs.
I have a friend at work who is many things - a persistant seeker of debate amongst them. A few days ago he asked me the question, 'Did God invent the mind, or did the mind invent God'? He was obviously trolling for an argument. I wasn't going to give him one.
I told him that the mind doesn't 'invent' anything - it creates concepts, and acting upon those concepts is what fuels invention. Since God is incomprehensible to the human mind, it would be foolish to believe that the mind created Him - instead, we create concepts of God that the mind can envision and relate to. We frequently refer to those concepts as 'God', even though the intelligent person knows that God is unimaginable in His truest form.
That shut him up for a little while.
It did start a train of thought on cerebral perception and the environment, which prompted me to, among other things, re-watch the Matrix movies and re-write that article. The notion that there is so much to our existance we are unaware of, and can only conceptualize though reason, meditation and study, is far flung from what is found in most major religions. The very fact-driven, 'it's what the book says' approach to reality and existance falls short when the deepest questions are actually pondered.
Descartes proclaimed the famous "I think, therefore I am", and in that statement set forth the notion of reality based on self-awareness. We can further put forth the notion that 'I am, therefore God is' based on the premise that we as entities do not exist in the universe alone, nor are we self-perpetuating or self-created. From the basis of the existance of Self, we can draw tangents to the existance of God and, indeed, the rest of the universe.
In the
Mahabharata, The Lord Krishna said to the warrior Arjuna, 'I am of you, and you are of me, and no man can tell the difference between us.' The statement is meant to convey not only the presense of God within the Self, but to show that God and the Self are of one and the same thing. This is more or less indicated through Descartes' famous statement, and were one to place a Biblical connotation on it, the phrase could have been made that 'I think, therefore
I AM'.
Food for another article, I suppose.
