Morality and survival...

Apparently, the notion that the super-sentient is seen as neither positive nor negative is advaitham... In all honesty, I disagree with the view that the sentient and super sentient are one and the same... but the sentiment that the super-sentient is neither positive nor negative is what I've believed in for a while now... I basically see the super-sentient as the basal form of energy in the universe and energy is neither positive nor negative. It just is! However, the uses it can be put to are either positive or negative for humanity, the universe etc. And that something that could be regarded as positive for humans could be negative for the other species or for the earth or for the universe and vice-versa...

The moral and social rules that we've come up with and that we ascribe to godly virtues are basically those rules that have evolved in order for human survival as a society so that we do not degenerate into chaos... This is not to negate the import of our wonderful kathas and expositions about our gods... It's just that we impose our view of good and bad on this energy.

I also believe that our belief itself has power (especially with the enormous number of people believing in the same thing!) and that this power in turn makes our minds focus in a certain way. Of course, this leads to the question that if our ancestors had decided that Vishnu was actually a rakshas and that Ravana was a god - would we have turned out any different? That if we had all been born completely black with red eyes (who knows what form evolution would have taken), would we have described gods the same way? And suppose society as such for humans was each individual for himself - well then would we have had a different definition for good and bad? And would our gods have taken on those inverted ideas of virtue? But this line of reasoning is not to say something negative - in fact i think this is the great power of the belief.

The requirement for survival of us humans as a social species pushes us along this path of morality that humanity has started down. Let us start supposing: suppose one family was capable of surviving entirely on its own without the need of any other human beings etc, suppose the urge for coexisting as part of a society did not exist, and suppose the definition that power is power over other humans had not been hammered into all of us.. Well, suppose there was one family that was capable of it... Would they not have killed everyone else off? Especially if they were capable of surviving forever... But of course, they wont survive forever! So, they propagate their species. And the fact that it's not evolutionarily (yeah - that's my dictionary) probable for humanity to continue without a large gene pool to mix and grow from is why we are as we are today.

This is one of the reasons i like physics or any of the sciences actually - I feel like we're truly trying to get the most basic understanding of the super-energy without imposing our mentalities or moralities on it. Because if you truly want to look at it, everything is beautiful - whether lotus eyes of the lord, or the red eyes of a mad bear... it's just how we decide to look at it. For instance - why would one want to call a rabid bear beautiful? It actually is - because it's part of the natural cycle... but our ancestors' studies and teachings are enormously important and we have learned that madness or insanity is not good for us humans as a society, so we call these traits unbeautiful. We define beauty and good in a way that protects survival and we live in a way that we find beautiful and moral.

If we do not feel that our lives are good and that we are doing well... then there's no point to life is there? The oldsters helped simplify survival into morality... :)