Is the author in saying we are the 'first cause' saying anything different from saying 'consciousness is the basis of the universe and reality'?
A materialist would say consciousness is an emergent property of evolution, while an idealist would say the reverse, that the material world is dependent on mind or on consciousness. But all we really know, in the absence of evidence, is that consciousness is coincident with all our experience, that it is inseparable from any possible experience we could have. That does not allow us to choose between one or other of these two alternatives. We never know anything without the world that gives us a mind that can think and reason about it, and we can never know the world without consciousness, it is all inseparable, these divisions into physicality and spirituality are conceptual mappings of the mind, they are far more arbitrary than is usually realised; they are artificial divisions in an interconnected whole. So the spiritual folk are clueless about the scientific view of reality, while the scientists are clueless about the reverse, and there is no way to pick one version or the other either on the basis of experience or on the basis of evidence. Unity only shows you that consciousness and matter are inseparable as a timeless experience, and because the experience is timeless, it tells you nothing about sequence, or beginnings and endings, and so cannot tell you whether matter or consciousness came first. Science gives us an idea of how things are, while spirituality gives us a sense of why, but it is a wordless answer, one that cannot be translated into speech. The distances and barriers to travel in the universe are quite profound; so far we know really nothing of the possible kinds of travel that would surmount those barriers. The stuff of science fiction, such a warp drives, wormhole travel, are undiscovered. Travelling near the speed of light is lethal due to effects of radiation. Life spans of biological organisms, so far as we know, is very short compared to travelling slowly across the cosmos. As a species ourselves we seem close to destroying ourselves by various methods of our own devising. Maybe other organisms on other worlds, should they exist, are equally incompetent, and thus we have no knowledge of them nor they of us. We do not know yet whether an ecosystem on another world would have any compatibility with our biological systems. That is, whether another world, if it had life, could be lived on without first razing the world of its living things and replacing them with our own. The same would go for an alien civilisation looking to colonise Earth. It seems possible now to find planets easily enough within the local neighbourhood, but getting to these worlds is a significant challenge, it would take many, many human lifetimes with our current knowledge (about 20,000 years to get to the nearest star, which may have one Earth-sized planet, with a surface temperature of 1200°C). We need more knowledge of life. The best bets now would be to find that information (which may not exist) on Mars, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and Enceladus, places we can get to fairly easily because they are within a billion miles of Earth. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_esq@...> wrote : The author of this article states it is so. But he appears to be clueless to the idea that consciousness is the basis of the universe and reality. He also states that we may be alone in the universe. What do you think? Why the Earth Will Never Be Invaded http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/why-the-earth-will-never-be-invaded_b_6879216.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/why-the-earth-will-never-be-invaded_b_6879216.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 Why the Earth Will Never Be Invaded http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/why-the-earth-will-never-be-invaded_b_6879216.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 Cosmologists propose that the universe was until recently a lifeless collection of particles. But they have ignored a critical component of the cosmos because they ... View on www.huffingtonpost... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/why-the-earth-will-never-be-invaded_b_6879216.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 Preview by Yahoo
