Patterns of Spirituality

Origins of Human Consciousness on planet Earth

How did human consciousness first appear on planet Earth?  Are we descended from ape consciousness, as Charles Darwin believed?  Or is the eastern theory of reincarnation much more likely?  Which version a person believes is strongly tied to how he or she handles new ideas.

Our ability to understand any topic depends on the existing ideas about that topic that we accept and have assimilated.  If we lack sufficient ideas about that topic, then the best we will achieve is a partial understanding of it.

We can put this view into an equation.
Accepted Ideas = Understanding (either partial or complete)

As a general rule, we tend to emphasise one part of the equation at the expense of the other part. We can either put emphasis on ideas that we can accept, or already accept, or we can put emphasis on the attempt to gain understanding. It depends on which part of the equation matters most to us. This is most obvious in contentious issues.

When we focus only on ideas that are conventional and academically acceptable, then our understanding is likely to be a limited or partial understanding. In contrast, when we focus on understanding an important topic, then we embrace the pursuit of truth and this will lead us eventually to accept new ideas, even ideas that once were strange and unacceptable to us.

I come back to the consideration of the origin of human consciousness on this planet. Did we originate from the primate consciousness of a few million years ago?  If not, then how do we explain the basic similarity of body structure and genetic coding between ape and human?  I accept the idea of evolution, but not the version of it championed by Darwin. To understand my view we need to prise apart two separate ideas that are normally blended together in traditional views.

Consider medical science. Surgeons are doing remarkable things with transplants. At present they are focused only on physical organs. No doubt soon they will experiment with brain transplants. However, even brains can have physical defects in them. So some time in the future, perhaps 50 or 100 years time, surgeons will try a different procedure. They will leave the brain where it is and experiment with mind transplants.  By this I mean that they will be able to transplant the mind of a person from one physical body into another physical body. For example, if a person's body is crippled by disease or accident, then when a suitable body is available, say from the natural death of someone in good health, that person's mind can be transplanted into the available body. This has practical advantages for science. If we want to explore extreme environments, say the bottom of oceans, then we can temporarily transplant a human mind into the body of an ocean creature such as a fish, and then use that fish to explore the ocean bottom. When the exploration time is over, the fish is recovered and then the mind of the human in the fish is re-transplanted back into his human body.

From this example we can see that the two ideas which are normally run together are consciousness and the container of that consciousness. For a human, this means his consciousness and his physical body. The physical body is just the container for the person's consciousness. Consciousness is not the same thing as the brain or even the complete physical body.

The separation of these two ideas is necessary in order to explain how reincarnation happens. The beginning of conscious life on planet Earth is the era of mythology. If we accept the idea of reincarnation, then an obvious thought is we must have come from somewhere else before we started using planet Earth. If so, then we would have needed a suitable physical body (or container) in order to use Earth for developing our consciousness further. We would have needed a physical form that allowed us to be toolmakers and artisans, so that we could produce a culture. We would need a physical body that had flexible hands. Looking around, the only physical form that was suitable was the ape form. So human consciousness became transplanted into the ape form and then was able to make further adjustments to it over time.

The result of this speculation enables us to explain why we have genetic coding and physical characteristics similar to the ape, without, however, needing to make the deduction that our consciousness has descended from the ape.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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