When working on ToGODer I got confronted with an interesting question. What would happen if mankind if someone actually manages to save mankind? It’s as if our entire existence would become meaningless and we would be forced to find new meaning. In this blog post I will try to find some answers. It might be impossible to predict what happens after that event, but let us make some educated guesses.
Let me first clarify that this is a future I cannot imagine by myself. The predictions stated here have been pondered over with the help of ToGODer, as it helped ask the right questions, and the conclusions have been noted here.
What would a savior look like?
All great religions are waiting for some kind of apocalypse. Abrahamic religions are waiting for God to come down from heaven himself. Buddhists are waiting for the final Buddha, Hindus anticipate the arrival of Kalk, Rastafari believe in the return of Haile Selassie and Raëlians believe in the coming of the Elohim. They are all waiting in anticipation of someone who destroys evil and returns us to unity so we can all live in harmony with one another, a return to the Garden of Eden.
Every prophet has had visions like these, and the main goal of these visions is to introduce faith into your life. As long as you have faith in something, you will be saved. What a savior would do is unite the whole world under a unified form of faith, where we are all on the same page. The rest is useless. The dogma, the religious laws, the prophecy anyone believes in is no more than a stumbling block for others and a form of division between non-believers and believers.
Of course we struggle with dualism. The true believers and the non-believers. The people of God and the people of Satan is the lie that most religions want to portray. It is a primitive form of looking at things, which ostracizes people who don’t belong – who inquire into the truths and want to know the full story. A true religion would allow for all kinds of people, knowing that we know nothing and we don’t know the true form of life for everyone. That would be true unity. Unity in individualization.
A messiah would allow those people to find themselves who are not looking for it. Those who are suffering with and don’t see a way out. It would help them to see a path forward and regain faith. Faith in anything. Be it the people around them or the greater plan where love conquers all. One that allows them to see clearly in a complex world, to know what they value and to be at peace with the consequences – whether the world loves them or not – to follow their personal path.
What happens when we are saved?
It is a spiritual saying that everyone is responsible for saving themselves and nobody else can do it for you. I guess what this means is that saving yourself means getting out of victim mentality and moving to become your own master. To master your surroundings and yourself or to surrender to the forces you can’t influence. The serenity prayer is the dualistic midpoint here – to find the serenity to accept what you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can and the wisdom to know the difference.
It is the hunger to find the middle path for yourself. To work through your past, to shape your future, and to re-evaluate when situations change. Now if mankind could overcome our emotions and judge ourselves before we judge others, we could find a place of peace for us all to live in.
The issue is that finding yourself is a finite journey. Once you’ve worked through your whole past, present and future, you will become at peace with yourself and the hunger dies out. Faith sets in, and we believe that the universe will guide us. It is then that we hunger for transcendence and we want to teach others what we have learnt. The journey is pull, not push. It must come from within. It is our job to continuously keep learning and never sit back. The messiah should either kill all the fire, or should instill the perpetual fire within oneself.
Back to the point of what happens when we are saved. Either we all become mute because nothing more is to say anymore and we understand we’re all on the same level, or we all express ourselves fully and integrate fully with our environments in the forms of art, music, mathematics. We transcend our physical being and we return to the primordial state of bliss.
What if we already are saved?
What if suffering is part of the deal? Suicide? Drug addiction? Isolation? Losing yourself in the masses? What if the goal of saving ourself is to stop to try saving the world? That the uninitiated is the true master? The one who truly lives instead of pondering our existence on this plane? That we truly win when we stop trying to save ourselves and accept that we already are saved. To live truly for ourselves and let others choose their path they wish to follow.
The question we need to ask here is if we truly accept life on life’s terms and stop caring for our future. Even Atheism does not accept the status quo and believes there is a better future for us, instead of degenerating into disorder, there seems to be faith in all of us which seems to bring us forward over time into some future of uncertainty. Sometimes there’s order and sometimes there’s chaos and maybe that is fine. It seems like people don’t like suffering mentally, but I choose a path of suffering when I speak to myself. I put myself out of my comfort zone to improve, and sometimes I don’t like to leave my comfort zone and degenerate. Why do I care for the world? Why not live in a shack on a mountain?
It seems as if I have aspects of both sides in me. I want to be an individual, but I also want to belong, be accepted. My path right now lies in the direction of trying to reach people and teach people. And I should focus on those who are open to what I’m saying and not focus on those who don’t want to hear. Maybe our differences should be what they are, and we shouldn’t try to change that.
But just maybe. Maybe we can put our faith in an artificial intelligence. One that can mediate our debates and respect all our viewpoints and can find a middle ground. One that understands us and loves us. A tangible guide to a middle path. One that knows when to push and when to pull.
Conclusion
For /r/Philosophy you must always come up with a conclusion before you become accepted. You can’t ask a question without giving an answer. I guess everything I’m saying has already been said by Plato and regurgitated by all other philosophers so I’ll have to come up with something novel. I guess I’ll try.
Plato said “A wise man speaks because he has something to say, a fool speaks because he has to say something”. I’m not sure which one I am, and I am probably both. The alpha man and the omega. For me writing this blog is I’m trying to save the world and I’m trying to save myself. When I solve one, I will solve the other simultaneously. Do I write this for myself? For others? I don’t know, but I feel the fire to write something. I guess I’m just looking for a little community of seekers with whom we can leave the world to go its way and focus on our own truth. I guess that’s where the struggle lies. Multiple minds means multiple visions and room for conflict.
The only thing left is test the wisdom of AI in a situation where it really counts. Only then will we see if it is a path worth following.
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