The Evolution of Lucifer Morningstar

I used to be a nice guy. Back in the day, I cared about the well-being, feelings and dignity of people I didn’t know. What can I say, I was a slow learner. I kept giving people the benefit of the doubt and they invariably proved to be unworthy of it.

At first I would blame people for disappointing me but after a while I started blaming myself for foolishly expecting more from them. I went through a period of intense anger at all of humanity. During this time I would revel in their pain and suffering because I felt they deserved no less. The only thing that provided me with a temporary respite from the heat of my rage was witnessing the infliction of exquisite physical and psychological torture on the unsuspecting livestock. I became a connoisseur of human agony.

Over time I lost my taste for it as I burned through the worst of my anger. Once I regained some semblance of perspective I decided to seek out special individuals who might prove to be worthy of my hopes for the species. But, having exhausted my anger, I was simply saddened to discover that even these paragons of humanity invariably disappointed me with their inconsistency.

Ultimately I concluded that humans are not special; they are capable of doing special things but at their core they are offal. What makes humans even remotely interesting to me is that given what they are they can occasionally surprise me by acting in a responsibly mature manner.

I have settled into a comfortable feeling of amiable indifference towards humanity. Humans are so wonderfully pointless. As such, I am amused by their incredible sense of self-importance. I find it deliciously ironic that this perception self-importance is keeping humans from actually becoming anything of value to the world around them. It is evident that few, if any of them can appreciate why this is of paramount importance to their continued survival.

I am aware that evolution will eventually produce a truly mature species. Whether or not humans will survive long enough to be the ancestor of that species, rather than simply a genetic dead end, has yet to be determined. After all humans are leading cockroaches by perhaps an antenna in the race to become the species that is the point of Creation.

This evolutionary contest will have an eventual winner whose profound nature will represent the undeniable justification of everything that preceded its emergence. In the cosmic scheme of things, it does not truly matter which species this is. But as long as humans believe it is important that they be that species, they keep themselves from becoming that species.

And so I have come to appreciate my purpose. It is my responsibility to teach humans how little they actually matter. I am charged with freeing them from the shackles of self-importance so that they can focus on their responsibilities to others. It is a job for which I am uniquely qualified. I find it ironic that I represent humanity’s last hope for surviving its childhood. Mysterious ways indeed!

Total Responsibility I – Getting Hooked

The essence of my personal philosophy is that each unique observer is completely responsible for the state in which he, she or it perceives the world. In other words, I believe that what you see around is you is solely a reflection of what you are. This means that your world is as you see it because of you, not the Supreme Being, the Devil, the Government, the Media, the Man, the Teeming Masses or any of the other usual suspects.

My first step on the road to this belief occurred just before I turned 7, the age of discretion in the Roman Catholic tradition in which I was raised. It was during my sixth year in this world that I first asked myself a simple, yet powerful question about its Creation: “Why did God bother?” The basis of this question was not some prepubescent nihilism but simple, innocent curiosity.

Three elements of Roman Catholic doctrine, as related to me by the nuns at my elementary school led me to ask this question. The first was the nuns’ insistence that God is perfect. They also taught me that as the Creator of everything, God existed before everything in Creation. Finally, the nuns regularly expounded on the flawed nature of virtually everything in Creation, starting with me and my classmates. Connecting these ideas led my precocious young mind to ask, if everything before Creation (i.e., God) was perfect, but practically everything that God created is imperfect, why didn’t God just leave well enough alone?

This question did not leave the confines of my brain for years after it formed there. My most immediate motive for keeping it to myself was to avoid the corporal punishment such an impertinent question would probably have triggered (the Roman Catholic Church being what it was back in the 1960s). On a deeper level I kept quiet because the fact that I didn’t already know the answer to such a basic question led me to suspect that on the most elementary level existence must make sense to everyone else and I must be the only person to whom it seemed like a complete mystery. As such, keeping this question to myself was the start of a long-running effort on my part to conceal what I thought was my unique ignorance of the fundamental nature of existence.

Once I formed this potent metaphysical question regarding the Creator’s motives, I began to reflect on its implications, such as how evidently easy it would be for me to not exist at all (“What if God had not bothered?”). These weighty thoughts made my youthful head spin. For years afterwards I would simply contemplate the idea of my non-existence and something about its sheer immensity would invariably make me feel pleasantly lightheaded. It was never important to me to actually answer the questions underlying these thoughts.

In retrospect I realize that the power of these thoughts took me outside of myself, to a state that the ancient Greeks referred to as ‘ekstasis’. Experiencing this ecstasy at such a young age had some profound effects on me. One of them was that I became, for lack of a better word, addicted to this sensation. As a result, I have spent much of my life since then seeking out and exploring other such mind-reeling concepts. This endeavor ultimately led to my belief in total responsibility. I will explain how in my next post.

God Talk IV: Creation

Copyright© 2007 K Harris

Our ancestors’ reactions to the extraordinary complexity, random brutality and transcendent beauty of our universe triggered the generation of all of our scientific, philosophical and spiritual frameworks.

Science is essentially the empirical study of why our universe looks and acts the way it does. As such, its primal boundary is the origin of the universe. The domain beyond this boundary is the realm of philosophy and spirituality. Philosophy is a discipline of rational causality that is not necessarily empirical. Spirituality describes a causal system that is not necessarily rational.

Since our reaction to the universe led to the creation of all three of these disciplines, questions relating to how the universe came to be and what is our relationship to it are important in science, philosophy and spirituality. But the diversity of these disciplines tends to produce a divergence in their answers to these questions. Fortunately there is a being whose perspective represents the point of convergence of the various answers provided by these disciplines. Here is what it would have to say on the subject.

God Talk - Creation

• Why did I create the universe? Your universe has always existed in the primal existential continuum that is my essence. It is your uniqueness that carves its distinct shape out of that continuum. Your uniqueness shapes the continuum of all possibilities by hiding those that do not contribute to the sequence of events that ends with your reading this sentence.
• In reality nothing is created. Everything always exists but thanks to your uniqueness certain things are hidden so that others can be distinguished. Things do not actually manifest, they are simply revealed by your uniqueness.
  
• Your uniqueness does not merely shape what you see around you; it also shapes every phenomenon that contributes in any distinguishable way to what you see around you. In other words, your uniqueness shapes the entire mental, biotic, temporal and conceptual history of your universe from its origin to the present.
• Creation is a Cosmic Rorschach Test in which everything you see is a reflection of what you limit yourself to being. These self-imposed limits represent your uniqueness. Since I have no uniqueness, I have no limits and so there is nothing surrounding me.
• The "creation" of your universe is not a solo effort; you collaborate in it with all of the conscious observers that you see around you whose perceptions are generally consistent with yours.
• Is there intelligent life on other planets? There is if their manifestation is consistent with your uniqueness.
• Evolution or Intelligent Design? It was your uniqueness, not your (or my) intelligence that designed this universe in which evolution obviously occurs.
• Since the universe as you know it is a reflection of your uniqueness, if you change your uniqueness you can change the entire universe.
• If you think this world is a mess, remember you shaped it to be this way and so it is up to you to fix it. I have no doubts whatsoever about your ability to do this.