Our personal subjective perceptions of the everyday events in our lives find expression among the many other thoughts and connect to singular experiences and emotions of a person. We can add to that the individual`s genetic makeup, the natural and social environment, as well as biological dynamics.
The connections between our thoughts and emotions are exchanges of electrical impulses between the nerve cells inside the brain, more precisely between the amygdala and the frontal cortex, where the feelings related to our emotional state and personal behavior “reside”.
The communication between these brain parts exists only in humans; no other animal can puzzle over their instincts.
The Human species is first and foremost a product of the original natural wild environment, fraught with impulses of primitive combat and prizefights for territory, a consequence of the unrelenting crucial need for biological evolutionary adaptation in order to survive, so as to feed oneself and not perish.
But the key to the secret of the survival of the human species has been its social adaptability, enabling life in groups and the hierarchies within them, and mostly because the amassed expertise learned by this group was passed on to the other members and their descendants.
Gregariousness is an effective survival technique that works very well for the benefit of the community, generating better defenses and feeding strategies.
The human groups that most valued these traits have shaped their genetic heritage by relating to each other and carrying on accruing new ideas.
When processing greater and greater amounts of information on themselves and their group, humans began to consider some new mindsets: a moral conscience emerges, and so does the concept of soul, of love, of good and evil.
These new approaches were passed on to the new generations and they withstood time, given their importance, because the wisdom we had so far acquired has taught us to accept our intuitions about their intrinsic value.
The emotive feelings accepted wisdom was the responsible for the advent of communal mores at a time when the groups became more populous and everyone had to get along well with an increasing number of strangers. These shared ethics was later on understood in conjunction with religious principles because both remained, for a long time, linked together at their source.
Only when the separation from the social probity laws (crimes against society) and the religious mores (heresy and sacrilege) came about, we were finally able to understand and explain the totality of foreign societies: other people with different moral and religious social realities.
Everything that we can grasp reaches our brain through what we see, touch, hear etc. These experiences (that our senses continuously impart about the world we live in) are a type of human feeling that interweaves with the sensation of being ourselves.
We can contemplate our own selves through to our senses and by way of the human ancestral brain, formed to process everything subjectively.
Ancestries of human generations have adapted to life under the effects of Earth's ubiquitous force of gravity that pin us down on the planet, to its surface temperatures, to the atmosphere that allows us to breathe, water and carbon in biology, etc..
If the physics laws were to be observed and measured differently, other scientific theories would be needed for the study of this part of the Universe, with distinctive laws of physics and chemistry. We can learn nothing about any settings if we are unable to observe the phenomena and the events or to mathematically infer about their existence.
Starting from our unique human perception on this planet, we must be attentive to the fact that our understanding of what happens in the natural world reaches the brain through the filters of our senses, and there receive an explanation and an emotional interpretation of what is being experienced.
Our consciousness and mental processes have entitled people to be the only creatures in the world, and perhaps in the entire Universe, to be able to interpret (and in numerous ways) our own daily reality here on this planet and, furthermore, to imagine other possible realms beyond this one. No other living being shares an existence of self-awareness and objective realism, no other animal or thing, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy of stars.
This perception we share is a network connecting all of us, but at the same time, we are separated in each individual, because the whole thing is subjectively personalized.
Abstract thinking, the supernatural and the religions:
As separate individuals, our perception of the environment where we all live in is not the same, and what one believes to be true seems real to that person.
Personal subjective points of view are custom-made and for that reason, no one can prove anything about the many religions, because each faith is considered to be the true one by its followers, their deities being real to those who believe in them, and at the same time, they are not real for the non-believers.
The act of contemplating the significance of Death, of what happens after a person's demise, and the institution of rituals so that the living ones could somehow join in the event once was, in human’s prehistoric past, the first experience of religion shared by all the brains that were powerful enough to imagine what death means.
In prevailing culture groups, their traditions about the end of life, past and present, assure us in their entirety that death is not as bad as it seems and the departed loved person continues to exist in some other way.
If we keep at home a picture with the image of a person who has already died, and then occasionally we take a look at it, we are recreating an ancient ritual: the desire to have a remembrance and some kind of contact with long-dead people, because if they are present in our thoughts, then they may also be present in spirit, and thus continue to exist after death.
The religions offer us comfort for the certainty that we are going to die, informing those alive about the fate of the dead ones so we will have the strength to continue to live without (too much) fear of the fatal moment. We can explore the fear of death in order to console us in life. The worshipping rituals, the sacred symbols and the building of temples are attempts to connect with the divinity of that religion and achieve some proximity to the holiness.
The issue of faith is just one of the manifestations of a cultural heritage we have received and passed on for generations. These belief systems were retransmitted with great success until the main religions assumed a central role in human social life and the religious interpretations became well accepted by all, mainly because there were no other types of knowledge available then.
Since countless generations, the religious beliefs systems have been reinforced because they were engaged in far more real and concrete purposes, such as:
To insufflate strength at war and to ease pain,
To calm the mind, to lessen the fear of dying, among other fears.
Religious conviction, mystical knowledge, and spiritual wisdom are examples of the activities on abstract thinking that is not directly related to the Sciences. Likewise, are all the abstract creations stemming from the power of the profuse human imagination, as are the stories about other worlds that have never been visited but undoubtedly have been imagined.
The religions have emerged well before the first scientific theories were ever developed, and in the absence of alternative scopes, religion has provided answers to be accepted as true, mostly by means of a pure exercise of faith, and a lot less by means of observations of facts or practical experimentations.
Just over a century ago, all branches of Science began to work together in the joint venture of uniting everything we know about the observable phenomena, assembling the pieces as in a puzzle, and employing systematical considerations in order to build a more functional model for predictions on the Universe, with all the possible associations between all the parts of the puzzle.
For the first time in human history, paradigms in Physics and Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics can begin to answer a few questions about cosmology, about the beginning of time and the end of the universe, the origin of life and the future of Man. The findings are based on observed facts by making use of instruments, models and scientific theories. The compiled scientific databank is a unified attempt to explain the facts out of the observation of the natural effects and their causes, and the laws that govern them.
For centuries, these issues have been addressed by religion only, and they have been quite influenced by a widespread mysticism, up until the arrival of the modern scientific notions we realize today.
When answering some of the questions about the natural phenomena, technical theories offer scientific explanations based on facts and processes that are observed in nature only, and never outside of it. If not so, we depart at this point from the scientific scope and move onto the supernatural realm, a type of alternative attempt to obtain some answers that do not worry about studying the experiments or making practical demonstrations of empirical results.
Moreover, scientific reasoning stays unmistakably and rigorously within the account for empirical standards of observation of the studied phenomena; while spiritual experience is the result of a pious exegesis and, on occasions, a personal mystical revelation.
How many interpretations of the Holy Scriptures are there? An infinite number, perhaps one for each human being, and every single person’s subjectivity influences how he/she imagines God.
Mystical insight is nothing like the conclusions of scientific reasoning, but it should not be totally rejected on this note. It is just another aspect of abstract thinking, a different way to approach and envision things and, being so, there are no counterpoints or divergent principles between mystical insight and scientific reasoning, they are not in conflict with each other, they are not mutually exclusive and do not contradict one another.
We must understand, however, that the scientific methodology is an open access to knowledge and is always open to general public debate, requiring only the study of the science and the data configuration on the examined phenomena.
In contrast, the path toward mystical knowledge is through a selective individual and exclusive access; preparation has many wide-ranging tracks, each one leading to its own distinct process of mystical learnedness.
Does this type of knowledge stand in conflict with the technical accomplishments of modern science? In no way they look alike, for they offer very different perspectives to the great interrogations.
Science endeavor is to discover everything about the universe in which we live. In turn, Religion already knows the truth from its own standpoint, and exposes the vision not of what things are, but what things should be.
From the religious viewpoint, there are some unquestionable truths. For the sciences, each and every truth should be investigated and it is provisional until the day another more correct truth replaces the old one.
Plain and simple pious creeds such as, for example, faithfully accepting the sacred scriptures as truth, (albeit this being non-verifiable through scientific methods), require only an investment of personal devotion.
Faith and mysticism seem to unite and establish opposing grounds to science, but the notion of applying the rational intellect unconditionally to all issues at all times would deprive us of free imaginative ideas that do not require any reasonable or scientific justifications. Each person’s subjective reality is useful in assisting us to better interpreter the objective results, but then also needs to be corroborated by other researchers and to be consistent with the results of scientific experiments.
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