Friends, I do understand that my blogs are rather cerebral and not easy reading at times. This difficulty is by design, as my intent is to encourage readers to overcome our species innate laziness and preference to maintain current belief systems. If I made them much simpler, I would be negligent in my duty to all fellow seekers. So persevere.

As all of you are aware, one of the most perplexing of the perennial questions circulating amongst contemplative minds is, “Does creation or the universe possess an innate and long-term purpose? Speculative answers having been offered by members of all hominine subspecies capable of considering the question over many tens of thousands of years. It is a truism that such answers arise solely from the finite imaginations of the primitive human psychocerebri. A time long before writing, mathematics, science, or rigorous logical thought were invented and applied to study this problem. Unfortunately, intellectual progress and technological advancement has been unsuccessful in displacing the primitive thought processes of our ancestors. Many moderns remain lost to magical thinking, inwardly believing in gods and devils, amulets, evil eyes, and so on.

The world literature is replete with unique creation stories recorded by anthropologists living amongst inhabitants of divergent cultures over the past several hundred years. Interesting and imaginative, they may be, such stories are wildly divergent, as to details and causality, between cultures and none are supported by rational thinking. Subsequently, no right-minded seeker should assign much weight to such imaginings, until such are verified by direct, detailed, and rational examination under the rigors of scientific methodology.

Why do I emphasize the rigors of scientific methodology, placing such above all other methods of obtaining potentially useful information, i.e., introspection, intuitive flashes, angelic visions, dreams, elders, cultural truths, and even revelations from God? Simply, because the later information sources cannot be verified objectively across members of even a single society, much less over the surface of the inhabited earth. Even more disappointing, the magical thinkers of one social group, generally religious, but, sometimes secular, clutch and cling to their imagined beliefs with ‘dear life’ as to deity and creation, regardless of rational counterpoint. Such irrational stubbornness being merely a psychological defense–and a poor one at that.

Any answer I provide must be one worthy of contemplation and verification both objectively and subjectively.

Subsequently, to usefully explore the possibility of innate universal purpose, we must vacate the empyreal realms of the dreamworld with its magical thinking and begin, once again, with the material world. However, as I am not a fundamentalist, either theist or materialist, my answer to the question will differ greatly from those presented by apologists of such persuasions.

To arrive at an acceptable destination, we must tread the middle path. A tenuous, narrow, slippery path following the stony ridge perched high above the bloody, thorn-infested valleys of theism and the desolate, empty, deserts of the atheists.

Allow me to guide you upon such a narrow path, the path of an emergent evolutionary physicalist. One, who carries a single bias, a compelling desire to see the universe as it actually manifests, the One as it is, nothing more or less. Zen practitioners would call this Original Mind, Original Face, or the Ultimate. The answer is the end in itself–and it does not belong to me alone.

So tomorrow, we shall take the first necessary steps upon this journey to answering the perennial question. We will begin at the beginning–that auspicious moment when energy again entered into space and the universal clock began ticking once again. For the material world is always the richest source of useful knowledge. I am thinking this might be a very long series of blogs.