The human brain, with its amazing complication, imposes laws onto the world through its observations. The stars are in the sky in a certain pattern, so we think there must be a law that governs them. It helps us to feel secure if we can master these laws and therefore control our destinies.
Some explain the position of the stars by saying that God, the Man in the Sky Who sees and records everything, put them there because He wanted them there.
This kind of explanation makes everything easy to understand. A higher being, whom we are too humble to comprehend the extent of, created all this. And even if it doesn’t make sense to us—such as all the suffering in the world of innocent people and animals—God has His purpose and that is all we need to know. This is the structure that allows so many to make sense out of all this confusion.
Because of the way the human mind thinks, we must have a cause and effect. It is so much easier to say that some big guy in the sky did all this and we must spend our lives making sure this guy doesn’t punish us too much. However, the way of the cosmos is not really a bunch of separate events impacting each other. It is more of a unity of all events happening at once—a simultaneity, a network, in which everything depends on everything else.
This is too big for most brains to comprehend. Then, too, we add our own conditioning from our culture, parents, schools, religious institutions, as a way of looking at life. We receive so many of our notions before we even have the capacity to say whether we believe them or not. A 4-year-old is not going to question the fundamental ideas Mommy and Daddy explain to him or her. “You are the servant and subject of God, so you better obey us and Him.” You will be an outcast, we won’t love you, you will be punished.
A dog, or any other animal, does not need to impose any explanations on Life. They do not think in terms of why does this and that happen? It just is. That is enough. They do not need to control the universe by trying to understand what makes everything happen. Humans, in their fearful desire to control, try to explain events as a long line of cause and effect that they can grasp with their intellect. This is a fallacy and reflects the limitations of the human mind and its own thinking patterns.
Some explain the position of the stars by saying that God, the Man in the Sky Who sees and records everything, put them there because He wanted them there.
This kind of explanation makes everything easy to understand. A higher being, whom we are too humble to comprehend the extent of, created all this. And even if it doesn’t make sense to us—such as all the suffering in the world of innocent people and animals—God has His purpose and that is all we need to know. This is the structure that allows so many to make sense out of all this confusion.
Because of the way the human mind thinks, we must have a cause and effect. It is so much easier to say that some big guy in the sky did all this and we must spend our lives making sure this guy doesn’t punish us too much. However, the way of the cosmos is not really a bunch of separate events impacting each other. It is more of a unity of all events happening at once—a simultaneity, a network, in which everything depends on everything else.
This is too big for most brains to comprehend. Then, too, we add our own conditioning from our culture, parents, schools, religious institutions, as a way of looking at life. We receive so many of our notions before we even have the capacity to say whether we believe them or not. A 4-year-old is not going to question the fundamental ideas Mommy and Daddy explain to him or her. “You are the servant and subject of God, so you better obey us and Him.” You will be an outcast, we won’t love you, you will be punished.
A dog, or any other animal, does not need to impose any explanations on Life. They do not think in terms of why does this and that happen? It just is. That is enough. They do not need to control the universe by trying to understand what makes everything happen. Humans, in their fearful desire to control, try to explain events as a long line of cause and effect that they can grasp with their intellect. This is a fallacy and reflects the limitations of the human mind and its own thinking patterns.
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