Transcription
The thought move is there any truth that humans have progressed in their way of thinking from magic into religion into science as an evolutionary trend of humans? Well, that's true according to the Scottish social anthropologist named Sir James George Fraser. He wrote a book in 1927 called *Man, God, and Immortality*. And in this book, he's kind of referencing how the thought of humans evolved from magic into religion and into science as a natural progression.
And so, let's go into here, into this book, *Man, God, and Immortality*, and let's see if we can gleam something out of here. And we can break down, um, this section in here. It's called the, uh, "Movement of Thought," and see what we can get out of it.
Now, we consider on the one hand, the essential similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times. So, what are some of the chief wants of humans anywhere and at all times? Food, shelter, clothing, protection, some cases, power, health. These are some of the common chief wants that humans have all over the world. And on the other hand, the wide difference between the means he has adopted to satisfy them in different ages.
Now, see, this is what we talk about. There's certain objectives that people have, and there's also certain means that people have in order to achieve those objectives. That's what we have to keep in context. That's what we like to try to keep in context to here when deciding on what avenues, what vehicles we want to use in order to bring us to a certain goal, right? So, everyone's had some type of desires. It just depends on how, what are the means you're going to use in order to reach those desires, goals, and objectives.
"We shall perhaps be disposed to conclude that the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science." He's saying that it goes from a progression, the higher thought going from magic to religion to science, almost like a linear thing. So, this is his perspective. And he's saying in order to attain or achieve those means, those chief aims and wants that people have, that magic, religion, and then science all have been used. Is this a progressive stage? Have been used in order to achieve those wants? And there is some, some type of truth to that, and we'll see as we keep going.
In magic, "man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count and which he can manipulate for his own ends." So, he's saying the magical way, which is the oldest way, is seeing that there's an established order in nature, and then the human is relying on himself or herself to manipulate this order in order to attain or obtain whatever it is that that person is trying to, um, reach.
"When he discovers his mistake, when he recognizes sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary." So, let's stop right here. So, Sir James George Fraser, he's saying that when the person doing magic, the, in the ancient times, the older times, doing magic, after they come to a certain realization that something's not working out the way that they assumed it to work out, and that is purely imaginary. And understand that he's saying purely imaginary. Now, when we understand what's purely imaginary, that means the person is thinking something in their minds that doesn't transfer over into the physical world. When it's purely imaginary, you got to understand the world of imagination is an actual world as well. When we can think in that world, and everyone can use it. Like right now, you can think in your mind, and you can imagine in your mind. Right now, I'm standing on Earth. I can jump over to to Pluto right now. I'm standing on Earth. I can go swim on the sun right now. All these things are purely imaginary.
So, when the, the earlier ancient people understood that some of the things that they thought transferred over into the physical world when they were purely imagin, uh, purely imaginary, that's when they realized that it was a mistake. One of the things that they, um, used to do is if they do rituals to try to call down rain, eventually you come to the terms that, okay, something's not working. That this may not work as the way we thought it worked, right? And there's something else going on.
"He ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own uned efforts and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself." So, once the person begins to see that all the things that were purely imaginary are are not working to allow that person to achieve the goal set out. So, if you're trying to grow your crops, doing the the the ritual dances may not be working. It may not be calling down the rain. That's when the the the the person says, okay, this no longer works. There must be something behind the veil of nature that's in control of this. And it says that it releases its own power, pretty much subjugates itself to these other beings, these invisible beings, which also come from the world of imagination as well, right? But they're saying since we don't have the power to do it, we can't control it, there must be some other beings behind it, and they have the power that, uh, it controls the situation.
"Thus, in the acuter minds, magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power." So, the phenomenon outside, like we said, the rain, the thunder, all these things start to be, uh, gods start to be ascribed to those things. And you start to say, well, the god of thunder, the god of this. And this is only on the lower level because what you come to understand is that there's always been some people in the higher understanding who understood those things not to be that. That's one thing I want to be clear about. But the average person would think that it is that, okay, I might, I can't do this because the god of thunder might strike me, or the god of whatever it is may get upset, right? So, and and these gods have attributes like humans. That's what you'll see in the Bible too, that it said, and and God made man in his image after his likeness, even though these are coded. But on the surface level, this is kind of what it's saying, right? They ascribe the powers of these gods to be kind of like humans have passions, moods, they get angry, get jealous, all these type of, um, human characteristics get ascribed to the gods.
"But as time goes on, this explanation in its turn proves to be unsatisfactory, for it assumes that the succession of natural events is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable and irregular. In this assumption is not borne out by closer observation." So, it's saying that certain people begin to realize that there's certain cycles in the world. There's certain laws. There's certain events that are set up that repeat themselves. And the explanation of something working behind the veil of nature dictating the events of humanity no longer is an acceptable form of explanation. And why is because we could be, as closer observation comes, you begin to see that there are laws put in place. There are fixed, immutable laws, right? And that is a must in order for this universe to work. So, this is as humans begin to observe even more, and they begin to question even more. Certain individuals already knew this, but for the average person, they come to that understanding. And as a collective forms, then those, a collective of people form, then the explanations of the gods and the religion no longer take precedence.
"On the contrary, the more we scrutinize that succession, the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried on. Every great advance in knowledge has extended the sphere of order and correspondingly restricted the sphere of apparent disorder in the world, till now we are ready to anticipate that even in regions where chance and confusion appear still to reign, a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos to cosmos." As humans begin to gain more knowledge, the things that looked disorderly and looked like they're happenstance and by chance, with closer observation, you begin to see that there are other things that go into the creation of that event, whatever it may be. And as more knowledge is, more is accumulated, the gaps start to close where the unknown starts to make its appearance into the known.
"Thus, the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate and to revert, in a measure, to the older standpoint of magic." So, let's stop. Let's pay attention right here to what he's saying. He's saying what he calls the keener minds, or just people who are just pressing forward and really trying to dig deeper and unveil the mysteries of the universe, what ends up happening with them is he said they reject the religious explanation for the natural phenomenon and instead do a sort of reversal back to the the magical perspective.
So, what was the magical perspective? He talked about that all the way in the beginning, that how the people who practiced magic understood the world to be ordered. Not only did they understand the world to be ordered, but they understood that they had a responsibility themselves to interact with that ordered world in order to create results, to do what? To achieve their chief wants. Those wants that we talk about that are common to all people throughout the world, the health, um, wanting power, wanting, um, uh, food, shelter, clothes, all these chief wealth, uh, uh, chief wants.
"By postulating what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which if carefully observed, enable us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly." Who to act accordingly? The humans. The same thing like the people who practiced magic had that same idea that they were supposed to observe the natural world and the order of it, and then they were supposed to act accordingly. The difference is now there's other tools to help humans observe precisely, be more keen, and have a fuller understanding. So, humans can then interject and act accordingly. Accordingly, to do what? To achieve and to obtain those wants, chief wants that all humans want throughout society. So, this could be used in order to find different ways to create foods, or to develop foods and to grow foods for a larger population, to build better homes, structure, rures, right? To be more healthy, instead of living to an age of 30, now you can live to a, an average age of, you know, 85, or whatever, 80, 75, whatever the life expectancy is, the average life expectancy, to do those types of things, okay?
"In short, religion regarded as an explanation of nature is displaced by science." Religion as an explanation of nature, how the actual physical world works, is replaced by science. Not religion to fill in other areas of someone's life. Maybe they want to have some type of explanation on where they go if they go somewhere after life. Religion can fill those parts in. We're not talking about that. We're talking about as an explanation of nature, the actual physical world here.
"But while science has this much in common with magic, that both rest on faith and order, order as the underlying principle of all things, readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis of science. For whereas the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension by false analogy of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds, the order laid down by science is derived from patient and exact observation of the phenomena themselves." The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method because obviously we can see that it has some type of workings. I'm using this right now to convey sound through here and a camera to record this actual moment right now, which is a, it's so phenomenal. Sometimes I can't even believe sometimes how humans figured out some of these things. And then it's going to be uploaded, and from there, people are going to be be able to view a moment that took place in time right now where no one can see it that's happening and see it at their own convenience. I mean, this is this is magic. You could call it science or what. To me, this is magic. This thing is magic. When I see the planes lift off of the ground, and I'm and I'm observing how humans figured this thing out, understand that it's with patience and keen observation. How did they figure out how to lift this super heavy thing off the ground to fly from here all the way over to another continent? I mean, this stuff is magical. This stuff is magical.
And to only to get to those type, to reach those type of objectives and goals, other ideas had to be done away with or at least pushed to the side. Thomas Soul, Dr. Thomas Soul, which is, um, he has a lot of works that, um, I would recommend people to read. But he has it in his book, I think it's in *Wealth, Poverty, and Politics*, he talks about how science had to break free from religion in there because it held it back for many, many centuries. At a certain time, if you were to come up with certain ideas that went against the religious ideology, you could have been put to death easily. And it would have been that day that that that same consequence. Today, if there were not certain laws in place to protect certain people, you come up talking about some of these things, many people would gladly want to put you to death, right? It's not all of them, but there's some people who take that thing to a fanatical level, and all reasoning goes out the window. They're just thinking about holding on to a certain belief and taking out anybody else who's against that belief, right?
So, we see that the idea, at least of science and the observation that it affords, it at least has some reliability, much reliability, right? The lights that I'm using here to light this up, all the stuff, the air conditioner in your house, the TV, the computer, all this stuff, this this technology is made with that type of understanding and that observation.
"Here at last, after groping about in the dark for countless ages, man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth, a golden key that opens many locks in the treasury of nature. Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final." And this is the part I absolutely love about this portion of the book. Let's just be honest about things. He's saying just because science has proven itself to work doesn't mean that this is the final phase. It doesn't mean that there's going to, there's not some other explanation that may supersede science, just as science superseded the religion and also the magic, right? Let's, let's, let's stay open and remain open and being receptive. That's one of the concepts that we have in the air to, that's within the name, being receptive to ideas that may run against current ideas. But if the ideas are more efficient and more effective in getting us to the objective that we're trying to get to, we can be receptive to it. We can replace things and take on other ideas. That's how you are continuously able to adapt, so you don't get left behind holding on, gripping to something like it's a trophy. That's what happens when you grip on ideas like they're trophies and don't understand the idea of being receptive. Receptive is just being willing to take on other ideas, right?
So, I, I appreciate this part of the article because it may, this book is because it's, it shows that let's, let's just be humble enough that we can say that this is not the finality of it. There could be more, and most likely there will be more that supersede this scientific way of thinking. But as of right now, this has a place and it works very well. But knowledge is infinite. So, who knows what we can run into next?
"In the last analysis, magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought, and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena of registering the shadows on the screen, of which we in this generation can form no idea." All the accumulation of knowledge that humans have right now, the people who live 5,000, 10,000 years from now, all those are going to be the inheritors of that knowledge. And the people who inherit the knowledge at that time, 5, 10,000 years down the line, those people will be able to form ideas within their minds that humans today have no conception of and cannot fathom because there's the, the material in order to fathom those ideas doesn't exist. And so, it is with people who lived before us today, 1,000, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 years ago. There's concepts that we have today that would blow their minds away. Imagine taking someone from 3500 BC and bringing them up to today's world. It would be like a foreign, it would be almost like living on another planet, riding in cars and flying on airplanes. This is something that their minds didn't conceive of at that time.
And so, this is important to understand because knowledge continually increases. And the more knowledge that people have within their possession, the closer that they can be to understanding how the world works. And this helps also when you understand how the world works, then you can also understand the means most efficiently on how to get those things that all humans seek to get, better housing, shelter, health, all those things here in the physical world. Not only with the physical world, it also helps you reflect within your inner world to understand how that works as well, to understand how you can get a, a better sense of yourself within and have more peace within yourself, and to be able to modify your own internal world to fit whatever it is you see fit for yourself, right? There's also an internal scientific method as well, where you can alter your states of being, and you can develop certain characteristics and traits that you want to develop in order to get you to where you need to go in life, whatever that, whatever it is that that may be, right? So, there's an inner world and there's an outer world. The better we understand the outer world, the better we can understand the inner world. The better we can understand the inner world, the better also we can understand the outer world.
"The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that forever recedes." Knowledge is infinite. We can never have enough of it because you can never get to the ends of it. You can never reach the, the, the, the infinite. All this back here, the books, all these things are like little tiny drops in a bucket, drops in the sea. It's not doing anything to compare to the infinite knowledge that humans have never unlocked. And so, that's why when you take, let's just say any one of these books, let's grab this book here, *The Ladder of Lights*. No matter of fact, there's a better one. There's this book here, this book right here, *How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the Science of Human Past*. He talks about it in this book how, how information moves so fast that by the time, and this is one of the leading, uh, geneticists in the world, he talks about how by the time this book gets in the hand of people, that some of this stuff will be already outdated because knowledge moves so fast, going towards the infinite. But you can never reach it, though. That's why he says it ever recedes, right? You cannot, you cannot put a defining line around knowledge and around the, all, and around what people would call the Almighty. It's, it's all this knowledge here plus all the knowledge you have in yourself, all the knowledge your sister has in herself, your brother, your auntie, your, um, cousins, your grandmother, the, the, the frog, the lizards, all the knowledge they have, whatever they possess in their own world that they have, all the vast knowledge that people accumulate from all over the world, all that stuff is still just a little bitty, iny-biny squirm of knowledge of the infinite, right? It keeps going.
So, this book here, *Man, God, and Immortality*, Sir James George Fraser, I think it's a pretty good book, um, provides some insight. And, um, this is his interpretation of it, and I think it's, um, has some truths in there, some pretty good interpretations in there, and some, some insightful parts. So, hopefully that we've gotten from this the breakdown of this is that, you know, things adjust, things adapt, things evolve, and that you can use certain things, um, as tools to a achieve your objectives. And when you start to look at things as tools, then you start to release yourselves from the grips of those things, right? I look at, let's see right here, the Bible. I look at this no different as I look at this as tools to help me understand something. I look at the Bible no different than I look at this here, this Yoruba religious concepts. I can find something from both of these, right? Any one of these books in here, certain things I take, certain things I drop. I'm adapting, right? That's what we encourage in the air to adapt, to be receptive, and to help you. That's how you help yourself grow because you within your own self has a piece of this infin, this infinity, right? And so does everyone else. All right, so, um, hopefully this has helped out and we got some understanding in this. And, um, my name is Brooklyn St. Michael the Hero, and I'll see you on the next one.