The Bombardier Beetle

The Bombardier Beetle

This is the transcription from audio of two one-hour lectures presented by Georges Van Vrekhem at the Savitri Bhavan in Auroville in 2008. Georges makes an excursus through science and its tentative to follow the prints of evolution. All his talk is full of the light of the Integral Yoga, and through it Georges accompanies the auditor in this voyage towards the sense of evolution of man.

Book Details

Author: Georges Van Vrekhem

Print Length: 44 pages

Original source: University of Human Unity

Contributor: Anandamaya, Blindshiva, Krishna

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English, Italian

Book Download

Contents

• Science end its black side
• Evolution and Intelligent Design

Book Sample

The Bombardier Beetle

[In answer to an audience member asking what this talk is all about, Georges begins…]

I try to tell you, this is the last in a series of four talks. So we have had a walk through philosophy in ancient Greece, we have been… had a look at spirituality and religion, Gnosticism and the early Christian church. We have had … a smell of contemporary history, Hitler and his god, so contemporary that a couple of people here — more than a couple who are sitting here — were participating very young at that time, but they were there, and now we have a walk through the landscape of science.

So my title, The Bombardier Beetle — you know, I was a play writer at that time of Ionesco and Beckett and the absurd theater so I always try to have a title which is provocative, catching the attention and actually saying what it has to say — it is about evolution and the idea of Intelligent Design, which is one of the most important things also for Aurobindonias like us nowadays.

First, I would like to sketch a little the background, because biology, Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, everything is science of course, but science has many faces, many facets. And it is extremely important, although I find it very seldom except in histories of science to realize [Georges writes on chalkboard] but science comes after the Middle Ages. Here was Greece [pointing to chalkboard] in the Renaissance this science has been rediscovered, for how long the Middle Ages last? One may say four hundred — when the Emperor Theodosius closed all the temples and made done with Greek culture, up to, I might say, sixteen-hundred. Of course here there was Leonardo.

Leonardo, as Sri Aurobindo says, concentrated in himself the whole modern world, he was the [mind?] but Leonardo’s… ideas have been kept hidden till quite recently — fifty, one hundred years ago they have been rediscovered. He was the man who started this all. So, this was fifteen-hundred. Then we have Galileo, sixteen-hundred, so we may actually say that these lasted from four-hundred till sixteen-hundred because Galileo was the one who started the scientific method. Now what happened is the following, brummm and this [Georges makes a gesture to indicate that the time went very fast] the further we go, the more the idea of God is dying out. We are still in that process. I’m telling that because we are still in this process.

The further we go, the more the importance of science increases. And now of course we are in a world — look around you — without it, without science, it would not be possible, it’s a world created by that. God is dead said Nietzsche. But that of course means the Christian God — and this is very important to realize — when we talk about God we are all the time talking about the Judaic Christian God. And the importance of what I think and I have to say today, is quite simply that in the West they have no idea of the Brahman, the One, the Absolute present in everything. And you read all these books — I have read a lot of books otherwise I would not be so pretentious to give a talk like this — you read all that and you will never find anything about the God as we try to live and realize it here.

…