The Law of Adaptation

Summary

The Podcast explores the Law of Adaptation, a principle suggesting that physical and spiritual faculties **atrophy through disuse* or strengthen through active engagement. The author illustrates this concept by comparing a personal injury to evolutionary shifts in nature, such as flightless birds losing their ability to fly once the necessity vanished. As human society transitioned from hunter-gatherers to a technological age, the reliance on tools like GPS and *Artificial Intelligence* has reportedly caused a decline in physical stamina, memory, and analytical reasoning. Beyond the physical, the text emphasizes a spiritual deterioration occurring as the intellectual brain dominates the intuitive spirit. Ultimately, the source warns that over-reliance on modern conveniences leads to a stunted existence, urging a return to spiritual movement to avoid permanent loss of higher abilities.

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The Law of Adaptation can be simply understood by the common phrase: “use it or lose it”. Over two months ago, I fell running and landed hard on my left elbow which immediately turned into a golf ball sized hematoma. The urgent care medical team confirmed a small fracture and placed my left arm in a splint and a sling. Luckily, surgery was not required, but I had to keep my arm immobilized for 5 weeks. As they say, it could have been worse.

During the immobilization period, I reflected on how much my day to day life was affected and how many adaptations I needed to make with the use of only one arm. Since I could not “use it”, I knew my arm was losing strength. However, my right arm actually gained strength as it had to compensate to perform many day to day activities. While I have since pretty well recovered the strength in my left arm, it took a concerted effort to do so.

This episode raised thoughts about people who have lost a limb or become disabled in some way and how permanent adaptations have to be made for their continued survival. If, they fail to make the necessary adaptations for whatever reason, their overall health will continue to deteriorate, and they will lose even more abilities, ultimately resulting in an early demise. Nature gives us examples that confirm that only the components and capabilities that are developed, maintained, and used are retained:

 Fish that had difficulty in holding themselves up in turbulent waters remained on the bottom. Due to disuse, their air-bladder degenerated and over a long period of time they lost the ability to swim entirely.

 Some birds can no longer fly such as penguins, ostriches, and kiwi’s! Most flightless birds evolved on island environments where they had few predators and flight was no longer needed for survival. They then adapted over centuries by developing stronger legs for running or swimming. This worked fine for them until their island was visited by settlers who unintentionally brought predators with them, which stressed the flightless birds (As a side note, this was not a blind spot of nature, but another example of humans’ disruptive invasion of geography that was not intended for them to occupy because of their incessant need to interfere with creation’s master plan,).

Throughout the course of human history, the physical body has gone through countless adaptations. As hunter gatherers, humans lived in small bands or tribes that moved frequently as the seasons changed and as the animals, they depended upon for food, migrated. They needed physical strength and to be fast runners to hunt down animals and kill them for meat to eat and skins for clothing. Additionally, they had to learn which plants were edible for gathering.

As farming developed, humans adapted as they now were fixed to the land. They developed different skills to survive such as keeping grain safely stored from pests. While hunting would still be necessary, as horses began to be used for transportation, it was likely that their running stamina would have declined as it was not needed to the same extent.

Fast forwarding to the industrial age. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, humans began to rapidly experience technological changes including in the fields of transportation (bicycles, trains, automobiles, and airplanes); communications (telegraph, telephones, radio, television, and mobile phones); and information (GPS, the internet, and artificial intelligence) to name a few. Each of these and other inventions caused humans to adapt to the changes that ensued.

For example, consider the oft quoted fact that the introduction of trains required a system of time zones to establish meaningful train schedules. Prior to that, the time in each locality was determined by the noon overhead sun overhead that sundials showed. That change, ompounded by the introduction of daylight savings time, disrupts each person’s circadian rhythm which keeps us in sync with our particular location thus causing health issues that are beginning to be recognized.

The consequences of these types of changes have generally resulted in a continued decline in the need for physical strength and for recalling or memorizing important information leading to a weakening of the body and a dulling of the intellect in many people.

As frequent readers of the blogs on this website are aware, our emphasis is on the spiritual aspects of the material we are covering. So, let us consider the impact of the changes on man’s spiritual being.

Early man was synchronized with the forces of nature. Humans had sharp intuitive senses that enabled them to be guided during hunts and to follow the signs that led them to find which plants they could safely consume. They were also able to see and hear warnings about catastrophic events that were about to occur and act in time to avoid them.

Their spirit was able to direct and guide their “tool”, the intellectual brain, through their intuition. As a result their will, thoughts, and actions were consistent with the swinging of creation.

But, over the course of time, the intellectual brain slowly began to grow larger and to dominate or drown out the spirit’s guidance. With the connection disabled or severed, the tool was taking over while the spirit was atrophying due to disuse. This sequence has intensified in the last 2,000 years and particularly increased since the industrial revolution.

The technological advances we noted earlier were intended to make our lives better, but at a heavy price. They instead have made our lives more stressful and moved us even further away from hearing those faint intuitions that our spirit continues to emit to try to warn us of danger.

Technology has been rewiring our intellectual brains. Now that we have devices in our pockets or on our wrists, we no longer need to remember many important things because we can easily look them up, repeatedly. How many phone numbers do we remember? Likely a handful at best – our own, our partners, our children and maybe a good friend or two. Since our phone stores all these numbers, we just look them up. But what happens when your phone dies or you lose it – panic?

It was not that long ago that people remembered, even without a map, how to drive to places

they frequently visited. Now GPS has made maps obsolete even, and we do not need to remember how to get to places. But what happens when GPS is mistaken because of some unusual event like an accident or a rockslide? People have frozen to death in instances here GPS guided them down mountain roads that were snow covered in winter and their vehicle got stuck. Odds are their intuition had told them that it was unwise to take that route, but they persisted in believing the GPS instead. There will likely come a day when the GPS satellites are disabled or fail. Then we will all be left stranded.

Turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Just think about the name that has been a fixed to machine generated “knowledge” for a moment.

Definitions of AI:

 the capability of computer systems or algorithms to imitate intelligent human

behavior - Merriam Webster

 the use or study of computer systems or machines that have some of the qualities

that the human brain has, such as the ability to interpret and produce language in a

way that seems human, recognize or create images, solve problems, and learn from

data supplied to them. – Cambridge Dictionary

Definitions of Artificial:

 man-made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural: - Merriam Webster

 made by people, often as a copy of something natural - Cambridge Dictionary

Definitions of Intelligence:

 the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or di􀆯icult situations:

reason; mental acuteness: cleverness – Merriam Webster

 the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based

on reason; the ability to learn and understand things quickly and easily. - Cambridge

Dictionary

Notice that “artificial” is a copy of something natural and “intelligence” is understanding based on reason. But “Artificial Intelligence” is a computer system that cannot, by definition, be based on reason which is the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking of the intellect especially in orderly rational ways tempered by experience and emotion. The more we rely on AI to do our research, analyses, and thinking for us, the more stunted our brains will become through disuse. And as for our spirit, it will have lost its tool for living in the material world and will also suffer further from lack of use. Not to mention what happens to that spirit when it leaves its physical body to journey in the afterlife. It will have lost the precious time of learning on earth which will make its wanderings in creation more difficult.

Conclusions

Are we on a train heading to nowhere as our spirits are being buried ever deeper within us?

Is it too late to stop the train or even to jump off?

Perhaps the teachings of The Grail Message by Abdrushin can provide hope and solace to

those seeking answers to these profound questions:

“Men are now only creeping along the ground, for their power to swing upward to the Heights

fell away from them long ago, when they ceased to apply it or make use of it after giving their

intellect the highest place, which bound them to the earth.

You thus had to become subject to the Law of Adaptation, which works automatically in the World of Matter. It is the same with you as with the animals whose wings, when never used, first gradually deteriorate and then cease to develop altogether…

Naturally this does not take e􀆯ect quickly from one day to another, but only in the course of centuries and even thousands of years. But it does come about! And it has already taken effect with the human spirit!

Everything you do not use zealously in the right way must gradually become stunted and lost to you! Automatic adjustment is nothing but the consequence of the Law of Movement in Creation. This is only one of its many-sided e􀆯ects. That which does not move in the right manner, and naturally also that which is not always kept in the necessary movement, must degenerate and be finally discarded altogether, also from every gross material form; for each

form is shaped only in accordance with the kind of movement…

Go out and seek in Nature! Observe Creation itself! … Only that part and that ability is developed and maintained which is used, thus participating in the Law of necessary Movement. You, however, have spent thousands of years for the purpose of clinging almost convulsively to the lowest and most narrowly limited Realm of Gross Matter, because it meant everything to you; you dug yourselves into it and now you are no longer able to look upwards! You have lost the ability to do so, you yourselves have broken the habit through the indolence of your spirit, which no longer wishes to move upwards and which with many today is no longer able to move!”

Abdrushin. In the Light of Truth: The Grail Message