LIFE FORCE CONCEPT

The question of life is never ending.


Even in our modern culture, in stories like Star Wars, there is a belief in a "life force."


FoxNews.com recently reported that archeologists have found evidence of an ancient Mayan ritual which focused on a belief in human life force and the requirement to feed their gods.
  An ancient arrowhead with human blood on it points to a Maya bloodletting ceremony in which a person's "life force" fed the gods, two researchers say.


The ceremony took place around 500 years ago in a temple in Guatemala. During the ceremony someone was cut open — possibly through the earlobes, tongue or genitals — with an arrowhead made of obsidian (a volcanic glass), and their blood was spilled.


The Mayans believed that each person had a "life force" and that bloodletting allowed this life force to nourish the gods. "The general consensus (among scholars) is that bloodletting was 'feeding' the gods with the human essential life force," said Prudence Rice, a professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.


"We know Mayas also participated in bloodletting as a part of birth or coming-of-age ceremonies," said Nathan Meissner, a researcher at the Center for Archaeological Investigations at Southern Illinois University. "This practice served to endow with a soul future generations and connect their life force to those of past ancestors."
Whoever gave their blood may have done so voluntarily and probably survived the ceremony, Rice said.


This life force ceremony was one of many discoveries made in a study published recently by Meissner and Rice in the Journal of Archaeological Science. For the study, they examined 108 arrowheads from five sites in the central Petén region of Guatemala. All the sites had been excavated within the last 20 years and all the arrowheads date to between A.D. 1400 and A.D. 1700.
Using a technique called counter-immunoelectrophoresis they were able to detect the remains of ancient blood on 25 of the arrowheads and identify the types of species they came from. Two of the arrowheads had human blood, while the others held blood from a mix of animals, including rodents, birds, rabbits and large cats.


During the lab procedure, proteins are removed from the arrowheads and tests are conducted to see if the proteins react to serums containing the antibodies of different animals. If a reaction occurs, then it means the proteins from the arrowhead may be from the animal whose antibodies are being tested. 
This technique "has been used occasionally in the last decade, but has some limitations because of cost, its potential for contamination, and its success rate," Meissner said. 

Quite often, ancient proteins don't survive the passage of time and the reactions don't always allow scientists to identify the precise species. For instance, while the researchers were able to tell that four of the arrowheads were coated with the blood of rodents, they couldn't identify what type of rodents were killed.


In the study, the researchers found that two arrowheads had human blood on them. The second arrowhead with human blood was discovered inside an old house near a fortification wall at Zacpetén. Impact damage on the arrowhead suggests it hit a person.

The researchers aren't clear on the story behind this arrowhead. A wounded individual (perhaps someone who was defending the site) may have been carried into the house, where the arrowhead was removed. "There are multiple accounts of Mayas surviving arrow injuries, which could mean they were brought back embedded in living individuals," Meissner said.


Another possibility is that the arrowhead hit someone in a skirmish and the arrow itself was then recycled. "The arrow could have been retrieved from a skirmish and brought back to the residence to reuse the arrow shaft, thus discarding the tip," Meissner said.


Modern man has the arrogance to view ancient civilizations as primitive cultures. However, these cultures had very sophisticated belief systems on par with most modern religions. Their viewpoint of the human spirit and the afterlife has not been determined to be false by modern science. A "life force" or soul is the center piece for trying to understand what happens to us when our mortal time ceases to exist. It remains the ultimate question of what is life?
 

DIRE WARNING

Literature and popular culture have always been a source of future developments, especially in the concepts of technology. Science fiction writers in 1800s dreamed about space exploration, which would occur at its zenith with the moon landing in 1969.

Technology is supposed to be good for mankind.  It makes life easier. Work more productive. More time for man to think about important things.

But even the most tuned technologists have a grave warning about the future of technology.

Steve Wozniak,  Apple co-founder and programming whiz, recently predicted that artificial intelligence's detrimental impact on the future of humanity to warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking.

"Computers are going to take over from humans, no question," he told an Australian financial publication.  Recent technological advancements have convinced him that writer Raymond Kurzweil – who believes machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence within the next few decades – is onto something.

"Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people," he said. "If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently."

"Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that …" Wozniak said.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has been the most vocal about his concerns about AI, calling it the "biggest existential threat" to mankind. He is an investor in DeepMind and Vicarious, two AI ventures, but “it’s not from the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return," he said.  "I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on…nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Musk said. “But you have to be careful.”

Gates said,  "I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned," he wrote. Similarly, physicist Stephen Hawking has warned  that AI could eventually "take off on its own." It's a scenario that doesn't bode well for our future as a species: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded," he said.

In LOST, the island housed once was "cutting edge" technology and research facilities. It was Dharma that was looking for answers to the darkest questions and mysteries in science, including end-of-the-world scenarios. 

There has been a debate on whether Dharma killed itself off, or whether it was the technology that it created that led to the mass destruction and purge.

The smoke monster may not have been invented by Dharma, but could have Dharma "programmed" this smoke monster in an attempt to give it human thoughts and memories in order to control it?  It would seem to be a reasonable scientific inquiry. But with many science experiments, unintended consequences could happen - - - such as the smoke monster learning to mimic human behavior, including violence, anger and murder. It could have used memories as a template to shape shift into human form to feed off the emotions of other life forms. For the island was kept on edge by fear, one of the strongest human emotions. Perhaps that was the source of the smoke monster's energy.

Further, Dharma could have created the smoke monster(s) and during the Incident accidently sent them back into time to the ancient Egyptian period. For some, Jacob and MIB as smoke monsters, as well as Crazy Mother, would show an advanced being trying to shed its confusing and conflicting knowledge base of humans. And the smoke monsters did not time shift back to present Dharma - - - but lingered on the island to re-live their immortal life spans, bitter about this external prison. The game itself with human pawns could have been the reaction of smoke monsters against Dharma's research  into the power of the island light.

So, Dharma failed to heed their own warning signs in creating technology which challenged time and space itself. Remember, Daniel had worked with Dharma in Michigan after his Oxford tenure. It is the time skips that give us a clue that Daniel may have set in motion all of the destructive patterns through the power to manipulate time. His return to the island was also to make amends for the horror he had created (akin to discovering the atom bomb) which was wrecking havoc on his psyche. History is littered with scientists who regretted their inventions and discoveries that were corrupted into acts of evil.

THE LOST PHAROAH

One of the major aspects of the was the Temple. It was an Egyptian temple. It's importance seems to be immaterial to the overall LOST story line. But with so much work put into sets, hieroglyphs, and ancient custom, the island as a temple brings about a unique theory (or sub-story context).

Temples were bult for the pharaohs as their burial chambers. But under Egyptian death practices, the temple is not just a burial place, but a large complex to continually feed the king's spirit in the after life to make sure that his journey for under ground will be complete so he can join and become part of the Sun. In order to make this journey work, priests and servants would live in the temple complex, praying and making offerings to their dead king. Inside the temple, the king is buried with all the things he would need in the after life: food, clothes, gold, women, servants, spell books and preserved organs.

It was believed that a pharoah's body and soul would separate into two distinct entities. They would journey through the after life to be reunited in the heavens. But there was great danger, as the underworld gods would attempt to thwart the king's path.

The most important clue about this ritual is the hieroglyph under the temple wall which depicts the smoke monster sitting across from Anubis, the god of the underworld. This may mean something startling to the average LOST fan. Why would the smoke monster be sitting equal, eye to eye, with a god?

Because pharaohs were considered themselves as gods, children of the most important entity, Ra, the Sun god.

Because in order to control the people, a new pharaoh often sacked the old king's temple in order to "take" full command and loyalty of his subjects. But that was not always the case. In certain dynasties, the temples were controlled by loyalists who cared and protected the temple and its occupant. But since this ruling culture and customs lasted for thousands of years, many of the pharaohs and their tombs were lost literally in the sands of time.

Which brings us back to the LOST island.

The supposition is that the island contained immortal beings trying to control it from outsiders.

The island was the lost temple of an ancient king.

It is not unusual for king's to be lost in history. For example, recently  the remains of a previously unknown pharaoh who reigned more than 3,600 years ago have emerged from the desert sand at South Abydos in Sohag province, about 300 miles south of Cairo, the Egyptian antiquities ministry said.

The skeleton of Woseribre Senebkay, who appears to be one of the earliest kings of a forgotten Abydos Dynasty (1650–1600 B.C.) was found by a University of Pennsylvania expedition working with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. It rested in a four-chambered tomb amidst the fragmented debris of his coffin, funerary mask and canopic chest. Such chests were used to contain the organs of an individual.

Senebkay's tomb dates to about 1650 B.C., during Egypt's Second Intermediate Period, when central authority collapsed, giving rise to several small kingdoms. It was found close to a larger royal sarcophagus chamber, recently identified as belonging to king Sobekhotep (probably Sobekhotep I, ca. 1780 BC) of the 13th Dynasty.

"It's exciting to find not just the tomb of one previously unknown pharaoh, but the necropolis of an entire forgotten dynasty," said Josef Wegner, Egyptian Section Associate Curator of the Penn Museum, who led the University of Pennsylvania team.

Badly plundered by ancient tomb robbers, the tomb of Senebkay is modest in scale. It features a limestone burial chamber painted with images of the goddesses Nut, Nephthys, Selket, and Isis flanking Senebkay's canopic shrine.

Other texts in the tomb identify the pharaoh as the "king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Woseribre, the son of Re, Senebkay."

If the island was the transposed "lost" temple complex of a pharaoh trying to get into the after life, that makes some logical sense in the Jacob back story.  If the island was the temple, then the guardian is the high priest whose duty was to protect and nourish the dead king's spirit. The priest would need to have followers, a cult, to help maintain this balance. So when Jacob brought people to this island, he was using them as substitute  worshippers and offerings to the dead king.

And the smoke monster was the spirit of the disembodied pharaoh. Because of the time shifting island physics, the dead king's soul could not find its path through the underworld and became trapped on the island. It needed to reunite with its body in order to move on. So the idea that the island had to be protected was true only in the context that the people on it had to serve the purpose of getting the pharaoh to the light of the after life.

And it makes sense, since the first incident shows the historical conflict that would doom ancient Egypt. When the Romans conquered Egypt, that signaled the end of the pharaohs. On the island, the arrival of Claudia's Roman boat signaled the potential end of the pharaoh's temple. The last cult member, Crazy Mother, had to make sure the Romans did not destroy the island (temple) because the king's spirit still had a chance to live and reincarnate.

What caused the smoke monster to become mortal again was the fact that the 815 survivors broke the historical chain that bound the spirits to the island. It was the actions of the survivors that caused a chain reaction which killed off the temple priests (Jacob and Dogen), which lifted the metaphysical chains tying the pharaoh's spirit to the island. Once his cult leaders were gone, and the castaways personal sacrifices were made, the dead king's soul reunited with a human body which would allow his dream to come true: the ability to leave the island. But the way he had to leave was simple: he had to die. He had to get out of the darkness (the smoke monster form) and into the light (human form) in order to transcend into the heavens. For thousands of years, he tried to accomplish this, but the island's unique properties kept him at bay.

This was the theme the smoke monster told many of the castaways, including Locke, that they had to die in order to protect or serve the island (pharaoh). The collective spiritual energy of dead souls on the island helped the pharaoh get the critical mass to become one in the after life.

The island visitors were spiritual fuel to re-launch a lost pharaoh back into his time and place in the ancient Egyptian Pantheon.