A few months ago I was talking with a colleague that I don’t see very often, and he was needling me a bit – good naturedly – basically saying that I have a bit of a reputation as somebody who “is willing to try on some weird ideas.” I laughed because he’s right. I am willing to hear a weird idea and “try it on” as he said to see if it adds anything to my life. I mention this, because that’s exactly what we’re about to do right now: try on a weird idea. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this trip into twilight zone.
This story is really about my quest to understand dinosaurs. I remember as a little kid, around 4 or 5 years old, I was in my room and my Mom was reading me the creation story. Day five the Lord creates all the land animals, and day six we have people. I said to Mom, “That sure didn’t leave much time for the dinosaurs.” It was then I got my first lesson about the Bible not being a science book. Currently, palaeontologists believe that dinosaurs were actually around for a lot longer than a day, with estimates that they lived for 165-175 million years.
As the years of my life have passed, I’ve maintained a curiosity about dinosaurs. The Writings interpretation of the Creation story was satisfying in that they allowed for science and religion to be friends, and thus I can believe that dinosaurs existed for millions of years while still believing God created the universe even if not in six days. Yet the more I studied the Writings, I found some things that had me question if dinosaurs and the Writings were actually compatible.
You’re probably familiar with the idea that different animals correspond to different things in us. Predatory or unclean animals stand for the affections and desires at work in a person – and their character (gentle or savage, clean or unclean) – reflects whether those affections are good or evil. Wolves, bears, and dogs represent harmful things in a person, while lambs, sheep, and calves represent good and gentle things (AC 45). Where things get interesting though is that the Writings also teach that venomous snakes, scorpions, crocodiles, disease-bearing vermin, and all other harmful forms in nature “were not created from the beginning” by the Lord, nor do they arise from nature’s own power. Rather, “all evil forms of use that exist on the earth come not from the Lord but from hell” (DLW 339).
Since hell itself consists of nothing but the accumulated evils and lusts of humanity, this means that harmful, “evil” animals in the world are, at their spiritual root, the visible correspondences of human evil. “These forms are merely correspondent forms of the lusts which pour from the inhabitants’ evil loves and which become visible in such forms” (DLW 339). The Writings go on to explain that there is a continual influx from the spiritual world into the natural world, and that wherever there are natural conditions that correspond to something evil (decay, filth, poison), influx from hell — ultimately traceable to human evil — produces the noxious creature that matches it. (DLW 340-341)
Do you see the problem here? If “evil forms of use” were not created by the Lord or by nature, but only come into existence through humanity’s indulgence of evil, then how could “evil” animals such as dinosaurs exist if humans didn’t exist yet? This question has been sitting with me for many years, and I’ve asked around a bit as to how we explain this. One colleague thought that the dinosaurs were a prophecy of the evil that would be introduced into the world. Interesting idea, but it didn’t really satisfy me. Most of my colleagues just seem to at best acknowledge the problem, shrug their shoulders and don’t worry about it.
Not me! Once I asked a psychic what his explanation of dinosaurs was, and he believed that dinosaurs were actually sentient creatures that were much more intellectually advanced, almost like us, than currently believed. Again, I didn’t find that answer satisfying. It wasn’t until I came across the books of Robert Monroe that I found something that was interesting, weird and worth “trying on” to see if it would work with the Writings. This is where things are going to get weird. The story goes something like this…
Someone(the creator, but not necessarily God), somewhere, requires, likes, needs, values, collects, drinks, eats, or uses a substance called loosh. This is a rare substance. Those who possess loosh find it vital for whatever it is used for. Faced with this question of supply and demand, someone decided to produce loosh artificially, so to speak, rather than search for it in its natural form. Essentially, Earth was set up as a loosh farm. The dinosaurs were created because they were part of the creator’s early experiments in developing an efficient system for producing loosh. The creator was essentially testing different forms of life to discover what kinds of organisms would generate the greatest amount of this energy.
Early animals primarily ate plants and reproduced, but this did not produce enough loosh. The creator therefore introduced characteristics such as claws, teeth, aggression, and predatory behavior, which created competition and conflict. Dinosaurs became particularly effective at this because their enormous size, powerful bodies, and predatory nature generated intense interactions—animals fighting, killing, eating one another, and eventually dying. All of these processes were understood to produce loosh.
In other words, according to this theory, dinosaurs weren’t created simply because the creator wanted giant reptiles roaming around. They were an experimental stage in figuring out how to make the Earth produce more loosh. However, the experiment eventually proved inefficient. Dinosaurs were enormous and consumed tremendous quantities of vegetation, while their long lifespans and enormous resource requirements disrupted the balance of the system. The creator therefore terminated their existence in a single event, wiping them out and moving on to another stage of experimentation. However – and I’m skipping a lot here – in time the creator finds that unconditional love produces way more loosh than anything else, and thus starts a program to teach humans to stop fighting and start loving.
So is this idea compatible with the Writings? What if I were to tell you that the Writings actually do give us room to believe that this world is an energy farm? When discussing what “food” corresponds to in the Word, Swedenborg writes: “The food of evil and hellish spirits… is that which is the reverse of wisdom, intelligence, and true knowledge, namely all falsity; and what is remarkable, evil spirits are also sustained by this food. The reason they are sustained by it is that it is their life. Unless they are given the opportunity to revile the truth, and indeed to blaspheme it, they cannot live” (AC 1695). So falsity and evil are explicitly called their food, and it’s said they cannot live without opportunity to indulge and express it.
Where does this “food” come from? Us! When we’re good, we’re calling up good spirits and we’re quite literally feeding them. The same happens when we’re evil: we’re calling up evil spirits and feeding them. The Writings tell us repeatedly that the heaven, hell and the world of spirits cannot exist without us and to me it seems to have a lot to do with the fact that we feed them. I think this general idea makes sense, because when you’re in a sad, depressed, or angry mood, we know we shouldn’t be “feeding” those emotions.
With those teachings from the Writings in mind, now what do you think about the idea that dinosaurs, and really, every living thing was created as a means to produce an energy that is vital to the existence of spiritual realms? I think what I find appealing about it is that it doesn’t chalk everything up to random evolutionary sequences, and in fact gives a greater, spiritual purpose to all life on earth. I think the Writings really do support that idea. It also feels a little bit like how the Writings talk about life on other planets, in that surely God didn’t create the entire universe just for us! Well, in a similar vein, did the Lord spend billions of years creating this Earth and life on it just to give us a home? Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe those pre-human creations spiritually matter too, even if they’re not at the pinnacle of creation with freedom and rationality like us.
The Earth-as-an-energy-farm idea doesn’t solve the question of how “evil” animals such as dinosaurs existed before human evil. I think you can get around that by theorizing that “human evil” doesn’t have to be limited to “evil on Earth” but could include evil from other humans on other planets. I’m not super comfortable with that because I don’t think that’s what the Writings were really going for, but what’s the alternative? Well, you could buy into another weird theory – The Silurian Hypothesis – to try to explain it. But my reputation has probably taken enough damage for today, so we won’t try that one on too. At least not today…