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| ~ ∞ ~ What Is Life? 2/3 – Awaken the Living Awareness Within ~ ∞ ~ |
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So let us continue our discussion about life and slowly transition our focus towards “Life.” This is the point where we should ask ourselves the following questions: What do we really mean when we are talking about life? Where do we draw the line between living and non-living? And on what grounds do we say that something is alive and something is not? Furthermore, we should consider the following: If life isn’t what we think it is, maybe death isn’t what we imagine it to be, either?
In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and conveniently declared that everything above that imaginary border is alive and everything below it is not. In actuality, there’s no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth’s surface between living and non-living; there’s merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the ‘material’ environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.
In other words, this division doesn’t exist outside the mind – there’s no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate. It’s not that there’s no material difference between living things and the inanimate; rather, we will never find some clean dividing line between the two.
This is because the notion of life and non-life as distinct categories is just that – a notion, not actuality; and yet we are still very eager to judge whether something is dead or alive, living or non-living, animate or inanimate.
Even though dualistic thinking is under challenge, it is still influential, and thus we are very keen to dualism in our thinking when it comes to the subject of life. To give an example: there is no uniform consensus on whether viruses are a form of life or just some organic structures that interact with living organisms.
Viruses are essentially strands of DNA or RNA packaged inside a protein shell; they don’t have cells or a metabolism but they do have genes and they can evolve. Thus viruses have been described as “organisms at the edge of life,” since they resemble organisms in that they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly.
So therefore, yet again, it is more than reasonable to ask ourselves: What Is Life, really? Could Life be something much more complex than we have used to? Could there be something “outside” the material structures that gives birth to life as we know it? Something that we’re not able to see through microscopes, e.g., morphic fields*1 that contain an inherent memory transmitted from similar past organisms by the process of morphic resonance*2.
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*1 Fields that play a causal role in morphogenesis. This term, first proposed in the 1920’s, is now widely used by developmental biologists. According to the morphosis of formative causation, these fields contain an inherent memory, transmitted from similar past organisms by the process of morphic resonance.
*2 The influence of previous structures of activity on subsequent similar structures of activity, organized by morphic fields. According to the hypothesis of formative causation, morphic resonance involves the transmission of formative influences through or cross time and space without a decrease due to distance or lapse of time.
*1 Fields that play a causal role in morphogenesis. This term, first proposed in the 1920’s, is now widely used by developmental biologists. According to the morphosis of formative causation, these fields contain an inherent memory, transmitted from similar past organisms by the process of morphic resonance.
*2 The influence of previous structures of activity on subsequent similar structures of activity, organized by morphic fields. According to the hypothesis of formative causation, morphic resonance involves the transmission of formative influences through or cross time and space without a decrease due to distance or lapse of time.
Could these morphic fields explain why viruses seem to have intelligence of their own – shared intelligence that drives the extent of the mutations to ensure organisms survival? Keeping that in mind, quite curiously, a recent study has found that not only are viruses alive, they are also really, really old, and they share a long evolutionary history with cells.
They simply have an atypical mode of living that’s slightly different from ours – they are not fully independent; instead, they move in and out of our bodies – stealing the resources and producing their offspring. Having said that, it is quite obvious that we need to broaden the way in which we define life and its associated activities.
Although the discussion in this chapter is mostly about life in general, it would not be complete without briefly talking about human life in the context of evolution. You see, in the Western worldview, which has its roots in scientific materialism, it is strongly believed that humans*1 emerged in evolution through random genetic mutations as the result of a spontaneous reshuffling of molecules in the genes.
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*1 This area is explored in more detail in the chapters, 1.) Humanity – The Pinnacle of Evolution? 2.) The Preciousness of Human Life, 3.) When Does a Human Life Begin? 4.) Our Spiritual Nature.
*1 This area is explored in more detail in the chapters, 1.) Humanity – The Pinnacle of Evolution? 2.) The Preciousness of Human Life, 3.) When Does a Human Life Begin? 4.) Our Spiritual Nature.
More precisely, it is considered as a given fact; with a leap of faith, scientific materialism accepts this assumption as truth, giving us the impression that no truths lie beyond the domain of science.
As such, it is pretty clear that scientism (the claim that science is the only source of knowledge; that science is the absolute and only justifiable access to the truth) has taken a considerably larger foothold in the world today. As a result, science has become ever more so pathological in nature, and thus taken a drastic turn toward being a faith, carrying religious-like undertones in its current structure.
The problem here is that the scientifically oriented people most often tend to believe that the only way to understand the nature of the universe and life in it, is through deterministic facts and evidence, but the honest and harsh truth is that in science there are no facts – there are data and models, and all models are provisional and incomplete.
Despite this obvious truth, these models that are based on incomplete data are taken as facts and therefore as truth. Scientific materialism essentially reduces human existence to our physical existence, and so it goes that we are fooling ourselves to believe that we are merely these physical bodies and mind.
But when we account for sentience, intelligence, and qualia (subjective, conscious experience) – something that cannot be measured or quantified, it becomes a whole lot more complicated than that. If we are to better understand ourselves, we should consider that there may be some other factors in play, other than the biological ones – especially when it comes to us human beings.
Unfortunately, we seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea of biological evolution, as if it would somehow solve the problem of consciousness, and therefore our existence as intelligent sentient beings. As a result, human life has become a philosophical issue increasingly forgotten, obscured, or passed off as a mere subjective appearance.
This presents an interesting conundrum. You see, isn’t it the other way around – life in general being a subjective interpretation filtered through layers of perception to produce a limited perception of Reality? Let us flip the script for a moment, shall we? Now, if we are to suppose for a moment, that we humans are, indeed, the pinnacle of evolution – would it not then mean that consciousness is the end goal for evolution?
And now, if we can see evolution as a spiritual path, we must then see that consciousness is the most spiritual thing there is, and therefore we must be willing to surrender to the spiritual process – the process of fulfilling the telos of human existence if we are to evolve further, you see?
This romanticized idea of biological evolution serves the role of being “the” one, all-inclusive, “be-all-end-all” explanation for almost everything. What an excellent way to avoid the conundrum of the most profound – don’t you think? When a different kind of approach is presented – especially those dealing with spiritual matters, things get interesting to say the least.
In this kind of situation, one can experience almost eerie-like feeling, a disturbance in the force, a resistance of sorts. The possibility that life’s origin may be spiritual in nature scares the heck out of people, even the very mention of such a possibility or even the very idea itself makes people uncomfortable and uneasy. There is clearly something to it – at the grandest level.
However, somehow, somewhere along the way, as is the case with so many other things, the “survival of the fittest” became the new normal; forming the narrow perspective through which we perceive ourselves – molding the structures of society that are based on a competitive struggle for existence. All based on a belief – a matter of chance and necessity; life guided by the randomness of mutations channeled by the determinism of mechanism in the interplay between organism and environment.
It is this narrow lens which makes self and others seem wholly disconnected. Both as individuals and as a species, we suffer from a sense of self that feels disconnected not only from other people but from the Earth itself. This kind of view doesn’t leave any room for purpose in nature; all progress and evolution is believed to be merely the injection of novelty through mutations – selected according to the necessities of survival in a particular niche.
Against this backdrop, we can easily see that this kind of limited materialistic view has created many levels of distortion into our collective worldview, which is another way of saying that the more rigid and narrow our thinking becomes, the more we seem to miss and dismiss the big picture of it all.
And so it seems that modern philosophy and science tries to limit the knowledge of the world and ourselves by reducing reality to what can be detected through sensory experience or can be analyzed with reason – leaving no room for intuition, insight and Inner Knowing*1.
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*1 Inner Knowing is the ability to know what you need to know when you need to know it.
*1 Inner Knowing is the ability to know what you need to know when you need to know it.
When we are perceiving the world around us through the narrow scope of vision, we are also limiting the definitions that constitutes something as being alive, and therefore we tend to draw a strict line between living and non-living. The latter is believed to be something that lacks or has stopped displaying the characteristics of ‘life.’
Therefore, solid inanimate objects like crystals and rocks are often considered as being non-living because of their seemingly solid nature. But in all actuality, they are very much alive – it’s just their energy vibration that’s condensed to such a low vibrating motion that we perceive them as solid objects.
This is to say that crystals e.g., take thousands of years to grow, and when we observe them a little closer, we can see that underlying within their dense and physical appearance, there is, indeed, energy filled with living, vibrating Life – a living sea of consciousness.
In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being. ~ Nikola Tesla
This goes on to say that there’s something beyond the surface – something much more wonderful and mysterious that is neither being nor not-being, neither living nor not-living. This something is a state of pure awareness beyond the limitations of space, time, and form.
This core essence is found in everything within nature and the universe – including us human beings. But for some reason, it is difficult for us to recognize that we are something much more than the physical body we inhabit. And for that reason we use the words “Soul” or “Spirit” in our attempt to describe that which is within our body; that which gives us our personality; that essence which ultimately animates our body – our Life Force.
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~ ॐ ~ Sambodhi Padmasamadhi ~ ∞ ~
Get the Book: Awaken the Living Awareness Within – Discover the Keys to Happiness, Inner Peace & Harmony
~ ॐ ~ Sambodhi Padmasamadhi ~ ∞ ~
Get the Book: Awaken the Living Awareness Within – Discover the Keys to Happiness, Inner Peace & Harmony
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that some of life must be ruled by quantum rather than classical rules. As expected, most biologists pretty much ignored Schrödinger’s proposal and continued to treat life as a complex chemical machine made of molecules; and so it seems that we as the collective human species are stuck in old, outdated & outmoded beliefs dating back to the nineteenth century, the time when scientists arrived at the conclusion that life was just an extraordinarily complex chemical reaction based on the principles of classical chemistry and physics.
