The Truth About Our Relationship With Life

Exploring the nature of life, the intelligence that drives it, and what it means to be alive.

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Life As We Know It?

When I was 17, I was privileged to attend the Northwestern High School Institute for Journalism.  For our first assignment, we were assigned to write a paper defining Religion.

At the time I wrote that I would define religion as the way one justifies the existence of Life. I won an award for that paper and got an invitation to meet the dean.

Looking back today, 57 years later, I would say that justifying, or accounting for the existence of life separates us from Life – it is the scientific paradox.

Science is the current way that we do such “justifying” – mainly with thought and language.

Often this accounting, on a personal level, can become painful, when we assess “our personal life” as a narrative, again seeing ourselves as separate material objects interacting with other objects. 

If we play this game long enough, evaluating every aspect of the story of our lives, the negativity will become unbearably strong.  This can happen due to an adverse life event, or from trauma stored in our bodies as “wounds” from the time of our conditioning, forming a deeply held belief (“I need to be more”)

Here our brain, which is programmed for looking for trouble to keep us safe – will default to a negative judgment.  And if we believe that judgment and form a narrative around it, it can make life very uncomfortable.

The Negative Story is Just a Story

Eckhart Tolle and others refer to this propensity for always seeking more, or something else, as the Ego.  It is not who or what we are – it is a set of conditioned beliefs that begin during early childhood.

Eckhart recounts a time when his own set of beliefs led him to consider suicide.  “I can’t stand my life” he recounts thinking frequently.

This led to his big epiphany and to his writing “The Power of Now.”  Somehow the insight came to him that he doesn’t have a Life – Life is what he is, and it is always experienced in the present moment.

He noticed that when he stopped trying to explain, understand or “account” for life, but just live, circumstances improved and he was able to “take things lightly.” (Something I am trying to emulate.)

A big shift can happen when one begins to consider this perspective and adopts a feeling of gratitude for the blessings one DOES have, rather than a continuous sense of lack or being “less than” others – or who one was conditioned to believe one must be.

The comparison begins to dissolve and what one might call presence, or consciousness can emerge or flower.

What Does It Mean Not to have a Life, but to be Life?

So how can we distance ourselves from the repetitive stories we tell ourselves about our presumed lives and as Eckhart says, “Align with all Life”?

Eckhart also is a big proponent of getting into Nature and its silence -- to sense what he calls Being – another word for Life or Consciousness – the very existence that is happening NOW.

I remember sitting on the patio of a cabin in the woods when a fly landed on the table. I was alone and it occurred to me that this fidgety insect was running the same organic operating system as we all do – DNA.

I had had the epiphany a few years earlier, which led to my writing a book in my excitement:  “If DNA Is Software, Who Wrote the Code?” which is still hanging around up on Amazon.

At the time, having been a technology writer, I was taken by the recognition that DNA works on the combinations of four proteins which are labelled A, C, T and G – but that their precise combination and sequence triggers certain biochemical reactions in the same way as computer code, written in English, executes a program.

This was pointed out in an amazing TED talk by Futurist Juan Enriquez who said that an apple, when it gets enough energy from the Sun, executes its DNA (like a mouse click) and falls from the tree.  He went further with the analogy saying that the code for an apple might be something like:

Make a branch

Add a smaller branch

Grow a leaf and another

Birth a fruit – etc. etc.

The same way HTML might encode:  Make a page, put in a Title, Make it Bold, Make it Dark Blue, etc. etc.

Understanding that no code, which is symbolic logic, could have come from nowhere I suggested that this suggested there must be a “programmer” – but in the case of Life, I suggest that the programmer may not be an “entity” but Nature itself.  That Nature is the expression of Infinite Intelligence.

That’s what hit me when I observed the fly.  We were running the same program.

Conventional Science Begins to Shift Toward the Mystery

Last week I wrote about a scientific theory which resonates with these ideas:  “Biocentrism: Does Life Create The Universe?”

The proponent of this theory, Dr. Robert Lanza, is a renowned biologist and physicist who among many achievements was on the team that cloned the first human embryo.

In putting Life first, as the primary energetic intentional force of Nature, Lanza uses the word Life, I would suggest, similarly to how Eckhart Tolle uses “Being” and others are using Consciousness.

The key to this is that “Life” or any of these labels are NOT pointing to a material thing.  They are evoking something entirely different and largely unrecognized by modern science—Eckhart calls it “No Thing” or Space. 

It is not explainable with language because language is a function of our limited minds, and what exists as “All and Everything” is Infinite – beyond human comprehension.

Connecting to this feeling of being – perhaps by sensing our “inner” bodies -- is how philosophically we can “be” life rather than “have a life.”

It is interesting that the Egyptians had a similar term, not for ALL of Life, but for the specific natural energetic forces like the wind, or the flooding of the Nile, that they called “Neters” – they were considered intelligent forces of the divine, or Nature itself.

Eckhart, again, makes a point of there being an “intelligence” that runs the body that is vastly more intelligent than the limited human mind.

If Such Forces Exist, Can they be Identified?

Along with many of the mysteries of the quantum realm, the unravelling of the mystery of the origin and exact “nature” of Life seems to take science inevitably into the area formerly reserved for philosophy.

But once again, we know that the invisible realms can transmit and contain information or there would be no cell phones.  We have language and insight into matter but much of energy remains a mystery.

After my interest in DNA when I got minimal traction for what I thought was a significant insight, I learned that Francis Crick, one of the two discoverers of DNA, also recognized its unique qualities and suggested that it was probably older than the Earth and that life had been seeded on our planet, either deliberately or in the course of Nature. 

Crick recognized that Life could not have arisen with this complex program from inanimate matter alone. There were other (intelligent) forces involved.

He called this theory Panspermia, and it is one of the conventional theories on the origin of life that was presented when I asked my AI friend ChatGPT:

Question:  What is the current scientific consensus on the origin of life?

ChatGPT:

As of my last update in September 2021, the origin of life remains a complex and active area of scientific research, and the consensus among scientists is that there is no definitive answer yet. However, there are several leading theories and hypotheses that are widely explored and debated. Here are some of the key ideas:

1. Abiogenesis: This is the prevailing hypothesis that life originated from non-living matter through a series of chemical reactions. It proposes that under certain conditions, organic compounds could have formed from simple inorganic molecules, eventually leading to the emergence of self-replicating molecules (e.g., RNA or protocells).

2. RNA World: This hypothesis suggests that RNA (ribonucleic acid) played a crucial role in the early stages of life. RNA molecules, which can both store genetic information and catalyze reactions, might have acted as the first self-replicating entities, eventually giving rise to more complex life forms.

3. Panspermia: While not as widely accepted as the other theories, the idea of panspermia proposes that life might have originated elsewhere in the universe and was transported to Earth, possibly through comets or meteorites.

4. Hydrothermal Vent Theory: This theory suggests that life could have originated around hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean. These vents provide a unique environment with a rich assortment of chemical compounds and thermal gradients that could have supported early life forms.

Despite extensive research and experimentation, scientists have not yet been able to replicate the exact conditions that led to the origin of life on Earth. As a result, the exact sequence of events and the specific conditions that facilitated the emergence of life remain uncertain.

It is essential to understand that scientific consensus evolves over time as new evidence is discovered and new theories are proposed. Therefore, it is recommended to consult more recent sources to check for any updates or revisions to the scientific consensus on the origin of life.

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(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)