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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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very nice srticle, thank you!
I very much agree with the notion of we are life, and that life itself is a vibration, pure energy.
The Being, God, the Great Spirit, Nature, the Dharma, etc are imho all ways to come closer to the greater self, the spiritual reality.
What I believe determines true happiness in this realm is HOW you approach the ultimate truth.
Perhaps we should not be too rigid in our choice of spiritual paths, be it religion or something else. Trying out various practices and seeing how they affect your state of being can be liberating.
A few days ago I wrote something similar: The Philosophical Conundrum of the Discrete vs. Continuity or What is a Human?
The Philosophical Conundrum of the Discrete vs. Continuity or What is a Human?
Humans are a form of life which has a particular form of consciousness which is singular as it is for all species, in that it includes the possibility of self reflection. This unique aspect of human consciousness gives humans a much wider range of possible options than it seems than all the other species.
Life is opposed by "entropy", the tendency for all things to decompose. And for life to exist it must overcome the force of entropy. Currently, it is hard for our form of life (humans) to maintain this state for more than 100 years. Entropy is continuous while life seems to be discrete, that is, a flow of individual units. Hence, humans are discrete entities that make up a part of a chain that we call life.
The human entity seems to exist on multiple levels from microscopic to macroscopic. And humans are composed of many other species of bacteria along with human cells. And while it seems that all living entities can experience the feeling of comfort or homeostasis, humans seem to have a greater capacity for appreciation of things beyond physical needs such as beauty, music, humor, achievement, contribution, conversation, literature, poetry, and all the arts, revelation etc.
And while the body has a somewhat mechanistic aspect, life, the product of all the dynamics of the physical body is of a different order. Just as the brain is the mechanism that produces the mind which is capable of producing thoughts. Thoughts seem to have no physical dimension. And when the physical dynamics are no longer capable of resisting entropy, life disappears, but continues in another discrete form due to the act of reproduction. In this fashion life is maintained in all the discrete entities found in every species. While life exists, it maintains a coherence that begins to dissipate the moment life disappears. A desert is what remains once life departs. Sand refers to the size of the particles, which eventually become silt, and finally clay.
I just saw a squirrel outside. It seems that most all species spend a good deal of their time hunting for food. I am eating my breakfast now. Since maybe 10,000 years ago, humans began cultivating plants and animals for food, we no longer spend much time hunting food. Instead we gain our food in abstracted ways. We might work at a job to be able to go to the store to buy food. This might only take an hour or so, but we had to work 8 hours to get the money for food and other necessities. So, we may have been better off before we claimed land to cultivate as far as the time and enjoyment that we lost when we discontinued hunting and foraging for food. And another huge loss is that while we cultivated animals and land, we inadvertently cultivated ourselves and lost our wildness and connection to nature.
All entities need air (except anaerobic creatures), water, sufficient heat to maintain body temperature, and food (energy) to resist entropy. On attaining these necessities one might imagine that all entities feel comfortable (homeostasis). These satisfy the physical necessities, but life transcends the physical because it is animate, speaking here of all the phylum of the animal kingdom and needs to make decisions.
Humans are analogous to "thought machines". Thoughts erupt into our consciousness, often with no effort on our part. Language augments thoughts. We can consciously focus our attention as I am doing now, to channel thoughts on a particular theme. This enigmatic thought mechanism that humans possess creates the possibility for us to create, imagine, and develop in a field of infinite potentialities. Our hands and feet help us to manifest thoughts into actions.
Mollusks can create a mobile home, their shell, while humans can create huge cities that cover over nature and are stationary. Since we are life, everything we do and create is natural, even synthetics. Everything initially comes from natural resources. What we call synthetics or inorganic are derived from natural resources initially and with time will become incoherent thanks to entropy. Since time seems to be infinite, nothing physical can withstand entropy.
Nothing physical can be permanent. Or so it seems. But it may not be true. Question everything, especially whatever I might write. If all is energy and what we conceive as physical is actually energy, there is the idea that energy in the Universe remains constant. If that is true, then perhaps the "physical" is the discrete part of existence and energy is the continuous. They seem to exist together at the same time. So the physical (life) is a discrete entity that disappears and then continues, is "reborn" in another new form.
To continue further, if there was no life, there would be no point to there being a Universe. Why would there be a Universe if there was no life? The profound implication is that the Universe is dependent on the existence of life if it is to have any relevance or purpose.