Life

We come now to living organisms, including ourselves: How do we fit into this grand scheme? The problem, at first sight, seems insurmountable since the grand scheme, as we have sketched it, arises through apparition, yet the apparition itself implies a perceiver, and perceivers, as we know them, are embodied in forms which imply billions of years of preliminary, transformational evolution. The chemical elements of which the Earth is made required billions of years of galactic and stellar evolution for their manufacture in the stellar interiors, for their distribution through interstellar space by explosions and stellar winds, and for their subsequent accumulation in the clouds of dusty hydrogen from which our sun was born. Then, following the formation of the Earth from that solar nebula, the development of such a complicated organism as man required another several billion years of genetic evolution, from the blue-green algae through the simple poly-celled organisms, the mud worms, the chordates, the vertebrates, the fish, the finbacks, the mammals, and, finally among the mammals, the primates, including man. (There is, of course, nothing final about it. We think of it as final only because we see it from our own point of view.) All these things arise by transformational causation from the apparitional hydrogen but how can the apparitional hydrogen exist without perception? First we must ask: What is perception? We think of ourselves as perceivers, but we are smart enough to understand that our sense of perception is associated with the consciousness of a highly evolved, multi-celled organism with an elaborate brain made up of billions of individual cells. And we also understand that we are not, in any way, aware of the consciousness or the perceptions of the individual cells of which our bodies or even our brains are composed. Is perception limited to such poly-celled organisms or do the individual cells have their own perceptions? We know that the individual cells do have their own perceptions, or at least that they respond to the same sort of stimuli as those to which we, as poly-celled organisms, respond. In fact, our own sense perceptions depend entirely on the fact that even single protoplasmic cells respond to gravity, kinetic energy, radiation, electricity and magnetism. The interesting thing is that just as our sense perceptions depend on the perceptions, or at least the responses, of single protoplasmic cells, just so the perceptions, or responses, of the individual cells depend on the responses of the individual atoms to those same five forms of energy. Even the primordial hydrogen atoms respond to gravity, kinetic energy, radiation, electricity and magnetism. What they don't do is show any evidence of individual will in their responses. This manifestation of what we see as individual will is a characteristic of what we call living organisms and we shall examine it in some detail, but what we see as perception originates at the atomic level. It arises in "square one." Every atom of hydrogen in the primordial apparition is gravitationally aware of every other atom. It is subject to falling by gravity, radiating when bumped, and is made of electrical particles which respond to the electrical and magnetic fields. All transformational causation depends on this native atomic sentiency. The problem of how could the apparition exist in the absence of perception does not, therefore, arise. The question that does arise is: How do we fit into this scheme? How is it that we seem to have energy of our own, the so-called "vital energy"? And what is the difference between the quick and the dead? As Erwin Schrodinger pointed out in his little book What Is Life?, every living organism has the problem of directing upon itself a stream of negative entropy. If it succeeds, it is alive. If it fails, it is dead. Entropy is a measure of the scrambledness of energy. Every machine, and every living organism, scrambles the energy in its environment, and must, therefore, have a source of energy less scrambled at the start. For all embodied beings, negative entropy is food. For a vulture on a mountain slope, feeding on the carcass of a deer, his source of negative entropy is the reducing agents in the carcass of the deer, and the oxidizing agency of the air which he breathes. For the deer, it was the reducing agents in the plants which she ate, and the oxygen in the air which she breathed. For the plants, the source of negative entropy, by which they produce both the reducing agents which we eat as well as the free oxygen in the atmosphere which we breathe, is the radiation of the sun. Finally, for the sun, its source of negative entropy is the dispersed, primordial hydrogen, falling together by gravity, and that negative entropy arose by apparition and not by any transformation. Locally, the universe appears to be running down. The usability of the energy is running down. gravitational energy, which is completely usable, completely unassociated with entropy, is being converted to kinetic energy, then to radiation and so forth, and at almost every step the entropy increases. Occasionally it remains unchanged, but it never goes down. It is easier to scramble an egg than to unscramble it. All living organisms live in this cascade of increasing entropy by channelling bits of the increase through their forms. That is what we feel to be our vital energy. It seems to be our own. Really it is not. The source of negative entropy is not in us but in the environment in which we live. If we give up eating and breathing, what we feel as our vital energy will promptly run down. Life does not exist in what the chemists call a state of equilibrium. If the energies of the universe ever reach equilibrium, life will be snuffed out. It is only the universal cascade of increasing entropy that makes life possible. And life is always a struggle. Always the channelling of negative entropy requires discrimination on the part of the organism, not the discrimination between the perceiver and the perceived, but between the organism and its environment, between the eater and its food. That is where our ego comes in. It is a gene-pool invention, related to the necessity of this discrimination. And, through the long course of genetic evolution, the forms of this discrimination have become so vastly proliferated that by now the ways in which the various life forms channel the negative entropy upon themselves have become innumerable and almost unbelievably intricate. Through the discrimination between light and dark, the plant must spread its leaves to catch the sun. Through the discrimination between plants of different species, the deer must browse. The snake must take the frog and leave the stones. Unfortunately, the discrimination between food and eater is not objective, so that, to quote the Panchamahabhuta Sutras, "What to one is body, to another is food." The deer sees herself as eater and the grass as food, but the tiger stalks the deer, and the vulture waits. There is another characteristic by which we discriminate between the quick and the dead, between the animate and the inanimate, and that is the ability of the animate to reproduce their kind. In order that an individual organism should survive, it is necessary for it to direct a stream of negative entropy upon itself. In order that a race of organisms, a species, should survive, it is also necessary that the individuals have a mechanism for passing the genetic code to a future generation. It is through this mechanism that we have the wool pulled over our eyes. For the survival of the species it is necessary that the offspring should survive and reproduce, but it is not necessary that they should flourish. It is not necessary that our life should be painless. And it is not necessary that our understanding of the universe should be correct. It is necessary only that it should be adequate for our survival and for our reproduction. It is through this natural selection, as it is called, we have come a long way. Our own species, at least, has reached a have come a point where correct knowledge has become possible. But if we owe the genes our eyes, we owe them also the wool that is pulled over them. Our problem now is to get rid of the wool, to keep the genetic advance and get rid of the genetic confusion. Our problem is to discriminate, not between the organism and its environment, but between the real and the genetic make-believe.