IDEAS ARE EMBRYOS

Not since Daniel Quinn clued me to the advent of totalitarian agriculture becoming the human practice some sixteen thousand years ago being what led to this present overpopulated civilization so thoroughly exploiting nature to its own extinction, have I come across a deeper investigation into the primary question I began this blog to explore. Until now!

Although Quinn’s Ishmael demonstrates a perfectly logical cause and effect for mankind’s apparent antipathy toward nature, I have been bothered by what it must have been that changed a hunter-gatherer culture from their evolved symbiotic understanding of nature to an antibiotic assumption of the superior authority required to clear forests and slaughter its denizens without eating them just so they could plant their own food. The only culprit I’ve come up with is the liar who told and swore to the first story about a creator who made the whole damned planet as a gift for his special children with which to do anything they damned well pleased. Oh, yeah … and the mob of fools that followed on faith… and the exploitive opportunists who followed the gullible mob with more lies. That fable snowballed into the world’s capital capitols, the Vatican and the White House, over millennia of devious refinements of a more total domination and exploitation of nature within and without mankind. In mistakenly swapping our quality of life for quantity of commodities we are literally counting ourselves out.

Now comes Richard Grossinger into my life with his book Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life. Needless to say, he goes a little deeper than the recent sixteen thousand years of human history, not to mention the six thousand year-old Earth down to which the original, much older lie about a creator has been refined. I found this book while searching for further information about a 3D map upon which astronomers are constructing plots of galaxy locations that seems to be revealing the form of a double helix. I got more than I knew I was looking for.

Before discussing the subject of the book I want to say that it was the most pleasure to read of any book I have ever picked up. Despite my voracious curiosity about the quickening of matter being all ready to plow right through the dullest scientific drone, I was halted in my tracks by the inspired poetry with which Richard Grossinger conveys his knowledge about and insights into the embryogenesis of both living cells and the science that is revealing the processes involved. I read the entire book three times — by phrases, paragraphs, pages — to first admire the writing, second to trace the scientific nomenclature for the process described and finally to put that bit in the context of his ongoing investigation

After an engrossing elaboration of the biological system of the entire embryonic atom-molecule-cell-tissue-organ-organism chain of phase states for possible conscious existence and the approach to this phenomenon by modern biotechnology, he confronts the genetic engineering with its refusal to consider matter more imbued with spirit than a bulldozer. He quotes George Bernard Shaw’s reaction to Darwin:

…[Natural Selection] is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirit and souls of the righteous … [It] has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

… allowing as how, eighty years later, “… fools and rascals hold all the positions of power, of sagacity and science, and most citizens accept them as leaders and aspire to their status and goals.”

In one swell foop, those needing an excuse to distance themselves further from nature than western civilization had accomplished by the turn of the last century now could appropriate Darwin’s survival of the fittest to justify the greed oozing through the sewer gratings along Wall Street; too bad Vatican. At the same time science revealed matter to be immaterial they explored and explained the phenomenon of living tissue like it was a machine or a “series of tubes” whose parts were patentable objects with no intrinsic value.

Nuclear physics examines molecules so closely they disappear into light. Astronomy examines empty space so distantly that light appears out of thin air. Biology examines cells so closely they can read the fine print on the contracts dna negotiates in its construction/maintenance business. None of them acknowledges the blind spot when they exchange information about their work. Chemical reactions explain how seemingly inert matter can appear to move itself, but no science has tackled the phenomenon of a consciousness organizing such chemistries into the self contained, entropy challenging entities that biologists so minutely study and so crudely replicate.

The final chapters deal with that gap in our understanding of the origins of life on earth. I read them much more carefully than the intricate, nomenclature filled early chapters lest I go off on one of my own tangents, as I tend to do when the concepts being discussed are about the connectedness of consciousness being the life of the universe. Well, I can only say he made his case brilliantly.

We don’t get it. Karma is not something to study and obey; karma is something to feel, in the depth of our very existence. One must behave well not because the universe is keeping score and there are rewards and punishments. We must behave well because it is the right thing, because how we behave is who we are. How we behave is what the universe is, what the universe of ourselves and our children will become.

If we trick ourselves into reducing our existence to molecules and cells, then the meaning of our life will evaporate too. We may be winning the secular game but we are blowing the only one of consequence because, having made ourselves petty tyrants over matter and over our acts, we have become mere hirelings and henchmen, totally myopic in relation to the epic event of which we are the source, the guardian, and also — when we let ourselves sing — the very song.

My departed friend and only critic, Erica, challenged me to explain why my enthusiastic endorsement of the book wasn’t the same as my daughter’s faith in the infallibility of the Bible. I answered that my enthusiasm was for such a wonderful statement of what my life experience has witnessed and led me to understand long before the book was written. She then suggested that assuming the agreement between my meaning and the author’s took a leap of faith. It is a very interesting question upon which I have been meditating since, but at the time I could only reply, “read the book.”