She was sitting in the front row – the car had mysteriously failed to start for the first five minutes of the would-be journey, as though projecting her future to this point with a mechanical will of its own. This point: the front row of a group of about twenty people, possessing a collective warmth – she had to admit – within which she was a complete stranger.
They had sounded interesting. Not presumptuous, not critical, just friendly and intelligent.
The speaker was talking; a man with kind eyes. He had the relaxed manner of one who had given many talks. He looked at her, smiled and asked the question, “What is Life?”
It was the end of a miserable event curve that had begun with the car’s idiocy. Now, she felt nineteen pairs of eyes and ears upon her and she wished herself away. Instead, she breathed, wishing to rise to this double challenge of being unknown and facing a question to which there was no complete answer – itself an unknown…
But his eyes – which had been on her – were moving away.. Had his question been rhetoric? The speaker raised his voice to address everyone. “We all need to ask ourselves that, for it is the basis of any spiritual exploration…” he said.
His head turned towards the back of the room, where she could feel someone straining to answer. There’s always a resident swot, she thought, recalling her school days…
“I would say that….” rose the voice from the back. Then it paused….
It was the pause that did it, she would later reflect. The pause that spoke to her and said here’s a gap. You can fill it with what you know. Damn it! She had studied biology in some depth; had created a synthesis in her own head, mixing it with her belief in universal kindness at apparent war with the eternal process that was the unfeeling universe…
“It’s a mysterious continuity,” she said, firmly – filling the gap.
She didn’t need to see to know that all eyes were upon she of the intervention. His eyes, too, restored to her – dancing with mirth at her interruption, nodding at the depth of her answer.
“Yes?” he said, inviting her…
She would apologise to the interrupted man at the back, later… For now, she had something to say… to share.
——————
So… what is life? It’s an obvious question that has taken us thousands of years to approach. Even philosophers have argued over its tangles, unable to frame the properties of ‘living’.
As a child, and keen on cheap horror films, we would go out into garden with old milk bottles filled from the kitchen tap and create coloured mixtures of soil, bits of plants and various other substances – bits of old cement from the builder’s yard next door, that sort of thing. We’d jam our palms over the neck and shake the contents for all we were worth. Eventually, and exhausted in arm, we’d watch the swirling mass of usually dark liquid spin like its own speeded-up universe.
Was it alive?
Of course not. But a billion years ago, above the broken fractures in the middle of the deep sea oceans, with their bubbling, muddy vents, powered by the intense heat from a gap in the Earth’s crust, something did live – according to the most likely theories on the origin of life.
What lived there that contrasted with our dead but sincerely shaken bottle soup? What was it that came into existence and sustained itself, miles from the surface of the sea, coaxed into life by the energy of the volcanic deep-sea trench?
The answer is fascinating and multi-faceted. One very good answer is that we did. We came into existence in that deep ocean trench, a billion years ago. The chain of life that began then resulted in us – a being that can actually look back, with some authority, on the history of life on Earth. But it doesn’t just look back; it asks whether this was a unique, freak event, or whether the universe is teaming with life…
The growing mind that resulted from that self-sustaining life-form can still only describe what life is, not why. The ‘what’ is wonderful and mysterious, but the why is either ignored with disdain or avoided. Science is not good at sharing the ‘truth’ with anything not based on its rigorous, but limiting principles. There are good reasons for this. The ages before the birth of rational thinking were marked by sheer fantasy and religious dogma as to what life was. The resulting materialistic swing of science was a natural reaction – and a good one. Perhaps now, though – as the questions of consciousness pile higher – there will be a loosening of what has become science’s own dogma, and a much deeper sharing of what it means to be human. After all, the human mind invented science, not the other way round.
Over the next few Thursday posts, we will take a journey from those ocean vents where life began, making the leap from chemical to organic – and watching it change its relationship with ‘the world’ forever.
©️Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
Bravo, Steve, for attempting to answer the most difficult to successfully answer question of all time… Looking forward to reading your posts…
Thank you, Jaye – and for the reblog. Onwards, then….
Thank you, Sue x
Reblogged this on Stuart France.
Thank you, Stu
Reblogged this on yazım'yazgısı.
Thank you for the reblog 😎
Science is not good at sharing the ‘truth’ with anything not based on its rigorous, but limiting principles – this is a brilliant statement.
Thank you, Robbie. And there is recognition of this, even within science, as we shall see in modern evolutionary biology 😎
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out The What of Life by Steve Tanham as featured in this post from Sue Vincent’s The Silent Eye blog.
Thank you, Don.
You’re welcome.
I think one thing that we can say about life for certain in my mind is that it is sacred – every bit of it from the smallest grain of sand to the largest mountain or the sun or moon, or any of this universe. It is all life and it is sacred. We are a part of it and we are within it as well. We are separate and yet we are all connected in some as yet inexplicable way. Although I cannot say for certain WHAT it is, I know in my soul and being that it is sacred. The good, the beautiful, the ugly, the horrible, all of it swirls around in this universe somehow inexplicably joined into one immense spirit or thing. Just as we have our own conflicts within each of us, so we have conflicts with every other living thing. Who is to say what is living and what is not? Who is to say what is good and what is not? In the realm of life, we are perhaps the smallest of the small, in a universe we may never know how to comprehend, and perhaps that is not a bad thing. Perhaps we are not meant to know every single thing in this world, for in every second, something entirely new is being created, and in every second, something is dying as we understand death. And yet we really don’t know if things truly die or if they just become other forms of life, or assist in the creation of other forms of life. We have seen that with fertilizer, that often comes from some living form, and given as nourishment to plants or other life forms, it creates more growth and food for still other life forms. So death as we think really of it is perhaps part of an endless chain of another beginning, another life, And within each life form, there is potential for that life form to evolve, and this is happening constantly. The entire universe is full of life, even as it is full of death, or what we believe is death. Since I have been studying with The Silent Eye, these things have all suddenly come to me. They are things I never had reason to especially think about this way before. Since I have finished my first year recently, I have had an epiphany about a great many things related to life and death. I have no way to know if it is true or not, and perhaps it does not matter because what IS truth, but another concept we have created in our minds and spirits. This is what I am coming to believe. Thank you kindly.
😉
We could, perhaps, say that all of ‘that’ is a mirror, Anne. We just need to find out what it is reflecting…
I don’t know that we will ever know that in this lifetime, but I would say if anything, we ARE God too, or Gods, or the Creators. That must be what it is. We too are capable of creating more life, as is everything else on this earth, just as we are capable of creating death. So this is what I think that is what is being reflected. We too are Gods. In the primitive tales, they tell of how the Gods first did the work of mankind, and that at a point, turned back to being just Gods, so that mankind would be able to exist for the rest of time. Mankind as it were, however, doesn’t seem to understand the whole concept, and strives to destroy every good thing at one time or another. Still, the key is that everything in this universe is sacred and if there is a beyond the universe, it too is sacred. That means that we need to find ways to help keep it as what it was always intended. Thank you most kindly.
I think you have touched something very profound there, Anne. Reflect on the depth of what you have seen and let the power of that clear the contradictions…
Thank you kindly, Steve. New thoughts on these subjects are coming to me one after the other since I finished my first year of study. I am not clear on how to deal with them all yet, but I sense that it is all good. Thank you one and all again. This is a wonderful study, and I am glad that I managed to enroll in it in these, my winter years.
So are we, Anne x