The Seven Mysteries of Life
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The Seven Mysteries of Life
Guy Murchie
Illustrations by the Author
TO MY FIRST WIFE,
ELEANOR FORRESTER PARKER 1880-1960
who rode the horse, played the violin, wrote poetry and loved life -
for what she taught me long ago
CONTENTS
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PRELUDE PART ONE - BODY I The Animal Kingdom 2 Realm of the Vegetable 3 The World of Little 4 The Body 5 The Complement Called Sex 6 Secret Language of the Gene PART TWO - MIND 7 Eleven Senses of Radiation and Feeling 8 Twenty-one Senses of Chemistry, Mind and Spirit 9 Emergence of Mind 10 The Body-Mind Relation 11 Memory, Intelligence and States of Mind PART THREE - THE SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE 12 First Mystery: The Abstract Nature of the Universe 13 Second Mystery: The Interrelatedness of All Creatures 14 Third Mystery: The Omnipresence of Life 15 Life's Analogies on Land, Sea and Sky 16 Doornail and Crystal Essence 17 Living Geometry and Order 18 Fourth Mystery: The Polarity Principle 19 Fifth Mystery: Transcendence 20 The Change Named Death 21 Evolution of Earth 22 Sixth Mystery: The Germination of Worlds 23 The Seventh and Ultimate Mystery: Divinity POSTLUDE - THE MEANING AND THE MELODY SUMMARY - THE SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE INDEX (not included)
Prelude
THIS is a book about life - all life in all worlds - and about life as the culminating celestial fact. I am writing it from the perspective of outer space as I did my last book, Music of the Spheres. That was about the material universe, and out of it the idea for this one sprouted as a sequel. But since the present subject perhaps over-ambitiously deals with things not only physical but mental and spiritual, it inevitably leads us, as you will see, deeper into philosophy than ever before. In fact the abstruse mysteries that soon cumulated and curdled in my notebook and which I eventually boiled down to seven in number became (to my wonder) the burden of the book.
Before introducing them, however, I will set the scene of observation so you may share in the discovery. Behold the body of Earth floating in living reality a thousand miles below us. See it, big as day, basking upon the black night of nothing, bedizened with stars - its mammose rotundity all fluted and furled in softest shades of bluish gray streaked with white.
Sometimes, looking at it out of the space station I imagine I'm in, I get the definite but indescribable feeling that this my maternal planet is somehow actually breathing - faintly sighing in her sleep - ever so slowly winking and wimpling in the benign light of the sun, while her muscle-like clouds writhe in their own meteoric tempo as veritable tissues of a thing alive.
I was not brought up to think of the earth as a being. Such an impression has come to me only in this new outer perspective of space, which so provokes the thought that I cannot but wonder upon it. Could it? Just could the earth be alive?
Of course no one who lives down there would likely expect the terrestrial organism to be breathing with literal lungs. But, reflecting on it, lungs are far from essential to life. Insects and lesser creatures breathe easily without lungs. And obviously any being of planetary size, to live at all, must live in a very different way from the minuscule parasites that inhabit it, as do I in turn live so differently from my germs. Yet those germs - who are presumed never to have heard of me - remain as vital symbols and symptoms of my living. In fact they are enduring and tangible clues of my integral whole. And even more significant (as we will see in Chapter 14) is the growing evidence that Earth is a metabolizing superorganism who maintains her temperature, humidity and other characteristics within viable limits despite much greater changes in her celestial environment.
So I orbit here and dream about the rolling Earth, and wonder what music she is tuned to - what unseen ferment may already stir her geostrophic consciousness, what unimaginable tides of motivation may drive her evolution upon what yet unfathomed scales of time.
I am thinking of course of life in its broadest sense as embracing all kingdoms everywhere - and of mind and spirit as life's flowering in the large. More than presumably alive myself, however, I can neither escape nor deny an inevitable bias. For, although of course I must have my egocentric and geocentric prejudices, I yearn to savor the entire sweep of life (including me) from my new spatial vantage as best I may. I thirst to quaff it whole in full draught, undiluted, undoctored - withdrawing (in a less earthy metaphor) to cross-question it from without, from the rare detachment of my figurative watchtower among the stars. More specifically I seek to scrutinize the earth and her creatures down to their deepest marrow, to sense through their senses, read from their minds, pulse with their heartbeats - finally tune in, so far as I am allowed, to their profoundest spiritual potentialities.
So let us get on with the vital quest. I see unmistakable life down there, where the cloud systems flow and twist over the surface of Earth - where the fine threads called rivers braid themselves and glisten among the slower-pulsing mountain chains, their meandering loops now grinding gracefully downstream at so many miles a millennium, now overtaking each other until they short-circuit and fuse with a jerk, impatiently reacting and writhing, never letting their channels stay comfortable long enough to doze. Those slithering glaciers and squirming ocean currents are alive too, according to their respective natures - as are the fickle arms of forests advancing, withdrawing like dark flames, year by year - the sprouting lakes and islands and cultivated valleys, and now the cities almost exploding outward like frost stars on a windowpane.
Life indeed is splurging over Earth as never before, even bursting away from her altogether with rising frequency, in demonstration of her newly acquired self-consciousness. One cannot yet know how far away is Earth's zenith of life or evolution, or how long any optimum in bodily or spiritual development might endure. Yet against the tireless hustle of earthly rivers and the patient bustle of terrestrial hills, the spectacular manifestations of human life in our day have attained a startling acceleration and climax of development that is apparently natural and which surely must have a once-and-for-all uniqueness in the history of this and every other planet on which an equivalent phenomenon can occur. Our own generation in fact, by extraordinary coincidence, happens to come in the exact epoch of Earth's debut as a conscious planet - at the very moment in evolution when terrestrial beings have first begun to read the book of Earth, to measure themselves, to hang up their own "stars" and to guide (or misguide) their own evolution, advents symptomatic of an incipient blossoming of mind and spirit - a basic planetary germination that yet requires such a sophisticated explosion of pooled primary knowledge that the same sort of virginal springtide can hardly be expected ever to repeat itself on the same planet.
To help myself grasp the unique significance of such a planetary burgeoning, I like to refer occasionally to other ages and other worlds - to review our unfolding universe from less specialized perspectives - to remember, as did Lucretius two millenniums ago, in Mallock's charming paraphrase, that
No single thing abides, but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow Until we know and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know. Globed from the atoms, falling slow or swift I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms; and even the systems and their suns Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift. Thou too, O Earth - thine empires, lands and seas - Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies, Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these. Nothing abides. Thy seas in delicate haze Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place; And where they are shall other seas in turn Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
It is probable, according to present knowledge, that most of the matter in our universe consists of very hot plasma, above a mil
lion degrees Fahrenheit, such as the simple, incandescent substances of far-flung suns and stars. But the even more scattered and rarer conglomerations of cooler solid stuffs, like the earth, may well have yet greater cosmic significance in that their ions have calmed down enough to offer hospitality to complete electron systems. For these have gradually permitted the diversification of the common planetary atoms, a few of which in turn have somehow managed to combine into such strange and potent complexities that they can recognize each other, compare impressions and, in some cases, even speculate on their own existence.
Thus, in the miracle that may spawn all miracles, I sense the surge of life upon a planet. But its entirety, of course, is very much too much for me to comprehend. Indeed, looking down with the perspicacity of my thousand miles of space, down upon the cloud-flecked paunch of a continent, even while remembering that I was recently confined to that thin veneer myself, it is a major effort to realize that that invisible biospheric surface is literally composed of millions of granulated films of life of innumerable but discrete varieties - not only creeping molds and soils and weeds and giant trees but buzzing flies and busy sparrows, darting fish and swarming germs, lumbering elephants and the finned vehicles of man amid invisible currents of pollen floating unnoticed up the moving halls of air, tuning in on each other magnetically, harmonically, corridor by corridor, stair on stair, scale for scale, note for note, fa sol fa - while mysteriously, ubiquitously, the sun's rays penetrate the microcosmic keyholes of life to warm and activate the world - feeling, knowing, loving, creating ... And all these teeming films of ferment and resonance somehow mingle and overlap and interact without cease, spatially, temporally, mentally, often fighting each other, ever competing for supremacy without losing their identities - indeed while continuously developing new species with new identities as evolution progresses.
This is incredible but literally true, and significance may be found in the fact that the films of life, like those of light and energy and matter, are not continuous but compartmented, with textures of interpenetrating units and groups of units: molecules, cells, organisms, plants, animals and their families, colonies and nations. The size of the units, however, has little relation to the thickness of the film networks, some of the thicker layers containing the smaller beings such as viruses and plankton, while various thinner ones may be made of large units like elephants or whales. Few of the films are obvious and many are virtually invisible, though of proven existence - like the established laceworks of rival songbird territories that cover almost every acre of the flowering land, a different cell texture for each bird species, the systems freely reaching and shifting seasonally through one another like untuned waves - amid other webworks of flitting insects as well as every kind of walking, crawling, slithering and burrowing creature there is. Not to forget the greatest numbers of all that swim through their equivalent precincts in the surrounding fresh and salty seas.
And if one would be thorough in considering life on Earth, one could not neglect the hierarchies of concentric systems of widely different size encased within each other yet so often dissonant in their conjunctions of scale and tempo. Like, for example, a soldier's stomach. While the workings of such a digestive organ go ahead under one motivation and plan; largely unknown to the soldier, other schemes are afoot within him on much smaller scales and with different motivations in the lives of his hormones, germs and viruses, even less known to him. And outside all these, the soldier's own conscious and subconscious motives may well be unwittingly at odds with the objectives of his army, which have not been divulged to him by his commanding officers, who, again, may be totally unaware of the true political or international pressures behind their campaigns.
If my explorations into such echelons of function and consciousness deepen my awe of the mystery of life, they may also make me aware of life's tenacity and pervasiveness. For these qualities are evident on every hand and it is obvious that, although no individual snail or lily or sparrow can exist for more than a very few years, the genes within such creatures pass along their traits so steadfastly that snailery, lilyhood and sparrowness are always with us - immortal in their essence. It is through just such essences in fact that I am gaining the impression that life is probably as inevitable to the earth as earths are inevitable to the universe - the latter inevitability being a prime derivative of the terrestrial normality that is increasingly admitted by the astronomers.
What then is life's true nature? And is there any definable limit to life? Does it have measurable boundaries anywhere, or when? And how is life tied to consciousness? In simplest terms, what holds body to mind and to what degree may a mind take flight on its own? As for death: is it an end - or a phase of life? And of what is spirit made?
These are the kinds of basic questions I seek answers to, and try not to overlook as I gaze out at the warm maternal Earth and brood upon her uncountable creatures - creatures whose myriad forms and rhythms I see pouring out, not only spatially over the planetary surface and microscopically through every organism dwelling there, molecule by molecule, atom upon atom, but also coursing temporally through the whole length of evolution, mutation after mutation, generation on generation - in its entirety probably the most profoundly mysterious thing available to our consciousness.
To give you an inkling of where our search is going and what sort of mysteries it will turn up, let me say that almost immediately, as I wrote, I began to realize that there is something intangible behind the life in physical bodies - indeed behind all matter - and that this immateriality (energy, if you will) is revealed by the flow of time, which literally makes things into events. I find it convenient to classify all forms of this mysterious noumenon under the general heading of abstraction.
Next appeared the mystery of interrelatedness, which, geneticists tell us, is a measurable fact among all members of a species (including humanity in all its races) and, on deeper investigation, turns out to apply as well to whole kingdoms of creatures, not to mention the interrelations between kingdom and kingdom, or even between world and world, without end.
Third is the concept of the omnipresence of life, which denies that any impervious boundary has ever been found between any of the kingdoms or, for that matter, between life and nonlife, which leads inescapably to the conclusion that all rocks and seas and worlds, and consequently the entire universe, must in some sense be alive.
Fourth comes the polarity principle which recognizes the balance and mutuality of the opposites we see everywhere: things like light and darkness, good and evil, male and female, predator and prey, matter and energy - all of which, by their contrast, give definition and meaning to life and make it work.
Fifth is something I call transcendence, which refers to the development of our perspectives on space and time as we grow older, as well as the progressive absorption of self into a wider awareness as one matures spiritually, all such factors ultimately revealing themselves to be, in effect, tools of learning in the inexorable drift from our present earthly finitude toward some sort of an Infinitude far beyond.
Sixth is the germination of worlds, a critical event that seems to happen once to every celestial organism and, after her billions of years of slow evolution, is occurring right now to Earth, as evidenced by many fundamental changes during what we call modern times - things that, as far as we know, never happened before and can never happen again on our planet.
And finally we come to the seventh and greatest mystery of all, the ultimate Mystery of divinity or whatever you choose to call the unknowable essence that leading thinkers have long believed somehow exists behind the creation and maintenance of all body, mind and spirit - not to mention behind every other known or unknown wonder of the universe.
PART ONE
BODY
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
The Animal Kingdom
* * *
LET US COME down to Earth now for a close look at life - a good, hard look at the nearest sample of life in the universe. I
am thinking particularly of our cousins, the animals, it being only natural to begin with our closest kin. Besides, if animals aren't always the simplest creatures to understand, at least they are apt to be the most familiar.
Human knowledge of animals of course has a long history - as long as man's own - but it can reasonably be said to have started in a serious way only in the fourth century B.C. when Aristotle became the first scientific student of life on Earth as a whole. For it was he who earned an enduring reputation as the father of biology by doing more research in zoology than anyone else ever had, notably by cataloguing, describing and illustrating about five hundred kinds of animals. Naturally he had the help of assistants and students, including Alexander the Great, who used to send him specimens from his campaigns in Asia and Egypt, but out of his assembled knowledge he managed to produce descriptions and explanations so accurate and modern in quality that they could not be improved on for twenty-two centuries.
"The catfish," he reported, "deposits its eggs in shallow water, generally close to roots or reeds. The eggs are sticky and adhere to the roots. The female catfish, having laid her eggs, goes away. The male stays on and guards them, keeping off all other little fishes that might steal the eggs or fry ... In repelling the little fishes, he sometimes makes a rush in the water, emitting a muttering noise by rubbing his gills ... He thus continues for forty or fifty days until the young are well grown ..."
Although Aristotle's five hundred animals now seem pitifully few, the total number of varieties known did not appreciably increase for two thousand years, until Carolus Linnaeus of Uppsala, Sweden, in 1758 listed and classified 181 forms of reptiles and amphibians, 444 kinds of birds, 183 varieties of mammals and over 10,000 sorts of small animals and plants - giving each a generic and a specific name under his practical system of nomenclature that quickly became standard and has served biologists all over our planet ever since. As the modern method of classification of organisms into phylum, class, order, family, genus and species gradually developed in later years, the numbers of species identified and classified increased way past the million mark, so that now, for example, some 30,000 different species of protozoans are known, more than 10,000 species of sponges, nearly 9000 species of birds, on whom live (among the multitudes of other parasites) 26,000 species of feather-eating lice. Then at least 100,000 species of flies, a staggering 280,000 species of beetles and a meager 7000 species of mammals including man, who is merely one among some 250 in the order of primates, which is a small part of the mammalian class, which is but a fraction of the subphylum of vertebrates within the phylum Chordata, etc.