by Guy Murchie
Even when he is a year old, the baby has barely started to become aware of time's passage. And a year, to him, naturally seems a lifetime. It is entirely logical that it should of course, because a year literally is his lifetime - to date. And clocks have just begun to tick.
But when he is ten, time has noticeably speeded up. Clocks have come alive and a year goes by ten times faster because it has become only 10 percent of his experience. When he reaches fifty, time is passing five times faster still, clocks have begun to whiz and a year is but 2 percent of his life. And if he reaches a hundred, it's 1 percent. His old friends have been dying off at a fearful rate while new children sprout into adults like spring flowers. Strange buildings pop up like mushrooms. A whole year to him now actually consumes less conscious time than did four days when he was one year old.
If you can project your mind beyond death, imagine how time must fly for someone who has lived a million years. Extrapolating at the same rate of acceleration, a year by then will have been reduced to a mere one-millionth part of his total experience, the equivalent of thirty-one seconds to the one-year-old. Babies will grow to adulthood in ten minutes and die of old age before breakfast.
Ultimately, as the natural law prevails, whole generations will pass like flashes of lightning. Eons will drift by like time-lapse movies of civilization on the march, evolution evolving before your eyes. Birth and death will merge into a simultaneous whole and time itself will reveal at last its full stature as a dimension of development, while total experience will blossom easily from the finite into the increasingly imaginable perspectives of infinity.
SPACE TRANSCENDING
The same kind of transcendence of course applies as well to space as to time. The baby learns on the scale of inches before he is big enough to grasp anything in the range of feet. Yet even when he can understand that his crib is a yard long, larger units like acres or miles might be infinite for all his comprehension of them. And it is only when he is big enough to take long walks that his world attains the span of a mile. From there on, the transcendent relativity of space becomes increasingly noticeable to him and the miles (like years) shrink and go by faster as they increase in number - and in a similarly inverse proportion.
By the time he is grown up and studying astronomy, he will get an inkling of what a light-year is. Then come parsecs and even megaparsecs, which relegate miles (relatively) into the microcosm. And all of this verifies Einstein's statement that neither space nor time are fundamental. Which means they are basically only illusions of this finite phase of earthly existence, out of which the law of transcendence is progressively and inexorably taking us. Moses seems to have agreed when he said in the Ninetieth Psalm that "a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." Later David added that, "as for man, his days are as grass." And, likening him to a flower of the field, "the wind passeth over it, and it is gone: and the place thereof shall know it no more."
Please don't get the idea that the sweep of transcendence through time and space need ever disrupt your sense of where or when you are. For the acceleration of dimensions is generally too gentle and natural for that. Certainly you do not have to lose the minute as you gain the hour. Nor let go the year to grasp the century. In fact I can read a chapter of the book of life now in as few clock hours as it took me to read a single sentence in my childhood, yet I'm sure I understand most sentences of that chapter much better than I understood the single sentence I once struggled with. By simple extrapolation I can even predict that when you and I are a billion earth years old and a finite century unrolls in a twinkle, whatever world we are in (assuming it includes the time dimension) we will still have ample "time" to take in every minute of every year. We may feel then what we can barely deduce now: that time is just as relative a dimension as space, with width and depth as well as length.
And so with space, the astronomer with his telescope who thinks in megaparsecs and supergalaxies need have no difficulty in switching, if need be, to a microscope and measuring molecules in microns and angstroms. For you do not lose the inch when you encompass the mile, nor the mile when you discover the light-year. And no one of the finite units of space or time excludes or diminishes another.
SELF TRANSCENDING
The third measure of transcendence after time and space, as we have said, is the self. And, like the interrelation between the minute and the year or between the inch and the mile, it is the interrelation between the self and society that is significant here. More specifically, I could call it the relation between one human and humanity, or between one organism and the superorganism of Earth or, perhaps most accurate of all, the relation between an individual consciousness and the all-pervasive, if hypothetical, superconsciousness called the universal mind. Here, I see, the commonly overlooked evidence quietly begins to crystallize, suggesting that the self is really nothing more than the conscious, localized, finite viewpoint of an individual cell in its surrounding aggregate society - and, no matter how vital that self-cell feels to itself, its actual importance to society and the world is temporary and educational.
It is so hard to comprehend self-to-society transcendence, however, that I am tempted to think there is something mystical about it. And this feeling is confirmed by the fact I haven't met or even heard of anyone who seems to know at what point, if any, cells cease being separate little individuals reacting to each other and begin being permanent unit members of one large organism. I suppose there could actually be many such points, one of the more obvious of them being conception, before which, in the snug bedclothes of fallopian folds, the excited sperms meet their darling ovum and lovingly lash her with their tails, literally rotating her (up to 8 rpm) in a kind of love dance that has recently been observed under the microscope. This is the preliminary to a vital transcendent event, not yet fully researched, in which the sperms sometimes pirouette for several suspenseful minutes before one of them, as if inspired, turns to the waiting ovum and closes in for a kiss and a true love plunge that is the crucial act in conception. Significantly, however, the victorious sperm not only releases a chemical substance that inhibits any competing sperms from also penetrating the ovum but somehow merges his latent consciousness with hers, which clearly means turning something plural into something singular. It is a merger indeed that naturally brings up the issue of what actually constitutes an organism. Is a hive of bees an organism? Are the tips of a hundred roots "searching" for water in the soil beneath a tree comparable to a hundred ants "searching" for food on the surface of the ground? is a tribe of pygmies in the Congo in any sense a unified being? What of a flock of birds, an epidemic of influenza, a school of fish or the four billion humans who inhabit the earth?
INSECT SUPERORGANISMS
Entomologists estimate that various insects have organized successful societies on at least twenty-four different occasions in evolution, and other creatures (from microbes to man) have had their flings at society with varying degrees of success many more times, but it is extremely difficult to measure the intensity of these aggregations or compare the interrelatednesses of their parts. In fact it appears to be about as hard for a man to learn the form of government in an anthill as it would be for some scientific-minded visitor from Vega to discover who or what runs New York. Ant colonies vary in size from a few hundred ants to some 20 million in the case of certain species of carnivorous army ants, who are probably the most highly organized of all and who, although individually no match for certain other fighting ants (the harvester, the stink ant, etc.), are, as an army, practically invincible in the whole animal kingdom.
When such a force of ants marches a thousand abreast through a tropical jungle or open country, every other creature from moths to elephants tries to get out of its path. But many a grasshopper or rat is too slow and gets caught by the voracious soldiers who spring upon their prey in large numbers and, it is said, often bite in unison at a hundred places, particularly such sensitive spots as eyes, ear
s, nostrils, and lips, the shock and widespread pain confusing and disabling the victim before he can escape. By such means snakes (even huge pythons heavy from a recent meal) are easily blinded and killed, human houses in the ants' path are denuded of all occupants (including vermin) overnight, crocodiles are sometimes eaten alive in shallow water and, in a case I heard of in South Africa, a caged leopard was overwhelmed in ten minutes, his bones picked clean within three hours.
The ant column, usually only a yard or two wide but perhaps 100 yards long and traveling more than an inch per second, weighs about 50 pounds and behaves like a single organism. Yet it has no central brain and no individual (or individuals) seems to be in command. In fact it is believed to flow somewhat according to the laws of hydraulics, the pressure coming from behind, the front often surging forward like fingers probing blindly, now here, now there, the spearhead salients nevertheless coordinating to outflank any prey or enemy.
You might suppose that, if such an ant army met another similar army, the two would fight each other as they fight almost everything they meet. But no: they recognize each other through their keen chemical senses and avoid close contact. I mean they normally avoid each other, but, if either army has for any reason lost its queen (as has been effected experimentally by entomologists) they merge instead. This is thought to happen because a queenless colony feels a kind of wholesale sexual attraction toward a colony with a queen, she being its prime hope of regaining its lost fertility. It also indicates that every ant carries evidence (presumably in the hormonal chemistry of its body) of the state of the whole colony, which by this means is integrated into a single superorganism that is literally flowing with the same social hormones (called pheromones) carried by every ant.
Some biologists have felt justified in comparing the army's various specialized individuals to blood cells, lymph, bile and other secretions of the body. One I know of has gone so far as to postulate that no injury is felt by any of the ants individually because only the colony as a whole can sense anything equivalent to pain. Although this view has not been generally accepted, it is supported in some degree by the selfless (seeming pointless) sacrifices made by individual ants, some of whom have been known to attack red-hot coals placed in the army's path, persisting until burnt to a crisp, but creating, with their thousands of bodies, an eventual causeway of ash the rest of the army can march over.
Faced with the necessity of crossing a stream, a tropical ant column will form a flexible, living bridge of the bodies of its forward members, who eagerly plunge into (or under) the water and cling to each other (literally to the death if need be) while the rest tramp over them. If the stream be too wide or swift for such an ant bridge to span it, the ants usually shift plans and, instead of a bridge, form a kind of Noah's Ark, a roughly spherical vessel with enough enclosed air to float, and thus launch themselves as if with a single mind, remaining an intact mass until they reach their goal or perish in the attempt. Since they apparently have not yet learned how to propel themselves in liquid, the ants must depend on what we call luck in their drifting voyages, yet in the long run they make out surprisingly well, as is proven by their 50-million-year history.
But it is the mental side of the ant that perhaps best illustrates transcendence. Individual ants have been likened to the cells of the brain, and it is an apt comparison because one ant or a few of them by themselves cannot function effectively, or even survive. It's as if a surgeon extracted a cell from your brain and asked it what it was thinking about. For no matter what sort of language or how subtle the test he used, he hardly could expect an intelligible answer. For the same reason, individual ants behave. moronically, if not randomly, and only slightly more sensibly when a dozen or two are together. But when a colony of thousands or (better) millions of ants is functioning, a definite intelligence is evident and the ants' activity becomes coordinated and purposeful, sometimes rising to the point of instinctive brilliance.
Termites, once called "white ants," have been almost as successful as ants yet with much less mobility, their social organisms taking the form of elaborate sealed-off cities, often with very complex systems of dark passageways extending some 10 feet upward, 100 feet downward and even farther outward in all directions. Although apparently more passive than a tree, a termite nest is constructed with certain animal-like "organs" corresponding to lungs, these being a series of heat-insulated ventilator shafts that line their towers above ground, using porous walls as filters or gills through which they "inhale" oxygen and "exhale" carbon dioxide. And the colony itself, usually numbering several millions, has a communal digestive system, as the individual termites, unable fully to digest the cellulose from the wood they eat, unfastidiously take turns in re-eating one another's castings, accomplishing thus in series of digestions what they could not accomplish singly. And termites, even more than humans, need intestinal microbes for digestion - in fact so much so that half the weight of the average termite is protozoa. It is pretty staggering to think of the 1500 known (plus probably thousands of unknown) species of termites, each harboring its own several species of cellulose-digesting protozoa, the total of all of them together adding up to millions more termite societies than there are termites in any single society and inevitably billions of times more protozoan societies inside the termite societies than the billions of protozoa in any one termite. And, on top of all that, it has recently been discovered by the electron microscope that each one of the billions of protozoa in each termite is not the single animal we formerly thought but rather a colony of semi-independent flagella mechanically coordinated in the manner of galley slaves. If that isn't enough of a challenge to our understanding, we must remind ourselves that although the termite workers are assumed somehow to control both breeding and feeding in their termite colony, just how they do it, what process really coordinates them or chooses, limits and regulates the protozoan societies and subprotozoan colonies within them is still anyone's guess.
A beehive, while relatively simple, is in certain ways even more of a superorganism than is either an anthill or a termitary. I know of researchers who have gone so far as to call it a single animal. For, like an animal, it can regulate the temperature and humidity of its enclosed body. And it enjoys a metabolism so intense that sometimes the member bees, serving as cells, are born and die at a rate exceeding a thousand daily. When the hive is severely wounded, such as by loss of its queen, it has been heard to moan in agony. Yet it often manages to heal its wound by miracle measures, like stimulating sterile workers to lay eggs or elderly bees to rejuvenate their youthful glands until they literally become young again. Although no actual blood circulates through the body of the hive, blood's equivalent in semiliquid food and glandular secretions full of enzymes is "pumped" continuously among the 40,000-odd bees that play the part of blood cells, moving the stuff rapidly from nurse to queen, to the waxmakers, to the cell cleaners, to the receivers, to the foragers and back from the foragers to the receivers, the cell cleaners, the waxmakers, the nurses and the queen. Whenever the flow slows down, the hive immediately notices it and feels off balance, if not sick. But when the flow recovers and stabilizes, the hive regains its composure, knows it is well and, like many another healthy animal, glows and hums with confidence.
VERTEBRATE SUPERORGANISMS
Animal superorganisms are not all composed of insects. In fact many are made up of much larger creatures ranging from a herd of reindeer that runs in V formation until cornered, when it invariably curves into a tight defensive circle like a wagon train attacked by Indians, to huge schools of fish and flocks of birds who maneuver by amplification of barely perceptible influences in their surround. It is
now believed that most such mass formations do not depend on any particular leaders, for individuals in the leading positions are frequently replaced by others, particularly in sharp turns. And vast bird flocks, like the formation of an estimated 150 million slender-billed shearwaters reported in Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania a few years
ago, sometimes show a complex three-dimensional motion that includes convexity over a thousand square miles as if it were part of the living skin of the planet and which seems to be affected by the local winds and pressure patterns as much as by food, mating or any of the accepted motivations for migration.
Schools of fish, being more amenable to laboratory experimentation, are better understood. Their formations in the sea vary in shape from square to diamond to elliptical to ameboid and, like sand grains on windswept dunes or orbiting particles in Saturn's rings, the individual fish automatically sort themselves out by size and speed. The newhatched fry of course are tiny plankton, who soon begin to swim, at first very slowly, but steadily gaining in both speed and size, their speed increasing (by Froude's Law) in direct proportion to the square root of their increasing length. Although they vitally need one another during all their early development (shown by the fact that isolated fry rarely survive) they keep a few inches apart, swimming irregularly until they are nearly half an inch long.
At this stage they suddenly and instinctively begin to feel regimentation, to swim side by side or parallel to one another for short distances, responding to each other visually, conforming more and more exactly to the regimen of their fellows as they grow bigger. They also come relatively closer together as they grow, reducing the separation distance from about three body lengths to half a length by the time they are four inches long and using their developing lateral-line pressure sense (page 208) to help maintain it. Because of the fact that smaller fish cannot keep pace with larger ones of the same species, they inevitably lag behind in ratio to their size, and that is what winnows them into their discrete grades or classes. It is a process really crucial in the schooling of minnows and a mark of its widespread success and importance as a way of life among fish is that an estimated 16,000 species (80 percent of them all) have adopted it, perhaps mainly because predators tend to become confused by mass-regimented fish and therefore leave more of them to survive. Fish in schools are also known to be able to swim for longer periods than unregimented fish, to cover greater distances and tolerate stresses such as colder temperatures and increased pollution. This probably relates to their mutually beneficial body radiation when in close formation and lower consumption of oxygen per fish (proven in diverse experiments) which in turn could well result (other evidence suggests) from their helping each other by positioning themselves in school ranks so each fish gets an energy boost from the wake eddies of fish ahead of him.