DEFINING LIFE

What is life? The demarcation between what is living and what is not seems so obvious to the average person that it is surprising to learn how much difficulty there is in the scientific community defining just what life is. Richard Dawkins who is considered by many, especially himself, as the foremost expert on the origin and evolution of life writes, “Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.” This may be a charming admission of humility in our 'foremost authority' but if a word like 'life' does not refer to anything definite, how can words like the 'origin of life' or the 'evolution of life' refer to anything definite either? If Dawkins begins without a clear definition of life, then how in the world does he know that any of his conclusions as to life's origin and development are in any way accurate? Is it possible that what Dawkins loquaciously espouses, whether we agree with it or not, is not really the origin and development of life, but merely the origin and development of the equipment that life uses?

Scientists often employ a list of the shared functions of life as a definition for life. In other words, life, by this definition, is "that which grows and develops, metabolizes energy, reproduces, eliminates waste and reacts to changes in its environment." Defining anything as "that which....." is never entirely satisfactory. If I say that my sister is "that which......eats ricotta cheese and Macoun apples, sends me a birthday card every year, and loves British television shows" all of which may be true, there is still some essence of my sister that is missing from this, or any, list of her activities, no matter how complete. Even if I listed every detail of my sister's daily life, behavior and history, which I would never do (I don't want you showing up at her door step saying, "So you're the sister of that guy with the weird blog!") it would still not capture her essence. I would be describing her behaviors and characteristics but not the person that performs those behaviors and that has those characteristics.

Let's suppose that we could construct the body of a robot that could somehow perform mechanically all the tasks of life that I mentioned above: growth, digestion, replication, etc. Let's imagine that this robot, behaviorally and physically, resembled a human being so well that you were fooled and did not know that this 'being' was, in fact, a robot. One day the robot breaks down; it suddenly stops. An expert is called in and you watch as the robot is dismantled, repaired and then restarted. The robot, then, continues on with no interruption of its earlier activities and no sense of regret or fear about what had happenned to it. When it needed a repair, it simply stopped. It did not care whether it stopped or not; it had no concern about whether it got repaired and remained functional or stood there, frozen in space and time. You would probably feel duped, because every communication that you had with this robot, while you thought it was a real human being, you had assumed was accompanied by some degree of genuine feeling and volition, that the robot was saying what it felt like saying, that it was talking because it wanted to. Now you realize that there was no feeling at all; that the robots words and intonations and facial expressions may have been artfully adjusted to give the impression of feeling and spontaneity, but that there was no real feeling or volition there; that there was no self capable of experiencing feelings or capable of 'wanting' to do anything. This revelation would probably feel similar to, but more intense than, the feeling that you have when you realize that the person talking to you on the phone is not making genuine conversation but is reading from a sales script, or worse, that it is a recorded message. So here is, at least, a hypothetical example of something, a robot, which could conceivably be designed to fulfill all those biological functions on the 'life' list in some kind of a mechanical way and yet still not be alive. One of the criteria that we use to determine that the robot is not alive is that the robot has no ability to care, if not for someone else, at least for its own survival; and that it has no desires of its own; but let's hold this line of inquiry for a moment while we consider something else.

The activities that are used to define life: growing, developing, metabolizing,etc., we do not actually do. We are so used to saying that we do these things that it may be shocking to learn that we actually do not. Now I don't want to underestimate anyone who may be reading this blog. I know you are very intelligent and capable, but, in truth, do you know how to grow your own body and metabolize energy from food sources and or is it done for you? If you do know, please don't tell anyone. You would immediately put several thousand research biologists out of business and our economy is suffering enough already. Please don't think that I am splitting hairs. If living is so elusive a concept that we are forced to define it by the things that living beings do, let's at least list those things that we actually do and not list processes that go on in our bodies, processes that we depend on, that serve us in vital ways, but that we do not actually execute and know next to nothing about. And don't confuse those few facts that you learned in biology class with your ability to do anything at all on a biological level. Our very best Nobel Prize biologists cannot begin to create anything from scratch, from basic elements, that metabolizes, grows, is responsive to it's surroundings, etc. And even the most brilliant biology students were breathing, metabolizing and growing just fine way before they ever heard of or could pronounce the word 'biology.'

Suppose you are acquainted with a very wealthy playboy who spends his entire time loafing and entertaining himself. Bewildered by his life style you ask him what he does. He proudly tells you that he manufactures tires, several million of them every year. Upon further investigation you discover that this tire business was, in fact, inherited from his father who inherited it from his grandfather. This gentleman's entire involvement with the tire business is to show up once a year for a board meeting during which he struggles to stay awake because he has so little knowledge of any of the business details that are being discussed. You have discovered the truth; that this fellow does not, in fact, manufacture tires; but that the tires are manufactured by others for his benefit. He is served by the manufacture of these tires but he does not really manufacture them. Likewise for the trophy wife who responds to an inquiry of just what it is that she does, by saying that she is raising her three children and maintaining a ten room house. You subsequently find out that she and her husband employ two full time maids, a full time nanny,a chauffeur and a cook. The kids are woken up and gotten ready for their prep schools by the nanny, cooked and served breakfast by the cook and driven to school by the chauffeur, while our 'housewife' sleeps in. After school they are in the care of the nanny who tries to keep them occupied until dinner, which is prepared by the cook and served by the maid, at which point the children may be joined, on ocassion, by their mother if her social schedule permits. Once again, she is not bringing up children or maintaining a home. It is all being done for her. She is benefitting from it; all these people serve her, but she is not actually doing the work and probably does not know how to.

Getting back to accurately defining life, with this understanding, life is not "that which metabolizes, grows, develops, eliminates, etc." but life is "that which is served by a metabolic system, a process of growth and development, and systems of reproduction and elimination." Is this the best we can do to define life and to define ourselves? No wonder Dawkins questions whether there is any such thing as living and others believe that consciousness is the same thing as the physical brain and the self is a figment of our imagination. Defining life by the processes that serve it would be like writing an obituary for a great woman or man by simply listing this person's staff, assistants and aides with no mention of the person's actual accomplishments.

Abraham Lincoln was a great man. He was assisted in life by a devoted mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, a brilliant Secretary of State, William H. Seward, an astute Secretary of the Treasury, Salman P. Chase, and a fearless general, Ulysses S. Grant. Oh, yes, he was assassinated in 1865. What a shame!

This kind of definition is almost comically demeaning to Lincoln's life. Were there no things that we could list that Abraham Lincoln actually accomplished himself; nothing for which he, himself, could be proud? Of course there were. Yet this is very similar to the way that we currently define ourselves as living beings. By defining living as a list of biological processes, processes that, supposedly, came about accidentally, randomly and mechanically (Darwin and Dawkins), and processes that cannot be properly understood, supposedly, without years of post graduate study and research; well, where does that leave the vast majority of us? Is there nothing about life, about us, that is unique? Nothing in which we can take pride or gratitude or even understand and appreciate?

If life is too elusive to define it directly, could we at least define it by isolating those activities that we actually do; activities that distinguish us from inanimate objects and even distinguish us from the organic materials of our bodies; from fats and proteins and nucleic acids; and from the biological processes that these materials are engaged in? Can we say what it is that these processes serve? What is it that these processes allow us, and all of life to do? With Richard Dawkins' objection duly noted, I can say, emphatically, yes, we can. Life is that which experiences and initiates. All our biological processes serve us in that they allow us to experience and to initiate; our sense organs allow us to experience the physical world in a particular way and our brains allow us to record and define those experiences; and our nervous systems, skeletons and musculature allow us to express, or manifest, our desires in the physical world. We, as living beings as opposed to matter, experience things and we do things because we want to do things. Now I know that I am suggesting a complete paradigm shift in the way that we look at life and that my words may have already provoked in you a torrent of materialist objections. I will anticipate some of these objections and try to respond to them later in the post. For now, let's return for a moment to our foremost expert on life, Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins would have us believe that prior to life there was no consciousness, no purpose and no initiative. There was merely the random collision of atoms, expanding and contracting, combining to form molecules and separating into individual atoms again. (The fact that these combinings and expansions and contractions followed an uncannily precise and inviolable set of physical laws without which there would be no atoms,no molecules, no galaxies and no Big Bang, which supposedly put this whole thing in motion; and where these laws came from, is never explained or discussed). Again, according to Dawkins, the first self initiated action in the entire universe, the first thing that was done by 'itself' (prior to this moment there was no such thing as a self) was that a randomly accumulated molecule 'made a copy of itself', it self-replicated. That the first self-initiated action in the universe was made by a molecule (no known organic molecule initiates anything, but merely, and automatically, responds to enzymes and electronic stimuli connected to the needs and cycles of a cell) and that this first initiated action was not some simple movement or simple starting or stopping, but replication, perhaps the most baffling and complex of all biological activities; and that the molecule that self-replicated just happenned to be made of nucleic acids that were arranged in a code that coded for proteins each of which proteins must be of an absolutely precise shape, charge and chemical composition to be of any biological value what so ever;and that this code was not like any other code we know, like letters or numbers or computer code; but these nucleic acids arranged themselves into codes, which is equivalent to letters arranging themselves into novels, numbers arranging themselves into equations and the high and low frequency charges of computer code arranging themselves into software programs; and that the entire mechanism for translating this code into proteins, which mechanism is similar to our best modern day computers, except much more precise and complex, had also and simultaneously accumulated by itself;and the amazing system whereby these proteins are then combined with each other and energized to form a specific and growing body with a specific and growing shape; all of this somehow being done by itself; and how the organic ingredients (think raw eggs without their shells) of this molecule could accumulate over millions of years without any protection (in our bodies our DNA is protected by the wall of the nucleus, the wall of the cell,our skin and the homeostatic processes of our bodies, and we live in an age of moderate temperatures, not an age of boiling oceans, enormous volcanic eruptions and constant asteroid bombardments which were the conditions of the early earth when all of this "accumulating" was supposedly taking place) and how this self replicating molecule could not only replicate its chemical composition but it could replicate this relentless desire to replicate which continues in its progeny to this day; all of this is never explained. And not only is it not explained, but if it is questioned, then the questioner is considered to be someone who is insufficiently educated or too blinded by deep seated religious prejudices to accept the truth of Dawkins' teaching.

If you think this is how life began, it may be time to think again (please see my posts ORIGIN OF LIFE and IMMACULATE REPLICATION). Yet however you think life began, whenever it did begin, along with it began the desire to survive. Before life, there was nothing that cared whether it survived or not. Certainly atoms didn't care if they turned into a gas or a liquid or a solid; if they combined with other atoms to form molecules or separated into individual atoms again. No one and no thing cared. It was simply, in Dawkins' vision, a mechanical universe, with every action caused by a reaction and those actions and reactions determined by specific, unalterable physical laws (with matter, nothing matters).

With the advent of life we have something completely different. We have a revolution on several fronts. First of all, regarding the unalterable physical laws (gravity, electomagnetism, strong force and weak force), these did not change, but with the advent of life came the advent of metabolic systems. What is a metabolic system? It is a system in which energy is borrowed and directed to accomplish a purpose. Replication, or any biological process, cannot take place without borrowed energy. Life processes still operate within the four forces of physics, but life forms are metabolic systems that use energy to overcome these forces to accomplish a goal. On a behavioral level we use energy to overcome these physical forces and the energy used to overcome these forces we call desire. On a biological level, energy is used to overcome these forces in order to operate biological processes and we call that energy will. The purpose of will is to survive. But what is trying to survive? Certainly not the atoms and molecules of the body. Why would atoms and molecules suddenly care about what form they were in? What wants to survive is the being that experiences the world and that fulfills desires through this body. We want the biological processes that serve us to keep going so that we can continue to experience the world and to some degree fulfill our desires through this body. When survival attempts fail, the being that imbues the body with purpose and that experiences things through the body leaves and the lifeless physical body, suddenly devoid of purpose and no longer the ground of anyone's experience, yet still containing all its molecules and atoms, remains.

Along with metabolic systems and the will to survive, the advent of life brings with it the advent of experience. Suddenly, there is a self, there is a 'that' which experiences that. Please note that I did not say that the first known life forms, primordial bacteria, had souls. The idea of a 'soul' is connected to the idea of someone's ability to contemplate their place in the universe. Do I believe in contemplative bacteria? No. Do I believe that bacteria have self-consciousness in that they carry around some idea or some picture of themselves? No, of course not. I am simply saying that bacteria experience things in a way that non-living congregations of molecules do not.

Bacteria are equipped with a light sensitive membrane. What is the purpose of this membrane? It allows the microbe a level of discernment that enables it to distinguish to some degree what there is in the environment that it should avoid (predators, toxins, etc.) and what there is in the environment that it should pursue (edible materials, water, etc.) Now if we agree that microbes are equipped with a system whose purpose is discernment, then we must ask what or who is it in the microbe that is doing the discerning? What or who is it that is using this information to decide to move toward this perceived object or to move away; to eat or not to eat? You may say, no, the microbe just automatically goes toward the nutrients it needs and automatically avoids predators. But what is that automatic process? We know that negative and positive charges will automatically attract each other like the opposite poles of a magnet. Is this the same thing? Are bacteria drawn to nutrients in the same way that iron filings are drawn to a magnet? If so, then why have any system of discernment at all? You have probably read in the Darwin section of your biology textbooks how the light sensitive membrane is the pre-cursor of the human eye and you have probably seen charts plotting the gradual, step by step perfection of organs of vision (absolute nonsense, by the way. There is no step by step genetic process leading from a light sensitive membrane to a human eye. That would be like going from a doll house to the Taj Mahal, by adding on to the doll house and along the way having it turn into a lean to, a hut, a bungalow, a ranch house, a mansion, a palace, and voila..the Taj Mahal. If you ever get a chance to build a Taj Mahal you'd probably want to start from scratch, not by building add-ons to your doll house, although you might want to use some ideas that you gleaned in the process of creating and designing all those earlier structures when you set about to build the latest one). But still it is indicative of the obvious understanding that light sensitive membranes allow the bacteria (again, not the body of the bacteria, but the being that inhabits that single cell) to determine where to go. Now I am not saying that bacteria have free will or that they spend any time wondering what they will do at any given moment. Bacteria are driven, but not by automatic forces, like a robot, but by powerful desires, like living beings. In other words, bacteria go toward nutrients because they are attracted to those nutrients. But that attraction is an experienced attraction. It is not the passive, unexperienced attraction of iron filings moving toward a magnet; it is the experienced attraction of a living being moving toward something that attracts 'it.' For this to take place there has to be some biological equipment that reacts in some way to environmental signals and there has to be an 'it', which is a living being, which experiences this biological reaction as an irresistible desire. Do bacteria have free will? Do they have any choice in the matter? Probably not, but that is not because they are automatons, it is because the desires that they experience are irresistible and overwhelming.

Now let's look at where biology ends and desire begins. Biologists think that we eat because our body needs nourishment; we sleep because our body needs restoration and we have sex because we need to propagate the species. But biologists look exclusively at the equipment that we use and not at the experiences we actually have. In reality we do not do any voluntary actions for biological reasons. Yes, involuntary processes are driven by biological survival needs, but our voluntary behavior is completely different. We have little to no idea and no control of what is going on inside our bodies. If the great majority of us in the twenty-first century are basically ignorant of what is happening within our bodies on a biological level, then, certainly, primordial bacteria had no idea either. We don't eat and bacteria don't eat eat because our blood sugar is too low or some other chemical is depleted; we eat because we are the recipients and the beneficiaries of an amazing system whereby the nutrients we need to ingest seem pleasurable to us when we need to ingest them. We eat because we find food to be delicious. We eat because we want to. And the more our bodies need the nourishment, the more delicious it seems. We sleep not to biologically restore our bodies, but because the idea of sleeping seems pleasurable and appealing to us and the more we need it, the more appealing it seems. We eliminate waste not to reduce toxins but because the build up in our bladders and intestines is uncomfortable and the release is pleasurable. And, of course, we have sex because we desire it, not to propagate the species. While our bodies 'need' certain things, we, not as bodies, but as beings, do the things and take in the things that our bodies need because we 'want' to, and we want to because it feels good. Every life form inherits a complete and utterly amazing system (that is never even discussed or considered by Dawkins and his ilk) whereby the things that it needs to survive are pleasurable to it and the things that threaten its survival are painful to it. Please think about this. This elaborate but uninvestigated system is so much a part of every life form that we may think of it as inevitable; that it is just the way that it is. But it is not inevitable. Because there are certain electrical and chemical processes in your stomach and intestine and in certain areas of your brain does not automatically translate into hunger and a desire for nutritious food. The fact that there are other chemical and electrical processes in your body during puberty, does not automatically translate into the desire for sex. Hunger and the desire for sex are carefully designed coded responses to these electrical and chemical activities. This is an entire system, above and beyond the visible, electro-chemical biological systems that we are used to studying; an incredibly specific and balanced system whereby what we 'want' is exactly that which will deliver our survival and our replication. And we cannot possibly imagine such an amazing and intricate system 'evolving.' For any life form to exist beyond the first few minutes, it must want what it biologically needs, and want to avoid what will biologically destroy it. You cannot imagine generations of life forms evolving by any random gradual process to be able to be aware of these chemical and electrical responses that we now call thirst, and then evolving randomly to the point that they can identify that "thirst" sensation as a desire to drink, and evolving generations later to learn that that sensation will be satisfied by water and then still later evolving a method of finding the water and then still later evolving a biological method of drinking it. This is all absurd. Darwin's principle of natural selection is based on the idea of nature selecting from a group of competitors the one's best able to adapt and survive; but there can be no living competitors to select from, at all, unless these competitors are already metabolizing, growing, replicating, digesting, eliminating and sensing their environment; and unless they already have in place an entire system whereby they are attracted to the nutrients and the water and the temperature changes they need at the time when they need it.

You may say that these behaviors and attractions are genetic. You can even see how these behaviors become distorted and self-destructive when genes are damaged by radiation mutations. This is true. Yes, the perfect balance of our behaviors with our biological needs is connected to our genes (connected but not 'caused' by genes. Bodies and human behavior are not caused by genes anymore than letters 'cause' novels or numbers 'cause' equations). I am saying that these basic life sustaining systems and behaviors could not have been 'learned' by the genes; that this could not have been evolving knowledge over any period of time; that it had to be there right from the inception of life forms or there would be no evolution and no survival at all; that it had to be part of the original design of life forms, and, if you prefer, I am happy to say the original genetic design of life forms (although genetic designs are like blue prints, or recipes; they don't write themselves; they are the materialization of creative ideas that are then written down in letters, numbers, diagrams or in the case of living bodies, in nucleic acids).

I want to say some more about this amazing system whereby the biological needs of our bodies are connected in perfect complementary balance to our desires. Very conservatively, there are at least ten quadrillion electrical and chemical processes taking place in our bodies at each moment. That is a lot of processes. If there are close to seven billion fellow human beings on this planet, that works out to well over a million processes for every man and woman and child on the Earth, all occurring within each of our bodies at every moment. How many of those processes are we in any way aware of? How many translate into any kind of experience whatsoever? An infinitesimally small amount. Not only do we (the great, great majority of us) not know anything about what is going on in our bodies, we are not even 'aware' of what is going on. Peristalysis, blood flow, enzyme production,every one of our one hundred trillion cells a beehive of frenetic molecular and electrical activity and we feel nothing. Let's say we felt, or were aware of 1%of these processes on some level. That means that we would be bombarded with one hundred trillion sensations at each moment. If we had any awareness of one billionth of what was going on that would leave us with several billion simultaneous sensations. In terms of my own experience, I may be able to handle and compartmentalize three or four conflicting sensations. Anything much more than that and I am paralyzed, a basket case. So, another aspect of this beautiful system, is that none of these processes, in any way, intrude upon our consciousness except when some behavior is required on our part. And exactly the same thing must be said for the primordial bacteria whose tiny one-celled body is host to hordes of molecules and countless electrons. Even in that microscopic body only a miniscule portion of electrical or chemical processes can be translated into any kind of microbial awareness or the result would be paralyzing.


Please don't take this for granted. Please don't say something senseless like, "That's just our stomach telling us it wants food," or "That's just our body letting us know it needs some sleep." Why is it that people who consider themselves so intellectually superior to "superstitious" concepts like cosmic consciousness or universal intelligence,or God, have no problem babbling such thoughtless drivel about hungry stomachs and talking bodies. Folks, your stomach is not hungry. Your stomach doesn't care whether you eat or not; your stomach doesn't care about anything. It's a stomach. It doesn't feel better when you eat; it doesn't feel worse when you don't eat. It doesn't feel anything at all. It's a stomach. And there is no such person as "your body." "Your body" doesn't want to sleep. Your body never feels tired and it never feels well rested. You feel tired; you feel well rested. Your body feels nothing at all. It's a body. Please understand that I am not demeaning this fabulous physical equipment that we have been given. The body is endlessly complex and endlessly amazing; and the more you study it the more complex and amazing it gets. But the body is not a being; it has no intentions; it doesn't experience anything; and it doesn't care about anything. It is your instrument that allows you, not your body, to experience the physical world and manifest your intentions in the physical world.

And it is not inevitable that a chemical and electrical reaction in your stomach should translate into an experience of hunger. There is no inevitable connection between electrons and chemicals and experience. If there were you would be reacting at every moment to your ten quadrillion chemical and electrical processes. Good luck with that! It is a system, an amazing, precise, selective and coded system. Basically the same electron flows at the same voltage and the same chemical deposits in the brain record every aspect of our entire human experience, intellectual, emotional, artistic, sensual, etc. There is no inevitable relationship between any electrical and chemical pattern and any experience. A Masai warrior uses basically the same system of neurons and the same electron flows and chemical deposits to record his experiences and help define his life that a Kalamazoo orthodontist uses to record his completely different experiences and help define his completely different life. Just like with other codes: there is no inevitable relationship between the code and what it is coding for; there is no inevitable relationship between the shape of the letters l o v and e and the experiences we associate with the word love; there is no inevitable relationship between the following shapes: p i r and 2 and the area of a circle. There is no inevitable relationship between a particular sequence of nucleic acids (genes) and a particular sequence of amino acids (proteins). They are coded that way because they have been organized that way. Codes are organized by intelligent beings (or, in the case of biological codes, by intelligent Being) as a way of communicating intelligent ideas and constructs from one being to another. They are intelligently conceived, intelligently organized, intelligently translated and intelligently experienced.

Why do we even say things like, "My body is telling me to lie down?" Because we can sense from the way these sensations impinge on our consciousness and from our ever beating hearts and our ever breathing lungs, that something or someone cares about us; something or someone wants us to take care of ourselves and survive. Why attribute that caring to feelingless and intentionless organs and tissues. Doesn't it make much more sense to attribute that caring to the Being whose limitless intelligence, limitless creativity and limitless caring supplied you with all this precious equipment in the first place? It is not your body that wants your body to survive. It is the Cosmic Conciousness or God whose boundless intelligence designed this amazing body and this remarkable system whereby you are alerted whenever you need to do something to help protect and sustain your body and its biological processes. It's not the body that wants you to get enough to eat. It's God that wants you to get enough to eat. It's not the body that created the amazing system of pain that alerts you whenver you are injuring yourself; it's God that wants to protect you and wants your body to survive so that you can experience the world and learn the things that you need to learn. And if you have negative associations with the word God because a nun was mean to you or a priest flirted with you or a rabbi was callous to you or a televangelist was seen at a peep show, or some pompous cynic like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Bill Mahr told you it was old fashioned and superstitious, GET OVER IT! What anyone ever did who called themselves religious has absolutely nothing to do with the omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient Creator Who pervades every atom of this universe, and without Whom, despite all the desperate efforts of twentieth century science to avoid it, the Universe, our lives, how we got here, how the planet got here and how the galaxy got here, make absolutely no sense.

I have to mention two more things that, by Dawkins' world view, must be initiated by the arrival of that first 'replicating molecule.' The first thing, or two things, is good and bad. In a purely material world there is no good or bad, there is only indifference. If something explodes, if something contracts, if something heats up or cools down, it is of absolutely no difference to the atoms and molecules involved; and if there truly was, prior to the arrival of life forms, nothing else but particles, then what happenned was of absolutely no difference at all. With the arrival of life forms all that changes. Life forms want to survive and life forms need things from their environment in order to survive. If a life form gets what it wants then that, from the point of view of that life form, is good. If a life form does not get what it wants and does not survive, or can feel the end of its survival approaching, then that is bad. With life, then, there comes about points of view and good and bad outcomes. Life cares; if not about anyone or anything else, it cares, at least, about its own survival.

There is a lot of talk that you may have heard or read about the beginning of altruism and morality. Is it genetic or cultural; do animals have morality, etc.? But, for there to be altruism there has to be selfishness, and for there to be selfishness there has to be a 'self' with a self-interest and a point of view. When altruism appeared among life forms is another matter; but if you study gene swapping among bacteria, it's hard to imagine anything more altruistic (and more intelligent) than that process (see my post EVOLUTION). The point is that when life forms began, if we follow Dawkins' scenario, then, at that very moment, selves, points of view and good and bad began. So, this is yet another revolution, unexamined by Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists, that had to have begun with this 'accidental' accumulation of a molecule that 'makes copies of itself.'

And finally, the arrival of life forms, again from Dawkins' perspective, marked the arrival of intelligence. Those of you who think of intelligence as one of the advanced bells and whistles of the human brain may understandably gasp; but let me first explain what I mean by intelligence. Intelligence, like life, has eluded a solid definition by the scientific community. Like life, intelligence can be observed by its results in terms of behavior, speech and creativity, but it cannot be observed directly. Let me suggest that intelligence is not a thing that can be quantified or measured but an attitude. When a living being looks or listens or in any way attempts to read its environment to determine whether it is safe or dangerous, whether it can, at that moment, provide the food or water or rest or temperature change or safety that it needs, that 'attitude' is intelligence. Let's distinguish between intelligence and intellect. Intellect may be the sole province of human beings and may require language, numbers and other symbology. Intellect is the attempt to read and understand environments other than the one that is immediately facing you, including both real environments and conceptual environments. Intelligence is the attitude of attempting to read the environment that one is confronted with in the present moment in order to get one's needs met; and intelligence is the province of all of life. Are some species, and some individuals within a species better at getting their needs met than others? Yes, but the difference has to do with their biological equipment, their musculature, reaction time, sense organs, etc. Certainly, the more complex the sense organs, the more distinctions can be made and the more sensitive a read on the environment a life form has; and there is a very wide variety of equipment that a life form has in terms of fins or feelers or legs or wings, etc. to act on the information that it receives, and bigger brains allow more information to be stored and remembered and the ability to make more subtle distinctions among a variety of environmental cues. But the attitude is the same; the attempt to read the environent is the same; the readiness to marshall resources to respond to the received information is the same; and that attitude is intelligence; and it is something we share with all of life.

To re-iterate, life then is that which experiences and initiates and life has the characteristic of caring and intelligence. The last part of the definition that I would like to discuss is the 'that which' part. I said in the beginning that defining something as 'that which' is not entirely satisfactory, but in this case it will have to do. The reason we must settle for a 'that which' definition is that life is not really a thing, at all. Life is not content, but context. All through this post, with each characteristic of life I prefaced the discussion by saying that 'according to Dawkins' view' these characteristics: having a self, having desires, the ability to experience, intelligence and caring, all began with the beginning of life forms, and that beginning happenned with the chance accumulation of a molecule that could make copies of itself. But this is, of course, nonsense. Life forms did not begin with a randomly accumulated molecule, and caring, intelligence and purpose did not begin with the beginning of life forms. Before there were life forms there was life formless. Life formless or what we call cosmic consciousness or God included unlimited caring and intelligence before there were life forms and even before there was matter. It is out of life formless, out of unlimited intelligence and caring, that the physical laws came that engendered the material universe, and that the whole system of genetic reproduction, translation and transcription was conceived, that allowed not life, but life forms, life connected to a particular body with a particular limited and specific perspective, to manifest. Life itself is context, not content; it is not a thing but it is the invisible bowl within which you experience 'things' and it is the non-physical milieu out of which comes your desires to manifest things in the physical world.

Your comments are always welcome.

EXPERIENCE

I would really like your feedback on this post. I am making no assumptions here. I am writing simply about my experience. What I imagine is that your experience is very much like mine and I would like to find out from you if this is true or not. Now I am not going to be writing about the content of my experience. I know that the content of my experience is quite a bit different than the content of yours (thank God, or we would all die of boredom) and by content I mean not just the facts and memories that I have experienced, but the attitudes and the beliefs that I have about this experience. No, what I am talking about is a bit more subtle than that. I am talking about the context of my experience; not the experience, but who is experiencing the experience.

Now I realize that we are not a very reflective society, but I am asking that you reflect on my words before you give me feed back. I am not interested in what your biology teacher thinks or what your pastor thinks. I am not interested in your 'researched' answer. I am interested in you searching, not researching. Just ask yourself as you read this post, if this an accurate description of your actual experience, or does your experience differ in some way. Again, not what you have been taught, but what and how you actually experience things. And I know that in our society we are taught by experts, both scientific and religious, not to trust our experience. Scientists tell us that we, as layman, lack the knowledge to understand our experience, and that we must be guided by the latest research; also, that there are many things about our experience that we do not yet know, but that must await future research which may take several generations. Some pastors, rabbis, priests and imams, also tell us that we, as layman, can be easily deceived; that experience can be misunderstood and we can be led down a dangerous path. But again, I am not talking about the content, but the context of experience. I am not talking about anything that can be observed or researched, and I am not talking about any attitude or idea about how to relate to the physical universe. I am simply talking about us, not the content but the context of our experience.

The first thing that I want to say about my experience (and possibly yours) is that I am not my body. I am that which experiences my body. I can move around my body; in fact I can move any place along my brain/nervous system that I choose to. But I am not my brain/nervous system. I am that which is moving around my brain/nervous system. Often I choose where I want to go. If I want to remember something, I go to that part of my brain where I have stored those memories; those memories are stored in a coded system of neural pathways and chemical deposits. When I go there, I translate that code; and those neural pathways and chemical deposits become the memories of what I had previously thought or experienced. If I want to enjoy the taste of something I go to the taste buds in my mouth and the chemical interaction of the food in my mouth and my tastebuds becomes the delicious experience that I was seeking. If I want to feel something pleasurable I go to where my skin is touching that surface and I have a pleasurable experience when I attend to it. Until I get there (and by the way, I am not travelling by bus, my mode of transportation is my attention) all the above are electrical and chemical reactions. It is only when I attend to them that they become an experience of pain or hunger or pleasure or memory.

Now many scientists will tell me that when I feel hunger, it only feels like I am experiencing it in my stomach, and it only feels like I am experiencing tastes in my mouth. That what is really happening, is that those chemical sensations are being translated into electrical patterns and these are travelling to my brain and my brain, at the hunger center, and at the tasting center, is what is really experiencing these sensations. Before I respond to this objection, I would like to discuss vision. The complexity of the eye and the optic nerve have been a hot topic of debate among Darwinian evolutionists and intelligent designers. How could any structure with the exquisite and coherent complexity of a human eye possibly be constructed by the blind, random system of genetic mutations? I am going to quote something here from Michael Behe. Have you heard of him? He is an intelligent designer and a biochemist. Here is his explanation of how we see:

Here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision. When light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior, making it stick to another protein called transducin. Before bumping into activated rhodopsin, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with activated rhodopsin, the GDP falls off and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.)
GTP-transducin-activated rhodopsin now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to activated rhodopsin and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cut a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, like a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub.

Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

My explanation is just a sketchy overview of the biochemistry of vision. Ultimately, though, this is what it means to "explain" vision.

Pretty complicated, eh? And notice that he says that this is just a 'sketchy' overview of vision. Now I am about to criticize Michael Behe, and in criticizing him I feel a little like a Democrat criticizing President Obama. Obama has enough criticism to deal with at the moment coming at him from the right; he doesn't really need criticism from the left. In the case of Michael Behe, it is not a criticism of left vs. right, or liberal vs. conservative. With regard to Michael Behe, he is taking a daring and heroic stand as a career biochemist and is under a constant barrage of attack from the Darwinist establishment. This is not a criticism from the left vs. the right, but from a spiritual spiritualist, me, criticizing a spiritual materialist, Behe, who is under siege from material materialists, the Darwinian scientific establishment (please see my post MIRACLES).

But I do want you to notice one very important thing about Behe's explanation of vision: although I am sure that all the impressive details of his explanation are accurate, it is NOT an explanation of vision. It is an explanation of how photons of light are translated into electrical impulses in the optic nerve. What about actual seeing? After this entire complex and detailed description of how photons are translated to electrons, all he says regarding vision is the following:

The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

That's it. That is his entire explanation, after all that biochemistry, of how we translate those electrons into our actual experience of sight. To explain the translation of photons to electrons, three incredibly complex paragraphs which is only a 'sketch.' To explain the translation of electrons to the actual experience of vision, four words "interpreted by the brain." Okay, so where? Where is this brain interpretation taking place? Not where the optic neurons are located, but where the translation is located, the organ, the process, that translates the neural electrical patterns to vision?

And the answer, of course, is that there are no such organs or processes, electrical or chemical. When I focus on looking at something it seems like I am looking at it through my eyes, from just behind the retina, at the tip of the optical nerve. It seems that way because it is that way. That is where I experience vision from. That is where I, a non-physical being, am when I see. I see through and at my eyes, I hear through and at my ears (at the tip of the auditory nerve, just behind the cochlia), taste at my taste buds, and touch on my skin. All the endless discussion about an eye evolving by 'itself' makes absolutely no sense. An eye is of no use unless there is an intelligent being looking through that eye; and by intelligent I do not mean intellectual. The purpose of the eye is discernment; to distinguish one thing from another, and most simply, to distinguish what is harmful from what is needed. Intelligence is the ability to read one's environment to be able to distinguish what is needed from what is harmful and to adjust one's behavior correspondingly, or adaptively, so that one's needs can be met and one can survive. I appreciate the dilligent work that has gone into the enormously detailed analysis of the mechanisms of the eye, but what sense does it make without including, in one's understanding, the non-physical being with his or her non-physical intelligence, that is looking through that eye?

So why do I always have this corresponding neural activity in my brain when I am looking at something? Two reasons: The first is that my brain is RECORDING everything that I experience; but the brain is recording what I experience; it is not recording what my brain experiences (the brain, like the rest of my body is matter, and experiences nothing). The second reason, and the reason that I have a brain connected to my consciousness in the first place, is that I use the memories and thoughts and insights that I have recorded in my brain to help me DEFINE my experience. When I see a tree, I see those sensations of green and brown against a blue background, and my brain lets me know, by automatically conjuring associations that I have previously made, that those sensations are called a tree, that it is located in our backyard, and that it needs trimming.

Which brings me to another point. I can be in more than one place along my brain/nervous system at a time. I can be focussed and focussless. I can only focus deeply on one place at a time, but even when I do I am also receiving background information. So I am experiencing something and defining my experience simultaneously. Why do I do that? Because I want to. At a very early age I discovered that I didn't like bunking into things and falling into holes, so I decided, whenever I was moving, to be continually aware and interpreting peripheral visual signals even while I was focussing on something else. But besides peripheral awarenesses, my focus of experience, be it my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or whatever, become the focal point for a whole raft of defining information and connected thoughts. These associations that I make are guided by the structures of my brain and by my desires; I automatically understand what I am experiencing because of the memories of related experiences that I have had and have recorded in my brain. These definitions allow me to establish and deepen my relationships to the physical world, my society and to other beings.

I am the seer of my sights, the hearer of my sounds, the thinker of my thoughts. I am that which experiences that. My fantastic sensory equipment and my fabulous brain assist me in defining what I am seeing and hearing and thinking, but all of my actual experiencing is not taking place on the physical plane, because I am not part of the physical plane. Matter does not experience anything; and matter does not initiate anything. Matter does not initiate anything because matter does not want to initiate anything. Folks, it's just matter. As amazingly complex and intricate as my eyes and ears and brain are, they are, still, just matter. They neither experience nor initiate. Me, a non-physical being, does that. What about you?

Your comments are most welcome.

MIRACLES

"We come spinning out of nothingness; scattering stars like dust."
Rumi

The miraculousness of an event is due to its origin, not its frequency.There are extremely unusual occurrences which cannot be called miraculous. Drawing a royal straight flush from the first five cards you are dealt from a shuffled deck may be, even for an avid poker player,a once in a lifetime experience, but it is not a miracle. Monkeys jumping up and down on keyboards may type out a poem; they may even type out the complete works of Shakespeare. (Although if you're in the laboratory waiting for this to happen, I hope you remembered to bring your lunch.) Looking at it at the level of statistics, these events are highly improbable, but still possible (of course for space purposes we must ignore, for now, the much larger issue of the probability of anything of coherent complexity on the order of monkeys, humans or keyboards appearing in a random universe in the first place; and the even larger issue of the probability of a precise, mechanistic universe obeying a whole raft of inviolable physical and chemical laws emerging from a consciousless, purposeless, meaningless void). Coincidences also, even the most unusual, can be explained in terms of probabilities. So, if on the same hand of five cards one person draws a royal straight flush, which is a probability of one out of twenty-three million seven hundred sixty-two thousand seven hundred and fifty-two, and another person draws a full house, which is a probability, by itself, of one out of two thousand one hundred and ninety-seven; it would probably give the loser little comfort to find out, after he bet and lost his entire life savings on his full house, that the possibility of those two events happening together would be a whopping one out of fifty-two billion two hundred six million seven hundred sixty-six thousand one hundred fourteen. A very unusual circumstance? Yes. A miracle? No.

The origin of an event determines whether or not it is miraculous. A truly miraculous event is one that is caused by a non-physical source, by something that cannot be observed or measured; something that is not part of the physical universe. An event that begins in the non-physical,the spiritual, and ends in the physical; that is a miracle. Most people think of a non-physical cause, if such a thing exists, as emanating from a divine being, so miracles are considered divine. But some people consider human beings and even all living beings, even though they inhabit bodies, as being essentially spiritual, or non-physical. From this perspective, anything that starts with an intention (Divine, human or otherwise) is miraculous since intentions are not part of the measurable, physical universe. Intentions, or desires, are the bridge between the non-physical world of being and the physical world of matter and energy. Within the non-physical realm I include the moment to moment experience of your life, which you experience but which no one else can either observe or experience; your Self, not your body or cells, or genes or neurons, or all the quadrillions of simultaneous biological processes that occur in your body at every moment, but that which experiences and benefits from all of these and which cannot be measured or observed by any outsider, including any scientist, and cannot be observed even by yourself. I also include the impossibly complex organization of living beings; not the matter that is being organized, but the organization itself, which is often referred to in scientific circles as 'the program' which governs the synchronization and organization of quadrillions of processes that deliver growth, replication, metabolism, digestion, elimination, and the ability to sense the external world. This 'program' and all the knowledge and intelligence needed to run it has never been seen by anyone or through any instrumentation, and it never will be. Will, intelligence and desire are also non-physical. They are experienced but not observed. And, finally, I include natural forces, like gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. I am not talking about the matter and energy that is affected by these forces, but the forces themselves. We know the forces are there because we can see their results, but we cannot observe them directly. How did they get there and does their existence have a material bases?

MATERIAL MATERIALISTS
Regarding attitudes toward miracles, the population can be divided into three basic groups. The first is what I call the material materialists or atheists. This group believes that there never is and there never was anything that can be called a miracle; that everything can be explained in terms of physical antecedents. Non-physical things are considered to be the result of matter. Consciousness is considered to be the result of the measurable electro- magnetic patterns surrounding the brain that are caused by firing neurons. You, or the self, is considered to not exist at all, but to be an illusion perpetrated by matter (the brain) to allow an organism to concentrate on one thing at a time (although if you are an illusion, who is it that is doing the concentrating?). Complexity of organization is considered to be the cause of intelligence, rather than vice-versa; and the amazing complexity of living creatures is considered to be the result of matter (nucleotides) arranged in genetic sequences. Also, the will to survive is considered to be the result of, to be emanating from, the DNA molecule. Supposedly this DNA molecule or some molecule similar to it suddenly emerged from the chance combination of chemicals armed with an unobservable but relentless determination to replicate itself that it was able to pass on, by itself, to its progeny from that moment forward to the present time, even though no molecule leading up to that moment had the least ability or interest or will to do anything at all, much less to replicate. Also, physical forces are considered to be the result of matter. For instance, electro-magnetic energy is considered to be emanating from and formed by electrons (or even tinier particles within the electron force field) and protons (or tiny particles within the proton force field); and gravity is considered to be the result of mass, and mass is considered to be the result of a theoretical particle which has not as yet been observed, but scientists are so sure that this mass conferring particle exists that they have already given it a name, the "Higgs Boson."

We will get back to all of these later in this post, but it should be noted that none of these causal relationships are known at this time. It is the belief of the material materialists (you didn't think that materialism meant the absence of beliefs, did you?) that these causal relationships will eventually be worked out and that the formulas and equations will be discovered that will enable us to understand and even replicate the processes whereby chemicals are turned into life, genetic material is turned into living bodies, consciousness and intelligence are created from electronic complexity, the will to survive is concocted from a combination of organic chemicals and the forces of physics are manufactured from sub-atomic particles. Rather than living in a miraculous world, material materialists live in a world that is completely explainable by observation of physical reality; or, really, that will be completely explainable as soon as the research is completed and the relevant equations and formulas are discovered. In the interim, which is now, none of it is explainable; but material materialists live in the hope and the belief that eventually, and perhaps even in their lifetime, it all will be.

I don't want to be a spiritual killjoy, but I know that none of this will happen. You cannot explain the origin of material by pointing to other material. I am not saying that there aren't sequential reactions, physical causes and effects that can be scientifically studied and observed. Of course this is true. The whole inanimate physical universe can be regarded as one gigantic sequence of causes and effects that began once precise physical laws were in place (it's the origin and make up of those laws that is the tricky part). Matter does not initiate anything and it does not experience anything. It merely reacts. Beings both initiate and experience, and the reason, ultimately, for the initiation of anything is so that a being can have a certain kind of experience. The initiation of anything by a being is called an intention, and the purpose of every intention is to manipulate matter or energy to provide an experience for that being or for other beings. Matter and energy are always the medium through which intentions are expressed, but matter and energy are never the origin nor the ultimate result of intention.

Let's put it another way. The universe is now being described in terms of a spacetime continuum and a fabric of space which bends and expands. This fabric of space is often likened to the surface of an expanding balloon. Although it has four dimensions (height, width, depth and time) it is considered to be all on one plane, like the surface of that balloon. When scientists study this physical plane and look for causes (how this or that happened to come about) they look for physical, observable antecedents within this plane. But all these answers to causal questions are lateral, in that the causes come from the same plane as the results. What if the entire plane was a result and the causes were elsewhere? What elsewhere could there be if the entire physical universe is encompassed in this plane? I am talking about something which is non-physical, which is no thing, which is beyond space and time and therefore, impossible to conceive. But for a conception that might be useful just as a way of trying to understand it, we could imagine, if we return to the image of the expanding balloon, that what I am talking about is the non-physical interior of the balloon, the endless surroundings of the balloon and the surface, itself, which is intersected at every point by this non-physical plane.

Although the non-physical plane (which is not even really a plane but encompasses and transcends all planes) is devoid of matter and measurable energy, it is, by no means, empty. I will talk more about the contents of the non-physical plane later in this post. What I should mention here is that most physicists, who are far more knowledgeable than I am about this spacetime continuum, do not realize that they, themselves, are not part of the spacetime continuum that they study; just as biologists are not the electrical, chemical protein mass that they study. We are not what we are studying, but that which is doing the studying. We are that which experiences that. We are not of spacetime, but we participate in spacetime. What we are transcends the plane of the fabric of the universe, although we operate within it. We, ourselves, are part of, are from, the non-physical plane.

Now I know that you cannot observe any of these things I am talking about, precisely because they are not things. But you can experience them. You can know the truth of them from your experience. If I say that you are not a thing, that you are the non-physical ground of your experience, and you are the non-physical milieu of your intentions or desires, you can give a knee jerk reaction and pooh pooh it as a fairy tale, or you can take it in, let it sit with you, and see that, although it doesn't jive with what you may have learned in biology class or Sunday school, it does jive with your actual experience. Are you your body, or are you that which experiences your body? You were once less than two feet tall and less than ten pounds. Were you that size or did you occupy a body that was that size. You were even once the microscopic size of a fertilized ovum. Was that you that was that size, or was that the size of the body that you were occupying? Do you experience yourself, not your body, as having any size at all? I am not asking if you ever entertain any thoughts about how tall you are or how much you weigh. I am wondering about the size, not of the body that you are thinking about, but the size of you that is doing the thinking. Do you, the thinker, have any height or weight? Also, your body ages, but do you age? I know you think different thoughts and dream about different things than you did when you were a young child. But you, not your thoughts, but that which is having those thoughts, not the contents of your experience, but the ground, the context, of your experience, have you aged, have you changed, or are you exactly the same context, the same observer, the same seer, the same thinker,the same listener, that you always were? Although in this life we are committed to this body/brain, we are not this body/brain. Our body occupies space but we do not. Our body changes and we call that rate of change time. But we do not change. Our body/brain is in spacetime but we are not. Spacetime with its physical contents was not created by itself. Spacetime is the result of intention and intention comes from being.

SPIRITUAL MATERIALISTSThe second group, regarding miracles, would be the spiritual materialists, or fundamentalists. This group believes that miracles once occurred fairly frequently, especially in the 'Creation' stage of the universe, and then the Creator (God) more or less finished His work and retired. Nowadays this God rarely leaves His Great Condominium in the Sky to intercede in human events and, when He does, it is not to settle wars, pandemics, ethnic cleansings or natural disasters. No, for some reason this God intercedes only at sports events. He (God) is supposedly male, although male being a relative term, there are no references to anyone or anything female in the divine realm that He would have an opportunity to be male with. This God also seems to have a penchant for the state of New York. So, He managed to avoid World War II entirely, but then arrived at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, New York in 1951 to help Bobby Thomson's eye hand coordination and to diminish Ralph Branca's pitching skill so that Thomson could hit "the shot heard round the world" and the New York Giants could win the National League Pennant. Then He completely overlooked Viet Nam, but in 1969 went, instead, to Shea Stadium in Queens, New York to guide the Amazin' Mets through their pennant race and World Series. And of course, there was the Divine intercession in 1980, this time in Lake Placid, New York, enabling the United States Hockey team to receive a gold medal in the 1980 Olympics. The goal , then, of many in this group is to coax the Creator out of His retirement so that He will return to earth not just for sports events, but to perform more serious miracles and not just in New York but throughout the entire planet and especially in the Middle East, that will save not so much the planet, but specifically those good souls that believed all this time in Him that He will call to His bosom just moments before the entire planet and all its non-believing inhabitants are obliterated.

Allow me to digress for a moment about this Second Coming that so many people are praying for. If I am expecting the arrival of an honored guest in my home, I get very busy cleaning it up. The more honored the guest, the harder I work to make my home immaculate. I may have a little time to pray that things go well during the visit, but most of my time and attention is taken with preparing and most of that preparation is cleaning. Now we are talking about the most honored guest of all, who is, supposedly visiting not just my house, but the whole planet. And, dear reader, I have to tell you that our planet is filthy; it's disgusting.

More than six million children under the age of five, an entire Holocaust, needlessly die on our precious planet every single year, by diseases that can either be prevented or treated. These include Aids, diarrhoea, malaria, measles, and pneumonia. Another four million children die every year before they are five years-old because of poor public health policies. More than four million die before they are one month old, largely because of preventable problems at birth. Another four million children die from diarrhoea or pneumonia. Malaria is responsible for one million deaths while HIV claims 300,000 lives each year. At least 100,000 children die from measles. (For those of you who are obsessed about the Holocaust, your mantra "never again," rather than keeping you more vigilant, has lulled you to sleep. There is a Holocaust taking place right now, right under your nose. What Hitler accomplished over twelve years with his insane malice, we are accomplishing every year with our insane neglect.)

A series of simple measures could prevent most of these deaths. Encouraging new mothers to breastfeed their children could save 1.3million lives each year. Breast milk can protect infants against diarrhoea and pneumonia by boosting their immune system. Encouraging mothers to start giving their children food as well as breast milk at six months, which would help fight diarrhoea, pneumonia measles and malaria, would save another 600,000 lives. A further 326,000 deaths from diarrhoea could be prevented if everyone had access to clean water and better sanitation. Spraying insecticides could help to save another 700,000 lives by protecting against mosquitoes, which are responsible for spreading malaria. Vaccinating against measles and haemophilus influenza type B (Hib) could save more than half a million lives. Providing children with antibiotics to fight pneumonia, malaria, dysentery and blood infections would save an additional two million lives, while giving oral rehydration therapies to children with diarrhoea would save 1.5million lives.

There is no need to wait for new vaccines, new drugs or new technology. There is no need to wait at all. Our governments spend countless billions of dollars every year to train and supply armies to kill each other. If we spent a fraction of that to train and supply armies to save each other the problem would be solved (and our foreign policy problems would be solved as well). We simply have to transfer what we already know into action, deliver the interventions we have on hand to the children, mothers and families who need them.

And for those of us who have managed to survive all that, we are grappling with epedemics of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Our rivers and our bloodstreams are filled with pollutants that diminish the health and vitality of our planet and our bodies and that are put there by commercial interests that put their short term profits above the health of their planet and their customers. What is lacking is will. But if you really believe God is coming, what are you waiting for? And I do sincerely believe, in fact I am absolutely convinced, that if we really did clean up the planet, if we really did treat each person and each society as if they were a precious and integral part of the divine fabric, then God would be here. We wouldn't be able to see Him, and He wouldn't necessarily be a He, but the presence of God would be felt wherever we went and we would, truly, create a heaven on earth.
I call this group of believers spiritual materialists, because although they believe in God, in a spiritual cause of creation, they believe that this God has a physical body; that He is a male; and that He has a name. That many of these spiritual materialists come from a Judeo-Christian tradition is very surprising to me. There are many references in the Bible to the omnipresence of the Creator. How could God be omnipresent if He were in a body that occupied one particular part of space and not the rest?

When I was a boy the translations of the Bible that I read began with these words:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

Nowadays the tenses have been tinkered with and current translations read something like, "When God was creating the heaven and the earth........" which means that during the time of creation, things began with a void.This grammatical adjustment seemingly resolves the question of how God could have first created the heaven and the earth and still be left with a void. It also, seemingly, resolves the issue of how God could have started with heaven and earth when Heaven (now capitalized) isn't created until the second day and Earth (now capitalized) isn't created until the third day. Taoists describing the act of creation, which they view as an ongoing event and not just a historical one, say "Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang."These two statements,"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth," and "Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang,"are not similar. They are identical! Heaven and earth, not as physical objects, but as forces (Father Heaven or Sky Father and Mother Earth or Mother Nature) appear all through the monistic dualism of ancient religions. It is through the interplay of these opposing forces that the world of matter is created.

The material materialists believe that the universe began with a Big Bang. They have worked out a detailed scenario that seems to fit with all the data they have accumulated about the universe that describes it as exploding out from a very tiny material center. But all their calculations are based on matter and energy following certain laws, or forces, like the forces of electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force and the weak force. If ancient religions have different names for these forces (yin and yang, in and yo, heaven and earth, vata and kapha, Tawa and Takpella), and if these spiritualists see two forces where the materialists see four, all of this is beside the point. The point is that in both perspectives there were forces that compelled matter to behave in very specific ways before there was matter; that matter could not have been created, and the Big Bang could not have occurred, if these specific forces or laws were not already in place. So it's not that the Bible had it wrong for all these hundreds and thousands of years, and we had to wait until the end of the twentieth century for our modern grammarians to work out the contradictions. There never were any contradictions. What the Bible is saying, and has always said, is that the universe started with two seemingly antagonistic, but really complimentary forces, and then the physical world happened.

From the void God says, "Let there be light!" What is a void? We may picture a bearded man shouting out in a fog enshrouded field, or floating over a foggy ocean, but is the void really like a fog, or a foggy field or a foggy ocean? This is the void that precedes the material world; so there is no fog and there is no field and there is no ocean, and there is no man, and there are no vocal chords that HE uses to shout out His pronouncement, and there is no one and no thing to hear Him if He did. Since we can only conceive in terms of matter and the movement of matter, it is impossible for us to conceive of this void which is the absence of matter. Although modern biblical grammarians have tried to gloss over it, you cannot avoid a void! (sorry) Because, although this void is absent of any material things, even absent of any molecules or atoms, of any gluons or quarks or bosons, it is not empty. The crowning achievement of Creation is life forms,and especially humans. But before there were life forms there was life formless. Life formless; not anchored to one physical body, one brain, one nervous system, one genome; is what we experience in a limited way as a life form. We each have our own little ration of consciousness, intelligence and will; but life formless is unlimited consciousness, intelligence and will. God is not standing in the void. God is the void. "Let there be light!"is not a statement made by divine vocal chords, but an act of will. The bifurcation of Infinity into two complementary and antagonistic forces and the creation of light, matter and a physical universe capable of supporting life forms, all came about because God (or life formless) wanted it to come about. The creation of the universe was and is an act of will.

The first thing that God creates, or the first result of this interplay of Heaven and Earth (of two complementary, antagonistic forces), is light. Einstein, looking at it from a material perspective said that the speed of light is the fastest speed that a thing can travel and still be a thing. But what if we look at the speed of light not as a cosmic speed limit, but as a cosmic threshold? Suppose that we say that the speed of light is the point at which matter or energy stops being a thing and becomes no thing. This no thing accelerating past the speed of light would achieve infinite speed because there would be no 'thingness' to limit its acceleration. No thing travelling at infinite speed would be everywhere at the same time, since it would take no thing no time to travel from one spot through the universe and return to the same spot. So no thing would be infinitely fast and absolutely still simultaneously. Also, there would be no separation between any one part of no thing and any other part. There would be no parts, since there would be no matter, no thingness, no boundary, to divide one part from the other. Therefore, no thing would both occupy all of space and take up no space. Whatever entered into no thing would enter into oneness with the entire universe of no thing. So, no thing is beyond space and time. Now instead of looking at it Einstein's way, as matter speeding up, let's look at it the other way, from the other side of light. If we were no thing (and we were and still are) and we were omnipresent and eternal and moving at infinite speed, and we wanted to create a physical universe of space and time, the first thing we would do is to slow down, and the first thing that would happen, the first thing that would be created, that would result from this slowing down, which would be the bridge between the spiritual world (no thing) and the material world (things), would be 'light!'

All this is to say that when you look at the Bible, or any great holy book that has been venerated for centuries, you should regard it as an instrument of enlightenment. That means that you respect the book and keep studying and thinking about it so that it changes and deepens your understanding of the world and yourself. In other words, you change your understanding to fit the book; you don't change the book to fit your understanding. This tinkering with the Bible to make it "modern," so that it fits comfortably with our shallow materialist understanding of the world, is as offensive as the use of the Bible, including even the teachings of Jesus, to support the most racist, violent and hateful beliefs of radical fundamentalists.

Many material materialists are of the opinion that they have progressed in their thinking beyond the foolishness and superstitions of their ancestors, as represented in the Bible and other ancient books. Certainly they have more facts than their ancestors did. Thanks to microscopes and telescopes and other instrumentation they now know more details about the physical universe. But are they wiser? Is their thinking really more evolved? Just like with other prejudices, people who have prejudices against 'ancestors' usually make an exception for their own ancestors, for the people they have actually known. In the same way that anti-Semites make exceptions for the generous Jews that they have actually known, and racists make exceptions for the obviously intelligent people of color that they have actually known, people with ancestor prejudice will say things like, "people were really foolish back then, although my grandfather was a brilliant man, and my grandmother was the wisest person I have ever met." If not our grandparents' generation, when was all this past foolishness? Was it their grandparents' generation? Do our grandparents remark about the foolishness of their grandparents or do they talk about them with the same reverence and respect that we talk about ours? How far back do we have to go before we encounter all this foolishness? Do we modern people really have a lot to teach Shakespeare and Plato about human nature? Have we really progressed in our understanding of the world, not in its material details, but in its spiritual essence, that far beyond Buddha and Jesus?

Each generation has a somewhat different fashion and style of expression as does each different culture. We each express ourselves in a different way and particularly when we are trying to express the ineffable. We use parables and symbols and examples from the physical universe to help teach truths about the non-physical spiritual universe, and, of course, we use those examples that would be most relevant and meaningful to whatever group we happen to be talking to. But what is always true is that the examples that are written are examples from the world of matter to give insights into the world of spirit. They are not to be taken literally; to materialize the inifinite. The older the book, the more out of fashion its style of expression may be. But there are universal truths, timeless truths, that outlive the fashion of the moment. If you are looking for timeless truths a good place to start would be in books and treatises that have been revered for thousands of years.

SPIRITUAL SPIRITUALISTS
But I am digressing. Let's get back to our attitudes about miracles. Finally, there is the third group; the spiritual spiritualists, or mystics. This group does not think of miracles as something necessarily infrequent or even unusual. If a miracle is any occurrence that starts without a physical cause, then, from their perspective, pretty much everything in the universe and the universe itself is miraculous in that it proceeds from intention. Intentions do not start from physical matter, from chemicals or energy waves, or even from molecules or atoms. Intentions begin with beings. And there are two types of beings. There are limited beings, like you, me and the goldfish; and there is an unlimited Being (life forms and life formless). All living beings are, at the same time, aspects of this One unlimited Being, and also separate beings with a separate limited consciousness and separate intentions or desires.

Beings are the milieu of intentions. Intentions originate with beings, not with physical matter. The physical universe has no intentions. It is completely indifferent. This may be clearer with the inanimate world than the biological world. Chemicals do not want anything. They react according to very specific laws, but they never initiate or experience anything. There is no consciousness there and no desire. If chemicals behave purposefully, like the gasoline in your car engine or the electrons in a pattern of computer code, it is certainly not the gasoline molecule's intention to get you where want to go, or the electron's intention to communicate the message that you are trying to send. Obviously, that intention begins in the beings that invented and built that car and that wrote that computer code and continues in you who is the being that is trying to get somewhere and trying to send an e-mail.

Living beings are purposeful. It is commonly accepted, even by the first group, the skeptics, that living beings are imbued with purpose. If nothing else, there is at least the purpose to survive. This is obviously, observably true. What may be a little confusing is that this purpose to survive does not start from the bodies of living beings. There is nothing in the proteins and certainly not in the fats or the trace elements of a living body that wants to survive. Again, we are just talking about matter that doesn't care what the temperature is, how many nutrients are circulating in that body, if it is serving a healthy, fully functioning being, or if it is a corpse in the process of being devoured by micro-organisms. The part of living beings that cares about the temperature, and getting enough to eat; that cares about survival at all, is not a physical part, but the non-physical being that inhabits that body. When the survival attempts fail, and we mourn the passing of a human being, we don't mourn the passing of a human body. The body is still there, in tact, at the funeral. We mourn the passing of the being that experienced things through that body and that imbued that body with intention. Certainly, the body is not in mourning. There is nothing in that body that could care one way or the other if it is being inhabited by a being or not, if it is preserved in ice, embalmed, decomposing in the earth or left somewhere to be eaten by scavengers. The desire to survive, or will, begins in a being not in a body. Our desire to survive is not a desire for the body to survive, but it is a desire to continue experiencing things through our body/brain and to continue to have our desires met, or to have the possibility of our desires being met, through our body/brain. If we feel that our body/brain can no longer deliver the experiences that we cherish and no longer has any possibility of fulfilling our desires, then we are ready to move on.

The Miracle of Willful Action
So how does it work? How does the physical universe manifest as a result of a non-physical intention? Let's start with a limited being, like you and me. Now at this point we are all somewhat acquainted with brain research that has been conducted over the past thirty years and we know that whatever we decide to do, or see or listen to, neurons will start firing in various centers of the brain related to thought or sight or listening; and these paths of neuronal firings will create a flow of electric current that can stimulate a muscle to contract, allowing us to move where we want to move. Light waves entering the eyes and sound waves entering the ears stimulate neurons that create a flow of electric current through the brain that helps us makes sense out of what we want to see and hear. According to brain scientists, it is the neuronal firings that initiate these sequential processes, and "the brain" is discussed, and "our neurons" are discussed as if they are the initiators of these activities, as if they have a will of their own. But neuronal firings are not causes, but results. What really initiates these flows of electrons, the cause of these responses, is not a stream of electrons or light waves or sound waves. What initiates these processes are your desires. You want to do, or see or listen to something and your desire (desire links the non-physical to the physical) stimulates the neurons that start the whole pattern of firing. Your eyes and ears focus on certain stimulations, on certain waves, because you want to focus on these waves. The neural stimulation leading to the elaborate patterns of muscular contractions that enable you to move across your room and open the book you want to read or to eat the snack you want to eat, was initiated by your desire to read and eat. I have emboldened these words because neither you nor your wants or desires have ever been observed by any scientist or by any scientific instrumentation; yet all of the things you choose to do or experience or think about or remember or build or create begin with your non-physical intention which begins with you, a non-physical being. So the fact that you are able to do anything at all, that you are able to intend to do something, and then do it (and I am not talking about starring in a Broadway show or winning a Nobel Peace Prize) even if it is the most quotidian of activities; like opening your eyes or getting out of bed and brushing your teeth; the fact that it starts in the spiritual and manifests in the physical, makes your entire life miraculous. A very unusual experience? No. A miracle? Yes.

And please don't take my word for it. After all, who am I but some anonymous jerk with a weird blog. If you question the miraculousness of wanting to look at something and then actually being able to see it, speak to a blind man. If you wonder what the big deal is about wanting to move across the room to turn on the television, and then actually moving across that room; talk to someone with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease). Take any of the countless things we accomplish every day, things that we completely take for granted, and talk to anyone who is not able to do them if you want to discover their real value. The fact that we can start from ourselves, from a non-physical place, and have a non-physical desire, and then have it manifest in the action and perception and behavior that we want, is miraculous. Everything that we choose to do and then actually do, is a movement from the non-physical to the physical, and these processes that biologists diligently study are the very processes that are initiated by our desires and serve our needs. Everything that we choose to do, experience or think about, is miraculous.

Can this be explained? Well, it is miraculous, so whatever explanation I can offer is limited and symbolic; a way of explaining it that merely gives some sense of how we could imagine it happenning. You have heard of psychokineses, or telekineses. This refers to the much disputed ability of the mind to cause movement in objects. Uri Geller, the famous paranormalist, has made a career of seemingly bending spoons and other metal objects simply with the power of his concentration. Popular movements like 'The Secret' claim that you can change not only the experience of your life, but your success in various endeavors simply by learning these 'powers of the mind.' All of this is hotly debated in the general population and probably scoffed at in scientific circles. What is not scoffed at is the obvious effect that one's undivided attention has on another human being. Athletes, statesmen, actors and musicians understand the palpable difference between rehearsal or practice and an actual peformance or game where a large group of people are in attendance. We are energized by people's attention.

Psychological studies have found that a vital factor in determining adult mental health is the extent to which that adult as an infant and as a child was the recipient of this focussed, undivided attention. Again, not so much attending to the child in an attempt to "parent" him or her, and irregardless of any 'lessons' you may impart, but just simply being in focussed contact results in that child feeling supported, connected and energized for who they are. It seems to me that this is a crucial point for the future of our society. At the moment everything mitigates against parents having this relaxed, focussed attentive time with their children. We are in an over heated, over competitive society. We are advertised at every moment of the day; the real message in all of these advertisements is that we are incomplete without a, b or c; that we cannot be fully realized or satisfied or comfortable or safe or sufficiently attractive unless we purchase x, y and z. Also, we find ourselves enmeshed in endless hierarchies of attractiveness, intelligence, athletic prowess, and personal wealth and we are continually concerned about where we and our children find ourselves on these hierarchies. All of this creates a restlessness, a nagging desirousness, which makes the relaxed, attentive enjoyment of each other next to impossible. Yet it is only through these peaceful interactions that a child is reinforced in the idea that he or she is lovable as they are and that the world is safe enough to allow intimacy and focus with another person and with the moment at hand.

Now we can do a little experiment at this juncture to reinforce the idea of the power of your focus. Sit in a very relaxed position, in a way that you could conceivably fall asleep. Now close your eyes and focus on a spot in your body where you are experiencing a little tension. Good. Now move to another spot where you are experiencing tension; and, finally, a third spot. (As a side note, when you were moving from your toe to your finger to lower back, what was it that was moving? If you were absolutely still, then nothing was moving, and certainly not your brain, which doesn't move at all. If you and your focus were moving and no thing was moving, then the only conclusion is that you and your focus are no thing. If you have not been too heavily inculcated in the materialist beliefs of our society to accept the simple conclusions of this experiment you should need no further proof that you are essentially spiritual and not physical. Now you may say, "that's not you; that's your nervous system." It is true that at each point where you are focussing you are at some place along your nervous system, but that doesn't mean that you are your nervous system. You are that which experiences and focusses on different points of your nervous system. By your tortured logic, if I was driving north on the San Diego Freeway, and was in San Diego at 10am, was passing Los Angeles at 12 noon and reached the San Francisco exit at 6pm; that would mean that I must be the San Diego Freeway!) But, getting back to the original purpose of this experiment: Focus on one of these spots of tension and try to melt that tension simply with your attention. It's important for the purpose of this experiment that you are not moving or doing anything muscularly. Try to describe that sensation of tension. How big does it seem to be? Does it seem to weigh anything? What does it seem to be made out of? Rope, or steel or electricity? As you continue to describe it, just will it to diminish and keep noticing how it gets smaller and lighter until it disappears or almost disappears. The longer that you stay with it the more success you will have.

Whether or not someone can bend a spoon without touching it is beside the point. The point is that if there is enough energy and power in the focus of a human being to relax whole sections of your body, it is reasonable to assume that this inner-focus, a much more subtle telekinesis, if you will, has the power to excite the neurons that initiate a path of reactions that lead to the satisfaction of our desires. So, if our physical equipment (body) is in working order and our environment is at least minimally cooperative, we get to think what we want to think, remember what we want to remember, look at what we want to look at and move where we want to move. And all of this begins with this subtle movement from the spiritual, the non-physical, focused by desire, to the excitation of neurons through a whole series of electrical and chemical and physical and emotional processes that wind up with us getting pretty much what we want.

The creation of the world of man made things is a movement from the subtle to the gross. On a physical level the awesome power of a nuclear explosion begins with the flicking of a switch, and the flight of a jumbo jet commences with the turning of a key. But backing up to the spiritual level, the nuclear explosion and all the equipment that delivers it begins with someone's desire to create something with that much destructive power and then someone's desire to use it; just as the jumbo jet begins with someone's desire to find a way to transport four or five hundred people quickly for long distances. Once the decision is made, these powerful processes are kicked off by a tiny movement which engages the power of these machines (nuclear fission in one case and internal combustion in the other). And everything we do on a personal level, whether it manifests in an enormous physical object or the subtlest biological process, begins with a desire which makes us focus on the neurons that will initiate this process and allows the power of our biological machine (metabolism) to kick in and help us reach the objective we desire.

The Miracle of Life FormsIf it is miraculous that we are able to use our equipment to fulfill our desires, what about the equipment itself? Our amazing body, with its ten quadrillion simultaneous processes, that responds to our desires and allows us to get our needs met; is the construction of our bodies, itself, miraculous? According to modern biologists and evolutionists, all of this complexity has a verifiable origin in the physical world; our genes. Aren't our bodies caused by our genetic sequences?

Scientists describe genes as recipes for enzymes, the basic building blocks of living bodies. The approximately thirty thousand genetic sequences in every human cell are recipes for thirty thousand different enzymes and in combination with each other, for the one hundred thousand different enzymes and amalgams of enzymes that make up our bodies. But wait a minute! Do recipes create meals? If I left a cookbook in a locked kitchen and was assured that no person had entered that kitchen since I had left; and then when I came back the next morning I discovered that every recipe in that cookbook had been translated into a delicious cooked dish, what would I think? Would I think that the cookbook had somehow figured out how to prepare its own recipes by itself? Of course not. We know that cookbooks are matter and matter doesn't have a self and cannot initiate anything. That is obvious. Yet, how have we come to believe that genes, which are also matter and are also a collection of recipes, can engender, by themselves, not only our bodies with their distinctive and inherited shapes but also all the myriad processes (easily ten quadrillion at every moment) that allow us to translate our non-physical needs and desires into actual physical activity and experience? And as far as we know, the genes are simply coded for enzymes, which are not even the recipes for limbs or organs or body parts; they are just the recipes for the raw materials that are used in the fashioning of limbs and organs and body parts. I am not saying that our genetic inheritance does not determine our shape and lots of our instinctive behaviors and the impossibly complex organization of our processes. I am saying that even though our genes may determine all that, they do not cause all that. In the same way I can push button number 4 on my channel changer and get the Jay Leno Show; that little button with #4 on it determines that I get the Jay Leno Show, but it does not create the Jay Leno Show. What creates that show are the unmeasurable, ineffable talents of numerous beings that know how to translate their desires to make something entertaining and efficient and attractive and profitable from a non-physical dream into a physical reality.

But what about our bodies? Keep in mind that the exact same set of recipes (genes) in every cell of every person manifests, depending on which genes are expressed and in what sequence and what amount, into a fetal body, an infant body, a teenage body, an adult body and a senior body. Also, from the exact same set of recipes (genes) again depending on which recipes (genes) are expressed, are manifested muscle cells, nerve cells, skin cells and stem cells. And all of this is continually shaped and reshaped with amazing precision to create our growing and constantly changing bodies. Who or what is it that is combining these recipes with such transcendent precision to create the myriad organs and structures and shapes and then to imbue them with the precise amount of energy and purpose to deliver at every moment a functioning human body? The truth is that no one knows! That is because the organizer, the planner and the decider of all this activity has never been observed by any scientist, either with their naked eye or through any instrumentation. The only things that can be seen are the results.

You may have read articles claiming that scientists have created, or are on the verge of creating, new life. How could they do such a thing if none of the actual creative details are known? In spite of what you may have read in sensationalist papers, no such thing has taken place. Even Craig Venter, the biological impresario, who is no shrinking violet when it comes to self-promotion, does not have the hubris to make such a claim. When Watson and Crick discovered the basic structure of the DNA molecule over fifty years ago, they thought that they had discovered God. What they had actually discovered was God's channel changer. Now Venter and his colleagues are figuring out how this channel changer works and have been able to take genetic sequences from one cell and implant them in another. What's important to understand is that, as precise and detailed as this work may be, they are doing nothing more than changing the channel. And, yes, when the channel is changed you get a completely different program, but how? They may know what to change, and they may even be able, after many trials and errors, to anticipate the results of that change, but how that change is achieved, how the new program or any program is conceived or executed, is completely unknown. It is very much like an isolated, pre-industrial tribe suddenly stumbling upon a working television. Some native may figure out that he can get very different results by playing with the channel changer, but how those results are created, where this programming is produced or directed or conceived of, and the logistics of how that programming is delivered, are completely beyond the understanding of that native changing the channels and completely beyond Craig Venter and his diligent colleagues.

After having scoured every micro-inch of every cell in the body and seen the results of this program and organization and magnificent intelligence in every corner of every cell; the program, the programmer and the programmer's intelligence are still nowhere to be seen. Only two conclusions are possible. Either there is no programmer and the cells, or the genes, are doing this themselves, which makes no logical sense at all (see post EVOLUTION); or the programmer, the program and all the intelligence involved in it, are there in every minuscule nook and cranny of every cell in the body, but are not observable, because they are not part of the physical universe. And this second conclusion makes perfect sense, at least to me, because my self, and my intelligence, and any thinking that I use to bring organization to the things that I am dealing with in my life, are not visible either.

Without ever seeing the program, the programmer or the intelligence behind the program, without ever locating it in space and time, scientists continue to talk about the program and even its origin and development. They tell us the program has evolved over many millions of years and has gotten more and more complex as we have learned more and more about our environment. Now it is true that evolution is certainly not just the accumulation of more genes (more recipes). That may increase the number of possible raw materials (enzymes) that would be found in an organism, but it would not, by itself, increase that organism's complexity. So, yes, the program for a human being would have to be much more complicated than the program for a microbe, but, again, where is it? With each program that I am familiar with, I can show you the disc where the program is inscribed, I can show you the computer that it runs on, and, with a little research, I can produce the name of the programmer who created it. With this 'living program' where is the soft ware, where is the hardware, and where is the programmer?

Also, scientists will tell us that over millions of years we have learned how to........(whatever the miraculous biological thing is that we are looking at). But who has learned this? Are we talking about the 'programmer." Yet, the whole point of modern evolution, as I understand it, is that everything has evolved by itself. So, are we the programmer? Have we learned how to do all these biological wonders? When? Where? I know of not one living being, human or otherwise, contemporary or otherwise, who has ever learned one biological process that takes place within the body of any living being. Do you know how to digest? how to eliminate? how to reproduce? how to grow? I am not talking about the few superficial facts that you may have learned in a biology class. You were growing, digesting and eliminating just fine way before you learned any of those facts or ever heard of the word biology. Where is all this learning going on? Do you think that your cells have learned how to produce enzymes? You're kidding! A little microscopic cell? If you have no idea what your cells are doing, do you really think that your cells have any idea what their molecules are doing? Do you think cells have any ideas period? And please don't say that genes, submicroscopic specks of nucleic acid, know anything either! What happens over and over in modern science is that scientists confuse location with agency. So, yes, metabolism and digestion and growth are going on in my body, but I am not doing the metabolizing or digesting or growing and neither is some mythical being called 'my body.' Yes, there are electrical processes going on in various areas of my brain every time I think about something or remember something or see something, but a being called 'my brain' is not thinking or remembering or seeing them. In the same way, there are a lot of ballgames going on in Yankee Stadium, but Yankee Stadium is not doing them. Yankee Stadium is merely the location where they are taking place. Likewise there are a lot of processes going on in my kitchen when a meal is being prepared, but a being named 'my kitchen' is not doing those either.

And what did we supposedly learn over all these millions of years? How to breathe? How to digest? How to grow? Please use your common sense. How would a life form exist for even a minute, never mind from generation to generation, if it didn't already know how to breathe, metabolise, digest, eliminate, grow and reproduce? No living being ever learned any of these things, EVER! The truth is that we are the recipients and the beneficiaries of everything that happens biologically in our bodies. We never learned how to do any of it and we never actually do any of it. And, of course, none of the little particles that compose our bodies ever learned any of it either.

In addition to creating mythical beings by infusing physical locations with the powers of agency, knowledge and desire ('our brains' want this,'our genes' want that) evolutionary biologists also create historical myths. There is an entire branch of speculation called 'pre-biotic evolution' which not only is nonsense, but has been proven to be nonsense over and over again, and yet it is still repeated and reprinted in textbooks and communicated as reliable knowledge. This is the supposed chemical evolution of organic material in Edenic tidepools on this planet for hundreds of millions of years leading up to the chance accumulation of DNA or a DNA type molecule which suddenly started replicating exact copies of itself, which means that not only the identical molecule was reproduced but the molecule's method of and commitment to replication was reproduced identically in a way that has continued, in tact, to the present day (no molecule, DNA, or otherwise, has ever been known to replicate except as part of a whole cell's replication). These ideas continue to be espoused even though it has been determined that the early earth was a roiling, boiling, exploding hellhole which was incapable of supporting any life what so ever, much less able to support the delicate structures of organic material that was supposedly floating around and staying in tact in these tidepools for many millions of years (in our bodies our organic material is protected from the elements by a cell wall, our skin, our ability to maintain a consistent internal temperature, etc. When I say organic material, think raw eggs outside of their shells). How long would such organic material last in a temperature above the boiling point of water, in an environment that is too base or too acidic, or too exposed to ultra violet light, or violent movement. Moreover, vestiges of microbial life that metabolizes, digests, eliminates, senses its environment, grows and reproduces has been discovered in abundance dating back over three and a half billion years to the very moment when the surface of the planet was cool enough to support any life forms (a temperature below the boiling point of water). And hundreds of millions of years before that there was hyper-thermophilic life alongside thermal vents in the ocean floor, that survived in temperatures well above the boiling point of water because of the extra bonding of their molecules. How could such creatures be 'accumulated' in an environment where any of their individual parts would break down as fast as you could boil an egg?

I say the following as both a mystic and a realist. I say it not because I want to believe it, but because my observation and my life experience leave me no other conclusion: Before there were life forms, there was life formless. Life formless is intelligence, love, creativity and will without limit. We have come to this life to participate in the world of matter and energy and we do that by making a commitment to a particular genome which becomes a particular body/brain. But we come from life formless, which is also called cosmic consciousness, which is also called God. And life formless, with its unlimited intelligence, will and creativity, is what provides and grows and maintains this miraculous equipment that allows us to participate with each other, to live this life of dreams and the fulfillment of dreams, of desires and the fulfillment of desires. Will, or the commitment to survive, which permeates every biological process in every living being on this planet, is the materialization of God's desire to have separate beings with separate consciousness and separate experiences. We are here in our physical bodies because God (non-physical) wants us to be here. So, living bodies: Very unusual? No. Miraculous? Yes.

The Miracle of the Inanimate UniverseThe inanimate physical universe passively obeys very precise and consistent physical laws. The only exceptions to this passive obedience are machines that are designed to use energy to overcome natural forces in the service of an objective; including both natural machines (living bodies) whose objective is the survival of the relationship between the being that dwells within that body and it's body/brain and the fulfillment of any desire that that being may have; and man-made machines, which are also designed to overcome physical forces for the satisfaction of the desires of the inventor or the desires of the people that she invented the machine for. So what is the source of these laws that all matter must obey and that we have to build machines to expend energy to overcome?

We in the West have a materialist idea of the world. We think that these forces are somehow emanating from matter; that matter is the origin of force. We cling to this idea even though it is commonly understood that the Big Bang began with really a speck of matter, but with all these precise forces in place. This should lead one to the conclusion that these forces preceded matter. Nevertheless, electromagnetism is still considered to be a force emanating from the electron particle of the atom (the negative force) and the proton particle of the atom (the positive force), which begs the question "what was electromagnetism before there were protons and neutrons?" Recently, though, it has been discovered that the proton and even the minuscule electron are not really particles at all, but are force fields connecting much smaller sub-atomic particles. Are these particles, quarks and bosons and mesons, the ultimate fundamental particles or will these, too, be discovered to be unimaginably tiny force fields connecting unimaginably smaller sub-sub atomic particles? Are there any fundamental particles out there at all? Gravity, too, is supposed to be emanating from the mass of an atom, although that mass has not been detected among these atomic force fields. Scientists anticipate the discovery of a mass conferring particle which they have already named the Higgs Boson, which is also referred to as the God particle, and they are so convinced that they will discover it that they have spent twelve years and many, many billions of dollars constructing a seventeen mile particle accelerator to smash sub-atomic particles together at enormous speeds and see if they can discover the Higgs Boson in the residues of these collisions.

Traditional Easterners have a different perspective. Throughout Asia one encounters the idea of two opposing forces (complementary antagonists) that engender the physical world. These are often referred to as yin and yang, but they have many different names through many different cultures in Asia and throughout the pre-industrial world, both east and west. From this perspective, matter does not engender forces, but forces engender matter; in fact, matter is viewed as simply a more stable combination of these forces. (Look at the post YIN,YANG AND BEYONG!). Gravity is not considered a function of mass, because there is no mass. Rather, gravity is the force of yang which is inward and is strongest in the center of objects. What we call gravity is the pull of this yang force toward the center of the earth that we feel on the surface.

As I said at the beginning of this post, science explores the lateral reactions within the physical plane. All of this is fine until it comes to theories and speculations of origin. Western theoretical science is, in a sense, a search for supernatural particles that somehow engender all phenomena. Physicists search for the Boson and the quark with their supposed powers of generating forces and mass; biologists ascribe amazing powers and creativity to submicroscopic particles of nucleic acid called genes; and brain scientists and now psychologists believe that microscopic nerve cells called neurons do our thinking and remembering and perceiving for us and engender our whole conscious life.

From a spiritual spiritualist perspective, there are no fundamental particles. All particles are relatively stable arrangement of forces that give the illusion of solidity and permanence. But there is no permanence in things. Everything changes, including atoms, genes, neurons and sub-atomic particles. The only thing that doesn't change is no thing, and luckily you and I and God are all no thing. So our real stability, our real sense of permanence, is not in the material world but in the world of spirit. And a propos of this let me mention some old silliness from one of our foolish ancestors that you might be familiar with:

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also."

Regardless of which perspective, the materialist or the spiritual, that you subscribe to, what are these physical forces? Take away the matter that is affected by the law of gravity or the law of electrodynamics and what are you left with? You are left with a law. A law has no actual force and no physical existence; it's only force and existence comes from the agreement that beings make to create it and comply with it. There is no actual force emanating from stop signs that stops cars. There is no measurable force that prevents you from murdering or raping someone. It is just an agreement. The reason the force of any law has any force what so ever is that we have agreed to obey it. Human laws are there because we feel as a society that we need these agreed upon boundaries to function safely and effectively. But there is no physical reality to our man made laws, just as there is no physical reality to our natural laws. From my perspective, these laws were put in place because God, or the cosmic consciousness or life formless, realized that we could not ultimately have life forms without a physical world that had a certain consistency and dependency. So these perfectly precise laws (laws which, if they were altered the least iota, would have prevented the physical world from ever happening at all) were put into place to insure that eventual outcome.

It is at this exact juncture that someone of a scientific bent (if he is still reading, which is doubtful) will object that I am answering the question of 'who' created these physical laws when I should be asking the preferable scientific question of 'what' created these laws. Au contraire, my materialist friend. I remind you that we are talking about the origin of matter; we are talking about laws that pre-date matter. There are no 'whats.' We are talking about the creation of the first 'what.' But how, you say, can a who precede a what? Because I don't think of a who as a talking what. I think of a who like 'youwho' or 'mewho' as a who that has a what called a body that we play with and enjoy and through which we experience relationships with both other whos and other whats. But before there was a youwho or a mewho or a what, there was simply a Who. Mewho and youwho were part of that Who, and we still are, but we are enjoying this illusion and diversion of separation called mewho and youwho. And there is no joy, no excitement in mewho and youwho that compares with the sudden realization or momentary intimation that youwho and mewho are really whowho; and that mewho and youwho and even that lovely, if a bit passive, family 'the whats' are from whowho, too.

But whatever your thinking is about the ultimate origin of these laws, you cannot argue against the fact that they must have pre-dated actual matter and they have no physical bases. So once again we have a movement from the non-physical to the physical and, once again, we can say....Very unusual? No. Miraculous? Yes.

The Miracle of Consciousness

The final miracle that I want to mention is consciousness, the actual experience of your life, whether that experience, moment to moment, be thoughts, perceptions, memories, sensations or feelings. Now why do I consider that to be part of the spiritual, non-physical realm? Because although you experience your experience, no one else can either experience it or observe it. I know that you are looking at the same sunset that I am looking at, but whether or not what you are actually seeing bears any resemblance to what I am actually seeing is indeterminable. Even if our reactions to an event are similar, the way you actually perceive it may be entirely different from the way I do.
Now some scientists are saying that consciousness is tied to the brain and does not exist at all; that consciousness is the brain (Steve Pinker). As I have said in other posts, I can be tied to a pole. Does that mean I am the pole? No. In fact, it implies that there are two separate entities that are tied into some kind of relationship. It's that relationship that bears looking into. If you are looking at that same sunset and I am looking at a scan of your brain while you are doing that, you realize that I am not looking at your sunset, and I am not looking at any sunset at all. You realize that there is a huge difference between a pattern of electrons and sunsets; just as there is a huge difference between patterns of electrons and Beethoven concerts, and patterns of electrons and great Thanksgiving dinners. All of them are connected to paths of electrons, but how is it that we all experience the enormous variety and richness of our conscious life and, as far as the brain goes, it is always related to the same flows of electrons with even the same amount of voltage? Yes, the location, within the brain and the paths that these flows take, vary, but how does that correlate, how does that translate with the beautiful and ugly, loving and hateful, light and dark, soft and hard, poetic and mundane, delicious and repulsive, thing that we call our life?
Even more mysterious, in the exact same areas of the brain with the exact same current going through the almost identical neurons (except for their genes) one person sees Manhattan and one person sees the Kalahari Desert. Refiring the same sets of neurons one person conjures up her mother and another person conjures up hers; two completely different people. All the people and places and environment, the whole milieu of your life is completely different from another person's on the other side of the world, and yet when you think about your life, the same sets of neurons are fired with the same voltage of electricity that is fired when that far away stranger thinks about her very, very different life. In fact all the thoughts that created the entire contents of all the great libraries in the world on every subject and in every language were all accompanied by identical electrical flows through almost identical neurons.
The inescapable conclusion is not that we all have a Kalahari desert neuron and one person found it and the other didn't. The only conclusion is that we, not our brains, think and see and hear and smell and our brains are the equipment that we use to assist us with that. The so-called unconscious brain is where connections are made between firing neurons and muscles and glands that allow all the automatic survival mechanisms to operate (which is the fulfillment of God's or life formless' or the cosmic consciousness' objective that you have a sustainable existence in this body); but the conscious brain is mainly a recording device. When you experience something you experience it and God has given you a brain that records it, so that you can refer back to that experience and so that your present experience is informed by your previous experience. You know what things are. You know what is, for you, familiar and what is strange. You know, for you, what is safe and what is dangerous. And you know, for you, what is attractive and what is repellent. And you know their names. All of this knowledge you have encoded in your brain through previous experiences and it automatically gets fired and automatically effects your present experience whenever you perceive something that you have neuronally connected to that stored information. How you are able to do this and then to translate it back to the original experience you had, when you remember something, is God's gift. It is some kind of code that we all know how to use but have not even discovered yet. (That is not strange. We were all benefitting from the genetic code for a few billion years before anyone discovered that code either.) The problem for material materialists is that the we that is using the brain, that is causing those neurons to be fired, that is experiencing things and imprinting the brain with the memories of these experiences; that is seeing things and recording those sights in our brain and that is hearing things and recording those sounds in our brain; that we cannot be seen.
But if you accept the fact that we are not physical, as we demonstrated in an earlier experiment in this post, then a lot of the 'mysteries of consciousness' are cleared up. We can focus on any part of our brain or nervous system that we choose to. At any given moment we all have little pains and aches and discomforts that we can experience if we attend to them. Even intense pain can be attended to or not. People involved in championship boxing matches and football games, in battles and in life or death escapes, have reported being so focussed on their desire to win or to survive, that they completely ignored their sprains and fractures and wounds and did not begin to experience that pain until the emergency was over and they were in relative safety. What we call pain is a certain chemical and electrical activity in our nervous system that we only experience as pain when we attend to it. The body feels no pain. The nervous system feels no pain. We feel pain. Likewise, the brain does not remember. We remember. The brain contains electrical pathways and chemical deposits that we interpret as certain memories when we attend to them. All the information in the brain is not information at all. It is chemcial deposits and pathways that only become information when we fire those pathways and we attend to those traces.
Also, the brain does not see or hear. We see and hear. There is a little synapse behind the retina of the eye where the light image gathered at the end of the retina reaches across this little space and excites the neurons at the beginning of the optic nerve. Right there, in that little space, is where we are when we are focussed on seeing things. There is another little space at the end of the cochlia of the ear where the movement of the little hairs of the cochlia create a vibration that excites the neurons at the beginning of the auditory nerve. And it is right there where we go when we are focussed on hearing something. By the time those electrical impulses are going up the optical nerve and the auditory nerve, we have already experienced the sight and the sound in all the richness and diversity that a human eye and a human ear provide. Those electrical impulses connect through the cortex to other associations that help us ascribe meaning and feeling to what we are seeing and experiencing. So we know that the structure we are looking at is a house and that we live there, and that what we are listening to is a symphony orchestra and not a magpie or a leaky faucet. And, importantly, those electrical impulses, and the neurons that are fired and the chemical traces that they leave, record our experiences so that we can refer back to them by translating that code from these traces so that our knowledge and familiarity with the particular part of our environment that we are perceiving deepens over time. In other words, we (the ground of our experience) can move wherever we want to move in our nervous system and we are perceiving the world directly through our sensory organs and not by first interpreting electrical signals in our brains; and we are recording not what the brain wants us to record but what we have already experienced. Our conscious life has so much variety because we experience the world in all its variety directly through our sense organs and not through the intermediary of electrical signals.
Also, we, not our brains, are thinking. When we think about something we fire up all the related neurons and get back in touch with the previous thoughts that we had about this thing. But if we have a new thought, it is our thought and not our brain's thought. Our brain dutifully records this new thought and then we have access to it when we return to thinking about this same issue, but it was our thought and it is our thought and not our brain's. Scientists will never discover the 'intelligence' of the brain through their observations, no matter how sophisticated their instruments and how detailed their observations. It would be like trying to discover the genius of Isaac Newton by microscopically examining the ink and the paper of his original manuscripts, or trying to find the genius of Shakespeare hidden within the physical letters of his written plays. The intelligence of any equipment resides, non-physically, in the inventor and constructor of that equipment and in the user of that equipment. The unlimited intelligence of God, or the cosmic consciousness or life formless, created the transcendently brilliant structures of the brain and its ability to record our experiences; and the non-physical limited intelligence of human beings is what is able to use that equipment in order to think, create and understand our environment more deeply.
Our relationship to our brains, nervous system and sensory organs is like a child at Disney Land. Within ourselves we can travel to whatever part of the brain we want; fire whatever neurons we want and think or dream or remember whatever we want. If we choose to deal with the external environment we can see or hear or taste or touch whatever we want by focussing on whatever sensory organs we choose to focus on. Just like a child at Disney Land who can go on a variety of rides, meet a variety of characters, eat a variety of foods, we experience what we want to experience among these options wherever our desires lead us. What Steve Pinker and the majority of his material materialist colleagues are saying is that the child was created for Disney Land. What the spiritual spiritualists are saying is that Disney Land was created for the child. Once again, the appeal of mysticism is not an appeal to beliefs, but an appeal to common sense.
And who creates the organization of the brain? We do. If something frightening happenned to us at a certain location then we make a neuronal association between that location and the experience of fear. Depending on the intensity of that experience that association may last for a long time, or until we have a very different experience of a positive nature at that same location and the new association, especially if that, too, is an intense experience, begins to replace the old one. We get the impression that 'the brain' has a mind of its own because we are often at cross purposes to the way that we organized these recorded impressions when we were much younger. So, it is not us vs. our brain, it is us vs. our earlier selves, and especially our childish selves which received impressions and organized our experience in a way that no longer serves our current needs, but the residues in the form of these coded neuronal impressions are still there and still get fired when we no longer want them to.
We are consciousness. The contents of that consciousness are the products of our desires. We choose what we want to experience. We even choose this human existence and we choose to experience the universe through the filter of our human sensory organs. We use our neurons to help us remember and organize this experience so that we can have a richer, more comfortable, more defined and deeper relationship with our culture and our environment. Our conscious life starts with the non-physical (us and our desires) and goes through the physical (sensory organs and neurons) that help us create the richness, depth and variety of our (non-physical) conscious life. So consciousness starts in the non-physical, is assisted by the physical and manifests in the non-physical. Unusual? No. Miraculous? Yes.
CODA
You don't have to be very astute to have figured out at this point that I count myself as a member of the third group, the spiritual spiritualists. What you may not realize is that I did not come to join this group, and none of the people that I know have come to join this group because of any belief system that they had blindly accepted from their teachers or peers. They are members of this group for two reasons: One is that they have had an experience that has proven to them that they are not their bodies; that they are that which experiences their bodies. The second is that they have thought long and deeply about life and death, about matter and spirit, about who they are and why they are here, and their spiritual understanding is an inevitable result of that deep introspection.
Being a member of any of these groups affects one's attitudes toward a lot more things than miracles. One that I would like to mention in closing is one's attitude toward joy. For material materialists joy is the rational and short lived result of winning a competition and achieving a material goal: you got the job, you won the award or you were accepted into the school of your choice. Any joy that does not seem to have an external justification is dismissed by a biochemical explanation prefaced by the word just. It's just your endorphins. It's just dopamine. It's just your blood sugar. It's just a release of opiads. Spiritual materialists condone irrational joy but only in specific circumstances. Joy experienced in their church is considered a great blessing. Joy experienced in a different church is considered delusional and dangerous. Before passing judgement on any experience of joy, spiritual materialists want to look into it first; to find out the setting in which it was experienced and the manner in which it was achieved. Spiritual spiritualists live in a miraculous world. They consider joy to be the natural outgrowth of the recognition of this miraculousness and the recognition of the oneness that they share with whoever or whatever they happen to be relating to at each moment. Are all spiritual spiritualists always joyful? No. We live in a society that is dominated by materialism and a sense of separation. In that regard, there is no sense of a being, human or otherwise, or even any aspect of a being, that is beyond evaluation and compare. We are ranked and criticized and judged. We are told what is good and what is bad, and the good things are, by their definition, scarce and hard to come by. But what we have is the ability to step back from this society, from this age of endarkenment, and go inside ourselves where we always find the light. And we even try to spread some of that light into the darkness. I hope that has happenned with this post. Peace.

Your comments are most welcome.