The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  A different kind of polarity, also clothed in stress and pain and revealing no less important a principle in evolution, is the self-predation practiced by creatures who prune their own offspring to strengthen the breed. The marsupial cat bears up to 24 young in a litter, yet significantly has only 6 teats, leaving places for only the toughest or luckiest to suckle and survive. And the same principle holds for the opossum and various other animals, not to mention many plants, such as the black walnut tree, which puts out poison to choke off not only surrounding grasses and shrubs but even most of its own offspring.

  SEXUAL POLARITY

  The polarity of sex is clearer, but it too has aspects beyond the obvious, beyond the physical male-female complementarity. Although sex and reproduction at first seem synonymous the one tends to decrease numbers by merging, the other to increase them by diverging. And while it is said that bodies are united by pleasure and souls by pain, how many masochists find pleasure in pain, even when self-inflicted - in submission, succumbence or, finally, suicide! There are also the love-death polarities like that between Achilles and Penthesilea, the Amazon queen he killed and loved. And the anomalous sex of sea horses, where she injects ova into him, and he gives birth.

  Carl Jung, speaking as a westerner, once suggested the earth has a sexlike hemispheric polarity by pointing out that "while we are overpowering the Orient from without (through science and technology), the Orient may be fastening its hold upon us from within (through spiritual influence)." Which is analogous to declaring that while a man is mastering a woman from without (through muscular strength, etc.) she may be enslaving him from within (through hormones and psychic forces), and her control, though less obvious, may be the greater. And why, do you suppose, the female is generally affected more than the male by the love experience? Isn't it because the polarity of sex is not exactly mutual - because rape has a one-way direction - because, if you liken the phallus to a gun, shooting is a less drastic experience than being shot? Offhand the only way I can think of in which the sexes are really equal is knowing (in their hearts) that they really are not.

  An analogy bearing on this is that between the mating polarity of male and female and the predation polarity of predator and prey. If you can consider a tooth a phallic symbol, it is clear that its effect, either as tooth or phallus, must be more traumatic for the recipient (female or prey) than for the activator (male or predator), whether or not the recipient provides a haven (as in the case of the female's sex organs). Actually there are simple little animals like the rotifer (page 88), whose phalluses literally bite into any part of their mates' bodies just as if they were teeth but serve to impregnate rather than digest them.

  POLARITY OF GOOD AND EVIL

  When we contemplate the omnipresence of life, of course we run into what I'd call one of the profoundest polarities of all. It is the increasingly evident truth that, as every world contains a potential seed, so does every seed contain a potential world! And from there, as if a mirror divided positive and negative, the roster of polarities continues inexorably on into matter and energy or, if you'd prefer, matter and antimatter. Then into cause and effect, subject and object, the concrete and the abstract, the macrocosm and microcosm, science and religion, Creator and creature, liberty and slavery, free will and fate, mortality and immortality, yin and yang, good and evil ... and a hundred more.

  Good and evil, I dare say, epitomize polarity as much if not more than any other pair of opposites, so I want to examine their relation closely. Indeed the fact that they represent value judgment through the whole spectrum of spirit makes them important to understand as clues to the deepest meaning of this world, and to the question of whether a supreme spiritual essence exists - and, if it does, what it is like.

  Naturally this subject brings to mind such ancient and troublesome but pertinent questions as: Why is there evil in the world? Why does God the Potter make "one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor"? And, as many have asked in vain, how can there be a God, presumed to represent the highest good, Who nevertheless creates and presides over a world containing injustice, crime, war, ugliness, destruction, pollution, disease, pain and other apparent evils? Will there ever be anyone who can resolve this bitter paradox that has plagued man ever since he began to ponder the meaning of his world? In brief: what good is evil?

  The more I wonder about this question, the more I am convinced that the answer has to be bound up in the concept of relativity - in some basic sort of resolution of evil's obvious polarity with good. Does efficiency then somewhere blend into charity? Is there a boundary between anarchy and eugenics, or an Umpire who can reconcile Survival of the Fittest with the Golden Rule?

  Perceptive philosophers have long touched on the intimacy between good and bad, the key idea emerging that the human soul thrives on a challenge or a problem and, once it is stretched by struggling with any sort of adversity, it can never shrink all the way back to its original dimensions. And so it grows bigger. Therefore one should think of adversity as a kind of growth hormone at the opposite pole from, yet absolutely essential to, spiritual development.

  To this you may reply, "But why does the adversity have to be so unfairly applied on Earth? Why are some babies born feeble-minded or deformed in hovels and others, no more worthy, born bright and beautiful in palaces?" My feeling is that the question is not only polarized but loaded - loaded with assumptions about values (of intelligence, normalcy, wealth, pain, happiness, etc.) - that no mere human is qualified to assess. Moreover doesn't a just judgment in each case hinge on spiritual polarities hidden to mortal view?

  Pain has a measurable polarity, I believe - one that ranges through the whole axis connecting life and death. And these opposite phases of our existence obviously hold a polar interrelationship that long retained a prominent place in the philosophy of ancient China, where life and death were likened to the opposite sides of one coin and were considered an integral part of the well-known Chinese complementarity of yin and yang. Indeed it was the yang of life that would inevitably be fulfilled by the yin of death, just as light calls for shade or fire cries out for water. For together life and death create a whole: a spiritual organism, a being, a soul. And in their metaphysical aspect their vibrating poles resonate and transcend the illusion of mortality toward the reality of immortality.

  In a not-too-different way we can also view evil and good as representing the poles of a single whole that often looks very different from its two contrasting sides but is really one living synthesis. When a baby, for instance, gets spanked by his mother because he tried to climb out of his crib, the spanking naturally seems to him evil, for it is probably the most horrible experience he has ever known or imagined. For no reason he can understand, his closest friend-mother-God attacks him with overwhelming force and he reflexively cries in outraged protest. To the mother, on the other hand, the spanking is not evil but essential. It is constructive. It is good. If she analyzed it, she would recognize it as a form of communication. The baby being too young to understand words, she has little choice but to use this traditional alternative, which amounts to an animal-level sign language with sharp accents on its syllables, to tell him that climbing is taboo and something to be avoided because it brings quick and fearful pain.

  It is far from obvious, I know, but in my opinion the life of the adult human on Earth is remarkably analogous to that of the baby. For, like the baby, the adult also experiences what is to him evil in crime, hatred, destruction and war. And he too protests and tries to correct these evils, as all religions and the common rules of decency tell him he should. Yet, from a viewpoint far beyond the human, indeed from what one might call God's perspective, it could be that crime, disease, famine, wantonness, waste, woe and war serve a purpose more constructive than appears. One could not and should not call these things good, for they are not good. They are really evil. Yet I see evidence that in a deeper sense they may be an important analogue of the letters, words and sentences of a divine and universal
language, a mystic code for teaching through deed and example the elementary lessons of spirituality. They thus can have a function, the function of evil in life. It is not good, to be sure - yet it is here, built-in, and it is viable. Its function was mentioned long ago in the Hermetic Philosophy of ancient Egypt, by the Manicheans, the Jesuits and, I suppose, others. It is part of life. Worlds are created by head-on collisions, and there is even said to be a conservation side to head-hunting.

  Most humans seem to believe they want to attain something in life. But do they actually secretly yearn for frenzy, conflict, failure and more struggle? Can there really be joy if there be no pain? The Prophet Krishna taught that "pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, are all one and the same." War is madness - but battle the spice of life. And despite all its destructive horror, a case can be made for war as mankind's first large collective action that forged tribes into nations and made feudalism into democracy. War also has greatly stimulated invention in recent history. In the first half of this century alone, World War I produced the tank that evolved into the bulldozer, at the same time rapidly developing other new vehicles from submarines to aircraft; and World War II created the aerosol bomb, the transistor, radar, the jet, the long-range rocket, the atomic age and the space age.

  Presumably it was his youthful intuition about war's fecundity that induced stretcher-bearer Teilhard de Chardin in World War I to write in his diary that "through the present war we have really progressed in civilization. To each phase of the world's development there corresponds a certain new profoundness of evil... which integrates with the growing free energy for good." Although since then mankind has been forced to face the stark fact that war has grown so dangerous it may yet run amuck and destroy civilization if not all major life forms in our world, should we not, while working for peace, at least try to temper our apprehension by recognizing that some paradoxical component of war just may somehow be a tool of spirit?

  Of course it is not really possible for us earthlings to descry the Elysian view of planetary life, even while in orbit, so I hope you'll pardon my stretching my mortal prescience a little farther than it likes to go. I do it because I deeply feel man must glean what he can of the spiritual meaning of adversity if only for his optimum understanding of the illusory paradox of evil that so tries this nether world. I believe anyone rash enough to criticize such a basic feature of creation as evil or woe should at least reflect how easy it is to under- or over-estimate the suffering of other creatures. Is it not clear that some of the apparent agony in predation may harbor hidden satisfactions in the predatee as in the predator, that a preying mantis who continues making love to his mate after she has eaten his head off has other-than-human feelings, that surface complacence in some creatures may conceal deep frustrations, that the lowliest of martyrs undergoing torture for his faith may be happier than the grandest of princes on his honeymoon?

  What is evil in respect to me indeed may be good in respect to you and vice versa. For there must be brands of evil that are good for me to struggle against - things that are "evil" only relative to my consciousness, not absolutely evil - things that challenge but don't really harm anyone, including me. This, I am convinced, is the meaning of the ancient Chinese saying that "to be right you must also be wrong." And I feel sure in my bones there is no such thing as absolute evil, for evil is in essence only a dearth of good, a deficiency from certain viewpoints, a negative quality, a relative value.

  This whole issue of good and evil of course deals with the question of contrast and its value for the world. Contrast creates impact, meaning, language, structure. It is effective because things are most sharply measured or defined by their opposites. In an example, you can use the concept of light to signify good, if you prefer, which would make the obverse side into darkness rather than evil. This may be helpful because darkness is not necessarily bad, often being the creative darkness that gives meaning by its very contrast, by surrounding and framing the light. Indeed it forms the black area on a printed page like this one. Some might say a completely white page is purer and more perfect than one with so many black marks upon it. But of course a pure page is also a blank page and worthless because it conveys no meaning.

  The same principle of contrast applies to the relativity of good and evil, a spiritual interaction between opposing forces that could be likened to a pen against paper, writing the language of God in mystic words that inscribe themselves as deeds upon the world. If you are not sure what I mean, consider the similar paradox that amplifies the images of many of the great figures in history. Would we remember Joan of Arc had she not been burned at the stake? How would Churchill seem without the villainy of Hitler? Or Lincoln without the Civil War?

  Even a symbolic figure like Saint George could hardly have become the patron saint of England without the aid of a partner whose great virtue was that he was wicked. I refer of course to the famous evil dragon for, if by some fluke the beast had turned good, George would have lost his reason for fighting him - and the whole fracas would have fizzled. Likewise did not Abel receive indispensable help from Cain, Abraham from Nimrod, Moses from Pharaoh, Christ from Judas ... ? And do not Christians agree that the supreme wrong of the crucifixion occurred on "Good" Friday which proved to have a right side on Easter?

  Of course there must be millions of people, particularly in Earth's more materialistic and complacent societies, who reject the need for contrast or any kind of serious struggle in life and enjoy nothing so much as interpreting their problems as proof that they are the unfortunate victims of injustice. Many of them no doubt would love to awake from their troubles and discover conscious life to be really just a bed of roses - roses without thorns of course - and they might even imagine they would be happy to loll in thornless roses forever if they actually got the chance. But any sensible person could tell you that if these louts really did loll a few days in their rose beds, it is certain (assuming they possessed a streak of humanity) that the lolling would get so deadly dull within a week that they would yearn for something to break the monotony: anything, even if it hurt. Indeed, although their encountering a thorn on one of the roses in the beginning would have been abhorrent, by the second week that same thorn would have become an adventure, a jot of spice, a pointed sensation, a punctuation mark in an endless sentence. And this may be the deepest philosophical significance of the thorn. For it is remarkable, when you come to think of it, how much the shapes of commas, accents, apostrophes, parentheses, quotation marks and exclamation points resemble thorns, and how similar is their evolutionary function. And it is a fact that thorns are not wholly defensive, nor do they merely puncture: they also punctuate! Some of them are even attached to seeds and eggs. And thorns do more than inflict: they inflect! Like pain, problems, predation, birth, sex and death, all of which evolved for creative purposes with various long-range survival values, if life suddenly lost the thorn, it would desperately have to set about evolving a replacement or hazard the very end of its existence.

  The tooth and the claw of course are the thorns of the animal kingdom, shaped similarly but wielded more willfully and subject to the same philosophical analogies. If you are one of those who see the thorn, the tooth and the claw as little botanic and zoological devils existing only to torment the "good guys" of nature, perhaps you should consider the spiritual station of the Devil in religious history. For the traditional teaching of the Church is that the Devil is really a fallen angel and therefore possessed of supernatural insight and potential. And, like any thorny influence bedeviling people, the figure of Satan has served as a symbolic predator of man who unfortunately is now almost uniquely deprived of what's known as natural predation. Indeed in the long view of the ecologist, mankind very much needs a predator before he gets any softer from artificial living - not just for his physical evolutionary enhancement, like the moose being pruned by wolves, but for mental discipline and, most of all, spiritual transcendence - to "separate the sheep from the goats" or to weed out (
as by sterilization) hopeless misfits from future populations or even turn organism man into superorganism Man.

  THE BOON OF ADVERSITY

  A different kind of evidence of the value of adversity in life and its evolution is the struggle that a young animal goes through to stay with its mother even though the closer it gets to her the more surely it will be stepped on, squeezed, scratched and knocked around. To test the factor of stress in this kind of "love," a biologist gave electric shocks to hundreds of baby ducklings while they followed their mothers and discovered that in ensuing weeks they showed a significantly stronger attachment to them than did hundreds of similar unshocked ducklings. Another researcher in the same field divided a couple of dozen puppies into three groups and reared them in isolation boxes. The first group he treated kindly, the second he consistently punished for making any positive approach to him, and the third he treated kindly or punished at random. And it turned out that the third group of puppies became the most attached to and dependent on him. Which suggests that stress, including the mental stress of uncertainty, is an ingredient in attachment or love and that perhaps even manifestations of hatred (its polar opposite) somehow enhance love.