The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  Sometimes I wonder about the human body's being a miniature replica of the earth's surface. For it resembles our outer planet remarkably, being composed of the same elements in the same proportion: three quarters water and one quarter solids, both organic and inorganic, with swift internal flows, occasional eruptions and gentle daily tides. And there is a corresponding similarity between the atom and the solar system, where the sun represents the proton and the planets the electrons that orbit around it. Such preponderant structures notably demonstrate how material forms are ordered in regular and meaningful ways by nonmaterial abstractions such as symmetry and conceptual archetypes. This applies to everything from crystals to supergalaxies, all of which in essence (as we have seen) may be considered alive even though influenced by what are generally regarded as mysterious, if not unknowable, forces.

  But how long does an atom remain an atom? A cell a cell? This too has a bearing on transcendence. Some cells, called lymphocytes, come equipped for chemical coordination with synthetic polymers before the polymers have even been invented. In other words, they are ahead of evolution. Or could it be that they are merely outside of time as some aspects of the microcosm are surmised to be?

  THE TRANSCENDENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  To think of worlds beyond this world and muse upon the idea of one's consciousness being absorbed into other consciousnesses (presumably greater ones than one's own) in its inexorable transcendence toward a universal mind - that, it seems, is a disturbing thought to many people. They imagine consciousness absorption as a total loss of self, a blacking out of all consciousness as if death must be the final end of everything. It is naturally a drastic and distressing thought.

  Yet it needn't be. For why cannot the absorption of one's consciousness be a kind of widening of perspective that is actually a natural, perhaps inevitable, accompaniment of experience? Isn't this really happening to all of us all through our lives anyway, little though we notice it? A newborn baby's consciousness is very limited at first. He feels the air and its coolness and the reassuring grasp of big hands picking him up. He gasps. He breathes. He hears new sounds. His consciousness expands as his senses quicken and he is absorbed into awareness of his mother, of the soft warmth of her bosom and the strange but wonderful taste of milk.

  As the days go by, his consciousness of his cradle and Mother is absorbed again into the consciousness that he also has a father and perhaps other members of the family - that beyond his bed is a room. Then, as the hours grow into days, his little domain is absorbed and reabsorbed to include a door, a window, another window, a table and more space - in time a whole house, a neighborhood, a village, a country, a continent, a world - each sphere larger and containing more people, more things, brighter ideas and great complexities. Yet, as we saw with space and time, you don't lose the inch when you gain the mile, nor the minute when you discover the hour. And so with your individual self. Since you retain your self and your personality when you marry a spouse, give birth to a baby, go to school, join an army, or participate in public life, so can you retain your personal consciousness when you merge your thoughts into a universal mind. Why not? This is one of the more reasonable hypotheses of the dying process that we will be looking into next chapter. And it plausibly hints that the finite adventures of your growing self in this world dimensioned with space and time have been just what you needed to develop and transcend. Indeed how better could you have learned about the world than by playing around with these simple, finite tools?

  Of course there surely must be much more to life than just space, time and self - even in this finite phase - and some of it is, to say the least, mysterious. Take creativity: where does it come from? The handiest example before us right now is this book, whose source is largely a mystery. If I write this page today it comes out as you read it. But if I had written it yesterday, it would certainly be different. Or at another time or place or mood still different again - maybe better, maybe worse - with neither an end to the possibilities, nor any reliable way of predicting them. I don't know why.

  A lot of one's ideas originate in other minds. That is part of interhuman transcendence, for it is inevitable that even the most creative among us learns from others, consciously or unconsciously, not excepting our most original creations. Just so did Shakespeare study the play books. Just so is Mozart said to have adapted the opening theme of his Overture to The Magic Flute from a Clementi sonata. Newton perforce accepted a lot from Kepler and Galileo, as did Einstein from Faraday and Maxwell. These greatest of creators have not pretended anything else. Indeed all innovation stems more or less from all before it and, if good enough, will transcend its source and become permanently absorbed into the ever-growing universal reservoir that is the preserve of immortality. In fact, what better immortality could any artist or inventor have than to dip into the world's sources and mold them anew, then discover he has actually added something that has changed them forever?

  Sometimes such a creative genuis sees in one flash a whole system of relationships never before suspected in the world, a sudden vision of harmonic beauty that lifts him up in a surge of esthetic delight. But even then most of his vision's elements are already known separately to others, perhaps to many people who haven't so much as heard of each other - for, as Alfred North Whitehead once put it, "everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it." Again, many a great discovery at the time it is discovered has no known value, not even in the inventor's dreams. And it is only long afterward that its true worth is revealed, like the famous case of Bernhard Riemann and his new geometry of curvature in a continuum of an indefinite number of dimensions which, after resting dormant for a half century, bequeathed to Einstein exactly the tool he needed for General Relativity.

  Einstein, I'm told, needed all sorts of stimuli that perhaps no one, including himself, consciously realized were available or functioning. For one thing, he needed an audience. And found it in his understanding friend, Michelangelo Besso, the engineer, who alone was patient enough to attend long hours while the obscure genius explained, half to himself, what he thought wrong with current physical theory. As Einstein's future son-in-law, Dimitri Marianoff, later articulated it: "Albert has to have an ear. He is not concerned whether it listens or not - it is enough if he sees an ear. Besso was always Albert's ear. It was during these interminable discussions (about 1902-03) that he would find nourishment for his ideas ..."

  The intermingling of minds within the human species has been compared to a vast plain containing millions of wells that appear on the surface to be independent sources of water but deep underground actually interconnect and combine into tributaries that ultimately become a single mighty river. The rough physical analogy is full of truth if you can visualize all the barriers that block the transcendent flow from well to well, the rocks, frustrations, pettiness and misunderstandings that retard unity upon the planet. For, as Thomas Browne wrote in the seventeenth century, "We are more than our present selves."

  SUMMARY OF TRANSCENDENCE

  By now you must have a pretty fair notion of what I mean by transcendence and its multiple aspects: individual transcendence in which each of us develops larger and larger awarenesses of space, time and self, social transcendence in which individual consciousnesses are absorbed into superconsciousness or a group mind, and world transcendence in which the consciousnesses and superconsciousnesses of nations and empires on a planet evolve into a world superorganism that ultimately conveys them beyond the finitude of space, time and self toward the Infinitude of Mystery in the Universe, which may be called God. All of these transcendences are more or less intervolved as far as I can tell but, if you'll pardon a suggestion, one could clarify the whole process in one's mind by thinking of the familiar mortal space-time field on Earth as something that extends or expands radially outward along with one's personal consciousness toward an invisible, intangible and abstract continuum in which one's fellow beings are somehow never born and never die but ju
st ARE.

  It is not a shocking transcendence really, for it only incidentally extends beyond the mortal life span and takes place regardless of death, happening so gradually and naturally that there seems no real change. And we retain our selves for what self is worth, even as we are absorbed by society and the universe. Self of course is more than just an outlook, and more than a finite, mortal viewpoint. It is a kind of tool of learning, an educational device, like the primer you learned to read from, or the teacher who taught you. How else but through your own self could you discover space and time, feeling and thought, pain and love, and all the important lessons of this early world of worlds? Is there any better way to learn?

  To be sure, the self is elementary and down-to-earth, as any beginning tool must be if it is to be grasped and used. But this doesn't mean it is fixed and unchangeable. For, as with time and space, your spheres of awareness inevitably increase and in imperceptible but progressive stages you find and lose yourself as part of a family, a nation, a world ... And, without forgetting your name or who you are, if you are growing spiritually, you begin to care less what happens to you and increasingly think and feel and act in causes beyond your individual self - at the same time letting that self diffuse and recondense into a bigger, more universal consciousness. As a Hindu might put it, atman becomes Atman.

  To see how transcendence works, take a look at your own sympathy for another person or an animal or plant and then try to add sympathy for still others. Of course you can have heartfelt sympathy for a starving child in the Sahara. But if you keep multiplying this feeling to six or a hundred children and try to apply it to anything like all the suffering in the world (leaving out other worlds), it just breaks down because time and space mercifully insulate you and all creatures from each other. That is the nature of finitude. It does not reach everywhere or go on forever. Yet it is just right for this world, and it provides mortality, the perfect tool to enable us to concentrate on our selves in the here and now, so we can educate and develop our souls slowly, finitely, and thus gently advance toward Infinitude - transcending - transcending - mercifully, understandingly, dimensionally, from less to more ...

  As to your own individual suffering, being human, you'd naturally try to avoid pain and would reasonably dread any form of imminent agony. Yet, in retrospect, even though time and forgetfulness insulate your own pain from your own self, if your life had been devoid of all pain and suffering, you could be said to have missed much of life's richest experience. This I believe true. For pain often includes a goodly component of soul satisfaction and it surely has spiritual meaning. Also, impossible as it would be to prove it in this mortal phase of transcendence, pain may well, in fact, be the greatest language of the soul. Certainly Christ's message to the world would carry much less conviction had he not suffered on the Cross.

  Transcendence is thus to be seen as beginning for each of us when we are still in the microcosm as a fertile egg: the seed soul, stirring, seeking, striving to win admission as a pupil in the soul school of Earth (a school we will return to in Chapter 23). Once we become locked into a human embryo, our spirit seed or cell must (by natural law) stick with that particular finite assemblage of organic molecules as long as it remains alive, for this material body is important as a disciplined instrument of learning. Although the mortal span is short - sometimes so short we are baffled at its seeming pointlessness - there is profound meaning in its transcendent existence, something Aristotle evidently surmised when he described life as "spirit pervading matter," a statement that sums up Earth as she was never summed before. I mean that some sort of viable world setting appears a necessity to the development of mind and the flowering of spirit. Indeed, without some kind of finite limitations such as are so well imposed by earthly matter, how could the spirit-mind that is YOU ever grow toward maturity? For limitation is essential to measurement, to contrast, to comparison, comprehension, articulation. Just as an artist must limit his choice of paints if his picture is to have meaning, or a message must begin and end if it is to be understood, so life must have impact, adventure, form and feeling if it is to fulfill its purpose. Without letters printed sharply enough to be sensed, the page of life is blank.

  So the spirit-mind associates itself with finity in order to grow. It makes its entrance upon the stage of a material world. It assumes form in order to learn meaning. It assigns itself to a position in space and time so it can measure things and grasp the shape of ideas, visualize relativity and feel the warmth of love. How else, in basic terms, could it learn anything or develop itself? Where else is wisdom to be sown but in some sort of a world - and what is a world without some kind of form to define its existence?

  Our earthly life then, in simple terms, is a tentative tuning in on a particular collection of human cells - a transcendent resonance of protein molecules with intangible awareness in an illusory space-time continuum - a harmonic, a geometric interval, a note in a song of eternal and incomprehensible mystery.

  Chapter 20

  The Change Named Death

  * * *

  LIFE'S PROBLEMS, as you may have surmised ere now, could well turn out to be the most important things it has to offer. And of all of them, the most mysterious and inexorable one to many, if not most, of the thinking creatures on Earth is the question of how does life end? Where does it go?

  I am talking about death, life's shadowy counterpart or silent partner, which, most people seem to assume, must inevitably follow it. But first let us take a fresh look with as little prejudice as possible and see what we can see. What is the true nature of death? Is it concrete or abstract? Is it an end or a beginning or, perhaps more aptly, some sort of transition or a dimensional frontier? Is it in any sense a "cure" for the "disease" of life? And should we think of it as a wall, a mirror, a shuttered window or a one-way door? Above all, can it be considered absolute, a fundamental state? Or is it only relative and a matter of degree? Finally, could one define it as part of some basic reality, a detail of an unknown whole rather than merely an illusion?

  Naturally one does not expect completely satisfactory answers to all such questions at this early stage of man's inquiry into a subject that has long been the very epitome of inscrutability. But now that the taboo of sex has been largely overcome, the more persistent taboo of death may soon follow or even turn into a respected branch of science. Recent surveys of hundreds of cases of people who "died," then returned to describe strikingly parallel experiences, suggest a trend in that direction. Besides, death is a very solid and durable subject. For it was noted two millenniums ago by Seneca that, although anyone anytime can lose his life - and obviously must lose it eventually - no one ever can lose his death. Which is why death is safe and secure to each one of us, and therefore to be considered the gift of God.

  CAN DEATH BE DEFINED?

  This idea is supported by the Bhagavad-Gita, which effectively defines death by making it the province of Shiva, the god of dissolution but not of destruction (which, in Hinduism, does not really exist). And Lucretius, more specific, explains that "Death does not put an end to things by annihilating the component particles but only by breaking up their conjunction. Then it links them into new combinations ..."

  There is also the fact that death is not an all-or-nothing state but normally arrives in quantum stages or degrees. Indeed, to take an extreme case, when a human head is chopped off there is evidence that the head is capable of consciousness for at least several seconds more and that it will almost surely feel itself hit the ground. Charlotte Corday's head was reported to have suddenly looked very annoyed a few seconds after she was guillotined at the age of twenty-five during the French Revolution. Crocodile hearts have been found to beat for hours when cut out and the decapitated heads of ants may bite again and again for as long as a day and a half. Besides, the fact that both the living and the dead are made of identical elements can make it nigh impossible to distinguish them.

  In consequence there is a varied spectrum of opinion amo
ng medical scientists as to just when a dying organism should be regarded as dead. Is a man dead when breathing stops and his heart is still feebly throbbing? A long-accepted tradition would call him dead only when his heart quits, but obviously that criterion no longer holds in this age of artificial circulation, when a heart can be cooled and medically put to rest during an hour's operation, then started again at will, or when it can be completely removed from the body, while either a living transplant or a mechanical heart takes over the job of pumping blood for an indefinite period.

  Recently it was discovered that the most critical factor leading to biological death is anoxia or lack of oxygen in the brain, which at normal temperature cannot survive more than about ten minutes without this vital energy-giving element. During the period between heart stoppage and permanent brain damage, capillaries are likely to clog with clotting blood and the body is in a kind of limbo state sometimes called clinical death, out of which it may still conceivably be brought back to life by drastic resuscitation. Once the brain breaks down from lack of oxygen, however, life can never be fully restored, even in the rare cases when both heart and lungs are later stimulated enough to resume their function for a time. The brain's electromagnetic waves, in consequence, being found to be the surest indication of its condition, have become such a sensitive test of life that a new practice is coming into acceptance of pronouncing a person dead only after his brain waves cease - this despite the fact that a few recoveries have been reported after more than an hour without detectable brain waves. But nowadays hospitals have so many artificial aids (oxygen tents, artificial respirators, electronic hearts, kidney machines, etc.) that may give a dying patient (or his vital organs) a kind of pseudolife, even after his brain waves have gone flat, that it has become a very trying, if not completely arbitrary, question when to "pull the plug" on one of these expensive machines and shift it over to the next patient, who may still have a real chance to live.