posted on Jan, 6 2017 @ 12:29 AM
When I look at the evolution of life on this resilient and alive planet, I think of one creature in particular: dinosaurs.
For good reason do these beasts astonish us. Growing big in a world with around 30% oxygen content relative to today's 21%, these dinosaurs were
supercharged, super-sized factories of energy dissipation: a lunging beast of a form - a symmetrical miasma - a biting testament to evolution's
viciousness.
But then some 65 million years ago, an asteroid is said to have smashed into the sea around the Yucatan, killing off the large oxygen chugging
dinosaurs, and leaving the world for the smaller creatures who survived to evolve.
Is this history, or cosmic metaphor? Would it scare you if you yourself were a living metaphor - an ontological transformation within the framework of
a historical dynamic, now being exercised by the dynamic center - the self itself, alive, real, and living within as the architect of its actions -
mutated into expression through the primates - descendants of rodents - now living in the trees, exploring the trees - exploring life at two
perspectives - the low ground and the high ground.
As someone with a deep love for the sciences, I am amazed by the speech that natures meanderings speak: the little rodent survives the dinosaurs - and
how? Through some divine intervention, as it were: a chance bombing of the earth by a 6 mile wide asteroid - killing off a species that had colonized
many different domains, with the tree eating brontosaurus - an outlier - to the more general carnivorous habit of the dinosaur.
Today, neuroscientists argue that the brain-stem of the Human being corresponds in a very general, autonomic sense, to the brain of the reptile. The
association is helped by the fact that crocodiles, snakes and most lizards have small brains - with not much when it comes to the processing and
communication of social signals. Of all the reptiles alive today, the most "evolved" is the komodo Dragon, which seems to engage in some sort of
play-like activity, but this is itself debated by ethologists. In a very general sense, the external look of the animal very much does correspond to
the internal life of its consciousness: reptiles are and have usually been killing machines, although there are interesting exceptions to the rule.
Looking Back
When the philosopher, scientist, theologian, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, said that evolution was turning inwards, Chardin was referring to
this act of "collecting", as it were, the semantic items of the Earths past, and indeed, our universes past, all the way to the beginning. Chardin
saw this as an important research project as well as a spiritual quest - and I agree. I would add that this quest is about honing in on the details,
moving from the physics of the beginning of our planets formation, to the unfolding structure which emerged through myriad feedback loops, at multiple
emergent levels. The atoms, the quark, the molecule, the cell, the tissue, the body, the mind. All the particles of my constitution cohere through
mutual, dynamic oppositions and attractions, with positive and negative charges separating one another, as a "geometric" structure - a symmetry -
emerges.
Symmetry. This is where the sciences are moving: towards the wondrous view of the Human being as a "living crystal", in the immortal words of Mae
Wan Ho. Tremendous books are being written, and were inching closer, inevitably, as we come upon a more coherent and sophisticated architecture of our
species existence - the nature of our consciousness - and how our body, the body of others, and the planet, exist in an invisible "womb" that binds
all humans into a single structure with the life systems of all other creatures.
In looking back upon our history - our own personal history as a self, and the history of our species and the planet we evolved upon, our body
structures our awareness through a transformation of state from dynamical (systemic/computational) to phenomenological - with an implicit awareness
already present, indeed, as the core reality of the structure: the desire to live, to express life, and to express meaning.
From amoeba to the human, the "spirit" of the structure - the eye which watches upon its actions - was implicit and present in all that moves and
seeks to be. What happened with the evolution of social mammals was the elaboration of the sensory input and motor output with phenomenological
analysis. With more meaning - or being affected in new ways, come new "coherencies" in the structure - and so the geometrical symmetry - essentially
taking on more material complexity, in both number of components and possibility of combinations.
Yet with mind, that great big eye - that concept hinted at in the american dollar bill - came an aspect of existence that hadn't yet been incarnated
in any evolving dynamical structure on the Earth. Our emergence followed a trajectory of transformations that were simultaneously constrained by
normal physics (time budgets, energy, travel, rest etc) and enabled by a new, higher emergent phenomenon with the capacity to do physical work: love.
Creatures affected by this force are drawn to use one another in various ways to support their dynamical functioning, but it is only in the Human
lineage that this power has become elaborated and accomodated - led and made possible by a "zig-zagging" through the geography and time, and being
the one species that hit the right marks, expressed the right dynamics, to achieve a complexity of symmetry, a being totally centered in the most
phenomenal emergent property there is: love. From forests to stones, to forests, to elaborating the mind, to experiencing a connection to the
objective world that in turn stimulates an affective reaction: just think of how remarkable this is, when thought of the annuls of time, from the big
bang, to the supernova that created Earth, to the small molecules that self-organized into cells, to the formation of symbiotic cells that could
metabolize oxygen, to the extension of the one cell into a cell asssembly: an assembly of cells, making this emergent property we call an "animal".
And then this animal evolves, through fish, sharks, amphibians, dinosaurs, rodents, monkeys, apes, humans, each stage in the process of
"neuralization" - of complexifying the meaning-structure that is the mind - we are faced with moral situations - situations of stress and suffering,
yet a simultaneous awareness of what relaxes and inspires you: other people. The horror and hell of loneliness against the anger or resentment that
aggravates: the solution, as always, is the conscious decision to cultivate an orientation of love - and so love "chooses" itself, through us, and
through us, enables a more powerful structure.
The Gray, the Nordic, and the Reptile
I know there are people who really believe that there are creatures from alien planets with the above names. Since this is a conspiracy oriented
website, I may as well admit to why I mention this: to point out how our imagination is made - from the fabric of our dynamical structures history -
through all those forms mentioned earlier, back to the first animals 530 million years ago.
The imagination is not an arbitrary structure, but a logically built fabric - or quilt - that records the history of lifes many transformations.