The unity of life

The self appears to be something we create or, better yet, assemble.  But I said at the outset that we are going to proceed logically. So if I am going to maintain that I and me are not the same, and that me is a later development, then it is only fair to say something about I.

Of course, there is no logical answer to the question of who/what we are. The best I can hope to do is to outline something you won’t simply reject as unreasonable, something you can accept as enough of a possibility to make it worth reading on.

With that in mind, I want to propose one assumption: the fundamental unity of life. That is admittedly a pretty big assumption, but less than has been passed down through generations as religion and spirituality. Whether we have expressed it as God, an animistic “Mother Nature” concept, a journey toward some kind of mystical union or nirvana, or even the various faces/aspects of the Divine as in Hinduism, we seem to see a unity underlying life.

I see no need to bring a deity into the picture, especially since there is nothing close to a consensus on this, but I think it would be more than arrogant to dismiss a collective thrust running through human thought through the ages. So I’ll settle for the unity of life. But with such famous and enduring ideas as the flat earth or the earth as the center of the solar system (or universe), I don’t mind padding the argument.

The prevailing scientific explanation for the birth of the universe is the Big Bang. I can’t think of anything more unitary. As far as we can determine, everything that exists came from one cosmic irruption that has been expanding and changing ever since. Of course this does not prove anything, but it makes the unity of life that much more reasonable a possibility.

Another thing to consider is the nature of life. It is possible that life is a random development, something that arose purely by accident from inanimate matter. Perhaps strict evolutionary biologists will say we have no evidence to go further than this, and I respect that from a purely scientific point of view. But it is at least equally possible that some energy animates life, that some momentum is at work.

You have to choose which makes more sense to you, but I go along with the sense of life as having momentum. At the same time, I would have to reject any idea that this momentum has any particular direction in the sense that we could know where it is headed. Even so, I would take things one step further and recall a famous philosophical principle that has been around at least since the time of the ancient Greeks: from nothing, nothing comes.

We obviously can have no idea what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang. (Interestingly, the Hindu concept of the days and nights of Brahma would be a perfect mythological fit for a universe that expands and then contracts over and over again.) But if life is not random and accidental, then there is no reason not to suggest that we can look at it as the journey of an energy or momentum that is coming alive, evolving, in the physical universe.

Alright, that was a mouthful. So let me run it by again. Instead of an elaborate creation story or myth, positing some deity with a plan, we have a simple impetus or life force that accompanies (maybe even produces) the Big Bang and then slowly takes form according to the physical reality produced by that primal event. In essence we have a creation with no predetermined end, a momentum that manifests or incarnates in the world of matter.

The only thing I want to stress before moving on is that what I am proposing is less fantastic than any standard religious account of creation. It adds life as a constituent or driving force to the scientific account of creation as we understand it, but without any plan or goal. It is a reasonable possibility that also is consistent with the most basic thrust of religious and spiritual thought through the ages.

Now that we have a starting point, we can go back to the hanging question of how I can be different from me. But I think we’ve covered a big enough chunk for now. So see how that all settles and I’ll pick up the thread in the next post.

14 thoughts on “The unity of life

  1. Bob bonnici

    Wouldn’t the driving force be unity? We realize that we are all one. Hence the golden rule, because I am you and you are me.

    Bob

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    1. vince Post author

      Yes, unity. But I see a concrete basis for it. It’s not an idea or a goal but tangible reality. Life manifesting through temporary, individualized forms. Seeing these forms or their abstract extentions (souls, karma) as having permanence or semi-permanence is simply a mistake we can understand and hence no longer be deluded by. Seeing a soul or karmic momentum as a kind of transitive stage leading to some form of mystical communion is a concept I would deem close enough to be mythically compatible; it just adds a whole lot of abstraction that I can do without.

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      1. Bob bonnici

        Ok, but must reality be limited to tangible forms? Is only what can be verified by our physical senses and instruments real, or we can know is real? As for permanence, isn’t it true that matter and energy themselves are never really destroyed but still exist in different forms?

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        1. vince Post author

          No, reality is not limited to tangible forms. But we cannot have a rational discussion if we do not restrict ourselves to tangible reality and logic. The point here is that we can arrive at a perfectly reasonable basis for compassion. People who share a more extensive common language or symbol system can discuss at more abstract levels, but I want to stake out a common ground in the most basic and widely understandable language possible. Much more is possible, but first we need basic agreement on the absolute reality of our unity and that we either evolve further with the rest of life or bring billions of years of evolution to a tragic halt. As for matter and energy, conservation seems to hold, but change in form can be more than radical, as with the first moments of the universe when only energy existed, before even elementary particles could form let alone atoms or molecules.

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          1. Bob

            This is certainly a noble venture and an exciting adventure! Reason is a great starting point and yes, energy does appear to change radically. So if compassion is the basis which can link us or reveal to us the absolute reality of our unity, what is compassion’s vehicle to awaken us all to our unity with one another and all creation? Could “story” be a vehicle that all humans recognize and are receptive to? True, stories of compassion can get mythic and abstract, but they do preserve memories of compassion and seem to inspire continuing acts of compassion.

            I can’t find a web page for Beatrice Bruteau but she does seem to integrate science and all religions well.

          2. vince Post author

            Realization of unity engages compassion as true self-love, life recognizing itself in all its forms. I’ll get to that a little later on. Stories, in a way, are all that we have in terms of communication. If we see religions as great stories, myths, that preserve fundamental insights but are not to be clung to literally, then they are gardens of insight cultivated over centuries. We understand well how no two people will give exactly the same account of events they witness together, but when it comes to religion often there is a bizarre insistence that exact words and rituals must be preserved or else terrible consequences will befall us. Really hard to fathom, yet the more fearful among us attack and even kill people whose thoughts, words or deeds might bring those imagined consequences, often considered punishment inflicted by an all-loving Creator. Just incredible. But fear of death, of nothingness, which is hard-wired into individual existence, leads to the most desperate grabs for immortality.

          3. vince Post author

            I have found this interview with Bruteau. Very interesting. Very similar concepts. She does seem to stretch God to the breaking point. I’d like to discuss that with her, and how she integrates the whole Catholic system in general with her thinking. If God manifests as evolution, does God also show up outside of evolution? And if not, is evolution as a creative impulse not enough to say? I’d also like to discuss her seeming view that an individual True Self continues.

  2. vince Post author

    Welcome. Sorry to take so long to respond, but I was working on the site and didn’t realize anyone had seen it, let alone commented. I’m “officially” letting people know about it as of today, so I promise to be more communicative.

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  3. Bob

    I don’t think god shows up outside of evolution because that would imply a separation. We are “inside” god instead of having god somewhere outside of ourselves. We are participants in what Bruteau calls god-ing (god being a verb) or the process of evolution in which we awaken to our unity with all our diversity. Salvation outside the Church? Not possible to be outside of the evolutionary process, but it is possible to not be consciously aware that you are in it.

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  4. vince Post author

    Right, so if God doesn’t show up outside of evolution, I think it best to stick with evolution and avoid all the baggage that comes with the word God, which so many people will associate with images formed since childhood. The old my God is better than your God extension of the domination paradigm has not done us much good. Of course, within religious systems, it is necessary to stay with the traditional concepts and, hopefully, evolve them.

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  5. Bob

    Alright, so love as the conscious attraction of life recognizing itself can awaken us out of a domination paradigm. Aside from the Christian understanding that God is love, would metaphysics be a better tool for referring to the Ground of Being, or Being itself? Our self is within an all-inclusive Reality which has no environment, no opposite, no alternative – One without a second. Hence, you cannot look at it, rather, you can only consciously realize your own location in it.
    This, of course, is a mystical description found in all major religions but perhaps Buddhism describes it most successfully because it is not theistic nor does it involve any myths, dogmas, or theories.

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    1. vince Post author

      I want to steer clear of mysticism, because it is too subjective. We are temporary vehicles though which life achieves consciousness, but in a distributed way. The response of self-aware life when it encounters life in its myriad other evolving forms is love. Hence the only love is self-love, the only dynamic is self-perpetuation, but of life as a whole. (Conversely, greed is the natural response to the delusion of the individual self, the natural warping of love and self-perpetuation that results.) I think a holographic paradigm is involved, by which each contribution through the distributed network of consciousness acts to clarify or creates a more detailed image. I also think this is a transitional stage – similar to what Teilhard envisioned with the Omega point – that will last until consciousness achieves a “critical density,” much as a critical density of neural connections seems necessary for consciousness to move from simple awareness and response to self-awareness. (Or until we self-destruct.) But these are speculative, not core. We are part of a process of becoming. I do posit some urge or momentum that manifested initially in the universe through the Big Bang. But no Ground or Being beyond the evolutionary coming into being that is the “ordinary” reality we are a part of, because there is no clear evidence or knowledge of this and I see no necessary reason to propose it. There is plenty of room for connections and possibilities we do not yet accept as part of this reality, that could appear as evolutionary mutations, that might in the future be considered part of ordinary reality. But I want to keep things as close as possible to agreed-upon, observable reality and the language of logic.

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      1. Bob

        Alright, mysticism is highly subjective yet it does seem to be observable reality as noted by mystics as far back as Plato. I suggest it because meditation is both consciousness-shifting and self-awareness shifting that helps us realize our mind’s self-sufficiency to exist without the external identification images that we constantly compare with each other and make us feel inadequate. In order to act out of a new consciousness of compassion, somehow we need to be able to observe and experience our true self-sufficient selves.
        But let’s stick with the agreed upon principles of working with the objectively observable realities. Compassion is an excellent starting point. May I suggest adding some other “transcendentals” from metaphysics: being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. Yes, they have some subjectivity but they do seem to be universally observable as attached to everything insofar that it exists and seems to transcend any other quality it may have.
        Again, empathy with other beings, compassion, is a good starting point but are we trying to walk with only one leg here? Can we acknowledge the ability to conceive the Infinite? Bruteau suggests that both of these abilities transcend the needs of the finite being’s intention to maintain and extend only itself.
        At any rate, for evolution to progress, our human consciousness needs to transcend a finite sense of self.

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        1. vince Post author

          A step at a time, I think. If we can see that the whole idea of a finite or permanent self makes no sense and has no basis other than error, leading to endless horrors in the futile and misguided quest for immortality — really eternal error and isolation — then we move forward into a world of endless possibilities. People who see this have no problem accepting and appreciating any number of mythologies that present complementary aspects of truth/reality. The problem we face is the great number of people who do not see the unity underpinning it all, and who defend their mythologies and subjective understandings as literal and absolute. The current pope’s Iesus Dominus is a perfect example of this. it is patently offensive, if “gently” so. And besides the resulting “clash of cultures,” and perhaps partly because of it, a growing number of people simply reject anything that smacks of religion or spirituality. This might well amount to throwing the baby out with the bath water, but it raises the challenge of whether we can conceive of reality in a way that avoids subjectivism as much as possible, that proceeds from the most minimal set of assumptions possible. That is what I am attempting. As I have said, once we get over the hump and are no longer in danger of destroying our world out of self-induced fear and ignorance, there is no end to what we can conceptualize, discuss and discover. But for those trapped in self who cannot find a way out, we need a way accessible to the greatest number and as neutral as possible. Religion and spirituality work well for some but not for all. Truth must be accessible from any direction.

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