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people who wrote and edited them. But this information is unfortunately more ignored than understood by those with a vested interest in forming their own interpretations of scriptures. It’s these ignorant views that form the basis for most conflict and debate about things religious. That’s the cuckoo egg. Churches are often far more preoccupied with their own preservation than their purpose.
Chapter 6Looking into Space
Nowhere is the arrogance of self more evident than in our on-going search for life in outer space. As I look up at the stars and wonder “Is there life out there?” What I’m really wondering is “Are there people like me out there?” I see everything from my perspective. Just as when I wonder about the meaning of life, I’m really wondering about the meaning of my life. If I really wanted to find an objective answer to these questions, whether there is life in space, or what is the meaning of life, I have to first define what life is. And here lies my dilemma. Intuitively it seems like a simple question – something is alive or it is not. But when I apply the discipline of an investigative journalist and go looking for the definitive answer I discovered there is no such thing as life. Life, as we know it, is really just another measure we have created to make sense of our world, like lemon and strawberry and gun and politician and computer and armadillo and Maurice Greene. Looking for life in outer space is like searching for time in outer space, or metres, or a lemon, or a butterfly, or a thought. These are only words – part of our language. Who am I? I am Leonard. Or am I? Leonard is a name. It’s a name given to me by my parents. But I am not the name. I existed before I was given a name. The name is just a word to differentiate me from the people around me. I have nine brothers and sisters, if we didn’t all have names our home would have been bedlam. In fact it was bedlam, even with names. But just imagine trying to run a household of 10 kids without names. Imagine trying to organise a school of 1000 kids without names. Now imagine trying to organise a world without names. Names, not just for the people, but for everything. In order to facilitate communication we use names – names make up our language. But names are only a set of categories, rules, measures, symbols that we agree on to create order in the chaos around us. So that we can talk to each other. Christopher Alexander explained this concept in his essay 'A City is not a Tree': “It is known today that grouping and categorisation are among the most primitive psychological processes. Modern psychology treats thought as a process of fitting new situations into existing slots and pigeonholes in the mind. Just as you cannot put a physical thing into more than one physical pigeonhole at once, so, by analogy, the processes of thought prevent you from putting a mental construct into more than one mental category at once. Study of the origin of these processes suggests that they stem essentially from the organism's need to reduce the complexity of its environment by establishing barriers between the different events that it encounters.” Life is just one of those categories. But unlike lemon, which is a name for something tangible, measurable, there is no measure of life. It is not real. This is not my theory, this is a fact. The Mechanics of Life from The World of Science series published by Andromeda Oxford Limited explains it thus: “The belief that life was fundamentally different from non-life led to the division of chemistry into two disciplines, inorganic and organic. The latter concerned itself solely with substances derived from living things. Since these substances were all based on chains or rings of carbon atoms, organic chemistry was also the chemistry of carbon. It was believed that organic compounds had special characteristics and could only be made from living things, but in 1828 Fredrick Wohler disproved this by synthesizing urea from an inorganic compound, ammonium cyanate. Thereafter, organic chemistry became simply the study of carbon compounds. Despite Wohler’s discovery and that of the Buchner brothers, ‘vitalism’ took a long time to die. Many people wanted to believe that the chemistry of life was somehow different, and as late as the 1940s there were scientists who thought that DNA would turn out to have some unique chemical basis. Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix with its conventional chemical bonds disappointed them.” So what exactly is it that we have put into the category, or measure, we call life? Everything is part of a chain reaction that started with the big bang. As far as we humans have been able to measure these chain reactions, we know that they all adhere to what we have identified as the laws of psychics and chemistry. At some point the chemical and electromagnetic conditions were such that they started a rapid series of chain reactions that led from the formation of carbon molecules all the way to single-cell “creatures”. These reactions continued and continue today. The results are the multitude of carbon-based cell formations we call life forms. All life is just part of a continuing chain reaction. Humans are, obviously, the most complex example of this phenomenon. Yet everything we do, everything we think, feel, perceive, remember, consists of a series of electro-magnetic chemical reactions that are no different to the chemical reactions occurring throughout the universe. I’m looking out my office window. There are large rocks with plants growing between them. We say the plants are alive, but the rocks are not. Yet the only difference between the chemical reactions occurring inside the plants and those inside the rock is time. The reactions inside the plants appear to be occurring billions of times faster that those affecting the rock. But there again, time is just another category or measure we have developed to help bring order to our lives. Like language, we need time to put everything into perspective. Otherwise how would I know that Maurice Greene was the “fastest man on earth”. Or how would I know whether or not the use-by date has passed on this cheese that right now I want to use to make a sandwich. While time has become a vital tool for us humans to keep control of our environment, never forget that we made it up. There is no such thing as time. Our time is based on the cycles of our earth, our sun and moon, so it has no relevance to the rest of the universe. But most importantly our time centres around us. I was born on July 26, 1957. That means I’m now “middle aged”, a “baby boomer”, a “Leo”. These may well be important dates in order to help fit me in with all the other humans on earth for administrative efficiency. My birthday tells me that I’m old enough to drive a car, to vote, to drink alcohol. It lets me know that it’s too late for me to embark on a career in ballet or tennis. Just as we time Maurice from the gun to the tape, we have also timed humans from birth to death, so we can organise our lives in order to optimise our potential – to encourage us to behave appropriately. Once you create a category you create prejudice. Species – humans, animals, birds, insects. Races – whites, blacks, coloureds. Nations – proud Americans, proud Australians, Irish, Irish decent, Greek decent. Religions, rich and poor, bride’s family on one side and groom’s on the other, haves and have-nots, life and non-life. We tend to look at our world from our subjective viewpoint – in terms of Us and Them – whether it’s as individuals our as a group. We are the dominant ones. Like a flea on a dog, the flea is Lord of his domain. This is the arrogance of self. On December 26, 2004, Boxing Day, our dog had a little scratch. The result was more than 200,000 of us were wiped out. This was nothing unusual. Our “dog” scratches all the time in geological time, it’s just that, like the flea, our life-span is so brief we rarely get to witness it. So if we are no different to the rocks in my garden or the matter that makes up the universe, then there is no such thing as life. Or, alternatively, we could say that everything is alive. Is there life out in the stars? Yes, the whole universe is alive. We are all part of one living being that is way beyond what we humans can comprehend with our mortal measures. Our being is bigger than we could ever imagine and smaller than we could ever imagine. How long have we been here? We’ve always been here. How long will we live for? We will live for ever.
Chapter 7Self Awareness
While the branches of this chain reaction we know as our universe continued to spread out in an infinite number of directions, our particular branch passed a major milestone several thousand years ago – we primates became aware. We began to think beyond the here and now. To use the words of Neuroscientist Professor Antonio Damasio we have developed the ability to “catch ourselves in the act of knowing.” Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Or am I? Science say’s I’m not – that “I” is just an illusion. The name Homo sapiens (Latin for "knowing man") is a bit deceptive, because there is a lot we don’t know and there is a lot we will never know. What we don’t know we assume. I assume when I go to work tomorrow I’ll still have a job. I assume I won’t crash my car. If I write this book I assume you will read it. If we don’t know how Saddam Hussein destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, we assume he still has them. Even though we often say “you can’t believe what you read in the papers,” nevertheless if we read something in the papers we assume it’s true. We assume there is an afterlife – has to be. We assume there is a God. I assume I know who I am. I know my name. I know my nationality. I know my religion. I know my parents. I know where I came from. I’m a husband, father, brother, son, uncle. I’m a journalist. I’m one who can get a couple of feet above the urinals at Immaculate Conception. But is this really who I am? My name was given to me by other people. The same goes for my nationality, religion etc. The rest are things I have done – roles I fulfill. I got married, had children, got a job – a career. What if I lost all this? What if I lost my family and all my papers in some war, or tsunami and ended up as a refugee in an Australian detention centre at Woomera or Baxter where nobody speaks my language. Out there in central Australia where I can see absolutely nothing all the way to the horizon in every direction – locked up indefinitely, alone, unemployed in the middle of nowhere with my name replaced by a number. Now who am I? I only really exist through my relationships with others. I am the sum of all my interactions. I don’t exist as an individual – I am part of the whole. Right now I am a writer. What makes me a writer? You do. You are reading what I write. You make me a writer, I make you a reader. Although we have never met, we are defining each other through our actions. There is a large climbing rose outside my widow. It has many pink flowers. The flowers are pink and beautiful because they are designed to be looked at. The plant wants its flowers to be looked at. They are designed to attract insects like bees and butterflies. The plant relies on the insects for its pollination and the insects rely on the plant for their food. Here are two organisms that have evolved in unison. They are different, yet they rely on each other for their very existence. They are part of the whole. A performer is only a performer if they have someone to perform to. I am a husband because of my wife. I am a father because of my children. I am a son because of my parents. I am an employee because of my employer. But I am not just the sum of my relationships to other people. I am also the sum of my relationships to objects. I am a motorist because I drive a car, I am a TV viewer, a movie goer, a reader, a gardener, a cook. As I am typing this Pope John Paul II is dying. He and I were close once. In fact he was my whole world and I his. We shared a great deal during our time together, although we never spoke and it lasted about three seconds on November 28, 1986. |
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