The Big Picture

We are but one life form on this planet. Life as a whole does not need us. In fact this planet would be faring much better without us. And it’s difficult to believe that the kind of intelligent God now in place would will the creation of a being that would engage in the piecemeal destruction of one of the centerpieces of all creation. That this God works in mysterious ways is no explanation but, rather, an escape hatch for those believers who find themselves faced with uncomfortable challenges suggested by their own religious scenarios. They claim to know the mind of God up to the point where it is useful to them.

Life created us. And life makes mistakes. It makes genetic mistakes in individuals and species which nature selects against. Are we Home sapiens proving to be a mistake? New and old species alike are constantly put to the survival test and are rendered extinct if unable to pass. Homo sapiens passed the test with flying colors. We became over-achievers. And that may prove to be our undoing. We have not only become the bane to the survival of other species but a threat to our own survival as well. We were created out of life’s prodigious drive to survive and we have hence evolved into a means for its extinction.

Life as a whole has always had to deal with surviving in relation to a planet that is at best indifferent to its existence. With the exception of vegetation life lives on life. And life created the atmosphere in which it evolved. Each species, in procreating through its own survival techniques, conspires to serve in the furtherance of life itself.

One can see a kind of morality at work here. No species totally lords it over any other (until human beings came along) while individuals are sacrificed for the greater good of life, for the existence of their own species and in turn for life itself. Predators, for the most part prey only on those individuals of other species that will provide a meal. Wild dogs have been known to kill more sheep than necessary for feeding purposes. But that could be the result of domesticated sheep that have lost the ability to take defensive measures which would have limited the number of sheep the dogs had access to. The dogs on the other hand have no intrinsic stop-preying signal and will only cease their momentary predation when and if the sheep deploy effective counter strategies to discourage it. But on the whole predators are not a threat to prey. The lion is not a threat to the wildebeest nor is the fox to the rabbit.

Life goes about seeking its own advantage in ecosystems of its own making, expanding its reach through the creation of life forms most capable of using, overcoming and changing environmental conditions for survival purposes. Each species, each part of life, plays a role in providing life as a whole, as a single organism, optimum opportunity for an assured existence in perpetuity by finding ways of living in all kinds of climes and nooks and crannies. In the depths of the ocean where sunlight cannot reach, thus making the process of photosynthesis impossible, life operates through a process of chemosynthesis.

Life as a whole is a cellular colony tenaciously determined to exist however, wherever, forever. Each individual life form of every species has an awareness of this tenacious drive to survive, to be alive eternally. A life form successfully occupying a particular niche secures a brick, as it were, in the edifice of life itself.

Through each member of each species life expresses its desire for immortality. Each life form in a sense desires to prey without being preyed upon. But as life itself needs the predator/prey dynamic for the preservation of life as a whole, individual species also need it for their own existence. The fox, for instance, enables the existence of the rabbit by preying upon individuals and controlling that species growth, while enabling its own individual existence in the process, as well as that of its species. In this way rabbit and fox play a part in the existence of life itself.

Life slowly carved out an existence for itself on a planet that only provided the possibility for the eventuality of life. Earth was not made for life. Life made the planet livable. The very things that help to create life can also be destructive to it. Sunlight, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, cold, heat, etc., can all be fatal to life. Life needs the opportunity to be able to use all those things for its own purpose. It needs to find just the right area within the creative/destructive dynamic of the elements conducive to its survival in order to thrive. Life in its primal state was the architect of the ozone layer, which found the area between the creative/destructive dynamic of the sun to make it friendly to new life forms to come.

Initially planet earth did not have the kind of atmosphere as there is today. The foundation for the subsequent development of life as we know it were microbes that could survive on a furnace of a planet while inhaling the nitrogen rich air and exhaling oxygen. This eventually led to their demise and paved the way for life forms that inhaled oxygen. Interesting to note here that primordial microorganisms engineered their own extinction. Something that Homo sapiens now seem to be engaged in. Of course, those primitive life forms did not have the conscious awareness to realize what was happening. So what’s our excuse?

It all has to do with which side of the creative/destructive dynamic a species finds itself at any given time due to its own behavior or to favorable or unfavorable environmental conditions or to how its behavior affects environmental conditions.

The cells of all creatures have been aware of this creative/destructive relationship with the nature of things for billions of years. Cells creating individual species do so with regard to the total cellular colony which all of life is part of. Cellular engineering, along with natural selection, conspires to create a network of life forms with all drives, appetites and instincts of particular species regulated by singular weapons, defenses and breeding rates that provide ample margins of survivability.

Whales who occupy the top of the food chain in the sea have low breeding rates and feed upon krill which are near the bottom and have very much higher rates of reproduction. In between these two extremes are many more such synchronized arrangements between species by which the one living organism of the sea, that each species and each individual of each species is part of, ensures its existence. This is not to say that the behavior of each individual of each species is somehow directed by the macrocosm of life itself for its own purposes. But that the entire living organism of the sea is all created and orchestrated from the microcosm of a cell. This nice (or perhaps not so nice) arrangement of the macrocosm was not predesigned but came at the expense of countless creatures that did not fit the bill and were condemned to extinction.

On land this same kind of synergistic arrangement between species is also evident. With the development of Homo sapiens, however, the arrangement is severely challenged by the very survival techniques that so successfully brought life to this point in its evolutionary process. We were endowed with a capacity for survival that has now become a threat to our continued survival. Our intelligence, our communication skills, have brought us to the brink of disaster and it now remains to be seen whether or not we can employ our conscious faculties to establish a new covenant with the nature of things that is beneficial to our survival and so to the entire ecosystem our survival depends on.

How do we do this? How do we go about providing the means by which we can reverse our present momentum and realign ourselves, our species, to conform to those elements of the biosphere that conspire to preserve and perpetuate life? Do we really have the ability to change our ways or are we a force of nature without the ability to sit in our own driver’s seat and effectively maneuver ourselves toward a future of a more conscious choice than that which presently appears before us?

There are no grand political schemes that are going to show us the way. That’s for sure. And old religions that still insist that mindless procreation represents the holy will of God are not going to show us the way. There is no God above with a plan for us to follow. We’re on our own. We are part of the God force as everything is. We are infused with particular manifestations of that force which emanate through us from the microcosm. So, we are formed as a force of nature that is one with the God force. We must combine with particular manifestations of the God force in other life forms to create a fuller more complete sense of God, of who we are and how we must conduct ourselves in this world for the sake of this world’s vigor now and in the unforeseeable future.

This world is our only link to God. All material, all matter, all life is the manifestation of the spirit of God, the essence of God. There are not two separate realms natural and supernatural that we must divide ourselves between while not really achieving a salubrious rapport with either, or achieving it with one at the expense of the other. This world is the realm of our concern; here we exist in a moment of God’s eternity. Our relationship to this earth, our relationships on this earth are one with our relationship with the essence of God, whatever God may be.

We know through our knowledge of the nature of things with reference to each other that life on this planet is something we must be responsible for. We also know that this newfound responsibility entails certain adjustments in our psyches and our living standards that we are not yet ready to accept. Our comfort level feels threatened. But it is threatened one way or the other. Present conditions are not very comforting and it seems they will only get worse in the long run. So the question is whether we take effective measures now, measures that we may find uncomfortable for the time being, or continue on our present course and invite wholesale discomfort to become a permanent condition.