“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
Mary Shelley- Frankenstein
Human beings are organisms, not machines. Western science has pushed the idea of reality being purely material and mechanistic to a very dangerous and damaging extreme. Yes, there are mechanical aspects to being human, yes, humans can act like unconscious, pre-programed robots, but to reduce us to nothing but a machine is absurd and dehumanizing. In the 17th and 18th centuries “scientists” perpetrated vivisection on animals and attributed their cries as nothing but mechanical responses, much like the squeaking of a rusted wheel, this is because animals where thought not to have souls or emotions. They also formulated the idea that the universe is a giant clock like automaton that is designed, wound, and set into motion by a supremely intelligent God. This is the legacy that we are subject to in our culture, but prior to the mechanistic fundamentalism, there was a time in which soul, psyche, and spirit was incorporated into a “natural philosophy” of science. This is a science of nature as a living, vital, organism and is what Darwin made famous in his formulation of evolution, for he studied the organic organization and process of living systems and the processes in which organisms adapted to continuous change in order to survive and pass on better chances of survival to their offspring.
Living organisms have emergent properties that are
creative and nested in ecosystems of interpenetrating relationship.
But really everything in the universe is interpenetrating relational
systems, from electrons and quarks all the way up to solar systems
and galaxies, there is nothing that is purely isolated constituent
parts that don't co-exist with other more complex parts and systems.
Let’s
examine the difference between machines and organisms; a machine is
something that is designed, built, and managed by an intelligent
being for a purpose, a chimp forming twigs to fit neatly into ant
holes is designing, crafting and using a machine or a tool toward a
specific purpose, or a software engineer envisions a program that
will help you keep track of your caloric intake and expenditure, so
we can see a machine is an
apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions,
used in the performance of some kind of work.
Organisms,
on the other hand, are
capable of some degree of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth
and development as well as homeostasis. The Greek and Latin
derivation of words having org
in them are related in meaning to “serving
as instruments”,
or “parts
that make up an integral whole.”
So, an organism is something that is alive, and made of constituent
parts that work instrumentally toward wholeness, in biology, we would
say survival, or the continuity of life. Other org
words would include; organ,
organic,
and organized.
An organism is self-organized, whereas a machine is organized by
something or someone else, it does what it is told…usually.
Why
is this distinction important? It is because we live in a culture
that has become incredibly mechanistic to the point that we are
reducing human beings, and human interaction to machine like
components, digital bits of information that streams across our radar
24/7. We stay on information/communication overload and are exposed
to a vast array of mechanical frequencies that entrain our brain
toward mechanical responses. Think of the coke and popcorn, hyper-
sensuous commercial at the movie theater and tell me we're not all
salivating Pavlovian dogs! All this has the tendency to induce
mechanical, automatic responses verses organic, creative and
critically intelligent expressions of ourselves as living, vital
beings connected in the web of life.
At
the beach recently, I had my second ecstatic experience of swimming
with dolphins. These beings are incredibly intelligent and at one
with their watery environment, they are in a continuous spontaneous
delight with themselves and others in proximity to them, they just
love to play! Their joy, playfulness, mischievousness and communion
with their environment is contagious, one cannot help but feel REALLY
good around them! In addition to their sonar abilities to perceive
their environment through emitted and received frequencies, they are
also able to transmit energetic frequencies of love and happiness
through their high pitched language. It is truly a close encounter of
the extraordinary kind!
At
the beach, I had an epiphany that nature is
life,
it’s not like
life
it IS life. So when I’m walking on the beach and I reach a place
where I’m sinking into the water due to a sand bank created by the
rapidly rising tide, this is my life right now, me and sand and water
and sinking, it’s not an analogy or an abstraction, it is a moment
in contact with nature in which I have to take action and choose
wisely or else my life will be threatened. This is one of 100’s of
examples of why man is an organism embedded in nature and not a
machine separate from nature. Other examples include the fact that a
human organism is made up of about 10 trillion cells, but only 1 in
10 is actually, well, human. The other cells are bacteria, viruses,
and other types of microbes that we have co-evolved with and must now
co-exist. Another example of organismic functioning is the fact that
every 7 years every cell in our body dies and is recreated,
everything from our liver, heart, brain... everything! How is this
possible? It is a mystery, but I assure you it is not mechanical! I
believe it has to do with consciousness itself, but that's another
story...
I
am making a commute for a new job in which I drive 6 miles down a
curving mountain with the sun in its early rise. The light is a
radiant golden hue that suffuses all my senses with a thick and
palpable life energy, I weave through a curve in which the sun
dissipates and then reappears through the fall cathedral of colored
leaves and the colors are psychedelic, I understand clearly why
people have worshiped the Sun as the life giving and sustaining orb
that must be revered and seduced into rising every day for life to
continue. All this is a celebration of ourselves as living,
breathing, thinking, loving, and creative beings….not machines!
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