morethanenoughtruth

You and I have a soul.  Animals don’t.  That’s the common understanding believed by a great many people.  But what about Homo Erectus?  Neanderthalus?  At what point in evolution toward homo-sapiens-sapiens did humanity become soulful?  I contend that there was no precise juncture in that incremental transformation at which he magically became the soul-mate of Divinity.

It is the ultimate hubris to claim that my beloved dog Maggie had no soul.  She climbed on top of me inside a freezing vehicle to keep me alive through one long stranded night while outside sub-zero temperatures plummeted and my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.  My dog loved me, and I loved her.  How could she not have had a soul?

What speaks to my own spirit self is belief that life is expression of the Divine, beginning with single celled organisms and growing into the majestic Tree of Life, culminating in our claim to be human beings.  Biblical writers scribe of human creation in the image and likeness of God.  I can go along with that as metaphor, but only if creation is postulated to be progression by whatever algorithm, toward increasingly complex speciation.

Religious scriptures rhapsodize about God being love.  Who is it that does the loving?  Mammalian mothers do it for sure.  They bond with their issue as they offer leaking nipples to squalling newborns and watch them respond with the ecstasy of full bellies.  Spiders, who as an expression of sexual satiety munch their inseminators as well as sometimes even their young, surely make poor lovers.  Perhaps they feel a spasm of affection at the moment of joining—or not. For them, maybe love is simply the exquisite twinge of lust they sense as they are drawn toward their supreme biological imperative—however grotesque.

Fish lay eggs and swim away, as do reptiles.  Perhaps it’s cold blood that doesn’t lend itself to affection.  Worms, bisexual and not caring who knows it, copulate in a paroxysm of mutual union while they exchange sperm to fertilize the eggs they have each placed in their conjoined nest.  While they may have shared a true affection for each other, the fertilized eggs are left to fend for themselves. Love ‘em and leave ‘em seems to be standard nematode behavior, not the basis for any God-like lovingkindness.  In their defense, how lacking any arms, would they care for progeny?  On average, a worm will produce two thousand offspring per annum.  With such spectacular fecundity, it seems reasonable to leave legacy to statistics. Can it be that only Mammalia achieve souls?  If only animals that can express love can contribute to the cloud of affection generated by living loving creatures, that might be the cat’s last meow on the subject.

The same is certainly true for us, crowns of creation.  “I love you,” he says as he grips his dearest engorged appendage, “And I you,” she replies, eyelids lowered and fluttering.  Do they really believe such declarations?  Perhaps at the final consummation of things they do, sharing what is often coined la petite mort—the small death.  Or are they merely attracted to their attraction to each other?  Such brittle affections lead to the sort of adoration that causes spiders to dine on Dearie.  Beware.  Friendship is the highest ideal, with agape finding its way, if indeed at all.

Love as Holy Spirit might be considered to have its inception as life morphs into the complexity that specifies nerves, and the passing of electrical charges down axons, across synaptic gaps, and into bundles of neurons that claim to be brains.  Like any electric current moving through a conductor, it induces a magnetic field around and about itself.  That magnetic field is powerful and capable of inducing corresponding urges in neighboring conductors.  Conglomerations of such induced magnetisms in metal have spawned a planet-circling technology of electronic amazements that thrill and excite, as well as control every aspect of human culture and economy.

As life builds upon itself, summation of that inductive complexity might be understood as “God,” a Deity I can relate to.  On Sol’s third planet, life has bloomed into what ancient Greeks named Gaia, now defined by some as the concatenation of all aspects of our planet.  I concur but fail to understand how a rock could contribute to any lively inductions unless perhaps it was ferrous in composition.  For me, the line between soul and not-soul has to be drawn between life and not-life.  My handy compass is smart, but though it is tweaked by the magnetic field of earth, it has no soul.  Conversely, the lowly worm that proceeds endlessly through the turf of my lawn does have a soul, and if he were to evolve through future eons, he would discover himself to be the pattern on which much of complex life will have progressed. 

Anatomists love to mention the obvious pattern of animal biology, whether lowly or evolved, as being a tube within a tube.  That night-crawler in your bait bucket might even develop a swell head, if he had one at all.  A least he knows which way to progress through the loam, a bit of knowledge which presupposes differentiation of head vs tail.  Worms don’t crawl backward.  The rest is a recapitulation of Darwinian progression.  It was Earnst Haekel who wrote “The ontogeny recapitulates the phylogeny.”  He was explaining that in any embryo, growth and transformation reenacts the progression of the entire species.  As I sorted myself out, cozy in my mother’s uterus, my blastocyst tried out gills before it settled on lungs.  If such patterns can be observed on Earth, surely they would hold true on other worlds.

As life develops on other planets circling other suns, equivalent physical laws should apply no matter where in the universe of stars that life might arise.  God as spirit would surely bloom again based even on a wholly different molecular architecture, such as being built on silicone rather than carbon.  However construed, love would surely arise and declare itself.  As extraterrestrials dominate their planets and come to express the music of their little green souls, they will surely find a way to proclaim that God is love.

The best way to relax and think loving thoughts on this beautiful green earth is to seek out nature.  What makes nature so peaceful is that there are no people.  Animals as well as the pretty scenery, have a calming effect on humans.  That is true even though we and they sometimes eat other critters.  We seem to forgive them that indiscretion since it is in their animal nature to eat what they eat.  People think mean thoughts, and worse still, they cause us to think horribilities of our own. If the only way we can walk in beauty is to be alone in the wilderness, humanity is surely over. 

People who mistreat animals are less than good people.  They are evil, but they don’t become all bad all at once.  Like evolution, it takes time.  Is that what devolution is about?  What about axe murderers?  They are generating as much feeling as those who sing songs of love and joy, but they hate and rage instead.  Is there an unclean spirit to be produced by unkind thoughts and deeds?  Such a question is reminiscent of being cautioned by my mother to watch out for the Ol’ Devil.  Surely such concerns of the ancients must have led to conflict between positive vs negative concepts of spirit.  Most people aren’t easily categorized.  What about those mean girls back in high school, and the ubiquitous bullies?  They must have grown up to be solid citizens who adore their daughters, sons, and puppies.  If all sentient creatures are pumping out complex feelings, Satanic as well as Divine, what kind of thundercloud of Spirit might be gathering—to what effect? 

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Al Gore may have invented the internet, but I invented Facebook.  Sure, I know it’s a stretch.  The straight scoop: I have long mused about the benefit of making of my life an open book.  For instance, what if every time I spoke about another person, that person could see and hear my statement?  That would no doubt mellow my words.  Do you often sense that you are a different person depending on whom you are addressing?  That can be a problem if you are suddenly with two people.  Which you will you be then?  Could that be the root of social anxiety?  It is scary to be real with a whole bunch of different people all at once.  Whom then might you be?

The obvious solution to this dilemma is Facebook, or something remarkably like it.  Assiduous utilization of such an asset can and surely will force users toward an integration of self.  Every comment must be weighed against the perceptions of everybody else, not just the person seated before you.  Methinks it is a conspiracy to civilize an uncivil society.  There have been worse plots.  This one I like!

In a recent dream I was riding around and about the farm with my oldest son in his 4-x-4.  We had been sitting in a meadow marveling at how green was the grass and how lovely the wildflowers.  Then bumping along in the vehicle we passed into a dark glade that fed into a rocky defile, that then degenerated quickly down an impossibly rough and boulder strewn path, down, down, down into a deep pool.  The water was still and strewn with floating vegetation and debris.  Dale persevered, assuring me that his truck was up to the challenge.  He pressed on, rolling into the water, but soon we were floating, the truck having become a boat with us holding on and swimming.  The long green strands of vegetation tangled with my treading feet and felt like slithering snakes.  I begged Dale to do something, anything, but he wasn’t afraid.  Dale is never afraid.  He said to just keep paddling.  We curved around the periphery, round and round, clearing away the greenery as we plowed through the water, using the truck as our blunt force object.  Several turns around and the pond was clean. 

He restarted the engine, gained some traction and up we went onto the far shore, chugging our way up the steep embankment.  This side was open, clear of trees and shrubs.  It was mostly domesticated fields, meadows, and pasture.  Dale explained that he needed to speak with a man in the community we were approaching.  The buildings were weathered and grey.  Many new structures had been attached to the existing ones.  Those were woven of grass on three sides, as well as the roofs, and affixed to the old houses and barns.  They were useless, without strength, either tensile or compressive.  They stood merely as concepts, delineating what might have been built, had circumstances been different.  Maybe they were only dreams or visions.

While Dale kept his meeting, I loitered, wandering into one of the large unmarked buildings.  It was a ladies lingerie emporium, with a luxuriant display of unmentionables.  Every item I noticed just happened to be my exact size, even the high heeled velvet boots I lasciviously admired.  There were too many colors to count, and they all were of complimentary shades, but the colors comprising individual garments were strangely combined.  I pulled out a pair of shimmery sea-green panties, and was amazed to see they were copiously decorated with brown lace.  I put them back, puzzled, and began to wonder what is “a pair” about panties.  Why are they sold as a pair, since they have no legs, only holes?  A pair of jeans makes good sense, with two good legs to make a legitimate pair of something to sell, even if only in concept.  Women must be pretty silly to pay good money for a pair of holes, no matter how decorously festooned with lace their apertures.

When I awoke it occurred to me that dreams are useful for sorting out quandaries that complicate our waking hours and defy any integration into what we understand about being alive in the world.  We seem to work harder asleep than awake.  Can’t we ever get any well-earned rest?  Also it would help if we could worry in sleep about things that really matter, rather than second-guessing the work product of distaff under garment designers.

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