On the nature of life, part I

The search for a path through life

When we engage in inner work, no matter how often we hear about how "this work isn't for me," somehow we always manage to think that that statement applies to other people. In other words, this work – this life – is always about me. The nature of thought is such that it centers everything around itself… and the problems begin there.

I was contemplating this the other day and realized that I believe that all of the moments I encounter in life are there to serve me; I don't see the need for me to serve the moments of life. Gaining a perspective where I see that I need to serve the moments of life is on the order of what Gurdjieff called outer considering; it’s the opposite of what I usually think from my egocentric point of view. If I spend each moment a bit more connected to sensation, there’s a possibility of inverting this egoism so that I see how I should serve the moment, and serve the others in it. Once again, of course, the difficulty – along with the staid form of thought, which is set in its egoistic ways and stubbornly insistent — is that the habit is to believe first in myself, and only after that in everything else.

This produces a kind of inflexibility in Being. Yet the nature of life itself, at its root, is a remarkably, perhaps nearly impossibly flexible thing; and it’s worth thinking about in and of itself, because its nature is quite instructive, and raises many questions about Being in general.

Some musings about molecular biology are thus in order here.

It was pointed out many decades ago by some scientists that the DNA molecule is an incredibly sophisticated organism, a crystalline substance that, presuming the laws of evolution apply to it in the same way that they do everything else, would have needed billions (yes, billions, not millions) of years not just to arise, but to have optimized its form and the way that it works. Those who originally pointed this out suggested, quite rightly, that the molecule was too evolved to have been present on the earth and producing life as early as we know it to have been here, which is on the order of 3.5 billion years ago.