LIFE, LOVE, & EVOLUTION

We are swung naked into the writhing streams of life, interacting with its myriad forms as we grow old, and ultimately, succumbing to the cold wind of death. These scenes—these snippets of film—are wound together as moments of passing awareness, encapsulated in their own contexts and time-frames. As T.S. Eliot put it in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock : Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. One day, however, the visions and revisions will end. One day, our incessant wanderings, whether in time, space, or thought, will reach their inevitable destination. The processes sustaining us—the modules that jingle and jangle in the crowded sphere of our bodies and minds—will either dwindle down or come to an abrupt stop. One by one, our organs will begin to fail, and likewise, our mental processes will probably decay in a haphazard fashion; first, we may lose our sight or o...

Natural selection is a passive observer—a lurker in the shadows that is there by not being there. Its presence is made known by what it leaves behind: the functional patterns that perpetuate their own survival and reproduction, or “life.”             We are awakened into our bodies and minds. Some are flawed, others less so, yet all bearing the primordial mark of millions of years of jury-rigged construction. As soon as an entity comes on the scene that enables its own survival and reproduction, its presence in this universe and on this planet becomes a mainstay. And so it goes for our minds; they are here now, though we don’t know for how much longer. Our thoughts and emotions, flowing in patterned rhythms through the four dimensions of this universe, are experiencing these patterns—indeed, they are these very patterns. There are, in fact, no pattern “experiencers,” only the patterns themselves. Of course, these patterns aren’t haphazard; their develop...