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The world we live in
20 - Good and Bad
Exploring a different planet does not mean that we have to abandon all our values. If a trip to one planet makes us change our mind, it must be a change that would apply everywhere and not only on the planet we are visiting. We want to preserve our notion of good and bad. That does not mean that we are going to impose our notion of good and bad on the whole universe. It only means that we do not pretend to have the monopoly of what is good or bad.
Our notion of Good and Bad has to change.
Have you ever heard of the Toxoplasma.gondii?
Humans, cats and mice have a common bacteria called the Toxoplasma.gondii and these bacteria have a problem. The T. gondii in the mouse must infect a cat before it can reproduce. Getting cat and mouse together does not happen naturally. You could not make sex life more difficult. The bacteria have a solution. They make the mouse seduced by the smell of the cat. You may think that this is a dirty trick, but it works. The result, of course, is that the cat devours the mouse, and the bacteria can reproduce.
The small bacteria are in control. The poor mouses are marching to their death, full of love and good intentions. They would never believe what Nature is preparing for them. We would decide that the death of the mouses is “bad”. It is even the worst thing that could happen to them!
Mother Nature may have a different opinion. Her goal is that everyone can find his place in the world. She sacrifices mice to make a place for the Toxoplasma.gondii. If, someday, the mouse becomes an endangered species, the cats will go hungry. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, will protect the mouse and restore the balance between cats, mice, humans and the T gondii. For the Toxoplasma gondii, it is a lifesaver. For the cat, it is an easy source of food. We would not blame the mice for having mixed feelings about the whole thing.
Toxoplasma.gondii can also be found in humans. “Toxoplasma infection is classically associated with the frequency of schizophrenia, suicide attempts or road rage”. How can we be sure that the main reason the Homo sapiens survived 300 000 years is not that Nature kept a balance between them and their environment? Humans may have been the cause of the death of innocent animals, and humans may have been sacrificed for the survival of some animal species.
We may have to reconsider what we call Good and Bad.
Some questions remain?
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How can the T. gondii know that they need a cat to reproduce?
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What do bacteria know about smell?
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How can the small bacteria know what a cat is?
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Can the Toxoplasma.gondii think?
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The general question is: ‘Who’ decides ‘what’ on planet Earth?
Mother Nature may have a different opinion. Her goal is that everyone can find his place in the world. She sacrifices mice to make a place for the Toxoplasma.gondii. If, someday, the mouse becomes an endangered species, the cats will go hungry. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, will protect the mouse and restore the balance between cats, mice, humans and the T gondii. For the Toxoplasma gondii, it is a lifesaver. For the cat, it is an easy source of food. We would not blame the mice for having mixed feelings about the whole thing.
Nature also keeps a balance between animals and plants.
The African koudous eat acacias. When there is a drought, they eat acacias to the point that the plant may not survive. Mother Nature’s solution is to make the acacias produce more tannin than the liver of the koudous can process. The plant kills the animal. The decision does not come from the acacias and their knowledge of the limits of the koudous’ liver. There must be a mastermind somewhere, in the immaterial world, controlling everything. This is way above our head!
Could the life of human beings on Earth be governed by something we are not conscious of? The main decisions about life are not made at the human level. Our ideas of good and bad may not always apply.
What happens when we grow up?
Something important happens when the human child is 2 or 3 years old and starts saying “I”. He is now conscious of being a separate human being. He has an individual ego. He divides the world into two: What is inside his skin and what is outside. Before this separation, he was part of the world, and the world was in him. He is now going to spend the rest of his life trying to escape his isolation. His first love may give him the illusion that there is a way to escape his solitude. That can make the first broken heart even more painful. He is getting access to a higher level of good and bad.
The ‘Bad” can help the ‘Good’.
We learn to walk from falling. We learn to use our body from getting bruises. We learn the bad from experiencing the good. It is from our failures that we learn how to succeed. We could even say that we never fail. We only learn to succeed. The most common lesson comes from dividing the world into small pieces. When you break a cookie into pieces we get the pieces and the link between them. Humans focus on the pieces because they have shape, color, and taste. They belong to the material world. This is well-known territory. We are not sure what to do with the links between the pieces. We discard them. This is what happens when the human species gets broken into little groups. Each group fights for what it perceives to be its own survival. We forget that we all belong to the same species. The “bad” appears when we focus on the parts and ignore the links between them. A country may start a war with another country. A religion may fight another religion. They have forgotten what unites them. That would require a higher level of consciousness.
How does science fit into the picture?
Science starts with analysis. It divides the world into little pieces and neglects the link between the pieces. You cannot leave science alone. It must be associated with consciousness. Look at all the killing machines that science has produced. Scientific thinking needs to be guided by feelings.
The two seeds
Let’s take two little seeds. They are identical. If we put one in the ground, a tree will grow. If we break the other seed into pieces and put the pieces in the ground, nothing will grow. What makes the difference between tree and no tree?
It does not come from the atoms. They are the same in the seed and in the pieces. Only the distance between the molecules is different. Could the tree be hiding in the empty space between the molecules? If we cannot find an explanation in the material world, should we look elsewhere?
Where is the tree? Is it in the seeds? Is it in the non-physical universe?” We are missing something.
Let us go back to the seed. In the past, its atoms were scattered in Nature. The seed is nothing more than one step in their cycle in Nature. It took thousands of trees, making millions of seeds over millions of years to produce those two seeds. We look at the seeds like we would look at one picture taken out of a film. What is important is what happened before and what will happen after. We are assuming that time does not matter!
The link between the atoms of the seed is the detour that each atom has made in its cycle to be there together, at the same place, at the same time. By breaking the seed, we destroy a well-organized choreography that no human could have created. We may have to change the way we look at nature.
What happens when we eat the seed?
How come a little tree does not start growing in our stomach? The only explanation is that our digestive system starts by crushing the seed and recycling the atoms. The process starts in our mouth. We isolate the molecules and insert them into a different cycle. Our body is made of recycled vegetables! We start by breaking the cycles that a plant makes, and we recycle the pieces! Our body recycles what is dead! Think of the compost in a corner of the garden. That is the idea. We are the killers!
This applies to everything around us. Before we make the first chair, we must have had the idea of a chair. Then, we broke the cycle of a tree and implemented our idea of a chair in the material world. Different ideas of chairs become different chairs. Different people on different planets are different implementations of an idea that creates different detours of atoms. The difference is that the detours are different.
Humans are not conscious of the way seeds and time can make a tree. We are not conscious of the music we are dancing to.
