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We, The people, are not happy
16 - Good and bad
Exploring a different planet does not mean that we have to abandon all our values. We want to preserve our notion of good and bad. 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.
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 eats the mouse, and the bacteria can reproduce. The small bacteria are in control. The poor mouse is marching to her death, not even conscious of what is going to happen to her. We would decide that the death of the mouse is “bad”. It is even the worst thing that could happen to it!
Mother Nature may have a different opinion. Her goal is for everyone to find his place in the world. She sacrifices mices 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, mouse 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 the 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?
Nature also keeps a balance between animals and plants.
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.
The "Bad" can help understand the ‘Good’.
When you break a cookie into pieces you get the pieces and the link between them. Humans focus on the pieces because they have a shape, a color, a taste. They belong to the material world. This is well-known territory. We discard the links between the pieces. Let’s see what happens when the human species gets broken into little groups. Each group fights for what it perceives as its own survival. They forget that they 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. We have forgotten what unites us. That would require a higher level of consciousness.
How does science fit into the picture?
The African koudous eat acacias. When there is a drought, they eat acacias to the point that the acacias 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.
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 in the immaterial world?
Where is the tree? Is it in the seeds? Is it in the non-physical universe?” We are missing something.
Let’s go back to the seed. In the past, its atoms were somewhere else in Nature. Being in the seed is only part of their cycle. The seed is nothing more than one step in a long process. It took thousands of trees, making millions of seeds over millions of years to produce those two seeds. What is important is what happened before and what will happen after. We look at the seeds like we would look at one picture taken out of a film. We look at the seeds, 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 one 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 atoms 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 corpse! Think of the compost in a corner of the garden. That’s the idea. Our body recycles what is dead. 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 became different chairs. We are only conscious of the material implementation of an idea that is still immaterial.
Different people on different planets are different implementations of an idea that creates different detours for 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.
Science starts with analysis. It divides the world into little pieces. Science neglects the links 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. “Knowledge without consciousness is the ruin of the soul,” said Rabelais.
