The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie

Author:Guy Murchie [Murchie, Guy]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Yet where are the fingers or toes a man feels after his arm or leg is removed? And where are the scenes the blind man "sees" after losing his sight, which in a few cases, I am told, have been so vivid he did not even realize he was blind? No doubt these presumed illusions are outside of space and time - at least enough outside that one might consider them the stuff of dreams, abstract and not normally definable. But for some reason their capacity to confuse human minds makes me think of the woman who painted the inside of her garage pale green, and, when a neighbor encouraged her by remarking that the light color would make the place seem bigger, responded with airy enthusiasm, "I sure hope so. We really could use the extra space."

A rather different illusion was experienced by a polliwog I heard of living in a farmer's pond. One November he was seen at the moment of getting frozen in the ice and looked, and probably felt, gone or "dead" if he felt anything. In any case he remained in "rigor mortis" all winter. Then during an April rain his icy tomb melted and he was suddenly free and alive. But it was as if his five months' sleep had been an enchantment for, like the sleeping beauty, he awoke apparently the same age as when he had dropped off and then recovered his active life from precisely where he had left it. He even finished biting the weed that had frozen in his mouth in November. The magic spell of winter was over. Time had stood still for a third of a year. The last breath inhaled in autumn had turned into the first breath exhaled in spring. Life and mind were simply flicked out like a light then flicked on again unchanged!

In returning now to our pursuit of life's essence it seems important to define the living unit of being. Is it an atom, a molecule, a cell, an organism, a family, a species, a world population ... ? Just what best constitutes a living individual? If reproduction is vital (and who can deny it?), a mating pair of rabbits is alive but one rabbit is not. In this context a pregnant rabbit is, strictly speaking, not alone. And perhaps (in special cases) even an unpregnant rabbit or single individual of another species capable of virgin birth (page 149) should be considered more than singular. Also a mating pair at the sophistication level of Adam and Eve probably could not qualify as a living continuum if too few others of their kind existed to enable them to avoid imminent extinction. It is relevant in this connection to recall that the passenger pigeon was doomed last century when its numbers got so low it could not roost in its customary, congenial multitudes. But that doesn't make it noticeably easier to predict how small a human community, even after thorough survival training in body, mind and spirit, could be expected to sustain and revive a stricken mankind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.