What if everything is alive?
One of the most common misconceptions in modern society is the representation of the cosmos as dead. We see in it nothing but a bunch of lifeless objects moving into a cold, hostile space. We believe we are the only intelligent beings. We imagine that, should there be other intelligent beings out there, they should more or less look like us, and they should try to contact us. Because we don’t find anyone like that, we conclude that there is nobody. The implicit conclusion is that we are the supreme, ultimate form of life in the entire universe.
If a bacteria could reason in the same vein, it would imagine that all the other living creatures should look like a bacteria, or at least be perceivable to them. The human beings would never fall into such a category: we are too big, and the bacteria who live inside us could obviously never see us, let alone understand or communicate with us. As far as they are concerned, we don’t exist. We can’t be real. When we act upon them, for instance when we eat and our food reaches them, they would treat it like a weather experience: capricious, chaotic, with some intelligible rules but no intelligent force behind it.
Such are the gaps between humans and lesser creatures in the living world, yet we refuse to even postulate that similar gaps, and even greater, exist between humans and more evolved creatures. We may be living, for instance, inside the body of a much larger being, just like bacteria live inside our bodies, and what we see as “dead” cosmic objects could be the toxins, the nutrients, the inner fluids or organs of that greater being. We’d be as capable of understanding the laws that govern them, as a bacteria would understand our physiology — only the time frame needed to observe the changes in such systems could be way beyond the life expectancy of any human civilization, or even of our entire planet.
What if the universe we believed to be dead and cold, is actually alive and thriving? What if planets, galaxies, and the universe itself are all superior forms of life?
Ancient people were more aware than us of this possibility. For a long time, they regarded cosmic elements as “deities”. Today, we believe they were just projecting supernatural powers on phenomena that they could not understand, but the reason may be well another. It could be simply because they understood that they were living entities. We admire and praise, for instance, ancient Greeks and Romans for their wisdom in philosophy, politics, social organization, life sciences and so on, but we refuse to give them the same credit when it comes to their religious beliefs. The historical fight to defend monotheism had a big contribution in this respect, although largely based on the same, unverified assumption: what appeared to be, and probably had become in time, nothing but pagan worshiping, could have been originally the mere recognition of much larger forms of being. Gea, Tiamat, Uranus, Jupiter, Nut…perhaps the ancient myths were not trying to manipulate us into obedient adoration, but only to speak of the true nature of the universe, and of its planets.
Such a vision of the universe would force us to admit that we are shaped by a multitude of forces outside our bodies, which are in hierarchical, non-linear relationships with one another. Many of them would be totally out of the scope of our measurements, and understanding. More importantly, at least part of what is happening with us, and inside our bodies, may actually be reflections, or mere consequences, of what is happening at a higher level. Even some of our thoughts, emotions, our diseases, may not be ours. They may not be generated by us, but be caught inside our minds and bodies just like ocean fish in a net, or like a radio channel on a given frequency.
The universe is said to have a fractal nature, reproducing geometric patterns at all scales, from leaves to landscapes. Could these actually be all patterns of living beings — the sacred geometry of life itself? If we live in a world of fractals, then fractals could actually project the codes of life into the universe — and the universe itself, with everything in it, could be alive.
