I came into this situation some twenty years ago by embarking on a research study which was to become a central theme in elaborating the Logos of life - the chemical origins of life on Earth. Traditional science teaches that life is a kind of self-reproducing accident, occurring in a universe whose laws of nature have no prevision of biological life, that the chemical bond is merely the substrate for an arbitrary collection of molecular building blocks, without reference to, or preference for life and that indeed, life itself is an insignificant and futile process in the universe at large, which if not obliterated by a sun grown huge as a red-giant, is doomed to be annihilated by the awesome and terrifying forces of a dying universe.
I sought a description in which life is an intrinsic part of the cosmological process, integral to the way the universe and its laws of nature were first established in its cosmological origin. Unless the universe admits such a description, any role and purpose for life eludes us and along with it subjective experience, free-will, personal responsibility, spirituality and even the rule of law. I set out to try to find a natural route to the living molecules of biology. I also spent some time learning as much as possible about how the forces of nature became established in the first few moments when the universe was born.
During the intervening years, a picture has continued to emerge which lends greater and greater support to the concept of life as a cosmological manifestation of the universe, in a sense as central to its functioning as are black holes, galaxies, the cosmic background and the other major features of cosmology. Although the theory is founded centrally on quantum chemistry and the physics of the early universe, its implications completely reverse the trend begun when Copernicus overturned the traditional Earth-centered view, when he discovered that the Earth moved round the sun rather than being itself the effective centre of the universe. However bio-cosmological theory is even more controversial, for it is life, and in the last analysis humanity, that now occupies a central cosmological role. This is disconcertingly close to being made in the image of the Elohim as Genesis I declares. Close enough to make scientists who should know better to shudder and recoil against the obvious.
Bio-cosmological theory goes as follows: In the first formation of the universe, the forces of nature, gravitation, electromagnetism, and the weak and colour (strong) nuclear forces break symmetry from a single common force, to become the very different forces we experience today. This may also be associated with an inflationary anti-gravity phase in the primordial symmetrical state, which caused the universe to abruptly expand to its current immense size, accompanying the big-bang at the origin of the universe.
Subsequently these forces interact in a non-linear manner to form interactive microscopic structures, in parallel with the formation of large scale gravitational structures such as galaxies, stars and planets. Firstly the fundamental strongly-interacting quark particles bind in threes via the colour force to form protons and neutrons. These then combine in stars in the nuclear synthesis pathway via the strong and weak forces to form the nuclei of the chemical elements. Once a cycle of star formation and supernova has occurred, these elements are again spread into space and form the basis for a second round of star formation. On a microscopic scale the remaining force which has not yet interacted is the weaker long-range electromagnetic force, which binds at much lower energies and only comes into play at the lower energies and temperatures of planetary systems surrounding the smaller longer-lived second generation sun-like stars. Because planets are also bathed in incident stellar radiation, they form non-equilibrium open systems which are capable of neg-entropic elaboration of structural complexity as thermodynamic dissipative structures.
What now occurs is the final stage of a non-linear interactive process which began with cosmic symmetry-breaking, the chemical elements begin to combine to form molecular structures. On a planetary surface mediated by gravity, the electromagnetism-mediated formation of chemical bonds becomes the final interactive process made possible by the differentiation of the four forces. The essential feature of this process is that, although the electromagnetic force is the most straightforward of the forces, and in the case of light superimposes in an almost linear manner to form for example the laser, the peculiar twisted form that conventional matter has assumed, through the symmetry-breaking of the forces, in which all the positive charges are located in the nucleus and the negative charges are distributed in the quantum shells of the orbital electrons leads to the non-linear quantum interaction we call the chemical bond.
Somehow chemists have failed to recognize the essential consequences of this non-linearity. The first is that the chemical bond is never fully resolved in the strong covalent and ionic bonds, but residual effects continue to be expressed in longer range weaker interactions from the hydrogen bond through Van der Waal interactions to the hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions in the aqueous medium. These interactions result in a fractal organization of super-molecular structures which only reach their final complexity in such natural structures as proteins, and nucleic acids, particularly RNA with their primary sequencing , secondary structures such as the alpha and double helix, tertiary global three-dimensional conformations and finally quaternary structures in which supra-molecules interact to form organelles such as the ribosome and membrane and finally cells, which can fractally organize themselves into biological tissues, expressed most eloquently in the fractal global-local organization of the brain.
The second is that the free interaction of atoms does not just result in a random array of all possible "building blocks of the universe" as Isaac Asimov once put it in an elementary chemistry book. Although all the stable molecules do form building blocks, the free interaction of atoms under the various forms of excitation that accompany early planetary formation lead not just to a random array of molecules but specific bifurcation structures of the self-interaction of the periodic table. The nature of these bifurcation structures is a cosmological invariant determined by the form of symmetry-breaking in the big bang. The form of CNO-H water-based life as we know it appears as a central bifurcation which leads relatively directly to ribo-nucleic acids or RNA, a molecule still occurring as messengers and translation molecules in protein formation in all living cells and ubiquitously as energy-carrying monomer ATP, effectively an RNA monomer carrying the base adenine one of the four bases A, G, U and C, adenine, guanine, uracil and cytosine used to form the genetic code of life.
The RNA era model of the origin of life is still debated, but has become ever more popular as discoveries have been made that, in addition to being capable of complementary self-reproduction, RNA is catalytic in ways which facilitate self-assembly. It is also a molecule capable of being formed directly from simple precursors. Indeed the base adenine and sugar ribose, the two organic components of ATP, are themselves pentamers of cyanide HCN and formaldehyde HCH=O, key multiply bonded products of excitation. The remaining inorganic component, phosphate, appears to be the key link in promoting the dehydration steps which make polymerization of large molecules possible, including sugars, proteins and nucleic acids. Phosphates also play a key role in selecting for ribose among the many other possible sugars during sacharide polymerization, clarifying a deeply troubling problem about how the elegant self-reproducing ribo-nucleic acids could have emerged form a diverse mixture of other non-functional molecules having other sugars in their back bone.
What is clear from this picture is that the non-linearities of the chemical bond permit at least one spontaneous route to self-organization. There may also be others using different atomic arrangements, for example silicon-based life, but nevertheless life as we know it appears to be the cosmic royal route - camino real de vida. It uses the strongest first row covalent elements in a symmetry -splitting with hydrogen which is the central interactive bifurcation, further using the second-row covalent elements as modifiers and the alkaline, alkaline earth and transition elements as critical ionic modifiers. These appear to be a central series of interactive bifurcations from a cosmological perspective.
In such a point of view, biological tissues, although they are fragile and are easily destroyed by the high temperatures of stars and torn apart by black holes, nevertheless form the interactive culmination of that cosmological process which began in the symmetry-breaking of the forces in the big-bang. The final expression of this process is the globally structured neurological tissue of the brain in which the subjective aspect of reality becomes expressed.
The evolution of the vertebrate brain displays
repeated processes of regeneration of new and more universal solutions
to the problems of sensory recognition and cognition from areas
of the brain which display greater plasticity. The dedicated mid-brain
optic regions of the frog for example are overtaken in mammals
by a general scheme of sensory processing whose principles, despite
individual difference between the senses, are common to the whole
cerebral cortex.
In coming to a cosmological view of life, one has to come to terms with the evolutionary paradigm, for it is this which has literally given birth to the tree of life now expressed in the living diversity of the planet. The central dogma of evolution is that it is mutation and selective advantage which combine to make evolution possible. Others have cited neutral evolution of key structural proteins and the role of whole transposable genes may be as important as singe point mutations. Neverthelss, because all mutation is accidental rearrangement, it leads to a philosophy that evolution, far from being cosmological in nature, is entirely accidental and adventitious and consequently that the life forms on one planet will in no way resemble those on another, each being idiosyncratic to their own historical combinations of chance and necessity. While this point of view is partly correct, it is modified in major ways by the universal selective factors which shape the evolutionary process and result in major bifurcations of type, so while in terms of individual mutations, evolution may be a matter of luck, as these become repeated an immense number of times over evolutionary epochs, a phase space of possibilities may be explored in which the universal solutions again converge to cosmological status.
One example of this is the division between prokaryote and eucaryote strategies. Another is the division of the higher eucaryotes into plants, animals and fungi. Another is the bifurcation between arthropods and vertebrates. Underlying the latter is a morphogenic scheme mediated by the so-called homeotic genes determining organismic body plans which may in some repects itself be a type of universal algorithm. Although eucaryotes now form the more advanced complex organisms, it is the prokaryotes who appear to have evolved specifically adapted rapid DNA metabolisms from the older RNA-based metabolisms which still linger in greater evidence in the eucaryotes in the form of many diverse RNA molecules. On grounds of photosynthetic energy conservation being the central energy input pathway, the existence both of photosynthetic bacteria and plants is more or less assured.
While some aspects of evolution, including rare and unusual molecules, are clearly adventitious, other aspects appear to result from the inevitable exploration of a nascent possibility by frequent mutation and natural selection over time. Although evolution can adventitiously produce variant transport molecules such as the copper porphyrin that corresponds to the iron-based heme in vertebrates, it is significant that both these and the magnesium-containing chlorophyll that is the photosynthetic receptor in plants are metal chellated porphyrins and that porphyrin itself is a molecule produced directly in pre-biotic chemical syntheses. A case can thus be made that evolution has found the chlorophyll option by optimizing a set of possibilities already nascent in the pre-biotic milieu, again stemming from non-linear bifurcations of the interacting elements.
A similar case can be made for the development of sensory organs such as the camera eye and of nervous systems which use ancient principles of excitability based on ion and electron transport common to all cells and a set of lipids and chemical neurotransmitters which display fundamental chemical complementations. For example acetyl-choline, serotonin and catecholamines are all amines, the latter arising from tyrosine and tryptophan, fundamental amino acids among which glutamate is again a principal neurotransmitter. This suggests a primordial complementation with the acid phosphate groups of membrane phospho-lipids, as is evident in the membrane lipid phosphatidyl-choline, supporting the idea that electrochemical excitation is a primary property of all cells which evolution has merely elaborated upon.
One of the central contentions of creationists is that evolution could never have produced the elegance and global integrity of the complete camera eye, yet Richard Dawkins in "Climbing Mount Improbable" has produced a delightful case for the near inevitability of the evolutionary transition to the camera eye. The senses themselves represent the evolutionary exploration of fundamental quantum modes of interaction with molecules, namely photonic excitation (sight), chemical orbital perturbation (smell) and phononic simple harmonic excitation (sound), touch being a combination of the latter. Just as photosynthesis is a central energetic pathway, so these quantum modes form the central informational pathways all of which could be realized as specializations of a primitive cell using chaotic excitation to facilitate multi-mode sensation through the sensitive dependence that is characteristic of all chaotic systems.
Although evolution is idiosyncratic and molluscs for example have never discovered the electrical shielding of nerves myelinization performs in vertebrates, squids thus having to use giant nerve fibres for rapid conduction, there is a very strong case that, given the great time scales and repeated experiments made by evolution using in parallel every member of every population, and the awesome power of sexual recombination, that at least in the line leading up to vertebrates, evolution has managed to explore the cosmic phase space of possibilities sufficiently to begin establishing universal algorithms for sensation and cognition.
There is significant evidence for such a process in mammalian evolution and it also makes good sense in terms of natural selection. The mammalian brain has seen the evolution of the cerebral cortex and limbic emotional system. Put together these form a new paradigm in which all the senses can be combined into one generalized system and in which the narrow confines of genetic selection under strict kin altruism can become broadened into diverse forms of reciprocal social altruism that permit a whole new order of animal and eventually human societies to evolve. This permits love and the capacity to empathize across species boundaries as well as passion, jealousy and hatred, which themselves are the emotional correlates of reproductive survival.
At the same time, the primate line has selected for a relatively high degree of sensory and ecosystemic universality, culminating in human kind in a nervous system which is designed for universality in a way which clearly defines humanity as a meta-species in which societies and cultures define specific ecological niches for individual humans as varied as those of many species of other dedicated species such as wading birds, yet able to be traversed and transcended in the discovery process the evolution of human culture constitutes.
This in no way means that if we met a similar species from another planet that we would have to look exactly alike in some pre-destined way, just as two human beings from a star wars movie meeting face to face, except that one conveniently might have distinctive long ears like Dr. Spock. It is however very likely that we would share RNA mediated CNO-H water-based life, that we would both be bilaterally symmetrical, and that we would share the major features of biochemistry and physiology, including a sappy neurotransmitter-based neuronal brain, which, though it might not be based on exactly the same cortical structure as ours, would embrace the same principles of edge of chaos excitability, bifurcation through threshold tuning and even a similar repertoire of ions and amine and other neurotransmitters - thus converging to the subjective conscious existence we experience.
What characterizes and distinguishes humans from other mammals is not that we have larger brains but that the brains but that we adapted to a universal type of solution rather than to a specific type of classical ecological niche. The slight differences that do exist between the cerebral cortex of a feline and a human are essentially that the feline is still specifically adapted to being a good nocturnal carnivorous hunter, whereas the human line has adapted for universal generality in sensory expression and its cortical representation in abstract terms. This has in turn made it possible, with the advent of language, to elaborate the diverse niches of human culture and to assemble descriptions of reality, spanning quantum physics, molecular biology, art, music and all the dimensions of familial, filial and erotic love, and in so doing to wonder in awe at the philosophical enormity of the cosmic, expressed in subjective form as mortal individual conscious observers.
This brings us to the ultimate mysterium tremendum which is the source of all philosophical inquiry, sang-raal - the blood-royal of religion and shamanism alike - the nature of the subjective conscious experience of reality. How is it that, locked within our three pound mass of cerebral tissue, lies a subjective cosmos as broad as the universe itself? A universe which spans all the personal experiences we have ever had, without which we would not even know the objective physical universe existed, and with it all the dreams and hopes of civilization throughout recorded history, including our empirical scientific observations of the natural universe. For it is only through our personal subjective sensory and visionary experience in dream, in waking experience and in our creative imagination that we come to know the physical world exists, as sentient beings, as we traverse a journey from birth to death - entirely and only as subjective conscious beings. Without this subjective aspect, the objective world would be null and void. It is this subjective realm which has inspired religious shamanistic and spiritual vision throughout history in virtually every culture. It is also the well spring from which we shall tap the underground waters of the stream of consciousness in synchronicity and it collective representation in the human cultural tradition.
So, in pronouncing the existential cosmology of life, we need to come to terms with and respect the ultimate mystery of the subjective aspect. To understand this in scientific terms, it is necessary to realize that subjective experience is of a different quality to all objective representations. The objective physical world is in fact a myth told by conscious observers about the regularities of their conscious experience. This connection cannot however be reversed, for no objective brain state can ever be fully equated with the subjective experience which may accompany it. This is something Indian philosophy has always been aware of, consciousness is'finer' than matter, although some practitioners of mechanistic science fail to make the connection.
This raises a very powerful question about the evolution of the conscious brain. Evolution never chooses anything and expands it to the degree our conscious brains have without there being a selective advantage to the organism. Despite the hopes of the promulgators of artificial intelligence, the brain is not simply a computer and its evolution can not be understood simply in computational terms. We are, despite having some 1011 neurons and 1015 synapses, lousy computers. Most people cannot make a six digit calculation easily performed by a simple pocket calculator. Furthermore most of the realistic problems of survival in the open environment turn out to be classically intractable because of a runaway in the number of contingent possibilities. A classical computer would thus take the whole history of the universe to decide what to do. But that time the quarry would be eaten and digested and have no further use for its brain. One of the solutions to this problem is to use chaos or sometimes random thermal excitations to provide a global solution which, while not perfect, is actually achievable.
What appears to have happened in evolution is that the chaotically excitable cell has evolved from being a universal sense organ to use edge-of-chaos dynamics and bifurcation to elaborate consciousness as a global adaptive anticipatory process. This can be possible in the physical universe only if this anticipatory process uses physical principles which delve deeper into the quantum realm than the classical logic of digital computation. Quantum computation for example uses superposition of states to enable parallel solution of a whole ensemble of possible solutions pinpointing in one step the answer. This offers a suggestion of the scope of quantum consciousness.
However the problem of consciousness goes beyond mere computation. The very idea of personal autonomy is based on the notion of free will. Although many materialists now pay lip service to the notion that they are chemical automatons simply reflecting the laws of their brain dynamics each of us quite jealously guards our sense of personal independence and could not take the most trivial steps without investing in the sense of freedom of will to decide each of the basic acts of choice that make up even the most routine of habitual days.
The problem is not even one which can in principle be deterministically solved, because the future contains so many free choices that no computation can even begin to suggest which of the many avenues we might like to take, let alone those which are necessary. An artist beginning with a blank canvas is not bound by computational rules to produce any particular outcome, nor is a musician composing a new sonata for the first time. Although these may contain recognizable motifs, each is fundamentally novel in conception. The initial conditions of the universe in any given day simply do not have enough information to determine for all time the future creative outcomes.
In coming to terms with this utterly intractable computational problem, evolution seems to have opted for a most ingenious solution, which plunges right back into the foundations of cosmology in unveiling in biological apocalypse the cosmological nature of conscious awareness.
The idea is as follows. The universe is a non-deterministic system which effectively uses and manifests the subjective aspect in resolving its problem of over abundance - having too many possible outcomes and having no temporally causal way to decide which to actualize. From the objective perspective it does this through quantum non-locality, a warp and weft of concealed virtual interactions that fan out in both directions across space-time - past and future - connecting together in a two-way hand-shaking interaction, all conceivably relatable particles and events. This level is what spiritual people would term eternal omniscient, because it spans space and time.
What we perceive to be quantum uncertainty is just the tip of the iceberg of quantum non-locality in action. Because it is a warp and weft connecting future to past as well as past to future, it carries with it indirectly a form of anticipation of the future, as yet unmanifest in real form. The evolution of the conscious brain then resulted from the selective advantage a brain which utilizes quantum non-locality has in anticipating those kind of events which are critical to survival, but are more a matter of hunch or intuition than cold hard logic. Like, will a tiger jump on you on the right or left-hand path? What is the logical computational difference? There may be some, but not really enough to decide for sure. Yet most critical matters of survival are like this - immediate conscious perceptions of risk and reactions with intuitive alacrity.
By combining edge-of-chaos dynamics with a fractal from of parallel processing based on the neuronal tree, the evolutionary process hit on a way to combine computation with this mysterium tremendum of quantum non-locality in a way which was of pivotal selective advantage to the organism. This discovery was made very early on in evolution because from the earliest times cells were electrochemically excitable, so these features of processing are common to almost all types of brains and probably occur in all eucaryote cells without exception. This means that subjective consciousness in some form or other is shared by all animals from the lowly slime mold, through the cockroach, to the mammals. It is not a sole prerogative of humanity, however because humanity has evolved to possess, in addition to root subjective consciousness, the most generalized adaptable brain in the tree of life, expressing universal algorithms of sensory recognition and its semantic abstraction, we stand as a doubly cosmological expression of this founding secret of the subjective-objective existential universe.
This of course does not mean that humanity is predestined to exist as an omega of evolution, indeed we may, through our failure of foresight, be heading for extinction, but it does mean that the universe over evolutionary time does have the capacity to arrive at a cosmological expression of the interactive process which began with the cosmic symmetry-breaking and only becomes fully manifest as we as conscious observers look out at the universe in awe and wonder and begin to ponder what place we and our sensation of free will has in contributing to the flowering of the conscious universe in the unfolding future.
The paradigm of liberty, love and the tree of life raises serious questions about the relationship between the common good, the genetic heritage, ownership of the Earth's resources, intellectual property rights and capitalism and the so-called free market. It is much harder to justify a simplistic investment driven winner-take-all right to possession when Earth's limited resources both mineral and in trerms of biological and genetic diversity are part of a cosmic endowment which we ourselves as a manifestation of are responsible for, to use wisely over evolutionary time.
By extreme contrast in the name of progress we are acting as quickly as possible to destroy the robustness of Earth's living resources in evolutionary time in almost every way we can conceive of. Not only are we failing to distribute Earth's resources fairly to those that need them, but we are allowing the rich and developed to exploit the under-priveliged. This is in turn driving a mindless race to economic growth through industrial expansion, and the exploitation of all available resources, mineral and natural, on a winner take all basis. However the worst effects are on biodiversity and these threaten to be irreverible.
We are burning the tropical forests, the concentrated jewels of biological and genetic diversity and turning them rapidly into hamburger farms, monoclonal agribusiness patches or frank desert, as projects which deplete the soil and turn whole areas arid and infertile run their course to oblivion. We are allowing transnational business to mount a creeping takeover of the genetic and seed resources of the planet and to reduce the genetic diversity of our food, medicinal and commercial species to a fragile genetically-engineered or monoclonal set of artificial varieties which could not survive under natural conditions and which would become extinct in the event of even a small asteroid strike.
The fact that we are immortal beings in our germ line has been overlooked by the patriarchal religious tradition and instead sexuality has been given the diabolical taint of mortality. It is true that as individuals, short of instituting human cloning for the rich, we remain mortal as individual organisms. However sexuality, in opting for the genetic altruism of contributing only half each individual's genes, has given rise to an unequalled evolutionary epoch of diversity and complexity which has brought into being all the complex organisms, plant, fungus and animal. Without the vast capacity for rearrangement sexuality provides, human evolution would have been impossible. We thus owe sexuality a sacred and historical debt not diabolical mortal suspicion. We should not resort to unrestrained human cloning for the simple reason that parthenogenesis, whether practiced by females or male milionaires is fundamentally selfish to the potentiality of new and better life forms to come into existence. This is the magic warp and weft out of which we ourselves have come.
The germ line is an immortal web which shall sustain the flowering of life on Earth as long as life remains possible. Each of us has in fact not just a lifetime of three score years and ten, but of 3,900 million years and each of us exists only because there is an unbroken germ web leading all the way from the most primitive life forms to ourselves as individuals. For the first time in history, large transnational agribusiness companies such as Monsanto are preparing to break the continuity of the germ line inour food and medicinal species.
Terminator genes are set inactive but become active once the mature seeds are soaked in a reagent such as tetracycline causing future generations of seeds to be sterile.The repressor keeps the recombinase scissors inactive until treated with tetracycline. Once treated the protecting spacer is remvoed then the toxin gene will become activated during seed maturationkilling the seed. Monsanto is currently negotiating to take over the terminator technology and wishes to replace the diversity of seed stock held by small-scale farmers world-wide with expensive monoclonal genetically patented terminator varieties so that they can maintian complete control of their intellectgual property rights.
The terminator gene is a way genetic engineering can be used to render the seeds of plants seeds sterile at any time after the first generation, by soaking the seeds in antibiotic to activate the terminator genes which then allow the plant to grow but render the mature plant's seeds sterile as they later try to mature. The terminator gene threatens to be the final nail in the coffin of humanity's self generated extinction, the true final Fall from the immortality of Eden, by rendering all the major food producing varieties used across the vast productive areas of the planet sterile from the second generation so that transnational seed producers like Monsanto can guarantee a complete control over the seed stock of all commercially grown varieties, forcing farmers to buy new terminator seed every year and replacing the immense genetic variety of locally-adapted seed grown from year to year by individual farmers with one or two globally distributed monoclonal or frankly engineered artificial varieties also possessing proprietary insect or herbicide resistance.
Terminator technology has the potential to disrupt the immortality of all our major productive species grown over vast areas of the planet. Combining these changes with genetic engineering and selective breeding to produce high-yield artificial varieties which cannot grow themselves in the wild, or which are contaminated by the inclusion of alien genes which make them herbicide resistant or insecticide secreting leads to the potential extinction of humanity because the biosphere becomes too fragile for humanity to survive on astronomical time scales.
In the event of even a very small astronomical disruption to Earth this could result in the extinction of humanity because of the loss of the original viable food plant strains upon which we must depend for natural survival as gatherer-hunters have done for a hundred thousand years. Not only would the populations of large cities fail to survive, because of disruption of the food distribution chain to urban populations who cannot grow food for themselves, but everyone would starve because we will have lost from the productive areas the hardy versatile varieties which have full viability which survivors could find in the wild and depended on to eke out human survival for long enough to regroup and reestablish.
Given the vast productive areas of the planet growing only frankly infertile doomed terminator varieties, let alone monoclonal genetically-engineered varieties dependent on additional herbicides or fertilizers required by the agribusiness process, also of little or no genetic diversity and no viability in the wild, with natural varieties stored only in vanishing numbers in gene banks, the chances of survival of the human race by this one reckless and selfish initiative reduces our long-term survival prospects orders of magnitude below that of our gatherer-hunter forbearers, even as we enter the age of the silicon noosphere of the internet global village.
Monsanto has recently issued a letter of intent claiming that it has considered the validity of concerns expressed by sources from environmental groups to the Rockefeller Foundation and has decided not to commerically develop terminator technology, but to instead making the technique merely disable added genetically-enginnerered features patented by the company. While this change is desirable it underscores how irresponsible the development of the technology has been conceded to be. Environmentalists have also noted that as the commerical development is still a distance away requitfring as a first step the completion of the takeover of Delta Pine and Land who own the patent that the letter means little at this point in time.
It is essential to reverse these destructive trends and begin the work of restoring the Earth to its biodiversity and the great forests to their climax condition. One way this can be done is by sharing a new vision of the love of nature which comes from reconceiving our cosmological place within nature as guardians of the evolving Tree of Life. In renewing the epoch of the Tree of Life it is essential that these greed-based drives for intellectual property rights are forsaken in the interests of preserving the genetic diversity of planet Earth in its full abundance as our common endowment for the future flowering, both in terms of the genetic, species and ecological diversity of wilderness areas and in the natural diversity of our productive species in agricultural and farming areas. The spirituality of the Tree of Life is thus essentially the biological altruism required to be worthy guardians of Earth's genetic resources.
This in no way prevents rational development nor does it deny the people of the world abundance and the good life. What is required is the fair and compassionate distribution of resources and a spirit of altruistic love both for one another and for the diversity of nature. Religion and particularly the Christian tradition can play a key part in this because the destiny of Christianity is clearly to the Tree of Life, the Fall was clearly from union with nature and the pronouncing of the messianic fulfillment is to restore the desolation of many generations as a garden causeth the things sewn in it to spring forth. These things taken together mean that Christianity, despite having for centuries played a role in the dominion of man over nature owes both a debt to history and is in its destiny the fulfillment of the promise of the Tree of Life in restoring both diversity and the egalitarian spirit of love to humankind.
If we do set out to "conquer" space, likewise we should be doing so in a way which in the first instance increases life's robustness to accidental catastrophe. We should thus plan for a lunar colony to protect against a catastrophic impact on Earth and plan for a similar parallel community underground om Earth to protect against a nearby supernova burst. These two alone could ensure the survival and weaving forth of life's continuing evolutionary achievements for hundreds of millions of years to come.
The kindest offer I can make to you in pronouncing the Logos, so that you don't get angry or blow a fuse and descend into derision to your folly is that you treat it at first as a piece of science fiction. A tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, yet calling simultaneously to your rational mind and visionary consciousness until, through the work itself, by its pronunciation and what it is saying about the preservation of life on Earth over cosmic time, you will come to know it for what it is - the portal Logos of existential reality. The miracle is then accomplished and the sleepers shall awaken.
Yet let it not be that I didn't warn you, for I share the quantum non-locality of Christ in a way which is more devastating than insane. I came to this task sang raal - blood royal - from cosmic destiny, born Chris King, Christus Rex or Cristo Rey on the Epiphany, the Dionysian advent throughout Anatolia and the Greek Islands, the earliest date of the manifestation of Jesus' divinity andnativity, which stands before the contrived solstice date of Christmas commandeered by Rome as a conveniently celebrated pagan festival of the returning sun. The Epiphany plutonium came into the world, as Graves' twin kettle drums "The White Goddess" and "King Jesus" pronounced the last days of Christianity in the return of the divine feminine in the environmental crisis. There is a broad streak of such prophetic writing and other synchronous happenings surrounding the renewal, so the advent of the Logos is more than a coincidence, rather an act of the cosmos in bringing home the meaning of incarnation in evolution.