In trying to make sense of life and the All, it is perhaps useful to gain some perspective of just how physically imposing we really are in the cosmos by taking a look at the earth from another planet in our solar system:

A view of planet Earth and its moon as points of light between the icy rings of Saturn

Taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft April 12, 2017 https://saturn. jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7656/

For some time now, there has been an attempt in the physics world to develop a “Theory of Everything” (TOE).  Unfortunately, the scientists engaged in this attempt have arbitrarily and with profound contempt refused even to consider an aspect of life which has been reported, or misreported, from time immemorial by peoples of all cultures and climes:  the paranormal.  In the view of said scientists, to imagine the paranormal to be real is the height of self-delusion, if not madness.

Because, they claim, there is no need to investigate such nonsense.  Every rational scientist (and his source of government grants) simply knows there could never be such a phenomenon.  Anyone who claims anything to the contrary should be cast into the utter darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I have had conversations with such Men of Transcendent Scientific Knowledge.  They have shown me the error of my ways by explaining that my dalliances with things and ideas which cannot be analyzed in laboratories or described with higher mathematics are due to inner compulsions and conflicts left over from a problematical childhood.

So I must thank such superior beings for their psychological expertise in psychoanalyzing me as a poor retard who seeks the comfort of a heaven and/or divinity to allay his fears of the postmortem unknown.  Why could I never have realized my neurosis?  Here all this time I have been imagining that I was looking for something real.  Now, thanks to their ad hominem arguments, I know that I really belong in an asylum for the mentally handicapped.

As a penance for my sins of wrong-headedness, let me list the sources and causes of my delusion:

First of all, there is the matter of hauntings — haunted houses, graveyards, grounds, etc.  In Armando Pavese’s Manual de Parapsicología (para descubrir y desarrollar sus facultades ocultas de médium, telepático, adivino, sanador, etc… con 60 experimentos prácticos).  Santafe de Bogotá, D.C., Colombia:  San Pablo, 1994  (Translated by Augusto Aimar into Spanish from the Italian original, Manuale di Parapsicologia (per scoprire e sviluppare le vostre facoltà nascoste di medium, telepatico, rabdomante, guaritore, ecc… con 60 esperimenti pratici), 15033 Casale Monferrato (AL):  Edizioni Piemme S. p. A.), the following is noted on pages 60ff. (my translation from the Spanish): 

The above text by Mr. Pavese is fully consistent with Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance, one of whose corollaries is that a being’s form field (morphic field, i.e., memory of a form with its behavior) subsists extra-spatiotemporally, and may be “recalled” by a later condition ecosystemically similar to the field’s original generator.  In the case of biology, the field will usually aid in the instantiation of a new life form and its conformation in shape and behavior to that generator.  A “haunted” environment is psycho-physically linked with that generator, which may be sensed or seen by psychically sensitive brains, including some women, small children and animals.

In the Sheldrakean view, the more instantiations of a given morphic field there are, the stronger it becomes.  Thus all electrons (better:  electron clouds) have the same mass and spin because they are all instantiating the same field.  There are no variations anywhere in electron morphology.  To put it in pre-scientific language, there is only a single electron “soul” expressing itself in innumerable instantiations.  Which easily explains the phenomenon of entanglement in physics.

It follows that what we anglophone humans call “memory” or even “mind,” then, is a quintessential characteristic of all matter, including us.  It supports the ancient view of the universe as characterized by hylopsychism (mind pervading all matter) or hylozoism (matter itself being in some sense alive), or what might be called panentheism.

Which brings us to the matter of life itself, which is a form of matter which accumulates and organizes memories.  In fact, morphic fields (which include behavior), function and purpose are one and the same thing under different aspects.  Which introduces teleology into the matter of evolution.

A bacterium is different from a grain of sand.  This is because, as distinct from the sand grain, it can accumulate new memories on its own.  That is, it can learn.  And so can all other forms of life.  Indeed, the whole story of evolution is evolutionary epistemology — a process of ongoing increase in knowledge (ἐπιστήμη = Latin scientia).  (On this, see the excellent work of Dr. rer. nat. Dr. phil. Gerhard Vollmer, Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie:  Angeborene Erkenntnisstrukturen im Kontext von Biologie, Psychologie, Linguistik, Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, Stuttgart:  S. Hirzel Verlag, 1975.)  Interestingly, the medieval Catholic Church’s “accidental” breeding of European Jews produced the smart Ashkenazi branch, which today ranks as having the highest average IQ of all human groups on our planet.  The explanation for this may be read in my downloaded webpage of Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending’s Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (no paywall, or behind a paywall at the Journal of Biosocial Science).  An abbreviated summary can be found in an article at IQ And Disease:  The Curious Case of the Ashkenazi Jews.  Naturally, political correctness abhors mentioning the obvious role of genetics in IQ, as riots at various colleges and universities against visiting speakers who have written about IQ differences among groups or other forbidden topics show.

Naturally, the current fad among scientists is to deny or ignore this epistemological interpretation of evolution because it sounds too much like teleology or maybe even like being in the same realm as “ghostly action at a distance” (Einstein’s spukhafte Fernwirkung), etc.  (By the way, German spukhaft does not mean the same as English “spooky.”)

But to proceed:  life, this “student” form of matter, shows something else:  the urge to survive.

Moreover, in all life, even in the smallest cells, we find incredible intelligence and information-filled structure (“design”) at work.  (For the sake of argument, we may omit here the countless incredible survival strategies found in the behavior of so many species.)  In addition, the biological “code” of deoxynucleic acid (DNA) and its allied epigenetics show marvelous cybernetic architecture and functioning.  To summarize some main points of life:

1. the fear of death (plus pain), along with
2. this incarnate intelligence, and
3. the drive to procreate either sexually or asexually

The cosmos wants to exist.

Pain, which appears in all creatures with a central nervous system (with analogues in forms without a CNS), is a psychosomatic messaging system.  It conveys information about life status, as does its psychological cousin, sorrow.  If a mouse or a fish, say, is pricked with a pin, it will react quickly and evasively, perhaps also defensively.  This reaction is not an intellectual operation on the mouse’s part, but is pre-determined by the subconscious, even though mediated through nerves and biochemicals.  In other words, it shows volition in matter itself.  (Medical research concentrates almost exclusively on the “somatic” part of pain, but tends to ignore the psychic aspect.)  Given enough intensity, as in murders, lethal accidents, etc., physical (or psychic) agony can leave a “psychic” memory trace in surrounding matter, resulting in “haunted” places.  But the key element here is the urge to survive, to continue to exist.

In brief, this painful but innate “pregeometric” response to the question of “to be or not to be” demonstrates what Aristotle and the medieval scholastics considered to be a conative nisus to live.  We are not talking about static things here, but about a process — existence as a verb rather than as a noun.

Of course, there is especially in the West a type of atheist that focuses only on the suffering (somatic) aspect of pain, ignoring its informational (psychic) nature.  The objection is that, if there were a god, he/she/it would not permit suffering.  And he/she/it would have me win the lottery.  Etc.  Ergo, there can be no god.

This objection is a relic of the god-talk given to a four-year-old child, which assures him or her that God is an all-loving, body-building Big Daddy in the sky, an anthropomorphic Zeus whose picture is seen on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  And of course, most people’s theological understanding never grows past the four-year-old stage.  Hence, after puberty, when it becomes evident that Zeus really doesn’t exist, the disillusioned individual assumes that there is no mind in the universe greater than his or her own, and throws the whole concept of the non-material overboard.

Let us consider another oddity of human experience:  the Near-Death Experience, or NDE for short.  This experience is virtually universal, reported among all peoples, cultures and places.  We might even call those who undergo an NDE “thanatonauts” or “death-sailors,” from the Greek words thánatos (θάνατος) “death” and naútēs (ναύτης) “sailor,” like we have invented the word “astronaut” (literally “star-sailor”) or “cosmonaut” (literally “cosmos-sailor”).  It is probable that animals experience something similar, except that they cannot talk and reveal what they have seen and heard on the edge of life.  Quite a few thanatonauts report seeing their entire lives flash before them in the event:  sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color, sometimes as a movie, sometimes as a series of still pictures, etc.

But what are they witnessing here?  Most think of it in terms of what they know from ordinary life — as a movie or picture album separate from themselves.  But what they are in fact seeing is themselves as consisting of memory.  This is the inner core of living beings, as Rupert Sheldrake has shown.

Yet another element is often found in the recalls of thanatonauts.  It is that some of them say they found themselves being sucked, perhaps along with other beings, through a “tunnel” of some sort toward an extremely brilliant “light.”  Light, of course, along with lamps, the eye (cf. the “eye” on the American dollar bill’s Masonic pyramid), and the act of seeing are frequently used as metaphors for knowledge, learning, understanding, thought and the like.  In other words, these “revenants” find themselves being pulled to their deepest existential root:  Mind.

Then there are the persistent reports, especially in Third-World countries, of what is often called “reincarnation.”  Ian Stevenson, M.D. (formerly Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, now deceased) worked for four decades on cases suggestive of what is usually called “reincarnation” and published his results in a massive, two-volume work, Reincarnation and Biology:  A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, which cannot be lightly dismissed the way the materialists are wont to do.  (They typically slur him as “having abandoned science,” or something along such lines.)  Stevenson did a lifetime of research about what is frequently called “reincarnation”;  that research produced incontrovertible evidence of, among other things, how body-disfiguring lethal wounds of people killed violently have often shown up as birth marks and birth defects in genetically similar, or even related, other people who were born afterward (usually within just a few years).  This is not to say that a previous personality is reincarnated in toto in a new person, even though small children who have just begun to speak occasionally say that they were someone else in a previous lifetime.

Rather, Stevenson’s evidence must be viewed in the same light as individuals who have had transplants of major organs from other people, living or dead.  It so happens that, subsequently, such transplant recipients sometimes show behavior or abilities which had not at all been characteristic of them before the transplant operation, but had indeed been part of the personality whence the transplanted organ had been taken.  This is yet more evidence of the association between matter and memory:  in such cases, the morphic fields of donor and recipient have become fused — creating, in effect, a new, “hybrid” soul.

In addition, there is the extraordinary phenomenon of murmuration.  Here a school of fish or a flock of starlings acts as a single body, flowing leaderlessly hither, thither and yon as a unit.  Such schools and flocks are for all practical purposes identical in their DNA, their epigenetics, their forms and their biology in general.  Similarly, human identical twins often exhibit amazingly similar behavior, even though having been separated shortly after birth and subjected to completely different educations and rearings.  Such twins might be understood as something close to cases of human murmuration.

Such observations have implications for the origin of multicellular life.  Unicellular life arose at the latest about three billion years ago, perhaps even somewhat over four billion years ago.  But until about 2.3 billion years ago when oxygen became an important component of the atmosphere, all life remained unicellular.  Then, under suitable conditions, two or more cells that were identical or were mutually beneficial to one another (e.g., through endoparasitism, in which one cell — as a kind of “organ transplant” — lives inside another to the benefit of both) somehow “fused” to become a single complex organism composed of more than a single cell.  This unification may have been paranormally facilitated by the merging of the morphic fields (or “souls”) of such cells.  (An abiotic analogy might be the way in which the magnetic fields of two magnets combine to make a single, larger, “supersummative” magnetic field when the two are placed together.)  In other words, a merger of this type would have led to multicellular forms activated by a single “murmurating” soul.  Such forms, including humans, are composed of many cells with identical RNA/DNA, but whose individuality is subsumed into the overarching control of the whole.

Animal bodies, including those of humans, are composed of many cells with identical DNA.  Although normally taken for granted, it is in fact amazing that such a massive aggregate can produce a single whole acting as a unit.  This is yet another element in the extraordinary phenomenon of murmuration, mentioned above.  We are all “murmurating” entities, somewhat more tightly unified than, say, a hive of bees with identical genomes, but nonetheless based on the same principle.

Another element rarely noted is the process of noticing similarity between percepts.  I may encounter an object or happening which “reminds” me of something else, which I take as being “similar.”  This shows that there is a kind of “attraction” independent of Newtonian geometry between morphic forms of different sizes and times, but in some abstract way akin to one another.  In fact, when we survey biological evolution, it appears that such forms may coalesce and become a single composite form.  (See Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance:  The Nature of Formative Causation, 4th Edition, on this.)  Thus, e.g., most of homo sapiens (especially the male half) today “enjoys” watching games which simulate conflict, fighting and battle.  This is because for millions of years our pre-human ancestors engaged in such activities to win food and sex.  The memories of these conflicts have fused into a composite morphic field, so that today we do not recall any specific conflict of any individual ancestral primate, but only the “generic” motif left imprinted on our extra-temporal foundation by the collective trauma of so many instances.  This process is the origin of “archetypes” in the human soul, as noted by many psychologists.

On the multiuniverse ideas (e.g., Edward Witten’s M-Theory, which is said to unify all the major superstring theories), and the problems involving quantum gravity, the jury is still out.  Certainly, we have no idea what conditions obtain beyond the event horizon of our own observable universe.  If the concept of infinitely and eternally effervescing “bubble universes” should turn out to be true, one interpretation might be that the Prime Mover is, poetically speaking, a seething, trans-spatiotemporal cauldron of life.

There are some mathematicians and physicists who believe that mathematics is the “language” of the universe.  Unfortunately, this Platonist view does not recognize that mathematics itself is a language, even though one much more rigorous than ordinary human linguistic codes.  In the real cosmos, there are few if any triangles whose corners add up to exactly 180º, no matter what Euclid says.  Most importantly, mathematics-fixated physicists almost universally refuse to acknowledge the rivetting fact that, at the most complex level — the level of evolution and life —, physics is characterized by biology, which is to say, by learning (a phenomenon known as “evolutionary epistemology” in philosophy).  That is, intelligence is incarnate in cosmic physics;  all life forms (including humans), whether earthly or otherwise, are partial instantiations of the Master Intelligence underlying the universe.

Mathematics is based on logical abstraction, following the pattern-finding and abstractional processes of the human brain as a result of our evolutionary development and learning.  If anglophone (non-colorblind) humans repeatedly experience a range of wavelengths in the longer bands of the visual spectrum, they may mentally abstract and condense that experience and give it the collective name of “red.”  But the phenomena and their biophysical interpretation behind the experience are vastly more complex, and the word “red” explains nothing about those phenomena in themselves.  The same is true of the abstractions of mathematics, even though math is much more exact and logically constrained than natural linguistics.  In mathematics, for instance, we can produce an “imaginary” number by multiplying a positive real number by the square root of -1 (symbolized as “i”).  Thus the square of “imaginary” 2i is -4.  Such an imaginary number does not per se correspond to anything in nature, but is often used in mathematical physics as a kind of shorthand to “cut corners” in solving complex problems.  In short, mathematics does not describe natural “laws,” but at best only approximates the external behavior of natural phenomena, even as it adds yet another layer of mental abstraction to our interpretation.  Moreover the very word, “law,” is itself borrowed by analogy from human legislative activity, which has nothing to do with physics.  Abstraction is a necessary tool for humans in dealing with reality, but does not explain the inner nature of reality itself.

Mathematicians can, thus, invent vast castles in the algorithmic sky which have no relationship to anything real.  More to the point, mathematical physicists Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler suggested in Gravitation, their weighty tome on quantum-mechanical and relativistic cosmology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1970-73, p. 1212), that,

Little astonishment there should be, therefore, if the description of nature carries one in the end to logic, the ethereal eyrie at the center of mathematics.  If, as one believes, all mathematics reduces to the mathematics of logic, and all physics reduces to mathematics, what alternative is there but for all physics to reduce to the mathematics of logic?  Logic is the only branch of mathematics that can “think about itself.”

Misner, Thorne and Wheeler then go on to suggest [ibid.] that the foundation of the real world might turn out to be a “calculus of propositions.”  This is a calculus which surveys all possibilities and chooses the one which best fits its criterion.

In this case, that criterion would be the emergence of conscious life, a kind of fractalizing, hologrammaticalizing self-replication of the Primordial Logic.

All of these considerations point to the existence of transcendent, supremely logical Intelligence as the foundation of our existence, an Intelligence quite different from the stew of wishdreams and political propaganda pushed out by traditional religions in response to popular demand.  But that Intelligence is nonetheless real.  Abusing signs of the paranormal as a tool, Judeo-Christianity used ancient psychology, politics, religions and philosophical movements to create a politically judgemental Lord favoring one ruler or another.  Later, a crack-brained Arabian schizophrenic who was hearing voices in his head told the ignorant barbarians around him that those voices came from a sociopathic Allah, and started a perennial international war for permanent barbarism over the entire globe.

But according to our best evidence, the Intelligence referred to above is a cosmic inframind that fractally and hologrammatically replicates its own nature everywhere, a willed process that on suitable planets results in life which is conscious.

By presenting the above, I hope to have done at least a little bit of the penance for my benightedness, even if Men of Transcendent Scientific Knowledge consider my effort to be unworthy of their time.  In my unenlightened state, however, it still seems to me odd that they should attempt to fabricate a Theory of Everything without including the massive evidence of a paranormal infrastructure underlying all of nature.

In conclusion, here is an article by retired chemist and atheist Joel Kirschbaum, which mentions porphyrins (sorry, no hemoglobin) apparently found in interstellar dust clouds:

On the English word “soul”:

A fluid, either vapor or liquid (especially water), is the almost universal human symbol for the unconscious.  Religiologically, it signifies the deep-soul of the individual and, beyond the individual, the Worldsoul and the Allsoul of which the individual is but a small, wave-like part.  As many other peoples, so also the ancient Northmen identified this “ethereal ocean” with local, physical bodies of water regarded as holy.  (Many corpses of obviously sacrificed men, occasionally with a strangling noose still around their necks, have been found in anaerobic peat bogs in northern Europe which were once lakes.)  Likewise frequently encountered among many Germanic groups as among other non-literate peoples is the view that souls are “recycled” from the land of the living to the Worldsoul and back again.  The Proto-Germanic word for “lake” was *saiwaz (whence also modern English sea, German der See “lake” [and also die See “sea”]), and the soul was for them a “derivative of the lake,” a “lake-ite,” and had the form *saiwalō (the ending -alō meant “stemming from”), appearing in biblical Visigothic as sáiwala, whence later Old English sāwol, then Middle English sāwle, sōwle and, finally, modern English soul.  Hence the word soul bears an implicit etymological (word-origin) reference to the “fluid” abyss whence it springs.  And in ancient Germanic religion, the foremost delver into these fluid and watery depths was Wōōden, the shaman-god of Wednes-day (“Wōōden’s day”).  (The original form of the god’s name was Gothic, Wōð-in, Wōð-an, meaning “chief” or “leader” [~in, ~an] of those who are wōð “diabolically possessed, insane, possessed by a god” [cf. Shakespearean wood “mad, insane”], with modern “giddy” being an adjectival derivative originally meaning “goddy,” i.e., deranged by godly influence, etc.)  A shaman, by the way, is, originally speaking, a tribal religious specialist who deliberately undergoes a Near-Death Experience and, as a “thanatonaut,” visits the spirits and gains knowledge valuable for hunting, warfare or healing purposes, etc., then returns to communicate that knowledge to the tribe.

In contrast, the Greek word for soul is psyche (ψῡχή, ῆς, ἡ “breath, spirit;  life”).  This term in turn comes from psychos (ψῦχος, ους, τό “cold, frost;  winter”).  Originally then, psyche meant a “cool breath of air,” then “breath of life,” “life,” and finally the “soul” as the seat of the feelings and desires.  Psycho-logy is thus literally “soul-lore,” German Seelenlehre.  The Latin word for soul is anima (of feminine gender), originally meaning “air, a breeze, wind,” then “breath,” and under the influence of Greek philosophy came to mean “the principle of life, psyche.”  The masculine form of this root, animus, was used to refer to the rational, volitional and emotional side of the mind.

Finally, the Russian word for “soul” or “spirit* is дух, with derivative душа́, stemming from Indogermanic *dhousos “spirit, breath, creature,” which, as in Greek and Latin, viewed the “breath” as the life principle.