To
Be
The Most Basic
Unquestionable Fact of Life, I Am.
There is nobody else in the whole world just like
you. Nobody else looking around from exactly where you are. Nobody who remembers the same
things you do or reacts in just the same way you do. There never was. There never will be
again.
We are all individuals, all different. We all
perceive, remember and respond according to the special view we have of the world. All of
us, even hermit crabs.
Every person, every animal, every plant, every cell,
every bacterium. It is one of the most basic reflections within This Magic Sea. You don't
have to imagine this truth. You experience it. Simply close your eyes, relax and you will
quickly understand that you are you, a focus like no other in the universe.
We think of this - in English - as
the words I Am or, To Be.
If you examine yourself closely, using a microscope,
you will discover you are made of little cells.
They form every part of you, your skin, your hair,
your teeth, your eyes, your blood, all your internal organs, including your brain. Each
part of you is made of the joint efforts and behavior of little animals we call cells.
All the plants and animals you see around you are
made up of little cells very similar to your own.
Nobody knew this until, in 1839, the botanist
Mtthias Jakob Schleiden and the zoologist Theodor Schwann made the astounding
pronouncement that all large plants and animals were, in fact, millions upon millions of
cells. It took 20 years for the jeers and laughter to quiet down.
Rudolf Virchow, in 1859 proved this remarkable fact
and took it one step further when he demonstrated we are not only made of cells, all the cells are derived from a single fertilized cell by
dividing and dividing again.
Seventy years later, in the early 1930s, biologists
took cells from themselves and kept them alive in a separate heated culture dish with a
plasma-like fluid. The cells relaxed their frozen pose like a mime who has been frozen in
dramatic poise suddenly coming to life. They loosened up their little membranes and
started wandering around the culture dishes, feeding, excreting, reproducing, and
responding to stimuli. The scientists were amazed. Their own cells, supposedly little
box-like affairs more or less like tiny building blocks, were really little creatures that
looked for all the world like amoebas found in fresh water ponds, first described by a
tailor in Holland two centuries earlier - in 1674.
Cellular biology became a major science, but the
basic, mind numbing news that our bodies were a collection of independent little creatures
was put on hold, glossed over, in the drive to learn more and more about smaller and
smaller details of cells.
Here, then, is the most interesting and vital
information about this discovery:
Each cell in your body is an individual, just like you. It perceives, compares its perceptions with
its memory system, and responds as it should to stay alive. Same as you.
Each cell has its own mind. Poke one, it responds. But whatever one of your cells perceives or
remembers or does is done within your form. It can't do whatever it wants. Every
perception it makes is part of you. Every memory includes you. Every response takes place
within you.
The cell can't perceive you or know what you are
thinking about. It does the best it can
and works together with all the other cells that are you.
All your cells originated from one cell that divided
and divided again. They all have exactly the
same capability, the same genetic information. They become skin cells or eye cells
or nose cells or finger cells, and do exactly what they should for the kind of
cell they become, because of the information they receive each moment telling them where
they are in relation to the other cells of your developing body.
Cells live and die but you continue to exist. The cells lining the stomach replaces itself every 5 days,
the skin in about a month, the liver in six weeks. Only brain cells stick around for as
long as you do.
Your cells
communicate with each
other, passing electrons, radiation, molecules,
and physical touches from one to the other and into and out of the whole system.
The communication network of all the trillions of
cells working together IS you. The flow of
information (including molecules) - tells the cells where they are and what form to take
and how to respond. It captures elements from the surrounding environment, moves them
through your focus and out again. The communication web of the cells causes you to look
the way you do and think and see and remember and move.
You appear and maintain your presence as information
flows through the cellular communication web.
Information and energy flowing through the
communication network simultaneously creates you and your cells. You can see yourself and you can, with the help of a microscope, see
your own cells. But you can't see the communication network or the information flowing
through it. You can only see its results. |
Many small beings
communicate with each other; trillions of messages continuously flowing through and
between them. The information flows together into a single communication web.