ENTROPY V/S LIFE
Life is full of opposites; light and dark, hot and cold, yin and yang, ugly and beautiful. The funny thing about opposites is that you have to have both in order to know each one. You can’t have one without the other. For instance, how can you know what a male is if you do not know what a female is? Entropy and life are opposites because the end result of total entropy is death.
You won’t find entropy it in a regular dictionary. It’s a science term. Entropy is what science calls the disorder that occurs over time. More specifically, it is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The theory is that in all transformations, some energy is lost to the environment. The lost energy, which is no longer available for useful work, is called entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that any system tends to run downthat is, increase its entropyover time. Not only does it run down, it gets disordered, like your kitchen sink when no one does dishes, or your car when no one keeps it up. Matter has a tendency toward chaos unless energy is applied to maintain order.
No matter how well you eat, how much exercise you have, sooner or later our bodies run down and we die. But there is another theory that life itself has some sort of built-in function that pushes back against entropy. The proponents argue that if this did not happen, all life, matter would cease to exist. In order to survive, over time life has developed a capacity to choose, and higher life forms such as humans are the result of those choices. As life evolved, life chose to develop humans with eyes, ears, limbs, a brain and consciousness.
When humans make choices, we have the free will to make those decisions subject to our experiences, our environment and our situations. We do not make these decisions in a vacuum. We interact with our environment in ways that help us sustain life and counteract entropy by recycling energy or bringing in new energy. In order to sustain this energy exchange we live in cooperative communities that become more and more complex. Our survival depends upon this exchange of energy in communities, in cooperative agreements, in relationships and partnerships.
Life has an extraordinary capacity to self-organize. You see it in the cells of our body, within the walls of a hive of honeybees, between a plant and a bee exchange of pollen and nectar. It self-organizes in that it does not need to be told what to do and how to do it. There is no hierarchical structure with messages being sent down to the bees telling them which plants to go to or how to enter a flower to collect pollen. Bees depend upon each other. Life exists in this interactive, reciprocal, intuitive knowing state.
This constant tug of war between entropy and life has energized life to pull together all its resources in order to not just maintain but to increase its ability to exchange and recycle its energy. To create this equilibrium, life has developed intelligence and willful action.
Consider the intelligence of a peach seed. Within that seed is a blueprint for a peach tree that will bear fruit that will produce another seed. It knows when to bloom and it knows when winter is coming. Not only that, if the peach tree should have steady winds blowing it and bending it over, it will begin to grow back the other way so it does not get out of balance and fall over. All that intelligence is in a peach seed!
The flower of a sunflower plant follows the sun across the sky. In the morning it faces the sun and by afternoon, the flower is facing the opposite direction when the sun goes down. This is the kind of intelligence that does not come from a book.
These actions are not just mechanical activities that these plants perform. Plants are not mechanical; they are organic. These activities are self-directed from the very life within the plant. Every cell, atom and particle of life within a plant is connected to and communicating with the rest of the plant, the soil, the air, the sun, the weather, everything, even you and me.
I read a book about plants in which a lab experiment included electronic readings of plants that were being either cut or about to be cut. The readings showed an awareness of the intentions of the lab person who cut them. The plants even showed an awareness of the distress of other plants. They also showed different growth rates according to what kind of music was played in the lab.
How can a plant have intelligence or even awareness without a brain? How can a plant listen’ to music without ears? Are plants conscious, or is it the life force within the plant that is conscious? Consider the pull of gravity. How is it that a tiny, new plant can defy gravity and push itself up through the heavy dirt toward the sunlight? It is as if something is pulling the plant up. What a fascinating thought!
When we realize that this thing we call life has consciousness, intelligence and will, we are left with an even greater mystery. What other awesome things are we about to learn?
Are we about to learn that we are all part of a great organic whole which is the universe of life? Are we about to realize that life has created us to become aware and totally conscious of this interconnectedness?
The implications of this are immense. It means that every bit of life is a part of us and we are a part of it. Our survival depends upon the rest of the universe and vise versa. What we do to others we do to ourselves.
For the last 5000 years, humans have lived in first one Empire then another. So many humans and communities have been destroyed as pharaohs, kings and madmen have raped, pillaged and destroyed each other. We have been destroying ourselves! Humans have been destroying the very communities that they are supposed to be living in harmony with. Even the animals do not act that way.
How can we instill a reverence for life that we need so badly? How can we ever overcome the kind of thinking that has alienated us from each other so much? We know that a single charismatic leader cannot do it. They get killed, like Jesus, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi did. It has to come from the grass roots, from all of us. Each of us has to realize our connectedness and how important each of us is to the whole.
As David Bo said, “How can we come to an experience of the infinite while we cling to an illusion of limits?” Being connected to all life is being connected to the infinite. Just realizing that there are no limits to our connectedness is mind boggling. If we can accept being unlimited, we can do anything, together.
