Philip A. Gonzales
The Physical Scale of Life
When I was 21 years old, I drove my BMW R60 touring motorcycle from Chicago to Vancouver Island. I did not sleep or eat indoors for two months. My world was, simply, The World. Many aspects of my being were transformed in ways that are still emerging to this day.
One hot summer day, I stopped for a rest in a northern arboreal forest. Even under the dense shade of the white pines, the air was throbbing with heat. I took off my shirt and sat down on the needle-cushioned forest floor to meditate and do some simple yoga postures. When it was time to emerge from my meditation, I became aware that my body was covered with mosquitoes: back, neck, legs, feet, arms, and face. With a sharp exhale and a wave of my arms, I stood up. The mosquitoes swarmed away. Somehow, my brain would not let me worry about it. As I emerged into the sunlight, I checked for mosquito bites, but there were none. Not one. And mosquito bites usually cook up some lusty, hot, red welts on my skin. Where was my being?
It is immediately apparent that you have being in your body. Your body is alive, giving signals all the time about its being. It moves. It has color. It is warm. It has senses. It communicates. You have awareness in your body. You have awareness in your mind. You have awareness of other bodies. And you have awareness in many other ways that you can’t easily explain; in ways that involve senses other than visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile. Where is your being?
Experiments have shown that a person in an anechoic chamber – a special room that keeps all sound from echoing; a perfectly quiet, isolated room – can hear primarily the low sound of his breathing, his heart beating and the whine of electrical current coursing through his nervous system. He might also hear other body sounds. He has a keen, detailed awareness of his own tissues and cells as they collaborate to maintain the sequence of life and death in his body complex. He has full awareness in his tissues and microscopic cells. Where is his being?
Where is life? There are limits to our five senses. We can sense the world. We can sense being in our bodies and our minds. We can sense being in our tissues and our cells. But where is life? Is it on all of these levels? Does the life inside all of us reach down to the molecular, atom, or sub-atomic scales? On the scale of matter, where does life occur?
The human body is living because of a complex relationship between chemical reactions (the molecular scale) and the flow of electrons (the atomic scale). The eyes, for example, can generate a measurable amount of electrical current from a single photon. That’s one photon! The structure and chemistry of the retina amplify that minute amount of current, making it possible for the body to live in a world of light and vision. And the current from the transduction of those photons bubbles up to the macro levels of the body structure in the storage of chemicals that help the brain function, the production of hormones like Vitamin D, and many processes that give the body life and movement and pleasure. The human body is teeming with such living interactions that take place on a sub-microscopic scale.
In exploring the limits of my senses, I cannot block an awareness of my life in molecules, atoms, electrons, and the entire family of sub-atomic particles that elude so many modes of study. Quantum physics would have our bodies actually living in a state that oscillates among the 11 dimensions of Membrane Theory. But do I live there? If my body and the bodies of living things around me have that same, underlying complex of life, then my meditations may have altered the chemistry in my body, spoiling the meal for those mosquitoes. That’s where my being was.