However life began, whether by accident or design, what we can be reasonably certain about, despite epochs of not very much happening at all, is that it was all of a sudden. Life is a binary arrangement, things tend to be alive or not without a great deal of dithering in between. Whatever it was must have happened in the blink of an eye.
The concept of Spontaneous Generation is probably way older than Aristotle who first put the idea on paper, suggesting that life sprang from inert compounds provided ‘pneuma’, breath or spirit, was present such that this sudden thing which happened could both duplicate and maintain itself at the same time. Louis Pasteur felt he could refute this idea by placing some inert matter in a sealed sterile jar and waiting to see what happened, which was nothing. Nor was it ever going to. Not in his life time anyway. Perhaps Aristotle would rejoin that Pasteur’s sample was clearly devoid of ‘pneuma’, which would be rather difficult to disprove since pneuma is, by definition, non-material and starting to sound suspiciously like divine intervention.
Let’s say for a moment that Pasteur was impatient by a factor of several trillion and that ‘pneuma’ does not necessarily imply godly meddling. What are we being asked to imagine? What does the idea of spontaneous generation involve? In order for life to exist it has to have a minimum number of components. Micro biologist Craig Venter discovered that the smallest and simplest life form had to have a minimum of 437 genes to survive. The simplest gene has about 200 DNA bases. One small DNA molecule is comprised of 50 million paired nucleotides each of which has a dozen or so atoms. This means that the most basic form of life has 1.75 billion atomic components. To get a sense of how much this is, imagine each atom was a grain of salt. The number of grains of salt/atoms required to make the simplest form of life would fill two bathtubs.
In the blink of an eye, nearly two billion particles fall into alignment with each other and then simultaneously get jolted into mutual co-operation. As an ‘accident’, this is infinitely less likely than the prospect of just the right kind of tornado hitting just the right kind of auto shop such that the ensuing chaos produces Kitt out of Knight Rider from the swirling maelstrom of mechanical debris. Unscratched.
Nevertheless, things that aren’t supposed to happen do. How creatures came to fly is about as unlikely as how life itself came into being because so many things have to line up for it to happen. You might say that the laws of natural selection themselves mitigate against this unavoidably slow and resource consuming process involved in developing wings that can only be used to advantage once more or less fully formed.
A smattering of feathers won’t do. You have to have a full set for them to carry your weight and constitute an evolutionary advantage. So, why would early birds go on consistently produce feathers if it would be a few million years before they ever got round to using them? Why would natural selection allow the initial emergence of non-functional feathers to persist as a desirable trait? Yet the skies teem with life. It rather suggests that Evolution has an aspirational goal. It seems quite happy to saddle a species with curious and apparently useless appendages so that one day a dream may be realised and some distant descendant benefit from the resources sacrificed by their forebears.
From this we might infer that Evolution involves something other than reactions to circumstantial constraint or the avoidance of ‘un-pleasure’. Life seems to anticipate what’s possible and then heads in that direction regardless of the un-pleasure or how long it takes. The adaptation of flight has its eye set on the future. It is rolled out despite the encumbrance of the initially insufficient proto-feathers to those earliest generations as yet unable to make use of them.
Evolution knows what it is doing. Those first useless feathers are kept as desirable traits and passed on to successive generations because they will be useful one day, a thousand generations hence. Flight wants to happen, which brings us back to our two bathtubs of salt grain/atoms. What if the missing bit of Aristotle is that ‘pneuma’ is always present, awaiting the fortuitous moment? Or, it exists/makes itself felt, where it perceives conditions are sufficient? Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say. Maybe pneuma is matter-wanting-to-happen. One way or another the bathtubs of grains organise themselves, or, are organised; then kickstarted into co-ordinated activity by something which cannot be measured nor said to be in the tubs along with the atom/grains. Even if you exclude god you still seem to have to reckon with some teleological agent.
A teleological view on any subject is the argument that the purpose of something is intrinsically linked to its design. Things are headed towards possibility as well as away from constraint. The difference between these two very different ways of thinking is that teleology implies sentience and intention. Why involve God in the story of creation when Nature already knows perfectly well what She is doing?
All kinds of weird stuff that shouldn’t happen does. Nature has a way of defying the laws of Nature. Bumble bees shouldn’t be able to fly at all but they do. Alaskan wood frogs shouldn’t be able to be frozen for months at a time but they do. Atomic particles shouldn’t blip in and out of existence but they do. They shouldn’t be both particle and wave but they are. You’d think nocturnal seagulls would get de-selected along with vegetarian vultures, yet they thrive. Cheeseburgers in vending machines shouldn’t be a thing but it is. Statistically improbable events seem to occur way more than probability likes to admit.
Our tendency to think of psyche and soma (body/matter) as distinct from one another forces us into the corner of having to explain Creation by either accident or design, by random events or by the hand of god. How would it be to think of spirit and matter as being at the ultraviolet and infra-red ends of the same spectrum? Perhaps Psyche is an expression of Nature and intrinsic to it which is why there are things that shouldn’t happen but do.
In much of Jung’s work you get the sense that he is trying to heal the Cartesian rift between spirit and matter which has made the circumstances of Creation and the generation of our own smaller creative efforts so mysterious. Jung’s ideas on the ‘Psychoid’, matter infused with pneuma, expresses ‘the essentially unknown but experienceable connection between psyche and matter.’ (CW vol 8)
According to `Jung the Psychoid possesses three different aspects. First, it is inaccessible to consciousness. Second, located in the meeting place between the psychological and the physiological, it can manifest in the relationship between a person’s psyche and their body. Thirdly it refers, “to the relationship between a person’s psyche and the physical world beyond that person’s body” (Main, p.26). We could add from Collins that the Psychoid is ‘the innate impetus to perform actions’. Intention does not have to be added to matter. It’s potentially already there. This is the principle behind the phenomena of synchronicity, which not only tend to occur against the odds but are invariably meaningful.
The separation of spirit from matter in western thought leaves those arenas of life where they clearly overlap unintelligible. This hatchet job on Being bequeaths an impoverished sense of soul to modernity. In Gnostic thought soul is like the radius of a circle, joining the circumference which is the body, to the centre which is spirit. If spirit and body are separated, the experience of soul is ravaged, reduced to a mere concept, inhabiting the body like a fugitive. ”The Spirit of the Times (Aristotle’s Pneuma) considers the soul as a living, self existing being and with this contradicts the Spirit of the Times (Descartes’ intellect) for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man ” Jung’s Red Book p232
Nearly two millennium before Descartes, Greek philosopher Plotinus taught that ‘the psyche is not in the body, rather the body is in the psyche.’ This means that psyche is also ‘outside’, in matter as well as in the body. You could call it a projection but the psyche doesn’t care much for ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. The alchemical opus of freeing spirit from matter means recognising just how tangled up it can be in the first place and therefor the meat and drink of psychoanalysis whose very name means ‘soul-disentangling’.
What we think of as objectively happening out there in the world is very often an inner event. Dreams seem like the quintessential inner experience and yet they come from somewhere beyond our ken. Something unknown is doing I don’t know what, seemingly unintelligible because of the narcissistic wound to ego’s pride in having to take seriously the autonomous existence of those layers of the unconscious from whence such things flow, consciousness beyond either body or mind which has the power to make things happen. Pneuma wants form and embodiment. ‘Eternity is in love with the clocks of time.’ to quote poet laureate Elias Cannetti. The Spirit of the Depths longs for the Spirit of the Time. It manifests in every niche available not because it has to but because it wants to and then revels in its infinite variety. Life on Earth began because it could. Life, like love, finds a way, one the mind is unable to imagine.
