There is hardly a question more important to ask.

QUESTIONS OF IF…..
If you don’t know exactly “what’s life” and especially your very own intimate life force, how can you know the ways to best nurture, heal or restore life?

If  you want to become more and more alive, or in the negative, stop being devitalized or subject to an aging process, how is that possible without knowing (transpersonally and objectively), again “what is life?”

If that life force is seriously ill, how will you choose between different ways that claim to reverse illness – without knowing deeply and thoroughly …. what is life?

If  you feel  somehow that your life is our of sorts, how can you move to fulfill your life, again and again with knowing what
…….God help us all to know …. what is life?

If you want to live a long and full life, and maybe for a century or more, how will that be made possible without first knowing, and precisely for sure the secrets of …. what is life?

If you are seeking a diet that is more enlivening, and choosing between a regular, raw, and raw-living diet, what exactly demarcates the difference and why?

If life on earth is seriously threatened with extinction (with nearly 25% or more of all of life slated to become extinct in this century)  plus if the causes are humanly triggered, how can we best deal with this crisis and know what causes and can stop this, without knowing first what is life?

CONCENTRATED PRESENCE
My answer to these questions is as follows. Life manifests, and especially in living organisms, through the concentrated presence, expression or drawing out of nature of what is consciousness. The mathematical principles that design machines draw out of nature the mechanical, which is relatively not conscious.

Life draws out of nature its consciousness.

Consciousness thus forms, in my view, the quintessence or irreducible distilled essence of what underlies all of life – and the development of that consciousness then becomes life’s distinguishing characteristic and sets its deepest core purpose in existing.

Thus billions or more of plants, animals and microbial life species have , in my opinion, just one commonly-held characteristic. They are sentient. They react to their environment in ways that does not fit the mechanical, unconscious billiard-ball colliding model.

We see this awareness in all of life, from the largest of dinosaurs to the tiniest of nano-viruses.

Life and its forms come, however, in a variety of not just sizes, but shapes, colors, textures, and many other features. Some live in the air and others in the soil or underwater. A horse may, for example, move very quickly. But a tree stands relatively still, rooted in its whole life to the ground. A squash plant may grow horizontally, hugging closely the earth. A tree will grow otherwise, reaching up to the sky.

Each life species has its distinguishing characteristics but they all share what is life.

Looking at plants, and their reactions to their environment, the presence of consciousness is not as evident. Books like the  Secret Life of Plants bring out that this is not the case. Plants are sentient.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
Now if the bringing out of consciousness is the essence of life, this begs the question, what is consciousness.

For me, consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature.

Continued in Part II

Simple truths are often the most profound. There is hardly a more profound truth to consider than what really is “life” itself.

We can observe that any living organism is connected within as a whole. Therefore, metaphorically, it wears a “badge of organicity” – some exterior design that reflects a living unity within. For example, a flower radiates from its center displaying such a paradigm of unity. A floral beauty is other than something helter-skelter.  A leaf similarly branches in a pattern of unity from its root vein. The eye of animal radiates like a flower or the solarity of the sun.  All of these are “organic badges” -  exterior signs of organic/organized life and consciousness within. For I propose that consciousness is the foundation relationship of connection itself in nature. When concentrated most purely it then manifests as organic life in its beauty and glory.

A reverse evidence is obtained by cutting a living organism apart, destroying that organic connectedness. There and then consciousness leaves and the organism dies.

CONNECTED WITHOUT
Living organisms do connect to their environment from within, from their consciousness. We can see this more in contrast or the reverse evidence – as when mechanical billiard balls do not do the same. Thus a billiard ball will move and react mechanically or only based on a reaction to a surface interaction. There is no inner connecting consciousness. The balls are “alive” in the sense of moving but dead in terms of having any inner motivating force, moving rather in a mechanical way. A seed that grows to become a tree has true life within. It will gather the force within needed to attract nutrient to grow tall with. Imagine it does so, at all cellular levels, from its consciousness flowing later within a tree’s sap. What is flowing is life within, withing the hard protective bark housing the softer life’s consciousness.

NURTURES OR DESTROYS LIFE
Following my train of thought, imagine first that life is the concentrated presence of consciousness, then that consciousness again forms the cosmic and pure principle of connection itself in nature, and finally that anything which connects life to its wholeness nurtures that life. The flip side implies anything which separates, severs, scalpels or cuts apart (or surgically disconnects that wholeness)  and thereby harms more than on a superficial level – harms life. That’s why life feels pain when deeply cut. Fire also harms life by being a separative or de-composing agent. It draws the light and consciousness out. The exception is to cut out something toxic  or life-harming – or where a double-negative that yields a positive. Water also nurtures life – which implies it must establish the same deeply integral connective/consciousness relationship. We can see this when water rounds the sharp corners of rocks. A sharp corner is something in geometrical opposition. To be so in opposition means something is not at one. When water rounds sharp corners it brings what is not at one back to connective oneness. Water re-establishes the connective relationship of nature that forms life. It thus also creates circular bubbles which have no points in opposition. This equates over and over again with our core and revolutionary view that consciousness form the root, foundation or pure relationship of connection in nature!

This is why water not only forms spherical bubbles, but also brings out the rainbow (another paradigm of nature’s oneness) and thus the miracle of life from every seed. Water, in this view, is not essentially H2O as chemically, dead, surface-effecting, or math defined in the mechanical view – which ideological orientation of the 17th century still dominates our modern culture.

HOUSED BUT NOT ROOTED
Imagine life is thus grounded irreducibly in consciousness, and consciousness in turn  forms this irreducible relationship of connection in nature. Then this powerfully differs from the Newtonian world-picture which adds that supposedly the atom, “the indivisible one” or “what God created as One on the First Day of Creation,” forms the building blocks of nature. Newton believed this premise because he thought that a) nature always mirrored mathematical order, b) numbers formed the building blocks of mathematics, therefore c) atoms, representing numbers, were the building blocks of nature. This was Sir Isaac Newton’s mystical logic for believing we need also something akin in the laboratory to search and find the atom under the microscope. We have nowadays culturally adopted his beliefs as objectively true.  The reorganization of nature based on that contorted view has opened up a vast Pandora’s box.

Shifting away from that Newtonian vision, imagine that nature is not essentially made up of separate building blocks to conform to Newton’s vision. Imagine instead that it has a connected inner weave – a weave of consciousness – which binds all of nature together.  Guided by the Newtonian view, we are destroying that weave. Imagine further that consciousness is rooted not in what’s solid or physical as much as what’s physical is rooted in is conscious. Life then flows “in between” what appears on the surface as separate.  And our life’s consciousness travels instantaneously from brain to toe, if the latter is consciousness-accessible.  Life also travels via a tree’s sap and via our bodies using various connecting fluids.

CUT A LIVING THING OPEN
Cut an apple open and it soon turns brown or “oxidizes.” Oxygen is a concept also created within the atomic view.  Imagine that when life is impaired, severed, made toxic, inflamed, or its vessels are cut apart,  life begins to leave. With the apple, it browns and then further decays. Its connective life force, so to speak, is absorbed by what surrounds it (when no longer protected within a whole and enclosed or shelled form).  We can think of a tortoise’s soft body being protected within its hard exterior. That aliveness then does not belong to the organism’s shell or its outermost form but rather to the inner softer, pre-physcial world centered within – and to the universal principle of connection itself  or to consciousness – which unifies living nature and to which life returns.

TWO MAIN DIRECTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In my deep personal experience there really are two essential and main directions of consciousness. I wish I could invent that proposition but nature displays this with our split left and right brains as tuning forks – each tuning into two opposite and primary consciousness directions. They work like a wave flowing towards a seashore and then returning to the ocean. These two directions also involve going away from and back to consciousness’ own underlying inner connected oneness. These two potential directions are why we and other animals have bifurcated brains and opposite “tuning forks” towards these directions.  One side tunes better into what I call the separation of all elements of consciousness (moving away from the  essence of life and living awareness). The other moves consciousness back towards what I call its connective essence. The latter movement is more healing, the former is not. However because things are ultimately and organically one, there is a kind of yin yang co-dependent between the two opposite directions. They need each other to co-exist. Their reversal expresses the other’s reality. For example, we cannot separate something that is not first connected. We cannot connect something that is not first separated. The two must be present for each other.  We therefore need both sides of our brain to think in a whole way. But if the right brain dominates, we can best connect what is most separate or broken apart.  If the left brain dominates, we tend best do the opposite, to break apart what is whole. The latter turns out to be destructive of life. There are vast consequences of adopting the later, and manifesting as a  mechanical, left-brain dominant vision of nature.

Continued in Part III