my 42

I woke up today, earlier than usual, wondering whether I should jump out of my bed and onto my yoga mat or should I laze around a lil more. I chose the latter and lay there, with the morning fighting through the upturned blinds to reach me, and the sounds of the early-birds dropping off their kids to school across the street from my window.

there were all these thoughts swimming in my mind then. I did not remember what dreams had come, but consciousness came thinking about my plants, and about how two of those pots now contained three different pieces of a mother plant in the department office at school.

my home has evolved somewhat like the earth did, if you subtract me since I am the observer. it started barren, collected some inanimate objects and then some little microbes probably, and slowly one by one - the plants. first came the cactus or the one that needed the littlest care, then the money-plant-look-alikes that just needed water (and have since been replanted in potted earth), and then a succulent and then a flower plant (cyclamen; its having trouble, its yellowing, feeding some parasites at the moment).

there can be no 'soul' to earthly life, no 'god' other than the laws of physics/nature, nothing beyond the vast universe because it ends nowhere.

when I cut a plant and put the cut stem in water, it roots out, for many crotons and money-plant-types. for others, they need soil directly to root out. but many many plants root out from cuttings. do all these cuttings share a 'soul' with the original plant? what is the boundary of one life from another, and what houses the 'soul' then? its not very different if you think of animals and other living things. a female human, when pregnant houses the baby within. are the two the same 'soul' then? or is one within the other, like Russian dolls? the only difference compared with plants is, the 'cutting' happens after the baby has been delivered out, as a separate individual, after having stored enough energy to grow and survive, with its physical boundaries defined away from the mother, only the umbilical cord still connecting, and so it is snapped, free.

the 'soul' and 'god' theory of life refutes logic. but so some would argue, its meant to. because you have to be blinded by belief to believe.

its not like this morning was a sudden epiphany or something. these thoughts have been in my head at least many months now. it all started with that 'energy theory' of life. according to which life is nothing but the evolution of inanimate natural objects in the path of the goal of everything to better capture, store, and use energy. rocks, sand, earth, and water warm up under the sun but cool down in the dark. life preserves the heat better, uses it, to grow and recreate, even exports it by becoming food for other beings higher up and lower down in the energy/food cycle. its pretty amazing.

but think about the flip-side of this argument. if so, what is the big difference between breaking a rock, cutting a tree, killing an insect, killing a pig, and murdering a human? its all killing, starting from the inanimate, going up the evolutionary chain, to the species that has conquered this earth by managing to group together, coordinate, cooperate, communicate, record, and imagine; and of course use hands to use other things, both living and non-living.

why is manslaughter so heinous, compared with every other kind of killing/destruction?

why, of course, because of all those years it took to evolve to reach a human. the highest-up in the chain. to achieve the kind of consciousness that beguiles the human herself to believe in a higher source and a higher purpose of/for her consciousness; to want to give it supernatural status and call it a 'soul', a piece of 'god'. but I am not contradicting. we each are a piece of god because god is nothing but nature.

some days ago I was watching a documentary about Jackson Pollock, after seeing his drawing/paintings in ink and oil and canvas and Japanese paper. apparently another artist once criticized Pollock saying he wouldn't go far because he "drew from his heart, not from nature", and Pollock replied, "I am nature".