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Earth is a living being. It is a collection of energized particles transforming magma into rock and rock into living creatures. Earth's crust turns cosmic radiation into its own forms of energy by packaging it into atoms, molecules, chemicals, evolving creatures and ultimately back into particles. All matter is living and continuous; a continuous transformation of matter into animated creatures and back into matter. A circular self consuming process--a closed circle of life. Single continuum: This concept of grouping all living creatures together as living matter puts down the polarized concept of the living and the nonliving. It proposes a single continuum of living forms only. To exist is to live because living is an unstoppable activity which describes the essence of physical reality. Life is activity; nothing less and nothing more. Physical reality is a living being. Cyclic transformation: There is a geobiological continuity; a continuous cyclic transformation of the geological domain into the biological domain and the biological back into the geological. To see the planet alive as a whole, one would see the same atoms and molecules as being part of rock in epochs and part of living creatures in other epochs. Ancient building blocks: There are very few kinds of protein or other molecules on earth today whose patterns had not been invented billions of years ago by ancient bacteria. Organisms today have created and incorporated nearly one hundred percent of all kinds of molecules found in nature; almost all of them having been created billions of years ago when bacteria were the only creatures around. Evolution since then has been a matter of rearranging the same molecules and atoms into an endless variety of new greater, more complex patterns. Geologic forces: Life is the most powerful of geologic forces. Virtually all of earth's atmosphere, seas, soil, and rock are made from the dead bodies and by-products of organisms; it is clear that the record of evolution lies in all of geology, not only in recognized fossils. Organisms are self-organizing packets of the earth's crust with enough energy to move about the more sluggish matter around them. The energy fluctuations of active matter result in a fantastic dance of continually changing forms projected onto the screen of our experiential reality. We see individual living organisms against a constantly changing living environment to which they must adapt. We see a constant coherent improvisational dance. We see all of nature as intelligent and interactive in this improvisational dance; as intelligent in exactly the way our human bodies are intelligent beyond the reach of our conscious minds. Earth has functioned in ceaseless creativity and dynamic harmony for at least five billion years manifesting transcendent self-reference behavior, knowledge of itself, and conscious intelligent behavior by creatively using mutually sensed information. |
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