1 result for (book:notp AND session:796 AND stemmed:speci)
[... 29 paragraphs ...]
Give us a moment… If we must speak in terms of continuity, which I regret, then in those terms you could say that life in the physical universe, on your planet, “began” spontaneously in a given number of species at the same time. I am going slowly in order to get the material as clear as possible.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors. Species have come and gone of which you have no knowledge. There are parallel developments. That is, there were “apes” who attained their own “civilizations,” for example. They used tools. They were not men-to-be, nor did they evolve into men.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination — that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible — and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.
There was no point at which consciousness was introduced, because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged. That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence. In your terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment. In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.
As hinted, there have been all kinds of species of animal-man, and man-animal, of which your sciences are not aware, and bones found thought to form, say, a man and an animal that were from the same creature. Afgastan —
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