Chapter 11 - All Flesh is not Mortal
We have already spoken of the profound divergence existing between the current conception of life and the conception of Hatha Yoga. Here is still another example. According to the current idea, life is something quite apart, an anomaly, so to speak, in the order of natural phenomena. Life appeared in the inanimate world, nobody knows when or how, and is transmitted in a non-conscious manner and always maintains an eminently precarious character. For Yoga, on the other hand, life is a natural phenomenon of a general kind; all is alive. The distinction between inanimate and animate, dead and living, for Yoga is merely a consequence of the fact that in so-called inanimate objects life is diffused, while in living beings it is individualized. One has nothing that the other does not have, but they have it in a different way. There is no abyss between the two.
Only in appearance is the phenomenon of life discontinuous and precarious. The transmission of fire is discontinuous, for each flame is a new flame, different from the one that lighted it; and fire is precarious because where there is no flame there is no fire. It is different with life which is always the same, one and permanent under its multiple aspects. Only its individual manifestations are precarious and discontinuous. In the most evolved living beings, life manifests itself in the form of an association between two different orders, the order of the species and the order of the individual. This association is precarious and discontinuous and when we speak of it we say: "Life is short".
In the realm of primitive living beings, to which the species of it belong, there are no separate individualities. We might say that it is a collective individuality, because it is always the same and unique element, the same cell which multiplies by division. In the class of more evolved beings, in which there is a personalized individuality, the species is represented by the egg, the permanent basis of successive vital phenomena. The individuals are born and die, but the life of the species, the egg, persists, always the same.
The primitive beings, which form the living tissue of the species and the innumerable classes of micro-organisms have no fixed vital cycle; organized as they are to live indefinitely, they never die by themselves but only through accident. When the conditions of their milieu become improper to the continuation of their existence, they disappear.
Everybody remembers the fundamental experience of Dr Carrel: a fragment of the human heart (a cellular aggregate) can live indefinitely as long as it is maintained in a milieu in which its essential vital exchanges remain assured. There is even the possibility that such cellular aggregates may be able to live a latent life in the absence of these conditions. According to two scientists, Lieske and Lipman, bacteria enclosed in sedimentary rock formations, the formation of which goes back millions of years, can be revived and have, therefore, always been latently alive.
But it is not necessary to go this far back to know that if our cycle of life is short, the primitive being with which we are associated, the species to which we owe not only our reproductive cells, but all cellular elements of our tissues can be considered as being immortal. If all accidents were avoided, if all the conditions necessary for the continuation of their vital processes were maintained, the cellular elements of our tissues would continue to exercise their organic functions immediately and indefinitely. Our body would be immortal.
If this is not the case, it is because the association, Species-Individual is seperated from the universal source of life at the moment of birth and disposes only of an initial energy charge just sufficient to maintain the conditions of organic existence for a very limited period of time.
In this association Species-Individual, the individual corresponds to what we call the "Me" or "I". The discussion of its nature and the laws to which it is subject, apart from the association with the species, belongs to metaphysics and cannot be treated here. We are concerned here only with the association, because it alone is man and not one of the parts taken separately. And what we understand by "cycle of life", or duration of human life is the span of time which normally passes between the apparition of the association in this world, ie. birth and its dissolution through death.
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