Something about 9/11

Watched (and listened on satellite radio) to some of the 9/11 memorial ceremonies this morning.

But it was a still image that I saw after 9/11 that has seared most deeply into my psych. It is those pictures of the people jumping from hundreds and hundreds of feet up. What kind of terror would make a person jump to certain death over being incinerated? That is a decision I cannot comprehend.

Perhaps that is when the mind just shuts down, and the raw animalistic core of being human just takes over.

And so I wonder, just how much of us is a “higher thing” where we think of soul and spirit and transcendental things. And how much of us is shear chemistry working in ways to sustain the non-equilibrium of physiological systems that separates life from death.

For why else do we eat? But to assimilate that energy that drives the chemistry that maintains the non-equilibrium environment of the “internal milieu.”

And is it all just so mechanistic? Or is there an aspect of “mechanism,” i.e. “spirit,” that is just at another frequency and energy level?

What is it that truly separates me, a naked ape, from my >97% DNA homology cousin, the hairy ape?

Do I have a soul?

Is that what separates me?

Does the hairy ape too have a soul?

Is not life precious to a hairy ape?

Do they not defend, with heroic honor, their infant child?

Is it primal biological drive that does this for both of us?

Would a hairy ape have jumped from a hundred stories up from an inferno of an environment?

Or was there some mystical moment in the recent past. God the Father standing there on a moist soil stream bank in Eden. God the Son kneeling in that moist soil. With his fingers, sculpturing the Adam. Forming the molecules of amino acids, proteins, bi-polar lipid cell membranes, the hormones, the blood transport molecules necessary to solve the problem of moving lipid material in an aqueous environment of the blood. Priming the metabolic cycles. Krebs’s cycle. The Cori cycle. The respiratory cycle. Regulating the kidney’s glomerular filtration rate to retain and reject the optimal balance of metabolic molecules. The coding of the architecture of life in stem cells. The dimple in the chin. A bit of humor with a extraneous belly button.

Letting these miniscule molecules roll by the billions and billions from his finger tips. The assembly. The forming. The sculpturing of an inanimate Michelangelo.

The brushing of the sand from Adam’s eyes. The tilting of the head back. Clearing the oral cavity. Opening the airway.

The look of the One Kneeling up to the One Standing and the mutual recognition that it was not only good, it was very good.

The pressing of lips together. The breath! The breathing! The releasing of a physiological maelstrom that defines life. The becoming a living soul.

That is what Genesis tells me what happened with the authenticity, the immediacy, the urgency of “CNN Breaking News.”

But Genesis does not record that being done with the hairy ape.

And I have to ask myself, just what is it that happened way back when.

Did God create the naked ape? In his image.

Or.

Did the naked ape create God? In his image.

And what is a god to a hairy ape? And does a hairy ape even know about a hairy ape god? Or a naked ape god?

And have naked apes simply evolved to a point where there is some kind of transceiver embedded within the very chemistry of the brain that resonates with a frequency and power we have likened to as spirit?

And how is it that I can even ask a question like this?

There is something about 9/11 that is seismic about my foundational bedrock.

The Refectory Manager