Third Day: Life

‭[9] And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear,” and it was so. [10] And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of the waters He called Seas, and God saw that it was good. [11] And God said, “Let the earth grow grass, plants yielding seed of each kind and trees bearing fruits of each kind, that has its seed within it upon the earth.” And so it was. [12] And the earth put forth grass, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit of each kind, and God saw that it was good. [13] And it was evening and it was morning, third day.

(Genesis 1:9-13 MEV‬)

Here, the richness of the life cycle of God's creation is narrated. The soil is the womb to sow and nurture the seeds of life, water is its agent. Nature emerged to be a symbol of fertility, generation, and nurturing of its offspring. It is the center of unity and duality. It's the very definition of Life, which we imitate and dedicate ourselves to, being an individualistic or a collectivist, we inherently are fighting for Life.

Its cyclical pattern is as follows: seed, conception, formation, spring, decay, putrefaction, and then resurrection. There is never an ending, as in the sense of “ceased existence”. That which is “dead” also brings “life”. This comprehension extends beyond the perception of materiality, it goes to what lies precisely in the primordial substance that sustains this cycle. A very ancient wisdom is that we are formed by two principles, regarding an earthly life: Spirit and Matter. As we can see, this also defines the unity and duality of Life.

Nature is a funny and intriguing word because its broader and strict meanings carry the same principle of “pertaining to the foundation and sustainer of”.

Greenery Life

Nowadays, more and more studies are dedicated to understanding the functionality and complexity of a “woodwide” web of the interconnectedness of trees and, in consequence, vegetation. Earth is a much more complex being than we can imagine. With time, science has been going after the insight and intuition that religion brought with the narrative of God’s Creation of the World. As Brother Paiva Netto expresses: “What Religion knows intuitively Science one day will prove in the laboratory. Science without Religion can lead to dryness of the Soul. Religion without Science can degenerate into fanaticism. That’s why in the ideal age that we all want to see coming over the horizon of history, Science (brain, mind) enlightened by Love (Religion, a fraternal heart) will raise human beings up to conquer Truth.”

Trees carry scientific value to comprehend Life as well as a symbolic and religious value to what we subconsciously infer as a divine source of wisdom and connection to God. That is the relation to our Divine Root, as Eliade (1987) shows that “the tree came to express everything that religious man regards as pre-eminently real and sacred (...).”

This sacredness is also brought by Wohleben in the introduction of his book The Hidden Life of Trees (2017) by talking about the different Time and Space that they live:

“One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That’s 115 times longer than the average human lifetime. Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one third of an inch per second. But why, you might ask, do trees pass electrical impulses through their tissues at all? The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemicals drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they ‘smell’ it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be ‘tasted’ by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree send our a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect. Life in the slow lance is clearly not always dull.”

Mother Earth

A very close connection that pertains to our daily lives is the idea that Nature represents the Feminine, hence naturally (and ironically) receiving the name of Mother Nature. This is Sacred. There is no question about it. This also brings the remarkable notion that Sacredness is connected to what persists through time and space. It lies in a different dimension where formless and form converge into unison. Again, unity and duality.

About the sacred view of the representation of Earth as a Mother, Mircea Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the Profane (1987), discusses:

“The image is found throughout the world in countless forms and variants. It is the Terra Mater or Tellus Mater so familiar to Mediterranean religions, who gives birth to all beings. (...) That human beings are born of the earth is a universally disseminated belief. In a number of languages man is called the earthborn. (...) It is the religious experience of autochthony, the feeling is that of belonging to a place [the same as being native], and it is a cosmically structured feeling that goes far beyond family or ancestral solidarity. The dying man desires to return to Mother Earth, to be buried in his native soil.”

He continues to explain that the symbolism of burial carries the same value of being baptized in the waters, thus transforming our current selves into another phase of our lives. We could even argue that the idea behind being buried in your native soil is to sustain the legacy of your family, friends, and nation, to be part of something that won’t cease and that will persist by giving life, as the memory of experience, to other generations. We yearn to Live and be Eternal.

Creation and Eternal Life

The idea of eternality or legacy is a persistent one that we carry in our subconscious. It is precisely related to the maintenance of Life. Even if we debate and defend that we don’t believe in a continuity of Life in a Spiritual Realm after Death, Nature debunks us by showing that death is only a transitioning and transformative phenomenon of the essence. Now, there is a difference between the essence of plants and animals to what refers to the Soul. Plants are not conscious of their own condition and choices, while animals differ in degrees until reaching a human condition. Nature in the sense of a self-sustained system of Life evolves its essential and substantial condition, as in Spirit and Matter, through the constant exchange of the phenomenon of Life and Death. Human life goes through the same, but the difference is in the causation behind these phenomena and the conscious justification for it. We have to keep in mind that Giving birth is Sacred and causing Death is consciously damning. The conclusion then is that Life is Sacred since Mother Earth is the bearer of and what gives Life, as the direct feeling of connectedness with something higher, something that makes you breathe and feel life itself.

Again, Eliade (1987) sheds light on an ancestral idea of the value of Life and its connection to Earth as well as the role of women in sustaining its holiness.

“All religious experiences connected with fecundity and birth have a cosmic structure. The sacrality of woman depends on the holiness of the earth. Feminine fecundity has a cosmic model—that of Terra Mater, the universal Genetrix. (...) The social and cultural phenomenon known as matriarchy is connected with the discovery of agriculture by woman. It was woman who first cultivated food plants. Hence it is she who becomes owner of the soil and crops. The magico-religious prestige and consequent social predominance of woman have a cosmic model—the figure of Mother Earth.”

Life is not isolated from a paradoxical principle. You cannot understand it without the notion of death. Thus giving value to Life. And you cannot say that one life is less valuable than another because, in the essence of this statement, you are valuing your own life.

Christ tells us and shows us the importance and the paradox of life. Giving the sense of eternal living and death or conservation and transformation. Eternal Life is a reality.

The sacredness of Nature

The intricacies of Life are outstandingly intriguing. Its grandness must be revering. Unfortunately, there is still a struggle to walk on a path that exalts the sacredness of Nature and a strange work of worship to its desacralization, but even though there are people who are stuck in the perspective that Life can literally cease to exist, there are those that realize the reality of its eternality and work to exalt and maintain the beauty of God’s Creation.

Again, the subconscious idea and dedication toward a sense of eternality are so engraved in our souls that we can’t escape the wonder of its representation through symbolical language.

“It is in such symbols of a cosmic tree, or tree of immortality or knowledge, that the religious valences of vegetation are expressed with the greatest force and clarity. In other words, the sacred tree or sacred plants display a structure that is not to be seen in the various concrete vegetable species. As we noted before, it is sacrality that unveils the deepest structures of the world. The cosmos appears as a cipher only in the religious perspective. It is for the religious man that the rhythms of vegetation simultaneously reveal the mystery of life and creation and the mystery of renewal, youth, and immortality. It could be said that all trees and plants that are regarded as sacred (e.g., the ashvatha tree in India) owe their privileged situation to the fact that they incarnate the archetype, the paradigmatic image of vegetation. On the other hand, what causes a plant to be noticed and cultivated is its religious value.” (Eliade, 1987)

We can’t prevent the manifestation of our religiosity or spirituality. An example is the garden of your house, be it inside or outside. Even the failed attempt to devalue the religious meaning of Nature in an idea of “esthetic contemplation” that we commonly see nowadays is a manifestation of religious worshiping of something that for the eyes and mind brings life to the room or space that is inserted in. We have a feeling of life and peace when we cultivate a garden. No one needs to tell you that, just by being in touch with Nature we feel as if Life is coming back to us, as if we are connected to something greater than ourselves.

Earth— as an exposure example of Eternal Life

The perception of or the desire for immortality is in us, be it to defend until our material death the preservation of our material bodies, or our legacy through name and deeds. It is in us. The question is, what do we believe our focus should be: Matter or Spirit?

Matter is easier because it is what we see and feel, no one can deny the reality of that. The Spirit on the other hand is difficult because involves something that we yet can’t see, but it doesn’t mean we can’t perceive it. Just as the farmer who knows, by observing closely without the help of microscopic instruments and having faith, that what “dies” can become sustenance for life in a material sense, we can observe the signs and perceive the existence of a reality beyond what is material. “Perceive by virtue of a religious experience, the specific mode of existence of the stone reveals to man the nature of an absolute existence, beyond time, invulnerable to becoming.” (Eliade, 1987).

This certainty brings us to our last topic: By observing Life, we can understand that it comes from somewhere else, that it does not pertain to the material world, but rather sustains it. It gives itself and goes back to its essence, that is God.

Nature carries duality. To the same degree that there is a material one, there is a spiritual one. And as we have an earthly body, we also have a spiritual one. If we still don’t believe that could be the case, one day the signs will be so strong (as they are starting to be) that science won’t have a choice besides accepting it and working to understand its functionalities.

There is a whole Spiritual World, where our family and friends live and we have so much to learn about, but the time will come, as Brother Paiva evidences in his article The Reality of Life in Other Dimensions:

Are our friends in the Spiritual World invisible? One day we will be just as invisible as they are, which does not mean that we have died and turned into the dust of the earth, as some still prefer, thinking that death ends everything. Obviously, regarding the material body—which came from the earth and to the earth shall return—this is what happens, as we read in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, in Genesis 3:19 and Ecclesiastes 3:20: “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” However, these words do not apply to the Spirit, which is eternal and of which Jesus said: “The flesh profits nothing. It is the Spirit that vivifies” (The Gospel of Jesus according to John 3:8 and 6:63).

The Spiritual Humanity is still invisible to our material eyes, but it exists. The Spiritual World is not an abstraction.