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Negative Entropy

Sitaram

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Life feeds on negative entropy.


Entropy is a measure of disorder and dispersion in a system. Something which is highly concentrated and ordered with a great degree of symmetry possesses a large amount of negative entropy. Negative entropy possesses a great deal of potential energy which is locked up or engaged in maintaining the high level of concentration and order and symmetry.


Life is also a localized system of negative entropy. Life is a process or, more specifically, a meme, which is a process with the ability to propagate and repeat itself. That which is alive is constantly expending energy in the process which struggles against dissolution and strives towards replication and renewal. The tendency of all matter and energy is to disperse and seek a common denominator; a lowest degree of organization spread out into the greatest possible space. Jung states in his monograph, "On the Nature of the Psyche," that matter has a psychoid aspect which strives towards consciousness, while, conversely, consciousness has a material aspect which yearns to be inert once again (Freud's death wish.)


We are back to our old dynamic duo of darkness and light, chaos and order; our superhero, Light, and his comical sidekick, Chaos. They started out as a Vaudeville team. Next it became a book, then a play, then a movie, and currently a television series (and entering into reruns). The first season will be available soon in DVD.


Ideas can be memes too, with a life of their own. Ideas dwell in the matrix of minds, in the substratum of a culture’s collective consciousness. The living pattern of an idea or ideology propagates from one generation to the next, just like the battlefield dialogue between Glaukos and Diomedes in Homer's Iliad, their imagery of human generations as leaves from season to season, but the ideologies are the acorns amongst the leaves. Note carefully that an acorn is a kind of nut.


Most living things are parasitic upon something else, taking possession and control of that other in some fashion and slowly consuming it.


Someone from Australia was discussing the huntsman spider in a chat room. I did a google.com search out of curiosity and came across a fascinating photograph of a spider and a teacup with a long worm in it. The worm is a species of nematode parasite which infects spiders. It lives inside the spider, feeding upon it, but carefully preserving all of the spider’s organs so as not to kill it outright. When the worm is ready to hatch, it fiendishly begins to absorb enough of the spider’s body fluids so as to drive it mad with thirst, forcing the spider to seek out the nearest water. The worm needs to be born in a body of water. The spider enters the water and the worm bursts forth from the spider’s body, must like that sci-fi movie, “Alien.” The spider then crawls off to die.


A black hole is a portion of a universe which is dying in some sense. Inside the black hole is another big bang baby universe, much like a parasite inside a spider. It is no coincidence that Hindu mythology depicts the sleeping god Vishnu, who dreams a foaming froth of bubble universes, as reclining on an infinite serpent named Sheshe.


Rupert Sheldrake and Shankaracharya and the Vedas are all correct in their notion of morphic resonance, that thoughts and ideas come from outside of us and we are like little radio or television receivers. Shankaracharya said that thoughts pour into the mind like molten metal into a form. The Vedas say, “May noble thoughts come to us from all sides.” This static of thought and ideas is what escapes from the dying universe and enters into the baby universe. This is why there is nothing new under the sun, as King Solomon said. This is why the love being born in Crete four thousand years ago is the love which ended yesterday in Texas, as Thomas Wolfe wrote.


Thinking does make it so, just so. God is an idea, a good idea. God is a savior in the sense that we are remembered. Why do prayers say, “eternal be their memory.” Tony Alamo points out that “God remembered Noah.” Imagination is being inchoate. What God remembers exists. Being is thought and thought is being.


This is why the Qu’ran describes Allah as “Lord of the WORLDS” (note the plural form) and not “Lord of the world.” We might substitute the word universes for worlds, and we may designate the universe of all universes as the Multiverse.


This is why, in the Bhagavad-gita, Book 7, verse 7, Krishna says, “All the many worlds are strung upon me as black pearls upon a thread (the word sutra is the word for thread, like suture, keeping us in stitches).” A line of thought is a thread. A series of posts is a thread. Penelope and the Three Fates use fibers and threads to weave their tapestry.

If we shall always be remembered, then we need not fear oblivion. If death is rebirth then there is no death.

An infinite regression was not absurd after all, but rather, quite necessary! Escher is transferred to the shelf on Romanticism.
 
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