Is there an elixir of immortality. Is there eternal life? Do we need immortality? Cases of immortality

Of the questions that are equally interesting for science, philosophy, religion, for each person the most, perhaps, the most important and hopeless: what is life?

Many works have been written on this topic. Special sciences are devoted to the study of the manifestations of life, not to mention the whole complex of biological disciplines. Scientists prefer to look for the foundations of life in the microcosm. However, there, at the level of atoms and simple molecules, standard objects devoid of individuality dominate, as well as mechanical interactions ... Or does such an approach primarily reflect our ignorance of the essence of life?

Be that as it may, answers to the question: "What is life?" - there are too many. Each science, and even more so each philosophical or religious teaching, offers its own explanations. One gets the impression that none of the interpretations of the essence of life will be convincing until the meaning of death can be comprehended.

What is death? Does it oppose life or dominate it? Is immortality possible for living beings?

Such questions affect the interests of each of us. From them we pass not only to the field of theoretical speculations, but voluntarily or involuntarily we think: how to live in this world? Is there any other light?

BALANDIN Rudolf Konstantinovich - member of the Writers' Union of the USSR. Author of 30 books and numerous articles and essays. The main topics are the history of the Earth and life, the interaction of society with nature, the fate of material and spiritual culture.

Life, death, immortality?...

On the meaning of death

Let's rephrase a well-known saying. "Tell me who your enemy is and I will tell you who you are." The enemy of all living things is death.

The original Russian thinker N. F. Fedorov argued that the distant and highest goal of mankind is victory over death, the resurrection of all who lived on Earth. Such is the filial duty of the living to those to whom they owe the greatest good of life. Fedorov tried to sentence death to death.

Perhaps this attempt is caused primarily by despair and the desire to overcome the chilling horror of non-existence at all costs.

Let's remember the fear of death, familiar to each of us. Leo Tolstoy experienced him painfully, and not only for himself, but also for his children: “Why should I love them, raise and watch over them? For the same despair that is in me, or for stupidity? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them - every step leads them to the knowledge of this truth. And the truth is death.

In religious teachings, this fear is usually "neutralized" by belief in the immortality of the soul. It is said that the American philosopher D. W. James even promised after his death to find a way of spiritual communication with friends. But, as I.I. Mechnikov noted, he never fulfilled his promise.

In our century of science, the belief in the immortality of the soul has been revived in new forms (it is enough to recall the most interesting work of the American scientist R. Moody "Life after life"). However, with all the consolation of such views, after a short reflection, you sadly realize that if the spirit separates from its inhabited native body, then this will be the death of me as a bodily-spiritual being. Without a body, my consciousness will be helpless, inactive ... And will it be?

“The inevitability of death is the gravest of our sorrows,” said the French thinker of the 18th century Vauvengargue. It's hard to disagree with him.

Death is a recognized necessity. Our complete lack of freedom. The highest measure of punishment, to which each of us was sentenced by indifferent nature. But there is another, directly opposite point of view. Death is good!

“We sincerely admit that only God and religion promise us immortality: neither nature nor our mind tells us about it ... Death is not only deliverance from diseases, it is deliverance from all kinds of suffering.” This is the opinion of M. Montaigne.

From scientific objective positions - detached from our personal experiences and fears - death appears as a regulator and organizer of life. All organisms, as you know, in a favorable environment multiply exponentially. This powerful "pressure of life" (an expression of V. I. Vernadsky) would very quickly turn the earth's biosphere into a swarming clot of organisms.

Fortunately, some generations free up the arena of life for others. Only in such a change is the guarantee of the evolution of organisms. The terrible image of a skeleton with a fatal scythe turns into the embodiment of a harsh but fair natural selection.

... Alas, each of us, living, yearns not only for knowledge, but also for consolation; understanding the good of death for the triumph of biological evolution hardly helps us to joyfully expect the cessation of our priceless - for us! - and the only ever personal life. And against the inevitability of eternal non-existence after a fleeting stay in the world, the only antidote remains - to live, as they say, to the fullest.

“If, along with death,” wrote V. M. Bekhterev, “the existence of a person ceases forever, then the question is, why do we care about the future? Why, finally, the concept of duty, if the existence of the human person ceases with the last dying breath? Isn't it right then not to look for anything from life and only to enjoy the pleasures that it gives, because with the cessation of life, nothing will remain anyway. Meanwhile, otherwise life itself, as a gift of nature, will flow without those earthly pleasures and pleasures that it is able to give to a person, brightening up his temporary existence.

As for caring for others, is it worth thinking about it at all when everything: both “I” and “others” - tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or someday will turn into “nothing”. But after all, this is already a direct denial of human duties, duty, and at the same time a denial of any public, inevitably connected with certain duties.

That is why the human mind does not put up with the idea of the complete death of a person outside of his earthly life, and the religious beliefs of all countries create images of a disembodied soul that exists behind the coffin of a person in the form of a living incorporeal being, and the worldview of the East created the idea of the transmigration of souls from one being to other".

But then scientific knowledge is nothing more than entertainment and a way of obtaining life's blessings, and we, like anyone sentenced to the "highest measure", in the last hour (month, year, decade - does it matter?) truly everything is allowed, and there is no difference between good and evil before the abyss of nothingness.

You can, of course, believe in the immortality of the soul, but you should know that our mortal body will dissolve in the world around us and we will never, never be destined to enjoy earthly life.

From the standpoint of natural science, the death of a living organism is the decomposition into the smallest components, atoms and molecules, which will continue their wanderings from one natural body to another. V. I. Vernadsky wrote something like this in his diary, emphasizing that he does not feel the fear of death. But he also has another entry: “... in one of my thoughts I touched on ... the elucidation of life and the creativity associated with it, as a merger with the Eternal Spirit, in which they are composed or which is composed of such human creatures striving for the search for truth, including mine. I can't express it clearly...

The last remark is very necessary. It seems that everything is clear to a scientist from a scientific point of view. However, his thought does not want to put up with the limitations of the scientific method, which recognizes only what can be proven. But death is an obvious fact that does not need proof (like any despotism). And posthumous existence is a conjecture, a fiction, a conjecture not confirmed by anything and taken for granted. Is there any possibility of confirming or refuting it according to modern science?

Let's try to figure it out not speculatively, but on the basis of the available facts.

Biological eternity of life

Beginning of life

Everything that is born is doomed to die. In the material world, we do not seem to know anything that contradicts this law. Animals and plants, stars and planets, even the Universe (or, more precisely, the Metagalaxy, the part of the universe we observe), according to modern ideas, once had a beginning, which means they will have an end.

Lot. If the Sun does not disappear, but simply goes out, we will have two problems - a severe cooling and the death of plants.

First, about plants. Photosynthesis will stop immediately and most plants will die in the first days and weeks. The largest plants, which have a correspondingly larger supply of the nutrient (sucrose), will last for several months. The death of plants will entail a number of negative consequences: mainly the extinction of herbivores and, as a result, the closure of all farms and meat processing plants, which means we will be forced to catch / breed and eat predatory ones. It is hoped that in the absence of herbivores, which are their food, they will form a new ecosystem - where strong predators will eat weak predators and thus the existence of animals will be preserved. Oxygen on earth will not run out so quickly - it will last for several thousand years. However, it will be harder to breathe due to the increase in carbon dioxide, so in the next 500-600 years, humanity will be forced to take care of the construction of oxygen stations.

Now about the cold. In the first week, the temperature on earth will drop to -20C, in the first year to -100C. Then it will continue to fall, but more slowly, and eventually stop at -150-160C. At the same time, all water bodies will freeze, but water will remain in the oceans under many meters of ice, and this very layer of ice will maintain a positive temperature. People will have to take refuge in geothermal complexes - they will receive heat and electricity by extracting energy from underground high-temperature sources. The easiest way to get them is near volcanoes.

Of course, not all people will have enough space in shelters. Many (perhaps very many) will die in the first few years in the struggle for resources - water, gasoline, electricity, but the rest of humanity will survive and continue to exist, only in changed conditions.

But if the Sun disappears altogether, the prospects for survival will be much lower - the Earth will move into outer space at a speed of about 107 "000 km / h and an almost inevitable collision with a space object such as an asteroid or another planet will entail gigantic destruction.

Read 6 more replies

The widespread development of robotics and automation, artificial intelligence systems, global information networks and integrated high-speed transport systems, clean energy. development of 3D printing. Intelligent systems will be in the home and in security.

Transport - unmanned vehicles will become commonplace (in air and ground transport)

There will be virtualization in the field of arts and entertainment. Virtual worlds indistinguishable from reality. Computer games and films - a person will literally "immerse" in them, and not look at the screen as it is now.

Since ancient times, people have tried to understand life and death in order to gain immortality. The desire to live forever was so great that it pushed people to terrible deeds, such as sacrifices and even cannibalism.
But is it really immortal life so unrealistic and unattainable?
There have been successful experiments in life extension in history.

So in 1926, one famous Soviet doctor and professor, Alexander Bogdanov, conducted an experiment on rejuvenation. He suggested that if the blood of a young man was transfused into an old man, then youth would return to him. He conducted his experiments on himself, and the first results were very successful. The professor exchanged blood with a geophysicist student. In total, there were 11 successful transfusions, the 12th was the last and fatal for the professor. An autopsy revealed: kidney damage, liver degeneration and heart enlargement.
The next attempts to gain eternal life ended fatally.

There are people in whom the aging process proceeds much faster than others. This pathology is caused by a very rare genetic disease - Bardel's syndrome or "Prodereus". People with this disease can grow old literally overnight.
American scientists have proved that life can still be extended for a very long time. They conducted an experiment on fruit flies, leaving the offspring of only the oldest flies, and the offspring of the young ones were destroyed. For several years, hundreds of generations have changed, as a result, the life expectancy of such flies has increased by 3 times.
But such an experiment cannot be carried out on people.

There are places on earth where people live much longer than others.
One of these places is the village of Eltyubyur in Kabardino-Balkaria. In this strength, almost every second crossed the 100-year milestone. Getting pregnant at 50 is considered the norm here. Locals believe that the reason for their longevity is air and water from a mountain stream. However, the researchers of this place believe that the reason for longevity lies in natural genetic selection on the principle of longevity. Genes have been passed down from generation to generation for long life.
Others believe that the whole thing is in the mountains that surround the village on all sides, and the mountains are like pyramids, which, according to some scientists, are able to change the physical properties of the substances placed in them, contributing to their longer preservation.
But, one way or another, the very fact of the existence of such places is unique.
In addition to such unique places, there are unique people who have achieved immortality.

One of these people is the head of Russian Buddhists Khambo Lama Itigelov. He left the world of his own accord. Lama sat in the lotus position and began to meditate, and then stopped showing signs of life. His disciples buried the body, and after 75 years, according to the will of the lama, his grave was opened. When they saw the body, the pathologists who were present at the exhumation were simply stunned. The body looked like it had only been in the grave for a few days. A more detailed study of the monk's body surprised scientists even more, his tissues looked like they belonged to a living person, and special devices recorded brain activity. A similar phenomenon has been encountered by scientists more than once, Buddhists call this state of the body “Damat”. With "Damat" you can exist for years, this is achieved by lowering the body temperature to almost zero, and as a result, a decrease in metabolism. Scientists have proven that if you reduce the body temperature by only 2 degrees, then the metabolic rate will be halved. And this means that the consumption of body resources will decrease, and life expectancy will increase.

Today, the mechanism of aging has already been studied. A special part of the chromosome - the "telomere" - is responsible for aging. And this telomere tends to decrease in the process of cell division.
But in our body there is a special substance capable of restoring the length of the telomere, this is an enzyme - telomerate. But the main problem is that this enzyme is found in the cells of a developing fetus, and it is forbidden to experiment with such cells in almost all countries.
But a way out was found. The telomerate enzyme is found not only in the cells of embryos, but also in a cancerous tumor - "Teratoma", which develops in the ovaries of women and the testes of men. And it is with such cells that it is allowed to experiment in the USA.
Research continues, and the time is not far when a way will be found to extend a person's life.

edited news katerina.prida85 - 16-01-2012, 14:04

Keywords:

Question Mark 1992 #2

Rudolf Konstantinovich Balandin

Life, death, immortality?...

To the reader

Of the questions that are equally interesting for science, philosophy, religion, for each person the most, perhaps, the most important and hopeless: what is life?

Be that as it may, answers to the question: "What is life?" - There are too many. Each science, and even more so each philosophical or religious teaching, offers its own explanations. One gets the impression that none of the interpretations of the essence of life will be convincing until the meaning of death can be comprehended.

What is death? Does it oppose life or dominate it? Is immortality possible for living beings?

BALANDIN Rudolf Konstantinovich - Member of the Union of Writers of the USSR. Author of 30 books and numerous articles and essays. The main topics are the history of the Earth and life, the interaction of society with nature, the fate of material and spiritual culture.

Life, death, immortality?...

On the meaning of death

Let's rephrase a well-known saying. "Tell me who your enemy is and I will tell you who you are." The enemy of all living things is death.

Perhaps this attempt is caused primarily by despair and the desire to overcome the chilling horror of non-existence at all costs.

In religious teachings, this fear is usually "neutralized" by belief in the immortality of the soul. It is said that the American philosopher D. W. James even promised after his death to find a way of spiritual communication with friends. But, as I. I. Mechnikov noted, he never fulfilled his promise.

“The inevitability of death is the gravest of our sorrows,” said the French thinker of the 18th century Vauvengargue. It's hard to disagree with him.

But then scientific knowledge is nothing more than entertainment and a way of obtaining life's blessings, and we, like everyone sentenced to the "highest measure", at the last hour (month, year, decade - does it matter?) truly everything is allowed, and there is no difference between good and evil before the abyss of nothingness.

You can, of course, believe in the immortality of the soul, but you should know that our mortal body will dissolve in the world around us and we will never, never be destined to enjoy earthly life.

The last remark is very necessary. It seems that everything is clear to a scientist from a scientific point of view. However, his thought does not want to put up with the limitations of the scientific method, which recognizes only what can be proven. But death is an obvious fact that does not need proof (like any despotism). And posthumous existence is a speculation, a fiction, a conjecture not confirmed by anything and taken for granted. Is there any possibility of confirming or refuting it according to modern science?

Let's try to figure it out not speculatively, but on the basis of the available facts.

Biological eternity of life

Beginning of life

In this case, the meaning of death is clear: to limit the expansion of life. However, then the meaning of life completely disappears: why are the most complex creatures needed if death is predetermined for them? Only an absurd game of blind chance remains to explain the appearance of living organisms. And the appearance of rational beings, conscious of the frailty of their life, is already seen as a tragic nonsense of being.

In addition to unnecessary suffering and fears, this knowledge does not give anything. And it takes away the most beautiful thing - the hope for uninterrupted life, for immortality. How much happier animals are, endowed with feelings, but devoid of the understanding of the inevitability of death!

For the religious worldview, the problem is removed by referring to God. He is the supreme creator of all living things, and the secret of creation is inaccessible to the weak mind of man. We must not try to comprehend it, but believe in a miracle.

To the question about the meaninglessness of the appearance of life and mind for the sake of the triumph of death, the scientist is free to answer extremely simply: it is, such is the reality. In relation to nature, questions are incorrect: why or why? They presuppose the consciousness and will of the creator, his intention. For scientific knowledge, this is an unnecessary hypothesis. Therefore, it is necessary to find out how everything happened. We do not ask why, burning, the sun shines? Not for those who like to sunbathe ...

People have thought about the appearance of living organisms for a very long time. In some myths, an idea is expressed about the birth of the first plants and animals from mud, silt. The same was asserted in the system of his materialistic philosophy by Democritus. According to him, atoms, intertwined, form various substances, as well as plants and animals, not without reason, but on some basis and by virtue of "necessity". He explained a little more in detail as follows (I quote from Diodorus): “The earth first solidified, then, when, due to warming, its surface began to ferment, it raised some of the wet (substances) in many places, and (thus) arose on their surfaces are rotting (formations), covered with thin shells ... When wet (substances) due to warming ... began to give birth to life, they (rotting formations) immediately began to receive nourishment at night from moisture deposited from the surrounding atmosphere, and during the day they hardened from the heat. In the end, from them "various forms of animals arose."

Something similar has been assumed by thinkers for many centuries. Especially widespread was the opinion, dating back to Aristotle, about the spontaneous generation of the larvae of many organisms in rotting meat. This legend was refuted by the experiments of the Italian scientist Francesco Redi in the second half of the 17th century. Even earlier, the Englishman William Harvey proclaimed: "Every animal comes from an egg." Vernadsky suggested calling the statement "the living from the living" the Redi principle.

How did the first organisms arise?

Of the scientists of the 20th century, the majority will answer this question something like this. Once on the lifeless Earth, conditions were formed for chemical evolution, as a result of which complex organic molecules were synthesized, and from them, after countless trials and errors, tiny clumps of organic matter were formed, capable of metabolism and reproduction ...

Such hypotheses are numerous and sometimes developed in detail. In addition to articles, substantial monographs are devoted to them.

It is assumed that clay particles - colloids - and such natural forces as lightning discharges, volcanic eruptions, the decay of radioactive minerals, and meteorites intrusion into the atmosphere played a significant role.

All these hypotheses have one single serious drawback: there is not a single fact confirming the theoretical possibility of the spontaneous generation of living organisms on Earth from inorganic substances. The most complex laboratory experiments were carried out for many years in different countries, but the artificial, technogenic synthesis of at least the most primitive organism still failed.

Suppose someday such experiments will be crowned with success. What will they prove? Only that for the technogenic reproduction of biosubstances are necessary ... a reasonable person, science is developed, sophisticated technology. All this, of course, bears little resemblance to the natural conditions on the primeval Earth.

More convincing would be the facts obtained as a result of "time travel" into the depths of the geological past. After all, if organisms once appeared on Earth, even in the form of "seeds" brought from other inhabited worlds, then its history must begin with an era devoid of life.

The search for such an era has been going on since the last century and still to no avail. The oldest known rocks directly or indirectly testify to the existence at that time - about 4-4.5 billion years ago - of microorganisms. Some researchers hoped that the riddle of the prefaces of the geological record of the planet would be cleared up as a result of drilling the deepest Kola superdeep well in the world. According to the project, it was supposed to pierce the entire earth's crust, composed of more or less altered (metamorphosed) sedimentary rocks. However, the design section of the well has not been confirmed: it has not yet gone beyond the known, studied rocks on the earth's surface.

I want to remind you that due to the vertical movements of the earth's crust and the circulation of the lithosphere, the oldest sediments usually again "emerge" into sunlight. Geologists have the ability to mentally travel to any era, studying near-surface stone massifs.

So, despite all the efforts of scientists of various specialties, there are only speculations about the origin of living organisms on Earth that have not been proven by facts. Some experts have returned to the long-proposed idea of transferring the "germs of life" to our planet from outer space. But in principle, this does not solve anything, if one professes the most popular theory of the formation of the Universe (Metagalaxy), which refers the moment of its birth to 15–20 billion years in the past. All the same, somewhere on some unknown planet or in clouds of cosmic dust, the great mystery of the emergence of life should have happened.

If there was a beginning of the Universe, then, therefore, there was also a beginning of life. These events could not take place simultaneously if, as astrophysicists claim, a "big bang" of the original superdense and superhot clot of matter happened. Only at a certain stage of cooling of the exploded substance should favorable conditions arise for the formation of organisms.

And again, the ideas of the origin of the Universe, the Solar System, the Earth, organisms, prevailing in modern science, lead us to the recognition of the optionality of life in the Cosmos, where dead bodies, fragments and slags, dust, ash and reflections of the colossal fireworks absolutely prevail - in time and space. perpetrated by who knows who knows for whom ...

Alas, you involuntarily switch to an ironic tone: from a scientific point of view, the fate of each of us and all earthly life is too hopeless - timid miserable sparks in a deadly dead abyss. Both the mechanical run of planets and the mechanical rotation of galaxies clearly demonstrate the hopelessness of the vicious circle of the realm of necessity, in which death reigns... And even our thought falls into some kind of vicious circle.

Is there a way out of it?

Of course have. It should be. Living science is also an opportunity to choose, to overcome inevitability.

It is usually believed that the first scientific theories about the origin of living organisms on Earth were created by A. I. Oparin and J. Haldane. However, at the very beginning of our century, the German scientist O. Lehman proposed an original theory of the formation of primary life forms from liquid crystals - peculiar substances that combine the properties of a liquid and a solid body. He conducted experiments and presented photographs of liquid crystal droplets resembling single-celled organisms.

In the same years, a brochure by the biochemist S.P. Kostychev "On the emergence of life on Earth" was published. He criticized all the hypotheses of spontaneous generation of organisms proposed at that time. In his opinion, the accidental appearance of a living cell is absolutely incredible:

“If I invited the reader to discuss how likely it is that among inorganic matter, by some natural, for example, volcanic processes, a large factory was accidentally formed - with furnaces, pipes, boilers, machines, fans, etc., then such the proposal would at best come across as an inappropriate joke. However, the simplest microorganism is even more complex than any factory; therefore, its accidental occurrence is even less likely.

The general conclusion of S.P. Kostychev is as follows:

“When the repercussions of the disputes about spontaneous generation finally die out, then everyone will recognize that life only changes its form, but is never created from dead matter.”

Ten years later, in 1923, V. I. Vernadsky developed these ideas in his own way in the report “The Beginning and Eternity of Life”. He tried to substantiate the position of the fundamental difference between living and dead matter. And he put forward the thesis: life is geologically eternal. In other words, in geological history we cannot find epochs when there was no life on our planet.

“The idea of eternity and beginninglessness of life,” Vernadsky argued, “acquires special significance in science, since the moment has come in the history of thought when it comes forward as an important and deep foundation for the emerging new scientific worldview of the future.”

The further development of scientific thought ruthlessly dispelled such hopes. The mechanical worldview and belief in the existence of the beginning not only of life, but also of the Universe prevailed. However, let us remember that in science the most common opinion is not yet the most correct one. Individual thinkers are closer to the truth than entire armies of standard-equipped "scientists." We will have to repeat once again: so far, despite all the efforts of specialists, not a single fact has been discovered that proves the existence of an “abiogeneous”, lifeless era in geological history; there is not a single experiment confirming the possibility of constructing a living organism from dead matter. Consequently, the ideas of S. P. Kostychev and V. I. Vernadsky are confirmed.

Over the past decade, some scientists have tried to revive these ideas with the current level of knowledge. The data of astrophysics and astrochemistry show that there is a huge amount of complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium. According to the estimates of the American scientists F. Hoyle and C. Wickramasinghe, there are about 1052 (!) biomolecules and the most primitive organisms in our Galaxy.

These data, according to Wickramasinghe, "clearly indicate that life on Earth originated, as it seems to us, from an all-penetrating general galactic living system." Earthly life owes its origin to cosmic gas and dust clouds, which were later captured by comets and grew into them.

He refers to calculations of the probability of a random synthesis of supercomplex biomolecules, subject to random combinations of their constituent parts. The number of such possible combinations turned out to be monstrous: 10 10,000 - much more than the number of atoms in the Universe. The scientist concluded:

“It is more likely that a hurricane sweeping through a graveyard of old aircraft will assemble a brand-new superliner from pieces of scrap than, as a result of random processes, life will arise from its components.”

As you can see, our contemporary involuntarily repeated the argument, and to some extent the image, expressed by the Russian scientist at the beginning of the century. And even knowing perfectly well - as a specialist - the fashionable concept of the "big bang", Wickramasinghe does not recognize it: "I give my own philosophical ideas to the eternal and boundless Universe, in which the creator of life arose in some natural way - Reason, significantly superior to ours."

One circumstance is somewhat embarrassing in this regard. Why in the eternal and boundless Universe, at some point in time, a creative Mind should arise in some natural way? For eternity, there is no fundamental difference between certain moments of time, it has as many of them as you like. In addition, this Mind nevertheless arose as a result, presumably, of natural evolution. So, there was a time when neither this Mind nor life existed? What kind of eternity is this, which is subject to the laws of evolution, which presuppose precisely a completely definite irreversible "course of time"?

It turns out that in this case we are talking about the geological eternity of life. Somewhere in the depths of galaxies or in bizarre whirlwinds of cosmic dust, biomolecules appear in an unknown way. It is enough to form an environment suitable for life on some planet, these biomolecules invade there, come to life, stimulate an active metabolism with the external environment, interact with each other and begin a long marathon of evolutionary transformations, constantly “feeding” from the space environment with biomolecules that carry new information.

This concept has one nice feature: it recognizes the Unknown, something inaccessible (yet?) to our knowledge. However, geological "eternity" looks like some kind of particularity, a favorable combination of random circumstances. Of all the planets of the solar system, only one turned out to be in such an extremely unlikely position relative to the star that gas and water shells appeared on it - the atmosphere and hydrosphere, the interaction of which with the earth's crust determined the "nutrient medium" for the embryos of living organisms. Well, when and how did the embryos themselves arise?

If in a natural way, then this means that somewhere and sometime in the dead Cosmos, living matter is synthesized from the inert. So, there is no cosmic eternity of life?

… And again, after long wanderings, our thought closes on the same initial position: dead matter dominates in the universe, death triumphs. On Earth, over time, due to super-powerful bursts of solar activity, the extinction of the luminary, or for some other reason, the natural environment will become unbearable for life. Consequently, not only individuals are subject to death, not only each of us, not only all of humanity, but also all earthly life until a new favorable case for the rebirth of life somewhere in other star systems. So is there still a way out of this impasse?

"Two synthesis of the Cosmos"

This is how V. I. Vernadsky defined the confrontation between two worldviews. On the one hand, the Universe is assumed to be the greatest mechanical system, on the other hand, the greatest organism. In the first case, the case is as most scientific theories imply. And in the second...

“Was there ever and somewhere the beginning of life and living things,” Vernadsky asked, “or are life and living things the same eternal foundations of the Cosmos as matter and energy are? Is life and living things characteristic of only one Earth, or is it a common manifestation of the Cosmos?..

Each of us knows how much for all of us important, valuable and dear is connected with the correct and accurate answer, the resolution of these questions ... For there are no more important questions for us than questions about the mystery of life, that eternal mystery that has confronted humanity for thousands of years ...

We know – and we know this scientifically – that the cosmos cannot exist without matter, without energy. But is matter and energy enough - without the manifestation of life - to build the Cosmos, the Universe that is accessible to the human mind? ..

He preferred to answer this question in the negative, referring precisely to scientific information, and not to personal sympathies, philosophical or religious convictions:

“... You can talk about the eternity of life and the manifestations of its organisms, just as you can talk about the eternity of the material substrate of celestial bodies, their thermal, electrical, magnetic properties and their manifestations.

From this point of view, the question of the beginning of life will be just as far from scientific research as the question of the beginning of matter, heat, electricity, magnetism, motion.

According to Vernadsky, ideas about the world based on the data of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and mechanics greatly simplify reality, offering schemes that are far from reality. At the same time, the Universe turns either into chaos, in which areas of order arise by chance, or into a grandiose machine controlled by the world Mind or deities.

For a naturalist, the Universe is embodied primarily in the terrestrial region of life - the biosphere (let us add: also in the human microcosm). And here life reigns. “These ideas about nature,” continues Vernadsky, “are no less scientific than the creations of cosmogony or theoretical physics and chemistry, and closer to many; although they are as incomplete as the geometric schemes of the simplified thought of physicists, they are less imbued with the ghostly creations of the human mind.

Let us add that the prestige of mechanics, physics, and chemistry has grown exorbitantly largely due to the successful use of relevant knowledge for military purposes, to create weapons of mass destruction. Governments spent enormous sums on the development of these sciences. To most people, intricate formulas and incomprehensible scientific concepts were perceived as abracadabra, hiding hidden wisdom. (They say that during the applause of the public that welcomed Chaplin and Einstein, the great artist whispered to the great physicist: “They greet you because they don’t understand your work, but me because everyone understands me.”)

In our century, the so-called exact sciences have begun to claim absolute primacy. They compare worldview problems, and the derived formulas of universal gravitation, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. are considered to be fundamental. However, all these sciences are built on the assumption that neither life nor the mind has any special qualities, without taking a significant part in the life of the Universe ... Not even in life, but in some kind of machine-like state. It is clear that a world built according to such a scheme remains inanimate and completely uncomfortable for a living thinking person.

Of course, any particular science, and indeed all sciences in general, have well-defined limitations. The main thing is how skillfully and wisely each scientist recognizes and takes them into account.

“There are always scientists,” Vernadsky wrote, “who vividly feel and embrace this living, real Nature of our planet, all imbued with the eternal beat of life, and for whom this understanding of a single Nature is the guiding thread of all their scientific work».

Why do researchers lose this sense of living Nature? main reason, perhaps, that human environment environment is changing radically. An artificial “second” technogenic nature, the technosphere, has been created. Modern man in everyday life, work, and leisure remains, as it were, a tiny detail of a gigantic mechanical system. So the whole world begins to appear to man as a natural likeness of the technosphere - the world of mechanical systems that push life to the back of life.

I would like to single out one remark by Vernadsky and carefully comprehend: “In science there is still no clear consciousness that the phenomena of life and the phenomena of dead nature, taken from the geological, i.e., planetary, point of view, are a manifestation of one process.”

Logically, this is not correct. First, the phenomena of life and dead nature are sharply separated, and then it is indicated that they are one. But what organic unity of the living and the dead is possible? And how then does the geological point of view differ from the biological one? If biologists have developed the concept of an organism, and representatives of precise, technical ones have developed a mechanism, then what kind of symbiosis is possible: either an organic mechanism, or a mechanical organism? It's unintelligible. Or is some third synthesis of Cosmos possible, embracing the first two? And how is it related to geology?

Living from the dead or dead from the living?

Maximilian Voloshin has a stanza:

And a terrible scar on the ridge of the Lunar Alps

Left the heavenly ax.

You, like the Earth, from which the scalp is torn off -

Face of Horror in the impassivity of the ether.

Such a characteristic of the Moon is not characteristic of poetic dreams. And for scientific reflections, the Moon for a long time remained the abode of the mysterious selenites. In the last century, many astronomers seriously discussed the possibility of the presence of intelligent beings on the Earth's satellite. In our century it has become clear that celestial bodies are rarely inhabited, like our planet. Most of the time they are lifeless.

It is curious that the poet preferred to see in the Moon an image of the Earth devoid of life, and not vice versa: in the Earth - the image of the Moon, which acquired a “scalp”, and scientifically speaking, a biosphere. Voloshin is generally characterized by the spiritualization of nature. One of its incarnations is the microcosmic man:

He thought in heaven

Thought in clouds

He carved clay

The plant grew.

Stoned with stones,

Beast with passions

He saw the sun

Dreamed dreams by the moon

Buzzed with planets

Breathed in the wind.

And it was all

Above as below

- Performed high matches.

Another poet-philosopher of our century, Nikolai Zabolotsky, around the same years, was not so optimistic. Looking closely at the life of nature, he drew attention to the incessant cruel struggle for existence, in which life and death are inseparable, being in some kind of meaningless cycle:

...Over the garden

There was a vague rustle of a thousand deaths.

Nature turned into hell

She did her business without a hitch.

The beetle ate grass, the beetle was pecked by a bird,

A ferret drank the brain from a bird's head,

And faces twisted with fear

Night creatures looked out from the grass.

Nature's age-old winepress

Connected death and life

In one ball, but the thought was powerless

To unite her two sacraments.

However, the human soul does not want to put up with the “eternal winepress”, where being is affirmed by death, It seeks and finds a way out of this impasse:

I will not die my friend. By the breath of flowers

I will find myself in this world.

Centuries-old oak my living soul

Roots wrap around, sad and harsh.

In his large sheets I will give shelter to the mind,

I will cherish my thoughts with the help of my branches.

So that they hang over you from the darkness of the forests

And you were involved in my consciousness.

Above your head, my distant great-grandson,

I'll fly in the sky like a slow bird

I will flash over you like a pale lightning bolt.

Like summer rain I'll spill, sparkling over the grass.

There is nothing more beautiful in the world than being.

The silent darkness of the graves is empty languor.

I lived my life, I did not see peace:

There is no rest in the world. Everywhere life and me.

It is interesting to note that Vernadsky has an expression: "the ubiquity of life" (meaning the state of the biosphere). But how, after all, can one imagine from scientific positions - yes, simply in reality - the unity of the phenomena of dead and living nature? Which of these two phenomena predominates? Or are they really woven into an inextricable ball?

If we are talking about ecosystems, then Zabolotsky quite accurately displayed the chains of the so-called trophic links - nutrition systems, where plants and microbes, whose tissues are woven from earth dust and sunlight, are eaten by herbivores, and those, in turn, are eaten by carnivores . There really is a cycle of life and death ... for the sake of life! For the entire ecological cycle guarantees the sustainable existence of the species included in it.

But an ecosystem is a largely speculative concept. To call it a single organism can only be more or less arbitrary. Another thing is the whole area of life - the biosphere. This is the real film of life on the planet.

Some scientists propose to call the biosphere the totality of living organisms (living matter - according to Vernadsky). However, organisms do not at all form a single sphere that envelops the Earth. They are separated, and most importantly, inseparable from the environment. All the atoms that compose them enter into their flesh only for a very short time. Following Cuvier, organisms can be called stable, though not durable, whirlwinds of atoms. And the entire biosphere as a whole is also a set of stable organized whirlwinds of atoms, cycles of matter and energy. her with with good reason should be considered an organism.

The biosphere is a living cosmic organism. The nutrient medium for it is the mineral substrate of the planet, and the energy is generously supplied by the Sun.

Such a conclusion, it seems to me, follows from Vernadsky's theory of the biosphere, its cosmic and planetary essence.

And yet, something remains unsettled. Of course, the molecules and atoms of our body belong to the biosphere. Each of us is like a tiny cell of this cosmic superorganism. The termination of our personal life does not yet mean any noticeable loss for the biosphere. In our body, too, some cells constantly die and others are born. As statistics show, more people are born on Earth than die. In this sense, it is legitimate to speak of the triumph of life, not death.

However, we feel ourselves not only physically, but also spiritually. Perhaps even bodily death is not too terrible. If it is not accompanied by torment, then it looks like an eternal dreamless sleep. Something else is terrible: the thought of the cessation of consciousness, reason, perception of life. This means a hopeless loss of what we are so accustomed to: the surrounding living world, the Universe, own feelings and thoughts...

Paying for Excellence?

The half-forgotten Russian philosopher N. N. Strakhov has an original work “The World as a Whole”, where one of the chapters is called “The Meaning of Death”.

“Death is the finale of an opera, the last scene of a drama,” the author writes, “just as a work of art cannot stretch without end, but separates itself and finds its own boundaries, so the life of organisms has limits. This expresses their deep essence, harmony and beauty inherent in their lives.

If the opera were only a collection of sounds, then it could go on without end; if the poem were only a collection of words, then it also could not have any natural limit. But the meaning of the opera and the poem, their essential content, requires a finale and a conclusion.

The thought is interesting. Indeed, in chaos there is neither beginning nor end. Only organized bodies are capable of developing in a certain direction. But every organization has a limit to its perfection. Having reached it, it remains either to maintain stability or to degrade. In the first case, sooner or later, the laws of nature begin to affect: in a changing environment, an actively living organism, having reached relative perfection, begins to “work out”, incur irreparable losses.

“If any organism,” continues Strakhov, “could improve without end, then it would never reach maturity and the full disclosure of its powers; he would always be just a teenager, a creature that is constantly growing and never destined to grow up.

If an organism in the epoch of its maturity suddenly became immutable, and therefore represented only recurring phenomena, then development would cease in it, nothing new would occur in it, therefore, there could be no life.

Thus decrepitude and death are a necessary consequence of organic development; they follow from the very concept of development. These are the general concepts and considerations that explain the meaning of death.

As soon as the meaning of death is clarified, justification immediately appears for it. Moreover, it begins to be thought of as a great blessing! This is no longer just a quantitative limitation of living beings capable of too rapid reproduction. We are talking about the dying of individuals who have reached perfection, not only for the sake of freeing the arena of life, but also for the possibility of achieving more high level perfection and maintenance of the highest biological activity of living matter.

It turns out that even the transience of dying can be considered a blessed phenomenon: “Death is remarkable for its speed,” says Strakhov, “it quickly reduces the body from a state of activity and strength to simple decay. How slowly man grows and develops! And how quickly, for the most part, it disappears!

The reason for this speed lies precisely in the high organization of man, in the very superiority of his development. A lofty organism does not tolerate any significant disturbance of its functions.

From this point of view, death is a great blessing. Our life is limited precisely because we are able to live up to something ... death does not allow us to survive ourselves.

It seems that the logical construction is harmonious, the arguments are convincing. And how many will they reconcile with inevitable death, short life and eternal nothingness? How many will be willing to perceive death as a blessing?

I think there will be few such originals. And what are the arguments of reason before the indisputable evidence of feelings? And they reject death. And even in this word, in its sound, there is something gloomy, vile, terrible;

N. N. Strakhov was of the opinion that Darwinism was doubtful. And at the same time, the idea of death as a retribution for perfection is consonant with ideas about the progressive evolution of species, which occurs as a result of the survival of the most perfect (if fitness is understood in this way). In the laboratory of nature there is a constant search for more active, developed, the best way organized forms. Unsuccessful specimens are discarded quickly, and successful ones have the ability to last longer, but they must also give way to new, even more perfect species. Creative nature, in its insatiable striving for perfection, is forced to use death as a means of increasing diversity and prosperity of life.

… To be honest, there is something deeply offensive in such an understanding of evolution for any living being. Here man and every creature acts as a means, as a dead (although alive, but for the creative nature - as if devoid of feelings and consciousness) material for experiments, for "higher selection". I recall Nazi ideas about the superman and inferior races, as well as the concept of a communist paradise, for the sake of which it is permissible to destroy and terrorize millions of people.

And what kind of higher creative Mind (Nature or God - in this case, it makes no difference), if it is completely devoid of the concept of good and evil, sympathy for the dying or doomed to death - that is, for all living ?!

Of course, it is possible that we simply do not understand the greatness and wisdom of the design of Nature. But our understanding remains on the surface of the ocean of feelings, emotions, the unconscious. And our whole being - not only reason - opposes death, perceives it as something terrible, as an absolute evil in relation to the individual, as something directly opposite to life and freedom. We involuntarily agree with Nikolai Berdyaev: “For me, nature is, first of all, the opposite of freedom, the order of nature differs from the order of freedom ... Personality is the uprising of man against slavery in nature.”

Nature has sentenced man to the realization of the necessity of death. The most intelligent creation of the Earth turned out to be the most unfortunate in this respect.

“Life is the greatest good bestowed by the Creator. Death is the greatest and last evil, ”says Berdyaev, as if not noticing that death is also given to man from above, and that this evil refutes completely, crosses out the great good of life.

The Russian philosopher Yevgeny Trubetskoy, retelling the views of atheists, wrote: “Suffering and death are the most obvious evidence of the nonsense that reigns in the world ... The vicious circle of this life is precisely the circle of suffering, death and untruth.” What did he see as a way out of this circle?

In the acceptance of Christian values, faith in God and the appearance of Christ. Well, what if you renounce the comforting religion? If we turn to scientific reality? Then it remains to recall the statement of Dostoevsky (through the Devil from the vision of Ivan Karamazov):

“Once humanity completely renounces God (and I believe that this period, parallel to the geological periods, will come true), then by itself ... the whole old worldview will fall and, most importantly, all the old morality, and everything new will come. People will unite in order to take from life everything that it can only give, but indispensable for happiness and joy in this world alone. Man will be magnified by the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Hourly conquering nature already without borders, by his will and science, man will thereby hourly feel pleasure so high that it will replace all his former hopes of heavenly pleasures. Everyone will know that he is completely mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like God ... "

Isn't it a prophetic picture. Is not the winner of nature became modern man, armed with mighty technology? Although in one smallness the victory is final! - still remains for nature: it still meekly and rigorously sends legions of “conquerors of nature” into oblivion, like any other waste, imperfect products of its creativity, just as a person himself sends objects created by him, equipment to landfills ...

No, there is no need to talk about the pride and calmness of a modern person in front of the grin of death. The deadliest wars in history took place in our century. And what does the future hold? If not a global military, then no less disastrous environmental catastrophe. Modern man, enslaved by life, production, technology, the power of the state and capital, does not feel like an omnipotent god. He is increasingly distrustful of the coming happy future. And this was foreseen by Dostoevsky. The devil rightly remarks:

“But since, in view of the inveterate stupidity of man, this, perhaps, will not be settled even in a thousand years, then everyone who is already aware of this truth even now is allowed to arrange himself completely as he pleases, on new principles. In this sense, “everything is allowed” to him ... All this is very nice; only if he wanted to cheat, why else, it seems, the sanction of truth? But such is our modern Russian man: without a sanction he will not dare to cheat, he loved the truth so much ... "

It might seem that this is the lot of an atheist: in the face of death, try to snatch everything possible from life, regardless of anything for the sake of their own pleasures. Not believing in God, he is free to set the “rules of the game” himself, when good and evil turn into relative concepts. However, for the believer, as is commonly believed, "everything is allowed" too; neither the devil nor even God has power over his soul. A person always has a choice to whom to devote his soul: to God or the devil, to live in good or in evil.

Yes, as long as a person is alive, the whole world is given to him; it is given to a person to manage his life, to choose certain actions, to hope for something, to count on happiness ... Death is complete certainty, the absence of choice, when nothing is allowed. True, in religious teachings, death is often interpreted as liberation. The immortal soul leaves the bodily prison and rushes to its eternal abode. Tricky questions arise. If the separation of the soul from the body is good, then why combine them at all for the sake of a short stay on Earth? And the death of an infant in a monstrous way then turns out to be preferable to the death of an old man who has lived a difficult life.

And the immortality of the soul looks somehow one-sided: it appears after birth (passes from the dying to those born; although, as you know, fewer people die than are born): it is formed over several years, and even then it does not remain in a state of eternal rest - out of time. She is changeable.

In short, if death is a blessing done for the sake of the highest perfection, then life can be considered a real misfortune that should be got rid of as soon as possible. A believer in God the Creator already during his lifetime is preparing for the afterlife "anti-existence"; the believer in Creative Nature must gladly give up his life for the sake of the highest perfection. The easiest way is for those who do not believe in anything or do not think about anything beyond. However, for them, in this way, animal life is realized, not worthy of a thinking creature, and their death only cleanses the Earth of greedy and unprincipled consumers.

Another option is possible: admit your ignorance, abandon clear conclusions and turn to facts. What do they testify?

Of all organisms, the simplest unicellular organisms have the shortest life span. In a favorable environment, they are crushed, multiplying, extremely quickly. Each such cell division can be considered its death. Although there is another version: a unicellular organism is immortal (in principle), because it does not die, but doubles. In any case, the situation is more definite for multicellular organisms: higher animals usually live much longer than lower ones. Man in this respect, no doubt, belongs to the long-livers.

However, here everything is not as simple as we would like. A pike or a raven surpasses a person in the duration of an individual life. In addition, modern people have the opportunity to postpone their death as much as possible with the help of medicine. And quite recently - several centuries ago - short lives absolutely prevailed.

Well, how long do trees live? Are they the champions in this indicator? Therefore, they can be considered special chosen ones of the Creative Nature, the most perfect creatures!

Let us turn to indicators of life expectancy not of individuals, but of species. In geological history, species are known that have lived on Earth for tens or even hundreds of millions of years. For example, the family of crocodiles has been preserved since the Mesozoic era, the era of the dominance of reptiles, and scorpions - from even earlier eras, when higher animals began to master the land. Sharks appear to have not changed significantly in nearly half a billion years. Well, blue-green algae have been living on the planet since time immemorial - several billion years.

Perhaps the most rapidly dying out ... our ancestors, hominids. Of all the species over the past 2–3 million years, only one Homo sapiens has survived. It turns out that the Creative Nature especially quickly rejected, dooming to death, the most intelligent inhabitants of the Earth. Yes, and humanity in our era looks like a doomed species: for 40 millennia, it has so transformed its environment that a global ecological crisis has begun.

Ancient crystal man

In the fate of any living being, the date of birth is the least determined, the date of death is the most determined.

The fragmentation of a unicellular is, in essence, the birth of two organisms. In sexual reproduction, two cells fuse to form a new organism. However, at this moment the organism as such does not yet exist. The idea of the future individual appears, a clot of genetic information that determines its innate qualities. The mechanism of crystallization of an individual is switched on (in the words of the outstanding physicist Erwin Schrödinger, an aperiodic crystal).

The question arises: does an organism appear only when it actively absorbs molecules from the external environment, building up its body? In the material embodiment - yes, it takes shape just then. But after all, as you know, all its atoms are quickly replaced by new ones. They are nothing more than building material. And the structure plan, design, stability, dynamics - all this is determined by genetic information recorded at the molecular level.

Therefore, in the informational aspect, the idea of a given particular organism comes from two sources - from two parents. And each of them, in turn, has two sources of genetic information. Thus, the information origins of each being, each of us, go into the distant past. From generation to generation, from parents to children, the flame of life is continuously transmitted - the idea of life! - without the slightest interruption

There is an image of a living quivering tissue woven from millions and millions of individuals in the four-dimensional space-time of the biosphere. To each of the present-day organisms there are continuous threads of past lives. In this sense, our past is the history of all living matter on the planet.

When we talk about the duration of the existence of a particular group of animals or plants, we mean a certain set of features that are characteristic of it and have been steadily preserved from the formation to the extinction of this group. But after all, each of the groups did not arise from nothing and most often did not sink into nothing. It was preceded by related forms, and new species “budded” from it.

So to speak. As an individual, each of us has a certain age, which can be counted either from the day of birth or from the moment of conception. At the same time, we are representatives of this or that family, clan, tribe, and these roots can go back hundreds and thousands of years into the past. belonging to the biological mind Homo sapiens, we number 40 millennia, and belonging to the hominid family pushes back our past by millions of years ... So step by step we delve into the geological past. Ultimately, it will be necessary to reach the mythological era of the origin of life on Earth or even in Space.

As varieties of a single living substance, all existing species have the same age. It's just that in the history of the biosphere they changed at different rates. Single-celled organisms - already very perfect - remained more or less unchanged, and those that were destined to become people evolved with maximum speed. That's all.

The birth of each of us is the end result of an infinitely long folding in parts and transmission from generation to generation of genetic information, a biological idea that is realized in the form of this or that organism. Birth is the materialization of such an idea. But at the same time, it does not disappear, but continues to be stored in the genes, recorded at the molecular level.

It turns out that any living organism, including you and me, as a carrier, the embodiment of biological information is much older than each crystal, stone. After all, the crystal, "dying", completely dissolves in the environment. It breaks up into atoms, ions or the simplest molecules, in which the memory of the former existence is completely erased. Having gone through the cycles of dissolution in natural waters or remelting in the crucible of the earth's interior, the newly born crystal is individual, like a living organism. In deviations from the ideal crystalline form and ideal chemical composition, its unique “personality” is manifested, it contains information about the features of origin and growth, the surrounding geological environment. This information remains in a passive state until some changes occur with the crystal, and in the end, until it disappears completely.

So, the crystal has a fixed date of birth. Usually it is determined by the rate of decay of radioactive minerals contained in this rock and accumulating more and more radioactive decay products over time. It is interesting that in living organisms there is an opposite indicator: the intensity of reproduction. And in this, perhaps, life is fundamentally different from inert inert matter.

Another fundamental difference relates to information. Crystals accumulate it in the process of growth, scooping from the environment in the form of "nutrients". It is stored in favorable conditions for a very, very long time, and when the crystal dissolves or melts, it passes into the environment. Crystals of one kind or another are practically the same, no matter what era they belong to: modern or unimaginably distant Archaean. It can be said that crystals have not learned anything in the entire geological history.

Another thing is living matter. It constantly absorbed information, learned, changed. The variety of organisms increased, their complexity increased. Animals and plants learned to interact with each other and with the natural environment. Living organisms have kept and keep information as the greatest value. An individual dies, but it passes on the genetic information to its descendants.

There is a widespread opinion among scientists that information accumulated in living matter due to errors, misunderstandings, and random distortions during storage and transmission. Strange idea. It is not supported by any mathematical calculations. On the contrary - it is categorically refuted! Yes, and common sense raises a very simple question: is it possible to improve the description of the future organism - the most complexly encoded information about its structure, properties, physiology, development, capabilities, and even death - with the help of typos?

Of course, there is a possibility that a sufficiently large number. monkeys, constantly working at printing presses for a very long time (say, millions of years; for theory, this can not be assumed), someday, quite by accident, they will type the full text of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. Even if we consider that such an incredible event will nevertheless happen, we should take into account that a controller is also required, who must get acquainted with the received texts and select from them those required for the “creation” of the novel.

It is commonly argued that genetic information is controlled by the environment through natural selection of the fittest individuals. This option either assumes infinite insight and wisdom behind the environment (God the Creator!), Or it does not take into account at all that it is the simplest ones that are most adapted to various earthly conditions, capable of living on glaciers, in hot mineral springs, in the depths of the earth, no sunlight...

Animal and plant species that exist without noticeable changes for millions or even billions of years are indeed well adapted to the conditions of the biosphere. They have chosen a strategy of sustainability, conservatism, maintaining the achieved perfection. To do this, they do not even have to die at all: it is enough to split up into identical parts. Having acquired qualities that are reliable for life, encoded in the genetic system, such an organism regularly stamps out more and more copies of this text. Standardization triumphs. Creative impulses are muted or prohibited.

Another part of living matter professes a different strategy. These species are plastic, changeable. And they create themselves, drawing new information through active interactions with each other and with the environment. How information is enriched remains largely a mystery.

This is a special, complex and secondary topic for our purposes. It is important to note the very fact of the search strategy in a significant part of plants and animals. Among them, the desire for diversity, unexpected solutions, freedom of creativity is clearly manifested. Over the past million years, these qualities have been most fully expressed in the evolutionary line of our ancestors, hominids, leading to the creation of Homo sapiens - Homo sapiens.

Is it permissible to talk about striving for perfection here? And what, then, is meant by perfection? If adaptation to the environment, then one should speak of a departure from perfection, given the highest adaptive capabilities of the simplest organisms.

Consider, for example, energy indicators. According to the calculations of the American biophysicist E. Brod, a person radiates thousands of times more energy per unit mass than the Sun. These calculations are easy to check by dividing the total amount of energy emitted by a person and a star by the mass, respectively, of a person and a star. However, a single-celled creature in this indicator is thousands of times superior to a person.

Examining the traces of biomolecules in ancient sedimentary rocks, scientists have established that more than a billion years ago, living organisms did not fundamentally differ from modern ones in biochemical terms. The most simply arranged species have been stably preserved throughout geological history. This fact alone testifies to their perfection.

Finally, it's time to remember that protozoa are potentially immortal. And in this, too, their perfection is manifested.

Perhaps a technical analogy is acceptable. An ax or a hoe has not fundamentally changed over many millennia, while computers have undergone a rapid evolution in just half a century: several generations of “smart machines” have changed, of which the first generations look hopelessly outdated and doomed to destruction. Similarly, many varieties of complex technical systems have died out. (aircraft, automobiles...) with the stable existence of the simplest devices (hook, needle, hammer...). In technology, the most ingenious, science-intensive, complex creatures are rejected faster than others. Something similar happens in wildlife.

It turns out that death is the price for excess complexity, for the possibility of creative freedom, and, ultimately, for the mind.

So, a normal crystal is maximally adapted to the environment, is completely dependent on it, does not learn anything (almost?) and exists - as an individual - outside the concepts of life and death.

The simplest organisms have reached perfection in interaction with environment, are able to quickly adapt to its changes and transform it for the benefit of life / Having achieved such harmony, they are not inclined to violate it, implementing a strategy of maintaining stability, despite any changes in the biosphere.

For complex multicellular organisms with an internal division of functions, the situation is not so unambiguous. They retain the simplest molecular structures (genes) that have potential immortality. In this sense, and for them, one can speak of the continuity of the fabric of life from the beginning of geological history to the present day. But as a biological species or as an individual, representatives of such groups that carry out a strategy of creative search for new forms are doomed to death.

The realm of the dead and the world of the living

Doomed Rebels

Maximilian Voloshin thus began his wonderful philosophical poem “The Ways of Cain. Tragedy of material culture":

In the beginning there was a rebellion

The rebellion was against God,

And God was a rebellion.

And everything that exists began through rebellion.

With amazing insight, the poet expressed an idea that is difficult to reveal by the scientific method:

Only two paths are open to beings,

Caught in the traps of balance:

The path of rebellion and the path of accommodation

Rebellion is madness;

Nature is immutable.

But in the fight

For the truth of the impossible

Madman -

Transubstantiates himself.

And the one who adapts freezes

At the passed stage...

What can you do: rebelliousness is imprinted in our genes. Undoubtedly, there are many opportunists among people. They adapt to the given social environment - no matter how ugly, impious, humiliating it may be. And they get great benefits in return. But they lose, perhaps, the most important thing: the ability to live in harmony with the rebellious nature of beings striving for the "truth of the impossible."

The poet is close to the human, spiritual, and not the biological essence of this division of all living things:

It's time for new rebellions

And catastrophes: falls and madness.

Prudent:

"Return to the herd!"

Rebel:

"Reinvent yourself!"

However, it should be remembered that prudence does not save a person from the inevitability of death. In this sense, it is completely indifferent for all of us how the life path. We all belong to the category of “biological rebels”.

Religious teachings promise the believer the immortality of the soul as a reward for complete obedience. It is assumed that the one who prudently fulfills the prescribed commandments is pleasing to God and after death will find eternal rest in paradise.

Let's remember that Satan - the fallen angel - was severely punished for his rebellion against the almighty God. The "father of cybernetics" Norbert Wiener wrote in one of his works that the devil the scientist fights is a mess. And he took the position of the religious thinker Aurelius Augustine, who saw in the world not a confrontation between good and evil, but simply a certain amount of imperfection.

In this case, absolute order, complete perfection would mean immobility, peace, the cessation of catastrophes and rebellions, ideal harmony ... Doesn't the face of death peep through this blissful picture?

Such an assumption may seem blasphemous. But after all, complete order is certainty, lack of choice, ultimate lack of freedom, crystallized tightly.

Most religious commandments are prohibitive. They tell you what not to do. In this they differ from the commandment of life: love, dare, create! For then life will not only last, but it will be even more diverse, unexpected, interesting.

It can be imagined that the flaws of our material and spiritual world do not belong to the afterlife, the ideal world. There is a sharp distinction: the souls of the righteous go to heaven in order to taste eternal bliss, and the souls of incorrigible sinners fall into the abyss of hellish torment...

It is unlikely that such religious images are designed for strict logical analysis in accordance with scientific data. However, some thought should be given to them.

If we agree that a certain spiritual substance leaves the body after death and goes to other existence, then some questions arise. Where is this "other world"? Previously assumed - in the sky. Now there is no place left for heavenly halls, just as a fire-breathing hell is definitely not hidden in the bowels of the earth. There are absolutely no reliable data about astral bodies residing on other planets. Fantastic hypothesis!

Suppose, however, that there is a "parallel other world", the transition to which is carried out through the death of the body and spiritual liberation. How do souls live there? Will those doomed to eternal paradise be happy there forever? Will many be satisfied with an inactive otherness? For a creatively gifted person, this will be a real punishment, even a tragedy! To whom is heavenly bliss oriented?

In Islam, it is embodied in purely worldly, earthly images. There, even beautiful houris delight the soul of the deceased ... In general, there is everything that the padishah, satiated with wealth, has in this earthly life. And the poor, deprived of these blessings on Earth, are offered to console themselves with the hope of gaining them posthumously. In such cases, the religious fanatic sometimes longs for death, or at least is ready to perceive it as a blessing.

Whatever you think, boring, and vulgar tone turns out to be an eternity, devoid of daring, creative impulses, freedom of search and doubt, mistakes and insights. Only the most unpretentious inhabitants, deprived of many human joys during their lifetime, are capable of being satisfied with it.

Eternal moment

The idea of heaven and hell can be interpreted allegorically.

Our conscious life Dwells in the eternal present. We keep the memory of the past, but also in the present and think about the future in the same way.

As Epicurus noted, death for each of us exists only speculatively. While we are alive - she is not there, when she came - we are not. We experience not death, but its presentiment, the thought of it. Our death will be marked by bystanders. For them, it is reality. For us, it's a fantasy.

It is possible to propose a hypothesis based on the subjectivity of the moment of death of a person. The last moment for him is not interrupted, but passes into eternity. The current events of life cease, but the experience of this moment remains.

At every moment of being, we combine the present-past-future into a single clot. And time does not flow, as they usually say, but events change in the same eternal present. (Once the Russian physicist N. A. Umov wrote: “It is not time that flows, we are wanderers of this world”; I would like to add: maybe the whole world flows in the motionless present?) Death stops the flow of events for the deceased. Remains forever...

Of course, objectively, a person's life ends. But life and death are individual. Here everyone, as they say, is for himself. Therefore, the reference point is personal, subjective. Only she interests us in this case.

Formally speaking, with the infinite divisibility of time, the last moment can indeed last for an arbitrarily long time. There will always be the possibility of splitting the rest in half, and so on ad infinitum. However, if we bring such an abstraction closer to reality, two circumstances become clear. First. In space, we have the limiting dimensions of a material object, the minimum clumps of matter-energy: quanta. Having recognized the unity of space-time, it is necessary in this case for the minimum portion of space to assume the minimum duration in time, which is not equal to zero.

The second circumstance is connected with the possibilities of our perception of the smallest portions of space and time. Here the human senses are obviously very imperfect "measuring instruments". Millions or even thousandths of a second remain elusive for us. Consequently, the infinite fragmentation of the dying moment can only be expected with a negligible degree of probability.

And yet the last flash of consciousness - farewell to life - may be unusual, unfolding whole cascades of events (imaginary) and vivid emotions, depending on how a person came to this state, which will reveal to him the conscience, implicitly counting the good and bad deeds.

No wonder in many religions there is a rite of initiation to imminent death, repentance and remission of sins. Cleansing from spiritual corruption, filth gives hope for appeasement before eternal rest.

Ideally, such a procedure testifies to the mercy of God, which reveals even to a sinner an eternity unclouded by evil, prepared for pure souls. However, one has to remember those who died suddenly, in a catastrophe, in infancy, in deep sleep. They are not given to comprehend, to catch the transition to the eternal moment. So it doesn't exist for them? Unacceptable injustice!

There is another "weakness" in the concept of the eternal moment: the categorical discrepancy between subjective experience and objective observation. One can console oneself with the thought of the imperishable last moment of one's existence. But all other people will indisputably state death. And if subjectively it will not be felt, then its objective existence does not raise any doubts.

... The great power of religion is in addressing directly to the human soul, to personal experiences and aspirations. The power of scientific ideas is determined by their provability, general validity, reliance on reliable knowledge. Where faith and knowledge are combined, there is a strong fusion that strengthens the soul and mind. But where faith and knowledge are in opposition, irreconcilable contradictions, one has to choose independently what to give preference to. Depending on the cast of character and mind, some reject the arguments of science, as if closing their eyes to reality; others are forced to courageously renounce comforting religious speculations in the name of dispassionate scientific truth.

Finally, one more position is possible: the recognition of one's own or even general ignorance. Such uncertainty can be creative, suggesting further searches in both religious and scientific fields.

Let's not predetermine our position In an effort to comprehend the essence of life and death. It is clear in advance that it will not be possible to come to unconditional truths that exhaust the topic to the bottom. The greatest thinkers of all times and peoples tried to understand the secret of life and death. Even if someone managed to express absolutely correct ideas, how to find them among many others? Here too much depends on our personal mental abilities, knowledge, character.

Perhaps someone is quite satisfied with the traditional ideas of heaven and hell, someone - an atheistic view of death as an absolute and hopeless reality, and someone - a comforting image of an eternal moment. A person, having accepted any of the established concepts, is free to abandon further intellectual searches. However, it seems to me more reasonable and constructive to avoid definitive and unconditional answers in such questions. This will be the death of a living thought, its transformation into a cold fossil.

...Let's set off on further voyages in the boundless ocean of ignorance.

Continuing the reasoning about the eternal moment, which completes the active life and reveals eternity, one involuntarily comes to sad conclusions. Our changing world of life is dominated by... the dead!

For many and many billions of our ancestors, the transition into timelessness has already taken place. And if each of them brought his “drop of eternity” into the world, then as a result, a truly ocean arose outside of movement, change, and life.

In this case, the events of the current reality of the world of the living are nothing more than fleeting waves in the bottomless ocean. An image of the kingdom of the dead arises, where each of the living is just a short-lived wanderer. I recall some cruel epitaphs on gravestones: "And you will be here" or "You are at home, and we are away."

Such thoughts are very ancient. Apparently, the ancient Egyptians came from them in their ideas about the kingdom of the dead. It is no coincidence that the most grandiose buildings were intended not for the living pharaohs, but for the dead. And yet, as Egyptian art testifies, the cult of the dead did not deprive people of optimism.

For example, in the tombstone of the dignitary Heni (Middle Kingdom, more than 4 thousand years ago) there are the words: “Oh, living on earth, loving life, hating death!” It is amazing how consonant with our mind this appeal from a distant era, from a different culture, from an unrelated people. It is close and understandable to us and as if specially designed for us.

Apparently, the Egyptians perfectly understood the greatness and "crowdedness" of the kingdom of the dead. But this did not reconcile them with death. It was terrible and disgusting for them: truly the realm of necessity, complete lack of freedom!

In a strange way, death is presented differently in the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism familiar to Soviet people. In the “Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary” (1983), P. P. Gaidenko writes: “For Marxist philosophy, the tragedy of death is removed precisely by the fact that the individual, as the bearer of the universal, remains to live in the genus ... Marxism-Leninism is an optimistic philosophy: after death, a person remains to live in results of his creative work—in this Marxism sees his real immortality. The strange thing here is that the real tragedy of the death of a person, each of us, is illusory removed by the consciousness that others remain alive, as if they, in turn, will not have to die, and some products of labor. But a normal consciousness suggests that it is not in these people and things that a dead person continues to live, but they cease to live for him. Everyone is afraid of the loss of himself, his own consciousness, his individual unique life.

Let us recall the dialectical exercises of F. Engels: “The denial of life is essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought in relation to its necessary result, which is constantly in its embryo, - death ... To live means to die.”

Thus, professing dialectics, Engels "abolished" life, reducing it to dying. It would be interesting to find out, by developing the idea of the denial of life contained in life itself, can the same technique be used for death? Does it contain self-negation? One gets the impression that in this case, when it comes to the death of an individual, it looks like an unconditional reality that does not contain any self-negation.

The idea of death as a necessary result of life is scary enough. Let us take into account that in Marxism-Leninism the goal and the result always prevailed over the means. It is assumed that a happy future can be reached through violence, cruelty, suppression of individual freedom, and murder. This theory has not stood the test of practice.

Apparently, Engels believed in the eternity and infinity of the universe. He even suggested: “... we have confidence that matter in all its transformations remains eternally the same, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and that therefore, with the same iron necessity with which it someday it will destroy its highest color on Earth - the thinking spirit, it will have to give birth to it again somewhere in another place and at another time.

The picture turned out to be quite optimistic. If only the first impression is limited. Thinking about it, you come to sad conclusions. Still, it turns out that the universe is dead. Everywhere in it the mechanical movement of dead matter takes place. Only here and there, sometimes in this gloomy abyss, rare separate centers of life "spontaneously ignite" by themselves, as dark night fireflies to soon fade away without a trace.

Against this background, for example, the arguments of P. P. Gaidenko will hardly be comforting: “In Marxist philosophy, the finiteness of the individual is considered as a dialectical moment in the existence of mankind, ascending in its progressive development to more advanced social forms of revealing the “essential forces” of man.”

The upward movement of mankind along the countless steps of obsolete generations seems strange. Where does this path lead? Is it not in the abyss of non-existence? And what do more perfect social forms and a more complete manifestation of human essence mean? Is it not that, thanks to these achievements and revelations, two world wars took place in the 20th century, each of which, in terms of the number of those killed, surpassed all previous wars in the history of mankind combined?

And one more bewilderment remains: after all, humanity is not immortal at all! The time will come - perhaps not in millions, but only in thousands of years - and it will disappear, like many other biological species. It cannot be otherwise: not only an individual is not endowed with eternal life, but also all individuals taken together.

If the life of a person is dying, then the life of mankind is the same, only lasting a longer period.

... It would be a clear simplification to believe that such a conclusion makes the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and nothing more. Apparently, any materialistic philosophical system, which assumes the primacy and absolute predominance of matter in the world, mainly dead celestial bodies in lifeless outer space, proceeds, sometimes implicitly, from the recognition of the dominance of death over life.

We have already said that modern scientific cosmogony, recognized by the overwhelming majority of scientists, proves that the Universe began with an explosion. Is this not a celebration of destruction and death?

So, perhaps, idealistic philosophies, giving primacy to the Spirit over matter, are able to help our consciousness get rid of the deadly inertia of the scientific universe?

immortal soul

The kingdom of the dead of the ancient Egyptians has a serious advantage over the "omnipotence of deadness", characteristic of scientific cosmogony and materialistic views. Reducing life to the transient existence of protein bodies, complex organic molecules that make up the body, one has to admit that such a phenomenon is negligible on the scale of space, and inert matter absolutely dominates on Earth. The ancient Egyptians, on the contrary, did not combine in a single reality, but divided into two “parallel worlds” (using science-like terminology) the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead.

The Egyptians' ideas about the afterlife are reflected, in particular, in the Book of the Dead. One of the most important chapters of this book instructs the soul of the deceased, how it should behave before the court of Osiris, and is entitled "How to enter the chamber of truth and free a person from his sins so that he contemplates the face of the gods." The soul is obliged to repent and hold an account of its earthly deeds before God.

Subject to proper rites and plentiful sacrifices “... the deceased will have bread, pies, milk, a lot of meat on the altar of the great God, he will not be removed from any door of Amenti, he will march with the gods of the South and North and will truly be one of the servants of Osiris ".

The transition scheme is as follows. The human soul, after being on Earth, says goodbye to the mortal body and goes to the kingdom of the gods, where it is rewarded for what it did during material life. The immortal soul retains some connections with the material world, provided that the memory of it is preserved in the world. Here one can even see a certain analogy with the Marxist ideas about immortality in the memory of future generations (only here the soul remains alive, and in the system of materialism it is absent as such).

The inscription on the scarab, which was placed on the chest of the mummy instead of the heart, read: “I connected with the earth from the eastern side of the sky. Lying prostrate on the ground, I did not die in Amenti, here I am a pure spirit for eternity. In other words, a specific person in a specific place does not die, but simply his spirit passes into other existence. And yet, the fear of death was not suppressed in people. For example, in the monuments of religious literature, the Mesopotamian land of the dead - the possessions of Nergal - was depicted as follows;

Ishtar, daughter of Sin, decided to go

To the house of darkness, the abode of Nergal,

To the house from which he who enters does not return,

On a path that no one comes back on

In a dwelling where everyone who comes does not see the light,

Where dust is food, earth is food.

Who lives there, does not see the light, is in darkness.

Dressed like a bird in winged clothes

Dust hung on the doors and the lock...

It is clear that there is no point in rushing to get into the land of the dead. The parting of the soul with the native habitual inhabited body seemed a tragedy, this event was mourned.

Gloomy is the image of winged spirits, immured forever in an underground dungeon. It is difficult to say what the authors of this picture had in mind, but it demonstrates the complete impotence of the soul, whose wings are given only for an imaginary flight.

Well, what if the soul soars in the heavens, if it is blissful in the radiant spheres? Or more "scientifically": goes into parallel worlds?

To some, this prospect may seem excellent and comforting. However, it raises many serious doubts. What does inactive consciousness and feeling mean? However, one has to speak about feelings conditionally due to the absence of corresponding organs. In principle, various hallucinations are possible. But in our times, few people believe in the mystical foundations of hallucinations. Physiologists and psychologists study these phenomena and explain them very convincingly without resorting to references to supernatural forces.

Apparently, it remains to hope for the preservation of consciousness "in its pure form", outside the material substratum.

Alas, one can only guess and build fantastic assumptions about such a consciousness outside of matter. It has never been observed or studied by anyone. How can one find at least a hint of its real possibility, if one agrees with the available scientific data on the structure of matter, energy transformations, biological processes, and brain activity?

And further. The assumption of the parallel existence of obsolete souls again returns to the idea of the domination of the dead. In the parallel world, more and more dead people should accumulate, who are increasingly interfering in the lives of the living. Sometimes this is presented in the form of "feeding" energy from this world to the energy needs of the inhabitants of parallel worlds.

What is left for the living? How to withstand this growing pressure? How did the Higher Mind allow such a blatant injustice: good and evil are on an equal footing, and the dead reign over the living? Why is access to the world of the living evil from another world not stopped? Are we guilty of the sins of former villains?

It is better then to believe in the alternation of material incarnations of spiritual substance, passing from a person to a blade of grass, an animal, a stone, dust, and again, after a series of transformations, returning to a new person. And the righteous, as it is supposed in Hinduism, are provided not with heavenly bliss, but with complete peace, disappearance, dissolution in the surrounding immortal world.

Well, it is possible that there is a kind of soul, in plants (isn't that why flowers are so beautiful?) And, of course, in animals, and, who knows, in crystals too, perhaps the vibrations of atoms and electromagnetic fields testify to a hidden spiritual substance. However, why did all these different natural bodies have a soul similar to a human one? And a billion years ago, the tiny inhabitants of the Earth - at that time the highest organisms, which we now consider the simplest - also had the same soul?

Questions arise strange, sometimes unexpected, and it is very difficult to answer them with reason, based on the idea of the immortality of the human soul. In any case, scientifically substantiated answers can not be obtained.

Let's turn to philosophy. For example, George Berkeley argued the natural immortality of the soul. According to him, the soul is capable of annihilation, but is not subject to “death or destruction according to the ordinary laws of nature or movement. Those who recognize that the human soul is only a subtle vital flame or a system of animal spirits, consider it transient and destructible, like a body, since nothing can be dispelled more easily than such a thing, for which it is naturally impossible to survive the death of the shell that contains it ...

We have shown that the soul is indivisible, incorporeal, unextended, and therefore indestructible. Nothing can be clearer than this, that the movements, changes, decline and destruction, to which, as we see, the bodies of nature are hourly subjected (and which is precisely what we mean by the course of nature), cannot concern an active, simple and uncomplicated substance. ; such a being is indestructible by the power of nature, i.e., the human soul is naturally immortal.”

With all due respect to Berkeley's originality and depth of thought, one gets the impression that his proof of the immortality of the soul is based on his own experiences, beliefs, and desires. This attitude is fundamental to him. And it's hard to argue with him. Indeed, the basis of our ideas about the world is our own "I", the experience of self-knowledge. However, this experience says nothing about the immortality of the soul. On the contrary, we are clearly aware that our soul is ephemeral and was born relatively recently - from non-existence. Therefore, there is reason to believe that it will sink into oblivion. Why not?

Interestingly, Berkeley refutes the opinion about the "subtle vital flame" of the soul, not so much from logical reasoning and observation, but from considerations of morality, piety, and human dignity. It seems to him that such an idea is "a remedy against the influence of virtue and religion", but is widespread "among the worst part of mankind."

In general, among religious theorists, perhaps the main - although not always obvious - argument in favor of belief in the immortality of the soul comes down to the fact that such a belief forces a person to think about his earthly deeds, to fear the afterlife retribution for sins, and therefore lead a virtuous lifestyle . In this case, the believer should be afraid not of death itself, but of the subsequent state of the soul, which continues forever.

Simply put: if there is no immortality of the soul, then it must be invented to strengthen moral principles and free a beneficent person from the fear of death, and strengthen this fear in a sinner. Scientific evidence is not at all needed here, because in any case, in order to live righteously, in order to overcome the fear of death, it is beneficial and convenient for a person to believe in the immortality of the soul.

mortal soul

It seems blasphemous and cynical to argue about the benefits of believing in the immortality of the soul. It seems that the base is connected - profit and the sublime - faith and soul. However, one should not turn a blind eye to reality. In reality, these two categories are too often adjacent and even united in thoughts, and even much worse - in the actions of the same person.

A most vile kind of lie arises: in relation to oneself, to conscience, to God. Hypocrisy and hypocrisy. And before these qualities were of considerable distribution. And now in our country, many citizens, having quickly rebuilt their convictions, turned to the church with the same impulse with which they previously turned to atheistic party bodies, even communicating with the Almighty and Omniscient as with high party authorities: saying one thing, thinking another, doing a third .

What can you do, the lie is too rooted in our mutilated society, and the higher you climb the levels of power, the more perverted and ugly the forms of this lie. However, the owners of ill-gotten capitals also have to pay for material goods with spiritual values.

Against such a background of triumphant hypocrisy, such pure and “noble people as Patriarch Tikhon, Father Pavel Florensky, Mahatma Gandhi stand out especially brightly and clearly ... They all believed in the immortality of the soul. And their good power was opposed by revolutionaries, atheists, seekers of earthly carnal blessings and comforts, rejecting the immortality of the soul ... In short, all those whom Dostoevsky classified as demons.

As if the obvious worldly experience confirms the correctness and beneficialness of the guidelines offered by the great world religions, in particular, the belief in the afterlife of the human soul. Regardless of how scientifically justified this belief is, it undoubtedly helps to live more dignified and die more peacefully. And there come what may!

Frankly speaking, in this case, the matter would come down precisely to profit, convenience. This will mean a rejection of the search for truth - the holy divine gift to man! - for the sake of profitable ... hypocrisy or superstition, perhaps. After all, true faith presupposes merciless truth, absolute sincerity.

So, let's take a closer look at the facts more carefully and impartially (philosophers from ancient times proved with equal persuasiveness both the mortality and immortality of the soul; here each of us has the opportunity to choose arguments at our discretion.) They testify that the noblest deeds are often committed by those who does not believe in an eternal soul or even in God.

Let us recall the anarchist revolutionary, the great scientist Prince P. A. Kropotkin. In the name of the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, he gave up all his considerable privileges, from a brilliant court career, wealth, and even from professional scientific work. He considered professional revolutionaries who despised work, in modern terms, demagogues-parasites, thirsting for personal power. Not believing in God, he was always striving for the highest moral guidelines.

What about Giordano Bruno? His example is no less instructive. He shocked many enlightened contemporaries, first of all, by the fact that he accepted the execution, not believing in the immortality of the soul. He had the opportunity to at least pretend to repent and thereby prolong his one and only life. What prevented him from doing so? If there is no afterlife, it means that in this world a person is allowed everything, and after death he will not be held accountable for his sin of false repentance before God!

Those who marveled at the courage of Giordano Bruno in the face of death seem to have believed precisely in the benefit that the belief in the immortality of the soul provides. And those who sentenced him to be burned at the stake - cardinals, bishops, grand inquisitors, thereby violated the sacred commandments of the prophet Moses: Thou shalt not kill! and Jesus Christ: love your neighbor as yourself, and do not respond with evil even in response to evil. How could they decide to trample on the foundations of the teachings of Christ? Truly believing in the inevitability of an answer to the Lord for their sins (and they all sinned to their heart's content!) and the threat of eternal hellish torment, they had to mercifully forgive Bruno for his "delusions" and misdeeds.

It turns out that Bruno believed in the high ideals of goodness, justice, human dignity, truth, not being afraid to give his life for them. And his pious judges (remember the commandment: do not judge, so that you will not be judged!) were thoroughly saturated with hypocrisy. I. Kepler rightly noted: “Bruno courageously endured death, proving the vanity of all religions. God he turned into the world ... "

What inspired Bruno to the feat of faith? (Without faith, is it possible to decide on martyrdom?) After all, he predetermined for humanity not universal prosperity, but difficult times: “New truth, new laws will appear, nothing holy, nothing religious will remain, not a single word worthy of heaven and celestials. Only the angels of perdition will abide and, mingling with people, will push the unfortunate to insolence, to every evil, supposedly to justice, and thereby give a pretext for wars, for robbery, deceit ... And that will be old age and unbelief of the world! .. "

And at the same time, in his opinion, all this can be experienced as a serious illness. People have to decide their own destiny. It is not the Universe that opposes us - we ourselves oppose, our low thoughts, so pitiful and vulgar before the inevitability of death for everyone. Only struggle and overcoming give the happiness of victory. Having achieved the ability to live in the past and future, a person joins the immortality and eternal beauty of the world.

In his words: "Whoever is carried away by the greatness of his work, does not feel the horror of death."

One can count the examples of Kropotkin and Bruno as rare exceptions. However, this opinion seems unconvincing. The mere fact that belief in the mortality of the soul does not hinder or even helps someone to live and die with dignity proves its fruitfulness. So, there are people - from the best representatives of the human race! - able to overcome the fear of death and do good, thought, beauty, perform noble deeds not under the threat of the afterlife, but at the behest of the heart, conscience.

In general, it seems to me, one should not count on the question of mortality or immortality of the soul to find the only true answer for all times, peoples, types of personality. Everyone chooses this faith according to the temperament of the soul, according to the level of reason.

In any case, no matter how we decide this fatal question for ourselves, the main truth remains unshakable: our earthly mortal life will certainly end sooner or later with death - the separation of soul and body. The body will disintegrate into its component parts, disappear. And the soul ... What will happen to it, no one is given to know. One can only guess, fantasize, believe. Even this option is not ruled out: everyone will be rewarded according to his faith and earthly deeds. One - eternal torment, another - bliss, the third - non-existence, eternal rest. And how do you know if the last option is the best?

One thing is clear: the former unity of soul and body will never be restored.

Overcoming hopelessness

Our reasoning about life and death, as you can see, constantly comes to dead ends. It is as if some fatal force does not allow the thought to rush into the radiant immensity of eternal life - no matter how you imagine it - each of us, any person. As a kind of general phenomenon in the Earth's biosphere, life, of course, has existed continuously since time immemorial. But even here the situation is quite hopeless: if earthly life had a beginning, then it is reasonable to assume its natural end.

The Sun will die out, the Earth will cool down, the biosphere will slowly perish. The last to die out are those who were the first to kindle the hearth of earthly life - protozoa, viruses ... What immortality of the individual human soul!

Such a picture fully corresponds to modern scientific ideas based on facts, logically built and thought out by many thousands of the smartest specialists. One can counter these conclusions with comforting religious fantasies, myths, and traditions. However, the arguments of reason and objective experience are not an empty sound.

A person is free to completely disregard science in assessing life and death, accepting the concept that suits him best. It is easiest to do this for someone who is not at all familiar with natural science. Otherwise, you will have to admit that science is not from God, but from the devil. And then - thoughtless obscurantism triumphs.

We have to make a reservation. Such reasoning presupposes calm theoretical speculation beyond the real threat of death. The situation is quite different in practice when a person dies. There is no time for science, and truly all means are good in order to reduce suffering, fear of death. And first, if necessary, reduce physical pain, because they often make the last days and hours of a person's stay in the world unbearable.

It should be noted that one of the most important functions of religious teachings and rituals is not only to make life easier for a person, but also to prepare him for death. In a sense, philosophy presupposes the same. No wonder Plato said: to philosophize means to learn to die. The example of Socrates, who bravely accepted death, has inspired many since then. (However, in advanced years, wise men usually part with life more easily than in their youth.)

It would seem that science with its merciless truth in this respect is fundamentally different from religion and philosophy, which are prone to substituting illusions for reality. An experienced specialist, examining a doomed patient, can accurately determine the remaining time for him. Doesn't this look like a death sentence?

Let's turn to examples. In the autumn of 1990, the Izvestia newspaper published a conversation between A. Vasinsky and Viktor Zorza, a journalist, political scientist, philosopher, a native of Western Ukraine, who has lived in the United States for many years. He is the initiator of the creation in our country of hospices, hospitals for the dying. A personal tragedy prompted him to this activity: the death from skin cancer of his twenty-five-year-old daughter Jane

“... The hospice where Jane died,” Zorza said, “showed me that if victory over death is impossible, another thing is possible - to leave without despair, with dignity, having completed many of my spiritual thoughts.

According to him, “according to the philosophy of hospices, it is inhumane to hide from the patient, if he wants to know the truth, how much he has left. He can get ready. Gather your thoughts. Say goodbye, forgive ... ”And this is not just reasoning, but the hard-won truth. After all, his daughter in one of her last days said: “For a person, there is nothing more important than birth and death. When I was born, I didn't know anything. Dying, I know everything. Everything around me is good, not evil. I'm ready to die."

This is, perhaps, the last moment worthy of a person, passing, e into eternity: the readiness to accept the inevitable, for everything that is possible for life has been done. And then ... the unknown? I would like to recognize just such an undeniable truth.

Of course, the unknown can sometimes frighten no less than the tragic certainty. And then the usual strategy for removing the fear of death is not to think about it at all, or rather, to suppress all thoughts about it. What will be will be, but for now we must live and have fun.

- Not to notice death, not to talk about it, - A. Vasinsky continues, - it seems to be part of the lifestyle, valued as a sign of courage.

- I agree, - answered V. Zorza. – But the most interesting thing is that hospices and serious attitude to death they encroach not on genuine, but on false optimism.

Indeed, the optimism of ignorance and silence can turn into horror at the edge of life in front of the open abyss.

To avoid this danger, you have to face the truth. And consider practical experience.

After all, it turns out that science - biology, medicine, psychology, pharmacology - can effectively help a person who is ending (especially if prematurely) life. This is evidenced, in particular, by the experience of hospices.

On this optimistic note, the story could end. Yes, one thought does not let you calm down. Humility in the face of inevitability is forced humility. The behavior of a slave before an all-powerful master. And when a slave shows calm wisdom and human dignity, he is doubly sorry!

The law of conservation of spiritual energy?

It is difficult to get used to the idea that such a finely organized, complex feeling, intelligent and beautiful creature as a person, after serving on Earth for some time, completely disappears, dissolving into the world around him without a trace. What can be opposed from a scientific point of view to such a conclusion?

V. M. Bekhterev tried to answer this question in his work “The Immortality of the Human Personality as scientific problem". The course of his reasoning was as follows.

The body of a deceased person decomposes and ceases to exist - this is an indisputable fact. The atoms and molecules that made up his organism pass into new states, enter into new compounds. Matter can be said to be completely transformed. What happens to energy?

In nature, the law of conservation of energy operates, which has no exceptions. Energy does not arise and does not disappear, only passes from one form to another. This extends to the phenomena of neuropsychic activity. “This law in relation to a given subject,” writes Bekhterev, “can be expressed as follows: not a single human action, not a single step, not a single thought, expressed in words or even a simple glance, gesture, or facial expressions in general, disappear without a trace.”

A person lives among people, and many others around him are subject to his spiritual influence to one degree or another, and they, in turn, influence him. Thus neuropsychic energy is organized in the form of a generalized social "superpersonality". She lives long before the birth of this particular person and continues to live after his death. A person transfers his neuro-psychic energy to her. This shows his social immortality.

“We are not talking about the immortality of the individual human personality as a whole,” Bekhterev clarifies, “which, upon the occurrence of death, ceases to exist as a person, as an individual, as an individual ... but about social immortality due to the indestructibility of that neuropsychic energy that forms the basis of human personality…”

In other words, he continues, “we are talking about the immortality of the spirit, which during the entire individual life, through mutual influence, as it were, passes into thousands of surrounding human personalities.” And by creating spiritual values and embodying his creative energy into material objects, a person acquires the opportunity to influence many future generations.

“Therefore, the concept of the afterlife,” writes Bekhterev, “in the scientific sense should be reduced, in essence, to the concept of the continuation of the human personality beyond its individual life in the form of participation in the improvement of man in general and the creation of a spiritual universal human personality in which he lives without fail. a particle of each individual personality, even if it has already left the present world, and lives without dying, but only transforming itself, in the spiritual life of mankind.

The thought of the scientist does not stop there. In his opinion, “if the human personality is immortal and remains to live in the future, as a particle of the spiritual universal culture, then it also lives in the past, because it is a direct product of the past, the product of everything that it perceived from the past universal culture through continuity and inheritance."

There is an interesting and unexpected image of "condensation" and "dispersion" of personality. Some analogy to this can be seen in the formation and dissolution of a crystal, or in the growth and dissolution of a body. In both cases, not only material-material, but also energy phenomena occur. Moreover, when Bekhterev speaks of spiritual culture, he means, in modern terms, information. It is indeed an intangible substance, unlike matter and energy. But it is inseparable from them as from its carriers. Information is produced, transmitted, perceived, lost as a result of material processes.

In other words, spiritual culture is the sum of information accumulated by previous generations: In such a formulation, the mystical meaning is lost, which can be suspected in any manifestations of spirituality. And it becomes clear that the material carriers of information - books, sculptures, architectural structures, paintings ... - in themselves remain inert products of creativity.

For example, an old film retains the living image of a long-dead artist who continues to actively influence the public, awakening emotions and thoughts in them. However, because of this, there is no reason to consider the film show as a ritual act of invoking an immortal spirit. And if this happens in the case when a visible image appears that is as similar as possible to a living person, then what can we say about the rock paintings of people of the Stone Age or the Egyptian pyramids?

There is no doubt that every person absorbs information from the environment from an early age, masters it and carries out his activities on this basis. Only now the energy generated by it is almost all dissipated. And those relative crumbs that are embodied in the products of labor can hardly be associated with the immortality of the soul ....

Table salt dissolved in water is not a crystal of halite - table salt. Atoms of gold scattered in the waters of the World Ocean are not a gold nugget at all. The rays of the sun and minerals are completely different from the tree they give birth to.

What follows from this? The most obvious, although not indisputable, conclusion is that the neuropsychic energy and information scattered in the environment have no resemblance or affinity with the human personality.

In this case, if there is a law of conservation of neuropsychic energy, even if it can be asserted (which is very doubtful) that it (and not just energy) is eternal, then there are no good grounds to conclude from this that the soul is immortal.

V. M. Bekhterev, apparently, understood this well, emphasizing that he meant social immortality, and not personal. He. assumed that a person would morally rise and be spiritually cleansed, realizing his involvement with the entire human race, the intellectual achievements of past and future generations:

“Responsibility for one’s actions and actions is completely natural if every deed, every step, every word, every gesture, every mimic movement and even every sound uttered by a person does not remain without a trace, but in one way or another is reflected on others, transforming here into new forms. impact on the outside world and transmitted through social continuity to future generations of mankind.

And if this is so, then for every human personality there arises the need for moral perfection throughout life.

Alas, no matter how true the reasoning of the scientist, the last final conclusion raises serious doubts. Logical messages and edifications cannot force a human personality to moral perfection. In essence, the entire spiritual culture is directed towards this goal. But there are no significant results, no universal moral progress.

But how could such progress be realized under the condition of strict observance of the law of conservation of neuropsychic energy? He assumes that with an increase in the concentration of this energy in one place, a corresponding decrease in another. Otherwise, the balance will not converge! Therefore, progress should be accompanied by an equal regression.

To some extent, perhaps, this is what happens in the history of mankind. What we call scientific and technological or social progress is carried out with enormous damage to society: the spiritual impoverishment of the individual, mass repressions, bloody wars, etc., and even more so for the surrounding nature. It is enough to look at the state of our planet (biosphere) mastered by man. Separate "prosperous" regions look like rare oases against the backdrop of vast territories where nature is sharply depleted, polluted, deserted, and spiritual culture is in the same distress.

No doubt, there is an accumulation of information. In this regard, progress is evident. But only in total terms, as the total number of accumulated books, articles, facts, works of art, discovered laws of nature ... However, such arrays of information are only available for mastering by a specific person in their insignificant part. But spiritual culture comes to life only if it becomes the property of the individual, is embodied in the consciousness, actions, creativity of a person. Spiritual culture not realized in a living person is dead.

And yet one gets the impression that, following the path blazed by Bekhterev's thought, there is a hope of breaking out of the vicious circle of ideas that constantly return us to the recognition of domination in the world of death, and not life.

To begin with, let's try to get rid of the habit, turning to science, relying only on knowledge - proven and approved, as if there is no hope for unexpected insights of scientific thought that opens up new areas of knowledge. It is significant that Bekhterev had this in mind:

“All transformations of matter or matter in general, and in general all forms of motion, not excluding the motion of the nerve current, are nothing but a manifestation of world energy, unknowable in its essence ...” And although the reference to something fundamentally unknowable recognizes this object as inaccessible scientific knowledge, this does not exclude at least partial penetration into the secret.

Beyond existence?

From the whole to the part

Let us turn to the work of the biologist and philosopher V.P. Karpov "The main features of the organic understanding of nature." He did not replace the universe with physical and mathematical models, schemes, but recognized it, following Plato and his followers, as a single and incomprehensibly complex organism: “The evolution of nature accessible to our gaze is the result of the eternally adoptable and disturbed harmony of millions of lives, in other words, part of the spontaneous world process ...

In what direction the world process is moving, according to what law the evolution of the universal organism takes place, will probably forever remain a mystery to us. There is too little data to answer this question; there remain hypotheses, more or less witty.

Thanks to the constant metabolism, all the chemical compounds and atoms contained in the body were more or less recently located in different places in the surrounding nature; there is not a single particle that is an integral part of the body. There is a certain force that connects them into a certain, strictly designated form, moreover, dynamic, flexible, aimed at self-preservation.

“Since the fundamental difference between natural individuals various kinds does not exist, and each of them consists of matter and form, - writes Karpov (let's add more energy. - R.B.), - we must recognize the soul in each of them ... In nature, there are organizations of the most varied complexity, they are probably accompanied by all possible stages of self-consciousness, and it is hard to believe that our human intellect is the last link in this chain.

What we call a living organism - a plant, an animal - is in turn part of an incomparably larger and more complexly organized whole. And this embracing whole should, apparently, be considered spiritualized, alive. According to Karpov, “animals, plants, clouds are part of our planet, the main organs of its metabolism… The Earth, in turn; is an integral part of the solar system, unusually complex and subtle? organism; the latter itself is part of the Milky Way, etc. ... If we have no way of delineating the limits of the universe, we must nevertheless recognize it as an organized whole ...

If this is so, we can close the chain of natural phenomena and connect the origin of the simplest natural individuals of a given era with the world whole.

In our time, it has become generally accepted: organisms, including humans, are part of the biosphere. But living sentient beings cannot be parts of an inanimate, insensible mechanical system. After all, they are united with the environment by the exchange of substances, energy, information. True, there may be confusion. If the Earth is part of the solar system, then shouldn't the latter be considered a living organism?

The combination of stars and planets is a mechanical system. About the same as the set of atoms that make up a molecule. But this molecule, being a part of the body and participating in life, is in itself inanimate (although not dead, of course). It is outside of life, or rather, a passive part of a living or inert body.

That's solar system does not hover in the Cosmos by itself, but enters the Galaxy, billions of stars and planets of which form something "organism-like". The life of galaxies is complex and diverse. With the nuclei of some of them, strange processes occur, reminiscent of cell division (or the radioactive decay of an atom?). Other galaxies appear to be merging or otherwise interacting.

Perhaps the lifespan of galaxies exceeds the human age as many times as the galaxies are larger than humans. It is possible that among them there are "unicellular" simplest forms and galactic associations resembling multicellular organisms.

Continuing our reasoning, we can assume something that unites all these galactic bodies together - the Biosphere of the Universe.

We must immediately make a reservation: such views are difficult to combine with the now recognized theory (hypothesis - more precisely) of the "big bang". And it measures the time for the Universe extremely sparingly: only 15–20 billion years. Such a period is hardly sufficient for the normal life of one simple galaxy, or even one star system. (A value of 15–20 billion times more than a person is negligible on a cosmic scale.)

It would be necessary, abandoning the "big bang" theory, to revise many modern ideas about the finest structure of matter. Perhaps this will happen as a result of further development of the quark hypothesis and the evolution of the cosmic vacuum.

The latter is especially important. With this mysterious substance - which is sometimes identified with an ocean of energy that has not acquired the forms of the surrounding material world familiar to us - there is. some reason to bind ... how to know if it is the immortality of the soul? the existence of the other world? manifestations of information and psychic energy?

V ancient myths the general prevails over the particular, synthesis over analysis, the living over the dead. Almost two and a half millennia ago, this principle found a logical embodiment in the philosophy of Plato. According to his ideas, the Creator - the highest Mind of the Universe - arranged the world like a living organism.

“What kind of living being is this, according to the model of which the organizer arranged the cosmos? Plato asked. – We must not humiliate the cosmos, believing that it is a matter of a being of some particular kind, because imitation of the incomplete can by no means be beautiful. But let us think of such a (living being) that embraces all the rest of the living according to individuals and genera as its parts, we decide that it was the model to which the Cosmos is most likened: after all, as it contains intelligible living beings, so the Cosmos gives us and all other visible beings a place in itself. After all, God, wishing to make the world as beautiful and completely perfect as possible among conceivable objects, arranged it as a single visible living being, containing all living beings akin to it by nature in itself.

In fact, these arguments can be expressed in a short verbal formula, an old aphorism: man is a microcosm. In the biblical version: man is the image and likeness of God. Not trying to find irrefutable scientific evidence philosophizing freely, one involuntarily tends to such conclusions.

Man did not come into being in the world by some unknown means, by a game of blind chance. It was created by… the biosphere, nature, Cosmos, God – not concepts or images are important, but the very fact of existence of the creating Something. And if we go from a natural analogy with a human creator, we should admit that any creation embodies – albeit partially, incompletely – the qualities of the creator. So, in our time, mechanical similarities of living organisms and even technical intelligent systems - computers - have been created.

In this case, something, if you like - a creative Nature, whose particular creations were living organisms, including Homo sapiens, must have the properties of a living rational organism. Moreover: a superintelligent superorganism (from a human point of view), with all its qualities surpassing any of its particulars, including each of us and all of us together. Similarly, an individual neuron of our brain and their entirety cannot be recognized as more “alive” and “intelligent” than the entire organism that includes them.

In the system of idealism, thanks to the genius of Plato, reasoning from the general to the particular is common. For example, Schelling believed: "The world is an organization, and the universal organism is the condition (and thus positive) of the mechanism." “Things are not the beginning of the organism, but, on the contrary, the organism is the beginning of things.” It is clear that in an organism devoid of consciousness, groups of cells with consciousness cannot arise. Where would this new quality come from?

Each person not only lives and dies, but also creates for himself. Although at the same time it remains a small part of humanity, which, in turn, is a small part of the earth's biosphere. Only the biosphere can be considered as a single isolated individual organism. And then, expanding the scope of reality, we can consider a galaxy or a set of galaxies as a whole organism, and even more widely - the Universe. Following the rule we have adopted to go from the general to the particular, we repeat after K. E. Tsiolkovsky:

“Everything is generated by the Universe. She is the beginning of all things, everything depends on her. Man or other higher beings and his will are only manifestations of the will of the Universe. No creature can show absolute will... We say: everything depends on us, but we ourselves are the creation of the Universe. Therefore, it is more correct to think and say that everything depends on the Universe… If we manage to fulfill our will, it is only because the Universe has allowed us to do it… Not a single atom of the Universe will escape the sensations of higher intelligent life.”

Living from living, reasonable from reasonable

Now we will try to turn again to the riddle of the origin of living organisms. From dead parts, as it turned out, they do not add up. Even finished parts on a factory assembly line do not “self-assemble” into a finished product without the participation of workers or robots acting according to a pre-thought-out program. Biology and paleontology testify that Redi's principle is unconditionally implemented: the living - from the living:

So what kind of a living organism in this case could give life to the first primitive unicellular creatures that once arose on Earth?

This organism is the biosphere of the Earth. And it, in turn, was a product of a cosmic superorganism that includes our Galaxy. Well, galaxies remain cells of the living Cosmos.

And what gave rise to the Cosmos?

Everyone is free to answer according to their imagination. For, as Tsiolkovsky rightly noted, one can only guess about the Cause of the Cosmos.

One should not think that the ideas about the living universe remain the property of mythologies, some philosophies and science fiction writings. Similar views were shared by many prominent scientists. I will refer to the book of a prominent Russian biologist, plant physiologist Acad. A. S. Famintsyn "Modern Natural Science and Psychology", published at the very end of the last century.

Considering the vital activity of both animals and plants (by the way, it was Famintsyn who was credited with the innovative study of photosynthesis, and not K. A. Timiryazev), he came to the conclusion:

"It cannot be denied that mental processes are woven into the life of every living being in a variety of ways, forming an indissoluble whole with material phenomena. Beyond these limits, it has not yet been possible to open the psyche; the psychic side of the phenomena of the so-called dead nature remains as yet an unsolved mystery.

There are also unconventionally thinking major astrophysicists. Here is what one of them, Nalin Chandra Wikramasinghe, wrote relatively recently:

“With today's level of knowledge about. life and about the Universe, the categorical denial of some form of creation as an explanation for the origin of life means an unwillingness to face the facts, unforgivable swagger. Just as it was once proved that the earth is not physical center Universe, so it is equally obvious to me today that the highest Mind in the world cannot concentrate on the Earth.

Finally, let us recall the final chapter from the famous book by E. Schrödinger “What is life from the point of view of physics?” (so it was not quite accurately called in the Russian translation of 1947). In it, one of the greatest physicists of our century made this argument.

Each of us controls the actions of our body and anticipates their immediate results. Our body is a collection of atoms and functions according to the laws of nature. Therefore, each of us can control the "movement of atoms" according to the laws of nature. In this sense, "I" has the quality of an almighty God!

For a Christian, as Schrödinger puts it, such a statement sounds blasphemous and insane. But it contains the truth expressed in biblical times by the wise men ancient india. Its essence is that the ephemeral personal soul (Atman) is simultaneously the omnipresent, omniscient, eternal world soul (Brahman).

In short: Atman-Brahman. In this unity, two statements merge: man is a Microcosm and, as Schopenhauer argued, “the world is a macroanthropos” or “Cosmos is a megaman”.

Let us take into account that we are not talking about material substance, but about consciousness, the soul. If life and mind are present in the entire Universe, then they are also present in every individual natural body, because both life and consciousness are manifested only in general, for the embracing whole. Therefore, life and reason, characteristic of the Universe, are at the same time the property of man. Thus, each of us is attached to the immortality of the Universe!

... I don't know if Schrödinger's ideas about life and immortality are correctly conveyed here, but I believe that they are not indisputable. Someone may recall the saying of the philosopher of the last century Soren Kierkegaard:

“Can you imagine anything worse than such a denouement, when a human being breaks up into thousands of separate parts like a crumbling legion of expelled demons, when it loses the most precious, most sacred for a person – the unifying power of personality, its single, existing self?”

... White blood cells live in our blood. They are able to recognize harmful microbes and try to destroy them. At the same time, they can die, protecting their native organism.

Do we penetrate with our consciousness into their lives, feeling each individual cell? No. And they are not able, apparently, to comprehend our common existence with them, feeling themselves a part of our organism. Both outwardly and in terms of the level of development of consciousness, these mobile cells are not like us. They don't live long, act intelligently enough, and die painlessly for us and perhaps for themselves too.

In a similar way, all living organisms are connected to the living shell of the planet - the biosphere. It is much more complicated than us, it stores and processes incomparably more information, and its life cycle takes place over billions of years.

It is quite clear that bodily we belong entirely to her. What is life and death for us is only life for her. The energy of our body and our thoughts also belongs to it, and only Partly to us.

But what about consciousness, soul?

It is interesting that the structure of the word "consciousness" implies the knowledge of belonging not only to a given individual, but also to someone adjacent: an accomplice of comprehension. Who is this? Another man? Unlikely.

After all, it is about self-knowledge. Perhaps some kind of abstraction is supposed, such as the "collective mind" of humanity or some kind of cultural community. However, it is more plausible that the authors of the word had in mind not such intricacies, but the idea of the divine Mind, embracing all kinds of knowledge. And then we again return to the recognition of the identity of the personal and universal soul (Atman-Brahman).

Spiritualized, permeated with universal consciousness, the universe is incomprehensible to our limited mind. So, the white blood cell of our body is powerless to comprehend the existence of a reasonable person. One can only guess about this universal consciousness, build fantastic hypotheses, compose myths... scientific method in such cases, it demonstrates its impotence, if it is limited by the principles of the movement of thought from the particular to the general, from the dead to the living, initially losing the understanding of the unity of life and the Mind of the Universe.

Perhaps new extraordinary discoveries await science on the path to comprehending this unity? How can they be expressed?

Let's try to imagine. For this modern science does not provide many options. One of them, perhaps the most promising, is related to vacuum research. From this ocean of energy that we do not feel, material objects and various fields are realized. Consequently, both the psychic energy of our body and the biofield also have a vacuum ocean of energy as their source.

Consciousness, mind, soul - all these are ideal phenomena. They manifest themselves indirectly in the surrounding material world. It is impossible to catch them with the help of instruments or sense organs. Why?

It is possible that the reason is hidden in the properties of the same bottomless energy ocean - the cosmic vacuum.

I suspect that a mystically minded reader will immediately imagine the "scientific justifications" for the appearance of spirits and ghosts, angels and demons, UFOs and drums in our reality as representatives of the "other world". Without infringing on the right of everyone to fantasize freely and, if desired, indulge in illusions, I just want to make a reservation again: the above reasoning about the “anti-world of vacuum” is speculation that does not even pretend to be a scientific hypothesis.

Another thing is the idea of intelligent biospheres of the Earth and the Universe. It looks logically and factually more substantiated than ideas about the dead mechanics of the Cosmos. Although in this case, our inevitably limited human mind is powerless to comprehend what is beyond its capabilities. True, we are still far from having exhausted those magnificent opportunities that the creative Nature, God, has given us.

For all our smallness and ephemerality, we remain the embodiment of the incomprehensibly complex, spiritualized, intelligent biosphere of the Earth, and it, in turn, is the bearer of the life and mind of the Universe. Participation in eternal being and consciousness is the guarantee of our immortality.

Worthy of eternal rest...

"Gods, my gods! How sad is the evening earth! How mysterious are the mists over the swamps. Who wandered in these mists, who suffered a lot before death, who flew over this land, carrying an unbearable load, knows this. The tired one knows it. And without regret he leaves the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, he surrenders with a light heart into the hands of death, knowing that only she will calm him down.

These words of Mikhail Bulgakov contain a sad and reconciling truth with death. For on the path of life, for one who has exhausted his strength to the last possibility, who is mortally tired - not satiated with pleasures, namely, tired, like a master who has completed overwork - for a weary traveler, the peace of non-existence does not inspire fear.

Such is the great justice of fate.

No matter how we theorize, no matter what ideas about the transition to the other world of vacuum or to the superlife of the biosphere we console ourselves, the simplest ordinary appearance of death inevitably remains, sooner or later awaiting us. And then much - if not all - depends on us.

Perhaps, in this regard, it is easiest for those people who generally stop thinking about their death and, all the more, mourn it prematurely. They live as long as they live. That's all.

For others, the fear of death is helped to overcome religious images and rituals, the hope for the immortality of the soul.

Still others believe that in the absurdity of life, only the pursuit of pleasures and material goods. Such people are capable - just in case, what if God exists! - formally profess one or another faith (isn't this superstition?). However, despite all their tricks, from time to time they experience the painful horror of a premonition of death, its lifetime experience.

The fourth seek to substantiate the scientific and philosophical concepts that explain the meaning of death. Becoming the subject of scientific and philosophical analysis, death appears as an ordinary natural process that accompanies life, nothing more. In the best position are thinkers who are able to deeply imbue the life of nature, the universe. Sometimes they lightly and calmly await the transition to eternity, the last and complete reunion with the life of the universe and the Mind of the Universe.

Finally, there are those that we talked about at the very beginning of this chapter: weary travelers who worthily survived the blows and blessings of fate, workers and craftsmen who experienced the happiness of creativity and self-giving.

It would be strange and unwise to choose from these options (or from some others) the best one. After all, we do not choose them, but they choose us. Everyone has that life and death, that immortality that he deserves. There are, of course, exceptions. But we must focus not on them, but on a fair reward for everything that we managed or failed to accomplish in this world, for the good and evil left behind.

And one more obvious truth: we are all immortal while we are alive.

... We have already mentioned Raymond Moody's book Life After Life. Since that plague, many scientists have written on this topic, analyzing the experience of “returning from death” of more than one thousand people. Mention may be made, in particular, of the collection Life After Death (1990). It contains a new article by R. Moody. He again confirmed, on the basis of numerous additional surveys, the most characteristic events of "otherworldly existence" (or otherness), remembered by those who had been in a state of clinical death: separation of consciousness and observation of one's body and current events from the Side; feeling of release; overcoming a dark corridor, behind which there is a light that brings bliss; returning to one's own body is sometimes without joy.

In general, most people of all ages mental development, education and different religious beliefs told about their "post-mortem experience" about the same thing. And one more characteristic remark by R. Moody: “In one form or another, all patients expressed the same thought - they are no longer afraid of death.” But that's not all:

“Many people come to a mono-understanding of the essence of the other world. According to this new view, that world is not a one-sided judgment, but rather a maximum of self-disclosure and development. The development of the soul, the perfection of love and knowledge do not stop with the death of the body. On the contrary, they continue on the other side of being, perhaps forever or, in any case, for some period, and with such depth that we can only guess.

“I came to the conclusion,” writes the scientist, “that there is life after death, and I believe that the phenomena that we have considered are manifestations of this life. However, I want to live."

It turns out that the desire to live during life is stronger than the desire for posthumous eternal existence. The author does not even notice that with the words “I want to live,” he sharply moves away from “non-life.”

But what then is the meaning of death, if personal life continues after it? And what are the possible explanations for the "experience of immortality"?

The patterns cited by R. Moody and other researchers are of a statistical nature and are revealed as a result of mass surveys, subsequent sampling and generalization. Before us are special cases, although quite common. True, the option that we mentioned earlier remains: posthumous otherness is given to each individually.

During resuscitation, various drugs are used that can give psychotropic effects.

“Near-death experiences,” adds R. Moody, “also have a certain resemblance to a nervous breakdown during seizures, especially due to disorders in the temporal lobe of the brain: 1) people who suffered from a similar disease reported that this was preceded by “noise”; 2) the temporal lobe plays a huge role in the mechanism of memory.”

Each of us has dream experiences, some of which are very similar to "post-mortem visions". For example, in a dream you often observe yourself and the events taking place as if from the outside. A similar effect should be reinforced in our century by motion pictures.

One has to critically evaluate the accuracy of the timing of memories of otherness. It is not at all excluded that in many, if not all, cases, we are talking about the last seconds or minutes of a fading consciousness, and its subsequent complete loss is a failure that was not felt at all.

It also happens that later thoughts and images, partly inspired by the stories of resuscitators, are presented as “near-death”. There are even much rarer sensations: "remembrance of the future", the illusion of foreseeing ongoing events. In this case, a person visiting a certain city for the first time clearly understands that he has already been here, seen these houses, is able to foresee what he will meet on the next street ... However, as psychiatrists found out, all this is just an illusion of knowledge.

The article by the American scientist Kenneth Ring says: “The main part of the studies of near-death states indicates that most people do not remember anything from what they experienced as a result of near-death shock, but the percentage of those who claim that they can consciously describe experiences is quite high ...” And his conclusion is: “We must emphasize that a decade of study of near-death states has never led to any generally accepted explanation, even among those who have carefully studied them for years ... At present, the question is how such experiences can be explained - more precisely, whether they can take place remains shrouded in obscurity and controversy.

Finally, let's remember the so-called reincarnation - the reincarnation of souls, the transfer of memory of past lives to other generations. Some researchers give information about individual cases of memories - usually in a hypnotic dream - about the events of a long lived life. The transmission of such information by inheritance ("genetic memory") is excluded. Even if reincarnation is recognized, its rarity and mystery must be emphasized.

So, scientific analysis does not give good grounds to assert that the experience of people who have experienced near-death experiences unequivocally testifies to the existence of an immortal soul. If it is present in everyone, then all those who have experienced death without exception should definitely feel it. This is not. And yet ... It's time to remember ignorance.

Those readers who hoped, as a result of their acquaintance with this work, to receive unambiguous, exhaustive answers to the questions posed here, will be disappointed. There are no definitive answers and there will not be, apparently, until our death. Scientific thought is not an all-powerful sorceress. It has its own laws and restrictions. Where there are no objective facts, it is powerless. But our life and our death are subjective, and no one in the world can survive our individual unique experience, our immortal life.

“But she will break!”

- Reunite with the life and mind of the nature around us.

– But the earthly nature is not eternal!

– She will be reunited with other lives and the Mind of the Universe.

- And what is the guarantee that everything is exactly so?

- None. Everyone has to think and choose.

“But this is utter nonsense!”

“This is one of the manifestations of human freedom.

– What is the final conclusion?

- None. It will be our personal experience. Let's wait. Let's live! Everyone is given the life and immortality that he deserves.

So what do you believe in anyway?

- In life. Into death. To immortality.

Notes

() I will refer at least to the work of John Bernal "The Emergence of Life" (M., 1969) or: D. Gollsmith and T. Owen "The Search for Life in the Universe" (M., 1983).