Looking With In

     For another billion years or so, these minute cells floated in the warm seas, birthless and deathless. No change took place. It was not until a mere half billion years ago that true evolution began. Life somehow managed to overcome its most basic problem — forgetfulness. Evolution cannot proceed without the accumulation of knowledge, and a single amoeba cannot accumulate much knowledge. It was not until the life-force invented the trick of coding knowledge into the reproductory processes that new advances became possible. The Pre-Cambrian creatures shed old cells and grew new ones in the same way that my body replaces all its old cells every eight years. With the invention of death and reproduction, they shed old bodies and grew new ones. Variety replaced monotony as the basic law of existence.
     Life invented death. There is no escaping this extraordinary fact, although a more conservative view might be that life simply learned to make use of death for its own purposes. The implications are the same. Life is not at the mercy of death. It is in control of death. Half a billion years ago, it learned the secret of reincarnation.
     The aim of all this manoeuvering was to establish a firmer bridgehead in the universe of matter. Individual creatures tend to stagnate when they have discovered a comfortable ritual of habit. A young creature fights and struggles and learns; an old creature vegetates. Death was invented to replace the vegetables with fighters and learners, to get the old soldiers out of the front line and replace them with shock troops.
     The next major step in this war — or process of colonisation — was the invention of consciousness: that is to say, of a group of faculties set apart from the instinctive drives. And their purpose? To observe and record and keep files. Consciousness might be described as the life force's secret police organisation. And, like the secret police in any totalitarian state, it is servant to the government — a powerful and formidable servant, but a servant nevertheless. Consciousness was a late evolutionary development because it was a long time before life could afford the energy for such an experiment. The instincts pay attention only to what deeply concerns them. The job of consciousness is to pay attention to everything, to keep watch on the surface movements of the world of matter. Most of the information it accumulates in this way is repetitive and useless, but occasionally its non-stop vigilance pays off, and a few random observations coalesce to form a new piece of knowledge.
     Consciousness has one immense disadvantage: it divides life against itself. When life was confined to the instinctive levels, its drives were simple: its aim was to increase its foothold in the realm of matter. Consciousness is concerned with superficial problems. The secret police know nothing about the ultimate aims of the government, about its economic and foreign policies. This does not matter so long as the government retains a firm control. But the success of consciousness has been so spectacular that it has become a kind of government department in itself. And this is dangerous. The danger has been immeasurably increased in the past few centuries. The invention of writing gave immense impetus to human evolution, and changed man's vision of himself. There is no evidence that Isaac Newton was more intelligent than Moses or Confucius, but he had subtler methods of storing and utilising his knowledge. As a result of three centuries of Newtonian science, man has become king of his earthly castle. He no longer takes life and death for granted, as his ancestors did. He looks out on the universe with the eye of a master. But consciousness is not the master; it is the servant. It lacks the power and drive of the instinctive life forces. Left to itself, it tends to become passive and bewildered, alienated from the world of instinct and the world of matter. It is a master who has lost all feeling of mastery.
     Human evolution has advanced too fast; its processes have become too complicated for its own good. But they can be simplified. Consciousness can be turned inward, to the understanding of the vital processes and the evolutionary drives.
     The chief enemy of life is not death, but forgetfulness, stupidity. We lose direction too easily. This is the great penalty that life paid for descending into matter: a kind of partial amnesia.
     But it is the next step in the argument that is the crucial one. The universe is full of all kinds of energies. Matter is energy — the most resistant and uncompromising kind of energy. And if life has succeeded in achieving some degree of conquest of matter, is it absurd to suppose that it has not succeeded with more malleable forms of energy?
     We are back to David Foster's notion of an intelligent universe, but now it is unnecessary to ask, Who does the coding? We know the answer. The force of life itself, which has been conducting its campaign for colonisation for more than a billion years....
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "Man's Latent Powers: Glimpses," pp. 577-579.

     The 'how' is unanswerable; we can only assume that the force of life began its conquest of matter by somehow splitting itself into units, each of which felt 'separate' from the rest of the universe. Chesterton answers the 'why': 'So that each thing that obeys the law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.' Which means simply that without individuality, life would not build up the same desperate force. The man of the crowd is a weakling; people who need people are the stupidest people in the world. And so the basic paradox of human nature seems to be inherent in the force of life itself: without challenge or crisis, it takes things easy, and collapses into mediocrity. So far, all life on earth has had to be driven forward, as slaves once had to be whipped into battle. It has never possessed positive purpose — only the negative one of staying alive and avoiding pain. 'Evil is physical pain,' said Leonardo, going to the heart of the matter. The old theological question 'Why evil?' is answered by the recognition that without evil, there would be universal mediocrity, terminating in death. It is only at this point in the earth's history that this has ceased to be wholly true. With the development of art, science, philosophy, man has acquired the possibility of a positive purpose towards which he can drive forward, instead of being driven from behind. (It is true that religion has always been an expression of this purpose; but religion was content with paradox: the assertion that 'the world' must somehow be denied by 'the spirit,' without trying to understand why this should be necessary.) If positive purpose could be established as the human driving force, it would be a turning point in evolution, for it is many times stronger than the negative purpose of avoiding pain. A man can do things out of love or enthusiasm that would be impossible out of fear. His chief problem at the moment is to escape the narrowness of everyday triviality and grasp the nature of his goal; this, in turn, will require the development of what Blake called 'imagination,' but which it would be more accurate to call Faculty X.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., p. 580.