Life Energy and Organic Evolution

They all depend on the conversion of food into energy. When metabolism stops, death ensues with rigor mortis. Alongside prana, or life energy associated with breathing, we find the energy of transformation, regeneration and reproduction which in this terminology takes the name of kundalini. Finally, fohat is the term to indicate the movement energy responsible for the evolution of the cosmos. In the Indian tradition, mediated by Western theosophy, prana, fohat and kundalini constitute three forms of that unique energy which in its essence is Life and which crosses with different intensities all the realities of the Cosmos. In the conception we present here, life is not the characteristic of a system, but is a type of energy that expresses itself through the three aforementioned forms and which is present, in a more or less latent state, in all systems or realities of the Cosmos. Like every form of energy, this too is linked to a special type of evolution that we will define as organic, exactly as kinetic and potential energy are linked to a type of evolution that is usually defined as mechanical.

Mechanisms and Organisms

Given the previous analyses, we will define as an organism a system, that is a set of independent but interacting elements, which is: self-organizing: in the system there are ordering and limiting influences coming from the elements themselves; endowed with metabolism, i.e., capable of generating energy and getting rid of waste material; endowed with reproduction or regeneration energy, i.e., capable of regenerating part of the system itself and also of reproducing it under certain conditions; endowed with the capacity for evolution or environmental adaptation, i.e., sensory and receptive capacity relative to the environment and, at the same time, capacity to transform and adapt to achieve a determined objective. We note how in this definition no reference is made to the physical connection of the elements belonging to the set or to their relative assembly. The only requirement that is made is that these elements interact with each other. According to the definition provided above, the Italian State is an organism whose elements are Italian citizens. The elements of this organism are capable of formulating internal laws for the organization of the state itself and an executive potentially capable of applying them and having them respected. The Italian State is capable of producing and consuming energy according to productive cycles, an approximate estimate of which may be the gross domestic product in the nation, freeing itself of waste material and thus having its own metabolism. It is endowed with a regeneration capacity by which every year in the face of numerous deaths it is capable of producing as many new citizens and is capable of environmental adaptation given by interaction with other Nations. As in every organism, the discontinuity of one or more of the characteristics reported above can lead to a crisis of the Nation and, in irremediable cases, even to its death. Like the case of the Italian State, similarly a company falls within the definition we have given of organism. Similar is the case of a single family. In nothing different from an organism is a religious movement, as Saint Paul attests in a famous passage from the first letter to the Corinthians. For the moment we will limit ourselves to these few examples which, however, are easy to generalize and abstract. Contemporary science has generally been frightened by such a definition and has preferred to replace it with others, certainly more rigorous in definition, but which however have even enlarged the field of those systems that fell into the category of organisms. We, however, have no preconceptions of any kind in this regard. All the examples we have provided in the previous paragraphs we admit tranquilly as organic systems, i.e., systems that share some fundamental evolutionary characteristics with those biological systems that we are commonly accustomed to call organisms.

Entropy and Syntropy

An important element to discriminate an organism from a mechanism, or, as we shall better see, an organic evolution from a mechanical evolution, is that of considering the entropy and its equivalent of syntropy of a system. To keep it simple, we can say that entropy consists in a measure relative to the distribution of energy. Given a system, the configuration at maximum entropy is that in which energy is distributed as uniformly as possible and that at minimum entropy is that in which such distribution is as concentrated as possible. In the current state all natural phenomena proceed in a direction of entropy increase, i.e., towards a uniform distribution of energy in the Universe which thus tends towards thermal equilibrium.