The Mysteries Of Life

Now that we are getting closer to Winter, I do not get out and about as much as I am used to during the Summer months.

This is perhaps a natural consequence of the fact that as a disabled person I have to be a little more careful about preserving my body heat as the weather gets colder.

Whether or not this changes the way in which I listen to what my carers have to say to me is an interesting point, as I suppose I do pay more attention to what they have to tell me about what is happening in the world.

This morning, what sticks in my mind from my conversation with my carer is something that she must have picked up from some television program recently, that we share more of our DNA with mushrooms than with any other form of vegetable matter.

On the surface, this is perhaps a rather startling revelation. But thinking about this, perhaps it is not so surprising, since it appears that we share much of our genetic makeup with the plant kingdom in any case.

Perhaps we would benefit from a greater awareness of the extent to which life in all its forms on this planet has much in common and much more than mere surface resemblance might reveal.

Perhaps life itself is entirely interrelated and we are all simply manifestations of the same strange chemical accidents that have led to our sense of consciousness.

That we appear to have self-consciousness may in itself simply be a factor of the complexity to which we have evolved over millions of years, and it is an extraordinarily interesting subject to contemplate.

Perhaps it is only by taking a broadly philosophical approach to our existence that we can draw any conclusions at all from this strange fact, if indeed it is a fact at all.

I have nothing to make me doubt the reality of this information, and it sort of makes sense as a broadly general proposition. that all of life on this planet should share something in common seems to make sense, although perhaps through this fact alone it may be revealing that I am not someone that has a position of faith from which my world view is derived.

To a great extent I have admiration for people that can have a faith position from which to construct their moral perspectives on the world, but I do not. And in some respects, perhaps this is a more challenging position to take than accepting a faith position.

Perhaps it is my education that is the determining factor in my story here, in that I was trained for three years at University College London, the Godless College in Gower Street, where I studied for a degree in philosophy.

Interestingly, UCL was the first institution in the United Kingdom that admitted women, and also people of faiths other than Christian.

It is perhaps something that is not remembered these days, but the Oxford and Cambridge universities were only open to practicing Christians, and whilst Christianity has been an important developmental factor in our cultural and social history, it has also placed limitations on whole sections of our multifaceted population.