The most fascinating thing about life.

Have you ever thought of that question and tried to answer it?

In the Bhagavad-Gita such a question is asked. In that book the answer given is, the most fascinating thing of life is that every human comes knowing that he has to die someday, that he, is a mortal. Yet he lives life like as if he will live forever.

There is, of course, more to that answerer than meets the eye. That answer has a philosophy hidden behind it that makes living life easy/peaceful.

For me on the other hand the answer is drastically different.

For me the most fascinating thing about life is how we function. The most fascinating thing about life is that the living are complex live machines that are run by nothing more than a group of nonliving proteins!

I mean just think about it will you. Take a moment and think about it. Look at yourself for example you are complex organism and you define yourself as alive or living and what makes you run? What makes you tick? What governs the functioning of your body? What is your source code?

Without doubt it is nothing other than your DNA. You are a slave to your  DNA. If that is still not hitting you hard than let me try my luck explaining a bit further.

 Your DNA is nothing more than a group of proteins that as such doesn’t make any sense what so ever. It does nothing more than sit there in one place doing absolutely nothing unless some other random proteins come to it asking it for a decision to be made about something. It’s unimaginably small to look at but amazingly long in length. On its own and even in a cell for all practical purposes its nonliving. Just because it’s got a fancy name ‘DNA’ or it’s a ‘protein’ does not make it living. And this non-living tiny seemingly insignificant thing is what is running you, a living or should I say a complex living object.

Sounds cool?

Yea, maybe.

But actually it should be a bit scary. Basically you have no control. This DNA decides everything. Environment plays a role by only supporting that which is already decided by your DNA that’s it and promoting it. Don’t be misled to assume that the environment has a major role here. No it does not work that way.

The DNA decides everything, at what rate you will grow, how tall you will be, when you will hit puberty, how much body hair and where you will have body hair, what disease you will be most susceptible to, how much of your diet will influence you. Yea pretty much everything.

Pretty fascinating.

 The most fascinating thing about life.

After knowing that one should be humbled that we all, all of life is run on some form of nucleic acid. We all are beings that are run by this nonliving source code. It brings in to question the reassessment of the already vague definition of what is living or life and thus therefore by default if death is in fact real?

If you ask me, the border that divides living and nonliving is in fact much finer that what it actually appears.

Every living thing in the world is made of cells. And every cell has DNA.

Do you remember you school definition of cell?

A cell is the basic functional and structural unit of life. Meaning it’s a biological robot. As such it’s too insignificant to feel or experience anything.

So it amazing but it’s too dumb. And yet, when millions of them come together how is it that they together create something else altogether that is capable of creating ‘thought’ and has the ability to experience?

As such it is dumb but together it’s a supercomputer? How the hell is that possible? My brain just can’t warp itself around that.

 What is cell made up of at the grassroots level? Basically chemical elements, right?

Chemicals are non living. Yet when they come together to form a cell we say its living how is that? Is it because it has a DNA?

Nah that can’t be the case.

Mitochondrion has DNA too. But it’s not living.

Viruses have DNA or RNA and they are basically zombies.

Everything in the universe is made up of the same thing. Does that mean that the universe is a big fat cell? Is the universe alive?

If at the grass root level there is in fact so much confusion if things are alive or non living how can we be assigning the word living to ourselves? If we are not living can we die?

Life therefore cannot mean living and nonliving. It must be something else. Perhaps information. Information carried by DNA that helps a group of processes and reactions to occur.

The most fascinating thing about life, we know…yet… we don’t know…yet we act like we know.

The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, obviously, because we know nothing to start with.

----Raghuvir Keni