The Human Placental Mammal
[The Medieval Schoolmen gave much earnest consideration to a being who had life from itself, i.e., a se. Such a being was said, in Latin, to possess the attribute aseitas, in English, aseity. This author names Aseity as the Mother Nature Self of the Cosmos.]
Strictly speaking, all biological cell reproduction is asexual being brought about by a continual fission process of one mother cell dividing in a complex process into two new identical daughter mother cells. This process is called mitosis. Initially the propagation of primitive living species followed this pattern. After a certain stage was reached, biological evolution could only continue and progress by means of distinct new individuals who were limited by spaced time.
Sexual propagation differs from the above asexual reproduction. Sexual propagation involves the fusion of two special sex cells called gametes (the female egg and the male sperm) to form a zygote. Though their nuclei fuse together to form a single nucleus, the individual chromosomes within the nucleus remain distinct.
Gametes and zygotes share the selflife of already existing human beings. Cells such as gametes whose nuclei contain only one set of chromosomes are called haploid. Zygotes whose nuclei contain two sets of chromosomes are said to be diploid. The zygote is genetically different from the diploid cells of either parent. It has a combination of both of their genes and becomes a new specimen of embryonic human being.
A zygote has twice as many chromosomes as a gamete. Hence the need for a special type of nuclear division process, called meiosis, whereby the chromosome diploid number of propagative sex-cells is halved to form haploid numbered gametes. When two gametes are united in fertilization, the normal chromosome diploid number is restored in the zygote.
The normal human is blueprinted at conception with twenty three pairs of live chromosomes, one of each pair from its mother and one of each pair from its father. Twenty two of these pairs are called autosomes being identical in size and shape. The other pair of sex chromosomes differ in women from men. Normal women have two identical, relatively large X chromosomes, whilst normal men have one large X joined to a comparatively small Y chromosome. In the normal fertilized ovum there is always one maternal X chromosome together with either an X or a Y paternal contribution. As a rule two X-s result in a female and an X and a Y in a male
Implanted in the womb, the new zygote is specifically called an embryo. Technically, biologists generally experiment with frozen zygotes, not embryos. After seven weeks of implantation in the womb, the embryo is usually referred to as a foetus. It is deliberate deception to invoke the use of emotive language and speak of the child in the womb. It is simply a human foetus. Nothing more. Language analysis would distinguish between the individual identity of a human being and the generic abstractions human being and human becoming.
The development of living human being from conception to birth reveals all the stages of the evolution of physical life on earth. Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny. There is an observable overall resemblance between evolutionary processes and embryonic development. The embryos of higher or more complex animals resemble the embryos of simpler or less complex forms. The first stages of all vertebrate embryos bear extraordinary similarities, and differentiating a human embryo from that of a frog, fish, chicken, or pig is not easy. To call human embryos sacred persons, whilst labelling their look-alikes just as mere animal embryos and usually of very little consequence is open to question and refutation. They all share selflife according to their genes.
In a woman’s ovaries long before her menstruation begins at puberty, there are live ova or eggs (gametes) already genetically programmed to produce live eggs within other live eggs ad infinitum. Every ovum is biologically sacred. Though a live virgin ova is not yet a human being, it is part of and shares the integral selflife of an already existing human placental mammal.
It might well be considered as a human becoming. It does possess haploid human being and is potentially capable, if given appropriate biochemical or biophysical stimulation of becoming a new individual human being, either identical to her as a clone or if given added conceivable genetic material from a male sperm, to develop into a unique distinct human being having a combination of both parents’ gene-traits. When such a latter biune concep- tioning occurs, there is a two-in-one fusioning of pre-existing self-functioning live haploid human gametes. Two live haploid human gametes fuse together to form or beget one live diploid human zygote. Arithmetically, two ones become one two. When does the enwombed offspring of a human being become a new distinct self-functioning human being? Physically it does so only when integrally separated from its mother after birth.
There still prevails much confusion and contrived ignorance in popular thinking and teaching in relating the traditional but unscientific Theology of the past to the verifiable realities of present-day embryology. Many well-meaning adherents of Christianity would still like to believe that an outside divine male omnipotence breathes into and infuses the individualized soul of a new human person into living matter subsequently to, or at the moment of conception, when the genetic material in a living human sperm gamete fuses with the genetic material in the nucleus of a living human egg gamete.
Such notions may have been necessary to accommodate past theological reasonings but today they are scientifically gratuitous. Freely asserted, freely denied. Once conception has occurred, the immanent Aseity continues to breathe the programmed growth of additional more complex biune selflife within this new identity. She animates both live gametes, egg and sperm. She also animates the live zygote when the live gametes fuse to effect the gene-blueprint of a future human being. There is only one Mother Self of the Cosmos who shares her own personal selflife with her spaced time otherselves.
This writer never uses the word soul. He prefers to use the grammatical self, both as a proper noun and also as a reflexive pronoun. He knows what self is by conscious experience, being the dictating director of his own self’s functioning feedback system. The traditional distinction between body and soul is better replaced with the experienced biunity of the physical and the psychical, of a force-field togetherness spirit continuum and its set of discrete quantized particles of matter. If the concept of an individual soul is abandoned, then questions do not arise concerning its immortality.
Aseity exists without beginning or end. She IS. She is SELFLIFE. Her maternal self knows infinite personal fecundity and filiation in her collective self-other consciousness which becomes differentiated and individualized in resonant spaced time human materializations. The human self, as a living image otherself of Aseity never dies. It only undergoes a new dimensioning in her collective self-other consciousness. The latter exists before physical sexual coition and conception’s union of a living human egg with a living human sperm and continues its becomingness after death’s physical dissolution.
A pregnant human placental mammal can be classified as a self-and-other-containing biunity of distinct units in biophysical union. It is a self-other-functioning feedback-system whose unique functioning self directs the distinct relational self-other-feedback functionings of both subsystems of mother-self and her embryonic or foetal other-self. The embryo or foetus is consubstantial with its mother. There is only one totally shared self in the system which ultimately undergoes a form of aseistic biological fission.
As long as the embryo or foetus is guest in its mother’s womb, it is part of her selflife and is not a new self-functioning human being having individual rights. Nature ordains that it’s life or death is solely the responsibility of the mother who, as a placental mammal, makes the decision who can enter her body and who can remain to grow within her with her own selflife. Only with the cutting of the umbilical cord is the new born offspring physically separated from the mother-self and becomes a new unique individual, though still theoretically dependent on her mammary system for nourishment. There are now two physically distinct spaced time human self-functioning beings.
Men, desirous of continuing their usurped patriarchal hegemony, need a steady supply of male offspring. They demand access to woman’s body by fair means or foul. Such right of entry (ius in corpore) was once a strictly enforced decree of Christian Canon Law. It applied to both parties in Matrimony. Once a woman became pregnant, the male partner considered himself, or was made to consider himself, the part-owner or co-parent of the growing human embryo or foetus. It would seem that, ideally, in Mother Nature’s sophisticated plan, male superior strength was not intended to be used to dominate or rape woman, but to be at her service to protect and to provide for the care and sustenance of the mother and her offspring. It general terms, it appears that of all creatures, only male man maltreats his mate.
The one-sided motherless patriarchal culture, from which society is slowly being freed, has served its purpose of harvesting distinction and self-destruction, fratricide and genocide. Whilst woman is a begetter and bearer of life, fighting, pillaging, raping, destroying, killing others are activities which seem to come naturally to the sons of men and are manifestations of the Motherless Child Syndrome. The noblest way a man could die was in battle, killing his fellowman - for woman it was in childbirth. Mule minded males are reluctant to leave to women the managing of women’s life-sharing business.
To be Aseity’s evolutionary unit otherselves we need to become real distinct materialized do-it-yourself individuals. As such, in our male fertilized human species, the unity of the We-Us-Ours collective self-other consciousness in the Mother Selflife Set is undone. Such new I-me-mine privatization from the self-functioning whole carries with it the sentence and certainty of physical death. The price of singularity is mortality. The children of men are born to die.
It is the being of Aseity’s one divine Self that is becomingly reflected in every one of her other self-other-functioning feedback-systems. These echoing images subsist resonantly in her Unified Field of Existential Relativity. They all share existence in the spaced time evolution of her self-other-life. Self-development through otherness is the characteristic of all living things.
A woman’s live ovum, whilst seeking and enjoying self-survival, is a self-functioning system of real haploid human being. While alive, it struggles as vehemently to survive at a molecular or microscopic level as does any self-developing fertilized version on the embryonic or foetal level. Self-survival and adaptational self-development are basic to all living self-functioning systems. There is one more part to such self systems over and above the mere matter of which they are composed. If they are to exist and grow as self-functioning feedback-systems, they must from the very first moment of any such existence, already respire the vital breath of Aseity’s force-field togetherness spirit which imparts to the growing system as a whole an entirely new and extraordinary dimension.
A chemically induced self-fertilization of a Queen Bee’s eggs is normal. It is physically possible to do the same with frogs’ eggs by simply pricking them. Such parthenogenesis would ensure a continuity of genetically identical new individuals or clones. If other-fertilized by a male sperm they would be genetically different. In both situations the self-developing new individual would be modified by whatever predetermining genetic data it possessed. In aseistic evolution, Mother Nature selects what fertilized individuals best suit the purposes of her self-functioning systems.
As an integral self-other-functioning-feedback-system Nature does not abhor abortion. Indeed she practises it in unique trial-and-error techniques whereby she gets rid of what does not suit her progressive intentions. Menstruation can be understood as the visible showing of the abortive ending of one life-and-death egg cycle and the expectant beginning of a new one. This periodic monthly aborting or wasting of unfertilized once living, but now disintegrated human ova is really no different biologically from wasting aborted fertilized ones. Observed at the molecular level, they would be seen to struggle in biophysical agitation as they experienced the distress of dying.
Few persons can relate with any sympathy for or empathy with the living and dying of such virgin self-functioning haploid female human being. Many men, with immature minds, fear such menstrual blood-flow in women and are generally embarrassed even to think about it. Add some new live haploid male genetic material to the haploid material of a live ovum in sexuality’s intercourse, and now having lost its pristine virginity the latter becomes the sacred object of rigorous male juridical and ecclesiastical concern.
Vocal anti-abortion advocates speak about the Right to Life. What do they understand by Life? Has a fertilized egg more right to life than an unfertilized one? Empirical Science in Biology observes and studies the phenomena of Life. It does not presume to define precisely what life is but only to describe it. We humans know what life is by living. For most academics, the essence and existence of life, and particularly human selflife, is a mystery. For this writer, Aseity or Selflife is Existential Self-Other Relativity “I Am ↔Thou Art”.
Aseity begets her other selves in spaced time. She shares her selflife with them. Begotten physically as individuals, their bodies are destined to eventually disintegrate in observance of Nature’s Law of Entropy. No human being has the right to biological life. All life is shared life. The bodies of all human beings are predestined to die. They are born stamped with a use-by date.
Every human being is called to forsake its mortal singular human I-me-mine sole self in order to participate in the plural divine We-Us-Ours before or after death or both. This is consonant with the self-sacrificial nature of orgasmic sexuality. Sexuality knows its most meaningful and profound reality in involvement with religion and selflife experience. This theme was introduced on Page 66 and bears repeating and further development.
Personal development and self-transcendence through sexual relations can and should have sacrificial connotations. To sacrifice should mean to make sacred in an act of reverential worship. For sexuality to perfect a new cultural and religious species in evolutionary ascent, we must apply such ideas of sacrifice analogously to personal relationships involving a self and its other. Unless the I-self's grain of selflife seed die, there remains but a sterile "me and mine", but if it submits to a psychical metamorphosis on encountering a beloved "you", then it enjoys a more abundant selflife as "we-us-ours" in the oneness of existential togetherness.
In the orgasm climax of sexual union there should be experienced the ecstatic pleasure of a mystical death. Biology's sex-functioning introduces limits bringing eventual death to the individual's body and likewise psycho- logically, there should be exacted a similar transition with respect to the individual self's conscious personal life. This is the self-sacrificial price that has to be paid for Nature's selective growth in unity and complexity. Sexual fertility, with its potential for an increased quality and diversity in the fruits of its union, requires ultimately the sacrificial surrendering of the flesh-masked personal individuality of both its participants to knowingly experience love’s togetherness as We-Us-Ours.
As a cosmic symbol and in the psychical realm of affective interpersonal relations and true mystical experience, human sexuality can be raised to levels of meaningfulness which totally transcend its mere biological propagative significance. Just as the ingesting of bread and wine can be transubstantiated as a Sacrament from simple food and drink to be re-interpreted as a sanctifying Eucharistic Communion, so also can the physical biune expression of human love be made the Sacrament of divine encounter and incorporation into the Trinity of We-Us-Ours. The material Eucharist is not intended for bodily metabolism. Likewise, sexual Communion can render procreation of new individuals unnecessary and artificial contraception both valid and advisable. Gluttony and lust are retrogressive and unbecoming. As the Sacrament of Existential Self-Other Relativity, sexual intercourse must always leave itself open to effect a more meaningful and sanctifying divine-human togetherness.
When does a clone or a fertilized ovum become a human person with legal rights? That is up to those human persons who define themselves to be rights-possessing human persons, to let their self-projecting reasoning decide and then to legislate accordingly. Naming a zygote a person does not make it one.
Persons are what persons think and say they are. Pro-life advocates like to empathize with the embryo or foetus. What they are actually doing is simply raising the concept of an embryo to the level of complexity of a human being and lowering the complexity of a human being to the level of an embryo.
When does a human being become a person? Some cultures say at eighteen or twenty one years of age. Some say at puberty; some say at birth or at conception or two weeks or more afterwards. Some jurists in patriarchal societies would deny women the title of even being a person and hence not having any human rights whilst males in their wombs would be legally sacred. When does a human being become a legal person? The answer is simple. When it is given a Registered Legal Name by the appropriate legal authority.
What is a human person? For the Latins of antiquity, persona (a feminine word) was the mask that actors wore. Who are human persons? Human persons are Aseity’s otherselves, her dramatis personae, the actors, masked with spaced time, of her two-in-one-act dialogue “I AM” ↔ “You are”.
Scientists can cope quite adequately with giving names to past, present and possible future observable entities. They know what they are talking about when they speak about cellular and corporal generic human being and also individual human beings. They are dealing with a posteriori facts. They are not concerned with intangible and contrived fictional transcendent realities like a hypothetical human soul. It is not for empirical science to define what constitutes a person from metaphysical, political, legal and moral points of view. On the other hand, many biased expounders of bioethics use completely arbitrary a priori fictional considerations in defining their own terms.
Restructured Set Theory can enlighten philosophers about the reality of unity and infinity. Existential Self-Other Relativity in Modern Science can provide the purveyors of food for thoughtful human beings with consistent foundations on which to build for the future. It can also remove troublesome enigmas. When does a human being become a person?
The answer to this question has been one of the main themes of this book. The author has allowed the Grammar of person speech to speak for its self and to be definitive in this regard. Users of the pronouns “I and We” are first persons. Those named “Thou and You” are second persons. “She, He, They” are third persons. A human being who is able to say, or to think, “I am” or “We are” is a person. A human being who is known and called “You” is a person. Human beings, spoken about as “They”, are persons. The Personal Selflife of Aseity is a Trinity of Divine and spaced time human Persons.
With reflexive attention, a pregnant woman knows her own selflife now includes that of the foetus in her womb. Her former singular “I am” becomes eventually aware of other selflife within. She has a personal experience of biunity’s two-in-oneness. She can monologue with her otherself as a “you” because the latter is sharing now in her plural person selflife of “We”.
Though religious right-to-life arguments against abortion are understandable in the shadowy light and specious terms of much of their traditional patriarchal western culture, they are basically legalistic and emotional, and in some respects are quite inconsistent and lacking in scientific logic. Opposition to abortion and linking it with medical research involving frozen zygotes (incorrectly termed embryos) as with stem-cells, is more often than not a misguided ego-trip by irrational over-zealous fundamentalist protesters rather than a genuine understanding and concern for human gametes and zygotes.
Bioethicists are implicitly claiming to know the scientific mind of their God when they accuse scientists of playing the role of their God in the laboratory. Aseity, who is SELFLIFE, has played god successfully for billions of years in life’s evolution here on her Planet Earth. She and her living image otherself, the human placental mammal, are quite capable of carrying on the good work.
This author would hate to find himself in a woman’s drastic situation of having to choose about terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Preventive systems using some sort of artificial contraception eliminate the necessity of having to make such decisions. It is quite pragmatic and logically acceptable, however, to both sides of those engaged in the abortion debate to allow the living human female ovum and the living human male sperm to disintegrate and die separately instead, in their hapless and helpless live state of being mere haploid human gametes.
The author has no intention of passing moral judgment on abortion, nor to condemn women who terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Natural Law ordains that the continued selflife of an embryo or foetus is the sole responsibility of the mother. It is pre-eminently woman’s business. It is man’s business to love and worship his partner, to protect and to provide for her and her offspring.
With reverential worship of her charms,
man finds his being’s good in woman’s arms.
The decision to terminate a pregnancy is hers. The decision to abort all life on the Planet of Mother Earth with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of global mass destruction is still on political operation tables for bloody-minded men to decide on and then try to implement. ■
[The Medieval Schoolmen gave much earnest consideration to a being who had life from itself, i.e., a se. Such a being was said, in Latin, to possess the attribute aseitas, in English, aseity. This author names Aseity as the Mother Nature Self of the Cosmos.]
Strictly speaking, all biological cell reproduction is asexual being brought about by a continual fission process of one mother cell dividing in a complex process into two new identical daughter mother cells. This process is called mitosis. Initially the propagation of primitive living species followed this pattern. After a certain stage was reached, biological evolution could only continue and progress by means of distinct new individuals who were limited by spaced time.
Sexual propagation differs from the above asexual reproduction. Sexual propagation involves the fusion of two special sex cells called gametes (the female egg and the male sperm) to form a zygote. Though their nuclei fuse together to form a single nucleus, the individual chromosomes within the nucleus remain distinct.
Gametes and zygotes share the selflife of already existing human beings. Cells such as gametes whose nuclei contain only one set of chromosomes are called haploid. Zygotes whose nuclei contain two sets of chromosomes are said to be diploid. The zygote is genetically different from the diploid cells of either parent. It has a combination of both of their genes and becomes a new specimen of embryonic human being.
A zygote has twice as many chromosomes as a gamete. Hence the need for a special type of nuclear division process, called meiosis, whereby the chromosome diploid number of propagative sex-cells is halved to form haploid numbered gametes. When two gametes are united in fertilization, the normal chromosome diploid number is restored in the zygote.
The normal human is blueprinted at conception with twenty three pairs of live chromosomes, one of each pair from its mother and one of each pair from its father. Twenty two of these pairs are called autosomes being identical in size and shape. The other pair of sex chromosomes differ in women from men. Normal women have two identical, relatively large X chromosomes, whilst normal men have one large X joined to a comparatively small Y chromosome. In the normal fertilized ovum there is always one maternal X chromosome together with either an X or a Y paternal contribution. As a rule two X-s result in a female and an X and a Y in a male
Implanted in the womb, the new zygote is specifically called an embryo. Technically, biologists generally experiment with frozen zygotes, not embryos. After seven weeks of implantation in the womb, the embryo is usually referred to as a foetus. It is deliberate deception to invoke the use of emotive language and speak of the child in the womb. It is simply a human foetus. Nothing more. Language analysis would distinguish between the individual identity of a human being and the generic abstractions human being and human becoming.
The development of living human being from conception to birth reveals all the stages of the evolution of physical life on earth. Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny. There is an observable overall resemblance between evolutionary processes and embryonic development. The embryos of higher or more complex animals resemble the embryos of simpler or less complex forms. The first stages of all vertebrate embryos bear extraordinary similarities, and differentiating a human embryo from that of a frog, fish, chicken, or pig is not easy. To call human embryos sacred persons, whilst labelling their look-alikes just as mere animal embryos and usually of very little consequence is open to question and refutation. They all share selflife according to their genes.
In a woman’s ovaries long before her menstruation begins at puberty, there are live ova or eggs (gametes) already genetically programmed to produce live eggs within other live eggs ad infinitum. Every ovum is biologically sacred. Though a live virgin ova is not yet a human being, it is part of and shares the integral selflife of an already existing human placental mammal.
It might well be considered as a human becoming. It does possess haploid human being and is potentially capable, if given appropriate biochemical or biophysical stimulation of becoming a new individual human being, either identical to her as a clone or if given added conceivable genetic material from a male sperm, to develop into a unique distinct human being having a combination of both parents’ gene-traits. When such a latter biune concep- tioning occurs, there is a two-in-one fusioning of pre-existing self-functioning live haploid human gametes. Two live haploid human gametes fuse together to form or beget one live diploid human zygote. Arithmetically, two ones become one two. When does the enwombed offspring of a human being become a new distinct self-functioning human being? Physically it does so only when integrally separated from its mother after birth.
There still prevails much confusion and contrived ignorance in popular thinking and teaching in relating the traditional but unscientific Theology of the past to the verifiable realities of present-day embryology. Many well-meaning adherents of Christianity would still like to believe that an outside divine male omnipotence breathes into and infuses the individualized soul of a new human person into living matter subsequently to, or at the moment of conception, when the genetic material in a living human sperm gamete fuses with the genetic material in the nucleus of a living human egg gamete.
Such notions may have been necessary to accommodate past theological reasonings but today they are scientifically gratuitous. Freely asserted, freely denied. Once conception has occurred, the immanent Aseity continues to breathe the programmed growth of additional more complex biune selflife within this new identity. She animates both live gametes, egg and sperm. She also animates the live zygote when the live gametes fuse to effect the gene-blueprint of a future human being. There is only one Mother Self of the Cosmos who shares her own personal selflife with her spaced time otherselves.
This writer never uses the word soul. He prefers to use the grammatical self, both as a proper noun and also as a reflexive pronoun. He knows what self is by conscious experience, being the dictating director of his own self’s functioning feedback system. The traditional distinction between body and soul is better replaced with the experienced biunity of the physical and the psychical, of a force-field togetherness spirit continuum and its set of discrete quantized particles of matter. If the concept of an individual soul is abandoned, then questions do not arise concerning its immortality.
Aseity exists without beginning or end. She IS. She is SELFLIFE. Her maternal self knows infinite personal fecundity and filiation in her collective self-other consciousness which becomes differentiated and individualized in resonant spaced time human materializations. The human self, as a living image otherself of Aseity never dies. It only undergoes a new dimensioning in her collective self-other consciousness. The latter exists before physical sexual coition and conception’s union of a living human egg with a living human sperm and continues its becomingness after death’s physical dissolution.
A pregnant human placental mammal can be classified as a self-and-other-containing biunity of distinct units in biophysical union. It is a self-other-functioning feedback-system whose unique functioning self directs the distinct relational self-other-feedback functionings of both subsystems of mother-self and her embryonic or foetal other-self. The embryo or foetus is consubstantial with its mother. There is only one totally shared self in the system which ultimately undergoes a form of aseistic biological fission.
As long as the embryo or foetus is guest in its mother’s womb, it is part of her selflife and is not a new self-functioning human being having individual rights. Nature ordains that it’s life or death is solely the responsibility of the mother who, as a placental mammal, makes the decision who can enter her body and who can remain to grow within her with her own selflife. Only with the cutting of the umbilical cord is the new born offspring physically separated from the mother-self and becomes a new unique individual, though still theoretically dependent on her mammary system for nourishment. There are now two physically distinct spaced time human self-functioning beings.
Men, desirous of continuing their usurped patriarchal hegemony, need a steady supply of male offspring. They demand access to woman’s body by fair means or foul. Such right of entry (ius in corpore) was once a strictly enforced decree of Christian Canon Law. It applied to both parties in Matrimony. Once a woman became pregnant, the male partner considered himself, or was made to consider himself, the part-owner or co-parent of the growing human embryo or foetus. It would seem that, ideally, in Mother Nature’s sophisticated plan, male superior strength was not intended to be used to dominate or rape woman, but to be at her service to protect and to provide for the care and sustenance of the mother and her offspring. It general terms, it appears that of all creatures, only male man maltreats his mate.
The one-sided motherless patriarchal culture, from which society is slowly being freed, has served its purpose of harvesting distinction and self-destruction, fratricide and genocide. Whilst woman is a begetter and bearer of life, fighting, pillaging, raping, destroying, killing others are activities which seem to come naturally to the sons of men and are manifestations of the Motherless Child Syndrome. The noblest way a man could die was in battle, killing his fellowman - for woman it was in childbirth. Mule minded males are reluctant to leave to women the managing of women’s life-sharing business.
To be Aseity’s evolutionary unit otherselves we need to become real distinct materialized do-it-yourself individuals. As such, in our male fertilized human species, the unity of the We-Us-Ours collective self-other consciousness in the Mother Selflife Set is undone. Such new I-me-mine privatization from the self-functioning whole carries with it the sentence and certainty of physical death. The price of singularity is mortality. The children of men are born to die.
It is the being of Aseity’s one divine Self that is becomingly reflected in every one of her other self-other-functioning feedback-systems. These echoing images subsist resonantly in her Unified Field of Existential Relativity. They all share existence in the spaced time evolution of her self-other-life. Self-development through otherness is the characteristic of all living things.
A woman’s live ovum, whilst seeking and enjoying self-survival, is a self-functioning system of real haploid human being. While alive, it struggles as vehemently to survive at a molecular or microscopic level as does any self-developing fertilized version on the embryonic or foetal level. Self-survival and adaptational self-development are basic to all living self-functioning systems. There is one more part to such self systems over and above the mere matter of which they are composed. If they are to exist and grow as self-functioning feedback-systems, they must from the very first moment of any such existence, already respire the vital breath of Aseity’s force-field togetherness spirit which imparts to the growing system as a whole an entirely new and extraordinary dimension.
A chemically induced self-fertilization of a Queen Bee’s eggs is normal. It is physically possible to do the same with frogs’ eggs by simply pricking them. Such parthenogenesis would ensure a continuity of genetically identical new individuals or clones. If other-fertilized by a male sperm they would be genetically different. In both situations the self-developing new individual would be modified by whatever predetermining genetic data it possessed. In aseistic evolution, Mother Nature selects what fertilized individuals best suit the purposes of her self-functioning systems.
As an integral self-other-functioning-feedback-system Nature does not abhor abortion. Indeed she practises it in unique trial-and-error techniques whereby she gets rid of what does not suit her progressive intentions. Menstruation can be understood as the visible showing of the abortive ending of one life-and-death egg cycle and the expectant beginning of a new one. This periodic monthly aborting or wasting of unfertilized once living, but now disintegrated human ova is really no different biologically from wasting aborted fertilized ones. Observed at the molecular level, they would be seen to struggle in biophysical agitation as they experienced the distress of dying.
Few persons can relate with any sympathy for or empathy with the living and dying of such virgin self-functioning haploid female human being. Many men, with immature minds, fear such menstrual blood-flow in women and are generally embarrassed even to think about it. Add some new live haploid male genetic material to the haploid material of a live ovum in sexuality’s intercourse, and now having lost its pristine virginity the latter becomes the sacred object of rigorous male juridical and ecclesiastical concern.
Vocal anti-abortion advocates speak about the Right to Life. What do they understand by Life? Has a fertilized egg more right to life than an unfertilized one? Empirical Science in Biology observes and studies the phenomena of Life. It does not presume to define precisely what life is but only to describe it. We humans know what life is by living. For most academics, the essence and existence of life, and particularly human selflife, is a mystery. For this writer, Aseity or Selflife is Existential Self-Other Relativity “I Am ↔Thou Art”.
Aseity begets her other selves in spaced time. She shares her selflife with them. Begotten physically as individuals, their bodies are destined to eventually disintegrate in observance of Nature’s Law of Entropy. No human being has the right to biological life. All life is shared life. The bodies of all human beings are predestined to die. They are born stamped with a use-by date.
Every human being is called to forsake its mortal singular human I-me-mine sole self in order to participate in the plural divine We-Us-Ours before or after death or both. This is consonant with the self-sacrificial nature of orgasmic sexuality. Sexuality knows its most meaningful and profound reality in involvement with religion and selflife experience. This theme was introduced on Page 66 and bears repeating and further development.
Personal development and self-transcendence through sexual relations can and should have sacrificial connotations. To sacrifice should mean to make sacred in an act of reverential worship. For sexuality to perfect a new cultural and religious species in evolutionary ascent, we must apply such ideas of sacrifice analogously to personal relationships involving a self and its other. Unless the I-self's grain of selflife seed die, there remains but a sterile "me and mine", but if it submits to a psychical metamorphosis on encountering a beloved "you", then it enjoys a more abundant selflife as "we-us-ours" in the oneness of existential togetherness.
In the orgasm climax of sexual union there should be experienced the ecstatic pleasure of a mystical death. Biology's sex-functioning introduces limits bringing eventual death to the individual's body and likewise psycho- logically, there should be exacted a similar transition with respect to the individual self's conscious personal life. This is the self-sacrificial price that has to be paid for Nature's selective growth in unity and complexity. Sexual fertility, with its potential for an increased quality and diversity in the fruits of its union, requires ultimately the sacrificial surrendering of the flesh-masked personal individuality of both its participants to knowingly experience love’s togetherness as We-Us-Ours.
As a cosmic symbol and in the psychical realm of affective interpersonal relations and true mystical experience, human sexuality can be raised to levels of meaningfulness which totally transcend its mere biological propagative significance. Just as the ingesting of bread and wine can be transubstantiated as a Sacrament from simple food and drink to be re-interpreted as a sanctifying Eucharistic Communion, so also can the physical biune expression of human love be made the Sacrament of divine encounter and incorporation into the Trinity of We-Us-Ours. The material Eucharist is not intended for bodily metabolism. Likewise, sexual Communion can render procreation of new individuals unnecessary and artificial contraception both valid and advisable. Gluttony and lust are retrogressive and unbecoming. As the Sacrament of Existential Self-Other Relativity, sexual intercourse must always leave itself open to effect a more meaningful and sanctifying divine-human togetherness.
When does a clone or a fertilized ovum become a human person with legal rights? That is up to those human persons who define themselves to be rights-possessing human persons, to let their self-projecting reasoning decide and then to legislate accordingly. Naming a zygote a person does not make it one.
Persons are what persons think and say they are. Pro-life advocates like to empathize with the embryo or foetus. What they are actually doing is simply raising the concept of an embryo to the level of complexity of a human being and lowering the complexity of a human being to the level of an embryo.
When does a human being become a person? Some cultures say at eighteen or twenty one years of age. Some say at puberty; some say at birth or at conception or two weeks or more afterwards. Some jurists in patriarchal societies would deny women the title of even being a person and hence not having any human rights whilst males in their wombs would be legally sacred. When does a human being become a legal person? The answer is simple. When it is given a Registered Legal Name by the appropriate legal authority.
What is a human person? For the Latins of antiquity, persona (a feminine word) was the mask that actors wore. Who are human persons? Human persons are Aseity’s otherselves, her dramatis personae, the actors, masked with spaced time, of her two-in-one-act dialogue “I AM” ↔ “You are”.
Scientists can cope quite adequately with giving names to past, present and possible future observable entities. They know what they are talking about when they speak about cellular and corporal generic human being and also individual human beings. They are dealing with a posteriori facts. They are not concerned with intangible and contrived fictional transcendent realities like a hypothetical human soul. It is not for empirical science to define what constitutes a person from metaphysical, political, legal and moral points of view. On the other hand, many biased expounders of bioethics use completely arbitrary a priori fictional considerations in defining their own terms.
Restructured Set Theory can enlighten philosophers about the reality of unity and infinity. Existential Self-Other Relativity in Modern Science can provide the purveyors of food for thoughtful human beings with consistent foundations on which to build for the future. It can also remove troublesome enigmas. When does a human being become a person?
The answer to this question has been one of the main themes of this book. The author has allowed the Grammar of person speech to speak for its self and to be definitive in this regard. Users of the pronouns “I and We” are first persons. Those named “Thou and You” are second persons. “She, He, They” are third persons. A human being who is able to say, or to think, “I am” or “We are” is a person. A human being who is known and called “You” is a person. Human beings, spoken about as “They”, are persons. The Personal Selflife of Aseity is a Trinity of Divine and spaced time human Persons.
With reflexive attention, a pregnant woman knows her own selflife now includes that of the foetus in her womb. Her former singular “I am” becomes eventually aware of other selflife within. She has a personal experience of biunity’s two-in-oneness. She can monologue with her otherself as a “you” because the latter is sharing now in her plural person selflife of “We”.
Though religious right-to-life arguments against abortion are understandable in the shadowy light and specious terms of much of their traditional patriarchal western culture, they are basically legalistic and emotional, and in some respects are quite inconsistent and lacking in scientific logic. Opposition to abortion and linking it with medical research involving frozen zygotes (incorrectly termed embryos) as with stem-cells, is more often than not a misguided ego-trip by irrational over-zealous fundamentalist protesters rather than a genuine understanding and concern for human gametes and zygotes.
Bioethicists are implicitly claiming to know the scientific mind of their God when they accuse scientists of playing the role of their God in the laboratory. Aseity, who is SELFLIFE, has played god successfully for billions of years in life’s evolution here on her Planet Earth. She and her living image otherself, the human placental mammal, are quite capable of carrying on the good work.
This author would hate to find himself in a woman’s drastic situation of having to choose about terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Preventive systems using some sort of artificial contraception eliminate the necessity of having to make such decisions. It is quite pragmatic and logically acceptable, however, to both sides of those engaged in the abortion debate to allow the living human female ovum and the living human male sperm to disintegrate and die separately instead, in their hapless and helpless live state of being mere haploid human gametes.
The author has no intention of passing moral judgment on abortion, nor to condemn women who terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Natural Law ordains that the continued selflife of an embryo or foetus is the sole responsibility of the mother. It is pre-eminently woman’s business. It is man’s business to love and worship his partner, to protect and to provide for her and her offspring.
With reverential worship of her charms,
man finds his being’s good in woman’s arms.
The decision to terminate a pregnancy is hers. The decision to abort all life on the Planet of Mother Earth with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of global mass destruction is still on political operation tables for bloody-minded men to decide on and then try to implement. ■
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