Let's Talk PAIN.

Real pain comes from the heart! From the soul. It's not something you get from the pain nerves, the pain membranes and what-not, the pain organs of the body. That's not real pain. That's more like, physical pain. The pain of the body. The pain of the weak, of the vulnerable. Anyone with pain like that - listen, what happened to mind over matter? Clear your frame of reference and move up to the next plateau already! Quit languishing in a prison of the merely physical.

Anyway, what was I talking about. Pain, right? I kind of got sidetracked a second. Let me go back and re-read.

Good Lord. What the fuck am I talking about?

Disregard. That's some kind of absolute gibberish. Let's talk something else, other than PAIN.

Hey, do you think the next phase for life will be to grow into some kind of crazy aggregate lifeform? Like before! It would fit with what we've seen so far: everything keeps aggregating, into higher and higher levels of organization.

First there were enzymes. Not even genes, just enzymes! They'd sift through the available soup of chemicals and elements, and as a natural consequence of their composition and structure, they would conjure more enzymes out of the cauldron. Kind of just, keep building more and more of themselves out of the available materials, almost as if by accident, until there were so many enzymes that what with all the bumping and swishing in the soup they began snagging onto each other, linking together into chains of greater and greater complexity, chains that as a consequence of their structure and composition would reproduce themselves. Building more and more of themselves out of the available materials, accurately and efficiently, almost as if on purpose.

Those were genes, at that point. They didn't know it yet, but they were. That was a leap. And then the process repeated until chromosomes, made up of genes, are making the scene. Another leap.

And so on. The chromosomes grouped into metaphylls. Then the metaphylls grouped into plaeocytes, and so on (this is called the Bessemer Process) until finally it was: living cells! Floating around as if fully sufficient and self-contained, but really if you look close, still made up of all these little structures and dudes inside of them that used to go it alone (or some of them used to, at least)! Those dudes had been subsumed. Technically these little guys are way too small to be called "dudes" - a more correct-sounding term would be "dude-ules."

I love that word "subsumed," by the way. Great word. Every time I use it I want to look it up again, just to savor how well the sense goes with the sound!

So those dude-ules got subsumed. Into cells! And then it all began happening again: the cells started clumping onto each other. That soup made everything sticky! All those chemicals. Soon cells were clumped together into colonies of cells. And the colonies got bigger, and soon cells on the interior of the colony and cells on the exterior began performing different tasks. Began specializing. This process of greater and greater specialization resulted in differentiated tissues, each performing different tasks within one big mass. But at that point, it wasn't just a colony anymore. It wasn't just cells clumped together.

This Was What Was Called: The Organism.

The Organism.

I, uh, made up the part about the metaphylls and the plaeocytes. It just sounded better with a couple more steps in there.

OK!

The Organism.

Actually, they call single-celled critters "organisms" too, but this seems like such a misnomer to me. Come on. An organism is made up of organs! What kind of organs can these little smears of gunk possibly have? They got ONE CELL. You can't build one organ with that, let alone an ism of them. One cell to work with. Those little dude-ules diddling around inside the cell, floating in the cytoplasm, those aren't organs. They can't be! Organism: made up of organs. Organ: made up of tissues. Tissues: made up of cells. Cells can NOT then be made up of teeny tiny teensy leetle organs! It'd be like saying a battalion is made of companies, and a company is made up of platoons, and a platoon is made up of battalions. WRONG! Call it something else.

Where were we?

The Organism.

Then organisms betook themselves of the next leap – except, well, not really. They haven't. There has been no further leap, in organization. Currently, The Organism is the highest real self-producing unit. At this point, organisms have developed greater and greater complexity, and a greater and greater degree of proliferation. Organisms proliferated into about every nook that could support them! Then once that environment was nice and ready, God plopped MAN (which eventually was corrected to "HUMANITY") into the scene, fully-formed and ready to fit in - having been sneakily made of indistinguishably identical raw materials to the other organisms, DNA-wise. Seamless! God's a real stealth operator sometimes. It's kind of funny, because some people are like, "WHY?"

Anyway - what's next? Is this the END? Do we STOP HERE? Is there no FURTHER LEAP?

What if from here, there's another level of hierarchy waiting for us? Where we ourselves become parts in a SUPER-ORGANISM? Capable of reproducing itself! Setting its own inscrutably huge agenda. A hundred years from now, might we find ourselves out in space, living inside some gigantic amoeba-thing? And we'd still go to work, each performing our task inside its gigantic membranes and meta-organs, and we'd each still have our hobbies on the side.

We wouldn't be aware really, of what the greater macroamoeba's unfathomable glom-mind was thinking. We'd keep to our small concerns, just like our own mitochondria keep to their small concerns. We'd really only think about our place in the scheme of things when disaster struck. Like a meteor impact, ripping through your district and leading your wife to complain, "I told you we should have moved to Central Amoeba last chronocycle when that opening opened up!" Like you, cutting your thumb, causing your red blood cells to spill "aieeee!" from their home. Does one red blood cell chastise the other on its way out? For not taking the left at the last capillary?

And when something like that would happen to us - each of us playing our tiny individual role inside the greater pulsing thrum of the macroamoeba drifting and glomming its way through space consuming space resources, excreting space waste - when a space rock flies undetected out of nowhere and rips a hole in the larger us...will we feel pain? Or will we just sit there on the other side of the amoeba and read the news: “Good lord, another meteor impact in the forward dorsal zone! Those poor people!”

It turns out we've been talking about PAIN this whole time. How about that. Thought I'd lost the plot for a minute didn't you? Well, never doubt me again.

I always bring it right back home in the end.