D: Modern biologists such as Huxley and de Chardin hold that man has
developed from the smallest cell, and that in him there is an emergence of
consciousness. Man as an entity can be conscious of the whole evolutionary
process.
P: From this another very interesting fact emerges. De Chardin says that the next
leap forward will come by ‘a process of seeing’, which is the same as the
traditional paśyantī. I think it is important to explore this verb which has such a
loaded traditional meaning in India.
K: We will come to that if we can examine the decaying process—the energy
which is mechanical, which is entropic. We are also trying to find that life-energy
which is non-mechanical. What is this energy?
D: Biologists say that it lies in cultural development, in the destiny of man, not in
a new species emerging.
A: This question faces modern man at many levels. After the satellites went up,
there was a new measurement of the cosmos. We call that the measurable
infinite. But man also knows that there is the immeasurable infinite.
K: Quite. They have measured thought. They have measured memory.
F: In what sense do you mean this?
K: In the sense that the electrical impulses of thought are measured.
F: Thought is the measure of entropy.
P: Only that which has a beginning and an end can be measured.
K: So there is a movement which ultimately, in its very motion, leads to decay.
F: It also leads to radiance and that is the end of entropy. There are those two
movements—a mechanical movement and an anti-mechanical movement.
A: The biologist’s approach is very tentative when it comes to consciousness.
Whenever he speaks of life-energy, he does not speak with the same precision as
when he speaks of the other kind of energy. There is a recognition that the anti-
entropic is the unknown, the undefinable. After having said that there is the
‘other’, the ‘other’ still remains unknown.
D: One fact is certain. That the life-energy does not move in the direction in
which the entropic energy moves.