Solar Wind

Resolving the Gaia Paradox

There is a theory, or more accurately a belief, that the planet Earth is itself a living, conscious being. Most commonly, those who believe this use the name Gaia for describing this Mother Earth. I do believe the planet is a living being, but that does create an apparent paradox.

Because I am a living being, virtually every part of me is alive. My head, my hands, my feet, my heart, and so on, are all alive. My hair, nails, and outer layer of skin may be dead, but mostly, all of me is alive. If something caused a part of me such as a foot to die, it would have to be amputated or the disease or rot would spread. This is simple logic that nearly everyone understands. Yet Gaia, Mother Earth, is about ninety percent made of nonliving material. Mountains, lakes, rocks, sand, air are all considered nonliving. That would mean that the living being called Gaia is made of mostly nonliving things. That doesn’t make sense and that is what I mean by the Gaia paradox: we know Gaia is alive, but how can a living being be made almost entirely of non living material?

The solution to this paradox, fortunately, exists. We need to accept that all is living, though some life may be in forms that science does not yet recognize as life. So mountains really are living things. So are rivers, lakes, stones, and crystals. Simply because something doesn’t move and doesn’t breath doesn’t make it nonliving. Most scientists would disagree with that, yet most will admit that they don’t really know what life is.

This idea that all is living brings up many questions. If the Earth is a living being, is it conscious, does it think? Do rivers, mountains, and wind have enough free will to do what they want to? If Earth is a living being, than what about other planets, the stars, the sun? What about the universe? All good questions.

The Earth does have a mind and does think, though it is a very different kind of thinking. In a sense, the Earth mind is made up of all the minds of all living beings on it, and of all people who have died without awakening their soul so they can rise to higher level of being. So if Gaia seems a little confuse, a little insane at times, that is why.

Rivers, mountains, rocks, wind and so on do have a very limited consciousness: nothing can exist without it. Consciousness is, in part, the glue that holds things together, so everything must have some level of it or the thing would just fall apart.

If Earth is a living being that thinks, than it is logical to believe that all planets are the same, though to different degrees. Since the Gaia mind is mostly made up of the minds and thoughts of all life on the planet, a planet that has nothing living on it would have a very limited mind compared to others. But then many planets have lifeforms on them that we simply don’t recognize because science, in it’s arrogance, expects all life to be very similar to Earth life. Obviously, if the universe is made up of many living planets and stars, than the universe itself is a living thing.

At the other end of the scale, science would say that the tiny atoms contain no life at all, even though they have no idea what life actually is. But we, and all physical lifeforms, are made entirely of atoms, so where is life? Squished in between those atoms? No, of course not. Logically, if a being made of atoms is alive, then the atoms must be living things also. And since all the rocks, mountains, rivers, planets, stars and galaxies in the physical universe are made of atoms, they must all be living. If we then go to the higher, spiritual planes of reality, this is even more true. God created the spiritual worlds and he does not create death or disease. God is living and all he creates is living, so everything that is spirit is living. And that is another reason why everything must be alive on some level. Everything physical has a spiritual counterpart behind it, generating it, powering it. Since that spirit is alive, so is the physical being or thing. So death doesn’t really exist and there is no paradox. Gaia is alive because all is alive.