My guess is that our individual (personal) DNA has been around for a long time. Maybe its been around since the time of the first fishes on the Earth. I'm thinking that my DNA has struggled through time to become what it is today, me. I'm Scottish by ancestry, and I've had dreams of being the leader of a tribe. I'm sure whatever tribe I descended from had a crest and flag back in the middle ages. So maybe I can ask my DNA (myself, if that is clearer) some questions about things that happened to me in the year 600 AD, and it will tell me - maybe in a dream. So our DNA has traveled through lots of bodies. The bodies die, but the DNA continues in our children. I think the songs we sing, and the stories we tell may be encoded into our DNA (like muscle memory), and the uniqueness of our DNA is the signature of our soul and its identity in the fields of energy in the universe. All living things emit energy depending on their activities - trees, fish, all living things. I think if we become part of some big energetic body (like the sun), where every last atom of us is separated from every other atom, then our souls and our identities no longer exist, but as long as our atoms exist in space - even as ice, that our souls (our spiritual beings) can continue to exist, move, and act as a gravitationally bound entity. Our atoms travel as a group like the stars in the galaxies, and galaxies bound by gravity to other galaxies. So the form the energy takes does not matter. It's flexible. What matters are the frequencies that are emitted. That's us.
This is an utterly wrong conception of what DNA is. DNA is unique to an individual. Think: if it were not, it would not be used in forensic science, to identify an individual from the traces he or she leaves. Your DNA has therefore not "travelled through a lot of bodies". The second part of the post descends into woo that is too meaningless for comment to be possible.
I don't think that's true if we are talking about particular DNA molecules as individuals. DNA replicates and makes new copies of itself. DNA also reconfigures in various ways, most obviously in sexual reproduction where new individuals inherit genes from both parents. So in that sense, your DNA is unique to you. But more abstractly, the information the DNA contains, many of the genes in your genome, have indeed been around for a very long time. Some of it has been around a lot longer than that. Important parts of our genetic inheritance probably date back to the last common ancestor of all life on earth, the organism (probably something resembling a bacterial cell) that all contemporary terrestrial life, whether bacteria, protozoa, fungi, plants or animals, are descended from. (When you look out your window and see a tree, that tree is very literally one of your relatives, since if you go back far enough, you share a common ancestor.) What parts of our inheritance might be so old that they originated with the first cellular life on earth? The things that we share in common with all other life on this planet. DNA and its code. Its transcription into proteins. Perhaps some cell metabolism stuff, such as the centrality of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in energy metabolism. Our family trees extend back far deeper into time than most of us realize. DNA doesn't retain a record of every event that happened in people's lives. Or at least the information encoded in it does. That information isn't a complete surveillance video of the lives of all of your ancestors, it's more along the lines of instructions on how to grow a human body and all of the cells that make it up. All living things emit energy? What kind of energy is that? If you are trying to link your own individuality with the individuality of the atoms that make up your body, keep in mind that every year a mass of your body's cells dies that approaches the mass of your entire body. Your body is ceaselessly replacing and renewing itself down on the cellular level. You aren't composed of the same cells, or the same atoms, that you were a few years ago. What continues through our lives is something more abstract, a body of information, a configuration that we identify with ourselves. Death occurs when the renewal ceases and the configuration dissipates. Quantum mechanics (something I don't come close to understanding) makes me suspect that it might not be correct to think of atoms or sub-atomic particles as distinct individuals that we could attach names and histories to. But if we did, I guess that we might say that the heavier atoms currently in our bodies originated in fusion reactions in distant stars billions of years ago, while the lighter elements may date back to right after the big bang. Is there any spiritual relevance in any of this? I don't know. Maybe in the sense that human beings are integral parts of the universe, embedded in and products of processes and events that are much bigger than we are. Perhaps we can say that the whole history of life is in our genomes, and the whole history of the universe is in our atoms.
What kind of energy? Everything radiates heat until it's cold. People sing and talk. Those things have frequencies (energy). I think trees communicate. I can easily imagine my spirit moving through time. Maybe dark matter and dark energy is what we become after we die. Whose to say that there is not just a whole bunch of intelligent creatures in dark matter. We die. Then we go to a spiritual place inhabited by lots of other spirits, and then we get shoved again into some new born creature. Really, the chances of being me in the universe instead of being a rock are pretty slim. What has it got to do with religion? Religion is another form of politics - control of the masses - maintenance of the status quo, and I don't like it. If we are to believe, or have faith in, something metaphysical, then we should be asking the questions - as humans do - about what we are spiritually in relation to other things in the universe. Thanks BTW for your thoughtful responses.
Don't take yourself to seriously. Better people than you have been wrong. The trick is not to misinform people that trust you.
Of course, no one knows the reality of the soul, except though faith, which is a belief without proof. So everyone is talking out their arses about metaphysical things - hence, the word. To quote, "The mind is what matters. Everything else is transport." To quote, "The mind is what the brain does." The best information I have is - when your body dies the soul goes soon after. I'm an old guy that has accumulated a lot of knowledge about a great many things, like physics, religion, biology, and so on. I want to combine this knowledge to arrive at a better understanding of the mind, body, spirit relationship, and the character and identity of the soul if it exists at all. I thought it might be something on the atomic or molecular level. Maybe if I ask the right question I'll get 'the idea,' but still no success in that for me just yet.
All that is fine. Just don't think that there is anything mystical about DNA. DNA is a very complex molecule, unique to each individual, but with parts of the molecule that are common to related organisms. I understand we share about 50% of our DNA with a banana, for example. But then, we share a lot of biochemicals with other organisms, since we all evolved from common ancestors, so far as we can tell.
Sry, but suppose the molecule had a spiritual component, an entity somewhat removed, but attached in some way to the molecule. That is, the soul moves like any other thing in the universe - as part of some group. It is that our mind is attached to our soul and one of them is going to proceed into the future until somehow destroyed. So, we've been around for awhile. Ask yourself how long you have been on this planet. The first coherent or semi-coherent answer you get is probably true - I think. How old do you think you are? 50? No, more like 50,000 years old or more. Anyway, 1 in an unimaginable 6 billion people that recycles every 120 years - does it matter? Maybe.
Teilhard de Chardin had a similar idea I think - that there was a spiritual element to all matter, which found its highest expression in the consciousness of Man. Or something - he was French and thus a bit of a pseudPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!. But it seems to me you are making a few strange leaps of thinking here. To hypothesise a spiritual component to each molecule is one thing, but then to speak of a "soul" is rather different, surely? How do you get from one to the other? And don't forget that molecules are continuously forming and disintegrating within any living system, as are the cells that comprise the organism. The new cells are made of new molecules - of the same types and structures as previously, since these are needed for the biochemistry to work, but made from different atoms. For your idea to work, you have to hypothesise that your spiritual component is not a feature of a particular molecule but instead is a feature of molecular structures - and that it migrates thus from old molecules when they disintegrate to the new ones. How? Myself, I think the whole dualist notion is under serious challenge from what we now know about the brain and consciousness - the "mind", if you will.
That sounds like the "code" that Intelligent Design advocates claim is somehow "written on" the DNA molecule. I always ask them what's the ink?
