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Have you ever wondered about the forces of fate and destiny, of how
the world has come to be the way it is?
Have you ever felt, from time to time, there were forces guiding
you?
The ancient Greeks believed in Fate. They said there were three
sisters of fate, the Moirae, tripple Moon-goddesses robed in white, whom Erebus begat on
Night. They were not the children of Zeus, but parthenogenous daughters of the Great
Goddess of Necessity, against whom not even the gods contend.
Clotho
spins the thread of life from the cosmic forces. |
Lacheis
measures the tread of life and assigns each man his
destiny. |
Atropos
the smallest in stature, but the most terrible, cuts
the thread of life with the abhorred shears. |
The Origins of the Three
Sisters of Fate
The Greek version was probably built around the
ancient meaning of the word moera; a share or a phase. The ancients believed the moon
had three important phases, associated with three personalities that resemble the three
sisters of the Moirae:
 New
Moon, the Maiden-goddess of the spring, the
first period of the year, when the crops appeared
from the soil and wove their welcome patterns
into the air.
Full Moon, the Nymph-goddess of the summer, the
second period, was the measure of the harvest, and
Old Moon, the Crone-goddess of autumn, the last
period before life subsided into the winter season.
The Three Sisters appear in various guises in mythology.
In Athens, Aphrodite or Urania was also known as "the eldest of the Fates." She was the Goddess of Desire who rose naked from
Chaos and danced on the surface of the sea.
In Syria and Palestine, Aphrodite was worshipped as Ishtar
or Ashtaroth.
In any guise, the role of the fates was easily recognized and nearly
everyone believed in the concept of destiny.
The modern view of the three sisters of
fate.
For a short time, a mere hundred years or so, a small number of
philosophers have tried to sell the idea that life, in all its diversity and complexity,
is the result of an evolutionary process of random chance. As silly as this idea seems,
their challenge was a serious one, because science is based on objective verification. And
how does one verify the forces of fate? Or the unseeable, unknowable forces that we all
sense at special moments of our lives, guiding us.
The problem was that we didn't
know how to think about the forces that created
all that you see and the mind that you see
it with. To make matters worse, there was
a conspiracy,
of sorts, blocking us from thinking clearly
about these issues.
We live in a complex world and each of us wonders what the future might hold, and how we might alter that future to match our dreams. There have been
individuals who have claimed to see into the future. And there have been individuals whose
lives have been filled with sequences of events that could only be called destiny. There
have even been a few people who believed they could, using one form of magic or another,
summon up the forces of destiny and make the fates work for them.
Some scientists dismiss these people as crazies. But there are many
others who have had their own brushes with destiny and don't take the matter lightly at
all.
The Biology Of Fate
Destiny implies control. Control over the behavior of
individuals as well as populations of individuals. The Greek's story of the Three Sisters
has surprising similarities to the networks of controls that influence all living
creatures.
Layers upon layers of controls delineate the destined
actions of a herd of elephants or a culture of blue-green algae. Or a whole ecosystem like
a coral reef. These nested webs of controls assure that, in the end, the development of
every minute detail of every individual creature will assume the proper form and function
for its environment - even if the creature is a complex atoll 60 kilometers in diameter
and millions of years old. This is what the science of ecology is all about.
All biologists recognize the vast network of interactions
that weave plant and animal behavior into the patterns of life. What is difficult to
understand, and is not so readily accepted, is how this principle results in such fineness
of detail as to enable a single human to perceive an event in the future as if it was a
frame from a movie; an episode previously unimagined by the human; an episode which cannot
be avoided.
By definition, life is non-random but how can the Moirae
weave the tapestry with such precision that I will be directed through a series of
impossible coincidences in the voyage from Florida to the Solomon Islands?
We have enough experimental
evidence to say that life does, somehow,
do this. Within the model of existence found
in the voyage of the research vessel Moira,
the explanation is not hard to imagine. For
at each level of awareness, the behavioral
complexities and selections leap to new plateaus
of potential.
In the language
mind of Man we achieve a level of control
beyond the ability of any one human to imagine.
This language system is the consciousness
of our planet-sun. But there is more to awareness
than consciousness. There is a vast ocean
of awareness; a magic sea beyond the horizons
of conscious perception. A sea which surrounds
us and carries us in currents and eddies we
can only know in brief moments when our own
awareness filters down into their depths,
like a diver trying to see in a sea lit by
phosphorescence, with a desperate ache to
return to the surface to breathe again.
As the diver knows there is a wealth of awareness within
that dark sea, so we know the deeper layers of awareness exist for each of us and for all
of us together. We may not be able to control them, but we can detect them through their
impact on our existence. We are on one side of the tapestry of the Moirae, but there is
another side. And more, there is the phenomenon of the tapestry itself. The Moirae exist
and grow stronger and smarter with each moment of existence, with each new thread of
awareness woven into the tapestry of life.
I offer you an opportunity, now, to learn about these forces - how
to percieve them, understand them, and perhaps control them.
In our voyage we will never be far from the Moirae for the myth is
derived from the intuitive understanding of the process of life,
To Be is the process of spinning the thread of
awareness by Moira clotho.
To Change is the process of segmenting the
continuous thread by Moira lachesis, measuring being the essence of dividing the continuum
into recognizable parts.
To Have Direction is the change in change, it is
that which remains after Moira atropos cuts the thread of awareness, that which we learn
as individuals, that which we evolve into as species.
The Observer, spun by the three sisters, is the
thread of awareness in chaos.
Return to the thread in the South
China Sea
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