A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga: The Yoga of WisdomAtkinson, William Walker
Religion
A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga: The Yoga of Wisdom
Atkinson, William Walker
Yoga, Jñana
These tiny Things--living Things--present to the sight merely a tiny
speck of jelly, without organs of any kind. And yet they exercise all
the functions of life--movement, nutrition, reproduction, sensation,
and dissolution. Some of these elementary forms are all stomach, that
is they are all one organ capable of performing all the functions
necessary for the life of the animal. The creature has no mouth, but
when it wishes to devour an object it simply envelopes it--wraps itself
around it like a bit of glue around a gnat, and then absorbs the
substance of its prey through its whole body.
Scientists have turned some of these tiny creatures inside out, and yet
they have gone on with their life functions undisturbed and untroubled.
They have cut them up into still tinier bits, and yet each bit lived on
as a separate animal, performing all of its functions undisturbed. They
are all the same all over, and all the way through. They reproduce
themselves by growing to a certain size, and then separating into two,
and so on. The rapidity of the increase is most remarkable.
Haekel says of the Monera: "The Monera are the simplest permanent
cytods. Their entire body consists of merely soft, structureless plasm.
However thoroughly we may examine them with the help of the most
delicate reagents and the strongest optical instruments, we yet find
that all the parts are completely homogeneous. These Monera are
therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, 'organisms without
organs,' or even in a strict philosophical sense they might not even be
called organisms, since they possess no organs and since they are not
composed of various particles. They can only be called organisms in so
far as they are capable of exercising the organic phenomena of life, of
nutrition, reproduction, sensation and movement."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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