Livingness
Email your response to thirtyspoke@gmail.com.Discuss whether you agree or disagree with the following conclusions inspired by the text (minimum 150-word response):
The meaning of living is thinking.
The quality of a person’s life is related to their self-awareness.
The more complex the thinking, the more living of the being.
Resource:
Thomas Troward
The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, 1909
Chapter 1: Spirit and Matter
We are accustomed to judge only by external appearances and by certain limited significances which we attach to words; but when we begin to enquire into the real meaning of our words and to analyse the causes which give rise to the appearances, we find our old notions gradually falling off from us, until at last we wake up to the fact that we are living in an entirely different world to that we formerly recognized. The old limited mode of thought has imperceptibly slipped away, and we discover that we have stepped out into a new order of things where all is liberty and life. This is the work of an enlightened intelligence resulting from persistent determination to discover what truth really is irrespective of any preconceived notions from whatever source derived, the determination to think honestly for ourselves instead of endeavouring to get our thinking done for us (paragraph 1).
We have no doubt as to the livingness of a plant, but we realize it is something very different from the livingness of an animal. What average [child] would not prefer a fox-terrier to a goldfish for a pet? Or, again, why is it that the [child themself] is in advance upon the dog? The plant, the fish, the dog, and the [child] are all equally alive; but there is a difference in the quality of their livingness about which no one can have any doubt, and no one would hesitate to say that this difference is in the degree of intelligence. In whatever way we turn the subject we shall always find that what we call the “livingness” of any individual life is ultimately measured by intelligence. It is the possession of greater intelligence that places the animal higher in the scale of being than the plant, the [person] higher than the animal, the intellectual…higher than the [feral]…The increased intelligence calls into activity modes of motion of a higher order corresponding to itself. The higher the intelligence, the more completely the mode of motion is under its control: and as we descend in the scale of intelligence, the descent is marked by a corresponding increase in automatic motion not subject to the control of a self-conscious intelligence. This descent is gradual from the expanded self-recognition of the highest human personality to that lowest order of visible forms which we speak of as "things," and from which self-recognition is entirely absent.(paragraph 2).
We see, then, that the livingness of Life consists in intelligence—in other words, in the power of Thought…(paragraph 3).
