I am not sure where these musings came from, but I thought that some of my readers might find them worth browsing. I hope so.

I’ve been thinking recently that one day we will discover that, along with all the DNA activity we can already observe when a human egg and sperm unite, at that same moment there is also a union of ancestral spirit fragments, a mosaic of all the people from the past whose “pieces” are coming together each time a particular egg and a particular sperm from two genetically composite human beings unite.

It occurs to me that perhaps spirit fragments that survive the physical death of their individual physical organism and the unique beings that were created at the moment the egg and sperm united in the past, arise again each time a new egg and sperm unite in the future. I have no problem assuming that what we call spirit is that which transcends physical body and physical death and then manifests itself in humans as part of the ancestral mosaic, which includes DNA, that comes together each time a physical egg and sperm are united.

Each conception event must be unique to the two human beings who are uniting egg and sperm at that moment because no other human beings can bring together exactly the same mosaic of both DNA and ancestral spirit fragments. The blend of ancestral spirit fragments that come together to create the spirit mosaic in the new being are unique to that being, just as the mosaic of DNA is unique to each new human being. I think that the mosaic of spirit fragments create what becomes what we call a “person”.

Now, we don’t need to hear the songs of Angels & sounds of Trumpets here, or to have visions of Unicorns and Rainbows. I don’t maintain that spirit fragments are all wonderful little bits. Plenty of ancestral spirit fragments are undistinguished as far as having any higher-level spiritual virtues because the lives they lived were spiritually undistinguished. And, of course, lives that are spiritually toxic (and there are plenty of them) leave their own little nasty spirit fragments lurking in the human gene pool, just waiting to play their part in the spirit mosaic of some unfortunate future human being. Not all spirit fragments carry positive influences into the new life, just as not all traits inherited through DNA are positive for the new life.

The great Darwinian principle of selective forces at work in the evolution of all species works just as well for me when it comes to the process of ancestral spirit fragments creating new physical humans with each generation as it does with explaining physical species evolution and inherited DNA. The more adaptive spirit mosaic fragment traits win out over the less adaptive spirit fragment traits in the long run, and in this way human spirit overall adapts and evolves. I think this is what Native Americans refer to as the Great Spirit.

So, there is no question in my mind that what we call life begins at conception. What society does with that fact is a matter for society to contend with and ultimately settle. The Great Spirit moves along regardless of what happens to individual lives, although what happens to individual lives matters greatly. In fact, I believe that the events that make up individual lives become encoded in spirit fragments that survive physical death and join together to create the Great Spirit, and how well the Great Spirit moves along in its own evolution toward some unknowable destiny is determined to some degree by what happens each time tiny fragments of spirit from previous lives come together and make a new human life.