In Panosophy, Life is the creative power that emanates directly from the Origin of the Universe, as its Divine Source, manifesting the entire world of form, from atoms and stars, through plants and animals, to concepts and signs. This conception of Life is the third pillar of wisdom, replacing the scientific notion that life is a property of the DNA molecule, which is the third pillar of unwisdom underlying Western civilization.

There is very little in the history of human thought to indicate an earlier understanding of this universal vital energy. While the ancients were aware of the existence of Life within them, they could not fully understand this vertical impulse because they had yet to develop a cosmology that could explain the relationship of humanity to God and the Universe.

It has only been possible to develop such a coherent, self-inclusive view of the Cosmos since the invention of the stored-program computer in the 1940s and the birth of the Information Society thirty years later, free of the constraints of materialistic, mechanistic science. It is therefore not surprising that biologists, as ‘scientists of life’, and physicists have not yet been able to answer the question “What is Life?”

Yet, we need to answer this question in order to explain how something new that has never been seen before emerges in the relativisitic world of form. For instance, without the universal power of Life, how could Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart have composed so much divine music in his short life, including his last three magnificent symphonies in just six weeks in the summer of 1788.

Turning first to the East for an understanding of Life, as this word is used in Panosophy, Sanskrit Rita (Ṛta) ‘the living truth that flows and works directly from the Divine’, comes reasonably close. So does Lao Tzu’s esoteric notion of Dao ‘Way’, “in the sense that it is the all-embracing first principle, from which all appearances arise.”

Regarding biology, as the so-called science of life, this word, first used in German in 1802, derives from Greek bios ‘life; course, way, or mode of living; livelihood’, as distinct from zoē ‘animal life, organic life’, giving prefix zoo-, from zoon ‘animal, creature, living being’. Both these words derive from the PIE base *g^wei- ‘to live’, also the root of vital, vivacious, quick ‘alive’, and many other words.

However, what biologists study is forms of life, not the Divine Power of Life, a notion that lies outside science, as it is conceived today. So Life did not originate some 3.5 billion years ago with the emergence of the first single-cell organisms. Rather, Life is ever-present in the Eternal Now, as we realize when we look deeply inside ourselves.

In particular, to understand how the creative power of Life has brought Integral Relational Logic into existence, a more appropriate word is what Heraclitus called the Logos, ‘the immanent and rational conception of divine intelligence governing the Cosmos’. This is the mystical meaning of Logos in contrast to its mundane meaning, translated as ‘word’ in the opening sentence of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”