WHENCE "LIFE?"

WHENCE MY LIFE? The phrase "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny," is an expression that stumped me when I first heard it expressed by my first legal employer, late Tedrick A. Housch, Jr., former Regional Solicitor at the United States Department of Labor in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1976. What the heck is that I asked him? He said it means that we are the sum total of our entire past. That struck me as logical, so, I let it go. This morning, September 11, 2018, I picked it back up. I looked it up. It is a 19th century phrase invented by a German philosopher and biologist named Ernst Haeckel. He said that "ontology'" is the sum of all of the intermediate parts of an organism's ancestors expressed throughout evolution "phylogeny." Looking it up has helped, but left me asking what of the "life" of us and the "life" of our ancestors, as opposed to mere physical forms? In short, whence is "life?" Neither German, Ernst Haeckel nor Englishman, Charles Darwin account for "life" the sustainer and producer of ontology, phylogeny, biology, philosophy, et al. Since the extremely few humans who will ever read this précis are or were perforce "alive" in order to read its contents, each one is competent to ask, to answer, their life's question. Our ancestors asked and answered that question with the wonder and worship of "God" variously named, known, beloved, believed to be, described, represented, taught and imagined from/in imagery, mentally. We too must ask and answer the question of "whence the life," and "whence my life?" not just the form of being, but the fact of being also! Whence came the spiritual essence of life, the energetic power of our of life; in short "the breath of life?" What does life mean for us , what does life mean to us; and what is life to our progeny, to posterity? Just being here as we are means something. The life we live, the life we share, means something. Why? Because out of all of the hundreds of millions of possibilities that were engendered in the process of your ancestral reproduction you/we are here. We are here and are still here! Before one can know oneself, well, one must also come to know God. God is the missing link of Haeckel's ontology, thus phylogeny evolution.