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Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life Paperback – Illustrated, August 29, 2003

by Richard Grossinger (Author), Harold B. Dowse (Preface), John E. Upledger (Foreword)

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Why is the universe conscious? What kindles mind inside matter? Why do fundamentalist sciences and religions never ask these questions? This sequel to Embryogenesis deals with the theoretical issues brought up by Embryogenesis, including: the relationship between thermodynamics/entropy and the emergence of life; a speculative set of embryogenic principles for all creatures on all planets in the cosmos; an explanation and critique of Intelligent Design and a proposal for a more dynamic psychospiritual theory of creature development; a series of alternatives to genetic determinism; a discussion of the relationship between consciousness and matter; an interjection of 9/11 (which occurred during the writing of this book); and many other topics. Chapters include: What is Life?: Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Complexity; Is There a Plan?: Creationism, Cultural Relativism, and Paraphysics; Biogenesis and Cosmogenesis: Cells, Genes, and Planets; The Principles of Biological Design: Physical Forces in Nature; The Dynamics of the Biosphere: Deep Time and Space; The Limits of Genetic Determinism: Dimensionless Epigenetic Landscapes; Topokinesis: Physical Forces in Development; Tissue Motifs and Body Plans: Coordinating Form; The Primordial Field: Metabiology and The Molecular Apparatus; Meaning and Destiny: The Relation of Consciousness to Matter

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Editorial Reviews

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"I am not a cabbalist nor do I have second sight, but I predict we will hear from Grossinger. This man is as large as Mann or Joyce."—John Montgomery, author of The Kerouac We Knew"A unique masterpiece! Richard Grossinger fathoms science with the core of the question that is rarely asked—what is the meaning of this concept, this fact?"—David Hurtwith, Amazon.com"This book is part of a secret project, secret even to its author. It represents a complex mode of consciousness on a subtle plane that has been working its way into the world for millennia. The author is carrying out one phase of it in a regular sense in linear time, but his inner self is doing the actual work in a timeless reverie. And this is the only way the project is going to get done. Otherwise, it would continually have to defend itself against an external voice that keeps saying, 'This is not happening; this is some bizarre aberration.' Grossinger is fighting both for and against something that won't go away. He can't drop it, and he can't complete it. It has no grand fruition, nothing to do with the New Age notion that everything is supposed to cross and become magnificent. Esoterically, it is its own reality, its own truth, its own justification."-Ellias Lonsdale, author of Inside Star Vision

About the Author

A graduate of Amherst College, Richard Grossinger received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan by writing an ethnography of fishing in Maine. He is the author of many books, a portion of which is listed below:Planet MedicineThe Night SkyEmbryogenesis: Species, Gender, and IdentityHomeopathy: The Great RiddleNew MoonOut of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossinger'sHe and his wife Lindy Hough are the founding publishers of North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ North Atlantic Books; Illustrated edition (August 29, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1556434197
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1556434198
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.85 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.01 x 1.29 x 8.93 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,648,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #84 in Embryology (Books)
- #292 in Developmental Biology (Books)
- #1,235 in Genetics (Books)

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Jamie

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Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2012

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This book offers thought for the 21st century, the 22nd century and the mind beyond the infinite beyond . .

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U Dream

"Like every athlete, pilot, bird, beaver, bee..."

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2015

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Written in the verbose style of Dr. Bronner—(as exemplified by the above title, which was lifted from the label of his famous peppermint oil soap)—Grossinger’s book gives the impression of a rambling lunatic or the manic musings of cannabis consciousness. Marked by hyperbole, fetishized linguistic bling, flight of ideas, and idosyncracies, this pretentious prose—begging to be poetry—makes a grand entrance in almost every paragraph that leads to nowhere.
Speculating on life forms on the planet Jupiter, Grossinger muses: “Two-kilometer Jovian jellyfish trailing rows of tentacles hundreds of meters behind them, their regalia beating a minute and a half per undulatory cycle in stately unison, may spurn terrestrial modes of morphogenesis, but they will still be materialized by some form of radial cleavage, Boolean distribution, lamination, foliation, squamation, cavitation, incremental thickening and thinning, vacuolization, outpocketing, and neural filamentation. Their ontogeny will reenact and condense phases of their phylogeny. This is atomic, molecular certainty.” P. 85.
Throughout the book, biological euphemisms in large italic print are poised at the head of such drivel. For example, “The infinitude of the universe is captured in the nucleus of the cell…The process of microcellularization has used the breadth and girth of the universe to encapsulate its own nondeterministic domain—to scratch, scallop, laminate, and mold carbon-phosphate clay; to seal sequential eskers in recombinative meiotic bundles; to establish hierarchical organization and replicative machinery; in short to fashion its own nucleocosmos. Gossamer microbes, diatoms, and minds have been spun from intermediate patterns into the great hollow zone among stars such that the catacombs of space are now rendered hologrammatically inside boxes of trillions of soft rhomboids.” P. 86.
Gossinger describes the biological cell as “vortex, as transdimensional bubble in the extensibility and boundary condition of cosmic ash. For being small and primitive, cells and their organelles are neither slave particles nor mere building blocks, nor are they witless fractals of barely sensate tissue. They are transdimensional rents in the fabric of space-time, gap junctions in the cordage of matter. Metathings releasing meta-energies, they foreshadow and potentiate the full rainbow of species.” P. 92.
The book never settles down to say anything substantial. There’s nothing quotable without laughing hysterically. And it gets worse. On the “Inertial Structure of the World…Fractal striations, strange attractors, connectivity mutations, and percolation sets provide hints that tissue-like lattices arise unbidden in Mandelbrot and Julia series, BZ reactions, and the like—long prior to photosynthesis, genetic regulators, and chemically hierarchical signals. Segmentation and replication are matter-inherent properties. Packets of galactic soot, ahitch on asteroids, are crudely cell-like. Wormlike fossils imprint themselves on meteors; iterative incisions coagulate on small moons. Molecular laminations and badges on rocks floating in outer space foreshadow microbial inklings in the Earth’s primordial seas. Their prototypes later guide Golgi folds, vertebral segments, worm metameres, and quickening seams of larval tentacles. This is gravity as we know him, but it is also more than gravity, as Jack was surprised to find coming down from the beanstalk.” P. 121-122. (Grossinger apparently knows Jack).
Two principal themes in the assembly of life are “topokinesis” and “morphogenesis.” He borrows heavily from German anatomist Erich Blechschmidt who saw gravitational-thermodynamic forces as primary and preceding genetic control. Throughout evolution, Grossinger muses, “Phylogenetic events became ontogenetic templates. Ontogenetic motifs accrued in phylogenetic fields, rolling along the topokinetic highway, irreversibly following time’s arrow…Topokinesis is thus the cell-inertial, tissue-specific magistrate of thermodynamics and gravity.” P. 128-129. (Did you get that?) How about: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (as the uterus recapitulates the dawn-time ocean), and together they recapitulate cosmogony—the overall evolution and destiny of chaos systems in the universe.” P. 136. And: “the microcosm, helix by helix, is the macrocosm, galaxy by galaxy.” P. 138 (As below, so above). Every elaboration is an opportunity for more bling, as the next sentence shows: “Thermodynamically, ontogeny and phylogeny are the same distributed chaotic event: the relationship between a creature and its germinal cell is a form of a logarithm or square-root function between a morphogenetic sequence and a lineage of prior embryos potentiating it.” p. 138
But wait! It gets even worse: “The primeval regulators, the source codes, design specifiers, circuit triggers, and quantum switches—while traceless and inaccessible—are still present, just as crucial as ever to the assemblage and structures of organisms. They are the lattices, frames, and base symmetries upon which life cultivated its once and future designs. Their submechanisms run under the mechanical surface, camouflaged by their own legacies of condensation, sublimation, transitorization, abbreviation, concision, tabefaction, ellipsis, syncope, meta-coding, deeper condensation, further abbreviation—and by the sheer layers and deviations of molecular motion itself.” P. 157.
Grossinger has a lot to say about the limits of genetic determinism, and much of it is provocative and even correct, if you can decipher his cryptogrammic verse: “Once we accept that genes are not the patented guardians of organic form, the sole architects and repair agents of our stuff, we stand as little more (or less) than elaborate ripples—unified, fluid-tissue matrices resonating with the aperiodic nanocrystals in our helices, held together not by a formula (though we could not exist without DNA’s circuits to locate and cue us) but by gravitational-centripetal resonance through chakra-yarn in excited, evanescent field states.” P. 228. Sounds very stoned to me!
On page 262, Grossinger detours into a 14 page rant regarding the 9/11 terroist attack on the Twin Towers—“Jihad versus McWorld.” Very strange!
There are many more paragraphs I could quote, but that would belabor the point. How does he conclude 445 pages of indulgent verbosity? Grossinger writes: “It hardly matters if we are atoms and molecules and our lives are not really real. What is real will survive somehow, even through obliteration of whole universes. What is illusion will be discarded. We don’t have to worry about this one.” Sounds like a self-reflexive paradox to me. The recycle bin is too good for this illusion. Perhaps the hearth is more appropriate. At least it will warm my bones beside the fire. If my critique sounds equally pretentious, it is by design. To quote Grossinger (page 265), “Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of retribution.”

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