Chapter 1: The Conception of Humankind

The Secret Hidden in the Mother's Womb: The Past of Humankind

When a swarm of hundreds of millions of the father's single-celled sperm arrive inside the mother's body, they begin to compete, staking their lives on it. Against a rough current, like a mullet swimming up a waterfall, they swim with the power of a single tail. The strongest and fastest sperm is welcomed by the waiting egg and, as the chosen winner, begins the process of growing into a multicellular being. The hundreds of millions of sperm that competed alongside it are abandoned, carrying the sorrow of the defeated. This selection of the most capable life became the power by which humans won the struggle for survival among all animals and became the lords of creation.

Just as a tadpole changes into a frog, it grows into a four-limbed form, and from the form of a lizard it grows into the form of a higher, milk-drinking animal, all the while swimming and growing in seawater. When the face of the moon has changed ten times, it at last comes out of the mother's womb in human form, the umbilical cord is cut, and it is separated from the mother's body. For the first time it breathes with its lungs and cries aloud. Drinking its mother's milk and receiving its mother's love, it begins practicing moving by crawling on its body. It crawls on all fours, and once it begins to stand on two feet, it soon walks and runs.

This is a reenactment of the past in which humankind grew into human beings on Earth. Because a baby came into the world as a piece of its mother's body, the first thing it learns is the ability to share love with its mother (spirituality). As it grows, it acquires the senses shared by higher animals — taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch and so on — and gains the capacity for the pleasure of finding food and finding a mate (emotion). Further, as the brain develops, it learns language and becomes a person with the capacity for logical thought (reason). This is the picture of humankind, which has evolved and grown in the same way.

Because of the three human capacities — spirit, emotion and reason — humankind gained religion, art and science, and came to stand in the most superior position among all living things on Earth. That is why humans are also known as the youngest, the life form born last among its siblings. But although humans seem to rule over all living things on Earth by these capacities, they cannot stop the proliferation of microorganisms that follows the Earth's rapid climate changes, and the danger that humankind will be destroyed by microorganisms as the climate changes is always present. If there is no sudden death from such a loss of health, humankind will, like the life of a single person, grow, mature and reproduce, and then go through the process of growing old.

The content of this book is to compare human history to one person's lifetime and to observe how far along in age humankind has now come.

The Appearance of the Universe and Life

All our activities can be divided into the fields of religion, art and science. I will try to explain, by way of looking at history, when and where on Earth these began and how they grew. All living things on Earth live with life. If we call that capacity "living," then higher living things also have "feeling," and humans have "thinking." Because humans possess all three of these capacities, we are called the lords of creation.

Astronomers and geologists explain that around 13.7 billion years ago, in what looked like an enormous explosion, energy transformed into material form and the sun and the matter around it were formed; around 4,600 million years ago the Earth, together with the other bodies revolving around the sun, took on the shape of the present solar system; and then around 3,500 million years ago, living things appeared on Earth.

The first life to appear began as the simplest single-celled organisms, in an environment of organic matter created by heat, air, water and so on, and as environmental conditions changed, various other single-celled organisms appeared. From this time on, living things have existed on Earth. Plant cells multiplied, green like moss, and animal cells moved and multiplied like bacteria; then, as they evolved and grew further, the surface of the Earth became covered with thick forest, and reptiles and primitive plants flourished. But the surface of the Earth was covered with water and heated by fire many times, and evolution and growth continued through a repeated process of regeneration from near-total annihilation.

Around 155 million years ago, as giant animals and plants began to inhabit the Earth, animals came to live in groups in family units. From then on, things that live and things that feel came to live on this land together, competing to survive. From about 65 million years ago, among the higher mammals, monkeys that walked upright lived in groups by family and clan and began to communicate through sounds made with the mouth and through gestures; then around 25 million years ago, monkey-like people fluent in language and mature in intelligence held sway over and lived in the eastern part of the African continent. Then, around 2 million years ago, primitive humans resembling the humankind now living on Earth appeared — so the paleoanthropologists explain.

Geneticists, whose field has been developing rapidly in recent years, are uncovering the past of humankind in greater detail. The ancestors of the modern humans now living on Earth appeared on the African continent 100,000 years ago, and in that time the other primitive humans vanished from this land. Modern humans are said to have reached Southeast Asia and Australia 60,000 years ago. As they reached Southeast Asia and social language developed, the human capacity to think — that is, intellect — has existed on this land. Now let us observe, one by one, what these three capacities — living, feeling and thinking — have accomplished in the lives of the humankind that lives on this land.

The World of Things That Have Life

When the solar system was formed, an environment for living things was first created on Earth; after that, life appeared, and that life was protected by its environment. Just as a child is born through the process of a man and a woman loving each other, yin energy and yang energy in the universe created an environment to protect life, and so the way was prepared for things that have life. That environment is love, and life is born within love. Trying to explain the birth of the universe and of life is the instinct of the intellect, but life is metaphysical and cannot be explained by physical processes; so the greater the intellect grows, the more profound the mystery of life becomes, and the vaster the power of the intellect, the more remote the mystery of life only becomes.

When a single-celled sperm is carried from the father's body into the mother's body and received into the egg, an environment that manages the energy the sperm brought and protects life is formed inside the mother's body, and the mother's love for her baby begins. That inside the mother's body one cell grows into many cells, passes through the forms of higher organisms, and is born as a baby is a record of the history of the living things on this land in miniature, and a model of evolution kept in the mother's body.

A baby with lungs grows in water inside the body, is born and exposed to air, and begins to breathe, and as a person it grows under the protection of the natural environment and its mother's love. Its reenactment of the evolutionary process of the past — the way it moves when it has no legs, the way it looks when it crawls on all fours as we once lived, and at last the form of a human standing on two feet — shows us our distant past condensed into one.

The baby's dependence on its mother's love as it grows shows that the past of humankind depended on the natural environment. Just as a baby's heart grows by leaning on its mother's heart, people leaned their hearts on all the things of nature, and so the world of the spirit — that is, religion — began. A loving heart took the form of nature religion or ancestor religion, and religious rites began in household and village events.

Among the nature religions, the sun and the moon, and the constellations in a sky that changed with the seasons, remained for the longest time the greatest mystery in the hearts of ancient people. Villages and hamlets where people lived together gathered to become nations, and nations gathered to establish empires. In that process, as language flourished and writing came into use in East Asia, religious scriptures began to be issued. On the foundation of the Dongyi people's yin-yang and Five Elements, the Taoist Book of Changes (周易) began in the Zhou dynasty as a religious book for imperial society. Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam followed in order, and these new religions, spreading from Southeast Asia through Southwest Asia to Europe at intervals of several hundred years, came to occupy a great part of human life; religion has continued down to the present day.

The World of Things That Feel

After things that live as single cells appeared on this land, 3.5 billion years passed until they grew into multicellular beings and lower animals evolved into higher animals. Around this time, things that feel appeared, and higher organisms lived together. Things that feel all began from two emotions in common.

One is the feeling of seeking out and eating food; the other is the feeling of seeking out and courting the opposite sex. The feeling of eating, which manages the body's own energy, takes in organic matter as a means of obtaining energy to preserve life. Preparing the next life before one's own lifespan ends is the basic capacity by which a species continues to exist in this world. By giving all higher animals that feel the pleasure of eating and the pleasure of sexual union, a capacity was created to protect those species and let them live on in this world.

They must eat plants or other animals, and in order to produce the offspring with the strongest capacity for survival, the males compete to sort out winners and losers, and the winners serve to leave better seed in more females. Humans, too, receive these two emotions from their parents at birth, and so we have the sinful nature to kill in order to eat and to compete in order to become strong; but on the other hand, competing brings the good result of becoming a winner. We show beauty in order to look good to the opposite sex, and beauty appears as art. Feeling comes from the six senses given to higher organisms and to humans.

Because the peripheral nerves that see, hear, smell, taste and touch are connected through the central nervous system to the brain, where they are remembered, by mobilizing them we gained the ability to find food, to associate with family, relatives and friends, to compete with enemies, and to become winners in the struggle for survival.

In the societies of higher organisms and of people that maintain group life, there is a happiness of finding satisfaction in being healthy in body and mind and in the feeling of living together. Art, through which we feel happiness, became the foundation of human culture, and the culture of art is a beautiful part of human history.

The World of Things That Think

Forty million years after the appearance of higher animals that value their own lives, love their young, seek out food, court the opposite sex and bear good offspring, the functions of the brain developed further and people with creativity and logic appeared. By doing with their hands what other animals do with their mouths, their mouths were freed, and the capacity for speech developed. Standing on two feet, the hands took on more roles and the mouth gained more time to speak, and so manual skill and language ability developed ever faster. The brain's memory gave rise to imagination, and imagination gave rise to creativity.

When modern humans left Africa and reached Southeast Asia, they found a good environment to live in, and settled social life began. They farmed and raised livestock, and village society began to develop. The rapid increase of Southeast Asia's population carried the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia into the interior of the Asian continent, to Africa, and to the North and South American continents. Linguists say that the roots of the world's languages lie in Southeast Asia.

Language and writing exchanged information, and the human world of intellect grew ever faster, gaining acceleration as time went on, and science and scholarship developed. Science and scholarship had grown since 50,000 years ago, and since the eleventh century, when the Mongols of East Asia conquered Europe and began globalization, modern human society has brought rapid change to this land over the past 1,000 years.

Humankind, with its capacity to think, placed itself in the winning position in the struggle for survival, and with the help of computers its capacity for living has moved to a new stage facing the future. Capitalist competition expanded, using resources as a means of conquest. The Earth's environment in modern times has changed abruptly, and changes centered on human living have left no space for other living things to live, with the result that the surface of the Earth has begun to fall ill with the disease of destroying nature.