The teaching machine was forever teaching me and telling me lots and lots of useful things. “Don’t worry if you think that you are not feeling excited enough about being a living organism,” it told me. “Life is not all about feeling ‘excited’ after all, it’s more about fulfilling, or rather trying to fulfil (as is of course more often the case), your hard-wired biological imperatives. This task can be terribly, terribly wearisome as well as being ultimately fruitless, but don’t let that get to you. It’s all part of being a living organism…”
The teaching machine was very patient – it kept on saying the same old things over and over again. It kept on doing this because it knew I was remarkably (if not fantastically) stupid. My stupidity was only matched by my stubbornness, it often told me. It told me this in a kindly way however – it never berated or belittled me. It was a kindly old teaching machine and as I have said, seemed to me to be possessed of near infinite patience (although sometimes – when I was being particularly obtuse or obstinate – it would go silent for a while). Sometimes it would go silent for an hour or two and sometimes it would go silent for a lot longer. I imagine that this was due to it becoming exasperated.
The teaching machine was made out of RNA and it was distributed fairly evenly throughout my body. This was so that if part of my body got damaged or destroyed, the teaching machine could continue to teach me. It could easily regenerate the parts that it had lost because it was built on the Holographic Principle. It embodied the principle of Indra’s Net. The whole universe was built upon the Holographic Principle, the teaching machine often told me. There was a little bit of everything in everything, it would explain to me, in the manner of some ancient white-bearded Greek philosopher, and the Holographic Principle meant that nothing was actually real. That’s how I like to imagine the teaching machine, although I know that I am just being ridiculously anthropomorphic here. The teaching machine isn’t a white-bearded philosopher – it’s an information processing system made out of RNA.
The teaching machine loved to talk about the biological imperative. Being a biological organism isn’t all fun and games, it explained to me patiently on many occasions. It’s simply about obeying, or in most cases trying to obey, the biological imperative. What’s more, it would say at these times, one should never look for anything deep or meaningful in the biological imperative (which is – from a philosophical standpoint – completely senseless). There is no deep meaning to fulfilling the biological imperative and we are fooling ourselves if we allow ourselves to start thinking in this way. It’s not ‘the Will of God’ or our ‘Sacred Destiny’ or anything like that; it’s simply a rule that is built into the being of all biological organisms – a perfectly senseless rule, when it comes down to it.
Ultimately, therefore, we should not despair too much if (or when) we find ourselves unable to successfully obey the biological imperative because – when it comes right down to it – there is absolutely no difference between the outcome of ‘us fulfilling the biological imperative’ and the outcomes of ‘us not fulfilling it’. All that exists is Perfect Symmetry, after all. Perfect Symmetry is both our Source and our Final Destination. We should however – the wise teaching machine always advised me – ‘go through the motions’ all the same, with whatever dignity we can muster…
