ching, to cleavage
into new individuals.

What is awareness? At what point even in protoplasmic life does it
appear? The amoeba avoids pain, seeks food, reproduces itself, and
blunders blindly through its environment in search for condition more
favorable to its continuance.

In the monotony of a purposeless existence, most humans do no more than
that.

Must awareness, too, be defined in terms of the consciousness of
me-and-mine? Defined only by what me-and-mine can feel, know? A
protoplasmic growth feeling awareness, excluding all possibility of
awareness in other kinds of growth because they are not a part of
me-and-mine, therefore too inferior to know awareness?

Each crystal structure has its own vibration characteristic, and on that
planet, in time, one special vibratory rate knew awareness of self.
Mutation here too gave added complexity to the structure, and
self-awareness took on that added growth of awareness of surroundings.

Through eons of time, and the mutations brought by time, awareness of
self and surroundings grew into awareness of wider peripheries, to
sensing their world, its structure, its nature.

Another mutant leap and there was comprehension of other worlds, of
other stars. Theirs was a vibratory awareness, directly akin to the
vibrating fields of force which compose the material universe, and the
vibrations of fields of force can be altered. To change their
surroundings to a more suitable environment through vibration rates of
things led surely to negation of distance. To change from crystal form
to fields of energy and back again combined with negation of
distance--they too spread out and out among the stars.

At first it was enough. But awareness is never still. Questions form.

In all the universe were they the only sentient thing? Did any cry but
theirs rise to the stars, seeking to know? Because of the nature of
their being their search was unconcerned with the outer shape of things
which could be changed by them at will, but rather with the inner
vibratory rate which would signal sentience, awareness.

They found no more than unconscious interaction of forces. Water runs
down hill without knowing that it does, without the internal structure
to provide the vibratory rate which would permit knowing.

For long eras they too were imprisoned within the confines of a
me-and-mine envisioning, and it took a major leap for them to conceive
that other structures than the crystalline migh