My Personal Search for Truth:
Trees Do Not Grow From the Ground Up: They Are Not of This Earth"Many people may believe that emotions originate in the mind, but they are also stored in the physical body. As we breathe oxygen into our bodies to aid combustion to provide physical energy, even thoughts are not merely ethereal but become actual biological matter, simply because they produce chemicals and require energy for the brain cells to produce the associated feelings in the body so, as with many other energy exchanges, even our thoughts and emotions create an acidic biological waste product that we expell." RhodH.
So, you will see that I have already posited elsewhere that thoughts and emotions produce physical chemicals required by the energy to act on them. Here then, is a natural extension of this thinking, from a different perspective.
"Similarly, although we may experience that there is space between everything around us, it is actually not empty space, but this 'air' is filled with electro-magnetic energy (in Western scientific understanding) - or Chi, Prana, Kundalini, to name but three alternatives (from Eastern philosophy). All energy is vibration, only the frequencies differ - some are outside of our bodies' reception (e.g., radio waves), whilst others may be perceived as light (the electro-magnetic spectrum), or sound pressure waves. This energy is all around us and permeates all things." RhodH.
So...do you know where trees come from? Of course you do; you've seen it thousands of times. You plant a nut or seed into the soil, add some water and wait. After a while, some delicate green shoots break through the surface and start reaching upward. Trees grow from the ground. Everyone knows this, so it's not even a question that needs to be asked. Except that it is because what few people ever stop to think about is how it can be that a mature oak tree will weigh around 10,000lbs (and some will weigh significantly more). That's thousands of pounds of wood, bark, roots, resins, sap, branches and leaves that didn't exist, say, a century before, but now they do.
So here's the question: Where did all the mass of solid matter physically come from? Where indeed. The obvious answer is the soil, right? The roots go deep, the tree pulls stuff up and that stuff becomes the tree. The food of plants consists of decaying animal and vegetable matter, the 'humus.' That feels about right; quite obvious, really. Aristotle was wise and he believed it. But, let us test this out.
Way back, around 1620, a benevolent Flemish medic, philosopher, mystic and transitional alchemist named Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644), performed an experiment. He is the man responsible for coining the word "gas" from "chaos" and for identifying carbon dioxide. Anyway, he took a willow tree weighing 5lb and planted it in an earthen pot with 200lb of dried soil. He watered it for 5 years and let it grow. At the end of the 5 years, the tree weighed 169lbs, so had gained 164lbs of new mass. He then dried the soil and weighed it again - it had lost less than 2 ounces. The tree had gained 164lbs but the soil had barely changed. So where did the other 163lbs come from? It became clear that the soil is not the answer.
So if the soil doesn't account for it, it must be the water, right? We all know that water weighs heavily and the tree roots constantly drink gallons and gallons of it. A large oak can pull up roughly 100 gallons of water on a hot day. Over a century, that's an enormous amount of water moving through the system. So, the mass must come from water. This might feel more satisfying than the soil because you can actually picture it. Roots drink, water travels up, feeds the tree, tree grows. Clean, simple, logical. This is the next obvious answer and the one that Helmont concluded.
Except this doesn't work either; Helmont was incorrect. Here's why: Everyone knows that water is H2O; that's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. When a tree processes water, it breaks it apart and uses the hydrogen while the oxygen gets released back into the air (which is where the oxygen you're breathing right now actually comes from). But hydrogen is the lightest element we know of and you would need an unimaginable quantity of it before it would amount to any significant mass. On top of this, wood isn't made of hydrogen, it is made of carbon. Carbon is heavy - and dense - and is the backbone of every organic molecule, every cell wall, every fibre of every tree that has ever grown. It makes up roughly 50% of the dry weight of any tree - and the problem is, neither soil nor water have enough carbon in them.
This is the point where most people might shrug and move on. They figure there's some technical explanation about nutrients and chemistry that they don't understand, which they file away and forget about. But don't be in such a rush to move on because what happens is quite extraordinary and could highlight a gaping hole in your understanding of how the physical world functions which, when you actually see the answer, will hopefully change how you think about trees and about matter - and even about yourself.
It is true that some tree glucose is exchanged with organisms in the soil via the roots, which absorb minerals from the soil; elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and all those that matter for biological function. But all of those minerals added together account for only around 1% to 2% of the tree's total dry mass. The vast majority of what a tree is made of cannot be explained by anything coming out of the ground. It doesn't matter how many times you picture roots drinking water, the maths refuse to cooperate and the numbers simply don't add up. So you may be left with a question that should feel a little perplexing.
You have a huge tree standing in front of you. You know it grew from a tiny seed and you cannot account for its mass, at least not from the soil or from the water. The mass actually comes from the air. That's the answer; not anything you can hold in your hand or see going into the ground. Almost the entire physical mass of a tree, the trunk, the bark, the roots, the branches, all comes from an invisible gas floating in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, CO2, the stuff you exhale, the stuff that makes up 0.04% of the air around you right now. That is what trees are made of.
A tree is, in the most literal sense, solidified air. When Van Helmont ran his experiment, he couldn't find where the mass really came from, even though he actually discovered carbon dioxide. He just couldn't see it because it was invisible.
Here, briefly, is what is actually happening. As we now know, trees pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through tiny pores called stomata under their leaves. The CO2 flows in, the chlorophyl in the leaves combines with the water which causes the process of photosynthesis to begin using the vast energy from sunlight to strip the carbon out of each molecule to use as raw building material, variously chaining carbon atoms together into long complex molecules. These molecules become everything it needs: inc. Glucose, cellulose and lignon, the rigid fibers of wood itself.
The oxygen that's left over after the carbon gets stripped out gets released back into the air, which (again) is what we breathe. We exchange our gasses and help each other to live. Trees are often thought of as the lungs of the earth, so it is fortuitous that there are countless more trees on earth than all the stars in our Milky Way. The tree is essentially running a disassembly line on thin air, pulling invisible molecules apart, keeping the carbon and throwing the oxygen back out while the carbon becomes wood - solid, dense, physical wood that you can touch and cut and burn. This is not theory; it is actually the chemistry of molecular biology.
If you stop for a second to ponder what this means, you might agree that every tree you've ever seen is crystallized atmosphere. Every plank of wood in every house ever built started as a gas. Every wooden table, every wooden ship, every forest, every piece of paper you've ever touched was once invisible CO2 drifting through the atmosphere. Trees are biological machines that reach into the air to pull matter out of it and stack it into a solid form, using nothing but sunlight as the energy source. Cool. Now it's feeling really obvious, isn't it?
Without concerning ourselves yet with which came first, let's explore it in a little more, yet still simplistic, detail: The Sun's light hits a leaf. This sunlight is not just warmth or light; it is electromagnetic radiation, the same force behind magnets and electricity, oscillating electromagnetic fields (the same fundamental force that holds your atoms together), travelling at 300 million meters per second.
When those electromagnetic waves hit a chlorophyll molecule inside a leaf's cell, something remarkable happens. The energy from the light gets absorbed by an electron in the chlorophyll molecule, kicking that electron into a higher energy state. That energized electron then gets passed along a chain of molecules called the electron transport chain. As it moves, it powers the construction of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP), which is the energy currency that cells use to do work (as the mitochondria do in our own bodies). That's the light reaction - energy captured from electromagnetic radiation and stored in chemical form.
The plant then uses the stored energy to do something quite impressive. It takes CO2, a molecule that is completely stable and has no interest in being broken apart and it forces it open. It strips the carbon out and uses that carbon to build glucose, a simple sugar with the formula C6H1206, which is six carbon atoms chained together with hydrogen and oxygen attached. That glucose is the first solid thing in this whole process. The first moment where invisible atmospheric gas becomes an actual physical molecule the tree can use.
The tree then chains thousands of the glucose molecules together into long repeating strands called cellulose which is the primary structural material in plant cell walls and into lignen which fills the spaces between cells and gives wood its hardness and rigidity. Cellulose, lignon and the chemical bonds holding all of those molecules together are what wood actually is. The bonds between every carbon atom in every strand of cellulose in every tree in every forest on Earth. Those bonds are electromagnetic. The same force, always the same force. Sunlight (electromagnetic radiation), hits a leaf. The energy gets captured and used to forge electromagnetic chemical bonds between carbon atoms pulled from the air. Electromagnetic energy becomes solid matter. That's what's happening.
Now take that and follow it one step further, because it doesn't stop at trees or plants. You eat food. That food is mostly plants or animals that ate plants or animals that ate animals that ate plants. Every calorie you've ever consumed traces back to something that grew by pulling carbon out of the air. Which means the carbon in your muscles, your bones, your brain, the carbon in every cell in your body right now, was atmospheric CO2 not that long ago. You are not made of earth. You are not made of water. You are made of rearranged air, stitched together by electromagnetic bonds and powered by ancient sunlight. You are quite literally stardust.
Every carbon atom in your body has a history. It floated in the atmosphere as CO2. A plant pulled it in, stripped it out, and built it into glucose. Something ate that plant. Something else ate that. Eventually, the carbon ended up in your food. Then in your body, forming the molecules that make you physically you. And before it was in the atmosphere, that carbon was in some other organism, which died and decomposed, releasing it back as CO2 to float free until the next plant grabbed it. Carbon has been cycling through living things and the atmosphere for billions of years. You are a temporary arrangement of atoms that have been part of countless other things before you and will be part of countless other things after. That's not philosophy, that's chemistry.
Philosopher and scientist, Richard Feynman, has discussed how a flower doesn't lose its beauty when you understand its biology; it gains something. Knowing what's actually happening doesn't flatten the experience of looking at a tree. It deepens it because now now when you look at an oak, you're not seeing dirt that somehow stood up and grew bark. You're seeing hundreds of years of sunlight made solid. You're seeing electromagnetic energy captured from a star 93 million miles away that is used to forge chemical bonds between carbon atoms pulled from thin air, stacked atom by atom into something you can climb and carve and sit under. The tree isn't drawing from the earth. The tree is drawing from the sky, from the sun, from the air itself. And you standing next to it, looking up at it, you are undergoing the same process; a different arrangement, but the same mechanism. Sunlight captured, carbon bonded, matter built. You and the tree are running the same fundamental trick, just in different directions. We need the trees and carbon is not the enemy; it is your life...it is you.
Van Helmont lived during the fractious crossover period between alchemy and provable science; a time where origins of the knowledge we now take for granted, were still in their inaccurate infancy. He was a controversial, pioneering character who questioned many accepted conventions and, accused of using 'magic,' some of his works even attracted the scrutiny of the Inquisition. Even his date of birth has been a source of some confusion, cited variously as 1577, 1579 and 1580, depending upon source - and his name also appears in many forms, including: Jan-Baptiste van Helmont, Johann Baptista von Helmont, Johannes Baptista van Helmont and many other variants. Many of his theories are now considered, at best, fanciful, but he was also a trailblazer into modern thinking.
But it is understandable that Van Helmmont was confused. He just didn't think to weigh the air. And honestly, why would he? The idea that something solid comes from something invisible violates any intuition we have about how matter works. But that's exactly what's happening. You learned the word photosynthesis in school. You probably remember something about sunlight and chlorophyll and oxygen. You passed some test or other and you moved on, but you were never shown what's actually happening - which is one of the most extraordinary physical processes in the known universe...and allows for the notion of unconscious reincarnation of matter.
I am you and you are me, have always been and always will be.
