.Dreaming of Atoms, Germs & Cosmic Ecology .The reconstruction of our world Before deconstructing the scientific worldview, it would behoove us to construct a workable replacement. This essay is one more step in that direction. A near term goal is to obtain a conceptual model that is sufficiently robust and precise that it will prompt a further adumbration with mathematical ideas.
We have dreamt ourselves a long way from our home in the Monad, and we might wonder what to make of all these atoms, germs and other impedimenta that seem to stand between us and our transcendental destiny.
Mary Baker Eddy would say that the germs are in our mind, and I agree. But I would add that so are we in the mind of the germs, and therein lies a tale.
Germs are busy little critters and they surely seem to have a mind of their own, which is not always in alignment with our minds. One might wish that the big dreamer in the sky might try to keep the germs on a shorter leash. I mean, whose world is this, anyway?
Now I could go ahead and make an apology for God and for germs, but you can be sure that has already been taken care of, after a fashion. What is of immediate interest is, how do those germs work? I’m not asking for a biology lesson, but rather for a dream lesson. If Bishop Berkley worried about the tree on the quad, we can worry about germs.
I imagine God as being reasonably lazy, and not really wanting to be bothered with looking after every darned detail in the universe, so God invents physics and biology and then we are right back with the scientific materialism where we started. That is either too easy or too hard. I am looking for some middle ground.
My hunch is that God gives germs a mind of their own, like ours, but not personalized. I am falling back onto a Platonic form for bugs, as if Plato ever wanted bugs in his heaven! And on what day of Creation did God make the bug template? Don’t tell me; see if I can guess.
We are not looking at this from the Monad’s eye view. What I am searching for is a Monadic, transcendental, teleological, immaterial ecology. Is there a transcendental ecologist in the house? There are a goodly number of spiritually deep ecologists, but they eschew the vertical, teleological, transcendental dimension, lest they be waylaid by their Sunday school teacher.
I picture creation as a continuous manifold stretched out around the monadic singularity. How does it get stretched? Partly it is the spontaneous internal pressure causing inflation, but there are also some deliberately placed hooks or pegs holding the cosmic tent in place. Deliberate? There would have to be a minimal external input to initiate the process on the proper path. The external pegs would represent templates for things like mathematics, physics, selves, etc. The shape of the tent would then be filled out by its internal processes and intelligences in a supra-temporal fashion.
This analogy is reminiscent of the Big Bang, but the manifold in question is not space-time. It is more of a functional, experiential hyperspace. This tent is the Monadic synergetic ecosystem. This is the living hologram referenced in a previous essay.
Where then do atoms and germs fit in this living hologram? God needed to be no smarter or more industrious than Democritus was. All that God needed was that atomic postulate to serve as a peg or reality check in Her dream. Once that atomic seed thought was planted, the ensuing logical condensation, habituation and contemplation would result in the atoms that physicists love to dream about and smash today. Those atoms will naturally be ensured to conform to all the stringent conditions imposed by the Anthropic Principle.
All natural phenomena will have to comport themselves in accord with the Anthropically certified atomic template; otherwise, those phenomena that are non-conforming will create a naturally self-damping disturbance in the functional, phenomenal web of the Monad. The immaterial potency of the atoms is further enhanced by their microcosmic semblance to the cosmic Monad.
Next on our list are the germs, but before dealing with germs, let us consider the biological cell. In terms of the metaphorical framework already established for physical atoms, we can treat individual cells as biological atoms. The biological cell serves as a conceptual, phenomenal reality peg, intermediate between the organism and the atom. Cells are alive and so we should treat them as sentient beings. Indeed, our own sentience can be understood as an extension of cellular sentience, just as God’s sentience is an extension of ours. Thus do we close the cosmic circuit that leads from the atoms, to cells, to minds and to the Monad. The logical, conceptual closure of this cosmic circuit lends potency to the entire Monadic construct.
Germs then are cells that like to do their own thing, kind of like us vis a vis God. We suffer germs as God suffers us. The benefits all around outweigh the costs, we presume. It is all worked out in the cosmic/karmic ecosystem. Perhaps Pasteur played Jesus to the bugs. This does not mean for us to eschew antibiotics, merely that we be more fully aware of the cosmic syntax and semantics.
Having completed this conceptual circuit with my mind intact, I take my leave.
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rev. 5/3/00