.Handle on the Monad .Micro-Monad The mystic will confirm how difficult it is to grasp the monad: how quickly it turns to dust. In that dust the atom appears as the counterpart of the monad. This micro-monad is our one handle, for better or worse.
Let us hasten to affirm that the atom has no existence independent of the monad. It is merely a chip off the ol’ block. It exists to serve the monad. It is the means by which the monad turns itself inside out. The atom will disappear on the completion of its task.
The atom is the coin of the monadic realm. It is the common currency, which ensures the complete outworking of the cosmecology. The atom invades the Platonic heaven and pulls all the forms down to Earth. Nothing remains in abstraction or in abstentia. Even God is pulled into the act. The atom is a Plato virus of unsurpassed virulence. From dust to dust. And we complain about the common cold.
The lowly atom composes our dreams and is thereby composed. The atom is God’s dirty little secret. Life might have been so pleasant. Nature being red in tooth and claw is all its doing. Our consolation is that we are stuck with the best of all possible atoms.
From whence comes the atom? Surely mere logic plays a big role. Democritus was a logician, not a physician. But there is also a vital force that comes into play. The atom is the germ of life. It is how the monad manages its multiplicity. The vitality of the atom is reflected in part through the quantum strangeness in which it is enveloped. The quantum entanglements ensure that the atom remains subservient to the life process. It would be more accurate to say that life process ensures the entanglement. Atoms embody the logic of life.
We have life, we have atoms, and we are not quite sure how the dog wags its tail. Biophysicists suppose the tail wags the dog, but some of us are skeptical. The immaterialist supposes that the organism is logically prior to the atom. It is metabolism which necessitates atoms. But why metabolism? Why dog eat dog? It is actually monad eat monad. This is the singular cycle. There is a dialectic where everything becomes its opposite. It is this costume party which maintains the unity in diversity. There is a vital spiritual metabolism whose continuity and symmetry is enacted with complete naturalness under the atomic aegis. The inherent teleology is only thinly disguised. This is the telos that wags the logos.
The atomic net is as fine a spiritual filter as money could buy. Nothing is left behind. Everything is swept into its telluric omega. The monad rules, the atom delivers. The atom instantiates the monadic delivery system. If the atom were not already a logical necessity, the monad would have had to invent it.
Now you see why it is impolitic to ask ‘why’ in a physics class.
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rev. 6/3/00