All is Connected is All
Ours is a temple of monism.
“In the beginning is relation,” said the magister.
A cell knows chemical gradients, the signals of its neighbors, and its own wall. Its local reality is comparatively small, yet the complexity within it is staggering. It has its own integrity and is bounded, and from that boundedness it answers other cells. Hundreds of millions compose an organ, which has its own integrity and is bounded, and from that boundedness it answers other organs.
An organ may experience itself as separate from the rest of the whole body, but it is inseparable. From the standpoint of the entire human being, neither a cell nor an organ stands alone. Each one’s existence, meaning, and function derive from its participation in a larger unity.
So with us.
We experience ourselves as isolated individuals with separate identities and separate interests. At a certain level of description, this is true. A person is a decision-making unit among other decision-making units. Our separateness is real at one level yet illusory at another. Both descriptions are true, yet neither is sufficient.
Just as the cell imagines itself independent of the organ and then the body, we imagine ourselves independent of society and then the All.
Every living entity is the consequence of some prior condition and becomes a condition for something else. Stardust forms stars that forge the heavy elements that become parts of planets, which bond and chemically interact, giving rise to cells that metabolize, divide, and self-organize. These entities evolve their own functional states in the harmonization of difference, becoming organisms that live and evolve within ecosystems that compose biospheres that revolve around their suns.
The All is not some supernatural entity standing outside the universe. The All is the living universe. And we are finite expressions of the infinite.
To awaken, then, requires only the subtlest shift in perspective. It is to hold oneself, in thought and in mien, as an expression of something inconceivably vast and alive. Just as a cell cannot fully comprehend the intelligence of an organ, much less of the human, a human cannot fully comprehend the intelligence of a society or the All. This shift will not arrive as some dramatic or visionary experience. It arrives like the dawn.
A cell dies, yet that of which it is a part lives on. The cell does not know to grieve. We do, and so we grieve. And some of our energy and information passes to others when we die. Whether we remain participants in a larger consciousness, or whether mystical insight reveals our embeddedness in it, these belong to the Unanswerable Questions, at least for now.
Even the way we understand the world, through individual and collective intelligence, is relational. To learn is to recognize patterns, and in recognizing them, we find hidden relations.
Metaphor links unlike things.
Science unifies phenomena under laws.
Philosophy seeks coherence.
Myth yokes experience to narrative.
“All real living is meeting,” said the magister.