A Cell in the Body of God, part 1
Is there a connection between spiritual transcendence and globalist control?
(Listen to the author reading this essay)
Charles Eisenstein calls it the “Age of Separation”. For several thousand years of recorded history, human institutions and human behaviors — even human perceptions — have been organized around the idea that we are separate individuals. The dominance of Western over Eastern and indigenous cultures, Enlightenment science, and capitalism especially have intensified the dominance of this Weltanschauung so that, to most of us, the idea that “I am a separate individual human” seems self-evident.
Many people who have had experiences of samadhi or kundalini or near-death out-of-body or psychedelic revelations report that, for a short time, it becomes tangibly apparent to them that separation is an illusion. I am drawn to reading these accounts but I have never had an experience of this sort myself. This essay is an experiment in reaching beyond my individual Self via the mental faculty alone.
Is it obvious that a change in so fundamental a paradigm, from “I am a separate individual” to a non-dual perspective changes everything about psychology, morality, politics, biology, physical cosmology?
We live in an age when central government is becoming rapidly more controlling. Beliefs and behaviors are homogenizing worldwide, and there is a visible movement for creating a global order. Is this, then, humanity’s destiny — for all of our species to become hypersocial, like an ant colony?
Is there a collective good apart from the aggregate wellbeing of individuals within the collective? Can you have a thriving society made up of sick, suffering individuals? Or a community that is languishing even though all the individuals within it are leading happy, fulfilling lives?
1. The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
In my freshman year of college, I took a survey course with readings from all the great philosophers. I scratched my head and wondered where Plato got his implausible ontology; I read Saint Augustine as mired in the absurd doctrine of Original Sin; I read Kant as abstraction piled on abstraction, dancing around the essence. But when we got to John Stuart Mill, I felt like I was coming home Yes! This is clearly the right answer.
For Mill (and for my freshman self), society is a collection of autonomous individuals. Happiness of the individual is the ultimate good. What constitutes happiness? “Pleasure, and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends.” Societies are formed via Locke’s social contract: Individuals voluntarily exchange some of their autonomy for a rules-based order in the context of which they can thrive as individuals better than they could on their own.
Essential to this system of thought is that there is no God-given morality, no Platonic good, no Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Pleasure is an individual thing, and the only rational way to define collective good is as an aggregation of individual pleasure — hence the “greatest good for the greatest number” was Jeremy Bentham’s mantra, adopted by John Stuart Mill and articulated as a coherent political philosophy.
I thought at the time that this philosophy was rationality itself, and that I had come upon it by my own individual powers of reasoning. Much later did I start to realize that I had acquired the Utilitarian dogma by osmosis from the assumptions implicit in the pronouncements of grown-ups from whom I had learned
Today I believe that psychology is transpersonal, that telepathy is happening all the time, that the thoughts in my mind do not necessarily come sui generis from my brain, that the psychological ills that our culture treats as chemical imbalances in the brain are more usefully seen as sociological dysfunction; that “happiness” is a collective attribute of a family and community, maybe of Gaia herself.
2. Major Transitions in Evolution
We think of a biological “individual” as an objective category, but the notion of an “individual” is an evolutionary variable. An individual paramecium engages in a struggle for existence like any other individual being.
Lacrymaria is a hunter that senses its prey, extends a neck out to retrieve it, explores vulnerable angles and strategizes about how to ingest — all without a brain or a nervous system of any sort. Lacrymaria is a single cell.
But a cell of comparable size and complexity may be part of your body, given over to serving the welfare of a larger unit. These cells are specialized to provide structure (bone cells) or to transduce signals (nerve cells) or to filter toxins (liver cells). Each may be as good at what it does as the lacrymaria is at hunting bacteria, but they have pooled their impressive and diverse talents in service to a collective entity, an individual operating at a higher level of organization.
Every second, four million of your cells die and are replaced by others. (Most of these are blood cells, most of the rest are lining of the stomach and intestine. But there is substantial turnover in the skin and bones as well.) You don’t think anything of it. You are the same person, because your identity depends on the relationship among many cells, and not on the cells themselves.
John Maynard Smith distilled and formalized the mathematical principles of evolutionary theory in the mid-twentieth century. His book on Major Transitions in Evolution describes the history of life on earth as the hierarchical assembly of functional systems at ever higher levels of integration. Life began with molecules that could reproduce themselves, but this was quickly subsumed by hypercycles of different molecules which mutually catalyze the formation of new copies of one another. The hypercycles collected into cells and cells aggregated as bacterial films working their chemistry together. Then — only after three billion years — the cells began to pool their destinies in multicellular animals and plants.
David Sloan Wilson theorized about levels of selection in evolution. Individuals are allied in communities that become powerful reproductive units in their own right, and communities are parts of ecosystems that are, in their own way, greater than the sum of their parts. Our living world is only part-way through each of these transitions, so that evolution takes place on many levels at once — selfish genes, selfish individuals, selfish communities, arrayed in “selfish” ecosystems that compete for space and resources with other entire ecosystems.
(I think of the origin of life on earth as a major scientific mystery, and Maynard Smith’s premise is only the most conservative hypothesis. We have yet to imagine a plausible mechanism, and, in fact, it seems from our lab work and some simple computation that the simplest self-reproducing biomolecule is far too complex to have arisen by chance, even with the most optimistic assumptions.)
Nevertheless, the idea that life has become more complex and integrated at ever higher levels seems sound to me. “Eusociality” is the word biologists use to describe tightly-evolved communities where every individual has a role to play, and the individual’s life purpose, her very existence becomes subrogated to the hive. Douglas Hofstadter describes an ant hill as a living, conscious being. Each individual ant may be playing a role by rote, acting in a way that is derivable from simple rules. She may have no more consciousness than a nerve cell in the human brain. But collectively, the ant hill acts with intelligence and direction.
In an imagined dialog between an anteater and Achilles, Achilles expresses amazement that the ants were part of a higher-level pattern without being conscious of it. (Typical of Hofstadter’s consummate cleverness, at this point in the dialogue Achilles is an illustration of the same phenomenon.) Anteater discusses how individual ants are communistic, but Aunt Hillary herself is a rich libertarian. Aunt Hillary has goals and strategies for reaching those goals, the hallmarks of a conscious agent.
3. Living ecosystems
Up until a few years ago, biologists thought that a tree farm was the same as a forest. Our concept of a tree was an individual, independent plant that grows tall in order to hog more of the sunlight — food for growth — denying access to the plants underneath for selfish ends. Thanks to the work of Suzanne Simard, we know that the forest is an ecosystem, and trees nourish one another through networks of fungal filaments, mycelia. Trees grow tall not because of runaway competition to grab more sunlight, but because the highest leaves can capture mists that float high above the forest and turn the humidity into precipitation that benefits all. A tree farm is a pathological perversion of a forest in which trees really do grow straight up to compete for sunlight, but the natural destiny of a tree, its highest calling, is to participate in a forest ecosystem.
Perhaps it makes sense to think of a forest ecosystem as an individual on a higher level of organization, as yet not completely differentiated. The many species that make up the forest ecosystem have pooled their resources and talents, and have linked their destinies; but only partially. It may be that the ecosystem is an individual in the process of differentiation that is not yet evolutionarily complete.
I have written about natural selection that operates at the ecosystem level, citing evidence that demographic homeostasis is a collective good, an essential component of “fitness” in the context of evolutionary competition, ecosystem vs ecosystem. In other words, ecosystems must be robust in the face of varying environments, and the ecosystem can’t afford for any one species to indulge in runaway growth that throws the system out of balance. We see examples of natural birth control, territoriality, and aging as evolutionary programs that seem to make no sense in the context of selfish gene theory. We can interpret all these altruistic phenomena as taxes that the individual pays in order to benefit from a stable ecosystem.
Biophilia is a concept described by E. O. Wilson, a sense of kinship that we feel across species lines. We relate to dogs as family members. Craig Foster bonded with an octopus with daily visits over a period of a year, and the octopus bonded with Craig. This video documents a manifest friendship between a dog and an elephant. Robert Frost wrote a poem about recognizing selfhood in a mite. None of these cross-species relationships can be explained in the context of evolutionary theory that is confined to fitness of individuals. They speak of relationships that transcend evolutionary competition between individuals and even between species. They speak of ecosystems as integrated biological entities.
End of part 1
A Cell in the Body of God, part 1
I'm eager to see you take on the initial questions you posed, Josh. I think you're right over the target. Here are some resources that might stimulate you:
Is There Life after Death? 50 Years of Research at UVA https://youtu.be/0AtTM9hgCDw
Awakening, by Caitlin Johnstone https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/awakening
Separation Is The Largest Religion In The World, by Caitlin Johnstone
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/separation-is-the-largest-religion
Our Entire Civilization Is Fake And Stupid, by Caitlin Johnstone
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/our-entire-civilization-is-fake-and
BTW, the mind alone can't take you beyond separation, because separation is intrinsic to rationality.
Very interesting post
Read 'Transformer', by evolutionary biochemist Nick Lane
Stunning.