We dwell as cells winged with sentience, filaments with feeling — creatures tasked with comprehending the ceaseless dialogue between our materiality and our spirituality, tasked with residing it. “Blessed be you, mighty matter,” the French theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote as he set out to reconcile the two. A technology after him, the poetic physicist Richard Feynman marveled at our inheritance as “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.” Within the age of AI — this precarious prosthesis of our consciousness — the query of what makes us human, a query of matter and spirit, rattles us with ever extra disquieting urgency.
The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis (October 23, 1915–June 14, 2007) brings an uncommonly lyrical perspective to this everlasting perplexity in his 1975 e-book On Not Knowing How to Live (public library).
Wheelis — who anchored his worldview within the insistence that life “escapes purpose” — considers the abiding relationship between matter and spirit:
We come into being as a slight thickening on the finish of an extended thread. Cells proliferate, develop into an excrescence, assume the form of a person. The tip of the thread now lies buried inside, shielded, inviolate. Our activity is to bear it ahead, go it on. We flourish for a second, obtain a little bit of singing and dancing, a couple of reminiscences we might carve in stone, then we wither, twist out of practice. The tip of the thread lies now in our youngsters, extends again via us, unbroken, unfathomably into the previous. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing stays however the germ-line. What modifications to supply new constructions as life evolves just isn’t the momentary excrescence however the hereditary preparations inside the thread.
We’re carriers of spirit. We all know not how nor why nor the place. On our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished palms via unclear realm, right into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continuous creation, we bear its full weight. Relies upon it on us completely, but we all know it not. We inch it ahead with every beat of coronary heart, give to it the work of hand, of thoughts. We falter, go it on to our youngsters, lay out our bones, fall away, are misplaced, forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more bizarre, complicated.
Wheelis revisits this manifold complexity in his essay “Spirit” for Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s 1981 assortment The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (public library):
Spirit is the traveler, passes now via the realm of man*. We didn’t create spirit, don’t possess it, can’t outline it, are however the bearers. We take it from unmourned and forgotten kinds, carry it via our span, will go it on, enlarged or diminished, to those that observe. Spirit is the voyager, man is the vessel.
Spirit creates and spirit destroys. Creation with out destruction just isn’t potential, destruction with out creation feeds on previous creation, reduces kind to matter, tends towards stillness. Spirit creates greater than it destroys (although not in each season, nor even all ages, therefore these meanderings, these turnings again, whereby the longing of matter for stillness triumphs in destruction) and this preponderance of creation makes for the general steadiness in fact.
Returning to the indelible materiality of our lives, Wheelis traces again the fundamental roots of our sentience and tasks ahead its most realized inner actuality:
From primal mist of matter to spiraled galaxies and clockwork photo voltaic techniques, from molten rock to an earth of air and land and water, from heaviness to lightness to life, sensation to notion, reminiscence to consciousness — man now holds a mirror, spirit sees itself. Inside the river currents flip again, eddies whirl. The river itself falters, disappears, emerges, strikes on. The overall course is the expansion of kind, rising consciousness, matter to thoughts consciousness. The concord of man and nature is to be present in persevering with this journey alongside its historic course towards higher freedom and consciousness.
Complement with physicist Alan Lightman’s great notion of spiritual materialism and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger on the relationship between quantum physics and Eastern spirituality, then revisit the science of how a cold cosmos kindles the wonder of consciousness.
