Notes on molecular sensation, part II

Thoughts from the morning of June 24, continued

Modern science does not describe the properties of feeling and thinking as belonging to tiny creatures like this, because it fails to understand the nature of the universe in its entirety. But if we were to refer to recent books on the subject, such as The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio, we might see that science is at least beginning to understand the essential nature of feeling both for human endeavors — that is, endeavors that express the nature of personhood – and the way that feeling connects life to agency. We will get back to this, because this series of essays is just as much about feeling as it is about order.

 The cell has just as perfect a sense of its own identity as we do; and it engages in the repair of its Being, from a physical point of view, because of the function of both thinking and feeling on its own level and from its own point of view. The interesting thing about this argument is that it has to be functional, even from the perspective of mechanistic rationalism. If nothing is intelligent, and everything is an automatic machine – which is what  scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker think — then thinking and feeling are just as mechanical, reflexive, and automatic in human beings as they would be on any other level.  By extrapolation, we thereby deduce that whatever “automatically“ and “ accidentally” produces thinking and feeling on our level would have to be able to function on every other level, including that of the cell.  I use quotation marks for automatically and accidentally because of course Pinker and Dawkins are entirely wrong; there is nothing automatic about the process, it all emerges from a sense of identity and the ability to think and care about it. It emerges from feeling. And that feeling emerges from the initial molecular sensation of Being. In order for anything to feel, it must first sense its self and be.

We know that the cell thinks about its identity and its nature because it has an intelligent perception of its own internal molecules (as well as outer ones), and it knows  when and where they are broken and what needs to be done to fix them.

We also know that the cell cares about its identity, because it wouldn’t bother fixing its molecules if it didn’t care that they were broken. This point about care is quite important, because it connects to feeling. No one can care about anything unless they have feelings about it.

The ancient roots of this word care come from old German words meaning to lament, suffer, feel anxiety, or grief: for example, the old German words chara (to wail), kartac ( day of mourning), and old high German, Karōn ( to lament). All of these words associated with care involve feeling — and, interestingly, we see that the very root of the word to care itself arises from suffering, lamentation, grief, and other challenging emotions.  To care is to see something that is broken and wish to fix it.  This is, of course, exactly what our molecule is doing with its DNA.

So it thinks, and it cares.

 From this perspective, we see that the molecular sense of Being is no small fantasy about the nature of what we are; it literally reaches down into the roots of our own essential Being in itself— and the way that our Being is composed, in its own turn, by the existence of many infinitesimally smaller beings.  We can use this word beings in this context as representing both actions — each action being an act of being — and as persons, that is, individuals. Let’s recall here Gurdjieff’s comment that our organic sensation is what creates our individuality (Wartime meetings.)

 I’d like to offer a few other ideas about this to my readers.  When Gurdjieff speaks of “multiple I’s”, both to Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous,  and in the many meetings we have notes from, it gradually becomes apparent from this that he was referring to this phenomenon not just on the level of our own humanistic psychology, where we are divided into different selves that want this, that, and the other thing — he was actually alluding to a much more subtle and expansive aspect of Being.  We can only appreciate this fully by referring to his remarks about how the principle “as above, so below” operates on every level – and by combining it, as is necessary with all of this material in order to understand it, with his comments about how a man cannot become aware of what is higher than he is without at the same time becoming equally aware of what is lower.

Thinking about this, it becomes obvious to the discerning thinker that functions on the cosmological level, that is, between suns, galaxies, and so on – will have similar features. And we will get to that in the next essay.

The next essay in this eight – part series will publish on August 23.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.