I sometimes find myself in envy of my cats.  They don’t have to worry about karma or nirvana or even showing up for work on Mondays.  “Never become a person,” I warn them.

Ken Wilber, a modern-day thinker of things big and infinitely small, summarizes the great wisdom traditions of the world by writing about the Great Chain of Being, in which more encompassing hierarchies, such as mind, envelope and contain within them “smaller” and less advanced systems, like matter.  In this way, spirit contains soul, soul envelopes mind, mind transcends body, biological life contains and organizes matter.  Each level of being contains and imposes order upon all that is present in the level below it, but the higher-level order adds something more that is inaccessible to the lower order which it envelopes and lies above.  British scientist and theorist, Rupert Sheldrake, conceptualizes these nested hierarchies as fields which impose their order on the lower order systems.  More conventional biologies refer to this as emergence, as the manifestation of qualitatively transcendent properties in complex systems which are more than the sum of their parts.

Whether I’m an adherent of the ironic science of Sheldrake or the establishment evolutionary biology taught at universities, the conclusion is similar: each higher level of existence contains and surpasses the lower levels which it incorporates.  What do humans add as their emergent dimension which other life forms don’t possess?  We find meaning in experience, whether it’s there or not. Yet the added awareness we humans seem to possess afflicts us with a certain pang and panic. We are wanderers of the existential void. We two-leggers are condemned to find meaning.  My cats aren’t.  Were I to be born again, let it be as a cat.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just