You and your universe are inseparable, and it must follow that, to be at all real, your enlightenment is necessarily suprapersonal and indeed cosmic.
To wake up is to wake the world up.
As an encouragement and prelude to “personal” enlightenment, try “cosmic” enlightenment. It may lead you to conclude that they amount to the same thing.
We talk as if it were somehow to our discredit that our universe is on so splendid a scale, and as if we had lost instead of found ourselves in it. We think of ourselves as mere pinpoints in the universe, as if our inability to weigh more than one or two hundred pounds apiece were somehow more significant than our ability to weigh the stars.
We speak of this vast expanse of mindless space as if it were anything but our life’s source, saturated with and saturating our own mind if no other. As for the human self-portrait as “an accidental collocation of molecules,” and one moreover that walks around blandly describing itself as such—now there’s a delightful spectacle! If this is a sample of what our idiotic universe can throw off accidentally (whatever that could mean), think of what it could do if ever it got around, by some particularly happy accident, to doing it intentionally.
How this universe can be so steeped in intention, yet remain merely accidental, we don’t explain.
We science-invoking moderns think of “living matter” as if it were somehow freakish, irrelevant to the nature of the universe. Yet science insists that the physical ingredients of inert objects such as heavenly bodies are the same as the ingredients of the creatures that come to life on them, formed of their substance. The difference doesn’t lie in the raw material, but in its organization. Thus the lowliest particles everywhere are capable of assuming the highest living forms. Potentially all the stuff of all the stars is alive, purposeful, and indeed superhuman. And even if such exalted functions were to emerge only for a moment in one spot, they would still reveal for all time the hidden nature of all matter.
There remains no sense whatever in our description of the universe as lifeless and mindless.
No matter how unimaginably prolific it may be, no matter what myriads of living worlds and species and individuals our universe-tree may put forth, no matter how luxuriant its blossoms of mind and values (all arising naturally, we are told), we still reckon it a flowerless tree. Worse, it is no tree at all. It’s not even a magnificent branching vase in which we, mere cut flowers, are tastefully displayed, but their indifferent or threatening background. Thus, idiotically, we human flowers deny the life of our cosmic plant because it’s not all flowers, but also enormous leaves and stem and root.
The ancient notion of a living cosmos is neither ridiculous nor inconsistent with modern science. But whatever we think of the universe as a whole, the great majority of us are quite sure that none of its bigger parts is alive. The bulkiest organisms we recognize are the big trees of California and Oregon and the blue whale.
Here we have, extending from particles and atoms and molecules and cells up to man who includes them all, a well-filled scale or hierarchy of unitary things or beings: and then, immeasurably above man, the Whole of things and the Being of beings. Why this cosmic gap? If the vast interval between man and his minutest particles is filled by a series of increasingly subhuman parts, surely the principle of Nature’s continuity suggests that the equally vast interval between him and the Whole may well be filled by a series of increasingly superhuman wholes. If these have escaped our notice, couldn’t that be because we have eyes only for our equals and subordinates in the hierarchy?
A living thing (scientists tell us) is an organization of nonliving things. The salts of our blood, the acid of our stomachs, and the calcium of our bones are clearly not alive, but neither are the atoms comprising our living cells. What is physics or chemistry at one observational level is a human being at another level, and at once alive and not alive. All depends on whether we take the thing to pieces or not.
If the pieces, as pieces, are lifeless, where shall we set the boundaries of the living whole? If by the whole man we mean one who is independent and self-contained, we can hardly leave out the air in his lungs and the sweat on his brow—at least nobody has pointed out where these cease to be organism and start being environment. And if they are caught up in the living whole of him, why not the tools without which he would starve to death and the clothes without which he would freeze to death? After all, he is far more dependent on his shoes than his toenails, and upon his good false teeth than on his bad real ones. They have become part and parcel of his life.
The expert is one who, having incorporated his tools, is unaware of them. They have temporarily vanished into his physique. He doesn’t sit on a seat in a boat that sails the sea. He sails, he is at sea. He doesn’t grasp a handle that holds a blade that cuts bread. He cuts bread. That’s how a man speaks because that’s what he is—an endlessly elastic organization of “dead” parts, mostly outside his skin.
In the well-developed citizen the world’s machinery springs to life and makes him what he is. These organs of his are all the more organic and lively because they are built, not of protoplasm but of all sorts of metals and plastics and so on, and can be amputated painlessly and at will when a new embodiment is needed.
Species neither occur nor survive nor develop as separate entities, but in great interlocking patterns of mutual interdependence. Just as our own blood cells make no sense without our muscle cells and all the other kinds, so the bee’s long tongue makes no sense without the flower’s deep nectary. And so on indefinitely. The more you study one bit of life the more you must take the others into account, so that really to know one would be to know the lot.
If we seek the living whole, the Specimen that is truly self-contained and self-maintaining, nothing short of the entire network of terrestrial organisms, growing up as one living thing, deserves such a title. And even this huge biosphere is still far from being complete. For without its core of rock and water and topsoil, and its envelope of air, it is as dead as the least of its ingredients. In short, nothing less than the whole Earth is truly alive. Here indeed is a visible goddess.
The only complete living organism of which we have direct and inside knowledge turns out to be a heavenly body—our Earth.
The behavior and build of such a creature are, to our minds, so odd that we need a new word for this very high-level vitality, this superlife which is at least planetary. Oddity, however, must be expected here. The living cell is a very different story from one of its molecules, and a man from one of his cells. It would be strange if the living Earth were not, in turn, very different from her human and subhuman parts or organs.
To the extent that we cut ourselves off from other selves we are out of our minds and dispirited.
This illusion of a separate self and the illusion of a dead universe are halves of a whole, segments of one vicious circle. The universe seems dead because I seem out of it, and I seem out of it because the universe is dead. Till the total mind in man rejoins its own total body—the many-leveled universe—he is not himself and the universe is not itself. But when at last they coincide, this is at once his own enlightenment and the universe’s enlightenment.
Just as it’s not a hand that puts forth a hand to shake hands with you but this man who does so, so it’s not a man or a country that puts forth a space-probe to study Mars, but Earth who does so. She is our astronomer—no mere man being equipped for the job—so that, in fact, there is the world of difference between the “I” in “I see a man” and the “I” in “I see Mars.”
There exists for none of us, not even for the most “spiritual,” a merely human or personal liberation which leaves out the natural world. There’s no such thing as a true enlightenment which doesn’t light up every creature on Earth and in the skies, however grotesque or remote or unlovable. How could we begin to disentangle ourselves from any part of the One in whom we live and move and have our being? Enlightenment is cosmic or an illusion.