Our life is
composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps
in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other
dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our
globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular
consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at
possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to
the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one
another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form
part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal
consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this
fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet
that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who
possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
of the Universe.
Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching
across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary
system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the
Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and
co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our
consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all
these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the
composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself,
and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear.
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