What if our essence is spiritual, and our present bodies are simply how that flourishes today?
When you think of the “ghost in the shell” metaphor what do you assume is more solid or real, the ghost or the shell. Could increased knowledge about the material world, and technological success give us a false impression of reality?
When we see a mushroom, we only see the small temporary fruiting body of a vast underground network that links and sustains not just that mushroom, but also the whole forest.
In the 17th century this was not understood. Thomas Hobbes famously used mushrooms as an example of how men should be understood as being free from their social context. This was accompanied by the statement that no “natural order” should be used as a “state of nature” to justify one individuals dominance over another.
“men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly (like mushrooms) come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other”
De Cive (1642)
Reason, individualism, and a sceptical approach to the pre-modern world characterised the centuries that followed. Rapid technological advances, have combined with social change to create a globalised world which is still dominated by European cultures and their offspring.
A perhaps unintended consequence of this change (which has taken centuries) is the feeling that many people have of being rootless. Many also feel disconnected. Initial successes in the pursuit of progress also covered European cities in smog. We suffer from the after effects of boom technologies to the extreme moment where we are even talking to machines we have built to simulate human behaviour and call them artificial intelligence.
Not all is bleak though!
Forest Church, Forest Schools, primitive technology are all indicators of a desire people have to reconnect. This is not a desire to return to feudal monarchies and complicated networks of duty and bloodlines.
However, just as we now know that the mushrooms are small ‘blooms’ of vast networks through which ecosystems are held together our understanding of human being is changing. There is a growing awareness of the reality and importance of the invisible fabric of being.
Perhaps our enquiries into the subatomic nature of matter will help us discover the nature of that elusive ghost again.