My son has been enjoying working on cars while he finishes high school. He currently owns two from the early `90s—a Volvo 240 and a little Ford pickup. He learns as he goes, completing myriad tasks including replacing the front end, brakes, shocks, exhaust systems. When connections are seized with rust or original parts are no longer available he has to find creative solutions and a will to solve problems.
“It’s a very different experience driving a car I’ve worked on. It’s a pleasure to feel all the parts that I know working together,” he commented after a long drive from Vermont.
The teenager’s matter-of-fact statement has come to mind when I sit in the morning to meditate and pause periodically during the day to renew the coherence of my inner life. I watch in wonder as the vehicle of my body transforms the food I eat into vitality and sensations, thoughts and insights, feelings of wonder and frustration, and awareness of all of these. I see that I really have no idea how this process unfolds, or of its purpose, and at the same time I wish to understand.
Biochemistry provides clues to how bodies transform food into life at one level, though I find its presumptions questionable. The underlying notion that theoretical, invisible compounds and chemical processes give rise to life and consciousness strikes me as upside down and bound to lead to ignorant conclusions. More importantly, the descriptions are neither observable nor practicable.
The medieval alchemists, the antecedents of modern chemists, seem to have possessed a greater degree of genuine understanding. In addition to earth, water, air, and fire, the alchemists recognized the reality of the ether, a very fine substance out of which all the other elements coalesce. This source substance pervades the universe and is the medium which holds the pattern of the cosmic design and conducts the energies that give rise to the other elements and to living bodies and systems. Incidentally, modern theorists now give this substance the enigmatic placeholder name of “dark matter” which, they conjecture, constitutes 85 percent of the universe.
A prime ignorance of the conventional worldview is the suggestion that the fundamental imperative underlying the impulses of living beings is survival. Of course, beings want to survive, but they want to survive in order to live, to be themselves, which is to say to joyfully contribute the function and emanation of their assigned form of a living being. A more apparent imperative is beauty, for any being that lives in its nature is beautiful.
The alchemists had one underlying principle handed down to them from a quasi-mythical figure called Hermes Trismagistus who was called Thoth in the ancient Egyptian pantheon. The principle is As Above, So Below. It suggests that the universe is composed of worlds of identical design nested one within the other. From the micro to the macro, each world is complete and independent and each is an integrated part of the next larger world. All participate in a sacred process of transformation.
On the micro level, we have the image of the red blood cell with its own life, fate, time, and purpose. By analogy we have a human being which is itself complete and independent and is itself a cell in the body of nature, which itself is an organ of the Earth. The Earth, in turn, is part of the body of the Sun (or solar system), which, in its turn, is part of the body of the galaxy, and beyond, which might be called the Body of God. Each has its own scale of life and its own time, but the same patterns and purpose of transformation of energies is present in each.
The beginning of a science that might successfully comprehend our own objective purpose begins with the understanding that the same laws and purpose apply to every scale of the cosmos. Each independent microcosmos has a duty within the greater whole. That duty is to be itself with the fullest vitality and according to its design assigned by nature.
In spite of the general theory of relativity, we have lost sight of the repetitive relativity of scale and time. With the flatland materialistic worldview we forget that we are part of a larger body that we can barely comprehend from the limited perspective of scale afforded by our senses and amplifying instruments of our invention. In fact, we have a duty to live in a way that serves the body of which we are a part. There is a responsibility we may joyfully fulfill in a reciprocal relationship with that higher being of which our lives are a part.
Before us is the invitation to come to know our own living alchemical instrument in the way a mechanic understands his pickup truck. With this knowledge comes the pleasure of driving the vehicle I have studied, repaired, and restored.
This article appears in February 2025.
