Having Trouble Fitting this Odd Piece

The older I grow, and the more I get used to the strange realities all around me, the more a single aspects of “the puzzle” comes to the fore. It is the purpose of bodies. If we accept the reality of disembodied living beings (angels, immortal souls) then what purpose do bodies serve? No matter how I twist and bend, I cannot but conclude that bodies are machines, ingeniously engineered from chemical components making good use of the elements’ electromechanical properties. I mean all bodies, from single celled living beings on up to the highly complex such as ours.

Materialists have it easy. In their definition life itself is these machines. It is whatever they do, those machines, while they function as they should. A little circular. When they stop functioning, life disappears—because life is that functioning. Now that functioning itself first, eventually always ends. Second, while bodies are still working, their only real purpose is to keep on working. I search in vain to find any meaning in this rigmarole. It has no more meaning then the formation and temporary maintenance of a wave-form in the ocean started by some external cause like wind or gravity. Good explanation for bodies, but meaningless beyond that.

Meaninglessness is not a puzzle. It is just a big fat nothing. The puzzle arises when we contrast bodies and immortality. The problem is as real in the east as in the west. In both realms an immaterial real entity remains after the body gives up. In the east, if its illusions continue, it will be reborn. But it is difficult to imagine that “ignorance” and the resulting “illusion,” supposedly the causes of bodily existence, could have created the intricacies, say, of the blood-clotting cycle when, for hundreds of thousands of years people didn’t even know that it existed, never mind grasping its incredibly complex feedback loops. Maya is not an engineer. In the west we have to believe that an omnipotent creator must have engineered bodies, in the most sophisticated sense by arranging the fundamental aspects of matter at the lowest level, in a less sophisticated sense by imagining divine interventions in created nature. And then, in our case, the immortal soul is super-added, as it were. Why do those immortal souls need a “vehicle” to express themselves, to manifest will, motion, intellect? Why this duality when angels—even fallen angels—don’t need them?

The Gnostics gave all this a negative interpretation—much as the east does (illusion, ignorance). They thought of souls as captured by the Evil One and holding them here in a kind of prison. But, for my part, having at least looked at biology deeply enough to see its magnificent engineering, what I see there is something positive—not always elegant (the blood-clotting cycle is not very sleek)—but not a prison. The body is an enabler.

Our cosmologies are missing something. The piece meant for that hole in the logic doesn’t fit neatly. And using scissors isn’t allowed. Well, comes the time when we shed the chrysalis. Maybe then I’ll get the briefing I’ve not encountered on any lecture agenda as yet.