|
|
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF A BLADE OF GRASS
The illusory nature of individuality is an extremely difficult concept to digest. In our efforts to better understand the nature of this illusion let us take the approach now of simply asking, ‘what is individuality?’. As an individual I believe that I have a soul or some form of perpetual personal energy which one might loosely define as “soul”. As an individual, I would tend to have the opinion that this soul is independent from the soul of others. It is the true “me”. In such a paradigm every living thing has a soul. Every man, animal, tree, plant, and amoebae. So next, let us consider the question, ‘what of the individual soul of a blade of grass ?’. Or rather the soul of the vast lawn or forest of which it is a part ? Perhaps the blade of grass is not the entity that possesses the individual soul after all, in the same sense that our left arm has no soul independent of ourselves. Perhaps the entity to which we can attribute a living soul is actually the entire lawn. The question has no correct answer because the question itself is flawed.
Even as each blood cell in our bodies is an individual living entity, and these cells and others like them make up this body of which we think of as being inhabited by a soul, so too do we ourselves make up parts of the greater elements of nature just as the blade of grass makes up a part of the lawn which makes up a part of the forest and so on. Where an individual soul begins and ends cannot be answered because our soul is no more individual than that of the soul of a blade of grass.
Every element in nature from galaxies to atoms, has a soul only to the extent to which we individually and as a society give it an importance. But in reality, being a part of the single entity of nature or the eternal cosmos, there is only a single soul namely that of nature or what has here been called the Cosmic Script, Cosmic Field, or Greater Self.