Therefore our own organization is a perpetual key, and a well-ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of facts a certain divination of that which it shall find.

This is the hardest part: seeing that we ourselves are the key. The idea that the human being is a microcosm of macrocosmic creation is one form in which this has been expressed. Let us take typical refutation of this idea and see where it leads.

“By natural teleology is meant the idea that all changes in nature are made for a purpose. But the only purposes we know anything about are human purposes. . . . The projection of human rhythms into the cosmos is only one form of identifying the microcosm and the macrocosm.”[1]

Following this line of thought we conclude that the correspondence between the human organization and nature is false, a projection of human purposes. Nature exists outside of, and apart from, us. Any other view mistakes inner processes for external ones.

Let us look at this argument more closely. Let us turn it around. We see a process in nature and describe it as external, and apart from us. We see this process as having no purpose in relationship to us. “But the only purposes we know anything about are human purposes.” This includes the purpose of having no purpose. We only know that something has no purpose because we assign it that function. Just as the projection of human rhythms into the cosmos involves a human decision making process, the process of seeing something as external, of denying a connection between ourselves and other aspects of the world, is a human process. In both cases we see the world as a projection of an aspect of our being.

We have tried to escape ourselves but have failed. What we normally think of as the external world, is internal. The world is in us. Even our bodies are internal. We look for the outer world but cannot find it outside of us.

Try this if you want a more visceral demonstration of this fact. Locate any object, then point to it. It is “there.” But what is it that is pointing? You? Your finger! Where is your finger? In the external world? Point now at your pointing finger. Then at the finger pointing at the pointing finger. Use your nose. Then point at your nose. What is left to point with? Your eye? Do it; then point at it. Point at your eye. — Eventually the game ends. There is nothing left to point with. Where is that thing that forms the final resting place from which you point? Do you find it in the external world? If so, point at it and begin again. You come at last to the interior I. Aware of the world in thought, it finds the word in itself and calls it “external.” This externality is a myth, the myth of the modern age. The external as external exists only to the extent that we think it does. In the future we will find in us what we now see outside of us, on all levels.

[1] George Boas, “Macrocosm and Microcosm,” The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library.

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