Spirit and Matter

In the Scientific Statement of Being, Mary Baker Eddy says that matter doesn’t exist. I have found it crucial to understand what this means and doesn’t mean. If you define matter as that which you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears, touch, etc, then it doesn’t make sense to say that matter doesn’t exist. After all, you can see beauty and love and harmony, you can observe incredible intricacy and order. If you say that what you can observe is matter, and then say matter doesn’t exist, you miss out on all the myriad, specific, splendid acts of love that are manifested in all forms of life, from the minute to the cosmic. It would close you off from all the color, texture, symmetry, pattern and grace of being, and leave you trying to construct a shadow world out of abstracts. Clearly, that’s not a good way to start.

Here is my understanding of matter: Matter is not a thing, but a construct. It’s not just something there, which we observe. It’s a set of assumptions about the nature and behavior of what we observe. Specifically, it is the notion that things are constructed of a substance that is independent of their identity. So a living thing is said to be composed of chemical substances. The substances are supposed to exist independent of the presence of life, and to operate according to a set of laws that have no necessary relation to those said to govern life. So every living thing is considered to be subject to two forces – one; whatever it is that holds it all together and causes it to organize as it does, and two; the matter, which is presumed to operate according to the tendencies inherent within it. So the life-force (whatever that is) is set as being in opposition to the forces of matter, which are said to tend toward entropy and inertia. Then, in many discussions, the life-force is hardly considered at all. All the discussion is about the somehow organized building blocks and how they may go awry.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to construct a theory of life without a life-force component. The theories I would call most material are those that posit existence to be a series of reactions of different forces on each other. Their proponents want to be clear that there is no grand design, no intent. They believe that random forces account for every development of life. Yet even these theories have a spiritual engine: the desire of life to perpetuate itself. Without that you can’t have natural selection, you can’t have survival of the fittest, you can’t have DNA and RNA working to keep life continuing. I’m not sure why it is considered anti-scientific to notice a required, fundamental element of one’s construct. Yet biology, as taught in schools, rarely mentions the spiritual force without which none of the explanations of life could float. A student of mine once told me that her biology teacher said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” But no further examination was made of what would constitute such a desire. It seems to me that such a desire can’t accounted for as a material force, since matter is the construct of something that doesn’t have volition. I understand volition to be a property of Spirit. Therefore I state that the engine of these theories is spiritual.

Once the spiritual engine of life processes is acknowledged, it begins to seem less obvious why we should think that Spirit needs a mindless component as a medium for its self-expression. And it seems more possible that an interplay between a spiritual force and a passive substance is not the only way to think about things. In fact, the word mythological comes to mind. A myth is a story which is used to explain a possible cause for something observed. People’s mythology then tends to color what they look for – hence what they see to be the driving causes in their lives. So we develop the expectation that the body, if not assiduously tended to, will fall apart (and will sometimes fall apart despite all tendings).

How would it change what we observe if we started out from the standpoint that things that are alive are comprised of the force of life itself? The properties of life are observable and very interesting. What if these properties are the organizing principle and the substance of life? For my own part, the more I am clear that my being is spiritual, the better my health, and the more lovely are the unfolding of things in my life.

So to get back to the question of Spirit vs. matter, I find that Spirit is something we observe with all of our being, including our sight, hearing, etc. It really is everywhere, so we experience it everywhere. Matter is a story about how things are put together, which says that existence is passive, and determined by various forces that act on it.