Man as Metaphorical Metaphysical Metazoan

Man as Metaphorical Metaphysical Metazoan

Metaphor: A figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity.

Metaphysics: The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.

Metazoan: A multicellular animal.

When I was 15 I was extremely lucky in my education to take a class in linguistics, the study of word formation an origin, meaning and implication. Over time I would go on to study the natural sciences, physics, maths, and in all I would use what I learned in linguistics to apply in acquiring knowledge, it was a massive advantage. Not unlike the difference between hand written notes versus typed or recorded information, a learning tool which allowed me to absorb volumes of information much faster than most.
For most of my 20’s I was a self styled information addict, and I came of age at the dawning of the information age, which pretty much damned me to become a philosopher, whether I wanted to or not. I actually wanted to be a scientists, but scientists are very close minded people, the effect of having spent too much time studying a single subject. I would get kicked out of several institutions, and ended up studying interdisciplinary science at Florida Gulf Coast University, under a Paleontologist who was taking advantage of the growing climate of interest in climate to pursue studies of palaeoenvironmental comparison. Here I developed an interest in the Burgess Shale, fossil remnants from the development of the first metazoans, big jellyfish, shrimp like arthropods, from the time in Earths history when life moved from sheets of floating algae and began to work together as organisms, animals, metazoans.
As a Christian I can’t understand why Christians view evolution as a threat to their beliefs, but Christianity is a religion that uses its persecution as a social bond, so that’s that. I was surprised when I met the sitting president of the Paleontologists Society, and she was the wife of a Episcopal priest and a solid Christian, but I was raised in a literalist church, which confused me because the bible is a translation of concepts transmitted by a deity, within a social framework. They didn’t like me in bible study.
I have nothing against religion, or organizations, but sequestration of power, political manipulation, and zealotry are some of the bad effects of organized religion. This is an organizational thing, not a religious thing. (Be glad for that, as it is the same principle that lead to brains and central nervous systems, before that it was all lymph and hormones)
That was College (Undergrad), so naturally, after Grad School I became a missionary; most “true believers” aren’t big on the book learning, so a guy who had the knowledge and skills to design build and teach people how to run fish farms they sucked me up like a Tilapia after a daphnia. To me an ecosystem is an ecosystem, 400 million years ago, or today, the principles are the same. I am a systems guy.
By this time, I had softened on my rather hard headed anti religion views gestated by my long hours at the foot of the ivory tower, and began to realize that the world is not what I was told it is, or more precisely, not what I was told to assume it was.
For three years I worked on little else but fish ecologies, education and grant writing (although I never got my cut of the grant money)
One night as a church youth group was having a bonfire, I was asked to speak, and I said something like this; “We need to remember that we are all members of the body of Christ, some are hands some are feet, some are eyes, and we are subservient to him within this body.”
I suddenly realized that the metaphor of the body of a higher being constructed of lower beings is the very literal explanation of a metazoan. And that this principle applied unilaterally throughout all situations, a matter of repeating scales and cycles, patterns and plans.
And that would open the door for my relationship with my creator being.
Now I can also explain how I was later to come to understand deeper questions about myself and the universe, quanta and dimensions, purpose meaning and all sorts of other stuff, but I won’t because all that is part of the experience, and to quote a great man with whom I share more than a few synchronicities, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”