Man, the Humongous Fungus

Yesterday's post ended on a cliffhanger: the promise -- or suspicion at any rate -- that we have located the whereabouts of the long lost fifth element: the holy grail, the ark of the covenant, the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the cosmic area rug, the x-factor that makes sense of the rest.

All you need is luv?

Don't be so cynical, Petey.

Now, what is a man, anyway? Not to be cute, but among other things, a man is someone who can ask what a man is. More generally, a man is full of questions about everything, including himself: he is, to purloin a phrase (from Andrews), Homo quaerens. 

You humans are queer 'uns, alright.

Indeed we are, and yet, everything else passes through us: we are the clearing house of the cosmos. Turns out that being is intelligible, only inexhaustively so: there's always more to be known, so knowledge is limitless, as is the knower. We will never run out of questions, and I wonder why? 

Why questions?

Yes, why why?  

Questioning is a two-way process: we can proceed upward from facts to principles, or downward from principle to fact. 

In reality it is always both, since one must have some implicit framework in order to even identify a fact. A fact is something relevant to something higher than itself, for facts don't illuminate themselves. What is, simply is. But facts don't come with labels telling us which ones are important or trivial. 

The most important facts are those which render the other facts intelligible, or, in the words of Andrews, "those conditions, presuppositions, or requirements without which the universe would not exist at all all -- and certainly not one giving rise to questioning beings such as ourselves." 

So, conditions, presuppositions, requirements, and principles that are both necessary and sufficient conditions for giving rise to the very Homo quaerens who wonders about them. One might say we are looking for the answer that gives rise to the question -- or questioner, rather.

Animals cannot ask questions. Rather, questions coarise with the first man. What, one wonders, was his first question? "Perhaps it concerned everything," and why not, since we are still confronted with this same question? For as Homo quaerens, "we are questioning beings in a questionable cosmos":

Consider this for a moment. What does it mean that such a universe houses our very possibility? What does it suggest about the nature and character of things that the universe comes to question itself through us? Is it plausible that human mentality is purely accidental in such a universe? Or is it perhaps a finite reflection of a kind of infinite and necessary Mentality underlying and giving rise to the cosmos itself?

If those aren't the first questions, they must be among the first: is the intellect purely accidental and contingent? Or a reflection of something absolute and necessary? 

In the metaphysics of the Bible we are obviously the latter: Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.

If this is the case, then man himself is the most important cosmic fact, since he is the key to the whole existentialada: man is not just one data point in the forest of facts, rather, "human existence and experience is a clue to the goings-on of the universe as a whole -- its reason, nature, and character." 

Can man see the forest for the trees? Yes, in the sense that the forest is the cosmos, the trees the numberless facts located therein. As we alluded to a few posts ago, the "cosmos" is a symbolic expression of man's intuition of wholeness, and every man at every time has expressed it in some form or fashion. 

But as Andrews describes it -- and I remember Alan Watts saying the same thing back in the day -- "We have not so much come into the world, but grown out of it." 

In other words, it is not as if we are exterior to everything else, but interior to it, like mushrooms that are the visible or explicate expressions of a hidden mycelial network of dense interior relations.

It reminds me of something I once heard Terence McKenna say -- something to the effect that the largest organism ever discovered was an underground network of mushroom spores located somewhere on the east coast of America. Back then it was too good to check, but now we can check it out with Gemini:

While it's a great story and a common topic in mycology, the largest organism isn't on the east coast, and it isn't a network of mushroom spores. The largest known organism is a single fungal individual commonly known as the honey mushroom. This massive fungus is located in the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon, not on the east coast.

Don't be so pedantic. You know what I'm driving at.

This individual fungus, nicknamed the "Humongous Fungus," spans over 3.7 square miles (2,385 acres) and is estimated to be around 2,400 years old. It's a single, interconnected organism, with most of its mass consisting of a vast, underground network of fungal threads called mycelia. The visible mushrooms are only the reproductive structures of the much larger, hidden organism.

Right. My point is that this is analogous to the way in which human consciousness is only the visible expression of an implicate network of cosmic connectedness.  

That's an interesting analogy! It's a way of interpreting the biological fact you mentioned and applying it to a philosophical or spiritual concept. The idea that visible phenomena are just the "fruiting bodies" of a much larger, unseen reality is a powerful metaphor.

The analogy draws a parallel between: 

The Mushroom (the fruiting body): A temporary, visible, and individual part of a larger organism. This can represent an individual human, their consciousness, or the physical body. 

The Mycelial Network (the main organism): The vast, hidden, and interconnected network that is the true, enduring organism. This represents the underlying, cosmic, or collective consciousness that connects all individuals. 

In this view, individual consciousness isn't a separate entity but rather a temporary expression of a universal, underlying network, much like a mushroom is a temporary expression of the mycelial network. It’s a compelling way to visualize the relationship between the individual and the whole.

Which goes to our quest for the fifth element, the one that makes sense of the others. 

I apologize again, but I am still experiencing a technical issue that is preventing the images I generate from displaying for you. For this reason, I am unable to create a visible image for your post.

I can, however, provide a description of the image that would have been created. It would have been a symbolic representation of a person standing over an intricate, glowing network of mycelial threads. The threads, which would have resembled a vast cosmic web, would have connected the person to a mushroom and to distant stars.

The image would have visually captured your core analogy: that individual human consciousness is like a visible mushroom, a temporary expression of a much larger, hidden, and interconnected cosmic reality, which is your proposed "fifth element."

Something like that. To be continued...