Adam Blatner

Yes! Here’s the low down on the higher-ups! Try on this metaphor for size: I (and you, of course,  all of us) am sort of a cell surface on the skin on the edge of a ridge in a pattern of finger-prints on the tip of a finger and where I connect with the world, the touch, the laptop keyboard, that’s sort of everyday life. I am also the deeper parts of the cell that receives nourishment from the metaphysical roots of being, but these “angels” and “essences” are not in heaven, but deep within me, part of me. There are subcutaneous tissues of all sorts, bone, tendon, and beyond those, muscles farther into hand and arm, and beyond those blood vessels and nerves from a mysterious distant core carrying “blood” and oxygen and nutrients from sources and organs within that core of which my tiny little cell on the finger can never know. We humans with our knowledge of physiology and anatomy are still learning about the marvels of the organism that serves as our temple, and that, too, is only the surface manifestation of depth-energies, body-mind beyond matter, that we imagine in our own anthropomorphic way as people-like gods and angels. But what if their relationship to us was more like the relationship of the blood or muscle or bone cells and all to the fingertip where, to change metaphors, the “rubber meets the road”?

My “angels” are thus with me always, feeding and serving me. They are a deeper part of me, or equally descriptive, what I have the illusion of as “me” is just the exterior surface of what is equally them and me, or “we.” Anyway, if I’m smart, and in return for their service for me, I’ll try to serve the organism that they express. They are not other but rather a deeper “me,” and “I” in turn are part of a myriad of others who also serve the greater good—or, if I’m foolish, the greater folly.  Anyway, it’s fun trying to develop my intuitions about the cosmos. I love this quote from the great modern philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947), from his book, “Modes of Thought”  (1938, pp.237-238.):
    “The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace. If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism; not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated. 
         Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern.”