Cells

Your body is made of cells, which grow from one to 50,000,000,000,000 cells in about 20 years. The largest kind of cell, an ovum, is about the size of a pin head, but most of the rest are so much smaller that 100,000 could sit on the pin head. All are born from the division of a previous cell, they grow and eventually die, living as long as a lifetime in the case of the super-adapted nerve and muscle, or, if they are stomach lining cells, they may be recycled within a couple of days.

Each one of your cells has its job to do, for which it is highly specialised. For instance, your nerve cells produce more electric current than other cells and deliver it to one precise destination very quickly rather than just to their next door neighbours.

For the biologist to view this level of you she must use her electron microscope. She places herself at the appropriate distance to see these cells of yours. With her you lower yourself down into your cellular world and, though you keep your links with the human level, become a member of this cellular society. The description in the paragraphs above of cells and their lives is made by one who has been in their company, and then brought this information back to the human level. By placing yourself at this range you take up a cell's viewpoint, embracing and taking on the cellular world.

And, as at every level, you are nothing in yourself but room for your peers. Looking down the microscope you observe a cell. You can at the same time study the near end of your instrument and observe that here at centre you are neither human nor cellular nor molecular, but space or capacity for the cell you are studying.