The structures of our language, which function as directly accessible carriers of meaning, reveal remarkable parallels to physical systems—particularly quantum systems—which can therefore be regarded as carriers of meaning as well. This profound interconnectedness of language, thought and reality challenge our conventional understanding of what is going on, argues Dr. Sachs. His insightful observations reveal surprising ways to make sense of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics along linguistic—and therefore thought-like—lines. Though involved, we highly recommend that you give this essay a careful read, as it is surely worth the effort.

The biblical story of the Fall of Man is a symbolic representation of our universal experience of primordial loss, the Freudian pure lack, or “das Ding,” argues Dr. Sachs. The fall into the phenomenal world of perceptual experience appears from this psychoanalytical perspective as the “I” development of the human being.  The subsequent expulsion from paradise and the loss of the immediate presence of God are the trauma of this fundamental loss.

Dr. Sachs discusses the dynamics of our deepest, seemingly ‘unconscious’ mental processes, and shows remarkable correspondences between them and metabolic processes such as protein synthesis and folding. He suggests, along firm idealist lines, that our body’s metabolism is simply a metaphor, the extrinsic appearance of our inner, ‘unconscious’ mental processes. In other words, metabolism may be what the deepest layers of our own mind look like, when displayed on the screen of perception. This is an involved essay and not the easiest of reads, but it is well worth the effort.

A careful investigation of our phenomenal inner life reveals a self indistinguishable from the world and others, and yet impossibly beyond both, argues Dr. Sachs. This realization constitutes a challenge to our need to self-actualize as individuals, with significant psychological (and perhaps even metaphysical) implications.