Body of Christ

In Paul's ecclesiology (1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12), the Body of Christ describes the architecture of total mutual constitution. Members of one another. The hand cannot say to the eye, “I have no need of you.” Each member's functioning is constituted by its relations to every other member. The whole body is a single organism animated by a single Spirit.

The Eastern Orthodox push this further with the communion of saints — living and dead together, all interpenetrating, all interceding, all participating in each other's becoming.

The Pauline picture is the Christian counterpart to the Mahayana Buddhist Indra’s Net. Both describe a single nested structure: an infinite net of interpenetrating jewels, each reflecting all the others, all together forming a single Body animated by a single illuminating presence.

What quantum mechanics supplies as physical substrate is Entanglement. The two religious images describe what entanglement looks like at the scale of souls.