The human person is in the image of God which means man is a "mirocosm." Fallen man doesn't express the wholeness of the microsm but rather the diversity of reacting parts, However man has this potential for a conscious wholeness that would be in the image. In Christianity, the process of the change of being from diversity into wholeness is re-birth.
From Jacob Needleman's book "A Sense of the Cosmos" chapter one:
Part Five
Microcosmic Man
At this point it is necessary to introduce the idea of the microcosm, which will guide much of the thinking in this book.
Many statements of this ancient idea are so literal-minded as to make it seem incredible that people ever took it seriously. On the other hand, most contemporary attempts to make use of the idea of man as a universe transform it into something so metaphorical and commonplace as to make it equally incredible that anyone could ever doubt it.
Yet the mystery, that is to say the energy, of the idea of the microcosm has somehow survived even to this day. Of all the fragments that have come down to us from the ancient teachings it alone has resisted capture by either science or religion.
How to approach it? Were I to attempt a historical presentation I would have to summarize the metaphysical and psychological teachings of every great tradition that has exerted influence throughout recorded history. For, this idea in one or another form resides at the core of all traditions. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we are most familiar with its expression in the teaching that man is made in the image of God--God, the Creator and Preserver of the Universal Wholeness in all its gradations and levels. The traditions of India speak of the Divine Cosmic Man whose dispersal into fragments constitute the creation of the world and whose re-collection is the sole essential task of human life. In Buddhism we find the doctrine that all the levels of being, from mineral up through the gods, are contained in Man--Man, the center and Man the all-embracing Void. The traditions of China revolve around the idea of the King, the Great Man who governs the parts of existence. One could go on with this listing--through the teachings of Egypt, black Africa, the American Indian; in Plato and in the Stoic philosophers; throughout the great tapestry of alchemy in all lands. The idea is everywhere.
Yet for all the force that this idea still contains, and despite the record of its presence in all cultures and times, it is obvious that the key to our understanding it is missing and needs to be rediscovered in our own experience. Otherwise, it could never have happened that of all the civilizations that we know, ours is the only one in which this idea not only does not occupy a central place, but is so far from the center of our thinking that when people--scientists or otherwise--make use of it, they do so as though they were coming across a "new image" or a "new slant."
Man is the universe in miniature--such is the bare statement of the idea of the microcosm. But as our conception of the universe is dictated to us by the scientific world view, the idea in this bald form adds nothing to our self-understanding. In this form, the idea tells us only that the same laws and substances that govern and constitute the stars also govern and constitute the human organism. But what kinds of laws? And what kind of substances?
Our understanding of the microcosmos is thus severely constricted by our preconceptions about the cosmos. For, when we think about the universe, what do we picture to ourselves? Simply repeating that it is unimaginably vast and great has the inevitable effect of allowing our thought to come to rest, which is equivalent to the illusion of having grasped something about the Whole. The idea that the universe is in man therefore leaves us untouched.
But it is enough actively to imagine the little we know of what takes place on this small planet earth for us to glimpse the power in the idea of the microcosm. One thinks of both the long, slow formation of the continents and the instantaneous eruption of a volcano; the birth and death of species that inhabit the earth for millions of years compared with the minute life span of a single celled organism; the constant movement everywhere of the winds and the stillness of rock and ice. There is the internal harmony of the ecosystem which is yet composed of conflict, mutual killing, fire and storm; there is gradual, subtle growth constantly in process in all things and the sudden destruction brought by earthquake, climatic change and disease; there are all possible movements upward and downward, collisions of fate every where at every moment.
But more than that, there are the laws that govern all these processes, the intelligence that adapts, reacts, creates and destroys within ever larger and more fundamental scales of intelligence and law. Is this intelligence, this all-penetrating hierarchy of purposeful law, something that is only of the earth? Or does it not pervade the whole of reality?
We must remember that these few examples are of processes and patterns among which we ourselves live and which we have more or less actually experienced. But if we now move in our imagination beyond the earth toward the complex life of planets and moons, and toward the sun, the stars and the galaxies. . .
At this point the question becomes serious: What does it mean that all this is man? And not only in man as separate processes in all their variety, but as a
cosmos, an ordered whole under the rule of a ladder of governing, lawful intelligence? The response seems clear: In whatever sense and whatever way all this is in man, it is not in
my awareness. I, this individual person, pursue my life nowhere near an awareness in myself of this incredible spectrum of time, force and structure, not to mention the intelligence that governs it from without and within. This realization is the key to the idea of the microcosm. And it is precisely this key that is missing or unemphasized in almost every account of it that we may come upon: Man is a microcosm, but
I am not that man.
With this key in hand, we may now admit the idea of microcosmic man into our thinking.