The Invention of the Wheel

Sometimes I feel like a monkey staring at a wheel. I keep scratching at my head and thumbing my chin, my face angled in curiosity. Some moments I reach out with my small trembling hands and I touch it. Nothing. So I keep at it. I keep touching and pushing, harder and harder, until finally it moves. It rolls casually away, slows and stops. I sit there for a moment, still scratching and thumbing, while my hands moves unwantingly forward to push it again.
Of course, it's only natural to be like this. To be like me. To be like you. We arn't much different then each other. We really aren't too much different than a monkey, or even a platypus. Deep down, so far down beneath your skin and blood, there's a place where you are totally indiscernible, where you are nothing but an organic calculation, an elemental orchestra of biological dissonance that plays so quietly no one can hear it's beauty.
Regardless, the notes play on, the symbols crash, and something holds the swaying staff in an attempt to control it. Of these ballads, there are few. They are practiced and memorized but prone to miscalculated inspiration. But no matter, their objective accuracy does not stop ticking of the metronome; it plays on.
I have been taught in the discipline of science. It has told me that I am a machine. My organs are no different in comparison to a Grandfather clock. Gears and a pendulum. Spurred by some understood first momentum.
But others have told me I feel. I live. I have a soul. A mind that is boundless. A spirit within me that separates me from the world.
I have thought of this. Why can't the two exist in harmonic tension? But more importantly, why must it be so microscopic? What of the world? What of the universe?
What if the universe had a soul? A duality of existence unknown to even it. Why must existence be so calculated? So cruel? What if the same internal struggles exist in it. An existence of consciousness.
I am told God is all knowing. He is everything. But if this huge great chain of existence, this elemental orchestra, unifies the universe, wouldn't the struggles of consciousness, of essence, still dominate. The circle of life could simply be revolving by a trembling hand.