Day 223: What tills the soil?

Mmm, tired. Been watching Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson discussing the nature of self today, and thinking about that whole bag. What are we, eh? What’s all this? It’s mad. Life is mad. All the LEGO blocks that made us up a little while ago were making up armies in glistening chain mail, or robed Roman statesmen, or plodding dinosaurs. There were really dinosaurs, actual bloody dinosaurs, bumbling about where we now sit and watch YouTube!

And more, when you look down at those LEGO blocks that make us up now, that once made up dinosaurs, you see the blocks are only structures of smaller blocks, and those blocks again are structures of even smaller blocks, and even further until you can’t tell the difference between the block and the structure - until you get wave-particle duality.

And it’s not that we are made of atoms, or quarks, or molecules, or our physical bodies, or our experiential ur-sensation of Mind, or that we’re but cogs in the machine of societies, or planets, or solar systems. On every level you look there is structure manifesting some essential… what?

God? Tao? Reality?

Even after all these years I still catch myself having to lay out existence in really simple terms like this, to try to draw forth its inherent craziness and splendour, make me face up to it, because I know it’s… I guess… something on some level I flat out do not believe.

The part of me that has learned what I am through the bias of language we use, how we interact with one another, commonly held assumptions about life, that part of me wants to be a thing. I want to be the thing. Something solid and meaty and real. But everything we know about quantum mechanics, metaphysics, ontology says that there are no things. Or, rather, everything that is a thing is only a passing form, a temporary manifestation of… whatever does the manifesting. Call it God if you want.

I was thinking earlier that the brain is an interface between Self and Other. Between individual mind and external reality.

Which doesn’t mean there is parity between these two things. The boundary between them isn’t like that between two countries, or even between two sides of a coin. Mind on one side, external reality on the other. It’s more that the self, experience, is something that arises out of underlying reality. It’s like the self is a flower that blossoms upon the plant of reality.

I am not you. I am not this keyboard upon which I type. The flower is not the leaves, the stem, of the plant. OK. But they are not mechanical things, like parts of a car, put together. The flower wasn’t screwed onto the plant. The flower grows from the plant. If you look down carefully at the boundary, the stalk, you find one becoming the other.

Is this the brain? I think so. I mean, my physical body, to an extent that already exists in the realm of reality, of Other, right? I have control over it, but that statement already implies the "it" is separate from the "I" that controls it. It’s like the lower part of that stalk beneath the flower, without which the flower would not exist. This is obvious when part of it gets cut off. If I lose an arm, a finger, a toenail, even. If this happens I haven't lost myself, I've lost something attached to myself. I guess it’s at the boundary, the liminal space, where it’s not wholly Self, and not wholly Other.

And so you have the flower, a unique, exquisite thing, unlike any other flower. And it buds forth from a plant, which is external reality, from which the flower cannot be detached (while it still lives).

And what’s more, this plant, with its leaves of objects out in the world - keyboards and desks and cars and yoghurt pots - is the same plant upon which all other flowers bloom. So I look across at you, and I have no doubt you are a flower, like me, but you’re also part of the plant of Other. You are part of my external reality. And I am part of your external reality.

Wild, man.

So we’re all intimately joined, right? We are flowers brought forth from the same plant, all different, but all manifestations of the same living process.

And that process, the plant, all the objects and physical structures in our universe, is rooted in some underlying soil. (Excuse the “rooted” pun there, which I didn’t make on purpose. And note to myself here, when looking back at these crazed ramblings [because let’s be honest, who else are they for?]: is this a meeting of Chomsky’s universal grammar and of Jungian archetypes, the idea that the concept of “rooted” has some deeper ground (ha!) of meaning that applies to relationships between both plant and soil, and physical and metaphysical; that you can use the same word for both?)

Uhh, what was I saying? So brain is the interface between Self and Other. And the reality that holds both of these is maybe the interface between… process and structure?

Structure, the plant and its flowers, is our world, what the world looks like, how it is formed. It is you, it is me, it is the environment in which we live, from which we arise, to which we in death we retreat.

Process is… the breath that animates us. The spirit forming itself into every rock, every wall, every home. It is the Tao. Mystery of mysteries. It is what someone might call God.

And that word is so loaded with so much rubbish, but the thing is in secular society today we don’t pay a whole lot of attention to this underlying essence from which everything in existence manifests. Which surely we should, because we don’t know anything about it, and it’s fascinating. But I think a lot of us instinctively turn away from thinking about it, because it doesn’t compute with our subconscious assumptions about who we are, which are unfortunately still informed by outmoded concepts of body and soul, matter and spirit, concepts from Greek thought, from medieval beliefs, from the Enlightenment, from Victorian science (which was too dependent on narrow-beam thinking, showing a picture of mechanical, individual things). When thinking evolves it does not necessarily throw out and replace how we used to think, but rather subsumes it, often keeping hold for a long time of elements that are no longer congruous.

I think that has happened with us, and the current views of quantum mechanics and ontology - of modern science, essentially - are actually incompatible with some of the older assumptions about existence we still cling onto in our brains.

And this is scary, because it involves letting go of your entire sense of self, of the rock you cling to in the tempestuous ocean of an uncaring universe. It involves acknowledging that the rock is imaginary, in fact, that it is a mirage.

And suddenly you’re drowning in darkness and everything is coming apart and meaning itself is falling away.

But then you breathe. And you carry on breathing. And you find that if it’s true that the rock doesn’t exist then the rock never existed. So what have you been clinging on to all this time?

You’ve been floating by yourself. Let go. Relax. Everything in you already knows how to live. You are not an object bobbing in the ocean, but the ocean itself. Its storming is your storming. You are alive.

And only I think after we've been honest about this can we seriously debate what we mean by terms like "God", what it is that pulses rhythmically through the central stem of the plant of Other, that rustles the petals of Self; what it is that tills the soil of the ground of existence from which all things grow.

...... 

OK, that's enough late night rambling. Sorry for the waffle. It's what's in my head. I can only put down what is in my head, communicated as clearly as I can manage in the time available, and not worry about where I fall short.

Music: something appropriate. I Never Lose, Never Really, by Belong. Beautiful!