The world is always changing. Sometimes it disappears and takes its place as the invisible, unconscious backdrop or the black paint behind a mirror. Just as light seems to fill the air, or the air seems to hold the light like water in a glass, it fills our being. And the changes we perceive blur because our perception is changing, too; it can be hard to tell what is the world changing and what are our own changes. Because the changes of the world seem to be my own: every change in me is a change in the world and every change in the world is a change in me. Our sorrow and joy also belong to the world. In this way, we make the world as much as the world makes us. The porousness of everything, the spiderweb divisions that keep everything apart, allows reciprocal bleed, everything permeated and permeating. At the same time, there is an emptiness in the physical cosmos, who's size, if size can be applied to the infinite endlessness, reduces us to ever smaller infinitesimals, irrational ratios, impossible odds.
History, as we know it, haunts us like the actions of yesterday we don't remember doing. We are the last child in the family of humanity, living in hand-me-downs, and left to our own devices because mom and dad can't be bothered anymore. Everyone we encounter is an individual, as unique as everyone else, with a life of their own, simultaneously sibling and utter stranger. Everybody is visible, out in the open. Institutions that seem as permanent as mountains are just fronts that probably won't last half as long as the Oracle of Delphi. The world seems like a big movie set. The only thing is, those guns over there, they're loaded. Just when we find our way out of the corn maze, we notice there are bombs going off, explosions, body parts blown all over the place; drones filming the destruction they wreak, operated by AI pilots. How are we supposed to relate to the fact that what're killing us are machines many orders removed from their human operators? Targets created by algorithms. Yes, there's a lot to keep us distracted. The moments we have to contemplate the strangeness of existing pass by unnoticed. Death. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it... Anyway, I can't remember where I put my memory or my keys.
Relationships. Haven't I seen you someplace before? Don't I know you? Yeah, we met at that cocktail party in a previous incarnation. We're filled with strangers. Ancestors or relatives-- an interesting difference, similar to the difference between nature and environment. We share a common ancestor; or lowest common denominator? We participate in nature or nature participates in itself through us. Or do we exist in environment like citizens within a government? Daniel Dennett died the other day. He proposed that every cell in our bodies was a little robot. Imagine that. What does that mean (mean.. something shared by all, common, general, low, or to intend, to have in mind, or to mean something, to matter)? The movement of a machine , or a robot, is not the same as the movement of a living creature. A machine cannot will itself to move. Machines, or robots, move because they were designed to move. Its will is given. If our cells are little robots, they cannot move by their own will. Somehow the mass of cells that make up a human being, the brain and the nervous system, are impelled by the will to move! It's extraordinary. One wonders the location of this animating force. Physics tell us that matter is never created or destroyed, the Law of Conservation Mass. Matter is composed of atoms which are made of interacting subatomic particles, etc... It also tells us that objective reality doesn't exist within the observable universe, that our observation affects how the observed behaves. A particle can be in two places at once; or the behavior of one particle can effect another in a different place. It gets confusing. On the one hand we are made of these automatons that are governed by laws; on the other, the more we learn of the way things behave on the atomic level, it is shown that our perceptions, our observations of these behaviors, have deep implications for the observed. So everything is made of soulless, mindless atomica; and, at the same time, this soulless, mindless atomica is profoundly interactive. Consciousness, Dennett proposes, is "the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying process in which multiple calculations are happening at once." Somehow the collection of robots created consciousness. Others, like Rudolf Steiner, believe that modernity has it backwards, and that the brain and all matter are the products of Mind. Most shutter at this idea. It seems to go against all the supposed truths embedded in the modern mind. It's a wonderful debate. One of the ironies is that, whether we believe in God or science or both or neither, we haven't left the domain of belief and faith.
Medieval, Scholastic, humans lived, it seems, in a different world than we do. The idea of theory and hypothesis, for example, had very different meanings before the scientific revolution. Today when we have a hypothesis or theory, it is an idea put forth as true; these kinds of theories or hypotheses can be proved or disproved empirically. Make an observation. Can someone else observe, under similar conditions, the same thing? Theory and hypothesis in their older sense weren't concerned with truth. "They (hypothesis, theory) were arrangements- devices- for saving the appearances; the Greek and Medieval astronomers were not at all disturbed by the fact that the same appearances could be saved by two or more quite different hypotheses..." Owen Barfield, "Saving the Appearances" So much of this changing world, and the way we are situated within it, is informed by ideas of which we have no firsthand experience; these things are true because we are told they are by specialists. When Mercury appears to reverse its direction and go retrograde, the astronomer tells us that it only appears that way from our position on earth. Most of us only know how things seem, and often that changes over time. We know that when water is hot it burns; or the sun always rises in that same direction where those mountains are I can see over the wall in the backyard. What we believe about and how we relate to the appearances have significantly changed in the last five hundred years. The changes can't be reduced to a single verdict of good or bad. We can observe how the change in our belief about theory has changed the way we live in the world. Humanity's ability to manipulate and harness nature, or its environments, has exploded and technologies increase exponentially. The speed we travel, the speed we make something, gets faster and faster. Barfield points out that the revolutions of Copernicus and Galileo were not so much about the heliocentric universe (which had been talked about for a long time) as they were about the very nature of hypothesis and theory. Suddenly, these things not only explained what we observed but were also considered true. The ways we see the world, what we believe about the world, have breathtaking consequences.
"..and already the knowing animals are aware that/that we are not really at home in our interpreted world" Rainer Maria Rilke
The spiritual and the atheist worship in the temple of life. Our beliefs themselves are as miraculous or holy as what we believe. The battle between meaning and meaninglessness , everything and nothing, God or the Big Bang, aren't much different than the tumble of day into night and night into day. Our sense of relationship, our experience of being in relation to another, or feelings of isolation and loneliness-- we wake in the night and in the darkness and the silence the weight of our lives, our actions, press in from all sides; we are suddenly aware of how everything is interdependent-- we pick up the phone and call a friend or wake up our partner and tell the how we feel. We share ourselves with another. Whether you're a yogi or an atheist, connection, touch, is as important as food and water. The behaviorist BF Skinner discovered that a lactating wire monkey wasn't enough to keep a baby monkey alive-- it was nurtured by feeling warm living flesh as much as the breastmilk.
The world is a cold place. The world is so cozy and warm. It seems like this has always been the way it is. However, we decide how pliable the world is. The world is not written in stone only; it’s written in the rainbow, in the sand between our toes; it’s written in the rain on your lips and it’s written in the eyes of a newborn child; it’s written in the last breath of your parent and it’s written in the rubble that used to be a hospital; it’s written in grass and in the concrete of the city; it’s written in the memory and the vision; it’s written in all the ways to spell love. It whispers to us and tells us what it is when we’re not listening. And when we do listen, sometimes it’s silent. Sometimes the fire tells us its secrets after everyone has gone to bed and we sit by the hearth and watch the coals.
I walk up the trail with my dog Emmett. We sit on a rock and take a breath. The sun is setting and I can see my shadow on a Palo Verde tree. If it wasn't there, there would be no shadow. That shadow is me, in a way. And the tree that holds the shadow, that is me, too. If I remove my shadow, the tree is still me somehow. I participate in it. Everywhere we are, we see ourselves within the appearances. None of it exists on its own. It seems we live in a world of laws: divine laws, physical laws, human laws. No one has been able to tell us where some of those laws come from. "You got to be honest to live outside the law," says Bob Dylan.
We can learn a lot from a dog. Thank you, Oliver. "Our sorrow and joy also belong to the world. In this way, we make the world as much as the world makes us". Absolutely. The words you once said, "Despite these modern times, we live in an age of Renaissance", is the crux to our human selves now; we believe what we see, and what we see is what we create.
I found this gripping. These thoughts are both affirmative and provoking. Thank you for taking me into spaces I will continue to consider.