The Ultimate Reality

May 2nd, 2022

I have to confess that I do not see the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. And I haven’t a hope of doing so.

But then I’m not claiming to. That was never the point.

Our experiences and our narratives, are a moving frame; a frame that is advancing through time. A frame in which the contents inevitably change as experiences are experienced and as understandings develop, deepen or are transcended.

As the saying goes, no one can put their foot into the same river twice.

Consider:

Many of us who, have looked at a bias held by another, will have thought, ‘This person is being partially blinded by this bias.’ I.e., they are not seeing the world around them as clearly as they might.

I’ve told the story several times about walking into a psych lecture in university. The subject was Freud’s Defense Mechanisms. 45 minutes later, I walked out and saw a changed world around me.

Experiences and insights inevitably push at us to absorb them. After all, we live in an existence wherein change is said to be the only constant. Change presses upon us; whether we open our arms to it or not.

Change changes us. The contents of our moving frame changes. What we are experiencing changes because the contents of our frame have changed.

And, yes, our experience is all still undoubtedly subjective.

There is no question of pulling the curtain away and seeing the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. That was never the point.

But the person who transcends a partially blinding bias will see what is there to be seen more clearly without the distortion.

And thus it is with all beliefs, religions, biases, opinions, hopes and fears; to name a few of our sources of distortion.

Each distortion we diminish lets us see a bit more clearly. Each moves us some immeasurable distance closer to the unobtainable ultimate. Each new thing we learn changes the contents of the frame and alters the view.

If the mutability of the moving frame that our experiences arise from is grasped, then the possibility of influencing what the frame is fed can be conceived.

Choosing to try to diminish all the beliefs, opinions, biases, hopes and fears from within a frame seems likely to increasingly clarify the frame’s perception of the reality around it.

It is a road that promises new vistas for the frame without ever a hint of a promise of the road’s end.

After trying many other things, I’ve found that this is the thing that I find the most intriguing.

Posted in Philosophical | No Comments »

The Need for Meaning

May 2nd, 2022

This ‘need’ for meaning in our lives shapes so very much of how we perceive the world.

The first thing I would say about this is that for the vast majority of the human race, I would never consider trying to deny them the sustenance of believing that there is a meaning for their life.

But for those few of us out here in the hinterlands thrashing in the bushes, I’d say that we should consider why we humans feel such a thirst for meaning.

We are as clearly the product of the evolution that shaped us.

We are, at this late stage of evolution on this planet, intelligent self-aware creatures.

And the evolution, that we are the products of, has honed us, and the survival of all creatures, upon our ability to reliably detect and understand what is going on around us in the environment; as the optimum way to ensure survival and propagation.

So, we are hard-wired to incessantly try to understand what we are seeing when we look out at the world.

And it is from this trying to understand that arises a terrible cognitive dissonance.

Having manifested self-awareness and the inevitable and concurrent sense of personhood that accompanies self-awareness, the observation that we appear to just live and then die deeply offends our sense of personhood, presence and continuity.

“I am, and I can see that I am, and then … I’m not?” Why, why, why?

Even today, with all of our biological knowledge, the central point of Dawkins’ book, “The Selfish Gene”, eludes us.

“You mean it is not all about me and my sense of persistent personhood?”

In the deeper stages of Zen Buddhism, and other meditative and introspective practices, it is often seen that our egos and our sense of personhood are illusions.

Everything is change. We come, things happen and we go. So it is.

Only the illusionary sense of personhood, and the associated automatically arising defensive barrier, the ego, resist the simple evidence of our transience.

So, in the face of this terrible cognitive dissonance, we dream up religions to ‘explain’ things and to comfort ourselves that our person-hoods are not really just transient patterns.

The book, “The Worm at the Core”, by Sheldon Solomon discusses all of this quite nicely.

If our need for ‘meaning’ drives us to construct religions that we believe in to comfort ourselves, then I can only group this phenomenon into the same basket with the other distortions which stand between us and increased clarity.

Posted in Philosophical | No Comments »

Determinism

May 2nd, 2022

Determinism or Free-will, These two are a real quandary. People tend to line up on one side or the other of the question; as if there were no other sides.

But there are.

The ‘Either-Or’ construct was probably the earliest bit of logic that our recently evolved semi-intelligent ancestors became consciously aware of. And thus it was enshrined, early on, as one of our first ‘go to’ strategies to be used when reasoning out the world around us.

But in truth, the reality being considered is under no obligation to conform to an ‘Either-Or’ expectation.

Nor does the choice between Free-will and Determinism define the only relevent alternatives.

And that’s a good thing. Because pure Determinism renders us pointless. And Free-will requires us to be Gods independent of existence.

The alternative we have been missing lies all around us; in plain sight.

It is looking out of your eyes this very moment and it in your cat lying on the couch on the other side of the room.

If you are an animal which experiences the urge to survive, then you are that alternative.

Existence is not defined solely by Newtonian cause and effect Determanism on one hand and Quantum probabilities on the other.

There is another dimension to our reality called complexity.

Visualize a line that runs from Determinism on one end to Quantum probabilities on the other. Now, add another line which rises vertically from the first and call it Complexity.

It is on this line that you will find “Life”.

Life is patterns of matter which replicate themselves using energy harvested from the environment around them.

Life has evolved and increased its complexity for nearly 4 billion years.

One form, the evolving complexity took about 600 million years ago, was animals.

The more complex animals have nervous systems. These systems allow the animal’s environment to be sensed so decisions, which optimize its survival and propagation, can be made. Emotionally, these animals ‘care’ if they survive or not.

This is life-based ‘local will’.

So, when you put milk in your coffee today, it was not an action presdestined to happen since existence began. Nor did it require your God essence, from somewhere beyond this causal existence, to step in to help make the choice.

It was just you, you sweet little self-replicating pattern of matter. You, who preserves the coherence of your physical manifestation using excess energy shed by the local stellar unit.

And that’s good.

Good because the saddest part of the Determinism/Free-will debate concerns those who cannot find their way out of this determinist/Free-will trap.

Many of these people are genuine seekers; people who have waded deeply into philosophical questions, spiritual traditions and into non-duality.

And they have begun by correctly concluding that our sense of a personal self and of ego-hood are illusions. And they are.

But then they’ve further concluded that if all existence is one thing, then a personal will must also be an illusion.

This is wrong.

And they do themselves and the world a terrible disservice with this conclusion. Embracing it removes some of our best and brightest from actively contributing to the shaping of our future.

Posted in Philosophical | No Comments »

My Spotify Playlist as of Apr 12, 2022

April 12th, 2022

For anyone who might be interested. There is some good stuff here:

https://open.spotify.com/user/evbgbmgjn7sq9du1bm7zolzb4/playlist/29qCiqFDMtstEKksB3V7qP?si=kcECsU1uS72sWsFhLar_Sg

Posted in The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Prognosis

March 8th, 2022

If we attempt to divorce ourselves from our human points-of-view and look on dispassionately, it can be seen that 99%+ of existence is simply working its way towards what is called the ‘heat-death’ of existence. Which can also be expressed as the end-game of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But there is a much, much smaller part of existence which is moving the other way. I.e. towards amassing greater complexity and concentration of energy and organization. I’m referring to life. Life can arises in goldilocks zones of excess energy through processes we don’t fully understand. But, arise it does. Life on Earth is the proof.

Indeed, I once expressed this in a cryptic bit of writing a few years ago:

“Energy evaporates down gradients and little creatures arise in the backwash.”

So, do we and the backwash arising of life have a purpose? If so, I cannot see it implied anywhere. But, in spite of that, it is a truly amazing thing that natural processes within existence should be able to create and evolve bits of itself (us) which are aware of itself.

Are we, the pinnacle creatures on this planet, likely to be the pinnacle creatures throughout existence? Given the size of existence, that seems an extremely dubious notion.

I like your idea about what a next intelligent species might be like:

“Maybe the next intelligent species won’t even care about tech. They’ll just float around, eat fish, sing songs, have sex, and raise their babies, happy to be alive on this planet.“

There’s nothing impossible about it. All it requires is the manifested intent of the new species be to live within the limits of the biosphere around it.

We humans could do that now and live on this planet for many hundreds of thousands of years more. Evolving our intelligence up and up and patiently enjoying our lives and seeing what awaits us.

But I strongly doubt we will change and follow that path. I think we are taking the current biosphere into a big reset. After that, life will slowly build again and maybe those who come after will outgrow this inherent self-destructiveness that we seem to have.

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, CyberChaos, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Pandemics, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Stuxnet – a history

January 13th, 2022

I haven’t kept this blog up much these last few years. But many of the topics I’ve covered in the past still deeply interest me. Cyber attacks are one such subject. Back in 2010, the Stuxnet Virus waged war on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. I recall the stories that came out back then quite well. Indeed, I’d been following stories in that vein for sometime.

Today, a friend acquainted me with a Podcast that went over how researchers discovered and decoded the Stuxnet Virus and I found listening to it intensely interesting. If this sort of thing interests you, I think you will like this. It is here.

Listening to the Podcast made me recall a post I’d made here on on this blog. The post reported, in May of 2009, the U.S. was convinced that Iran was within three years of obtaining a nuclear weapon. That, in retrospect, may connect some of the dots. Dots that are always a bit vague at the time.

The 2009 post is here.

Posted in Conflict, CyberChaos, Tech-Software, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Be here now?

December 24th, 2021

My friend,

I’ve read your E-Mail over several times and I’ve let my responses roll around in my mind – sort of like clothes tumbling in a dryer; waiting for one response or another to pop to the top and suggest a beginning response.

But mostly what arises for me is the feeling that I am in a thoughtless and immediate space.

And that I’m watching someone in a thinking space; thinking.

I am here pressed up against the plate glass wall of paradox.

The irony of it almost makes me want to laugh. (not at you, my friend, but at the absurdity of the paradox itself).

Have you seen this skit by Bob Newhart?

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=519168745237080

Thinking about our thinking to try to untangle the problems we feel that we have – because of our thinking.

Does that make you smile?

Or, perhaps, does it makes you want to squirm – and think about it a bit? (smile)

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not being cynical, critical or mocking you. I like you far too much for any of that. I highly respect your sincerity in all of this.

But, you are trapped in a paradox; from my POV.

Of course, you could just lead a life of staying busy and not thinking about things; but that will not serve you. You would get nowhere. And just wake up, decades later, no different than you were when you fell asleep.

But, just as surely, if your strategy is to try to sort things out by thinking about them and trying to understand them conceptually, then you will just end up like a conspiracy theorist. Who, after years of trying to see the ‘real truth’, finds nothing but evidence of evidence born of confirmation bias around him in all directions.

The more we think we can think ourselves into ‘seeing life directly and simply’, the further we will get from it.

But there is a place between denial and trying.

Calling it by one word or another is always a risk; because words can lead us back into thinking about words and what they mean.

‘Being’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘acceptance’….

Consider dropping the idea of cause and effect and its suggestion that the way forward is to ‘do things’ to ‘get results’.

Cause and effect, subject and object, this and that, now and then, here and there, and on and on. They will all lead you astray.

They all suggest that ‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’ are not perfect. and they suggest that ‘that’, ‘then’ and ‘there’ might be better.

Again, I am not being critical. But I am trying to get you to see that the idea that ‘things are not perfect’ leads us to think about why things are not perfect. And no amount of subject-object consideration can untie the knot and the paradox of duality.

Two blonds are standing. One on either side of the river. One hollers over to the other, “How do I get over there?” And the other shouts back, “You are already over there!”

As Bob Newhart says in the skit, “Just stop”.

Say ‘yes’. It is what it is. You are you. This moment and how it is, is OK.

This moment, just like the past, is indelible – it cannot be changed. Only the future can be changed.

But we make too much of the distinction between now and the future.

Saying ‘yes’ to this moment’s unfolding does not mean that you give up all hope of manifesting a better future.

It means that you recognize that saying ‘yes ‘ to this moment cannot help but create a better future.

Your attitude, at the point of acceptance, is one and the same as your attitude at the point of manifestation.

There is no point in time other than here and now. So, there cannot be any other place from which we can manifest the future.

But our ideas of cause and effect inevitably pull us into ‘do this now and get that later’ notions.

But, in fact, accepting joy in your life at this moment creates a future with more joy. You are both the creator and the created; once you drop believing in the world being a cause and effect mechanism.

Like your life and your life will become more likable.
Like yourself and you will become more likable.
Trust the future and the future will become more trust-able.
Trust your instincts and your instincts will clarify your seeing.

Just stop.

Quit trying to figure it out. Accept and say ‘yes’ to how it is. Feel gratitude for how it is.

Don’t engage in trying to stop. Just stop.

Don’t try to stop thinking. Just stop thinking about thinking.

Don’t try to say ‘yes’ to how it is. Just say ‘yes’.

Don’t try to ‘feel gratitude’. Just feel it.

There is the trying. And there is the doing. One is cause and effect and the other is just … wordless, here and now, one thing, inseparable.

Let yourself pool into simple awareness that says ‘yes’. And look at the world through those eyes.

Posted in Personal, Philosophical | No Comments »

Letter to a friend

August 23rd, 2021

My friend,

I found the article on Karl Popper’s ideas interesting the other day.  But, they left me dissatisfied as well.  And I’ve thought more about my reaction since then.

“So lost in the trees that one cannot see the forest”, is the aphorism that comes to mind.

A friend in the U.S. just referred me to Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. I haven’t read the book; though I did read a Wikipedia summary of it.

Not unlike Popper’s thoughts, Klein’s book is a deep analysis of the world that Klein find himself in.  I.e., the world of U.S. politics and the deep and widening gap between the liberals and the conservatives there.

And wasn’t this, again, just the same with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

And can we not think of others, again and again, trying to decipher their world and their times to make sense of things?  

Just pick a country and a period of time.   And there will have been someone in that place trying to understand and make sense of their local world.  I think that implicit in each of their attempts to understand, was an assumption, that if we can understand, then we can have some hope of solving the problems described.

But there’s another aphorism that comes to my mind at this point:  “Arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.  And this fits into the earlier aphorism; about not seeing the forest because of all the trees.

Systems thinking has come far enough now to be ubiquitous for most intellectuals.  We all know now that we live within systems within systems. 

For those of us, who really want to be effective at working on the world’s problems and not just to end up as footnotes redolent of the small times and places we found ourselves in nationally and philosophically, we need to refocus on our world’s problems on the largest scales.

We need to think about transcending nationalism, local-ism and ‘isms of all kinds.

If we cannot refocus on and strive to solve our global system level problems concerning how humanity can adapt to live within this planet’s resources sustainably, then we are simply rearranging the deck furniture, pointlessly.  And, in the end, all that we do and all the excellence that we do it with, will be wasted.

There are an abundant number of reasons why we humans are poorly equipped for refocusing like this.
 
I’m thinking now of core issues to do with our human nature, which is, itself, derivative of our evolutionary heritage. (see: https://samadhisoft.com/transcending-our-biological-imperatives/)
  
And I’m thinking now also of our minds and our perceptions; which we are inordinately proud of.  But which we really understand the limitations and shortfalls of so very poorly.

I’m not at all confident, my friend, that we are going to manage the refocusing I am saying is necessary.  But I am utterly certain, that more books composed of deep analysis of local problems and local systems are not going to help.

As always, I am interested to hear you thoughts in response to all of this.

Posted in The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Changes

June 11th, 2021


We all have changed over the years and I’m not an exception.
Maybe I wondered a lot in the past about the future. But I don’t much these days. If I have a motto that expresses what I feel now, it is this: “It is what it is”.
I know we are not getting out of here alive and I feel at peace with the fact.
I know that the more I’ve learned about existence, the more I know I will never understand it. It is increasingly a mystery.
Many years ago, about the time I graduated University, sitting in the screened in porch in the house where Rose and I lived on Dawson Street just around the corner from the Art Theater, you and I were discussing higher consciousness and enlightenment. I recall clearly that you said to me, that if you knew anyone who was going to achieve it (enlightenment), then it would be me. I think you were referring to my unrelenting drive to know and understand things.
Well, all these years later, I think there was some truth in what you said. But like so many things, the imagination of it before you have it, never measures up to what it is like in actual fact.
These days, I don’t think there is ‘enlightenment’ in the glamorous, extreme and magical way most folks think about it. But rather, there is a simple and deep acceptance of “it is what it is”.
There is a dropping of belief in your own Ego and personhood.
There is an untangling of all the voices in your head that were placed there by your family, your church, your school, your society, the media and your friends. And this untangling involves a discarding of all the ‘shoulds’ that permeate us. Dropping them one by one (or adopting them as our own, if they are good) until there is nothing left but our own inherent ‘wants’. And at this point, we can say that we ‘own’ ourselves and that we are the real chooser of what we choose.
There is a steady dropping of beliefs, hopes, fears and opinions. All of these things are simply ways that we try to ‘negotiate’ with existence.
They reflect that we cannot simply accept existence as it is. But rather, that we want shape it to be as we want to it to be.
Existence, seen without beliefs standing between us and it, can be a frightening thing. A thing of mystery, omnipotence and a thing that is utterly unaware of our existence.
So, we ‘fear’ when it may be as we don’t want it to be. And we ‘hope’ that it will be as we want it to be. And we form ‘beliefs’ and opinions about how it is.
Belief systems like reincarnation, Islam and Christianity.
And these belief systems seem to frame the nakedness of reality and make it a more palatable thing for us to deal with. Our beliefs give us the feeling that there is purpose and meaning to our lives and that existence cares about us.
Least you think I’ve fallen into a Nihilist hole and cannot get out, it isn’t so.
Day to day, subjectively, I feel like one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met. I deeply love my life and how it is going. I feel deeply blessed – though I haven’t a clue why it is so.
But I’m not in Mary Poppins land. When I look at the world, I see it is a huge, and getting worse, mess. We humans are showing sure signs of moving towards a global disaster and a major reset. I can see this as clearly as I see the letters on the screen in front of me.
So then, the question might be what can we do about it? And I think the probable answer is, ‘Not much”.
We are not the authors of it nor will we be the ones to repair it. We are simply the ones born here and now and who will see what unfolds. It is what it is.
So how can we still enjoy our lives in the midst of all this?
Cherish being alive and try to make someone else happy – just because. After all the complexity of our university educated lives, this must seem far too simple.
But we are just like fish leaping free for a moment from the surface of the sea of mortality. We take ourselves seriously and that is a lot of the problem we create for ourselves and our potential happiness.
It is what it is. Let it be as it is and say ‘yes’ to it. Just as we did when the acid began to get into us and disassembled our egos and made us feel everything directly and intensely.
We can resist or we can say ‘yes’. We can be unhappy that reality isn’t as we want it to be. Or we can embrace it ‘as it is’ and treasure the moments we still have left.
The voices that tell us that we cannot simply stop and accept things as they are are not ours. They are ‘shoulds’ still operating within us after all these years.

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different, Personal, Philosophical | 1 Comment »

Awareness of Awareness

May 18th, 2021

18 May 2021

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article the other day. It was entitled, “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs“.

It concerned a researcher named Michael Levin who is intensely interested in how electrical currents help shape our bodies. He calls it the ‘Bioelectric Code‘. He has been able to convincingly demonstrate how the mechanisms, some lower creatures use to grow and repair themselves, can be significantly altered through the judicious use of electric currents. And further that these changes are due solely to the introduction of the electric currents themselves; as the genomes of the creatures are not touched.

We’ve known for a long time that electric fields are an integral part of biology. Cells have ion channels that allow their inner and outer charge environments to be balanced in ways that are optimal for the cell’s health and functioning. Cells signal back and forth with other cells via electrical impulses via axons and dendrites. It is becoming ever more apparent now that cells employ the bioelectric spaces between them as a kind of inter-cellular Internet; they use it to build intricate and extensive communication networks that control the transcription of genes, the contraction of muscles, and the release of hormones.

The concepts of how creatures develop are moving away from earlier and simpler paradigms in which biological science visualized that genes defined proteins and proteins combined to create cells and that was much of the story of biology.

But we’ve known for some time that large parts of the morphogenesis puzzle were missing. How and why do some stem cells become livers and others become arms or eyes?

It was tempting, early on, to imagine that hidden inside of our genomes were intricate instructions, which we hadn’t discovered yet, which guided a entity’s development from its initial zygotic stage to its full expression as a mature creature.

But matters have turned out to be far more complex than that.

The things that have been accomplished in Levin’s lab are pretty amazing. One of his postdocs noted that in frogs, certain electrical patterns developed in areas where later features like faces and eyes would develop.

As an experiment, the postdoc imposed the electrical pattern that predicted an eye onto the developing frog’s stomach and, amazingly, an eye appeared there. And, once the eye was present, the frog’s nervous system began building optic nerves to connect the new eye to the brain by way of the spinal cord. Clearly, Levin and his students are onto something.

But, exactly what they are on to is still under debate; as you will see if you read the paper itself.

Levin’s former advisor, Clifford Tabin, says he is “agnostic” about how Levin’s “bioelectricity” should be understood. Levin would have bioelectricity be the be-all-and-end-all which largely explains how morphogenesis unfolds.

But others, like Daniel Dennett think that there are also many other moving parts required to make up the full picture. He feels that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other still unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.

If you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, by now, what any of this has to do with this piece’s title, “Awareness of Awareness“?

Well, we’re going to get to that. But there are still more pieces to tie in.

Dennett thought that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.

His list would indicate that the interactions between cells involve a lot more than just the magic of bioelectricity as Levin envisions it. But I don’t think we’re done yet drawing in relevant factors.

As many simpler units come together, Emergent Properties can come forth.

Ants, which are quite simple in and of themselves, combine into colonies which have quite complex behaviors. And it is these new behaviors which seemingly manifest from nowhere. No amount of study of individual ants would ever give a researcher the ability to predict the behaviors and properties of ant colonies. You can read more about all of this in Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

So, we have all the factors Dennett mentioned as ways that cells intercommunicate. And we also have a vertical functional assemblage that progresses from a few local cells into larger groups of cells organized as specific organs like livers, eyes, brains and hearts.

And through all of these organs and their inner organizations and their external communications and co ordinations are all the interactive communication technologies Dennett listed and probably more.

It gets harder and harder to hang on to to all these points at once. One strategy open to us is to realize, through logic, decomposition and analysis, some sort of a simplified picture of what our biological beings are.

But another and deeper insight is to see all of this coordinated movement of many parts as an all-at-once flow that is happening in the immediate now. A non-dualistic immediacy that has no notion of, nor need for, our decompositional analysis in order to simply do what it does.

Now, we are getting close to the point of this article, “Awareness of Awareness“.

If small groups of cells, as Levin asserts and I’m sure Dennett would agree, tend to coordinate their activities through bioelectric fields (and all of the other listed mechanisms) for their own greater good, then wouldn’t such a beneficial organizational mechanism repeat at all levels of organization?

Does not the heart regulate it own activities for the benefit of the heart, directly, and for the benefit of the overall organism, indirectly? And would not every sub-component do the same for itself and for the overall organism?

And what of the sense of self that pervades your overall organism? Is this not the highest level of communication among your disparate parts? Does it not act for the highest good of the organism it represents?

Does it matter if we can say if it is bioelectric or any particular mix of the other contributory items that Dennett mentioned?

From here, a hundred roads and a hundred questions beckon us. Questions about awareness vs. self-awareness. About duality and non-duality. About Free Will and Determinism. But all of them are arising from the dualistic side of us. The mind of cognition and abstraction. The side that decomposes in order to attempt understanding.

But none of that, as endlessly fascinating as it is to the mind, is what I’m interested in here.

I want to talk about the sense of self we feel when our awareness is aware of itself and aware of this material being which hosts the awareness.

Just as a few cells communicate and coordinate among themselves, think of the communication and coordination that occurs when you sit for a moment and empty your mind and let a feeling of peace and well being permeate through you – all of you.

Think of the signal sent for the benefit of the sender when you stop and consciously give thanks for all of the good things in your life.

Think of the message you are sending when you gaze at your body in the mirror and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts your awareness.

Truly, our awareness helps to maintain the boundaries of our existence. Not just because of its flight or fight capabilities but also because it coordinates and directs the sense of well being that serves to optimize our continued existence in the body.

To get to this place where these effects can be beneficently directed, much of the collateral confusion that arises, as a side effect of the mind’s conceptual, linguistic and abstraction capabilities, has to be discriminated and intentionally isolated.

It isn’t that these mental abilities are not valuable. They are immensely valuable and we would not have them if it were not so. But they are tools – they are not what we are.

The self aware, but untrained, mind is like an echo chamber or a mirror. And it is almost inevitable that our burgeoning awareness should mistake the contents of the mind (the concepts, the language and the abstractions) for itself. Many of these contents are instilled into us before we are mature enough to defend ourselves and to question and possibly reject what is being imprinted upon us.

At some point, if we are lucky, we become mature and independent enough to control the further inward flow of ideas. And then, if we experience unease at all the inner dichotomies and inconsistencies, we may begin to sort through the mess.

And, as the mess is cleared and we begin to increasingly identify with our awareness of awareness and to dis-identify with the contents of our minds and our egos, we can being to focus on the message we are sending when we consider ourselves and our bodies and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts us.

It is awareness intentionally giving loving concern and integration to the physical entity that hosts it for the mutual benefit of both.

Let us make a small aside here, to acknowledge all the religions, masters, schools and traditions which have tried unrelentingly for thousands of years to awaken us from the illusion that we are the contents of our minds. And who promised us, that if we could but realize the primacy of our awareness as being what we are, that we should then experience a deeper and more pervasive sense of subjective peace.

I am deeply grounded in science. And I am also deeply grounded in non-duality. I appreciate the power of the mind as a tool. And I also appreciate the immediacy and essential truth that manifests when I stop my mind and see this existence as an immediate and inseparable flow; that I am an inseparable part of.

Following the threads implied in the “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs” paper has enabled me to cobble a tentative connection between how the physical systems of our biological bodies function to communicate, coordinate and preserve themselves and the ideas of higher consciousness that arise from the meditative, spiritual and non-duality worlds in which this same preservation of what we are is deeply honored.

Posted in General, Personal, Philosophical, Science | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »