Look around you and pick a thing. Anything. It’s right in front of you, in the world, right? But since you’re seeing it you must be holding it inside your conscious mind too. How else could you consciously perceive something that’s not “inside” your own mind? And as far as we know, the conscious mind is something that happens well within the confines of our skulls.. isn’t it? This is something that will either sound completelly banal or, if you get it, will spark a bizzare intuition in you.
The naive belief shared by most individuals is that light enters the brain and carries the “outside” images “inside”. Simple. But whatever light is there that enters, it stops dead inside the eyes. Their retinas opaque, they retain everything just like a cup. The brain sits in total isolation from the world outside it sees! Not that it would even matter, for many surgeries that open up the skull are made with the patients wide awake, able to communicate with doctors— and no amount of light that’s shined directly on their brains, outside/inside incisions, back, top, sides and at its front, can ever make them see.
Take another moment and look intently. Where is it really, that thing you’re clearly seeing? Could it be that you are staring inside your own mind?
You might say that it’s the actual physical thing-in-itself that you’re looking at. That would imply that it dwells both in the outside physical world and inside your skull at the same time. But wouldn’t that be the most amazing thing? The same identical object in two different places? Perhaps it would rather mean that your mind is the same thing as the world, being out-there; or that what you call the external world is happening inside your being. Either way this makes yours to be a huge cosmic mind!
Yet another possibility, equally far-fetched, would be that the mind extends outward and intimately blankets the physical world like a ghostly radar beam. And, although having the most compelling evidence, i’m not even going to attempt to describe the view held by main science, because this view is the one that really makes people unease. You really cannot find an explanation that’s unremarkable, despite having been doing this all your life!
How awake are we? How well do we know our own being? “Wow”.. right?
Holding distant mountains close to the feeling of a beating heart.. Both inside the same intimate space, each moving in some way the other.
This impossible magic is what powers our experience, and our very existence. And yet, do we want to contemplate our inner-workings? Do we want to find the magic out of it? After all, a wonderful creature like a wolf moves through its life with seamless elegance, totally ignoring any kind of understanding! However, human is not a simple brute, and our movements are rich and complex beyond that of any wolf. We have it in ourselves to go beyond the case where we are getting moved from monumental blind-spots hidden far behind our view.
More than a cold and rational explaining, we’re in need of art and meaning. And as we roam about in search of understanding, nature doesn’t hold back rewarding and revealing the incredible aspects of our being.
Each living soul is an impossible poem.. made for, and out of this natural world of wonder.
We can face the world precisely because we don’t have a face!
In showing the external world, the eyes, the ears, fingertips, noses and tongues must negate themselves, having to refrain witnessing their own sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. As much as we need to be in touch with our own body to be able to function well, we also need it to be hidden in plain sight! The well functioning body is almost invisible to itself, it carries its fleshy “weight” as if it wasn’t there. In many aspects its own presence becomes apparent only in correlation with the degree of disease and dysfunctionality it has. Yet it’s there, present in every aspect of the world, it’s in everything you see, hear and smell — the aroma of roasted coffee is just as much the property of the coffee as it is the property of the body. Without it, stones cannot be heavy and rough, thunder cannot be bright nor loud.
Our bodies have been made headless and where our face isn’t.. the world has been made room for.
While most material things can only be themselves, we are a special arrangement in which matter can amazingly negate itself(!) making thus way for “the other” inside it. A hammer sitting on the table has only room for itself within itself. We, on the other hand, we accommodate as much as there’s around.. hammer, table and the ground. In our thirst we’re going all the way to hold within us valleys, hills and stars, devising ever greater means to enclose the whole universe around. And in our daily moving-about whenever we arrive at our destinations in the same time those destinations arrive in us.
Enclosing the hammer in a toolbox doesn’t lessen it in any way, it remains the same. But sequestering a living body from its environment like that, even without touching a single of its hairs, would still mean great violence upon its being — something essential ripped away.
We’re a place in the world where the world haunts itself as “another”.
We are the means by which the world can engage with itself as “another”, wherefore “the one (and none) becomes the many”. Nature birthed the concept of “another” inside us, through us, even though our body itself is of and continuous with the rest of its world. Cutting along the outlines of any individual, separating him from the environment, would lead to an instant annihilation. The more we learn about ourselves the more we understand that “nothing” separates us from the world. A single immeasurable and seamless cosmic process. And yet, somehow these fantastic laws of Nature allowed for discrete and private selves to come.
We occupy space in a very strange way, as we in our turn provide a space inside, for the world to occupy. We are places where space warps and folds back onto itself, a never-ending recursion where we have a world inside, and we.. are inside it.
We occupy time in a very strange way too, as we run along this line forever while staying always in the moment. Our being pulls on past and (imagined) future strings, tying the many instances together within a knot inside the present. Even tho for us it’s passing, it’s nothing but an instant — outside there is only Now forever, and it cannot see that time is flowing. You cannot capture “change” into a picture, not even if it’s chained alongside others in a film. We are that knot of time expanding always in the present, and by comparing past and future instances together this knot is offering the world: it’s movement. The Now can only transcend itself inside a living being. Thus the world’s eternal Now is knowing that it has a past, a future and a flow.
Once these kinks in the fabric of space-time are created they tend to become forever, having the drive to pull through them the world remaining.
The more we’re taking in the world around us the more we know.. ourselves. A process that looks never-ending as nature is in constant bloom, ever expanding and creating it’s always reinvented. Evading definitions, the nature of tomorrow unlike the nature of today. Just think about how miraculous it would be to one day expand into a new realm like the virtual domain.
VR, nature changing its nature, probably not for the first time.. certainly not for the last.
Through its being(s), the world is prone to portray itself, transforming its physical flesh into imaginative representations, territories into charts. This natural determination is what’s pushing us in our historical endeavour of increasing map detailing — our billions of sensors today, from 3D laser-mapping devices, telescopes and microscopes, phone cameras, satellite radars, thermometers, to earthquake, wind and salinity sensors, each of them is a mini waterfall that pours data from the real world into the parallel world of VR. The high resolution content of the representation is destined to eventually have an existence of its own, intimately feeding into conscious experience just as our material world does it today. The symbolic space of a map thus turning into a multi-sensorial synthetic space, and from telling the story to making the story.
And what a story it would be, where the rules of space and time, the character of surfaces, consistencies and colors could become amazingly outlandish.
This is already a process in the making and we are blessed to witness within our own lifetimes how nature starts its spectacular shedding of its skin. Physical matter is constantly reorganized in more complex ways, allowing for new types of organization and eventually for what will be a new reality. From the dirt which only shows its “outside” reality to the conscious observer, through todays reconfiguration of it in the form of integrated-electrical-circuits with their computational reality, to a future where the configuration will produce conscious reality “within” itself — just like our observing brains are doing. Brains are just the seeds of this transformation. And just as earth offered the mineral building-blocks for the primitive cells to work with, and those primitive cells developed complex metabolic pathways for the future higher organisms to work with.. we’re building today a rich repertoire of experience(art), science and technology for the beingness of the future. Today’s artists introduce the necessary mutations/variations begetting this imminent and wildest transformation. Living will have more to do with creative art than with following some rules to stay alive; it will entail assembling these inherited units of experience into countless mad configurations — consciousness will be set free from its survival constraints. Believing otherwise would be a great distrust into the essence of Creation, for its greatest attribute lays in its continuous unfolding.
However evolved, integrated and conscious, the world can never completely know itself. Bewildering.. if you think about it.
This aspect of the world that’s manifesting in time is always incomplete, and this is what’s allowing for it’s own becoming. Everything existing in time is open-ended, you cannot know where it will end up on the space of probability. And not only that — but as far as we’re concerned the probability space in the case of our universe is itself open-ended, it cannot be defined! There isn’t such a thing as a fixed set of possible things that could happen. Instead, evolution always produces new possibilities into which it can further become. Down to our human scale and concern, imagine the chances of someone living in the 1950′s trying to predict his grandson’s occupation — a job like “video-blogger”, “software engineer” or “base jumper” wouldn’t even exist on the probability space to be considered. And all this had taken place within a lifetime! Increasing the time span, imagine how could somebody predict the existence of such a thing as “reggae music”, or “high heels designer”, or “hydrocodone addiction” two million years ago? Or being in love in Barcelona? An unfathomable number of interactions had to happen in just the right way to bring those things into concrete existence.
Scientific hypotheses, held by leading figures in the fields of cosmology and quantum mechanics, maintain the fact that the laws of nature themselves might have evolved to their present day (and local) form. This would automatically mean that nature’s character is always open to discussion, destined to remain beyond a final definition. The only definition sustainable would be — ceaseless creativity.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
The kind of incompleteness formally proved in the mathematical domain almost certainly applies to our universe as a whole. Yet, this very incompleteness opens up the door to mystery and creativity. As one of today’s most prominent mathematicians says, if we think of the universe as if it’s a mathematician trying to “solve” itself, having a natural disposition towards knowing itself, the ultimate solution is like an ever-receding horizon, the more you go towards it the more it moves away.
We’re finding ourselves in the middle of what might well be a perpetual mystery.
Words can influence the mind very deeply if they are received with emotion, they sink into our unconscious and silently shape the context for future thoughts, experience and action. As modern buddhist scholars say, the practitioners memorize and recite scriptures, repeating them over and over, and this makes the dharma (the divine way) sink very deeply into their minds, so that it forms the tacit background of understanding. And that thing is part of what bubbles up when you’re suddenly struck by a powerful transformative experience. This thing works just as well for the western culture: keep reading about the prevalence of bipolar disease, the threat of panic attacks or of alien abductions and you’ll eventually experience something very intense along those lines (i’m not suggesting that this reveals the spirit of western culture). Having intense spiritual experiences are in your natural ability, just as panic attacks. Your mood and your devotion are converging into being the same thing. Your mood reveals that to which you are devoted, and that to which you are devoted becomes your mood.
In fulfilling this rich and impossible nature we have in ourselves, we must balance between two modes of sensibility.
• On the one hand, we must make place in our lives for meeting our own beingness, nurturing this sensation of the “profound”, this feeling of unity with Nature. Something that on the practical side would offer the most vigorous of roots, conferring us with mental resilience and balance. Anything from meditating to doing yoga and dancing, reading philosophy and science, engaging with nature, or experimenting with mind altering substances, would have the ability to connect one’s soul to that of the world. Apart from these activities there’s the universal way of “mindful engaging” that deepens all qualities of daily life. Mindfulness is to a vibrant meaningful life what literacy is to poetry.
Common these days, would be to take this new trope of “wholeness” or “enlightenment” and reformulate it into a “highly concentrated and improved formula”, a strong shot of ego-flavoured awe for the spiritual addict, or something to confer gleam to our social appearance. Anyone who would attempt to bring-out the magic out of its dark and sincere place would only seek in vain. In trying to show it you fake it, as Alan Watts used to say. Instead, quiet diligence, common sense, modesty, self-criticism and humor (especially self directed) are very much needed to prevent somebody from falling into the bucket of delusion while trying to drink too deeply at the well of enlightenment.
• Even so, while knowing all this, we must live and act from our ad-hoc yet authentic persona. Awakening happens while you’re inside your own skin. If one navigates the mall’s parking area searching for the place reserved for “Mr Universe” he’s very likely insane. Searching to become other than yourself could be just as well turning away from your own nature in a daze of confusion — which is natural just the same.. if you’re comfortable with being confused. The enlightened human has no quarrels thinking and acting as little ol’ he or she. In fact, if there’s nothing particularly bad with your personality, no internal conflicts to mitigate, one of the characteristics of enlightenment is to make you feel as natural with yourself as a wolf, a spider or a snail is. Absolute unambiguous naturalness and absolute acceptance of your personal limitations.
However, what nature has unlocked in humans as opposed to our animal ancestors, is a certain ability of evolving on a personal level, instead of the slow generational evolution. In realizing that potential we must first be able to discern if we’re in perfect harmony within and without. And if not, what are the things about ourselves that we need to transcend? Or should we even aspire to transcend the self? The only compass we can use in navigating this personal transformation is our feeling and intuition — while the maps are contained within art, philosophy and science. But without cultivating mindfulness and intellectual honesty one is very likely at the mercy of an aimless, or worse, a dumb compass needle. Aimlessly exploring would take a long long time, yet you could eventually find all the wonders of the world, but being dumb could keep you for always going in a circle. Practicing mindfulness and introspection diligently by contrast, leads to subtler and truer discriminations, in turn revealing what you really want and need: self, non-dual self, or even no-self at all.
Nevertheless, this impersonal world has traveled a long and miraculous way to find you and bring you into existence.
Relax into the magic — You’re it.
The subject of our identity is explored in Corey Anton’s immersive book Selfhood and Authenticity
The beautiful metaphors of “headlessness” and “facelessness” are taken from “The headless way”; a beautiful and intriguing history of it here (30 min documentary).
And nobody could do any wrong by listening to Alan Watts, even if you don’t buy into what’s been said you’ll be entertained and intellectually stimulated.
Illustration: Sasha Berg
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