It Seems to Me – – – (1)

April 18, 2018

(I will break this long piece down into more digestible bits and post them separately. This is the first.)

What? What is it?

This persistent question hangs there, in the far distant view from the mountaintop, in the empty space before the altar, in the storm, in intimacy, in the darkness, in pain and pleasure and beauty. What? What am I? What is this world, what is the universe, what force or energy acts, what is the importance of it all? What?

Throughout human history mankind has invented myths, stories, religions, and philosophies to try to answer, to explain, the inscrutable. All are invented by the mind of man, none divinely inspired, none full of the truth, at best a dim intuition, much like Plato’s shadows seen in the cave.  Each observer creates and sees his own version of reality. What is my own creation, what are my own views of the nature of things? And what are the questions that persist?  First, it seems to me that all beliefs, including this, are a trap, in that they put an end to seeing the constant process of change, to immersion in the flow of energy, to awareness of the stream of the Tao. Belief clings to something, awareness does not.

It seems to me that it is impossible to know what veridical reality is. Everything that I think that I know is subject to the limitations of my perceptual mechanisms and to the endless conditioning imposed by life on planet Earth. With my senses I can perceive only a minute fraction of the energy passing through me at every moment – radio waves, gamma rays, dark matter, infrared, ultraviolet, the strong and weak forces, all of these are imperceptible, even though they make up most of what is. I don’t have the tools to perceive them. What I can perceive is limited and interpreted by the structures imposed from birth by society, family, school and church, all unexamined conditioning.

The universe exists entirely and only within my skull. Wavelengths that constitute light, frequencies of sound waves, sensations in the nerves of the skin, the tongue, the nose, all of these are assembled in my brain into a representation of a reality, which I create. Where do those waves come from? What is the reality? Is it ephemera? A dream? An illusion? “Man is asleep. Must he die before he awakens?” Consider that there may be no reality beyond the  construct within the skull.

It seems to me there is an entity called “I” that thinks it knows things. It thinks it knows that there is an in-here called me, and that there is an out-there that is different from me. But there is no in-here without the out-there, of necessity they are interdependent, they go together. The observer is the observed. There is no figure separate from the ground, there is seamless wholeness. The entity “I” thinks it knows is that there is something out there in charge, and it calls that God. Or perhaps it thinks there is nothing out there and nothing in charge.

What is the thing that calls itself “I”? It seems to me that I am a perceiving mechanism linked to a device that stores input in the form of memory and then reassembles memories into some image I call reality, and housed in a sack of skin containing various kinds of protoplasm. The stimulus of this moment is processed through the memory bank and projected into the future, and this seems to me to indicate that there is something stable, fixed, and permanent. The illusion is that there is a control center manned by me, located just behind the eyes, running or reacting to my show. I seem to be central to all experience.

But nothing is permanent; everything is changing all of the time. Consider the pattern of a stream flowing over rocks, or of a whirlpool. The water is constantly flowing, never the same, but the pattern persists. A form appears to be there, but it’s not. Am I a pattern in the water? Is that pattern called the soul? Is there something that this entity has created that lasts beyond the end of the organism, transcending the physical? When the water changes course the whirlpool disappears. Does the dissolution of the memory bank at death put an end to it?

(This is the first posted portion of this writing. The discerning reader will find echoes from other sources. There will be credits at the end.)