How do we each come to be a single human being looking out through a particular set of eyes? If we are somehow able to sneak out of our framework a bit, perhaps we can imagine what it is like to see a baby human for the first time. We might see a brand spanking new creature, yet one that is still literally connected by a cord to a parent creature. Less tangibly, if not bound by time, we can see it is also connected to a second parent creature as well, both of whom are are connected by a cord to the two other creatures before them, respectively, and so on through the generations.
While perhaps not like a neat continuous line, it is still life moving through time, swinging from vine to vine, as the universe knits it's sometimes, and all too often, dysfunctional sweater. Epigenetics is showing that fears can be passed down biologically, so the idea of healing the pain of the elders isn't too far off.
By our perceptions, we are separate, but if we were to float above time & escape the grip of the particular bodies we find our selves in, it seems we would appear far less isolated. In the same way that time lapse photography reveals the 'secret lives of plants', which are anything but still, the reveal of our hidden connection would be apparent.
One might contemplate ourselves as one thing sliced up by time like an earthworm, who after an accidental fragmentation, separates and goes on to behave like two separate creatures... or the slime mold who can exist as multitude of individuals or come together as one functional entity depending on circumstance. Even a future self may differ from past self as to be an almost different creature.
However, if we wish to kill time, and be only what is now, the past is still a residual and we may dwell in the shadow of it even though it seems to be no more.
In a scene from the Lion King, a baboon named Rafiki hits the lion Simba on the head to make the point that the past may be gone essentially, but it still hurts, and Simba can either run from it or learn from it. That doesn't mean we don't have tools to negotiate or even dissolve the residual, to pull a body or mind out of patterns of the past and into this, the right here, right now...but still.
II
Though we may be life moving through time, connecting all these forms, in a freeze frame, we are still living in the context of being individual women and men. Though, consider that in the womb, we are understood to essentially be female until chemistry kicks in and nudges us down one road or another.
In the same way that all of the colors & races of people are simply functions of having adapted to varying amounts of sunlight & many other conditions, as we have spread to all corners of the world, we trail back to the same origin point. Just as life has adapted to the variable of sunlight, it has adapted to the in-house chemistry of the pre-birth conditions of the self. And here we are.
And yet we have grow outward, often to come back in opposition to one another like branches of the same tree, with no knowledge of the tree at all. The harder one looks, the bigger the tree gets. Yet if the branches grow thousands of miles long, it is hard to see the trunk through the fog. And one might wish for things to be more compact and for Jack to give back his magic beans, so we can all climb down and go back home.
It is interesting to contemplate male and female as the classic yin-yang symbol, each having an aspect of the other, evidence, a slice of, the tree both are from. Long term couples are said to fluctuate hormonally together. A female's testosterone levels may increase during a cycle, as the male experiences a simultaneous decrease in testosterone and increase in estrogen.
Perhaps one way of putting up a wall between the masculine and feminine is to deny each's existence in the other. One can even imagine the hidden bit of the supposed other, itself running away, seeking protection further inside the self.
So the element may be on the defensive, in the cases of both the explicit and the implicit, the obscured aspect... which, like the moon, is hidden by light of day but is present all the same. What is the role, if any, of possible subconscious insecurities from this?
If we add in the powerful ways we affect one another, biologically, chemically, emotionally, etc., things can get even more complicated.
There is also the quote from the Batman v Superman trailer... "that's how it starts... the fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness, that turns good men cruel"
In addition, there are cultural perceptions which may implant a perceived superiority of one being over another... an easy example being Columbus with his treatment of native people... This is to live out a sense of separation, to take power over, to make the other small.
This is also all too apparent in society's treatment of animals and furthermore, its general lack of regard for small creatures such as insects and worms. (who after breaking down the soil, which provides the ground for the plants we eat, may receive a dose of chemicals, such as round-up, which can't be a good day for anyone) These creatures are seldom a passing thought when breaking ground or considering size and scope of our projects.
At the other end of the spectrum, members of at least one indigenous people have been known to sweep the ground in front of them to avoid crushing insects. And, meanwhile, there are stories of some indigenous peoples learning secrets from plants and having respect of plants as teachers.
Technically one does not need to be aware of our connection to another to be compassionate. However, notice how people may suddenly connect simply over having the same shirt on or liking the same sports team or the same music. Notice how people develop respect for animals when they demonstrate human like behaviors.
The parrot may say one thousand words in human, but the human does not speak one thousand words in parrot. Of course, ultimately, we may have to go deeper and embrace the quote attributed to Einstein "Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Then perhaps we notice how behavior toward the other changes once the other is regarded as sentient. Recognizing the other in self certainly can not hurt.
Well, in a way it can, as, Dean Radin and others point out, mirror neurons will often have us feeling what others are feeling, simply as a function of connection. Then there is the idea of "our energy field affecting other living systems" and vice versa. Take, for instance, this experiment with yogurt.
"The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together." (Obi Wan) There is the other in the self.
On the other hand, if we dive completely into the small swimming hole on our half of the ying/yang symbol and somehow lose the land, we might slip from the niche in society that comes as a function of us expressing those predominate traits... in a context, it is possible we might throw off the balance... sink too far into the small circle & automatically invite a similar but opposite behavior in the other in an attempt to bring about balance.
We may flip our vantage point, at least in to a degree in theory, and maybe, just maybe, we might end up in a microcosm of the same original tension. Dysfunction may abound. We are always creatures who contend with micro-adjustments towards balance. However, when someone can't hear the stereo and asks you to turn it up, you don't generally turn it all the way up.
Whenever I try to wrap my mind around it, there is something else. I often want to erase whatever I have written. We can't be afraid to crush our own sandcastles. I am either pointing out some small part of it or I am trying to get all of it, and I am at a loss in that as well, because I'm trying to chase it into the endless veins of tiny fractal patterns, where I really can't go.
So there is something missing, which I might have some intangible feel for but still can not quite reach or put into words, something that brings a 3-dimensionality to the masculine/feminine spectrum and everything else. We aren't, after all, just a notch on a line that moves up and down and spirals outward to create all of our problems... like too much bass on a speaker system. Well maybe.
It is easy for thoughts on feminine and masculine, to get trapped in the frameworks we've be taught to see them through. For one, we might mistake feminine and masculine for American feminine and masculine. Where is the control group? Also, it is hard to discern & know when to filter out/in passive-aggressive and other dynamics that seem to have a life unto themselves, at least in a way.
Of course, within a given people, there may naturally be more extreme expressions of feminine and masculine. There are also a number of gender identities and expressions of masculine/feminine that have all too often felt the brunt of society's unfamiliarity.
Whatever the case, it seems reasonable to prevent violence, both explicit and implicit, upon these groups if we wish to ease the suffering of society, which, even in an indirect way, relates to self.
I like to think of bands/tribes where women are said to have had "more power and autonomy than European women" Wouldn't it be amazing to be instantly transported to these societies, to know first hand the details, the chemistry on that. That would be quite the field trip.
At least I can say the basic quest here is to be balanced human beings and to not to eat each other. There is that saying "dysfunctional families eat one another".
It is largely a matter of self awareness at this point and about making elevated choices rather than reacting, with physical and other types of violence, but these tools often must be learned, and there must be a framework for learning them. This is to step back to see the branch and to see the tree.
What do public schools offer in the way of meditation, self reflection, and emotional awareness, and what frameworks could be provided without being overly controlling, syrupy or counterproductive? How do we grapple with immature expressions of energy and work towards fairness?
We are, after all, in relationship. And in a context, as previously indicated, we are literally born out of one another. Life is essentially carried on a wave of hands.
III
Furthermore, this wave is not just made of human hands, The very ground supports us as we walk and serves as the starting point for just about everything we eat. It provides the building blocks for our muscle tissue.
If we were to see ourselves and a quick flash history of our food consumption, we would see the world flowing in and then out of us, holding us up, almost as an illusion, like a motion picture created by frames. Like us, the food is separated from the tree, and you can hold it in your hands for awhile, but later returns.
The star at the center of our solar system, as it spirals through time at "43,000 miles per hour... roughly in the direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation of Lyra", feeds these plants, keeps a hospitable climate & physically intertwines with our bodies, penetrating the eyes & connecting with the pineal gland, thereby helping our circadian rhythms, among other things. Likewise it interacts with the body to make the power player known as vitamin D.
The sun is not interacting with a solid human body so much as it is interacting with an energetic latticework.... intangible interacting with intangible.
The imaginary line from one of our own molecules and the next seems no more tangible than the distance between us and the photons of light which we come in contact with and/or have pass through us. Is light disconnected from a star anymore than one molecule of us is disconnected with the next, and furthermore, are we disconnected from that star as it's light extends into our forms?
The sun is not the only that deals in light, as kirlian photographs and sensitive laboratory equipment show plants & people giving off light. Lynne Mctaggart makes mention of scientists, such as Fritz Albert Pop(?), who have studied small organisms & observed that they appear to communicate through light. McTaggart is quoted as saying "We swim in a sea of light"
And we are presumably changed by the conditions of the sea we swim in. Solar radiation levels appear to strongly correlate with suicide levels. I read an article on this topic, and then noted the onset of a unusually huge solar storm.
I reached out to a very close friend with this information, one who was experiencing emotional turbulence as it was, and sadly I was unable to get the message to him in time.
This is only one example of how we might be influenced by the cosmos. Just as an allergy might be implicit until the body reaches a certain threshold, what triggers around us and within us will push things to the tipping point?
Much like sugary sodas, bad lighting and fast food lunches might influence an individual in the public school system, who is already on the brink, and further encourage an expression of that imbalance... perhaps in the form of school violence... At the very least, the environment is interwoven with and has the potential to influence the individual. What disasters might we avoid if we were to become aware of the universe's finer influences?
Just as small amounts of pesticides might bio-accumulate in a creature, small influences may accumulate enough to radically alter a situation, even by flicking a domino.
Unlike the tangible case of the school system, where we can improve lighting & remove soda machines, and remove depression feeding aspects of school lunches, we may not manipulate our surroundings so easily, but we can become aware of them, become aware that they are passing though us. Everything is passing through us including the sun and other aspects of the cosmos. We are as far out in space as it gets.
Strip astrology of its caricature and something real still stands. We dance in the unseen, but tend to consider only the most obvious partners. Partners are hidden all around like dark matter.
If there were a quantum sized observer out there, perhaps we would be invisible... there would be so much apparent empty space between us and our particles, that we might be missed if someone were tiny and nestled in the black.
In a similar way, we may miss out on other dimensions of intelligence. And even the empty space isn't likely empty. One continuous, multi-dimensional, fabric.
We can imagine ourselves as entangled with the entire universe and the greater reality as well. In a reality where one thing fades into the next, at however fine or unusual the level, it is hard not to contemplate a conscious universe, points of concentration not withstanding.
A thought experiment is to consider, for a moment, finger and toenails, which we would consider a part of us, even though we do not feel pain when they are clipped.
Clearly we do not follow a clipping on its journey to follow as it falls to the ground or is carried off a landfill somewhere. There may be a piece of what you once considered self fifty feet underground somewhere. Were we on a space station, we might jettison that clipping into the vastness of space.
Other creatures, places, rocks, plants, heavenly bodies, elements of the seemingly separate universe, might be what the forgotten toenail blends into, an extension of self that, as humans, we do not have obvious and intense sensing of... Unless, that is, we are like characters from Star Wars, feeling disturbances in the force, of course. And it seems we are... according to data from Princeton Experimental Anomalies Research (P.E.A.R.) and the global consciousness project... and perhaps... yogurt.
Yet in this framework, the only reason we would identify with the toenail is if we picked it up and recognized it as a piece of self... my toenail... but what of that which we can not identify with? We are like a lump in a blanket contemplating another.
And of course, what if we are like a toenail clipping to the greater universe. What if we are a clipping of something greater (for lack of better word) And what if reality is like a web with points of density, creating a apparent individual (person, animal, plant, rock, etc). A cloud is still connected to the water vapor of the greater atmosphere, and it bleeds into other clouds, though not in as obvious a way.
Our own form and its blaring signals make it hard to hear the music in the background, unless we attune to the music in the background somehow, through a reflective moment or some form of practice perhaps, and in some way- either dissappear or expand.
Take into account, individuals with heightened sensitivity, empathetic individuals or autistic individuals, or animals as described by Temple Grandin. A change in the environment or a change in the emotional state of a fellow creature can register much more loudly with a sensitive system.
This can even cause one to enact harm upon self or to cut the self, perhaps in an effort to escape the self or to let the air out, which contains the overstimulating amount of influx. To escape the sensory overload. To escape into the vapor. People may jump out the window during a fire to escape the greater pain of staying in the fire. The obscene becomes the preferable option. Yet to the onlooker it remains obscene.
We also can't necessarily look down upon the seemingly inanimate and discount the vapor for not being a cloud, and for being so ridiculously invisible to us, since we can't feel pain upon its encroachment.
Upon hearing someone talk of leprosy... the battering of body that comes with an inability to feel pain, it is interesting to contemplate the role of immediate pain for the individual, for the individual is often in a position to do something about it, so pain serves a practical purpose... whereas pain from outside the body of self would be somewhat extraneous.
We have an impact there too, but generally less obviously so... so we may sense it less. Though there are plenty of indications of collective reflections of pain to a system (mirror neurons, global consciousness etc.), pain may cling in greatest density at the center of the individual's control.
IV
In reality it seems like everything is clinging to something.... existence wrapping around itself. Water vapor wraps around condensation nuclei before creating a cloud. What does reality wrap around? I've heard some people talk of reality filling an invisible framework (or reality forming around ideas and information) or, in the case of Rupert Sheldrake, conforming to what he calls "morphic fields".
I recall a discussion in my nutrition class regarding a case of removal of the spleen (which is not, by the way, recommended by traditional Chinese medicine). Over time, the tissue remaining clearly began to take on the form of the removed spleen.
Something is removed, and whatever takes it's place, fills the energetic latticework. In a related way, a person may leave an unhealthy relationship, only to fill the remaining void with a similarly flawed individual... Even the new partner's latent behaviors may be further activated by the unchecked energetic expectation. See Watson
Much of our reasoning and explanations for reality may amount to just another colorful layer of "Son, I'll level with you, I don't know what the f*ck is going on here either, but the star you see is you." We can tell a kid why the sky is blue, or why s/he sees it as blue, but maybe we are just telling the kid what correlates with the sky being perceived as blue, bound by our world of cause and effect, before and after. Which came first, the melody or the beat?
For example if we were to watch someone build a house of legos, we'd say the small bricks came first. But maybe the idea came first, so the house was already built, and the material was begged for and the legos were utilized to fill it in... or the two worked together to bridge another layer of architecture. Perhaps it is both, sometimes first the pieces, sometimes first the whole. Perhaps, we too, are already built.
So can we really explain ourselves from the bottom up or not? The only thing you can really pin down is a mystery. If we contend with the possibility of being held up by the unseen, we have to contemplate the unseen and know that to judge whatever creatures are here with us is to judge only the cards that are on the table. What lies underneath the table?
V
To tangent, what lies underneath the table within the self? I have to acknowledge my own experience of having a nearly unmanageable fire inside me these past few years, especially upon immersing myself in a conventional community, which happens to be a world of materialism, conventional treatment of the-symptoms-of illness and my witnessing of the pain that stems from that... not to mention the sharpness among people... who are, albeit, all grappling with their own emotional storms.
There is the frustration of knowing alternate solutions & approaches while having no quick way to introduce these into the set framework. It is the feeling of racing down a burning corridor and pointing out windows, but no one sees them, and people just keep running further into the fire, and you run behind them. The window doesn't seem right and neither does the flame.
Often there is the feeling of talking to a stone or perhaps being a stone. For me, there has to be a certain neutrality, or there is a difficulty in maintaining healthy personal practices... or even seeing the point.
To identify as a tribe is to wish wellness for all members. In the same way one would not keep all the food for himself, neither would one take all the well-being or all of the information. Though it does not work in this way, since, in simple terms at least, well-being is not a limited resource.
So one has to have this sense of neutrality. Thus, after all that has been said up to this point, one is alone, in a sense. It is a weird thing to be alone and yet to be simultaneously connected to everything.
There is the puzzle of respecting other's decisions, while all the while knowing that these decisions have deep effect on the self. There is perhaps the relative torture of being in a tribe where you are the closest thing to not quite-a-shaman & you are essentially invisible, banging soundlessly on the outer glass of the bubble your tribe is in.
Then you may feel like you are in a dramatic film playing a character... and you wonder... at what point have you become accustomed to the drama, as a participate, and at what point have you begun, on some level, perhaps to unknowingly crave it. And to what extent is the situation an effort to help, and to what extent is it simply to feel right about and at peace with the self?
Unchecked, all of this can certainly lead to a feeling of helplessness. When grappling with an internal fire, and forgetting (or at least neglecting) the systems to contend with it, a person can suddenly come pretty close to picking up that red light saber... or at least come close enough to the edge so as to sneak a look over... to see a mirror and recognize that the self could be anyone... were it not for awareness (or a very strong pre-existing structure one blindly fills). We may not have to think so hard if the program is good.
There can be a moment when a person feels an impulse reaction rising up in the self, something destructive, something violent. Even Luke Skywalker walks right up to the line.
Of course, one may have to consider his/her environment or tribe (not necessarily chosen but often chosen). Perhaps there is the possibility of creating distance, building a healthy tribe, setting a good example and leaving an opening for others to adopt it's ways, or perhaps even join in, as it strikes them, rather than operating from the inside, at obvious odds with the self.
Or perhaps the right person can operate from the inside, though I do not necessarily think this wise, speaking for myself. We may have some big decisions to make in modern times. The same grand quotes which motivate on a given day may fail us on another when we are actually in the fray.
Still, in whatever case, such inner torments may come down to a lack of practice, a practice which stands to elevate the baseline of nearly anyone. Yoga & meditation are the easiest examples. To raise the threshold, to receive strength and immunity from a different place. It is easy to let a practice slip, perhaps easier because you never thought it was even conceivable that it would slip.
Tic Nat Han said something to a student once... something like "If you lose your practice, you will lose everything" Meditative activities (or inactivities) have the potential to raise the baseline. Baseline patience. Baseline contentment. Baseline happiness. Baseline limitations.
Furthermore, in the context of group consciousness, to raise up the self in this way, is to perhaps help the other. We expand. Dean Radin mentions a study, that I believe John Haglin was involved with, where crime statistics in Washington D.C. were measured before, during, and after days of group meditation. An overall positive effect was indicated. Lynne McTaggart is running an experiment now, part of which is to measure the effect of group meditation, with intent for decreased casualties of war, potentially affecting outcome of a conflict. There are indications that just being an in-tune human being can have a postive effect on an environment / culture.
There are a ridiculous number of studies indicating power of conscious intent on a number of systems... mechanical (P.E.A.R), biological (N.I.H. - studies of Reiki showing faster healing of those who received it), neurological (before and after brain scans correlating with Joe Dispenza's workshops, which involved meditation), global (coherence indicated by Global Consciousness experiments... that is random number generators correlating significantly with specific moment to moment world events)... and more.
I'm also thinking of situations where groups of people riot and become out of control. Sometimes there is a catalyst, a lack of whatever resource. Imagine this combined with a lack of practice... an absence of a knowing that everything is passing through us... that we "are not our thoughts" How could we expect anything different?
VI
And, in a context, maybe there is room to get angry. It is a world where things eat one another. We struggle in society with basic equality. Our biological, mental, emotional, social adaptation to the quick changes of civilization, can be quite brutal, as we contend with modern life's unfolding while still dwelling in the bodies of our indigenous brothers and sisters.
We can blame a god.
However, if we assume the flipper of cards to be us on some level, to get angry is to wish to give the self a spanking. And maybe that feels good, and we are sadostic people of a sadistic universe, but maybe it doesn't and one day we grow board with hating the multiple levels of ourselves.
On a side note, it is said that anger can be taken as an improvement over despair or infringement, so it could be an improvement depending on the context. The person expressing it, for all we know, might just have tossed off the chains of despair. Anger could be an side effect of perceived unfairness. It's gradually buildup could result in a revolution of the oppressed. "We're not gonna take it anymore" (Dee Snider)
Though, all in all, it is a dangerous friend to take to the movies, and if peace is what we want, it ironically may not be what we demonstrate. "I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me." (Mother Teresa)
"You are not your thoughts."
One can say I am more than this thing passing through me. Though one may also be proactive, shake out the body, scream toward the stars, rather than let the anger, or whatever, settle in, down into the roots, the secret program of who we are going to be... and what we are going to crave. Sometimes one has to let out the sound. Volcanoes erupt, lightning strikes, stars explode. We aren't exactly dancing on a static field here.
With that said, neutrality capable of speaking truth to power may be a kinder companion. Ideally the practice would sink deep down, so that even upon losing the mind, so to speak, one would still be pulled by these finer strings.
Anyhow, there is plenty room for a god or gods, and perhaps the separation is significant enough to identify with something distinct & outside the self, a consciousness that is as definitive and tangible as we are, but likewise we seem connected, so we can also call all of this the self.
If we feel a sense of expansion as we grow, where does this expansion end? At a point, all of these are words, casings for a reality which is reluctant to be encased, so the steadfast religious individual or the agnostic or atheist may contemplate the mysterious in another framework.
It seems there is room for all, at least in a context. However, to deny interconnection, to deny the mysteriousness of consciousness, the apparent mind/matter inter-relationship, the potential for more, seems almost to hold up a hand in a river.
It will simply go around the hand and continue to wave at the world through various frameworks, some offering perhaps finer approximations than others, but all pointers. All ideas wrapping around something, like water vapor around a condensation nucleii.
VII
Eventually a cloud becomes heavy with water vapor and its is time for a storm. Even as it appears an individual, it is in relationship, being built and expending.
Furthermore we are like that cloud. We are constantly being built and our cells and molecules are being constantly being shed, and no one cell or molecule can be removed that will essentially cease us to be... we are in a cycle and, just as no water droplet determines a cloud, no cell or particle seems to determine us.
So we ride this wave (a multi-dimensional wave) and we have two choices... either will ride the wave or we fill the wave.
If we fill the wave, we are something more. If we ride the wave, we are something more. Everyone that even dips a little toe into philosophical thought is required to use a wave analogy by the way. Its like the I IV V progression for a musician.
You may play it in isolation and think you are original and then you hear thousands of other people use it. Roses are red. Violets are Blue. I am a wave and so are you. I'll play you a song but its nothing new.
VIII
Gradually he discovered that all the women of this particular tribe made this type of doll. The point being that sometimes we are special, but sometimes so is everyone else. I think this philosophy is less harmful in some ways than the western tendency to stuff people full of the go-for-your-dreams... mentality... the dream typically being large scale social approval or popularity.
Easy to lose sight on the purpose of daily being and interacting... to lose site of the value and rhythm of every day essential tasks, which we separate by an imaginary boundary... like a state border over land which knows no such boundary. We play with imaginary lines.
Maybe we want to make it big and then play the rescuer to those below, but the system we rise through is reinforced, as people that don't make it, or get lost in the shuffle, may suffer self doubt and a sense of being less or being a failure when they don't achieve the dream... or get the recognition for the dream, which quite possibly wasn't their authentic dream to begin with. It was the culture's dream, in a context.
Just as our society at given times has suffered the delusion of a man being worth more a women or of one color being better than the next, we suffer the delusion of superiority.
Just as what a person is attracted to can alter somewhat by one having been deluged with media pertaining to that, a person can begin to be attracted to dreams that are not his/her own. And what do elephants and dolphins dream of? What do tribal people, who share our same biology, dream of?
This is all said with a grain of salt, as there are particular artists, musicians, public figures, leaders, mathematicians, whatever, who have, not only a rare knack for something, but an ability to inspire. I like and am inspired by some music more than others. I am moved.
We all may have our mentors. I'm thinking of the social change in South Africa, spurred by music, as described in the documentary Search for the Sugarman. A domino effect of inspiration. It is ok to yield to greater knowledge or to be led by something you can learn from. I benefited greatly by attending a number of herbalism classes with my teacher JoAnn Sanchez. Likewise, it is sad to contemplate a society that dwells in ignorance pertaining to ecological issues, for example.
Still, maybe in small bands, we'd each have our dance around the fire, but now, the fire is very big, and all our eyes are turned to it, from our televisions and other media, and there is less total airtime, per person, so the dancers are a select few. They are not necessarily the wise elders or the shamans of the tribe. And they don't always dance the greater truths.
Then again, perhaps their inspiration can't help but activate the creativity within an individual, who will find a way to express it on a local stage of some sort or among friends. A bigger explosion feeding smaller ones, some of who filter up, to become a big explosion to continue the cycle. Still, it might be good to step back from the big fire and take in the local scene.
IX
No matter our talents, we are all equalized, as we are headed to the relative end, which at least seems to not discriminate. It is hard to imagine we are not something more. If consciousness is only in the brain, then it is somehow holographic, because removing a small cell or particle from that brain won't change any self identity.
So even then it is an overlay of some kind, spread out, non point, ungraspable. You may destroy the body looking for it, but then it is hard to say you haven't simply burned the house. And though we focus on the brain, lets not forget about the stomach, for example, which is considered a second mind in some systems.
Just to make the point here, that we are limited even by our concept of mind. There is the western concept of it 'being in the head' and the eastern concept of it 'being a radio tower' I don't remember who said that. Someone.
Going back just a bit, several ideas have been mentioned that serve as overlays. First off, the idea of the physical self as not only a person, but as extending into others and the greater environment... life swinging on a vine Then there is the idea of consciousness being like water vapor... manifesting as clouds... clouds condensing around an idea. You may add numerous layers that we interact with, including a food layer. This itself is to open a pandora's box. (These ideas are all a pandora's box. How do you contain them in a linear paper?)
Anyhow, there is the idea of these different layers superimposed upon one another. So, we are imagined as complicated and of multiple deminsions, and therefore there is room for a multitude of truths. This place is wild and refuses to be put in a box, but at the same, perhaps it knows how to compartmentalize. Thus the self.
And none of this excludes the possibility of individual energy-body existing beyond the body. Something to fill with legos. Just because we are everything does not fulfill the assumption that we return to everything in one grand step upon death of the body. And just because there is a force, doesn't mean we have to bend over and let darth vader give us a spanking.
The universe is hardly a cut and dry place... whether we are talking about dark matter or the nooks and crannies that consciousness tucks itself into, we hardly have the entire picture. There is always a band of light we do not consciously perceive.
There are questions regarding our existence as pieces of everything... our imagined chunks of existence. Being someone who easily senses energy, sometimes visually, and someone who has heard accounts from at least three individuals of their near death experiences, it is an easy notion to contend with.
To assume that we, as individuals are born following the conception of our individual bodies, is just as assumptive as to assume that consciousness is located only in the head. Or to assume that we are built without a blueprint (a pre-existing idea) There is room for both randomness and order...
And it seems there is a little of each in the other.
http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/23931
http://astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/71/howfast.html
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