TURNING TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Solstice will turn in the night and the days will get longer.  We can call this Enlightenment, a fact as well as a metaphor.

"Tonight's full moon will be a supermoon, which occurs when a moon is full or nearly full and is at its closest point to Earth along its elliptical orbit. That closest point is called perigee."  It's only "gibbous" at the moment, approaching perigee.

These past days I've been looking at darkness in our world -- not the most serious examples like murder and war if seriousness is measured by death -- but rather the more subtle horrors and terrors, anxieties and dreads that are embedded in our ordinary lives.  The "lanterns" for mammals are two-fold, attachment and empathy, the ability to form organically existing ties with others and even to recognize their thought patterns and emotions.  Even a puppy can do it.  It is a precursor to faithfulness and what we often call "love."

The ability to share consciousness, or at least parts of it since it is only the part of our self-awareness that is UNconcious and therefore unknown and uncontrolled, is specific to humans, though Jane Goodall assures us that chimps come close.  In humans, the stroking and kissing and feeding that is common to all mammals (though humans resist kisses that are licking) and grows into shared frame of expression that begins between mother and child, grows into making love between adults, and finally becomes into an ability to open up to process and shifting reality, is sometimes labeled "spirituality."

Two thousand years ago the idea was that a superhuman molded little clay dolls that became us.  Today some people hang onto that, but many of us see a human being as a creature emerging from the life around it with the help of one other human being equipped with the proper organs to support nine months of growth that lead to decades of evolving growth, pulling in the environment as food, breath, and music and then pushing back what is around us in order to make room for our own existence, reaching out to others of all kinds.

Years ago I read an account of how a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly.  The expectation was that the parts would rearrange themselves into a new anatomy, one thing becoming another.  But as the study proceeded, it showed that the parts of the caterpillar were stripped back to the molecules of the organs and then re-gestated into butterfly parts.  The chrysalis was a womb on a deeper level than was suspected: parts were still parts but smaller and more elemental.  For a while neither creature was really a creature but only a kind of soup.  "Splitting the gene and running its map into the ground was exciting while it lasted, but molecular genetics, pursued to ever lower levels of organization, inevitably does away with itself: The gap between genetics and biochemistry disappears." Seymour Benzer, 1971

This is what death is.  This is what our whirling times are like.  We are in the midst of transforming, neither this nor that.  Highly disconcerting to not be an organized and dependable insect/animal.  Fire, climate change, floods and droughts are taking even the environment back to the molecular level.  Ten thousand years of culture based on being able to use the surface of the earth to make food and shelter are deeply challenged.  We must become different creatures.  Probably we will use our tremendous advantage of a culture that is both conscious and unconscious, both inherited and newly conceived.  But then those developments will cause our bodies to change.

The dashboard of our bodies is our brains and it works in circuits built partly before birth and partly through experience.  Go back to the idea of the frame of expression that creates something called "liminal time and space."  It takes us over the threshold of what we know and have built a map for in our brains, into a context of possibility, a new way of looking at life which becomes life itself as we enact it.  New neurocells add longer axons that create the circuits.

We are told that our unconscious sensory world, besides coding the knowledge of organs, also notes the evidence from single-cell senses, like whether we are standing or moving and where are limbs are, whether we are near a drop-off or a rising wall, which end of us is the "head", very faint awareness of magnetic force, and as many as a hundred other bits of monitoring.  Some animals can produce enough electricity to light a Christmas tree.  Maybe we could, too, if we could manage our unconscious, but that's why it's lucky it's unconscious or we'd either be doing frivolous stuff or weaponizing it for war.  

So much happens through us, not at our bidding.  The most "spiritual" of us may be the ones who can feel life passing magnetically, electrically, through us.  Maybe someday it will make our faces shine with enlightenment, but not right now, though some folks are said to "light up."

The moon waxing and waning, the planet tipping from side to side, are phenomena of the light produced by the sun which defines our days.  But the light of the night, what we see in the dark, are the dancing patterns of the Aurora Borealis across the sky.  "When charged particles from the sun strike atoms in Earth's atmosphere, they cause electrons in the atoms to move to a higher-energy state. When the electrons drop back to a lower energy state, they release a photon: light. This process creates the beautiful aurora, or northern lights."

At night in our sleep, something like this happens in our heads.  Some of it is unconscious, clearing old patterns and ideas away, and some of it is conscious, seen as dreams, sometimes reassuring and other times terrifying, traveling the circuits of the life as recorded in the dreaming creature, even mammals -- the dog chasing and whimpering, the cat muttering and flexing claws.  Rehearsing both perigee and apogee so we'll be ready when either rises over the black horizon line again and again.

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