BACK TO THE SEVENTIES!!

"We must let go of ourselves but we can’t -- because we don’t really exist."

"We’re only an idea based on feeling.  We’ve lost our connection to natural homeostasis, happening of itself."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LXiSPpfM54&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs

Alan Watts  1970

This post is a discussion of my own 2015 version of Watts’ insights.

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These assumptions keep people from being in touch with reality:

That everyone is like them.  Anyone who is not like them is either better or worse.  If they are worse, they should be treated badly and even eliminated.  If they are better, one should attach to them to one’s advantage.  All the rest of the world is just like this place.

That their consciousness, which is based on words either in print or spoken, is THEM.  Their identity.  It defines them.  Therefore, words that are insulting should be eliminated.  Words that are unknown should either be quickly learned or considered some kind of witchcraft, ruled out of order.

That what they have in their consciousness is real.  This makes two problematic experiences suspect:  one is perception of imaginary things, (possibly the “voices” of psychosis) and the other is virtual worlds like those created for fiction of some kind.  [Images are as powerful as words.]  Keeping one’s reality separate from one’s vivid but “unreal” experiences is a preoccupation, though sometimes it is the “unreal” experiences of books, movies, or even stories recounted by friends and relatives that become more valid than what one’s own body has recorded or can reconstitute from its memory systems.

IMPLICATIONS AND ADDITIONS:

We can actually move our “experience” back and forth between “real” and imaginary worlds.  We have made flying an experience both in machines and with sails as personal “wings.”  We have made dragons real by inventing predator drones.  

There is a world, reached through scientific augmentation, that amounts to extrasensory perception.  Sometimes we found those second-hand or enabled experiences through curiosity about what it is that other creatures are reacting to:  the honeybee, the homing pigeon, the snuffling pig or dog, the deep earth thrumming of elephants or the deep water songs of whales, how the bat finds the gnat.  Sometimes we find them almost by accident while trying to understand northern lights or relieve pain or discover why -- if all the mushrooms in a grove are picked -- the trees die.  Then we discover the cooperating filaments among them.  If we weren’t so intent on these searches, we would not know about DNA, but knowing about DNA means that we’re unraveling all sorts of things, from crimes to the knowledge of our physical unfolding over time and the vulnerabilities/
strengths/variabilities of the assemblage of cells we “wear” as our bodies.  New “truth tests” arrive and reveal the faults of our old systems of justice and commitment.

One of those physical systems is our sensory monitoring systems and the brain that sorts and regulates them to keep us within the bounds of human homeostasis -- the conditions that will allow us to keep living.  But this varies from one person to another and we know that it is subject to illusions, maybe from molecular ingestions and maybe from processing aberrations, brain glitches.  To say we have five senses doesn’t tell us much except that we have organ protuberances to help the sensing cells: ears, eyes, noses, mouths with tongues, little hairs that stand on end, inner gyroscopes to keep us level and so on.  

All the sensory intake cells are interacting with the outside environment as fiercely and carefully as they can, but they can be fooled.  For instance, phantom pain or the opposite, anesthesia.  At the “keyboard” or “dashboard” or “working platform” level of the brain, which is the presumably conscious mechanism that accepts, discards, organizes and orders action, deception is even more possible.  And yet this is what we claim as our identity, our coherent “self.”

The dark historic brain cannot be accessed by the conscious brain nor can the biomes that live in the flesh and gut as digesting organisms.  But we can “feel” them as dis-ease, joy, well-being, fittingness, grief.  Experience-based thought systems choose facts to fit these moods or intuitions.  Viruses cannot be directly felt -- they are only code -- but their consequences can be catastrophic in the case of aggressive code that infects cells.  But now that we can identify and describe a virus, recognize it as code for a cell nucleus, we are learning how to reach it and use its tricks for our own good.

Wirelessness is comparable.  The electromagnetic forces that zoom through us all the time are usually not felt, but have major consequences that we can harness to create things like the internet so that our senses are greatly extended.  And yet we are ultimately dependent on the emanations of the sun and even right now great tongues of storm there are affecting my provider service here in this Valier back bedroom, scattering and distorting the letters I'm trying to make into words.

Many people have been persuaded by our educational systems that literacy is a superiority to others, when it is in fact only an instrumentation.  People believe that their consciousness, as captured in words, is their identity and that identities can be ranked in value, with the more powerful values being captured and recorded by institutions.  These are sorted according to gender roles which -- with the invention of agriculture and cities -- were pulled away from their biological origins in child-bearing and physical strength.  Now that physical gender is being blurred -- maybe by choice, maybe by molecular industrial environments, maybe by a change of consciousness -- we must make choices more individually.  

It greatly helps to have the instruments of literacy, academic disciplines, social hierarchy, and the other social forces of homeostasis, which can be as sustaining or as deadly as physical bodily need.  How those forces are used is the crux of morality.  The more variety can be successfully introduced to the ecosystem, whether it is biological or social, the more structurally robust the entire system can be.  And yet each social element tries to seduce the individual persona into believing that only one attachment counts.

So where does attachment come from?  It is a biological phenomenon to keep babies close to their mothers until they learn how to take care of themselves, and in some situations that attachment is lifelong.  In others the attachment is shifted or shared to one’s own reproductive partner.  But because there is so much in the human identity that is created over time inside the brain and not dependent on outside “facts” though interacting with them, that attachment can express as repetition of former attachments or even as rejection of attachment to persons, slipping them over to attachment to things, disciplines, activities and other foci.

In sum, a naive person living in homeostasis with a stable biome will be quite different from someone trying to deal with scientifically presented realities, created stories of great power, and a physical world that is limited and created by human invention -- or possibly one that has been set free in some dimension, learning to parasail or deep-sea dive or walk on the moon.

Since the brain loves metaphors and uses them to keep sorted out what is “really” happening, who they “really” are and what should “really” be done, sometimes becoming a hazard to all the rest of us, what is the most compelling metaphor that can cause someone like Netanyahu, someone like an African dictator, someone like a street addict, someone like a woman who seeks power through her appearance -- what will throw on the lights so that they see they are on a theatre stage and could walk away?

The most recent map of the cosmos.

When does the obsessive story of all the holocausts, all the famines, all the species extinctions end?  Surely they are not “real” in the sense of inevitable, imposed by Gods or Fate or even human limitation.  Where are the stories that can replace them?