There are three things.
There is the tehom, the chaotic, oceanic pool of potential.
There is the Go()ds, the pluri-singular call to go()dness.
And there is the creation, the universe that is creating itself.
In the beginning was potential. Here, in this undifferentiated nothing is the potential for everything. I'm not sure if time was, or time came to be (in time?). But from this potential, flecks of froth emerged and then dissolved back into potentiality. Each fleck was an actualised potential, a creation, a moment of creativity, a decision of this and not everything.
One of these cosmic decision was to remain. Creativity flared forth in moments, and most of this again dissolved as the matter collided with its correlative anti-matter and again entered the pool of potential. But not all. A cosmic imbalance was born. The decision for this imbalance (more matter than anti-matter, something that mattered) was made. Its agency (who/what made the decision) can be mythologised as The Creator.
Was it here that the Call that is Go()ds was established, or was the call always there, always calling? I don't know. But with that decision, the call changed, for the call was able to call out to (something that) matter(ed).
Difference multiplies difference. As matter continued, it differentiated itself, first as elementary particles, then atoms, nebulous clouds, distinct galaxies, molecules, shining stars, evocative supernova, varied planets, complex organisms, inter-species dependencies, communities, societies, civilisations, everything that is now. And all of it mattered.
The tehom is neither go()ds nor evils, but is the active potentiality for both. In creation, both go()ds and evils exist. The call of Go()ds is go()ds. That is the imbalance. Yet Go()ds is also the balance that allows for matter, allows the creation to matter.
The tehom is freedom. "All creativity entails the risk that the creature will turn malignant, indeed will turn against its creator. Even our own writings, loves, technologies, might turn against our intentions." (Catherine Keller)
Creation is the cutting off of possibilities. I will create this and not that. As a painter paints a line here and not there. However, creation also always creates new possibilities - creation makes possible things that were previously impossible. And so, of these countless created possibilities, some of these will be chosen to be created, and some will forever be cut off from possibility. And some may even remain possible, sinking and rising in the tehom, waiting to crest the wave of existence, waiting to matter.
The moment defines creation. What is now is that which has just been created, and isn't merely potential.
Go()dness comes in many forms. It is one call, yet the calls are multiple. I am called to ecological awareness, to help relieve the suffering(s) of the earth. If I help the poor I am responding to (one of) the call of Go()d. If I enrich a life, I am also responding. Hopefully, in writing this, I will influence my readers toward the Go()ds, and so this creation of writing is a response to the call.
Evil is rejecting the call to Go()ds. Exploitation is evil. Abuse is evil. Rape is evil. Being rich while others aren't is evil. To decide upon inaction when sufferers cry out for you to respond to the call of Go()ds is evil. To waste (time, resources, life, possibilities for Go()ds) is evil.
There are three things.
We, the creation (1), are called to create the imbalance of Go()dness (2) from the fluid potentials of tehom (3).
Note: This was originally called "An Ontology of Three", but narrative is more accurate. It is a way to tell the story of life, not an intention to define 'the way things are'. I advocate narrative plurality.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Subverting upness
Prioritizing upness is often seen to be patriarchal (see James Nelson's The Intimate Connection), as it is the erection that points up and the male monotheistic deity is often up (amongst other things). But upness is also something that is very hard to not privilege. Historically, power has been associated with language. He who speaks is the one who currently holds the power. And when there are large groups of people, in order to be heard, the speaker is often raised up on a stage or dais. So power is closely connected with those who are raised up, who are higher than those around them.
It has been said that height it so connected with power that it cannot be separated. We can't crouch down in order to be heard in a crowd, and when a voice is muffled by crouching, the voice will lose its power to someone else.
However, there is a story of Jesus subverting this up-privileging. Jesus got in a boat and went out on the lake so that he may be heard. Jesus went horizontally, not vertically. And he still managed to achieve a place from which he could be heard, still retained the power of speech, yet did so in a sideways manner.
So maybe there is hope for those who wish to escape this patriarchal privileging of the erection.
It has been said that height it so connected with power that it cannot be separated. We can't crouch down in order to be heard in a crowd, and when a voice is muffled by crouching, the voice will lose its power to someone else.
However, there is a story of Jesus subverting this up-privileging. Jesus got in a boat and went out on the lake so that he may be heard. Jesus went horizontally, not vertically. And he still managed to achieve a place from which he could be heard, still retained the power of speech, yet did so in a sideways manner.
So maybe there is hope for those who wish to escape this patriarchal privileging of the erection.
Friday, November 9, 2007
I have never seen a bookcase in a car
We adore books. Great big bookcases, filled with words, have a special place in the house. There's excitement there, and awesome life-changing power, and beauty, and art, and knowledge (which is art).
Writing is one of the most prized parts of civilisation, maybe even the key to its existence. Writing has been treasured as holy, given authority to direct our lives, seen to portray God's voice, seen to subvert/disprove God's being, and valued as describing the universe. Writing has been dear to human hearts for millennia, it has been the sign of decency, the sign of education, the sign of humanity, indeed, as valued as humanity. It has been said, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." - Heinrich Heine.
I've seen TV's in a car. I've seen CD racks. But I have never seen a bookcase in a car.
Is this an added benefit to the oil/car companies: a book-free zone for our de-education (deaducation?).
Cars are where books aren't welcome.
Writing is one of the most prized parts of civilisation, maybe even the key to its existence. Writing has been treasured as holy, given authority to direct our lives, seen to portray God's voice, seen to subvert/disprove God's being, and valued as describing the universe. Writing has been dear to human hearts for millennia, it has been the sign of decency, the sign of education, the sign of humanity, indeed, as valued as humanity. It has been said, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." - Heinrich Heine.
I've seen TV's in a car. I've seen CD racks. But I have never seen a bookcase in a car.
Is this an added benefit to the oil/car companies: a book-free zone for our de-education (deaducation?).
Cars are where books aren't welcome.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
God as Freconscwareience
I'm sick of God being thought of as a being. Even people who no longer think that God is a big person in the sky still use personal, anthropocentric language of God. "God does this, God is that, God listens to prayer," and on, and on. And it strikes me that while the mystics generally claim that God is a word that points to the --- that cannot be spoken about or named, this --- is so difficult to talk about that 'God' quite quickly re-enters the stage, and, at least in the popular realm, God is again brought back into the 'big person' model.
Most recent theology has headed towards panentheism - all is in God. But this isn't always explained, so I'm going to have a go, starting from human experience.
We often assume that God has a consciousness, just as we do. But why? This is (human)consciousness-centric, and human-style consciousness is surely just a recent thing on the evolutionary stage, something that can be seen in homo sapians and not much else. If God is to be seen to be something existing prior to humans, then surely God should not be primarily modelled off of human experience so directly (can we really escape this completely?).
How does a rabbit think? Or a dog? Certainly animals don't think as humans do (although some may assume they do). They have a different consciousness, a consciousness that isn't (as) self-aware. If a dog were to have a God, then the dog's God certainly wouldn't be assumed to have a human-style consciousness. But if humans have free will, then it also seems that the animals would. Indeed, fruit flies do.
What about a plant? It experiences life, and is somewhat aware of its surroundings. It 'knows' when light is shining on it. It is somehow aware of where water is, and where to send its roots. It probably even experiences the pain of the loss of its parts as something eats it or cuts it down.
And so to the pebble. Now you're probably thinking that it's ridiculous to suggest that a pebble experiences its surroundings. But it most certainly does. It experiences the pull of the earth that we have named gravity. It is aware of the rocks below it that holds it in place.
But lets go more basic, to the electron. Is an electron conscious? Yes. In a way. It is conscious that there is a proton nearby, and that it holds an attraction for this proton, and so feels temporarily attracted to it. It feels the other electrons in orbit around the common nucleus. It experiences the close encounter with another atom that approaches, and develops a relationship with it so it shares its time between nuclei. (And as it jumps in and out of existence, maybe even the electron makes decisions and exercises a limited amount of free will?) So even very small things have a certain kind of consciousness, although that word is probably inappropriate for it. But we lack words to describe an electron's experience.
Now lets get big. The earth has been seen more and more in recent times as a single organism. It has long been worshipped as a goddess, mother earth, and it has recently been called Gaia. The earth can be seen to be a single, complex organism, with an incredible variety and quantity of internal and external relationships. And the earth, Gaia, is often seen to be conscious. She is reacting against the industrial pollution of her atmosphere, getting angry and sending storms. But in that last sentence, I personified the earth, making it a her, and using her as the subject of my sentence, the one doing the acting. As a subject, I granted her agency, and to have agency indicates freedom.
And now the universe. By universe, I'm talking about the biggest 'all' that is. As far as I know, that means I'm talking about something that is about 13 billion years old, and probably almost as many light years across. Brian Swimme in The Universe is a Green Dragon pictures the universe as, well, a green dragon. And here (0:11:25), he talks about the universe as having a purpose, in some ways, consciously choosing to head towards greater richness.
But I don't want to talk about the universe's consciousness. That sounds too anthropocentric to me. So I'm going to compile 4 words into one, in order to try to talk about this. Freedom, consciousness, awareness, and experience. Fre-consc-ware-ience. This is my proposed word that allows us to talk about God in a panentheistic schema, so that God can still be talked about, and yet is not done so in an overly anthropocentric/consciousness-centric way. God is the freconscwareience of the universe.
Something to take from this is that God decides the overall purpose of existence. And God, the freconscwareience of the universe, seems to generally choose to go down paths of greater complexity and greater diversity. I've not worked out much more, but complexity and diversity seem to be favoured. Not always. But often. And so, if I am to work alongside God (and not against the universe's freconscwareience), I should also work towards greater complexity and diversity. In this, I find a great deal of guidance.
This plays out in many ways. I encourage religious diversity, and work on the side of causes that try to protect the diversity of species on earth (opposing extinction). I work to protect freedom of expression, and immerse myself in diverse arts. I appreciate different languages, different cultures, and different customs, and hope that they do not become assimilated into my own, losing their uniqueness and identity. I try to have deep, complex relationships with my friends (although they are sometimes exhausting and so I also seek simplicity). I reject simple schemas, quick-fix promises, and paths that overly limit options. I reject stereotypes, and always try to work out how someone could hold the beliefs that they do, only dismissing someone after a great deal of exploration into their world (if ever). I am suspicious of simple answers, and dislike one-size-fits-all solutions. Cookie-cut houses, offices and shops are not my thing. Findings in science are exciting, and quantum physics often helps to show the complexity of life. But science has also gone beyond a suitable level of complexity: we should stop experiments that could create a black hole (we'd all die), we should stop experiments into robotic-free-will (read most sci-fi to see the tyranny of robot-rule (Asimov, Dune, Battlestar Galatica, etc.)), we should slow down research on genetics, and we should greatly reduce neuroscience research, as the possibilities of mind-reading (removal of privacy) and mind-manipulation (removal of free-will) are too scary. But we shouldn't stop all scientific research (I don't think), as complexity is good. It's just that sometimes we're not ready for it. I encourage people to read more, and to write more - create stories, create theories, invent words. Grappling with ideas and thinking about philosophical and psychological issues tends towards complexity. I encourage people to learn about soil, the most complex and diverse substance on planet earth, and as a bonus it will make you happy.
But in all this, I am merely trying to work in the same direction as God, the universe's freconscwareience.
Most recent theology has headed towards panentheism - all is in God. But this isn't always explained, so I'm going to have a go, starting from human experience.
We often assume that God has a consciousness, just as we do. But why? This is (human)consciousness-centric, and human-style consciousness is surely just a recent thing on the evolutionary stage, something that can be seen in homo sapians and not much else. If God is to be seen to be something existing prior to humans, then surely God should not be primarily modelled off of human experience so directly (can we really escape this completely?).
How does a rabbit think? Or a dog? Certainly animals don't think as humans do (although some may assume they do). They have a different consciousness, a consciousness that isn't (as) self-aware. If a dog were to have a God, then the dog's God certainly wouldn't be assumed to have a human-style consciousness. But if humans have free will, then it also seems that the animals would. Indeed, fruit flies do.
What about a plant? It experiences life, and is somewhat aware of its surroundings. It 'knows' when light is shining on it. It is somehow aware of where water is, and where to send its roots. It probably even experiences the pain of the loss of its parts as something eats it or cuts it down.
And so to the pebble. Now you're probably thinking that it's ridiculous to suggest that a pebble experiences its surroundings. But it most certainly does. It experiences the pull of the earth that we have named gravity. It is aware of the rocks below it that holds it in place.
But lets go more basic, to the electron. Is an electron conscious? Yes. In a way. It is conscious that there is a proton nearby, and that it holds an attraction for this proton, and so feels temporarily attracted to it. It feels the other electrons in orbit around the common nucleus. It experiences the close encounter with another atom that approaches, and develops a relationship with it so it shares its time between nuclei. (And as it jumps in and out of existence, maybe even the electron makes decisions and exercises a limited amount of free will?) So even very small things have a certain kind of consciousness, although that word is probably inappropriate for it. But we lack words to describe an electron's experience.
Now lets get big. The earth has been seen more and more in recent times as a single organism. It has long been worshipped as a goddess, mother earth, and it has recently been called Gaia. The earth can be seen to be a single, complex organism, with an incredible variety and quantity of internal and external relationships. And the earth, Gaia, is often seen to be conscious. She is reacting against the industrial pollution of her atmosphere, getting angry and sending storms. But in that last sentence, I personified the earth, making it a her, and using her as the subject of my sentence, the one doing the acting. As a subject, I granted her agency, and to have agency indicates freedom.
And now the universe. By universe, I'm talking about the biggest 'all' that is. As far as I know, that means I'm talking about something that is about 13 billion years old, and probably almost as many light years across. Brian Swimme in The Universe is a Green Dragon pictures the universe as, well, a green dragon. And here (0:11:25), he talks about the universe as having a purpose, in some ways, consciously choosing to head towards greater richness.
But I don't want to talk about the universe's consciousness. That sounds too anthropocentric to me. So I'm going to compile 4 words into one, in order to try to talk about this. Freedom, consciousness, awareness, and experience. Fre-consc-ware-ience. This is my proposed word that allows us to talk about God in a panentheistic schema, so that God can still be talked about, and yet is not done so in an overly anthropocentric/consciousness-centric way. God is the freconscwareience of the universe.
Something to take from this is that God decides the overall purpose of existence. And God, the freconscwareience of the universe, seems to generally choose to go down paths of greater complexity and greater diversity. I've not worked out much more, but complexity and diversity seem to be favoured. Not always. But often. And so, if I am to work alongside God (and not against the universe's freconscwareience), I should also work towards greater complexity and diversity. In this, I find a great deal of guidance.
This plays out in many ways. I encourage religious diversity, and work on the side of causes that try to protect the diversity of species on earth (opposing extinction). I work to protect freedom of expression, and immerse myself in diverse arts. I appreciate different languages, different cultures, and different customs, and hope that they do not become assimilated into my own, losing their uniqueness and identity. I try to have deep, complex relationships with my friends (although they are sometimes exhausting and so I also seek simplicity). I reject simple schemas, quick-fix promises, and paths that overly limit options. I reject stereotypes, and always try to work out how someone could hold the beliefs that they do, only dismissing someone after a great deal of exploration into their world (if ever). I am suspicious of simple answers, and dislike one-size-fits-all solutions. Cookie-cut houses, offices and shops are not my thing. Findings in science are exciting, and quantum physics often helps to show the complexity of life. But science has also gone beyond a suitable level of complexity: we should stop experiments that could create a black hole (we'd all die), we should stop experiments into robotic-free-will (read most sci-fi to see the tyranny of robot-rule (Asimov, Dune, Battlestar Galatica, etc.)), we should slow down research on genetics, and we should greatly reduce neuroscience research, as the possibilities of mind-reading (removal of privacy) and mind-manipulation (removal of free-will) are too scary. But we shouldn't stop all scientific research (I don't think), as complexity is good. It's just that sometimes we're not ready for it. I encourage people to read more, and to write more - create stories, create theories, invent words. Grappling with ideas and thinking about philosophical and psychological issues tends towards complexity. I encourage people to learn about soil, the most complex and diverse substance on planet earth, and as a bonus it will make you happy.
But in all this, I am merely trying to work in the same direction as God, the universe's freconscwareience.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Two thought-webs
I believe there are two kinds of people in the world: those who assume everyone thinks more-or-less like them, and those who acknowledge that everyone and everything thinks infinitely and sublimely differently. I don't often make claims like this, categorising all humanity into two groups, but I believe this is a somewhat useful distinction to make. I have been both of those people, moving from the first to the second. I believe the acknowledgement of the second type requires a kind of deeper-consciousness. Or at least, it did for me. My world is opened up in variety, complexity and beauty because of it. Let me explain these in order.
The first one I experienced most when I was in fundie-college. At that point, everyone thought alike. It was a simple world, a world in which everyone could say the same thing (e.g. a statement of faith) and mean the same thing (unless you really thought about it, and that was discouraged). Religion could quite easily be based off the idea that people could believe exactly the same thing (although the increasingly-exclusive Fundamentalists at the start of the 20th century seemed to indicate otherwise). And since your friends all thought the same way as you did, you could easily establish relations with them that didn't require much depth to develop 'true' communication. Indeed, it confused me that miscommunication happened at all.
In fact, life was quite confusing. But it wasn't a confusion you worried about, and tried to understand. It was a confusion you tried to fix. For example, I could not understand how it is possible for a man to love a man. It was so far out of my experience that I was quite frankly confused by it. Why would anyone want to live that way? How is it possible? On the other hand, it was easier for me to imagine a woman loving a woman, because I loved women. For a woman to love a woman meant that the woman was like me, which made sense. Of course, it made sense also that women would love men, because I love 'the other sex', and so it was just mirroring that. This resulted in a weird quadruple-standard. 1. Men loving women was normal. 2. Women loving men was simply a reflection of that. 3. Women loving women was understandable, probably wrong, but when I admitted it, somewhat exciting (lesbianism is OK if men get to watch - as long as men gain pleasure). 4. Men loving men was completely wrong. But not just wrong. It was incomprehensible, unnatural, inconceivable, detestable. Because for a man to love a man meant that they must think completely differently from me, and that just wasn't a possible part of how I believed existence to be. They didn't fit within the understandable world, and so they needed to be brought into my world, they needed to be 'fixed'.
My acknowledgement that everyone thinks infinitely sublimely differently emerged over time and involved many sources. As well as discussions with friends, inspiration came from philosophical books that discuss how animals think and experience the world (such as Berry and Swimme's The Universe Story, Barry Allen's Knowledge and Civilization and Langer's Philosophy in a New Key), Keller's book on relationship called From a Broken Web, along with literature like Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These books opened up the thoughts of others to me in two ways: 1. The way something thinks and experiences the world is intimately tied to its brain/consciousness, and 2. Every moment brings with it the complex web of previous experiences, through memory, and everyone's life experiences are amazingly varied and different.
The first of these may be brought out by asking how the first, single-cell organisms 'thought' (see The Universe Story for a more detailed examination). This first life provided the universe with an amazing accomplishment: memory. These first cells had the memory to know how they were created, and so could replicate themselves. They knew how to bring together groups of molecules in such a way that they could form them together to be chemical-copies of themselves. These tiny creatures worked at the molecular level, taking amino acids and changing them, giving them the spark of lightning-life that they themselves were 'born' from. How did they feel? How do they experience the world? Certainly not in a empirical or rational scientific way (these being recent human creations). Without nerve endings, they didn't experience touch in the same way that I do. Maybe scent gets closer, sniffing out the suitable amino acids, and knittings them together so they may pass the spark of life on. But it certainly isn't scent in the same way that I smell. Indeed, their experience of life is amazingly different from my experience, and that difference comes out in their experience of other lives, other life-forms, other sensations and sense, and other ways of appreciating time. A lead-on and provocative question that stems from this might be, How does a photon experience existence and time?
The second opening up of my experience comes from the recognition that everyone brings a great deal of 'baggage' to every experience, through memory. In this sense, baggage is not necessarily bad (or good), but it is always limiting - baggage means I experience the world in this way, and not your way, not that way, not any other way. The baggage I refer to are the relationships and associations I draw between the present experience and the past experiences that I relate to the present. If someone says 'snake', every person present will immediately connect it with multiple associations and think of completely different, highly nuanced things. One person may think of the time when they were bitten by a snake, connect that experience to the biblical serpent in Genesis, relate that to temptation and evil (through the teachings they have heard (through language)), and before they can say anything they shudder with disgust. At the same time, another person may immediately think of their pet snake. This sends them off into thinking about the religious symbolism of snakes from a different tradition, where the shedding of skin symbolises new life and the shedding of old habits, which the person then relates to escape from oppressive conservativism, and so they're response comes out in a smile and a sentence, "I love snakes, they're so beautiful." With just a single word, two very different responses are evoked.
The possible difference in experience between humans is of an amazing magnitude of diversity. This can especially come out in the experience of time. Where one person sees time as a succession of 'now's, so that "one, two, three" occurred in different times and places (my experience when at fundie-college), another person can view time as a single, monistic, and eternal 'now' (more like my experience now, through the influence of Robinson's Thou Who Art, Buber's I and Thou, and a great deal of (Christian) liberation and aboriginal writing). In this eternal Now, freedom is in the decisions I make, yet they would always disappear into non-existence, except for memory. Memory preserves the no-longer by making it re-membered in the Now, and so re-membering is a very active, creative decision, allowing the otherwise-no-longer to affect the Now and so to have a continued existence (although in that existence it is ever changing as its re-membering fluctuates in the fractalic complexity of universe). Yet I also believe that these are just two ways to experience time that I have had, and that not only are there other ways, but that everyone's and everythings ways are different.
However, I won't leave this blog with the fundie-college in too bad of a light (see, light can be bad, again - also see Mollenkott's chapter, Godding in the Dark). For it's not just fundie-college that goes with the first assumption. It is also the common liberal stance. You've heard it: "Christian fundamentalists are just deceitful, they know that they're preaching is a lie." But that isn't the case. Speaking as a recovering one, I know I was not lying when I spoke - I believed it, it was true. I thought differently from 'liberals', and so would have been put into the same 'inconceivable' category that I then put gays in. The typical liberal cannot understand fundamentalists in a very similar way that fundamentalists cannot understand gays, because the assumption of both liberals and fundies is that everyone thinks just like me.
Maybe the fact that I separate humanity into two categories (rather than allowing for the 6 billion categories I really need), undermines my claim that I acknowledge that everyone thinks differently. But I advance this idea as a heuristic tool, as a way to help people think, so that they may better understand the world from their own, unique, and infinitely complex perspective. Don't dismiss someone because they're in the first group - their experience is more nuanced than anyone could ever define.
The first one I experienced most when I was in fundie-college. At that point, everyone thought alike. It was a simple world, a world in which everyone could say the same thing (e.g. a statement of faith) and mean the same thing (unless you really thought about it, and that was discouraged). Religion could quite easily be based off the idea that people could believe exactly the same thing (although the increasingly-exclusive Fundamentalists at the start of the 20th century seemed to indicate otherwise). And since your friends all thought the same way as you did, you could easily establish relations with them that didn't require much depth to develop 'true' communication. Indeed, it confused me that miscommunication happened at all.
In fact, life was quite confusing. But it wasn't a confusion you worried about, and tried to understand. It was a confusion you tried to fix. For example, I could not understand how it is possible for a man to love a man. It was so far out of my experience that I was quite frankly confused by it. Why would anyone want to live that way? How is it possible? On the other hand, it was easier for me to imagine a woman loving a woman, because I loved women. For a woman to love a woman meant that the woman was like me, which made sense. Of course, it made sense also that women would love men, because I love 'the other sex', and so it was just mirroring that. This resulted in a weird quadruple-standard. 1. Men loving women was normal. 2. Women loving men was simply a reflection of that. 3. Women loving women was understandable, probably wrong, but when I admitted it, somewhat exciting (lesbianism is OK if men get to watch - as long as men gain pleasure). 4. Men loving men was completely wrong. But not just wrong. It was incomprehensible, unnatural, inconceivable, detestable. Because for a man to love a man meant that they must think completely differently from me, and that just wasn't a possible part of how I believed existence to be. They didn't fit within the understandable world, and so they needed to be brought into my world, they needed to be 'fixed'.
My acknowledgement that everyone thinks infinitely sublimely differently emerged over time and involved many sources. As well as discussions with friends, inspiration came from philosophical books that discuss how animals think and experience the world (such as Berry and Swimme's The Universe Story, Barry Allen's Knowledge and Civilization and Langer's Philosophy in a New Key), Keller's book on relationship called From a Broken Web, along with literature like Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These books opened up the thoughts of others to me in two ways: 1. The way something thinks and experiences the world is intimately tied to its brain/consciousness, and 2. Every moment brings with it the complex web of previous experiences, through memory, and everyone's life experiences are amazingly varied and different.
The first of these may be brought out by asking how the first, single-cell organisms 'thought' (see The Universe Story for a more detailed examination). This first life provided the universe with an amazing accomplishment: memory. These first cells had the memory to know how they were created, and so could replicate themselves. They knew how to bring together groups of molecules in such a way that they could form them together to be chemical-copies of themselves. These tiny creatures worked at the molecular level, taking amino acids and changing them, giving them the spark of lightning-life that they themselves were 'born' from. How did they feel? How do they experience the world? Certainly not in a empirical or rational scientific way (these being recent human creations). Without nerve endings, they didn't experience touch in the same way that I do. Maybe scent gets closer, sniffing out the suitable amino acids, and knittings them together so they may pass the spark of life on. But it certainly isn't scent in the same way that I smell. Indeed, their experience of life is amazingly different from my experience, and that difference comes out in their experience of other lives, other life-forms, other sensations and sense, and other ways of appreciating time. A lead-on and provocative question that stems from this might be, How does a photon experience existence and time?
The second opening up of my experience comes from the recognition that everyone brings a great deal of 'baggage' to every experience, through memory. In this sense, baggage is not necessarily bad (or good), but it is always limiting - baggage means I experience the world in this way, and not your way, not that way, not any other way. The baggage I refer to are the relationships and associations I draw between the present experience and the past experiences that I relate to the present. If someone says 'snake', every person present will immediately connect it with multiple associations and think of completely different, highly nuanced things. One person may think of the time when they were bitten by a snake, connect that experience to the biblical serpent in Genesis, relate that to temptation and evil (through the teachings they have heard (through language)), and before they can say anything they shudder with disgust. At the same time, another person may immediately think of their pet snake. This sends them off into thinking about the religious symbolism of snakes from a different tradition, where the shedding of skin symbolises new life and the shedding of old habits, which the person then relates to escape from oppressive conservativism, and so they're response comes out in a smile and a sentence, "I love snakes, they're so beautiful." With just a single word, two very different responses are evoked.
The possible difference in experience between humans is of an amazing magnitude of diversity. This can especially come out in the experience of time. Where one person sees time as a succession of 'now's, so that "one, two, three" occurred in different times and places (my experience when at fundie-college), another person can view time as a single, monistic, and eternal 'now' (more like my experience now, through the influence of Robinson's Thou Who Art, Buber's I and Thou, and a great deal of (Christian) liberation and aboriginal writing). In this eternal Now, freedom is in the decisions I make, yet they would always disappear into non-existence, except for memory. Memory preserves the no-longer by making it re-membered in the Now, and so re-membering is a very active, creative decision, allowing the otherwise-no-longer to affect the Now and so to have a continued existence (although in that existence it is ever changing as its re-membering fluctuates in the fractalic complexity of universe). Yet I also believe that these are just two ways to experience time that I have had, and that not only are there other ways, but that everyone's and everythings ways are different.
However, I won't leave this blog with the fundie-college in too bad of a light (see, light can be bad, again - also see Mollenkott's chapter, Godding in the Dark). For it's not just fundie-college that goes with the first assumption. It is also the common liberal stance. You've heard it: "Christian fundamentalists are just deceitful, they know that they're preaching is a lie." But that isn't the case. Speaking as a recovering one, I know I was not lying when I spoke - I believed it, it was true. I thought differently from 'liberals', and so would have been put into the same 'inconceivable' category that I then put gays in. The typical liberal cannot understand fundamentalists in a very similar way that fundamentalists cannot understand gays, because the assumption of both liberals and fundies is that everyone thinks just like me.
Maybe the fact that I separate humanity into two categories (rather than allowing for the 6 billion categories I really need), undermines my claim that I acknowledge that everyone thinks differently. But I advance this idea as a heuristic tool, as a way to help people think, so that they may better understand the world from their own, unique, and infinitely complex perspective. Don't dismiss someone because they're in the first group - their experience is more nuanced than anyone could ever define.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)