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.