I continue to draw great inspiration from Stewart & Cohen's book Figments of Reality, a book that has clearly also influenced my favourite philosopher John Gray. In the book they state:
Living
species, including humans, are emergent properties of (what Daniel
Dennett has labeled) the 'pandemonium' of the body's semi-autonomous
processes -- We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism.
And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and
free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection
system jointly developed to advise these creatures' actions for their
mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our
neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
Thinking
about this in the context of my recent writings on doing versus being
and what we're 'meant' to be and do, I began to realize the absurdity
of the entire concept of individual (which literally means
'indivisible'), and hence of cultures based on individuality. As a
complicity we, each of us, are not 'one', We are not singular. And that
is true not only within us but without us -- we are part of the larger
organisms of community and Gaia, the community of all-life-on-Earth.
Our bodies and the rest of what we call our "selves" are plural parts
of larger pluralities.
It is not surprising then that we have
this problem with deciding who we 'are' and what we're 'meant' to be,
and do. It is a question that can only be answered in the context of
knowing what we are made up of and what we make up as part of larger
organisms.
As a generalist, I have always struggled with aspects of my 'self' that seem to be constantly struggling with each other:
- extrovert versus introvert
- lover versus fighter
- being versus doing
- staying still versus changing
- being present versus becoming
- being happy versus being of use
- pacifist versus activist
- intuiting versus sensing/perceiving
- thinking/conceiving versus feeling
- love of simplicity versus love of complexity
- love of silence/stillness versus love of transformation/movement
These
are not, as I thought in my youth, dualities to be resolved as I got to
know who I really was. These are parts of me, reflections of the parts
of me. This is not about multiple identities or personae or
personalities, they are aspects that are always present. But not
aspects of one, rather aspects of the whole me, plural. This is why I
have no use for psychology, which presumes (except perhaps for gestalt,
which is not a 'therapy' but a methodology for self-discovery, or maybe
I should say selves-discovery) to diagnose what is 'wrong' with us to
make us 'better'. And why I have no use for most religions that presume
to tell us what our purpose is and how we should live, or for the
modern scientific cults that teach us how to control and 'program'
ourselves to live 'integrally'.
The way to understand what we
'are', it seems to me, is a way not of greater self-control but a way,
a Tao, of giving up control, of letting go and
letting come. Of abandoning this foolish concept that 'we' are
something that needs to be managed, directed, restricted, kept from
being 'evil', either by outside disciplinarians and 'leaders' or by our
'selves'. Of realizing that we are merely, and totally, the space through which stuff passes. Stuff material and non-materials. Coming and going. Combining and separating.
My anal list of things I want to spend more time being and doing
is not inconsistent with this 'worldview'. My purpose in practicing
these things is not to become a 'better' person, more moral, or wiser,
but rather to develop capacities, to become healthier and more
resilient and more sustainable and hence ultimately happier and more
useful to others and to the world. Happiness and usefulness confer
enormous evolutionary advantage, so we shouldn't be surprised that
these are the things, ultimately, that we aspire to. (I should mention,
by the way, that I have already started making time for some of these
practices, even though my days are over-scheduled and ceasing doing the
things that I have to stop doing will take some time and effort. That
is the power of intention.)
So what does this mean, to be the space through which stuff passes?
In a way, perhaps, it is being nobody-but-yourself, in the ee cummings
sense. Or perhaps it is giving up the whole notion of 'being', and
seeing the universe as composed of movement (or movement and
stillness) and not matter at all (whatever 'matter' means, as one
scientific theory after another about the makeup of the universe is
undone by new discoveries). To be not the dancer, but the dance, or at
least part of a dance so complex as to be unfathomable to us.
That's
as far as I've come in my thinking, and perhaps it's absurd to think
that I or anyone can go further in this remarkable direction. For
further inspiration I'm re-reading phenomenologist David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, in which he writes:
As
we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived
world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to
consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory
participations, certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our
focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward
the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin
to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness. The
countless human artefacts with which we are commonly involved --
buildings, automobiles, television screens -- all begin to exhibit a
common style, and so to lose some of their distinctiveness; meanwhile,
organic entities -- crows, trees, rainfalls -- all these begin to
display a new vitality, each coaxing the breathing body into a unique
dance. Even boulders and rocks seem to speak their own uncanny
languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into
silent communication. In contact with the native forms of the earth,
one's senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and
recombining in ever-shifting patterns...
An
alder leaf, loosened by wind, is drifting out with the tide. As it
drifts, it bumps into the slender leg of a great blue heron staring
intently through the rippled surface, then drifts on. The heron raises
one leg out of the water and replaces it, a single step. As I watch, I,
too, am drawn into the spread of silence. Slowly a bank of cloud
approaches, slipping its bulged and billowing texture over the earth,
folding the heron and the alder trees and my gazing body into the
depths of a vast breathing being, enfolding us all within a common
flesh, a common story now bursting with rain.
I still have so much to unlearn.
(Thanks to Cheryl, Siona and Patti for sparking this realization.)
Painting
above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in
1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
