The past and Present

I am feeling frustrated. A part of me wants to cry out, fall down and curl up into a fetal position.

I don't want to know it or show it. Yet I just can't leave it in there unthought about. I have to go closer, know myself more deeper. Empathize with me, who am I am, and ask: do you need to suffer?

It doesn't have to be that way, at least I don't think. The science part of me, the part that is influenced by scientists and scientifically oriented philosophers, pokes in, and tries to monitor the neutrality of my position.

Yet life isn't neutral. And if it, it a paridoxical 'middle ground' that inter-includes opposing states, which together, in their wicked harmony, makes something magical happen.

Yet to be calm, relaxed, sure of myself. I can be so brittle and think and feel difficult thoughts with a force of persuasion that eats me from within my chest: there's a "knowing" there, from my past, which repeats the same refrain: be afraid, don't move, don't think, creep away and hide. Above all, hide.

It's probably not a coincidence that traumatic surrender produces gestures associated with toddler hood. Baby's are very vulnerable, and thus liable to being traumatically over-aroused. But not every baby's been traumatized, so I wonder, why do I feel this need in me, to fall down and cry, and lament my existence?

I - what is I? I should thank my lucky buttons that I read Joshua Abraham Heschl. I like his ideas about awe and doubt. Not so much the emphasis he placed on the ontological primacy of the former, but because he spoke with such enthusiasm about it. This man had awe for reality, for the fact of consciousness, his consciousness, and the apparent automaticity of all other organisms, to varying degrees. 

Jews have this feeling of awe. Their religion has cultivated it, and I think, there may have been enough generations of interbreeding to support the predicted environmental reality: Judaism. Of course, culture is the primary mediator here, and Judaism, such as in Chasidism, and even more specifically, a sect called the "breslovers", named after the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. This knowledge here is a testament to that part of my life - my religious past - where I cultivated a feeling of awe, in my prayers to God, in my abstract forms of devotion - willing, willing, and my mind grew through that, through the biological reality of a particular neuronal network being 'more used'.

I don't know if I believe in God anymore, and it pains me to say that. Even reading that, I experience a second guessing: do I? Or don't I? One part of me pulls away towards a humanistic bent; while another part, the part that sees awe, and cultivates awe, can't help but see a oneness in the world that is not at all different from the views I held before. Our brains are interpersonally created, so why should God, in the form of an imagined companion, not be experienced in a human like way? Are not my words natural properties - emergent functions - that depend on biological materials? The psychological reality - the meanings of words - are more than mirrors for others to understand, but also, and more critically, something I hear presented to myself. My consciousness bears wisdom to my cries, and hears it, responds to it, with compassion. Why do I feel this, and why am I drawn to finding healing in it? The attachment processes of early life, where the mind is forged and given its 'charge', is this the source of the feelings? And if yes, how may one think about it ontologically? That is, to think about this fact in light of the feeling of existential awe.

But I am but a single human sharing a world with 7 billion other humans. Each one of, or the healthy of us, forms a self, and a history, and a narrative. But more than that, we share this same existential vantage point upon the world we experientially encounter. Each of us, then, together, do we make up God? But what of reality and the ineffable emergence of life? The perfect cosmic conditions, arising out of certain astronomical relations, making a sun this sun and having a planet, the 3rd one out, developing this way, and oh yeah, put a moon there to get the life producing waters on the planet moving. And then the chemicals got together, merged in ways that seemed oddly predestined, and developed in ways that involved various ways of combustion and transformation.

That I am a consciousness, emergent upon the process that is this biological evolution. Can I hear my own cries? I do. And I respond.


But would I leave it at that? I'm not big enough to be God, and neither are we together. We emerge in beautiful ways out of processes that began 700 million years ago when Eukaryotic cells evolved and came together in multicellular units. The history, and the subtly of the consciousness that came about in it's various forms. I am now the most complex thing created. 40 trillion cells. Each one processing 10,000 molecules of ATP every second. Which means the body processes 1 quadrillion molecules of ATP every second.

How can one hear that and not be amazed at the dazzling complexity? How can one not then connect our emergence, and our awareness, to this tremendous scientific fact?

The philosopher Raymond Tallis seems to be the only other person I've read who is amazed with what human beings represent. From the big bang till now, evolution has followed determinable laws. When organisms acted, they acted from inbuilt principles that conformed with earlier principles. The ontology grew more complex, but the basic processes were always physical. And remain physical. And yet, simultaneously, there is this 'mental' plane which can assess the contents of it's experienced perception. If 'experienced perception' represents Damasio's idea of the body forming feeling states that bias perception, then the consciousness that looks out upon these dynamics is oddly out of place. It's as if reality, or ontology, has made a U turn, where reality itself, or a consciousness that looks upon reality, can now act directly upon it in a conscious and self-determinative fashion.

That we can be tugged between two, very different states, and, despite what are body may compel us to think, we opt for another perception, another view, strongly suggests that the mind is involved with the ethics of choice. Not merely that either, though: it can change it's own reality - it's own brain - in a manner reminiscent of spinning a merry-go-round. The mind is either going with the motion, or consciously interrupting it, putting a hand upon it as it spins, slowing it down, bringing it to a stop, and then spinning it in the other direction.

That to me is what free will amounts to. The mind immersing itself into experiences and trying to recognize how the past is influencing the present.