What are these levels that I think I've reached? Why do I have this sensation of a "level"? It's because I feel something has become me. Has entered me - or I entered it. It's a feedback loop propelled by an ordinary, yet extraordinary meaning. I am this thing. I am.
Something like the above would have made me sneer 5 years ago - I would repeat to my brother and imitate it in a condescending way. I - related - to it, as us monkey-like humans so shamelessly do, as if the word "I AM" was trite, dumb, insignificant.
It amazes me how disconnected we can be from the conveyed meaning content of a real interaction with another human. The other speaks - they say their words, but what do we hear? We hear our own emotional needs at the moment; we enact our typical comedic routine, feel those good emotions - or conversely, enact a surge in annoyance and irritability. The main thing is: we act like we really know the truth of things.
Now, 5 years later, I look upon myself in my present mind and wonder, what has changed? What has changed is my felt conviction of being 'held'; but by what? Who holds whom? Or what is held? I find myself related to myself with a burst of compassion; but yet a calm awareness lurks in the background, taking things in, mindful of the flow of it's breathing, of it's chest region.
My thinking mind derives its strength of conviction from the 'content' in that perception - in my sensing some 'strength' radiating from my heart region. I know I gain access to it by attending to the regulation of my breath; yet it's the feeling itself which I find myself becoming attuned to. Its from there, from the neurons (presumably) where I sense a sort of homeostatic organization, radiating outwards, like a sun, with my mind, above, attending to it.
But what is this mind above? As much as I like to think about a cosmic center in my heart region, My also plays a part, structuring, knowing, in awe of the design, of the form, of the colors and intensities - and the meanings they convey about the world. Within my being, I embody an odd relationship - ontological in nature, between a "perceiving screen", and a felt, interfaced-with reality. The one charges the other, feeling, acting as the conflagration in the background, giving the perceived concept an expressed luminescence in mind.
And ultimately, "I Am", really just gets to the point. If this world is as it is - and resisting its way produces these sorts of effects - and affects; then why suffer in resentment, in opposition, in anger? Why hold up a dispute; and to whom, exactly are you angry at? The question is posed this way because our brains are constructions over millions of years of biological evolution. The minds we have represent the self and the other as basic constructions. The outer world, the world of interactions, is represented within us at the most basic level: we talk to ourselves, as if we were someone other than the one who is talking.
We fail to take account of this habit when we speak and communicate. The imagined 'other', in all its ways, derives from our past interactions. Within us lies the worlds and words of other minds; in us, lies an imagined intentionality - an assumed orientation to the world, which is reflexively projected in our every act of perception. We relate to one another, and in the 'how' of how we relate, is expressed the forces that acted upon our development. Our behavior speaks about our past and the ways we've had to adapt to the world. In our every action, in our every presence, we can learn to know worlds of meaning, intimations, and whispers from the past.
The mind sustains itself in feedback loops. Just like whirlpools, they twirl. Like the dervishes. Like the milky way. The universe dances in circles, twirls in chemical feedbacks, social feedbacks, mental feedbacks. One reality pulls all things along these paths; and then, the paths lose their form, and what remains is all that there is. I am.
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