Imbolc                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

“Things never were “the way they used to be.”
Things never will be “the way it’s going to be someday.”
Things are always just the way they are for the time being.
And the time being is always is motion.”

Warren, Frank, Bill, Mark, Scott and I gathered at Frank’s for the traditional St. Patrick’s dinner.  It was a light turnout for this always festive meal featuring tonight shamrock shaped ravioli.  This was a mixing of cultures, a bit of culinary diversity.  Otherwise it was the corned beef, cabbage, short bread and potatoes.  What I’ve always imagined as the peak meal in a year for poor Irish folk.  It sure tastes good to this one-half Celtic guy, with half of that coming from the auld sod.

We had an interesting evening discussing what I described as the mechanist versus the vitalist debate.  This is an oldy but goody from the 19th century, a debate very far from over and anyone who follows the neurobiological thinking about the brain will find it much alive in the third millennium.  Here’s a review of Ray Kurzweil’s (the Singularity guy) new book: How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.  It focuses on this topic through careful thinking about the distinction between the brain and consciousness.

We also had a brief encounter over a topic dug into deep to my psyche, that of our solipsism.  We construct our own reality using sense data, organized and turned into information by the brain, then utilized as part of consciousness to define the world as we experience it.  This solipsism makes the existential argument that existence is prior to essence; that is, that our life is not being human; it is about being ourselves, a particular instance of human.

In a book I’m reading right now:   Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson (reviewed at this link) the author describes the Zen idea of no permanent identity, no permanent reality, that is, we are what we are in this moment, then what we are in the next moment and so on.  It fits very well with this conversation, the uneasy, slippery grasp we have on who we are as individuals and what we’re experiencing at any one time.  In a sense Zen increases the degree of relativity created by our solipsistic situation to an infinite number of slices, not even necessarily threaded together by an identity.

If embraced, this is deeply disturbing.  It shakes the foundations, as Paul Tillich said.  In fact the earthquake is so severe that intellectual structures built over thousands of years come crashing to the ground and disappear.  We do not like this stripping away of the animal cunning that gives us the illusion of permanence.  What then is left?

Not very damned much.  If embraced, this is profoundly liberating.  Those structures fall to the ground and disappear.  Religion and tradition and politics and culture no longer have power to frame us, shape us, define us.  We are free.  Free in a radical, personal, cosmic sense.  Neither chained to the earth or to the past or to each other, not even to self.

The world moves through and in us, just as we float through and in it.  When I can bring this awareness to consciousness, when I experience it, at first I feel disoriented, tethered no longer.  At moments it seems I (the I of this aware moment) might split apart, shred into molecular portions and drift away.