The semantic sense of these two sentences in Welsh does not convey the thoughts which currently run through my head. Literally translated they mean, "I am in knowing; I'm not in knowing." Literal translation from one language to another never works well; from Welsh to English, it works terribly. Imagine from Mohawk to English.
There is so much information available, even at the rate at which some is being lost, and yet most of mankind remains trapped in a cycle of outworn repitition which leads nowhere. It begs the question of the soul. It begs the question of god.
Then, there is "What the Bleep Do We Know?" An interesting film, at once reconfirming, mildly affirming and question raising at all one time.
It underscores three points...
1) The universe is interconnected. Having adopted a pagan principal, the Unitarian Universalist Church of which I am a member, reaffirms this notion. No thing in this world happens in a vacuum. By this world I mean, this reality, this bydysawd, this world of assault as it is called in Welsh. The world is indeed on of assault, from the wind and the rain to the very peptides that flow through our veins. We are never free from an unending barrage of stimuli, even in sleep. I learned tonight that what are mind sees and what it remembers are no different. Dreams then are no less real that the act of typing these words.
2) Everything is one. Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan and many other traditions underscore this point. According to the interpretation of the people who made the film, Quantum phsyics does also. Matter is a subjective experience. Matter is mostly vacuum. Matter is an illusion; it is not what it appears.
3) Essentially, we are all addicts. Our bodies, inasmuch as they are matter, work in a system of proteins (in this case, for this example, neuro peptides) and receptors on individual cells which make up the the complete figure of the self. When I feel joy, or any other emotion, my hypothalmus creates protein chains that wiggle out voraciously into my body and I feel the reaction to them on a cellular level. When each of my cells is ready to split, they split with the requisite number of receptors to accomodate my internal cellular levels of addiction to happiness, sex, anger, etc. They do this even at the expense of receptors which bring nutrients or expel waste from the cells. I am each of my cells, and each of my cells, as long as it lives is me. And yet, I am them, and more...
I am the atoms.
I am the nuclei.
I am the vacuum.
I am, at the very least, all these things...
My brain is a storm of electricity, and when my body dies, and the charge dissipates, do I merely dissociate into the background of 'stuff'?
I am alive in the quantum field.
My thoughts exist in the quantum field; in the quantum reality.
And yet, quantum physics suggests that there is no real difference between the past and present. It suggests that all is illusion, at the very least, it is not what it appears. It's real enough, just not what we think (Reference the story of St. Oran and Collumcille on this point, or, just as well, St. Gwenole and the Druid - whether these tales ever took place in the real world is irrelevant in both the literal and the quantum sense...)
Life then too, individualized, with its peptides, it's addictions, would be an illusion.
Freedom to think, to conceptualize represents a paradox on the most profound level. Most humans, who share 99% of our DNA with Chimpanzees (monkey see, monkey do) simply react to the consistent and only slightly variable pattern of addiction to the streams of neuro peptides. They never think "outside the box." Ironically, few of the people who are fond of saying this are either....
Yet those of us who do change our pattern of thinking, by some uknown mechanism of thought, of will (merely a conspiring coaliton of neurons scattered, not only throughout the brain as previously thought, but throughout the body?), we become free. At the very least we rewire our brains, reconnect the neural pathways, build new connections in our brains and this allow easier pathways to perceptions of what we observe.
However, we must beg the questions, who is it who observes? Quantum physics underscores the oneness of all things. Is it God who observes, and we merely melt in Its presence? Are each of us God? Am I the only one who exists and I am God? The potential answers to all these questions are numbing. Yet another question, or rather an answer is that all we are is what we observe. Our thoughts are indeed nothing more than the highly complex interplay of chemicals coursing through the cells of our bodies. Indeed life is still in illusion in this paradigm: consciousness is nothing more than a biochemical side effect of chemical processes; all of our musings are nothing more than observations made by conspiring chains of reactions based in electro-chemical processes.
But... if our observances of quantum physics is anything more than the result of knowing the truth, then perhaps there is indeed something more to this life than what meets the eye, the electron microscope, or the muse of religion. Life may indeed have meaning beyond what is observable. Our relationships may be more than chemical dependencies.
I do not know.
I know less and less about my life and what I am here with each day that passes by.
Perhaps I am addicted to not knowing...
in the same way I am addicted to the taste of my lovers' sex, and the beats of their hearts as I clutch their chests as I maw the parts of their bodys that make their addictions rise...
in the same way I am addicted to the refreshingly numbing feeling of bourbon, scotch, whisky, vodka and gin as the cells in my body receive their peptides...
in the same way I am addicted to the over-sated feeling of a good meal...
in the same way I am addicted to the sadness I feel when my friends and family die and I must close the chapter of their lives with my tears....
in the same way I am addicted to the green and craggy mountains of Wales, because I am addicted to my special knowledge of the place, its culture and its language...
in the same way I am addicted to all my knowledge, the co-conspirators of my brain notwithstanding...
in the same way I am addicted to my death, like Orpheus in love. Mine does not come as his, and I am even more addicted to the precept of its distances than its existence, more addicted to the feeling of urgency than to it as it approaches...
As I am addicted...
Dwi'n gwybod
Dwi'm yn gwybod
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1 comentari:
One more example of synchronicity in my life. I just watched "What the bleep do we know?" at the strong recommendation of a good friend. I was going to suggest it to you. The concepts you delineated have been kicking around in my web of neurons as well. For the past week, I've had one foot in the other world --- just like when we were teens. Everything is thought. Everything is vibration. Nam myoho renge kyo. So mote it be. Amen. It's all real and not at all what it seems.
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