 31 Mar 2004 @ 11:47, by D
And we, who are we anyway?
Plotinus
It happened again: Synchronicity! I was thinking about my good friend R. Little, today, and all the Stuarts Little of the world, and was reflecting about my good friend Flemming Funch's post, The Singularity and the Fifth Dimension (good stuff there), and, what do you know, this book by David Darling (“Zen Physics”) literally landed on my lap and fell open to the following passage:
"What a brain does is act as a filter, a limiter of consciousness, and therefore a shaper of self—a separator of subject and object. The brain effectively pinches off a little bubble of introverted awareness and stores and manipulates information relevant exclusively to the survival needs of the individual so created. Using its archived memories, the brain builds and subtends the myth of personality and self, its onboard programming working ceaselessly to substantiate and immortalize this phantasmic inner being. And such a fine job does it do that the projected self not only feels itself to be tangible, but it fails to appreciate, or even suspect, that it is never the same from one moment to the next.”
“With the rudiments of a belief system in place, the brain starts to interpret and evaluate everything that comes to its attention in terms of this resident catechism of received wisdom. Every sensation and perception, every incident and event, every word, gesture and action of other people, is construed within the context of what the brain understands the world and itself to be like. Thus the brain steadily becomes more and more dogmatic, opinionated, and biased in its thinking. It tends to hold on to—that is, to remember—experiences that comply with and support its acquired worldview, while at the same time it tends to reject or deny anything that seems incongruous with its system of beliefs. So, the emerging belief system is further strengthened and validated. And in this way the brain builds for itself and island of stability, a rock of predictability, in the midst of a vat ocean of potentially fatal chaos and inexplicable changes.”
Every deep moral and religious system around the world has intuitively grasped this truth—that we must endeavor to transcend the self.
Both the revolutionary theories of quantum physics and the traditional tenets of Zen support the idea that everything is interconnected—the world cannot be divided into good/bad, being/not-being, or even particle/wave. As science and mysticism converge in such worldviews, we begin to transcend the limits of the self and see “ourselves in a new light, not as frail individuals limited by small, uncertain lives [which we are], but [also] as eternal participants in a much greater adventure that extends throughout time and space.”
David's suggestion that "the one does not preclude the other" and that "the two appear to be in some kind of extraordinary, intimate symbiosis" (the significance of which, in the author's opinion, will doubtless become clearer as our species further matures) echoes Flemming's own intuition (and that of others before them, poets, philosophers, mystics, artists and scientists) that "there is something in our collective super- or sub-conscious evolutionary mind pattern that's smarter than any of us."
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