I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

  

.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

—Emily Dickinson

 

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self is a myriad

   

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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. 

Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.


—William James

.

Self is a myriad. We can use the word to cover both our sense of extension over time – the feeling that somehow I am the same person I was as a child – and for the constantly changing ungraspable flow of consciousness. 

Which is the true self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray.

Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there is another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for. Not surprisingly, we can never find it. 

But when a problem remains intractable for so long and so many answers that are proposed are so unsatisfying, one must begin to suspect that the question is either being asked in a way that makes it inherently unanswerable or that we are looking for the wrong kind of answer.


—Barry Magid
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

. 

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always 

be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

—Alan Wilson Watts

 

.

 

con(version

Khatija Possum Nampijimpa
My Great Grandmother’s Country and Seven Sisters Dreaming

 

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The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force is not independent of the belief system, which can translate expectations into physiological change. 

Nothing is more wondrous about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain than their ability to convert thoughts, hopes, ideas, and attitudes into chemical substances.  

Everything begins, therefore, with belief. 

What we believe is the most powerful option of all.

—Norman Cousins
wait - what ?

.

Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,
let them sleep

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,
sleep on

I've given up on my brain.
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,
and sleep.


—Rumi

.

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one cubic millimeter

 

Chabely VG

.

In a tiny corner of the human brain, smaller than the head of a pin, lies a universe. A universe that, for the first time, has been mapped with detail that borders on the unimaginable. A team led by researcher Alexander Shapson-Coe decided to focus their gaze—and the full power of electron microscopy—on just one cubic millimeter of the temporal cortex. The result: a nano-resolution map that reveals not only neurons, but synapses, vessels, connections, and patterns previously invisible to the eye of science. 

That tiny piece of brain generated 1.4 petabytes of information. To put it into perspective: it's more than a thousand times the amount of data stored in an entire library. What's incredible is that they didn't just observe... they also shared. They created a free tool for anyone—from neuroscientists to knowledge enthusiasts—to explore this cerebral microcosm. 

What's published in the journal Science isn't just a technological feat. It's a new door opened to the secrets of the human mind. A map that not only shows what we are... but what we still have to understand.

SCIENCE
WIRED

Here is what I love about the brain: How it remembers.

How it sews what soft it can into a blanket

for the nights when I am cold with trouble.

—Sean Patrick Mulroy
The Offering
wait - what ?

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where are our boundaries?

 

.

Most of the body’s cells are continually turning over. Some cells renew over a period of years, while others are replaced every few days. So, most of the molecules (and therefore atoms) of our bodies return to the planet as well, in an endless atomic cycling and replacements.

From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form the the transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

As the scales of our investigation continue to get smaller, our boundaries continue to expand outward. At the atomic scale, each one of us is both our own separate self and, in complementarity, also just walking, talking Earth.


—Neil Theise
Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection,
Consciousness, and Being

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tricky

  

sea water

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When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it's still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them. 

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.
The glass doesn't even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they're many isn't saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they're multiplied.
They don't even have decent innards.
They don't know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are - or aren't.
Still they decide our life and death.
Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don't know what their moment is.

Since they're so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.
A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.
I've wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.


—Wisława Szymborska
microcosmos 
Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh version

 

 

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To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. 

These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.

—Rachel Carson

Under the Sea Wind

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It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm.

—A. R. Ammons

Reading

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really, truly

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Our bodies are not solid objects at a “higher level” and cells at a “lower level” and molecules still “further down", though we have used that shorthand to construct our complexity view of the universe. Instead we should say that a body as a holarchy appears as a solid object from one perspective, as a community of cells from a different perspective, and as a cloud of molecules from a still different perspective.

If the universe is a unity, one vast holarchy of self-organizing complex systems, then we have to consider that what is true for any part is true for the whole. From this standpoint, every action we take, every decision we make, every thought we have, is not only our own—it is also an integrated, integral part of the whole holarchical universe. In this sense, when I raise a glass of water to drink, it is the universe that raises a glass of water. If I am alive, then the universe is alive. We are not merely separate, lonely, disconnected beings searching for meaning; moment by moment we are unique emergent expressions of the universe itself.

You might argue with me, instead saying that the universe contains distinct and separate living and nonliving systems. You would be correct; however, that description is in complementarity with the view that the universe is, in its totality, a single living system. This is much the same as the way we deem each of our bodies, in its entirety, to be a living organism even though we have nonliving parts like hair and cartilage. At the boundless, nonlocal scale of the quantum realm, the living nature of the whole transcends the particularities of each part. There are no purely alive domains and none that are exclusively non-alive. There is simply the living universe.

Casual generalizatons about how we are all “one with the universe” are so common these days as to be trite. However easy it might be to thoughtlessly repeat that banal truism, though, it is in fact exceedingly difficult to intuit it directly, as a physical experience, not merely a belief. Our usual habitual experiences of the material world and our Western cultural bias toward materialism—that the world is only its physical substance—continually push us in the other direction. But complexity theory, woven together with relativity and quantum mechanics, tells a different story. 

Oneness is real and true. And while separation is also true, it is not any more true than oneness. They are a complemtarity—each, though different, is equally indispensable for a full comprehension of reality. This conviction comes not only from a subset of philosophies, or from ancient religions, or from new age mysticsm but from our modern, contemporary, empirical sciences.


—Neil Theise
Notes On Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being 
(treasure)

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The word holarchy, coined by author and polymath Arthur Keostler, ha been used to capture what we intend here. A holarchy is a system of elements that do not relate to each other in terms of higher or lower, top or bottom, left to right, or right to left. The members of a holarchy (holons) are always equivalent to all other members. When we say that light is both a wave and a particle, we are not privileging one aspect of light over the other. Moreover, at our every day scale we experience light as neither of these—we experience it merely as light!


—Neil Theise
Notes On Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being

.

 

real(ly

   

.

Reality, as it turns out, is far different than what we thought. Not only is it holographic but also nonlinear and multidimensional. 

The "you" who you think you are is really but a tiny fraction of all that you actually are. You are a limitless being that has "split" itself "multidimensionally", and you're now consciously experiencing one small part of yourself on this level.

—Ziad Masri
Reality Unveiled

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Who is this self on whom we meditate?

Is it the self by which we see, hear, smell and taste,
Through which we speak in words? Is self the mind
By which we perceive, direct, understand,
Know, remember, think, will, desire and love?

These are but servants of the Self, who is 
Pure consciousness.
The self is all in all.

He is all the gods, the five elements,
Earth, air, fire, water, and space; all creatures,
Great or small, born of eggs, of wombs, of heat,
Of shoots; horses, cows, elephants, men and women,
All beings that walk, all beings that fly,
And all that neither walk nor fly. Prajna
Is pure consciousness, guiding all. The world
Rests on Prajna, and prajna is Brahman.

Those who realize Brahman live in joy
And go beyond death. Indeed
They go beyond death.

Om shanti shanti shanti


—The Aitareya Upanishad, Part III
Eknath Easwaren version, 
Easwaren's Classics of Indian Spirituality, Book 2

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listen

  

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The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.

And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”


—Tomas Tranströmer
Robert Bly version

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relevant to every(thing

 

 

 

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To demystify consciousness we must look beyond known physical quantities. But how? 

One possibility, simple and bold, is that individual particles themselves are endowed with an innate attribute of consciousness—call it proto-consciousness to avoid imagery of elated electrons or cranky quarks—that cannot be described in terms of anything more fundamental. 

That is, our description of reality must widen to include an intrinsic and irreducible subjective quality that is infused in nature’s elementary material ingredients. And it is this quality of matter that we have long overlooked, which is why we’ve so far failed to explain the physical basis of conscious experience.

How can a swirl of mindless particles create mind? They can’t. 
To create a conscious mind you need a swirl of mindful particles.

By pooling their proto-conscious qualities, a large collection of particles can yield familiar conscious experience. The proposal, then, is that particles are endowed with a well-studied collection of physical properties (mass, electric charge, nuclear charges, and quantum mechanical spin) as well as the previously neglected quality of proto-consciousness.

Reviving panpsychist beliefs, whose historical roots reach as far back as ancient Greece, Australian philospher David J. Chalmers entertains the possibility that consciousness is relevant to anything and everything made of particles, whether a bat’s brain or a baseball bat.

—Brian Greene
UNTIL THE END OF TIME

(heroic)

 

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Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, 

colour is colour, but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

—Democritus 460–c. 370 BC

 

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behind every atom hides an infinite universe. —Rumi

    

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Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness. 

Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.

A few candle flames flickered.  

An angel with no face embraced me

and whispered through my whole body:

"Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!

Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.

You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be." 

Blind with tears

I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza

together with Mr and Mrs Jones, Mr Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,

and inside them all vault opened behind vault endlessly.


—Tomas Tranströmer

Romanesque Arches
Robin Fulton version

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Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

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veins of the spirit

    

 

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Consciousness is reflected in a word as a sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. 

A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.


—Lev Vygotsky
Thought and Language, 2012, p.271 

.

 

Plants are all chemists, tirelessly assembling the molecules of the world, and in their transactions with insects, birds, animals, and fungi, they find elaborate ways to defend themselves, to seduce pollinators, to confuse.


—Gary Snyder

 .

Every tree, every plant, has a spirit. People may say that the plant has no mind. I tell them that the plant is alive and conscious. 

A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive. The channels through which the water and sap move are the veins of the spirit.

—Pablo Amaringo

.

 

so, question

 

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Neutrinos they are very small.
    They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all. 

The earth is just a silly ball
    To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
    Or photons through a sheet of glass. 

    They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
    Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
    And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
    Down through our heads into the grass. 

At night, they enter at Nepal
    And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed — you call
    It wonderful; I call it crass.


—John Updike 

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Every second, hundreds of billions of neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth! 

—M.A. Ruderman and A.H. Rosenfeld
An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,
American Scientist

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i am

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Because I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised one
I am the mother and the daughter,
I am my mother’s arms,
I am the sterile one, yet my children are numerous,
I am the married woman and the unmarried one,
I am She who gives birth and She who has never given birth,
I am the consolation for the pains of childbirth.

I am the bride and the groom,
I nurture my fertility.
I am my father’s mother,
I am my husband’s sister.
And he is my rejected son.

Respect me always,
As I am the Scandalous and the Magnificent one.


—Gnostic texts
Found in 1947, Nag Hammadi, Egypt
Dated III-IV BC.

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philosophic truth

.

We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole and self-referential at all scales of its existence. We, and all things in the universe, are non-locally connected with each other and with all other things in ways that are unfettered by the hitherto known limitations of space and time.
 

—Ervin Laszlo
A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World

.

As there is one soul in all the members, which operates aloft in the brain, and also moves the feet beneath, so the Godhead contains all creatures, the heavenly, and those under the bottomless pit, and is everywhere fulfilled in the creation, although it transcends the creatures, because it is infinite and incomprehensible.
 

—St Macarius the Great
wait - what ?

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From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is … illusion.
 

—Paramhansa Yogananda

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This being human is a guest house —Rumi

  

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Item. A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. 

They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them we could not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.

Mitochondria are stable and responsible lodgers, and I choose to trust them. But what of the other little animals, similarly established in my cells, sorting and balancing me, clustering me together? My centrioles, basal bodies, and probably a good many other more obscure tiny beings at work inside my cells, each with its own special genome, are as foreign, and as essential, as aphids in anthills.

My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with; they are ecosystems more complex than James Bay.

—Lewis Thomas
Lives of a Cell (treasure)

 

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My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa and it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Virgil who burn up the whole room, the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment; this is the body, so beautifully carved inside, with the curves of the inner ear, and the husk so rough, knuckle-brown.

As we walk, we enter the fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see, and a being inside leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. When we come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling smells . . . slowly circling energies . . . the protozoa know there are odours the shape of oranges, of tornadoes, of octopuses . . .

The sunlight lays itself down before every protozoa, the night opens itself out behind it, and inside its own energy it lives! So the space between two people diminishes, it grows less and less, no one to weep, they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us start out in a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone, that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door . . . and it was after that they found their friends, who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world . . . 

The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms . . . the beings dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them . . . to them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the voice of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says, “Now do you still say that you cannot choose the road?”

—Robert Bly
for Lewis Thomas, and his The Lives of the Cell

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In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

—Rumi

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