8.16.2012

Consensual hallucination

Footsore from shattered mirror and glass, both products of drowsy night-time fumbling.
(No allusion to that joyous night-time fumbling of two -- this was a sadly solo incident; sleep the only bodily function I'd hoped for.)

Ankle aching -- past indiscretions and injuries amplified by the old-timer's mantra: there's a storm coming.

I can feel it in me bones.

Maybe this is the way of it!  Short snipings of random thoughts and lines, jotted down and entered into the fold...

Collective unconscious.  Analogous idea, cross-cultural, multilingual. The notion defies their own Babel-esque expressions.  Again, some details change; secondary, tertiary, quaternary ideas, multiple forkings of thought amplify that different-ness, but at that lowest level the kernel of truth.

So, my self is defined by my thoughts and also by (what I perceive to be) the thoughts of those that I care about and interact with.  Thoughts are brain processes that depend on electrolytic exchanges across membranes; electrical charges, action potential transmuting into action itself; axons splashing +'s and -'s onto dendrites (the particulars escape me, please forgive the imprecision).  Sentient life thinks in this way.  The same process that occurs right at this moment in my bone-dome is happening across the planet in the skulls of nearly all other meat&bone tubes extant.  Yours too, reader!  Even bridged by whatever gap of time that flowed between my fingers skittering across a grubby laptop and your moist orbs seeing and relaying this all -- still the synapses heave to.

So the point? God (and gods for that matter) do exist, but only as much as we exist (I think).  My particular meat&bone tube is real, and the dharma is real, and God and Ganesh and Krishna and Siva and Allah and Avelokitesvara and Kuanyin are real insofar as sodium and potassium ions are really sliding around up there, behind these eyes. Insofar as if we all die off, so will they.

Again, the koans express it well:

Does a dog have Buddha-nature?

http://xkcd.com/




2 comments:

morning turtle said...

There's always a relevant XKCD....

morning turtle said...

Actually, one might argue that a dog could have Buddha-nature. When I was able to hear His Holiness the Dalia Lama speak in Florida several years ago, he spoke about what defines sentience; can something feel compassion?

I think dogs (among other animals)can feel compassion. Maybe it's their pack mentality and their long history of shared existence with humans, but it seems likely that they can both feel and act out of compassion.

Which maybe negates my use of the koan in the post, but I'll leave it be -- my musings about the sentience of dogs withstanding.