Everything Is Happening On All Possible Levels At All Possible Times

I realise now that the type of Reality I have been trying to describe is nothing more than a collection of fluffy, amorphous blobs - clouds of vagueness which trap us and make us forget their form, like the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. 


I have spent a lot of time blithering on about the grandiose things - the very fashionable cosmological discoveries which lend themselves well to those romantically, philosophically and magniloquently predisposed - in order to reveal some Big Important Headlines about who we are and what we are doing here.  (Have a look at my Everything Really Is Waves blog for a link to the beautiful chromoscope, which shows most elegantly how many levels of Reality are manifest in the skies.)

Yet we can get equally lost in the clouds of the very small.  The kindest British doctor on television without a moustache, Michael Mosley's new series Inside the Human Body is an incredible and intrepid Innerspace-type journey through the human body.  Using cutting-edge (ha! funny because there is also a lot of graphic imagery of surgical procedures!) CGI imaging based on what we have actually observed happening inside us, the programme paints us as planets - enormous colonies for autonomous, exquisitely alien cells.  It becomes very quickly apparent in watching this show that we have little to no control over the vast majority of what we do.  Our breathing, our immune system, our digestion, our emotions, our blood supply - in fact, everything which keeps us alive - is nothing to do with at all, much as we have colonised our city, our country, our planet, without it having any say at all.  

And it is miraculous.  

There seems to be a current trend at the moment in the media- every generation has had an apocalypse to face, but ours is shown in high definition, backed up by data, and all the more terrifying as a result - to find the unity between humankind, to try to remind us of all we have in common and therefore how much we all have to lose.  Humility based on facts - how I wish that this could be what defines us as an era, rather than the looming tsunami of disaster which seems ever-present (although it may well be that the distinctly apocalyptic tip the weather seems to be on at the moment may not strictly be climate change just yet - much of the most recent catastrophes - in Pakistan, in Australia, in the US, in South Asia - have been attributed to La Niña).


But sharing a common genetic heritage and corpus operandi is not nearly all.  


Beyond the cellular level, we are atomic.  Each cell is made up of incredible strings of proteins, made from amino acids, each made from tiny ornamentations of elements, bound inextricably together.  Each atom is a combination of protons and electrons, separated by comparatively enormous distances of nothingness.  Beyond that, we are at the quantum level, which (as I most recently blogged about) is tantamount to a different reality altogether.  In fact, each layer of existence is in itself a different Reality, as separate as it is inter-connected, each organism both a universe unto itself and part of many other universes, like messing with the zoom on a camera, microscope and telescope all at once.

I argued last time that it is possible to argue anything, to believe anything, if you thought about it for long enough.  When you consider how ENORMOUS Reality is, everything really is everything.


As Einstein said: "A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"

Of course, it isn't as easy as all that, Einstein.  We have evolved to perceive the world the way we do because it is the most useful for us to survive.  Contemplating Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't make running for the bus easier (may even render the whole thing futile and cause us all to lie down like in the video for Radiohead's Just).  It is perhaps just as difficult to understand that we are part of a human collective, part of a mutually upheld present, part of a generation, part of a planet, part of anything.  It is perhaps merely enough to contemplate, every now and again, perhaps while letting the entire planet of your bowels do its unbidden work, this fact.  


We are just as much sketches as paintings:

And it is little wonder that we find so much wonder in all of this, how a "God"-creature can be the only way our mind can cope with the the fluke of its birth - we have accidentally developed to be able to appreciate the vastness, we are fleetingly unbound from our most primal urges to be able to stare, blinking, at what is happening all around us.  It is perhaps redundant to name this feeling, to worship it - this is, however, an impulse which has existed exactly as long as we have had the brains to deal with the Looking Around - but it is important to be grateful for it.  Even the mighty Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was humbled thus:
"All things are woven together and the common bond is sacred, and scarcely one thing is foreign to another, for they have been arranged together in their places and together make the same ordered Universe. For there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one Truth.
Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe.
We should not say ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a citizen of the Universe'.
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)"

We are, within and without, made of Universes.  

Close-up image of a tumorous pancreatic mass

Simulation of the current most accurate model for the structure of the entire Universe as we understand it

Meaning of Life May Not Be Basket of Roses Shocker

After my last (and admittedly rather excited) post about the meaning of life being that of constant change and death and rebirth, I have had feedback from quite a few people which seems to suggest that people may have found this a bit dry and bleak.  After all, if all we are here to do is exist then be blown away to become something else, then our Nectar points and our children and our insurance premiums and, y'know, the whole of our lives, may well look a bit pointless and shit. 

But I think this chronically misses the point.  I think human beings have, on the whole, missed the point on this for the entirety of their existence. 

Why should your life be special and different and imbued with the traces of Gods?  Who ever promised that it would be?  Your parents? Your teachers? Ah, wait, no, the Bible did.  The Qur'an did.  The Talmud and, in fact, almost every religious text reassures, soothes and cajoles us that we are here for a reason.  The coincidence of consciousness is too great, too important, to have spontaneously occured as a quirk of evolution (best tell everyone that's not real either).  All the other frissons of fate that reality gave birth to are less important than the fact that we are aware that we are thinking. 

My point was that there is something special about this - we are starstuff contemplating starstuff - as Carl Sagan used to say.  But I don't see how that is incompatible with what I have been saying.  If anything, our awareness of our own mortality gives the exquisite shudder of tragedy to our lives.  Religion (particularly but not exclusively Western religion) caters to a deep-seated, primal fear of death.  They proffer a bunch of plastic flowers - beautiful, yes, but not alive.

The religions that promise everlasting life are essentially death cults, shushing our anxieties with pictures of clouds and virgins.  Why would anyone want that?  At some point would it not be a much bigger adventure to be something else?  Are we so vainly wedded to our personalities that to imagine not being us for a second is enough to propel us churchwards?  I don't see that this is a necessarily nihilistic, heavily-kohled, purple velvet, angsty statement.  I see it as part of a Cosmic Bargain, really.  Even if the codified forms of reincarnation don't exist (which I don't think they do, I don't believe that if I steal someone's chips that will contribute to an Eternal Karmic Scorecard where my points will be totted up at the end of class and I will be assigned a body based on my behaviour - a bit like Boots Advantage points, or the perennial "No Pudding If You Don't Eat All Your Greens" maxim) then we will become the air, the trees, the bits of pavement and the cup you drink from...eventually.

We have to die in order for other things to live, that's all there is to it:

If we have welled up from the morass of non-sentient beings to be able to experience this most noble of realities, even for this blinkiest of seconds, then I am happy to have been part of that, before dribbling back down from whence I came.  In that time we can conceive of an entire Universe in our minds, we can meet people, create people, learn and wonder and jizz and fight and live all the life that's coming to us.  Is that really so horrible an idea?  Does our common heritage with everything single object around us not create a feeling of peace and oneness (and more than anything else, a bit of perspective on all the mundane shite that we wear about our necks as emblems of having lived, mediocre medals to a life we think we cherish) rather than a pompous sense of disgust that we might have more in common with the world around us than we like to think about?

It baffles me that specialness has been equated with difference for so long.  Has that ever really been a policy that has worked for humanity?

Death is an inevitability, but it is up to each and every one of us to decide how to deal with that fact.  There are many cultures who deal very well with death - just look at the Mexicans - because they realise that to confront death is to make it less scary:

To accept the incontrovertible scientific truths that are out there, that we as a species have worked out, that we are elemental beings, just as subject to the Laws of Nature as everything else, from the amoeba to the supernova, lessens the clamour of the bullshit, lessens the import to be given to meaningless things (bearing in mind at all times that, so mired in debt am I that my corpse will belong to Bob Diamond and the loan companies. I'll never buy a house, learn to drive or do any of the things which I fully acknowledge are nice and convenient to do as an apparently fully-fledged grown-up and taxable citizen) but instead allows freedom where it really counts, in the fucking mind.  That is why it is our duty to learn as much as possible about everything in the world, more, to live as much of everything in the world as possible.

I'd rather be a bunch of real flowers that blossom and twist to get at the sun, rather than cling to the dusty permanence of plastic ones.

Applying "The Being Interested In Everything" Towards The Face Of A Person

So I trust you have all been looking, as if all on some very pure hallucinogen, at more things, the every-things, the all-things, searching for the waves, the connections, all that jazz.  As Huxley said in The Doors of Perception: 

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."

I like very much this idea of Mind at Large - a bit like Carl Sagan's Spaceship of the Imagination, the Mind at Large whirls around the alleyways, bumping into things, having a nice analytical squeeze, and then moving on.  We are so bound by our corporeality, our need to piss or our desire to cry or our desperation for a sandwich, to be taken seriously, to be loved, to be remembered - that we forget how free the Mind at Large can be.  (Perhaps the kind of bright-pink-vomiting, ankle-shattering-heels, freshly-fake-baked Joop! cloud that sprawls across city centres every Friday night, and which is so excruciating that I feel obliged to apologise to all foreign taxi drivers on their behalf, perhaps that is the "freedom" of the Body at Large.) 

As Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) said, "Au plus eslevé thrône du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul." (On the highest throne in the land we are not sat but on our arse) - we so rarely get the clarity of thought of being perfectly balanced, being well-fed, well-rested and not needing to go to the toilet, but when we do we should be ready to pounce.  

We have only our minds really, and it our human duty, as I have already said, Captain Kitchener style, to feed and water and change the straw of the hutch of our brain.  

And yet, I have thought recently that this is a very lofty but very lonely pursuit. It is much nicer to have someone who you can ricochet your ideas off.  I think that we have lost sight of the fact that a relationship, in its most profound and useful sense, should be someone who you can roam about in your Minds at Large with, and try to flesh out a worldview based on your considered findings.  This in no way sounds as exciting as finding your soul mate, The One, your lobster, or any of the various misleading titles we have given to our imagined Other, and which are liable to cause us diabetes for being so sugary.  I understand that Love also has a lot to do with the prosaic things - with convenience and chemical impulse to mate and shared debt and history and jokes and fear and fear and terror and fear of being alone - but beyond all that is the exquisite chance of ending up with someone who can sherpa you through the sierras of sight, the mountain passes of memory, the sand-dunes of smell - reality itself.  Then, "Wonder into wonder, existence opens" (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching) 

I have never understood why people think that to argue with someone is a bad thing, a destructive thing.  I have to argue in order to understand.  If you're doing it for the right reasons, then it hurts because your version of reality is being challenged, which is disconcerting and destabilising.  Your guideropes to reality are twanged and everything teeters for a moment.  But, if you and your co-pilot in the Mind at Large are sailing  for the right reasons (more of a Beagle than a Black Pearl) then you find something approaching a mutual truth which will have been tested, rather than a dogmatic truth that only has value because it has never been questioned.  

Sexy, you might think, love is nothing more than having a science lab partner.  

You're wrong for thinking that.  I'm disappointed in you.  

Huxley himself said:

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." 

This pooling of our Minds at Large, whatever that process ends up creating, is the only thing you can do, the only monument to your life, that you can make, before it all gets blown away by time:

You can make children to keep yourself immortal (Shakespeare's first 17 sonnets speak of nothing but, as do the vast majority of ancient literature - all of Brad Pitt's dialogue in Troy is essentially, "Ma, my legend will last through the ages, won't it, Ma?" and so on), and you can spend the rest of your days attempting (in vain, yes, but all the best things are in vain in the end) to pool our experiences, or to reconcile the fractalised universes that we all inhabit:

And while you're in the pool, have a little look at all the waves, just for continuity's sake.