Category: AnyBody Thus Gone

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What remains?

When we select some part of the system to symbolize the life of the whole, we always choose something that flows, such as blood or breath, rather than the rigid parts. Indeed the skeleton, essential as it is for a living body’s movement, usually stands for death. Can flow itself be imagined apart from any fluid substance? If it can, it seems to be nothing other than time. Time is the essence of life because life is essentially a process, or rather a network of processes.

If your real life is a process, a kind of flow, then the fixed identity you call your self is an illusion – or at least its continuity is inseparable from its being always in transition from one “state” to another. Its life is its impermanence. The idea of a substantial, permanent selfhood is a species of what Trungpa (1973) called ‘spiritual materialism.’ A fixed “creed” or formulated belief is more of the same. But the practice of whole-body reading, grounded in the spirit of inquiry, can resurrect a dead dogma into a living, breathing belief.

The true remains of the Buddha’s body are found in the sutras.

— Dogen (Cook 1978, 47)

Living Earth

Eugene Gendlin wrote that ‘the living body is an interactive process with its environment and situation’ (Hendricks 2004, 8). Its life is its withness.

We could say this of the whole biosphere, as suggested by John Palka in his blog post Is Earth Alive?, which reconsiders the “Gaia hypothesis” originally proposed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. John Palka, “a neuroscientist who loves plants and ponders big questions,” quotes from a recent book by planetary scientist David Grinspoon:

Margulis and Lovelock proposed that the drama of life does not unfold on the stage of a dead Earth, but, that, rather, the stage itself is animated, part of a larger living entity, Gaia, composed of the biosphere together with the “nonliving” components that shape, respond to, and cycle through the biota of the Earth. Yes, life adapts to environmental change, shaping itself through natural selection. Yet life also pushes back and changes the environment, alters the planet. This is now as obvious as the air you are breathing, which has been oxygenated by life. So evolution is not a series of adaptations to inanimate events, but a system of feedbacks, an exchange. Life has not simply molded itself to the shifting contours of a dynamic Earth. Rather, life and Earth have shaped each other as they’ve coevolved.

Palka’s article gives several specific examples of life changing its environment on this planet. Grinspoon’s book, Earth in Human Hands, is about the “Anthropocene epoch,” in which “the net activity of humans has become a powerful agent of geological change.” Here’s another sample from it:

I think our fundamental Anthropocene dilemma is that we have achieved global impact but have no mechanisms for global self-control. So, to the (debatable) extent that we are like some kind of global organism, we are still a pretty clumsy one, crashing around with little situational awareness, operating on a scale larger than our perceptions or motor skills. However, we can also see our civilization, such as it is, becoming knitted together by trade, by satellite, by travel, and instantaneous communications, into some kind of new global whole—one that is as yet conflicted and incoherent, but which is arguably just beginning to perceive and act in its own self-interest.

— Grinspoon, David (2016-12-06). Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (Kindle Locations 158-163). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Startlings

From the earliest recorded myths to the latest scientific cosmologies, we have speculated and theorized about the origins of the universe, of life, of species, of language, and so on. But no matter what stories we tell about the past, it’s a present problem that precipitates our storytelling and our inquiry. The origin of inquiry is closer than your jugular vein, to steal a metaphor from the Qur’an. It’s the human bodymind exploring its own presence here and now by tracing it back to the past. The first step in your quest is always from where you stand.

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be
      I knew I should be of my body.

— Walt Whitman, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’

Within this fathom-long sentient body itself, I postulate the world, the arising of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world.

— a Pali text quoted by Rahula (1974, 42)

Brain the size of a planet?

The matter or “material cause” of human bodymind consists of the cells who interact to carry on the body-process, which in turn organizes itself in several levels intermediate between the cellular and organism levels.
holarchyYet each cell has its own life or identity, constituted by still smaller-scale molecular interactions; and we ourselves form the substrate of larger-scale entities, such as communities and ecosystems. At that level, the dialogue of which this book is a minute part may constitute the thoughts of a “global brain,” expressed in a vast language we humans can only imagine by analogy with human languages. But its context is beyond our comprehension. Is there a being for whom “the Great Conversation” is an internal dialogue?

At the scale of the human bodymind, all the buzzing business inside your brain serves the purpose of your understanding, and none of your neurons has any idea of that, even though they constitute it with their interaction. But what if all the human dialogue, including the crosstalk of the Internet and all the global media, is just the inner working of a global brain, working as a guidance system within the global body? What if the human collective, or Gaia perhaps, is doing the real meaning, even though we constitute it by interacting?

This may be an appealing idea, since we long to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to serve a higher purpose – this is part of our heritage as social animals. But we can at best imagine such ‘higher purpose’ – as we are now doing – within the limitations of a human organism. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (Swidler 1999, 9). Drawing upon the repertoire of human-scale experience, we might imagine Humanity or Gaia or God like a wise and nurturing parent – or we might imagine that this higher-level being cares about us no more than an anthill cares about the feelings of its ants.

Let imagination do its wild work, and let our humble dialogue probe and push the envelope of knowledge.