Structures of mind

According to the spiritualists, the world beyond this is not dissimilar to our own world. There are still people (all the people you and everyone else has ever known), there is still a form of order, of society. This world is fabricated from a material called the Ether (that is why it is known as the etheric realm). Ether - like our bodies in the other world - is an incredibly light and versatile substance. Unlike the coarse matter that this world is made from, it is not subject to the laws of physics. The link between ether and mind is more profound - you could even say that it is an extension of mind. The beings in the next world have built the structures of that world entirely out of ether. They have done this without lifting a finger. Thoughts impress themselves into forms with ether as their medium. The other world is a place of beautiful impossible gardens and elaborate fountains...

I talked a little in the last post about a revelation - a personal one - born from seeing the second face of birds. This then extended into seeing our second face. Ever since then I keep experiencing moments where whatever I'm thinking about falls away and all that remains is a hairless ape, lumbering through incomprehensible forests of concrete and plastic. Perhaps I am looking down at my pink feet pressing into that soft midway point where the sand meets the surf, or playing with my son - that wriggling pink chimpanzee. If you take the monotonous crackling chatter we call mind out of the equation, what are you left with?

It's a trick question, of course. We can't take it out of the equation. Because, to a greater or lesser extent, all of it is mind!  

Now this isn't an issue of perception - this is not the place for a discussion about the subjectivity of our individual worlds. Sure, we can never experience The Real, never apprehend it directly, because it always comes through the filter of our first five senses, and those in turn filtered again by the mind. The focus of this train of thought is more to do with the tangible results - the outputs of mind - which we now take entirely for granted, which we mistake for underlying reality. These structures are both physical and conceptual, some are universal in the world that we share (the world that persists even after we have stopped believing in it) and some exist only in the minds of individuals or groups of individuals. The concepts creation and creativity refer directly to the process by which these structures impress themselves on the coarse matter of this world - the transformation of the logos (which one could interpret to mean the ordering principles of the self-conscious mind) into kreas (flesh). Creation is the divine act by which the world is perpetually brought into existence.

It's important though to bring this down to a mundane level. Let's take an average day as an example:

You are awoken by the shrill notes of an alarm clock - one of many variations on a theme of concepts pertaining to the telling of time, itself a structure of mind. After becoming aware of your tiredness and the heavy feeling, like black honey, of a dream departing too swiftly, the first thing you may experience is the sense of security in your bed, the duvet, the pillows. Let's take only one - the simplest - of these objects to demonstrate. 

The pillow is a concept developed to meet the simple need for comfort during sleep, combining materials that would never come into contact with one another were they not brought together for this purpose: feathers from a duck; cotton woven into rectangles; each layer stitched together based on a design, an idea of how best these individual components should be made into a  whole. When we look at a pillow, there exists within it, not only these constituent physical parts (and the sub-concepts that may be required for them to exist in that form - such as cotton spun and then woven into material), but the idea of each of those components, and the idea of the whole. Once this idea or concept has impressed itself into the kreas of the world, it becomes self-replicating. Seeing the physical object (cotton-stitched feather bag) imposes or reinforces the concept pillow in the mind of the perceiver. Soon enough you don't even see the physical object any more, only the concept, or the word that flashes into your mind. A little box that contains every pillow you've ever experienced, even pillows of fantasy with no basis in material existence reside in that box.

That's just a pillow. Without getting up we could have followed the same analysis on the bed, the mattress, the duvet. As you switch off the alarm and lift yourself up, your feet press down onto the woven fibres of a carpet - the weave itself a concept, the visible pattern another, the whole created in great looms, each one an idea built upon another idea. Thousands of component parts, component concepts, structured by other higher-level concepts into great machines creating further concept-born structures. Machines that pack the coffee you prepare with water boiled in another concept, that you pour into the concept mug, that you spill over the concept breakfast bar, that you wipe up with the concept dishcloth. Before you get out the door to catch the concept bus, there isn't one aspect of your morning that hasn't been formed entirely of mind. Even the birds you hear twittering in the trees that line your street are perceived by you as concepts.

And it's not just objects... as the bus pulls away it draws you towards the concept of work at the concept bank, looking at the terrible concept traffic up ahead you realise you are going to be late (another concept with no foundation in ultimate reality). Down the concept road, lined with concept shops - small transient shops with signs scratched out with felt-tip on butchers paper, or grand institutions with internationally recognised branding and their own line of perfume and home and contents insurance - each one the concept (or agglomeration of concepts) of a mind somewhere. Maps, buildings, windows, bus stops, posters, billboards, water-towers, shopfronts, hedgerows, old ladies' shopping carts, fences, botanical gardens, motorways, museums, post boxes, letters, stamps, the head of the Queen... Behind you, some conceptual kid with a concept t-shirt and a concept haircut is blasting tinny conceptual music through concept headphones. All around you the air is filled with conceptual chatter, conversations about the concept TV and the invisible waves from mobile phones and radio stations. You are overcome by an invisible wave of nausea. You decide to get off the bus, quit your job and flee to the forest to grow a beard and chop wood all day... (Of course, such an escape would itself be just a concept...)

I was going to go further with this, but am giving myself vertigo. Each concept that we feel we have got a grip on, have safely identified and contained, has tendrils snaking out from within it, connecting it back to the million-and-one other concepts that it needs to exist. And they in turn, with their own tendrils... the whole world and all within it a dense knotted root-mass of concepts snaking back into pre-history. Back to the first fires, the first tools, the hundreds of beings who died over the millennia from eating the wrong berries, from boiling the wrong roots... This world, the material world that we perceive, is like a house of cards, a near infinitude of structures of mind precariously stacked one upon the other. A whole world made of mind. And a population of naked monkeys, not one of whom has any idea how the whole blasted thing works!

So who are we, really?

Up until a few days ago, I thought I had a pretty good handle on this. 

As you grow older your vision of the world, of people, places, of who you are, tends to calcify. It becomes rigid with years of categorisation. Of creating compartments in your mind into which all of your experiences and opinions go. Even the things we say lose their freshness. We are not present when we are saying them, not creating new strings of words and ideas to convey our thoughts and our feelings. We're just reaching into the nearest, most convenient box and pulling out the most-used thought or expression we find in there. Following neural loops that we've carved out over years of repetitious living. We consider ourselves thinking beings - that, after all, is what separates us from the animals - but can we be truly said to think?

Certainly we each have a mind. But are we its masters? Or its victims?

I've recently been watching the old BBC series, The Life of Birds by David Attenborough. This, as well as the birth of my now eight-week old son, has been the catalyst for a train of thought that I'll try to work through in the next few posts.

I've never really looked that closely at birds. Previously, whenever I looked at a bird, I never really saw it. I perceived it plainly enough, saw its defining characteristics (beak, wings, tail feathers), but never really experienced it. Didn't see the incredible power of life within it. When I saw something flying overhead, or perched in a tree, I would reach into the box marked 'Bird' and pulled out the closest available image, which I would then lay over the top of the real living bird in front of me. 

This is probably true of most of my experience of animals. Four legs + pointy ears + tail + 'Meiow' = Cat. Four legs + pointy ears + tail + 'Meiow' + [other recognisable characteristics] = My cat.

There have been a couple of times in my life where I've seen through the automatic overlay of stored impressions to the true being beneath. Each time it's happened I've become aware of a sense of true communication - of completely experiencing the other, their essence. Not just animals - this has happened with people too. When I was a child I thought that everyone had two faces - the one they always wore and the one that appeared if you really looked at them. What I realise now is that this 'second' face is the true face. It is the face that is revealed when all the filters, all the projections, are turned off. 

So, back to The Life of Birds. For me, watching this series was like a non-stop revelation - seeing not on the life, but the second face of birds. The biggest mindfuck has been to perceive birds as one experiment in the form of life (other experiments in form being insects, or mammals, or reptiles), with many thousands of permutations, each perfectly adapted to the geographic niche it has carved for itself. These adaptations do not always fit comfortably with my preconceived idea of what constitutes a bird. In fact, some of these birds do not fit into my box marked 'Bird' at all! Diving birds, for instance, like auks or guillemots have traded in their flying for prodigious underwater skills. They seem to have more in common with similarly adapted mammals - beavers for example, or otters. So what is it that makes it a bird?

I'm not looking for the zoological answer to this question. This train of thought is more to do with our (or, in this case, my) perceptions of animals and the world. How we relate to the world and the beings in it based on those perceptions - the name on the box and all the things we put inside. 

Seeing how these huge families of beings (birds, mammals, reptiles, insects etc) have adapted to the needs of their environments, and the way in which those needs can give rise to comparable adaptations (adaptions which may even transcend or negate the characteristics that I had previously considered essential to their definition), gave me a vertiginous sense of the flow of evolving life. It was as though I was seeing simultaneously the second face of all the living beings of Earth. And in the second face I perceived more connections than distinctions. Beings surviving. Beings eating. Beings fucking. Beings making turds and falling in love and falling over dead. Beings killing other beings. Beings eating and being eaten by other beings. Beings unified in their desire to stay alive, to produce offspring, to feed and protect and educate their offspring. Beings acting out genetically inherited behaviours. Beings acting out learned behaviours...

Looking back then to our world, the (western) world of human beings - of TV, advertising, shopping malls, pornography, finance, high-speed communication - what lies beneath that, what props it up and sustains it, if it isn't those same beings. Beings not so very far removed from the birds, or the gorillas, or the lizards. The invention of the internet, or the stock-exchange doesn't lift us from that flow of life and blood and shit. So why do we think it does? What do we think makes us so special?