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!
No comments:
Post a Comment