Weaving Candyfloss

It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.

If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?

Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.

And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.

Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?

Dream relationships

Intimacy can be a nightmare. Or dreamy. Which is it to be? It’s within our gift. To ourselves.

They want to take. Do I give?

Maybe. Probably, but do they understand that you are giving, and what they’re taking? It shouldn’t just be giving in. Just  It seems to me that this is how it works. I have my own image of who I am. You, my beloved, have your idea of what is “me”; it’s quite different from mine. When we started out on our journey together –  you needed me to be that person. Remember all of the friction back then? It was all around my idea of me and your idea of me. (Oh, and the versa of course. In fact probably more so!. So many years later our ideas and images of me have jostled toward each other. Giving and taking.

Mirror, mirror, you’re my all

It was a bit gritty sometimes, but looking back; thank you. Without your idea of me – I wouldn’t have become this facet of me-ness. You have been my  mirror; which seemed to be distorted at first. Not so much giving and taking; more pushing and pulling; cajoling, believing, shining a light.

Here’s what I think. All  the  versions of self  – are all dreams. Stories.. There is no real thing called me. Except perhaps the sum total of everyone’s idea of me. So can I change? As easily as changing channels. I can become how you see me, or how I’d like to be – just by thinking it.

Four in a bed

Really  there are (at least) four people in our relationship. Me (according to me). Me (as you imagine me). You (who you are, to you). You (as I need and imagine you to be).

And we dance, don’t we. So many steps and pirouettes and sore toes.; but it’s the stuff that’s kept us going through the years. Holding our our gaze. An emergent quartet. That’s us.

We have trodden on each others toes  quite often; but thank you for staying on the floor with me.

Think of all the fabulous stories that could be told. If we stuck, rather than twisted – when our dream of ourself is confronted. We’ve all walked out from friendships and marriages; all to preserve a fantasy of one particular me-ness or you-ness. Give, but don’t give in. Take, but not to cause heart ache.

Joy beyond angst?

It is politically correct to assume a materialistic existence built on a series of microscopic random events unfolding in intransitive time. We live in the ship of our ego, afloat on an ocean of materialism. No wonder we are full of loneliness and fear.

Sigmund Freud observed that the more you avoid a fear, or abyss, the unhealthier you become. All of the mechanisms of dealing with unconscious pain (projection, avoidance, repression etc) simply lead at best to neurosis, at worst to psychosis.

The big fear, the monster lurking in the deeps is existential angst. The terror of nothingness inside the tiny baby inside each of us. How, then, to deal with that? It’s worth tackling, since our insecurity is rooted right there. The more secure a person is, then the more listening, creative, compassionate, generous, talented and capable of joy they are. Insecurity spawns withdrawal, narcissism, unhappiness and disconnection. So that horizons contract to world as prison.

How then does security arise?  Where do we find an ability to live in confidence? (Con Fides; with trust)? Some simply have faith. Probably they were securely attached as children. What about the rest of us?

Science is uncovering deep meaning at the most fundamental level. Experiments on matter at the most microscopic levels shows that existence is an infinite series of possibilities, potential – until observed. It is the act of observation that, in effect, crystallises out this particular existence from the cloud of possibilities. What then is this act of becoming, of creation that we are engaged upon together? . Surely there must be an “observer” to create this particular reality. Sure enough, our species are the most efficient engines of observation, whether through science or the arts. We each of us spend our life in observation (or as some would call it – witness, some knowledge). Interestingly our gathering of knowledge is escalating in a geometric progression. (Are we approaching Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point”?)

It appears to me our purpose as humans is to be just this – engines of observation crystallising out existence; and we do this together. That puts the onus on us collectively. It is OUR task to work for “good effect” – rather than trying to live with our eyes tight closed against the fear that we float on a sea of random meaninglessness.

…and then comfort comes; and connection and joy. Atman replaces ego, and angst evaporates. Until we forget and have to realise it all over again.

Its Wyrd, Man

The druids and those before them believed in Wyrd. Fate, spinning and spun eternally by the three sisters sitting at the base of the tree of life. World interwoven and changing with tides and currents rippling through it. Reality as flow, connection, relation, context, love). New facets of our connected reality constantly emerging. The same truths at the base of Hinduism – and in Quantum Mechanics ( and Buddhism and Christianity).

Metamorphosis.  Water becoming ice. Caterpillars pupating, emerging into butterflies. We journey together into wondrous new states. Society has a reality separate from the individuals that it is made from. And we as individuals in turn have emerged as something new, from the molecules that constitute us now. We are co-evolving in a phase of emergence from one state to quite another.

Yet; mostly we think of the material world as static and secure. How strange. We manage that by focussing on short time segments.  Thus we ignore the riverine flow of rocks, the evolution from raw plasma to chemicals to biology to ideas; and  we are also blind to  “now”, the window to eternity.

Why? Fear, I suspect, is to blame. The terror, the existential angst that is located in our ego – which of course is definitely an ephemera. This is just a trick of light.  Look past the surface of the pool with its (reversed) image where  we see our “self” reflected. There, within the water, is the flow of life which is our home. We let our egos rule over us, when – just here, just now (always here, now), in the flow  of the universe is our real deathless self. As Rupert Brookes  puts it “..  a pulse in the eternal mind, no less”. Like Narcissus, we are transfixed by inner absorption rather than an awareness of all-that-is.

Touching the Flow

Poetically…

No no I’m never no thing

I’m bumbling  bee not its sting

Flight of the gull not its wing

Not noun or thing-y at all

‘Cos I’m the bounce of a ball

Hop of a bird and its call

The verb, I am is to be

Container containing set free

Strong brown god striving to sea

Prosaically…

All is not as it seems. Physics and Philosophy are pointing us to integration rather than differentiation. To wholeness rather than fragmentation. This requires that we change the way we relate to each other. In the language of neural networking – to focus on edges and synapses rather than points and neutrons.

David Bohm proposes (“Wholeness and the Implicate Order”) that language is reshaped to focus on verbs, rather than nouns (subjects & objects). He calls this a “rheomode”, reflecting a reality of flow, of movement. Elsewhere, for instance in “On Dialogue” he picks up the insight of existential philosopher Martin Buber – that reality is in relation, not the thing (“Ich-Du”).

The world, as Buber says, is two-fold. Everything can be described simultaneously either as bits – quanta – or waves. We appear to have achieved mastery by conceiving reality in terms of the material. To be investigated by smashing into fragments. However consider, just for a moment, the REAL basis of a theory – the standard model – which purports to explain material reality; but depends on conjuring “dark matter” and “dark energy”. For “dark” read – “we don’t know, but we need it to make our equations work”. How much of this “dark” stuff is necessary for the equations to work? 95% of all that is… You have to say that physicists have chutzpah. Not only does this dark stuff account for 95% of everything – but these guys are really precise about what they don’t know – Dark matter accounts for 23.3 percent of the cosmos, and dark energy fills in 72.1 percent [source: NASA]

Meanwhile, fortunately, considering reality as a wave is much more productive. In recent work Milo Wolff has shown that when described as intersecting standing waves, then reality can be described by simple equations. It is no longer necessary to invent a veritable zoo of exotic particles – and “dark” matter and energy. Wolff’s work is not new, but based on work by Maxwell, Schrodinger and Einstein.

Our watchwords, or better – watching words – and focus is shifting..

From nouns – to verbs..From quanta – to waves..From individuals – to connections..From fragmentation – to wholeness

.. or as Teilhard de Chardin would say – to the Omega Point – where humanity awakens to the reality of the whole.

Teilhard calls the contributing universal energy that generates the Omega Point “forces of compression”. Unlike the scientific definition, which incorporates gravity and mass, Teilhard’s forces of compression sources from communication and contact between human beings. This value is limitless and directly correlated with entropy. It suggests that as humans continue to interact, consciousness evolves and grows.

Conjugating Feminism

Animo

Animas

Animamus

We comprise  dynamic balance. Yin, Yang – or Jung’s concept of Anima and Animus.

Animus ..  the male aspect of the female psyche, as the Anima is the female aspect of male psyche”

I like the concept of conjugation in relation to establishing this balance, as in Buber’s  “I & Thou” – moving onward to an existential “We”.

Perhaps then,  Animo, Animas.. Animamus. (Anim-am-us).

Feminism is a conjugating force  rebalancing centuries of dominance of male. The work though is inside each of us, balancing our Anima and Animus to release our true self. Can someone tell Donald Trump & Daish.

[And yes the attached sound-thought-expressions (I don’t want to call them music) owe something both to Bach’s Siciliano transcribed by Wilhelm Kempf]

Becoming

As it is with you
presto accelerandissimissimo
Raveling one steppe at a time, our Kensington debussant. Close-coupled at the ice-break prow
from nights on your bare mountain
over through and on
care-bear-share
touch and push, wellington heels in mud
gurgling moonbright splinter
shining, glowing, giggling in a blanket
embracing, holding, sprinting
drawing toward the outline of your own smile