Things are moving – feelings, sensations, perceptions experienced in a fluid, seamless way. Events occur in the world and in the brain. Correspondences between these mysterious locations bridge the disparate worlds of meat and mind. At first, they are simply strands of connectedness, correspondences, analogies, and metaphors: ways of creating bonds that stitch the endless stream of experience in comprehensible ways.
New patterns emerge, which create and reveal relationships of being and seeing. The brain is entrained, synchronized to the ebb and flow of experience – even while it interprets and modifies the very impressions which are shaping it.
Connectivity enhances being in the world and entrainment reinforces it. New experiences are filtered through existing pathways that have built up over time so that what is experienced is only partially new. Soon, each new experience is also old experience reviewed and renewed.
In this way we become simply who we think we are. In time we lose our way, only to wander in a mirror world – a world of mind. We see little of what happens to us. We lose our power to create experience.
Time to die.
Death obliterates but leaves something in its wake: the imponderable journey from nowhere to fetal life, months in utero, recapitulating the million mutations of animal ancestry, brilliant consciousness, fathomless dreams, sharp sensations of self and other, self and family, self and society, the rise of sex and strength, hormone surge of adolescence, years of senseless risk… then the circular routines of adulthood, establishing rank, predictable patterns of behavior, reinforced roles of dominance and submission, while the timeless world spinning transformative surrounds us, dragging down the tilted frame of old age, holding out against the fear of an inevitable annihilation. Instantaneous, unearthly, alien, death unhinges us with utter unconcern. What remains?
Things are moving – feelings, sensations, perceptions experienced in a fluid, seamless way…
Image: “Neurrealism 2010,” by Tullio DeSantis, digitized analog ink drawing, 2010.