I am of my world and my world is of me.

Image by spanaut via FlickrI am sitting here on a sunny afternoon, and the warm air is entering behind me. I can hear a radio coming from my neighbour's kitchen. The odd door opens and closes. above the humdrum of the city that surrounds me, I can hear birds and gentle sounds all around me.

This is the background to my existence. I am amidst the world, not alone. The world was there before me and will continue after me. In another sense, I have always been and will always be a part of this world. That I have experienced life and that that life will pass, is but a miracle of the world I inhabit, and of the consciousness of it which i was born and educated into by others like me.

This is far from trivial. This forms the essence of who I am, and the perception I have been granted by the miracle of nature. These others who have come before me and will follow me share a similarity which i recognize. This recognition is so potent that I look and see it in other objects around me, and see those objects in myself and the other bodies who I recognize as equals.

Sometimes I try to mimic the bird calls i hear when i am out and about. A dog barks at me and I growl back in a distinctive more or less dog-like manner. I can snort like a pig, neigh like a horse, indeed, some have said that at times I am as stubborn as a mule. The human animal is remarkable precisely because its body can metamorphisize into that of others at will.

Other objects outside of me can also be rendered mirror-like into the terms of my own perception of myself and those I identify with as equals. The way the dog looks sad when I am about to go out, the cat that panics when i am preparing to move house, the horse that is startled by a small piece of paper floating through its field of vision. I interpret the responses of these other mammals from the perspective of a human: I have an empathy with them because I can see that they too are similar though different to me. They too feed there children milk, have emotions and behaviours that I can recognize as coming from a similar source and myself, and that they too are similarly a part of my family, if only distant cousins.

Image by ecstaticist via FlickrThis relationship with mammals is much more obvious than the way I see beyond into the world as a whole. The relationship between me and my fellow embodied humans and the environment we share, is an extension of this primary recognition of myself in others, namely my family, friends and the wider human society and even spreading beyond that as described above.I see the world itself as an embodied being. there I have a tendency to see it as a whole; a world or universe beyond my immediate environment.

This process is reversible in that I am the world and the world is me. While I am stardust the world is also there for me. There are constellations in the sky that I recognize as part of my tribe. Like the expansive ocean, it draws me too it, while its vastness fills me with awe and dread. There is a mystery to its very existence precisely because my own existence is tenuous. It draws me to toward it, to understand it and the patterning that seems to emanate from it. Even though I can recognize in the universe a beingness, it is a beingness which gave birth to me and my kind. More than that even, to all like me, both animate and inanimate. It's power transcends me and my kind, and yet, gives me power to act upon it.

Is it any wonder than that throughout the ages, people have personified this relationship with our creator the universe as a human-like being, which created us in his or her image? Perhaps such a metaphor is a truly honest and open expression of who we are. Sure, this personified God is created by us, but nevertheless exists as an infinite environment that we witness when we look at the stars at night, when we see the sun being drawn across the skies during the day, when I sit here typing against the background provided for it, and which my mind can imagine thanks to it, not because of it.

The universe doesn't exist for me to understand and exploit it, but it understands me and exploits me in its development. I am of it and it is not of me. The universe is my God and it is the creator of me. I can c
                         Image via Wikipediareate because of this God, and any god I create is less than. The universe, after all, my be just one of a myriad of other infinite beings. Even a glimpse of this imaginary scenario makes my head whirl. But there can only be one creator of me, and that creator is the totality of all possible universes including my own.

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In what way are social networking sites spiritual?

Image via WikipediaAfter spending two weeks on Facebook and 10 or so days on RSVP in the last month, I am surprised at just how unfulfilled I feel. This experience has left me drained, exhausted and tired. The obsessiveness with which I attacked this task has no doubt contributed to this feeling of emptiness, as too has the inadequacy I feel when constantly bombarded by claims of Buddhist enlightenment, Hindu pantheons, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, half full glasses and the oneness of the world.

My experience of these sites has left me believing, that in spite of the claims made by various 'members' on their pages, that what I feel when confronted by these claims to spiritual superiority is counterfactual to the stated aims of the creators of these pages. I am left with a feeling that to me is anything but spiritual, my stomach an empty space robbed of whatever sober thought or emotion previously taking seat there, and wondering what on earth I am wasting my time reading and responding to empty platitudes and hopes rather than anything of substance.

I left these sites this morning and have been growing happier minute by minute ever since.  I can walk down the street again and say hello to a real person and smile, offer my hand in solidarity, asking nothing of them and accepting without question their humanity.

What is it to be spiritual? For me this seems to be the question at the heart of this matter. I don't know how to answer that. Surely it is tied up in someway with words used kindly and acts of genuine humanity. But that doesn't seem to go far enough. If the words and actions are given to boost my ego, that is, with an aim to making me look good in the world, of become a petty god or guru, then isn't this the antithesis  of spirituality, which surely is tied up with humility?

It is not that I am against metaphysics, not at all, it just seems to me that much of what I was exposed to in the past month has a smell of sophistry and pedantry, of people claiming that they could read my mind but never once told me exactly what I was thinking. Ancient claims presented as if the writer had only now thought of this proverb or that with a stroke of inspired genius.

Of course there where exceptions. A Spanish lady who had studied philosophy as well as being a practicing Catholic flattered me without expecting anything in return. Nevertheless, I returned the pleasure. This was a rare moment of human innocence. I had similar experience with a Philipino lady, a retired teacher in the outer suburbs, and a recovering alcoholic.

To me, these were truly human experiences as there was no pressure at all to conform, no feeling of having to submit to an idea which one could not live up to, and most importantly, a feeling that I had connected with something unspoken, ethereal and ephemeral. Perhaps that was what is called spiritual. Simply the feeling of non-exploitative human communications.

I think I'll just stick with looking people in the eye and offering my hand.

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Looking for similarities amongst the differences.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It is an adult thing to live in a world of difference. Since childhood we have grown accustomed to differentiating objects in the world and naming them. Of course, this is a purely human occupation and part of our learning about the world we live in. In the end, though, we risk losing the ability to see things clearly for what they are, as this process of differentiation separates each object in our field of perception into individual elements.

A child perceives the world as a whole field of moving and stationary objects. There is little differentiation at first. The first foregrounding of an object is possibly its mother's smiling face followed by the teat presented as a source of oral satisfaction and food. Still, at this preverbal stage the objects are yet to be named and exist in the foreground against a background constructed to varying degrees in a way deemed suitable for the raising of a child.

   

Almost immediately the child is introduced to its mother tongue, and to  the process of the linguistic linking of objects in its sensory field with names learned both in isolation and connection with one another. This learning continues well into adulthood for many, as every more complex objects become integrated into the matrix of language which go to make up each persons vocabulary.

The integration of these words into this matrix becomes knotted with the increasing differentiation between the individual words. Also, this knotting is accentuated in when one considers the individualism prevalent in complex late-capitalist societies, where each persons vocabulary is pitted against the next persons in a battle for linguistic superiority and acceptance. This process is a dialectical one between fractured individuals living in disparate communities each jockeying for placement and meaning within a their community and each community positioning itself for access to scarce resources.

Rather than seeing this as an historically contrived evolution, post-modernists argued instead that this was in someway the natural state of affairs. That language was a process that constructed meaning through the differànce amongst words, assuming from Saussure onwards, that words are learned against each other, that an object is defined as this and not that. Words are learned as discreet units relating to discreet objects and only later against other objects. They are just as commonly related to similar objects. Post (post) modernism or the return to the future of the modernist impulse recognises this.

 

I passed onto my children language in the form making connections between words and pictures of objects as well as through reading picture books to them. Words and narrative were related to them and to a visual representation of what they signified. In going out amongst the real world, the children would spontaneously practice asking, Car? while pointing at a variety of automobiles, or Cat? while pointing at a small dog on a leash. No that's a doggie, I would say in reply, or yes! that's a car. Anyone who has parented a child knows the routine which is both rewarding and at times tiring.

 

 A similar effect can be observed through the learning of narrative. Imagine a child running out dressed as a fairy complete with a magic wand and a tiara. Here, a cluster of words go together to make a fairy. The fairy is not made against goblins or superheroes. In fact the child is likely to quiz an adult 'What do I look like, Daddy?' confirming for the child that he or she has got the cluster of meaning right. If a Superman appeared discretion would be called for if the child insisted on being a fairy. I've never seen such an occurrence but I suppose it is possible. 

 

Once the language matrix is formed, however, in all its complexity and in social competition with siblings and peer groups, a process of differentiation appears to take place with the way these words are stored. Similar objects become isolated from each other and differànce becomes an operational function of the way words are used. This is a margarine container and that is a plastic storage container. The tree outside is alive while the wooden desk is dead. The matrix has integrated differentiation within its structure and blinds the body to the similarities between the containers both being plastic and the tree and the desk as both being made out of wood.

 

When I awoke this morning I started to think of similarities between the objects in my sensory field. The sun is warm like me. It is a body that throws off heat just like my body does.  It is rises every morning and sets at night, it begins and ends just like a story, and just as my body is bound to do. When it sets it goes somewhere else just as I will when I am gone. 

 

The tree outside of my window has branches and I also have limbs. Through its limbs flow a fluid just like a fluid flows through my limbs. I recognise it through its similarity to my body. It is alive. So too is the sun which is full of fire as I am full of heat. It is irrelevant to me what the source of that heat is and how hot it is. To me the suns rays caress my skin as if they were emanating from another body close to mine. I don't care how far away it is. That is not for me. I am not a scientist.

Once out of bed I logged into my Facebook account. Somebody was full of this post-modernist difference asking me to see that men and women are different, begging me really. Well, I would have thought that was self-evident I wrote in reply. Gender hatred is based on this differentiation. So too is racism and any other form of hatred, this desire to see difference amidst overwhelming similarity. Hatred in based on this impulse to neglect the similarities in favour of differences. 

 

The knotting of words becomes a knotting of the body, a posture full of anger towards the objects of the world, with muscular energy displaced towards objects outside of itself, either towards externalities or the inner self, resulting in self-hatred and loathing. There are differences between men and women as was written, but the similarities are overwhelming, the variations slight.  We are human. Of course the differences have to recognized and tolerated because of the similarities and not in spite of them.

 

The birds were singing this morning. So, too, was I. I felt we were both singing for similar reasons. It was a beautiful sunny winter's morning. The birds were expressing there joy at a new day bodily in the same way that my body was expressing joy. They seemed less inhibited about their singing than I did perhaps, but nonetheless, we were both honouring the warmth of the sun. We were behaving similarly. I am able to think of this because they too share a body like mine, a body that moves in the world and seeks shelter in a storm and some food in the morning. There is of course one big difference of course. I only wish I could fly.

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