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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There is nothing to worry about.

It is Sunday evening and I have eaten and have the television set on. There is nothing on the box and so I thought I'd sit down and write. I couldn't think of what tow right, but remembered a lengthy online discussion that i had during the week about nothing.

Nothing is something that is mostly ignored. As humans living in modernity we are convinced that what hits our senses and is perceived directly is real, that which does not being unimportant. Seeing is believing and conversely that which cannot be sensed by our legitimate five senses is deemed illegitimate and beyond any meaningful discourse. This is in spite of the observable ad perceivable fact that the universe itself is mostly made of nothing at all.

The ancients knew this intuitively. In English we have separate words for heaven and sky but in other European languages at least this is not the case. There is one word for both heaven and sky in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Polish and Russian: ciel, Himmel, cielo, cielo, cel, niebo and небо respectively. The only other European language that uses words to differentiate the two entities is Greek, which uses παράδεισος and ουρανός. When we look up at the heavens we see nothing foregrounded by what we now know to be the bluish sheen of our planets atmosphere in interaction with the suns radiation and backgrounded by the stars, the closest of which is about four billion  billion miles away. We say this is four light years to stop this astronomical calculation overwhelming us in the almost complete nothingness that exists between us observers on earth and the closest source of light apart from our own sun.

Nothing can overwhelm us and so we have a tendency to reduce nothing to mean not being of importance. We pretend this nothing is not something to notice but is just a space. An absence rather than the overwhelming presence that it perhaps in reality is. We unwittingly perceive the foreground and background while neglecting the middle ground of nothing or next to nothing. The whole of our perceptual reality is treated similarly when I think of it. The universe is overwhelmingly composed of nothing and all we seem interested in is finding something solid. The human mind seems allergic to the idea of the abyss.

Think of a single atom. No one has directly perceived one but we believe by inference that it is made up of a nucleus of protons and neutron encircled by electrons. Other sub atomic elements are thought t exist as well and even a God particle which is being searched for at the Hadron Collider project on the French-Swiss border. These scientists are searching for something that may turn out in the end to be nothing. This is not to say that a God particle does or doesn't exist, but perhaps the God particle consists of nothing and therefore is something as part of everything that goes to make up our universe. (Other universes not with standing).

I am using nothing here in the same sense as Merleau-Ponty's concept of the Invisible. The biologist tells us that we are largely water or the chemist carbon depending on just how reductionist they happen to be at the time and what barrow they happen to be pushing. This is all part of a language game, and misses the point that the externalities of our bodies encapsulate matter which is just as much composed of nothing as it is of any particulate or matter. Remember, as matter we are both particle and light?

I do not, however, perceive myself this way. I am flesh and bone and I see the world in my image just as the ancients once saw God as a heavenly father. The world appears to me as embodied, as having a being apart from me but behaving in a way similar to the way I perceive my body to function. Once I understand the nothingness present in the universe, I begin to understand how this nothingness inhabits the world and through its existence as a flesh like substance through which I move, my very own body to be inhabited, perhaps overwhelmingly so, by nothing: That when nothing is seen as something then it and all the other somethings can be seen to construct the world around me in a way which expresses more closely the overwhelming nature of the universe we inhabit somewhere in our dark corner, lit only by our sun and the faint glow of the milky way and all the other stars off into the broad expanses.

We have the Visible or perceivable and that which is not directly perceivable and which forever remains invisible except when expressed by us humans through our day to day lives and that cultural phenomena called art, religion or spirituality. If the invisible is so overwhelming then why too is its existence denied just as vehemently as God has been by many lesser scientists and thinkers. I can no more sense nothing, than I can God. Yet, all the expressive parts of humanity are in the same basket of non-matter. Human consciousness does not exist in the same way as love does not exist. These are not particles or light, but are part of the realm of nothing that I have described. 

 

We can not sense these things from the outside but can only experience them from within. I can no more sense how much you love your cat than you can sense how sad I am that my friend forgot to ring me this evening. Because you have a body like I do, and I know through experience that we perceive the world in similar ways, I can have empathetic feelings for you and you for I. But it is not possible to cross that gap and to see my consciousness of things, because that consciousness does not exist to the senses; it is in the realm of the Invisible and nothingness. If God exists, this is the realm to look in, not for a particle but into the abyss.

So, nothing is something to worry about. If we want to gain a broad understanding of everything that goes to make our universe and the world, we need to concern ourselves with the overwhelming bulk of that universe, not discount it as meaningless. To do so is to deny one of our essential features as human beings and that is to make meaning from our perception of things and to express them in a way that makes sense of the world we inhabit.

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Oh dear, is that all there is, my friends?

Image via Wikipedia

The day has now past. The sun has set despite what astrologers have apparently proven to be false. The birds have gone to sleep, and the rabid fruit bats who nightly disturb the peace in my suburb, will be starting to emerge and gorge on any available tree. In any case, it's no use crying over spilt milk.

The milk was spilt long ago. The renaissance for all its wonderous brilliance, set in motion a succession of changes, each feeding on the previous ones, so that change has indeed been revealed to be a constant. The seeming tranquility of medieval times, once torn asunder by the introduction of the bubonic plague, gave way to internal wars between European fiefdoms which has continued on and off up to the present day. I am still reeling from the effects of this momentous period in the history, and indeed, re-birth of the West.

This constant change has made obvious the paradoxical point that change is indeed a constant. What is often less obvious, is that the more things change the more they remain the same. the post (post) modern era is to be characterized by the realization that objects share solidity and fluidity at one and the same time.

Despite the cleverness of Quantum Mechanics and its practical applications, Einstein was correct to see and prove the paradoxical nature of our perception of reality, that matter behaves both as particles and as light; is both static and discreet, as well as moving and fluid.

In the post-modern era, which only ever existed as an aberration of the tenets of modernism, Derrida argued through his all too clever word play, that meaning is grasped through both difference between objects as well as differed to some other point in time.

This doctrine of la differance blinded people to the similarities between objects, most notably in gender studies, where the differences between the male and the female where at on and the same time seen to separate the unity of the species and to blur the differences. The point of post (post) modernism must therefore be, to restore this stolen unity by accepting that similarity and difference exist side by side, just as reality has a duality when perceived from a non-dualistic point of view, that is, that matter consists of particles and light, that they are equivalents, and therefore E=MC2, and light and mass being interchangeable.

There's nothing new under the sun, every thing still remains the same, to every thing, turn, turn, turn. Reality is in constant motion and is static at one and the same time. I can only ever perceive a point of view, but when I do perceive it I also see the point of view from another direction. There is both order and chaos. If there wasn't nothing would work.

Motors and computers work in a perfectly orderly fashion from one perspective, and from another are chaotically compensating for imperfections at the sub perceptive sub-micron level. Smoothness and jitter can not be separated no matter how small the tolerances. Males and females share much in common but remain intrinsically different.

It's all a matter of acceptance, not difference. Two identical man-made items are different. It is impossible to have two identical items as they can never occupy the same space, that is they are different, nevertheless they are functional identical. We accept their sameness. So just accept that reality both is and isn't as it seems.

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