That we're each a bag of organized cells spewing molecules. That we call one of the floods of these molecules love, another hate, and so on, and affix them to something outside us.
Some of us see that each of us carries a reality inside, some of us think there is only one reality, our own inner one, that the rest of these bags of organized cells are somehow secondary. There are subcategories of these theories of self and other. I know.
What you call your "self" and I call "you" or say, even "me" changes all the time. The baby that you were that your mother loved or didn't no longer exists but to everyone who loved that baby, in our heads, there you still are, so far away and yet just behind our eyes. Like the dead.
You could get struck by lightning you know, say right in the prefrontal cortex and then you would suddenly not be the you you had been just a moment before. Never again. Or a stroke, a hemorrhage. Anything could change you. An epiphany. Trauma. And where would your love and hate be then? Who would love you or know you? What would you know?
So how does love work if it's a hormonal reaction, some function of the brain, some kind of communication among glands and neurons, an evolutionary mechanism that keeps the species propagating? Why do we believe we love a specific person, when we can't ever really know who that person is, or who we are?
Because you don't, really. All you know is what your chemicals tell you. And they're not always so honest or shall I say clear about their intent.
Five senses, five. They send signals endlessly, even when you sleep. You think that you are, outside these signals, but how do you know, because you are never outside them. They are you. Change them and you change. That's the lesson of medication. Why do you believe that the process of selfness will go on in some way after you are dead? Why do you believe in the retention of self? After all the glands and neurons cease their endless chatter what will run you? How will you love and hate? Where will you be, besides just behind our eyes before sleep?
Unpacking Someday
2 years ago
And how limited our senses really are. We perceive so little of our environment...
ReplyDeleteMice talk to each other in frequencies too high for us to hear, and the Elephants and Giraffes do the same in frequencies too low.
Birds and bees see designs on petals totally lost to us...
And we think we know soooo much.
I think sometimes that (as a species) we humans are in our terrible twos...we've just discovered 'selfness' and we stupidly believe it means we're actually supposed to separate from the very connections that make us whole.