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The Nature of Thought – Part VII

 

by Mr. Iain Kirkaldy-Willis,

Naturalistic Philosopher

Canary Islands, Spain

 

 

Well then, Who Am I?

 

So, we have this idea that, looking in a mirror, what we see is what the past has made of us.  Now imagine that that `I´ in the mirror is looking back at me! What would that be for?

 

Reality is an illusion. We have had this has come up in all sorts of ways. Let´s re-visit some of it!

 

First: The nature of the bio-organism a life form possesses and the energy counterpart that inhabits it, interpenetrate. There are all sorts of cells of which the body´s organs, tissues and members are constituted. Each of us is an immeasurably great number of cells that all come from one original cell at conception.  Our tissues, organs and body members emerge from that one cell´s continuous, self-determined differentiation, division and multiplication, in every which way, to become a complex interweaving of body systems, structures and functions. This is so for every unit of life.  It happens all over again each time, as each unit moves through this process for itself. The informing intelligence that structures the same genetic material into the host of different forms of life and then replicates itself in each individual of that species as a new generation of itself make this so. This is Life, that which comes from everywhere all the time, going to its special somewhere at every moment, in which everything is a coherent, sacred part of an overall ´divine` resonance. The key here is `self-development´, the process by which this `everything´ comes out of itself!  

 

So, hold on to that one! There´s more to come!

 

Second: Every form of life is not a life-form but the world of a multitude of forms of life. Teeming with life other than its own, my body is a world in itself, something more than everything I conceive myself to be, for it is crawling with parasites. A vast community of bacteria, fungi and viruses, on the skin, in every orifice and in the lungs and guts inhabit the world I am. I depend on these microbes. (Something as intimate as a mother´s feeding her child, for instance, only happens through the single-celled creature that digests the sugars in the milk, so releasing short-chain fatty acids which are what actually feed her infant.) They manage me in all sorts of ways. They affect my mood; take charge of my immune system; both protect me from disease and make me ill. They will kill and decompose me. This is my microbial ecosystem. With 90% of body cells being bacteria, include the other micro-organisms and biologically, my body is even less than 10% human!

 

It is as if we are the playground of multifarious creatures collectively cleverer and more ingenious than us as they operate and cooperate, nurture one another and create the synergy within us that keeps us alive, in more or less vibrant health and moving through a succession of transformations in life. We provide everything they need to replicate. Without realizing it, we are breathing the DNA of other species, so dispersing them to pursue this game elsewhere. (With 40 trillion microbes living in the human body, 37 billion of which get into the air around us every hour we sneeze, cough, talk and breathe, the air is a sea of life.) But with no recognition of what this means, it engenders nothing in us beyond the mundane fear and revulsion of catching something from others´ germs. There are, in actual fact, neither good germs nor bad ones, for each has its place within the larger life as to what sickens, or sustains, kills or cures. They operate in tandem. It is not just that we are their home, they are us. We would not be but for them, just as we would not be without them. It is only we who do not perceive the life-affirmative and the degenerative belonging to the same self-determining faculty in all life.

 

... and the next step?

 

Third: We are under the impression that the senses show us what life is, when it is the larger movements in life that bring about what we perceive through these doors of perception. It is a common misconception that what we think and feel is `us´, when it is the activity of all those `others´ in the internal state of affairs and the outer circumstances of our lives, in a permanent state of flux, that are perpetually tweaking our reactions and behavior, leading each of us to have certain thoughts and feelings, as opposed to others.

 

(This is actually how things should be for any organism, human or otherwise, in the sea of life! The funny thing is that, for all that we think the world of human affairs is something different from the rest of life, we thrive because its doings and goings on keep us on our toes by triggering feelings and thoughts this way.) We think of life as a sequence of events stemming from certain given processes when it is actually the dynamic balancing act that occurs from one moment to the next between a chaos of systems within systems organizing and regulating themselves, according to their inherent intelligences, all occurring within the embrace of the overarching intelligence of Life.

 

What’s more! ...

 

The more varied and irregular the consequent interplay of the body´s organs and systems in all this is, the greater the complexity of the body´s self-regulation, the wider the field of electro-magnetic frequencies to which the body´s bio-oscillators are exposed, the more sensitive the body´s bio-oscillators are to the information contained therein, the greater the content of information that gets processed, the more vibrant the organism´s health and well-being are. They all belong to the same scenario.

 

Think of this as two different states of play working in opposite directions, simultaneously, the one of the cells in units multiplying towards the critical point of organization that takes them across a threshold into another state of being, within which they become sub-units of that new system (as is to be seen in the continual proliferation of cells multiplying, diversifying and replicating themselves from one cell at birth to a complete, mature member of its species with its appropriate quota of body members, organs and systems, or, individuals in a species swarming across thresholds, to become families, communities and societies, with their own, different behaviors, in the new state generated). Going in the other direction is the activity of lesser, sub-systems performing the tasks prescribed by the intelligence of the system they belong to (to whit the body´s members, organs and systems performing the functions that pertain to that body, or the plethora of floral and faunal species going about life in their home environment which, as a composite, make their environment the system it is). The scale on which such matters are occurring in life within each of us and on every hand round and about belongs to metaphysics, the domain in which the enlightened perceive greater movements behind the scenes of Life in the physical world.

 

... and then?

 

Fourth: From energy, physics makes chemistry. Together, physics and chemistry make biology. Energy creates elementary particles, inspiring them to combine infinitely, the alphabet of the language that tells the story of galaxies, stars, the sun and moon, mountain ranges, forests and meadows, material forms, finite beings, you and me. Everything is sentient, but not in the limited sense of the humanity that considers itself the measure of life. Hydrogen, for example, the first of all elements, knows itself as hydrogen, has the sentiency of hydrogen, so behaves as hydrogen, reacting and interacting as only hydrogen can. Metals are sensitive to stimuli. Undergoing stress they experience fatigue. So, it goes, on and on, up the scale from cells to organs, to organisms, to eco-systems, to the planet itself, to the universe, beyond the big bang, out into everything that is. Energy, Life and Consciousness are enmeshed.

 

If we talk of everything as energy, matter that is energy derived from itself, as it were, we are looking at but another veil before the face of the Absolute. Even though we think we think this brings us closer to the Truth, we are not there. The unfathomable is just that, unfathomable, indefinable by any system of thought, incalculable by any means of measurement; no matter how much more complete it seems to be! We think we are independent. We think we have an impact on Life. Maybe we conceive of ourselves belonging to an ecosystem with whom, not only are our life and well-being entangled, but whose own life and well-being are enhanced or diminished by us. Here is the illusion of grandeur. We are nothing, if we are not Energy-Life-Consciousness, electro-magnetic frequencies, energy sensitive to its own vibrations, awareness. With everything being energy, frequencies, fields vibrating, nothing is as we see, hear, feel, smell, taste or experience it, for what the world the senses show us is something construed in our heads from the frequencies out there in the sea of life by which our sense organs have been activated. We are in a sea of Energy, Life and Consciousness characterized by the way everything comes and goes in their play. Things are forever coming and go in this ocean of being.

 

In this sea of being, each entity is a field of energy oscillating at its own frequency. Biological oscillators as systems, come about through the activity of lesser, differently oscillating sub-units organizing themselves into that system, characterized by the broadband frequency to which they become entrained, which contains them all and to which they all cohere. Non-linear and oscillating at its own frequency, the Universe is thus a self-organized system. Earth is a non-linear, self-organized system, within a larger system, and so it goes, to bacteria as non-linear and self-organized, too, and out, beyond, as applying to everything about life. From the Universe as one amongst many entities buried in the broadband field of The Absolute on down through the scale of life, each system speaks through the work the lesser systems have to do. You and I are also non-linear, self-organized systems, with Gaia speaking through the work she has given each of us to do. This means that deep inside some part of us knows what it is that we should be doing, just as our internal organs know what they are to do. You see, just as the Gaian system speaks through octopus being octopus towards the end that she has given the system of octopus to be within her scheme, in telling each of us what to do, that thing within is an expression of Gaia speaking through the movement of each of our lives. It is through our acceptance of this that the Gaian system finds fulfillment and the solutions to the challenges each of us faces can be successfully met.

 

Oh Arthur, it´s all so complicated, such a lot of words!

 

So where do our brains come into this? Their function is the cerebral activity that belongs to our bio-organism´s intelligence. An elephant, for example, is a composite of body, brain and intelligence. In itself that elephant´s brain is useless without the body its intelligence inhabits. Intelligence, each form of it, is what distinguishes one form of life from another. This is no different in our case. And the seat of intelligence? That is at the core of the central nervous system, the heart, for, with 60-65% of the same kind of neural cells as the brain, the heart has its own nervous system, directly wired into the CNS. It not only processes specific types of information in its own right, but coordinates the activities and functioning of the brain and the gastro-enteric or brain of the body organs´ coherent functioning, too. So, for instance, being in phase with the brain like this means that changes in the heart’s activity shift brain functioning, so that the linear, sequential  nature of the brain’s analytical thinking serves the organism’s overall well-being. Attuned to the body´s ever-changing physical state, the heart directs information to the brain as a flow of sensory stimuli. It also reads external fields and feeds the data to the cortex in the same way, along with the stimuli from all the body’s other sensory organs. (Yes, the heart is a sensory organ!) Cortical functioning extracts meaning from the emotional flow received. This is relayed back to the heart, along with what the brain has extracted from the signals and messages of other sensory input. Acting upon this and other cortical activity (such as the secretion of neurotransmitters), along with the other bodily functions and activities that it monitors, organizes, co-ordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts, the heart is, therefore, the master organ of the organism it belongs to.

 

Well, let´s go back to the idea of me and that `other´ looking back at me from the mirror!

 

Huge groupings of cells beat together as one, generating electrical impulses that create electrical pulses in the body’s conductive tissues, whose charge is continuous. Also, ions in the blood, subjected to the vortices of the blood stream, create a magnetic field. So, just as the blood carries bio-chemical agents, it conducts e-m signals between the heart and every organ, tissue and cell in the body. This information sequestered in the e-m activity of the host of the body´s biological oscillators is codified, synchronized and carried as one by the heart´s own powerful broadband field. When this field `touches ´ another field, whether that be of a plant, a rock, some creature, another person, or some field of ambience, it `listens´ and the sensory impressions are registered in a process that follows through to a whole body response. This is the heart as an organ of perception and communication mediating between self and the other – the heart in one and the heart of the world – that within and that at the core of Life. Through this are we in the world and the world within us.

 

As a bio-oscillator, the nature of my electro-magnetic field is continuously forming and reforming, as it adjusts in response to the perturbations it experiences from within and without, in the here and now. These alterations go to the realm of my other self to elaborate on who I am there and the part that plays in the overarching whole of The Absolute. The two are always connected through how I handle life´s contingencies, here and now. Whether I am attentive to such matters or not, what I do here on the material plane affects that other in the invisible realm, regardless. We cannot separate these two worlds from one another, for this is the way the matter works.  The spatial/temporal and this other operate in tandem, the person I see in the mirror and the person in the mirror looking at me. So, here we are back at that image. The person looking at me is who I have become, looking for who I will become. All of this is who I am and I am less than myself in-so-far as I am not attentive to it.

 

The three image/text presentations in this the seventh of these articles, are Living towards Life´s End, Taking Self in Hand and Walking the Line Between the Visible and the Invisible.

 

For correspondence with the author, contact: Bibliotheque: World Wide.

E-mail: information@bibliothequeworldwide.com

 

 

Presentation A
Presentation B
Presentation C

 

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