Second Q — and surely something we all think about all the time —
whether somewhere, and perhaps in my thinking self, there is an indivisible and indestructible unity — or nothing but what is divisible and passes away
This seems an easy win.
All flesh is grass argues the whole of the Western tradition, from St Paul through Abbess Hildegard of Bingen and Hamlet to Proust.
With great artistic energy, our physical dissolution and our soulful continuation is insisted upon.
Kant here becomes briefly gorgeous, because deeply earthy.
And religious.
Although monotheists shouldn’t feel reassured: Kant’s nothing (as I read it) includes everything, including God (first person singular).
He is asking whether somewhere there is any kind of indestructible unity anywhere and at any time, not just in Königsberg in 1780.
There’s a place for I, somewhere a place for I.
But what’s being dealt with here isn’t just the question of an eternal deity or an immortal soul — it’s about how we perceive, moment to moment, from a place of ultimate and non-illusory stability.
If you were the kind of flickering-in-and-out-of-presence being that the Empiricists insist upon, how could you ride a bike?
That’s the kind of question those who believe in impermanence need to answer.
How could you put a photograph of your parents in a shoebox and, forty years later, when you took it out again, how could you know not only that they were your parents, and that it was you who once put it in the box, but also that while you were putting the shoebox in the attic you were wearing your favourite pair of jeans?
This is continuity of identity.
Doesn’t something somewhere inside you stick around to have experiences that mean today’s sulk reminds you both of yesterday’s sadness and childhood’s melancholy?
And when your childhood friend sees you again at the reunion you really didn’t want to go to, they say you haven’t changed and somehow mean something by it.
Even if they are, slightly, being kind.
But Kant also says indestructible, and that’s very metaphysical.
We’re none of us certain to continue knowing who we once were.
We all know a hammer-attack could end our thinking self.
The childhood friend wouldn’t say we hadn’t changed if they had to visit us in the Intensive Treatment Unit — us on a ventilator with our heart being cattleprodded forward, beat by beat.
This second whether comes down to a matter of belief.
Science says, We’re just electrical impulses in brain matter. Then, when it gets off work goes for a pint down the pub, Science admits consciousness is the Hard Problem.
Despite what I’ve said about photographs and memories of photographs, I’m more on the Buddhist side of Empiricist.
The Heart Sutra puts it absolutely:
All things are by nature void
They are not born or destroyed
Nor are they stained or pure
Nor do they wax or wane
So, in emptiness, no form,
No feeling, thought, or choice,
Nor is there consciousness.
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
No colour, sound, smell, taste, touch,
Or what the mind takes hold of,
Nor even act of sensing.
I’m saying But, just as you are.
[Image: Sensory homunculus model by Sharon Price-James. The cortical homunculus represents the area of the brain's cortex dedicated to sensory functions.]
You keep putting image credits or descriptions in these, but, at least as I see it, no images? I am confused.
Much of the Western traditions are veiled in illusion and at the heart of their secret esoteric truths are something much like the Eastern traditions. Allegory and metaphor describing accent. Enlightenment. The Serpent rises up the spine to the King Dome (Kingdom). We are lied to for to keep dumb, and the secrets are kept for the power to control.
There's no such thing as 'monotheism' in any Church. Aside from Trinities (the original Trinity included Sophia or Zoe, the spirit aspect was female, a Goddess), and son of God, Angles and Demons are no different to minor Gods in the older traditions. Not to mention Saints, who are no different in worship to deified heroes, Kings, etc. or Mary as Goddess worship.
There's an old saying, and I'm not sure if I'm getting the words exact, but it goes along the lines of, 'You can't step in the same river twice' and I reckon that applies to humans n'all. We are never the same man/woman from one moment to the next. Even memories are often false, exaggerated, perverted, distorted by time. This is why I don't believe in reality. Or truth. There are realities and truths. Each with his own. And each altering on the fly.
I have trouble telling dream, hallucination (or visions), and this 'reality' apart in memory or experience, and it's a constant struggle to navigate through disoriented confusion.
Some of us are infinite. I am God. When you can see the unseen, know the unknowable, you are infinite. You can be nothing. When you enter the void, you disappear. If you see the infinite, the Abyss, become the Void, you are never the same again. If you experience trauma, madness, poverty, starvation, murder, suicide. If you have experience extreme violence, either/both as aggressor and victim. You alter.
Many cling desperately to an imagined reality. A concrete reality that don't exist. They were told it by their culture. Parents, school, religion, friends, etc. But it can be removed, quick.
I feel that I'm similar to who I was as a child. But I have morphed so many times since then. I have also worn many masks, to try to merge with the others. To exist within a society that rejects me. But I find that intolerable and hard to maintain. However, it all changes a perspective. We shed our skins so many times. Cells die. We die all the time. Reborn new, into a new reality. The Phoenix rises from the flames.