Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash
When I was young and open to the free-flowing knowledge that bubbles up uninvited and unhindered, uncensored by our social conditioning and the fear of losing conditional love that so often determines what we choose to do, say and share , I used to wonder what it would be like to be someone else for a day.
Did you? I mean, really want to be another person. Not live their life, in their house, meeting their family and going about their business. No. I mean, I wanted to actually be them. Only for a day or so. Like a mini-break. Inside their skin, seeing with their eyes, smelling through their nose, feeling what it would be like to walk on their legs, in their body, with their feet beneath me. Just to know what it would be like not being me and being someone else.
Then about ten to fifteen years later, I discovered a song by Bob Dylan called ‘Positively 4th Street’. He’s pissed off with someone. Properly. I don’t think they’ll be friends again so he kind of lets loose on them. But anyway, there’s a lyric towards the end of the song that goes….
‘I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you’ ©Bob Dylan
Whether or not you like Mr. Zimmerman, he’s got a Nobel prize for literature, so someone out there apart from me agrees he does have a nice turn of phrase.
Now, that’s not exactly what I was thinking. I know. But I’m wondering if we all have this thought and it’s a really basic musing along the lines of ‘I wish I was X person with all their lovely hair and long legs and they’re so sure of themselves and they’re popular and really sorted in life’ etc.
I don’t think it’s the same thing. I wasn’t looking for a life swap. Nor a personality transplant. I just wanted to experience life via another vessel. Weird? Maybe. Who cares? It was a thought that came to me as a kid. So blame thought, not me for having it.
Fast forward to about 3 or 4 years ago when I learned of a book called ‘Being a Beast’ by Charles Foster published in 2016. In it, he describes his experiments trying to live as an otter, a badger and an urban fox.
Here’s the difference - I had a thought, he took action, sleeping, hunting and eating as these animals. Weird? Fuck yes. But wild, philosophical, metaphysical and a true action-based enquiry into the realms of identity and meaning. And while his roots were fairly working class in Sheffield, I did learn that he went to an English public school - which means not just private, but generally elite single sex boarding school with the supposed future masters of the universe - which will turn anyone but the most steely-willed into an eccentric at best… So I reckon he’s on the same line of enquiry, but just not with humans. And he’s done more than something about it. Good on him, if he wants to eat worms or out of garbage cans and sleep under a bunch of twigs, that’s his journey, as they say in the self-hell world (intentional typo bro).
All this is to say, the intuition that came to me, as I’m sure this and many more come to many of us, is this: We are not separate. We are not just trapped in this one static body, finite and localised, incarcerated forever and never to know what it is to be other (or otter as Mr Foster would like)… And neither are we separate from anyone or anything else, as so many of us come to believe. We are all connected. Essentially. In so many ways. Is that obvious too? I don’t know if that has always been obvious to me.
I haven’t always felt a deep connection with everything and everyone. I don't always feel it now. I don't always feel connected to cows. Or rocks. Or mushrooms. Or the guy across the road who won't look me in the eye. But sometimes I do. Do you? As an idea, it makes sense. It's intense but it makes sense. I’m totally down with the concept, So I’m happy to accept and wait for the feeling as it comes and goes. We all come from one universal big bong after all We're all made of the same stardust, right? So even if you don't want to get religious, our science says so too. Doesn't mean I need to like you. But one way or another, you are me and I am you too. And if that's the case, then so is everyone and everything else.
No. The separate self is a false concept. Partly created to disconnect us from another reality, partly to encourage a sense of fear and isolation, partly to make us accountable to others, to institutions, to heavenly bodies. And partly by our magnificent but often misguided scientific body of work over the past hundreds of years.
Science is not wrong. But generally it measures what we are able to perceive with the limited faculties of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. However, science also tells us there’s no such thing as a solid object. Tell that to someone that just got hit by a bus.
But apparently it’s true.
Science calls it quantum physics. And it’s been around, proven and peer-reviewed for decades, if not longer. It’s just so hard to get our heads around, we generally don’t bother. See the quote below that I grabbed off our wild and wacky world wide web…
“Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual”
(1) – Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (quote taken from “the mental universe)So where does that leave us?
Wide eyed? Immaterial-mental and spiritual? Maybe so.
Trapped inside our solid skulls and waterproof skin, we so often feel like separate individuals. But that’s from a separate point of view in the first place. As the esteemed thinker Bernardo Kastrup says, we’re inside the cockpit, looking at the world through a dashboard of perception.
That’s not necessarily reality. That’s our perception or illusion of reality. And while it may be the best tool we have for the job, I think there’s a deeper knowledge, accessible to us all that tells us there’s more. More connection. Less, if any separation.
So what’s the connection? Is it that everything exists inside ever-expanding ecosystems, like a nest of matryoshka dolls? First, your own ecosystem built of cells, skin, bones, vital organs, billions of bacteria, not to mention your mind-made memories, thoughts, feelings and perceptions. Then your immediate surroundings, including your nearest and dearest people, plants, animals, objects and places. And, well I could go on, but I guess you get the picture… whether we like it or not, we are all connected.
Idea and Matter
In an interior world of ideas and feelings we seek solace in the sensory, the solid. Where ideas come and go, uninvited or untangled like a cat teasing out a ball of wool, ephemeral and dreamy as dandelions. Even passing sensations anchor us safely in a familiar harbour of objective reality. A place where we can rely on our ability to feel the floor beneath our feet, or the water splashing on our faces, the scent of perfume, the distance to shore, the speed of a passing car or the weight of the clothes on our backs.
External reality is the day to day companion to our internal experience, reassuring us when we wake each day that we’re still here and it’s not all just a dream.
But how do we square this point of view with the scientific evidence and philosophical understanding that these perceptions are perhaps not wrong, but merely an illusion?
Yes there is a world, a universe and maybe more. But not necessarily as we know it, Jim.
It’s well known that other living creatures perceive our same world very differently. My dogs Sunny and Misty have hearing and smelling capabilities on a whole other level to you and I. Champion skateboarders have a highly developed sense of balance that eludes me certainly. Bats dispense with sight over echolocation. We know there’s a spectrum in the animal world. And in the plant and bacterial world, the ability to self protect, grow, decay and communicate in community is facilitated through senses and intelligence that are beyond most of our understanding.
So we know reality can’t just be what we humans are able to perceive. There’s more or less out there. Or perhaps it’s all inside us?
After all, there’s no experience or knowledge outwith or beyond our own consciousness. However, as my main teacher in these matters, the magnificently articulate Rupert Spira warns, the suggestion that the whole of existence could rest only in your mind is the slippery slope to solipsism. Look it up. I had to as well… However there is nothing in existence that resides outside of consciousness. Right?
We’ve been convinced that we live in a material world. And because that framework provides us with the reassurance that the sky won’t fall on our heads or disappear tomorrow, it suits us all just fine.
And within the realm of human senses and perception, matter is hard. So it works.
But we know that there is a very good chance there is no such thing. Which is disarming at first and vertiginously dizzying or hopeless at worst.
I’ve recently learned there are philosophical arguments at both sides of the spectrum - known as Idealism and Materialism. And in fact, many variations in between…Wasn’t even aware of these positions as an option.
Materialism is the idea that everything, including consciousness, arises out of matter - even though there isn’t any solid form and there’s no clear scientific explanation or proof where consciousness comes from.
Idealism posits that all things material, physical, mind made and beyond arise out of consciousness.
Is it possible that everything in entirety, including but not limited to the universe, arises out of one consciousness?
Thanks for reading this far. As a work in progress, I will be updating this post from time to time but in the interests of internet updates, it will probably take the form of Parts 1, 2, 3 etc.