All In The Moon Shadow II

Part 1 of 2 parts! 

Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher described reality as shadows on the wall, made by the people watching them while sitting in front of the wall with a fire burning behind them casting their shadow on the wall. As the fire danced the shadows danced. As seen on the wall this was construed by those people watching as reality.

Like the curtain falling in front of him exposing the Wizard of Oz to Dorothy, the shadow dance describes me in Dementia World. My life, living, all of us are but reflections in the shadows of the moon. What we see and believe it to be it is not!

If what we see, what we experience was for real, we would not need birth to get in and death to get out. We would not need a mind with which to think nor experience with which to learn. For what purpose would any of this be?

From conclusion drawn simply from logic, (logic being one of our inherent proclivities) there has to be more than what we believe this world to be. If it is not life in our universe is no more than a paradox that defies that basic law that day follows night and 1 + 1 = 2.

Science relies on this kind of order in knowing what it can about our world. If not for that airplanes would not fly, bombs would not explode, x-ray would not work. Is technology and gravity something we can depend on? Must we qualify any conclusion reached by us in our day to day activity because we can’t? The rules to which we become accustomed to say we can.

Although all in this space/time world is a series of interlinking algorithms or illusion as the Buddhist says, we can still rely on what we feel, see, sense, because these are abilities we carried into this dimension for the purpose of fathoming all we encounter in this dimension and making use of it.

When I was told “It’s AD” I asked why? My answer became “It’s all in the Moon Shadow!

Everything about the chaotic history of the happening of this my life came together into a sensible whole. With clarity I was able to see why I came into this world, the purpose I had and the means with which to do fulfill that purpose. The moon showed this clearly, finally.

The AD was in the moon shadow. It was there, it was something I didn’t need to see all that well. I was able to see enough in the shadows that I could not deny it was there. It was something I had to deal with and the clarity gave me enough light in which to do it.

This is metaphor I know; please excuse my Poetic Irish Heritage and my Jewish exposition of true reason. With Buddhism I was able to form it into a working model..

The Buddhist Philosophy organizes it all. It’s all Illusion, they say, do not take it so seriously. Like a bad gas pain it too will pass.

Life is but a weigh station on our trip in the Cosmos. The Cosmos, whatever it is, is where our consciousness emanates. It was conscious before and will be there, conscious, after we leave this body to the earth there to break down, decompose, and return to earth. This body has been but the Avatar through which we navigate in this unique cyberspace or virtual reality like dimension we know as Life.

That is what breaking down the free will each of us knows so well and each of us understands to be uniquely ours amounts to, it is ours and it isn’t ours. Like everything else in this virtual reality we know as life it is there and then it slips away on us. Sometimes we are its volition other times we have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Free will is in the moon shadows along with all else we perceive to be. As but shadows it is less than real but more than purposeful.

The Maze of Free Will and Other Random Acts of Consciousness.

Cognition, reality and us! This is my subject today. This post refers to an article from the New York Times on July 22, 2010. It is entitled: Your Move: The Maze of Free Will. Click on it to go to my Archive to read it.

If your brain doesn’t bust reading the article the significance I see in it are two observations I make of it.

1.    Philosophers are much like lawyers, my former crew. It takes them longer to say less than any group I know.

2.    The  purpose of my comment is this: Free will, our claim of natural heritage which makes us different than the animals, that personal distinguishing piece of god-endowed creation we claim ours, is not all that it seems to be.

We live and go on in a unique time-space limited environment with the bio-chemical capacity to live beyond our birth until that biochemical mass we are poops out and dies on us.

In between the two most important events of our lives, birth and death, we survive, learning becomes a major endeavor of doing so. We learn from what we encounter. We learn more from what we learn. We learn how to master this world, and then we work on mastering it.

Our exercise of free will fits into the process. It is; but it is not as much as we would believe like to it to be. With the exercise of will, all that occurs before, all expected to occur after have influence over our act of now. Sometimes our before will control it, other times we see it exercised in ways that happen before we can do anything about it. We see it happen and realize we were not an instrument causing it to happen.

It is of course a moral act as the writer of the article discusses. The morality of any free will exercised must be measured in the context of all there is about it, including the one exercising the free will action.

Looking at a decision in the instant of now is difficult to measure in terms of moral efficacy. Dealing in the instant is like the Sea Pilot steering his ship. He is at sea, bound in a direction, and on the move. Taking no account for the ship being piloted, the sea in which they are bound, the conditions about them weather included, all of the other exigencies of the moment, how do you measure the efficacy of the pilot executing a turn? Was he right, wrong, was it good, bad, is there even anything to measure?

The exercise of will is something we do and we don’t. We need to look at this, as well as all other matters of us, our world, all in of that in our world was in our world and all of that yet to be in our world. In this context we can measure what part of our act was the exercise of our fee will and what of it is the volition of the other elements that go into the act having nothing to do with free will.

Our actions are time limited. They occur within the time, we, they, the universe itself, occupies at the time of the exercise of the action. This is one of the constraints curtailing all existence in this time/space condition we are in.

We must therefore measure our degree of volition in producing the consequence of an act and all the other exigencies participating in influencing the act. We must see it from the greater whole of which we are but part.

We need to see it from the whole of it. In this context, limited in our measure of it, it is but with wonder and awe we ponder it and apply it.

Like consciousness, was I to be asked to give a quick explanation my only response would be: “It sure is an interesting anomaly of being; I must learn more about it!” 

Applied to my theme of “There is more than the eye can see” we need to consider the exercise of our free will as part of the mix that illusive reality is for us. In doing so we must consider it with the nuances that occur with it that are nowhere near being in our control.

Yes we have free will. We exercise it frequently. There is however so much more influencing each step we choose to take along the way. This too remains largely illusory in our view of it. We believe sincerely it is all ours, each decision we make with each step along our way.

Fortunately in reaching our third stage, those senior years in which we have time for contemplation, for wonder and awe, we can start seeing “The Plan” that has exercised so much more direction over us than we saw possible.

For that I say to my Higher Power: “Thanks. You navigated and performed so much better than had I been solely in charge!”

Is Pure Altruism Possible?

 

Love is one of the greatest altruistic acts, that is the kind of love that is all giving, not getting, not sharing, just the giving of love not bound in any way by expectation of return

Interesting thoughts come from reading Is Pure Altruism Possible? a commentary that appeared in the Opinionator Column of the New York Times some time ago. Click on its title to read it on my Archive.

This article provoked in me the following thoughts:

“What can I do to help you?” is a phrase rarely heard in our culture. When it is it is said to a relation or responding to an acute need presented. This is not a common ordinary question generally asked among us. This is true for many reasons, the one I deal with here, responding to the silence of the question never asked is this:

Our western civilization is built on the fundamental concept of “Survival of the Fittest.” It is built around this general belief that man in his depravity best serves himself and all others by having to compete amongst all others for his selfish needs. This is the only real urge that man in his wantonness can consistently adhere to.

If all men compete with one another, they will secure the greatest possible good obtainable for themselves and secure that same degree for all others. This will happen because all will come into balance as one man’s selfish needs act as a check on the other getting more than his rightful share, leaving all in the end with the greatest possible measure of share.

In that base way man secures the greater common good.

For centuries this principle has directed us and has seemed to work for us. We now see the effectiveness of it crumbling away. Many reasons are responsible, the most prominent one being this: through media access and politics one group has come into too much control taking more than their fair share.

Normally the political process could balance this. It seems unable to do it today. No other remedies are seen. The baseness of Capitalism has taken over the baseness of man and made it worse for man.

Man by nature is Altruistic. The need to do for others is knee jerk to the condition we know as being human. Instances of quiet care of one another readily attest to the existence of it and the satisfaction found in doing it.

The loneliness and emptiness looking out for one’s self is real. If not realized immediately it does in time. It wears out after the endless distraction of getting, holding on to, attaining, owning, acquiring, having, belonging for self and not someone else. Always, it comes up empty in the end.

A truism of life is “The Only Thing That Lasts Is What We Give Away.”

The end product of living leads us to this realization. When we have exhausted doing all that we have to do and are blessed enough to see the emptiness the result, we then start looking for what really works. We learn that looking to another’s needs offers us what is missing. Compassion for others is the key to finding peace and serenity for one’s self.

Best said by a famous Buddhist teacher Shantiveda:

Whatever joy there is in this world
All comes from desiring others to be happy.
And whatever suffering there is in this world
All comes from desiring myself to be happy.

How does the subject of this essay, which I originally posted some years ago, fit in to my current theme, “There Is More Than Meets the Eye?”

It seems to me little question that in our life time we are driven in part by urges. I often speak of

the infant and young person’s urge to learn and work towards becoming what they are to be.

A middle aged person is urged to be whatever it is they have become. In doing this they have the benefit of having the recognition of it, acquiring all available to acquire and then to hold on to all of it. It is their primary avocation with so much involved there is not time for anything else.

We came into this world designed this way and it is ok. We can’t fight Mother Nature. At the start we are driven by the urge to look to our own needs, to learn and then become so we can acquire and be recognized by it.

At some point, usually our senior years, we look out and look around. We see the something missing from the mix. Our urge changes and we become centered on filling the void that starts to evidently appear. This involves both identifying what is that is missing and then our undertaking to seek whatever it is to complete our life on earth.

This happens in the normal order of things. We learn about the baubles of life, we yearn to possess these baubles, then if we are lucky, we realize how empty the having of them is. It is this realization that comes with the corresponding gift of a sense of what is transcendent to us. This is the time of our lives when Altruism gains in importance to us.

It is also a time that we are reminded of how important it is not only at the end of our days but throughout our lives.

This is another realization of mine, produced particularly by my Dementia. Not only is this needed at this time in my life, but needs to be recognized for all of our lives. That realization is the need to look out for one another and the need to abhor the system we know have that canonizes selfishness and greed, making it sacred and not abhorrent.

We are designed to seek our selfish ends then realize this leads only to loss. When turning from the selfish to the altruistic to we find fulfillment having lived.

The Strange Realm of Forced Transmogrification. II

As Prelude I repeat the theme of the recent stream of Essays which is: “More than Meets the Eye.” The following essay fits nicely. In my last posted essay I stated:

“Necessity is the Mother of Invention” so say the technocrats in our culture. This aphorism is aptly applied to our brains in dysfunction. By necessity new talents emerge when the brain must find another way…

Does AD restore the sight of the mystical Third Eye?

The following essay deals in yet another instance where life forces us to see More than Meets the Eye.

 Transmogrification is a hundred dollar word that describes a thousand mile leap. Words similar to this big one are: metamorphosis, alteration, born again, change of heart etc.

The Article of Bob DeMarco in Alzheimer's Reading Room noted and posted here was one that catapulted me into this kind of reflection It is entitled: Alzheimer'sCaregiver Unleashing the Strong and Deep Desire Within You. Read  it by clicking on the title to go to my Archive I have posted it.

When I read something I look for the substance of what is said, like, what is its meaning or what does it suggest? I drive my wife Diane nuts with this. AD has done nothing to diminish this trait of mine. Along with my cognition it remains alive and well as so many other functions of mine are flushed down the toilet of AD’s progressive debilitation.

That said (an apology: an explanation), should you read on… I go back to a recurrent theme that I have recited in past comments. It is mind boggling to me the affect AD has on its Caregivers and often on its afflicted ones.

We are forced by the circumstances of having Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), affected by it, afflicted from it, to do things we never thought of doing and too often never really cared to do. In the doing of that which AD requires of us something wonderful happens to us.

There are so many words that can be used to describe what that something is. Words like Mystical, Sacred, Communion, this can be an endless list. The list boils down to this: Love. We are forced to love; we learn to love; the door is opened to the transcendent gift of our Creator, the Cosmos, or whatever power the word can describe. The appropriate word is in antonym to the word material.

It is in this circumstance that we can experience the heavens opening to us while we are in this time-space materiality.

We partake in the purpose of life which is simply to learn to love. It is to what so much of our lives seem directed if we care to watch. All the rest is corollary; as corollaries it defines life and explains its purpose.

It adds to and fills out the love we discover by having been through all the correlative experience leading to it. All of that experience that is corollary, namely complementary, fleshes out the fullness of the experience that is ours.

Sound heavy? Not really; that is if you stop to give it some thought. The word Corollary bears many definitions one of which is this:

“A natural consequence or result. A correlation is a mutual relation of two or more things”

It seems to me all of life’s experience is in correlation, one experience after another, Linked! Adding these correlative events if we are fortunate in this life to be able to do so it can lead us to a realization of the perfect reward of life.

That reward is the transcendent experience of love. The Love available to us in this life, that has its roots below and arms reaching above, reaching into the Cosmos, in Heaven, or whatever concept we can use to describe the source and the end of all of this.

The love of the Caregiver can and more than not does reach this celestial end.

Funny about that too; we are forced into it, Yeow!!!!!

CROSSING DIMENSIONS II

I posted a few articles some time ago which supplemented an essay I posted on this blog. I am re-writing and posting the essay again. It fits my theme of “More Than the Eye Can See.”

Neither of the first two articles which were posted to supplement this essay is particularly associated with the other, but… The idea they triggered in my wandering mind did an association.

They are:


1. Not a Ghost of A Chance -- An Alzheimer's Out of the Box Moment


2. Keeping The Love Alive: Crossing Dimensions

A third article screams for inclusion:

3. Who Are We? Experiments Suggest You're Not Who You Think
(Click on any one of the three articles to go to archive to read it)

I have discussed this before. Here I go again. Something weird happens in the head as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) wends its destructive way in our brains. As pathways are lost the functions provided by those pathways seem to be lost too. However, functions can be recovered, particularly while in the early stages of AD. The professionals speculate on the brains ability to form new pathways, generate new tissue, and otherwise supplement the circuitry between a call for a function and the learned ability stored in the brain bank which needs a function to answer the call.

It is being observed, at only a theoretical level, that the talents of the right brain, our creative side, start showing a capacity for talents not otherwise manifested by the brain’s function before the onset of AD. My own experience is one. I find myself thoroughly enjoying and doing digital art passably. Artistic ability, such as, ability to draw, to blend color, express mood and creatively express it in picture and other creative forms, are talents I am now able to use. These did not exist with me before AD.

After reading Jill Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight, I realized perhaps the AD Afflicted experience is in some ways like the experiences Jill writes about, particularly as it regards her loss. The difference with Jill is she suffered a stroke that all at once damaged her left brain obliterating all of her functions from that part of her brain.

With Dementia the damage is not massive and self-contained in the location of the brain damaged nor is it immediate as it is with a stroke. With Dementia it is gradual, it occurs randomly with no order whatsoever, and therapy cannot attack it by directing itself to the function lost as produced by the part of the brain lost to the damage. The lost function emanates from too many parts of the brain in a randomless order

Ms. Taylor, a neuroanatomist at Harvard, recognized Stroke as happening in her. She experienced entry into an entirely new and different dimension operating out of her right brain, the loss of her left brain leaving her no alternative. 

The book deals first with Ms. Taylor’s stroke experience, her realization of what occurred and then her efforts to utilize her right brain to reclaim the functions of her left brain damaged by the stroke. It is more than fascinating how she did this describing it each step of the way.

She describes the differences of the left and the right brain. The left brain is more acclimated to our more technical kind of life. It deals in the material, with the material, is our manager in our space/time environment.

It is the right brain where we dance with the angels. It is the place of wide view, appreciation of the art able to be evoked by us. It is not serially programmed as the left brain. It is one enormous now that sings to the spheres for us to hear. It hardly fits in the way of us as we are in this phase of evolution of man in this world into a more technical/material way of dealing with life. The right brain remains very much there and able to accessed by us.

It is with artful expression among many other of its facets that help us reclaim lost functions. The so-called “Best Practices” head up a list of what works well for us. If we eat right, exercise, stimulate our brains with intellectual, creative and social activity, it is believed by many we can overcome much of our loss or at least slow the progress into more loss.

Jill Taylor’s story gives credence to what can be done by us with Dementia to obtain a better quality of life.

In our lifetime we train from birth to death to operate out internal computer which is a function of the left brain. It keeps, collates, store and offers retrieval of all the data our senses accumulate in life. It is with this ability we operate successfully in living day to day.

Ideas come sneaking out of the right brain; they are needed, utilized and relied upon. Outside of the utilitarian use of this right brain activity, namely processing ideas, our life neither prompts nor do we explore the many capacities of the right side other than experiencing periods of intuition, sparks of creativity, and an assortment of other abilities that can be sourced from the right brain, but not done in our technically dominated culture.

In the east, the Orient, we see more utilization of right brain abilities then in the west. We see it in Taoism, Confucism, Hinduism, Buddhism and a variety of other philosophical traditions. Yoga, acupuncture, the practice of faith healing, and psychic surgery in the Philippines, Shamanistic practices are used throughout more primeval cultures with varying success all fit in to the categories of right brain talent that can be utilized by us.

These are all examples of “More than Meets the Eye.” Just as the medical practice debunks the practice of homeopathy, the latter is in fact effective. In the west we have this way of hive mentality. “We do it this way. Therefore, our way is the only right way!”

“Necessity is the Mother of Invention” so say the technocrats in our culture. This aphorism is aptly applied to our brains in dysfunction. By necessity new talents emerge when the brain must find another way.

This leads to the first of the three articles I have posted. In “Not a Ghost”, Bob DeMarco at Alzheimer’s Reading Room speaks of his mother’s ability to dredge up the words of a song from here distant past. She did this by hearing the tune and automatically singing along, with complete lyrical recollection as well as singing in tune.

It seems, Bob’s mother Dotty was able to do this without relying on her normal retrieving ability, it just happened. There are accounts of other AD afflicted, in mid and later stages, able to sing pitch perfect with full retrieval of the lyrics, something they could not do otherwise. What is this? Probably it is that creative side that gave that person the talent to sing in the first place and provides a creative memory function.

The second article a little more in point. It talks about watching the angels. Do angels exist, can they be seen, can other ethereal creatures be seen, ghosts? Is there life after death; are there others dimensions; alternative or parallel universes? Is there transcendent power able to be utilized by prayer, devotion, meditation, seeking the higher power described in AA or the myriad other ways of mankind?

I am reading an excellent book written by Deepak Chopra How to Know God: The Soul's Journey Into the Mystery of Mysteries. In part of it the author spends time dealing with paranormal and other inexplicable events that to the author seem real. He explains them from the basis of man tapping his natural ability to transcend that finite part of him to utilize this ability. Examples range the spectrum from the miracles of Jesus and the Prophets, Prescience, Fortune Tellers, Occult Practices, and simple down to earth intuition.

Martin Buber, the noted Jewish Existentialist, notes the child having memories from before birth, from before conception, from being one with the Cosmos. He notes an infant’s ability to see above and beyond the concrete of material objects.

In the second article the author speaks of the old people at the Jewish Service in the Assisted Living Home who during service seemed able to see that angels. She goes on to say that heretofore the only ones noted able to see the angels were small children.

Does AD restore the sight of the mystical Third Eye?

The last of the three is that of Robert Lanza who speaks of “Biocentrism.” Wikipedia describes biocentrism as the belief that all forms of life are equally valuable and humanity is not the center of existence. Biocentrism has been contrasted to anthropocentrism, which is the belief that human beings and human society are, or should be, the central focus of existence. Lanza goes deeper in his book Biocentrism in which among other points he talks of the spiritual existence which we have and how this transcends our material consequence.

There is more than meets the eye in this world. Most of us never look at it much less ever notice it. One of the benefits I see in AD is it has forced me to explore new ways to think and function in this world of ours.

Thank God for that!

To Know All We Can Know

We operate in dimensions of space and time. In so doing we could be called four dimensional beings. We have volume (viz, take up space) which is manifested in what we have come to know as 3-D. We are a point that is extended into length and expanded into depth occupying space. That is the first three dimensions. Our fourth dimension is the consciousness and involvement in the passage of time. We are continuously moving through the passage of time.

There are other dimensions. Wikipedia informs us as follows:  

Abstract five-dimensional space occurs frequently in mathematics, and is a legitimate construct. Whether or not the real universe in which we live is somehow five-dimensional is a topic that is debated and explored in several branches of physics, including astrophysics and particle physics.

In physics, the fifth dimension is a hypothetical extra dimension beyond the usual three spatial dimensions and one time dimension of Relativity. The Kaluza-Klein theory used the fifth dimension to unify gravity with the electromagnetic force; e.g. Minkowski space and Maxwell's equations in vacuum can be embedded in a 5-dimensional Riemann curvature tensor[1][unreliable source?]. Kaluza-Klein theory now is seen as essentially a gauge theory with gauge group the circle group. M-theory suggests that space-time has eleven dimensions, seven of which are "rolled up" to below the subatomic level. Physicists have speculated that the graviton, a particle thought to carry the force of gravity, may "leak" into the fifth or higher dimensions which would explain how gravity is significantly weaker than the other three fundamental forces. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_universe_of_five_dimensions)

Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space)

Whether five or eleven dimensions, we have the capacity for interfacing in four of these dimensions.

Could we access more? We know what is within our view materially now, namely, presently. On information and belief we know that which we are told exists or conclude by the various methods of communication and measurement we have developed. We know the past. We do not know the future.

The future is not known to us because it has not happened yet in time. But, time is no more than a function of materiality. It doesn’t exist beyond its confines of material world.

We know many things, starting with black holes and particle composition of matter more by conclusion. Just as Einstein concluded about relativity and the facility of what has come to called wormholes, we reason to the likely existence of such things, and assess their power or potential.

On the level of spiritual transcendence many conclude there is a God who created us. There is nothing empirical that can demonstrate God. I believe the existential philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel said it best. ”There is no way we can know God. We are finite, God is infinite. But then again we can know God by knowing finitely what God is not!”

As we spend that last part of our lives where we are given to being reflective, might we not do more to know, to see and to surmise? Is it possible to go back and learn other ways to access what about us? As we start musing through our right brain capability might we not intuit more than the evident?

With that capacity for intuition might we not take further steps into extra sensory perception, develop abilities for prescience, delve into the paranormal, detect and understand psychic phenomena?

These abilities have not been of practical use in our time in materiality. Because we haven’t needed them we haven’t tried to use them; does that mean they are not possible?

Reflection is that time in our life to expand what we have come to know. I would like to believe it is also our time to learn new things.

We should all keep an eye on what happens to us on this third stage of our worldly way and assess what new challenges we have. The times in mid-life as we concentrated on what we had become and endeavored to gather all the fruit of that, we did not have time or opportunity to look.

Now in our senior years we do have that time, also with the time the opportunity, and the wisdom of having been where we’ve been. Some of us need no more than reaching this age to harvest these fruits.

Some of us, me as an example, need a kick in the pants to go in that direction. I knew something was missing, I knew there was more for me to do, but I was trying too hard trying to hold on to bits of my professional life where I had a meaning I at least understood.

Kicked as I was by Dementia, I now have been forced from what I was holding to and forced into finding my fulfillment. Coping with this terrible disease made taking action necessary. That action amounted to getting out of myself and taking a real view of all that was around me.

The Infinite Moment

  

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable. Rinpoche, Sogyal (2009-10-13). Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying (Kindle Locations 554-558). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

The theme of this series of articles following the thought “There is more than meets the Eye”

Is served by the forgoing quote from Sogyal, Rinpoche discussing ego, something which is well known to all of us; it is well known and relied on as our identification and by that our meaning. It is in fact distraction, diversion, something lying in wait for us and continually defeats us in reaching beyond our egos.

The misconstruction we have of the passage of time, we have of the reality of materiality is much the same. What we perceive of it has the appearance of being real; it influences our action; it does all kinds of distraction. But it is damaging to us to believe in its priority of importance to our lives. The trick of life is to learn how to walk away from these as the mighty Ulysses closed his ears so he couldn’t hear as he sailed past the island where the sea nymphs sang their siren song asking him to come and be with them.

The greatest paradox of our life is this: Our experience of life does not include involvement in the passage of time. We know of its passage in retrospect. We are able to see pastime is the days gone before. We do not see the time to come we simply trust it will because each day becomes yesterday on running its course. Why is this? It is because we are constantly present, present in the time known as “now” this instant, and then that too passes into the time that was. 

We live in an infinite moment made up of “Now.” It is a continuous “now!” Now has no before, no after. That makes it what it is in the present moment. It may be affected by before, influenced by before, it may be directed to after, but essentially it stands alone in the moment, the presence of it totally in charge.

“Now,” this present moment is under the direction of whatever power it was that provided us with conception, gestation in the womb, birth into a space/time limited dimension into which we carried our consciousness, not anything more, and forgot a good portion of that consciousness. The lost or forgotten consciousness waits for our return from this dimension. It is however in the nature of this life that we can retain and use some of that forgotten as we evoke the transcendent available to us in this life as discussed in previous essays.

In the unique form our “Life”, that period between our birth and our death, much of the consciousness we carry into life is limited and for the interim is unknown by us. All we know is what the material that constitutes who and what we are in this life is able to perceive and develop knowledge from as we encounter it and apply our consciousness and the latent talents or abilities that come with this existence seem to have.

Like starting the first day of work we do not carry into this new job “Life” a conception of what to expect, a list of achievements we want to accomplish, a plan of how to do it. When we first start dealing with the new day of work, or what it metaphorizes:  “Life” we do so from a clean and blank slate.

We are able to perceive what is within our field of encounter; soon we are able to perceive we are separate and distinct from that which surrounds us. It is at this point our organic brain kicks into action and we commence a time of data observation and data storage, all managed by our consciousness and sorted by this body we seem to occupy.

ONLYTHE MOMENT IS OURS TO DO is an essay posted on April 25, 2009, which discusses the instant in time, the infinite moment, in which we act as the overall plan interfaces with all of the other action of ours linked to it.

The conclusion reached in that essay was this: 

• ·       Retrospective view is the one insight given us from which we can learn something. When I look back I see this:
• ·       Everything that happened follows a direct course linked to the events which preceded it leading to it. One after another they all connect. In this way these previous events do influence the subsequent events.
• ·       It is as if they form a pattern. A pattern I have had little or no hand in formulating.
• ·       So many of the events are such that there is no way I would have chosen them to happen. They are no more directed by me than was my birth to my parents in the time frame it occurred with the gender choice for me as I entered this life.
• ·       The degree to which I stepped back out of the way eased the process of the happening of these events. The extent in which I could turn it over, let it be, go with the flow, the easier time the process has reaching its result.
• ·       As each of these events transpired, one following necessarily on the other, the pattern of them produced in my view a favorable result. Not a pattern I might have chosen. But, not something I would now choose to turn aside. I like the result in spite of what I would have had it be.

 From the foregoing I have come to believe my life has occurred according to plan, not my plan, but a plan, that flowed along on its own terms. I do not know who set the plan, where it came from; whether or not set in some dimension beyond this one in which I find myself, none of it is of material consequence to me.

What is significant about it is the way it seems to happen. Anything I have done to defeat the plan fails or explodes all over me. Usually the plan’s choice of action occurs in spite of me. When I take control of my moments and try to direct my response it makes it harder for the natural consequence of my moments to occur. Having 75 years of living this experience I am convinced this is how it works!

The Way It Really Is:

(I apologize to the reader. This is long, too long. I could not break it down and stay on message.  For this reason I did not want to break it up. Therefore as you read it if you don't feel like reading the whole essay at one time you might want to do so in segments) 

Human beings are part of a whole, called by us the “Universe.” Our part is limited in time and space. It is a part of a “Greater Existence” not readily apparent to us because we are limited by the same limitations that limit our “Universe.”  Persons here experience themself, their thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task here must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I cannot claim the foregoing as mine. I cannot find the source but qualify it as someone else unknown to me. Although the writer is unknown the context fits the theme of this series of essays, there is more that the eye can see. My object in this series is to propound the idea that the primary object of our lives is to live it in such a way that at some point we are moved to look, to see and to act on what we see unfold. What unfolds is a view into the “Greater Eexistence” referred to in the foregoing quote.

What there is to look for is what is aptly described by Sogyal, Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher who said as the reading for March 9, in a book I read daily entitled, Glimpse after Glimpse: 

Sometimes we have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind. These can be inspired by an exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday situation. They can arise simply while watching snow slowly drifting down, or seeing the sun rising behind a mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace, and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us.

I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses. But then, modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to comprehend them.  Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore them more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we try to share them. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization—its ignorance and repression of who we really are.

(It is most important to note the meaning of the phrase “the nature of mind” as used in the foregoing. Nature of Mind as I understand it is the consciousness that we access through our brain but is not part of our brain. It is part of something far larger, far more comprehensive which I call Cosmos [all of creation]. The nature of mind is our consciousness in that mix accessing and communicating with the Cosmos of which it is quite capable of doing. While in the limitations of this time limited dimension we are too distracted by all the bells and whistles, all the intrigue we encounter here, that attract us then distract us from reality.)

The ideas and concepts propounded by the foregoing I first encountered in the AA program. “Turn it over, step out of its way as you let your Higher Power take care of your addiction problem,” they said. I saw it again studying Judaism, the religion I chose to follow half way into my life. Martin Buber said it best in his book I and Thou. I then found it codified in Buddhism. It is there the product of the Mysticism of the Orient.

Putting it into simplistic language it might be said this way: Life is actually good for us, the bad of life included. The determination produced by the tensions of the good and the bad, the purposeful and non-purposeful and all of the situations forcing our decisions, the experience of all of them are what we need to be able to ultimately see what we are supposed to see. That view is of the “Greater Existence” our life is meant to direct us to so we can act on it to our benefit having lived.

My manner of discovery went like this:

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) prompted my introduction to what I have come to believe are the ways and means to learn what it is all about. This is the way it really is!

I arrived at knowledge of what my life has been all about by putting it together into memoir then stepping back and looking at it. In the memoir I wrote:

We Have a Plan

We seem to follow a plan as we live. Whose plan, what plan, where did we get it?  I honestly do not know other than I know the plan is not mine. I know this because there are too many things in my life I would not have done, would not have planned to do, and am totally surprised by having done them. 

I arrive at this conclusion in this way: I look at the results of this plan as I have lived it. I am pleased. I would not change the result in any way. At best, at each juncture of the plan, each event I encountered following it, I had the choice of accepting the direction in which I was urged or refusing to take that course. The times I have followed the plan I obtained the best result.

What I learned applied in the context of this topic is that my life included more than myself in the living of it. There was a hand other than my own helping to live my life. This is seen in the decisions I made, why I made them, and the purpose that revealed by where these decisions took me. The end result was to my benefit, and in many ways was in spite of me were the choice to have been mine.

This discovery of mine is significant in this respect. A purposeful bias accompanies me in the exercise of my conscious interaction in my life. It seems the bias is the exercise of a power the source of which is not in me. This power seems active in all of us, guiding, directing and challenging us.

The significance of this as it regards the topic of this series of essays has to do with recognizing a bias going on in the process of our conscious interacting in our world which is not singularly ours. It is as if there is a power active within us, patterning so much of what we are doing.

It is the presence of this power that can be seen in the way we think, the way we develop our powers of cognition and the how we interface our world using it.

We have the power to learn, the power to share, the power to make more of what we have in this process we use in confronting the world, interacting with it and with each other.

It seems like we are all programmed in the same way from birth to death in the use of our capacity for sentience and cognition. We use it in a practical way, in different ways through stages of our lives, and use it to survive within this strange framework of time and space in which we find ourselves.

I have discussed this process and proclivity in a number of blog posts previously. One of my first posts was ESSAY:LIMITS BY DEFINITION January 14, 2009. Click on it to read it.

In this essay I speak of reality and interacting in what we sense reality to be. Centering on how we interact using the marvelous machine we know as our brain. We learn with our brain, store what we learn in our brain, make short cuts to remember what we learned and extrapolate the data assembled into a more meaningful whole from which we go on learning.

It is fascinating looking at the pragmatic way we use this power that is ours, use it for our purposes and expedite the process doing so.

What the essays discusses fits so well into the theme of this series of essays. It is as though we follow a predetermined path. This path brings us into this world naked, without a clue of how to get along in it. We are however equipped with a great tool box starting with those looking out for us, the nurturing they give us. Next in the tool box is the talent, the intellect, the wonder and the inclination to learn and become familiar with everything about us. Next we use the talent we have to build on all that we have learned to learn even more.

Through all of this we find ourselves first inquiring and then planning what will I be when I get big? We complete the training and the education to get to where we become whatever that is to be. We then enter the middle period of our time here being what it is we became. That includes serving all of the operating plans for the one or many things we have become, from spouse to job and all in between.

During this time we all do what is to be done almost automatically. Not a great deal if any thought goes into it. The process does get us to the point of having done all that seemed expected and now we have time. It is this time that is given to either holding on to what has been acquired, on to who or what we have become wishing only to continue that.

If we are lucky, or blessed, or whatever, we lose that urge to be, to acquire and all that goes with it. We enter that field named “Why.” It is here in this field our needs have slipped away and we want to know the meaning of all of this. Why am I here? What is this time/space we occupy? Is that all or is there more? Has there been purpose in being here? The questions are endless.

What happens to us is this: No longer in need, no longer part of that war, we look above our foxhole to see what is really out there. The many of us blessed, able to raise our heads up and look, and ask, arrive at this point from many different paths.

My path has been all of my life, finally losing all to disease, and finding as result all that is there to be had which far exceeds in value anything in this life that had distracted me from it.

My point is: I am the jackass led to water but I knew not to drink. My master hit me over the head with a hammer whereupon I figured it out all too quickly put my head down and drank!

The Way it looks and the Way it really is!

REVISED ON 3/13/2012 AT 11:56 am CDT

A writer named Robert Lanza takes the cosmology of space, the pathology of cognition and surmises within that context along with many other factors, like Schrödinger’s Cat, that the world is not as we believe it to be. He calls this his theory of Biocentrism.

At the end of this essay is a part taken from Wikipedia giving a cursory explanation of Biocentrism. The theory is essentially as follows:

Those things observed by us to be outside of us are not controlled by the confines of space and time as we believe them to be. Starting with the fact they are movement captured by us as stationary material in the instant of time we make our observation of them, they are as we observe and appear to us to be no more than the observation we make of them.

Although occupying the cosmology of what constitutes all of that in existence; add to that the separate universe from which we are observing that existence; we  can draw this conclusion:  that which we observe is not necessarily bound by either the time or space limited universe we currently occupy. That time/space universe limits what we see but does not limit the reality of what is.

From there Lanza asserts the control we can exercise over what we observe by observing it with the particular characteristics in which we make our observation of it we thereby seem to create it. All we do is generate it into this dimension, we have no proof one way of the other of it existing elsewhere.

Deepak Chopra a kind of Renaissance Transcendentalist and New Wave Thinker, speaks of our power over the objects outside of us much in the same way, however for other reasons. He takes what he believes to be the extrinsic properties of them and us and speaks of what we can evoke from between and within the communion of both.

In many ways this is not unlike the existential existence derived by the encounter between Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Much of the same thought permeates writing on Buddhism and premises in foundation from beliefs of other Eastern Systems of Philosophy and Thought.

The bottom line is this: boiled out, so much of this is the same, not simple, but uniform in its basics. It is the same whether looked at through Western eyes or Eastern eyes, from whatever spiritual discipline; the same conclusions are reached when all is reduced down to the essentials.

The technically adept West believes this is all there is. The rest is poppycock. Science, Religion, Philosophy, it is all time limited material, serially evolved and or projected! All of the rules discovered about it with all of those yet to be discovered, absolutely determine it and by determining formulate it absolutely as this: Everything we know occupies space passing through time from a start to a finish.

But then there is the East, the reverse or mirror image of the West in so much of this. The concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc. see things quite differently. I can only speak with a small amount of authority having studied Buddhism.

I was educated and trained in the Western tradition. I found Buddhism as an important subject of study after a lifetime of an existential search of “What’s it all About?” I could not find a complete answer in the Western Traditions.

I put what I learned into book form the title of which is From AA to AD, A Wistful Travelogue available at Amazon. Click on the title to go there. It is from the conclusions I made in writing this and other material, including a memoir that preceded the book, in which I concluded it all boiled down to the same thing.

There is more that we can see, there is more than we can see. Living this life is a period given to discovering all we can see or what does not appear on the face of things.

The forgoing is purposeful and fits the theme of my overall topic “There is more that the eye can see” in this respect:

Appearance allows us to see our way in the world one way, that way being tied up with things of the world. Such things like: How Much Money do Have? What will I be remembered for? All of these have to do with what I acquired in the world. This is appearance generated in and by a space/time limited dimension. Like its dimension it has no more basis in reality more than any thing else in the dimension. Ii is illusion just like all the rest of this dimension. Therefore, in the end, it has no value to us. The value of it is in the way and why it happened on our journey through. The lessons from it are more the essential value than the occurrence itself.

Looking at the essentials of life we see the value of our lives. Values can be many things, such as: Who have I helped? What have I done for others? For what kind of good have I used my talents?

One such Essential is what I see at the end of my road. In my case I see me struck down by the horrible disease with which I am afflicted. Carrying me to this Essential awakening is the background I have had, the talents I gained professionally, the family I nurtured, and failed to nurture, the method for living successfully as I learned in AA. The negatives and the positives of my past life’s experience brought me to my moment of truth asking what am I to do about this intrusion Dementia has been to my life. Terrible as it is can I convert that make it matter? Undertaking to Make it matter has been the fulfillment my life was yearning for.

******

ROBERT LANZA:

THEORY

Lanza argues that the primacy of consciousness features in the work of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Bergson.^[7] He sees this as supporting the central claim that what we call space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects.^[8] 

Lanza argues that biocentrism offers insight into several major puzzles of science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, and the fine tuning of the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe as we perceive it.^[2]According to a Discover magazine article adapted from Lanza's book, “biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do sinceEinstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago.”^[9]

Lanza's theory of biocentrism has seven principles:^[10]

1.     What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2.     Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3.     The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4.     Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5.     The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatial-temporal logic of the self.

6.     Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7.     Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.