I am only one...

Considering war

(I composed this essay as my contribution to a conversation initiated by a friend who is a combat vet talking about how he opposed the war, before during and after his service, but did his best while there to protect his comrades from harm.)

I believe that none of us have standing to pose in a safe place and criticize those who faced what we know only in theory. I think we cannot overdo thanks and honor to all those who served.

Also I believe we cannot overdo honor to those in a thousand places and thousands of years who did not go to war, but had war come to them. The mothers who used their bodies to try to shield their infants from the bombs; the children who scrabbled for food in the rubble; the doctors and nurses who worked to heal until they succumbed. Those who were brave and those who were overtaken by terror --- on any side of the lines (if there were lines) --- in VietNam, in Russia, in Germany, at Pearl Harbor, at Guernica, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, at Hiroshima, over and over again in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, France.

Those of us who have never seen our homes ripped apart by bombs, our neighbors slaughtered, our children and parents and lovers ripped apart by shrapnel --- we can easily forget the awfulness of war. We can fail to teach our children that war is unspeakably ugly. We can forget how lucky we have been so far.

War can look grand through the filter of distance and time. We can see the light in the eyes of the brave soldiers, and think that war is all about heroism, about passing a life test with high marks, proving oneself. War is especially seductive to our young men who yearn to do something brash and dangerous and glorious.

I have another good friend who served at the D-Day landing. He has kept contact with his fellow soldiers and has met with them regularly; they are his companions for life. His work after the war was in education, and he has spent much of his own time working for peace and helping develop programs to resolve conflicts. I once asked him if he thought any war was justified --- what about the war against Hitler? He said he thought there came a point in that conflict when war was inevitable, but it would have been possible to avoid getting to that point if enough people had determined that the costs of war are more horrible than the costs of a just peace.

Peace won't maintain itself. War provides tremendous profits in wealth and power to those who position themselves to profit; there will always be people willing to promote wars for that reason. Unless we speak out, are willing to be fools who throw ourselves against the machine, teach our children and grandchildren not to believe the speeches of the demagogues and the excitement of the trumpets and drums, war will happen again and again. We are fools if we think it will always happen somewhere else.

It will take the efforts of millions to stop wars, but it could be done. Wars are waged by humans; humans could stop them. How important is it to us? Picture yourself huddled in inadequate shelter under a bombing run, and then ask that question.

What is Mind?

Statement of the question:  How are we to make sense of "mind" --- that is to say, awareness, intelligence.  Is mind separate from body?  Is it evolved from some non-aware state, and if so, how did it ever get started?   

Or if it is separate from body, where does it come from?  and --- the big question grappled with by most religions and innumerable  folk tales and supernatural stories --- what happens to it when the body dies?

Logic, and the best working hypotheses I'd been able to develop about other aspects of life and being, told me that mind, awareness, is probably a physical quality rather than something else entirely.   And yet mind feels --- I feel --- quite different.  I can look at my hand typing away on this keyboard, admire the flexible way it moves and the many tasks it can handle, with no problem believing that it's a thing which evolved gradually from simpler forms, requiring no special explanation.   My eye likewise --- I see no problem in its gradual development from slightly sensitized cells to greater and greater sophistication. 

But awareness --- this "place," this Self, from which I look out, observe, and think about all else --- can that be explained in physiological terms?  can it be said to reside in the body --- in the brain?  Intuitively, it seems separate even from the brain.  Is intuition reliable on this?

I have a sense that I'm not the only analytically-minded person who's left this question off to the side, answered tentatively, but with a question mark remaining.  The biggest challenge to an evolutionary explanation was the question of how it would get started, what would be the evolutionary advantage?  It's easy to explain the survival benefit of complex reasoning (though in the end some of our less felicitous human ideas may do us right out of existence), but the complex stuff wouldn't have sprung into existence in full-force.  What is the mind-equivalent of the pre-visual patch of cells that were faintly phototropic?

Well, now I think I've got it.  My new hypothesis is that self-awareness comes before thinking, with the corollary that thinking is an elaboration of awareness.

The only drawback (and it doesn't bother me at all, though it will irritate those who want a huge gap between Homo sapiens and the "lower" animals) is that it goes waaaay back.

Picture the primordial pond and the multicellular creatures eating one another, and being eaten.  In the harsh environment promoting mutations, and the rapid turnover of generations speeding promulgation of the advantageous oddities, the beginnings of sight and scent arrive not long after self-propulsion.

If every now and then one of those small conglomerations of cells has a mutation that lets it differentiate what is itself from what is not itself, think of the advantage!  It can hide itself from a predator; or it can hide and pounce on its unsuspecting prey.  Not hard to believe that it, and its progeny and its variations, would tend to thrive.

Take that and 600 million years of development, and it's not astounding to have a self-aware thinking animal that can consider everything from space travel to genetic engineering to theology.  It wasn't inevitable; if it hadn't happened to happen we wouldn't be here to think about how amazing it is.  But here we are.

Yep.  I relinquish the idea that my mind is some different thing, outside natural explanation.  It's a little disappointing, but not too much so.   (Paul said "All this, just because we could hide!")

Speaking of mortality

Aging, sickness, and the possibility of death are issues I've thought about more and more  --- not surprising, since I and many of my friends are now in our 60s or beyond, and death has become an immediate fact or a near possibility for lots of folks I know and love.  When we were all younger, thinking about death seemed morbid.  But at my stage of life, it no longer seems morbid in the sense of life-denying or obsessive.  In fact, once we come to terms with the fact that life isn't going to last forever, we're motivated to spend our hours doing what feels meaningful. 

Beyond that sort of "Seize the day" philosophy, I've looked for a way of understanding life and death.  What follows is based on thought and theory, but the ideas led me to imagery which makes the end of life a much less disturbing prospect.   (For me, this understanding built gradually.  For Paul, who's far more intuitive than I am, it came as a profound image in a dream, and the logic came afterward.  I'm grateful to him for the galaxy-forming image.)

The whole of our universe --- including each of us --- is made up of the same physical elements:  oxygen and hydrogen in great quantities, with a lot of other elements.   We are  not really altogether distinguishable from the rest of the universe chemically.   The living beings and objects and even the air around us is made up largely of the same elements we're made of.   When I think of it that way, it becomes a little hard to picture what separates me out from all the rest.  In a quite literal sense, I really am one with the universe.

Watch a stream flowing over pebbles.  Here and there the water is caught into a whorl that spins for awhile in a motion that seems separate from the rest of the stream.  One of these whorls may be momentary, or it may move along with the stream and last for quite some time.   But eventually it melts back into the stream as a whole.

Look at smoke rising from a fire and you'll see something very similar.  A "bit" of the smoke is caught into a swirl which may move and rise and spin for some time, and then it's absorbed back into the motion of the whole.   

Watch a waterfall that's big enough for the water droplets to disperse as they fall, and you'll see that same thing again.

All those things have become my images of life and death.   A life is the whorl in the waterstream or the rising smoke, the momentary pattern in the falling mist of the waterfall.  Dynamic, even beautiful, but certainly not something that will last forever.   Also:  not something that is ever really separate from the whole, and when it ceases it is not gone, it is simply reabsorbed to become part of the whole.

I'd read many years ago that the cells or elements of our bodies aren't the same ones all through our lives; the molecules come and go, exchanged with the atmosphere around us, and over a period of months, there's no individual cell left of the body we started with.

What this says to me is that in an even more specific sense, we are never separate from the universe we are a part of.   I am a part of the ocean, the trees, the wind --- and some part of me has been, and will be again, a part of everything I see around me. 

Death is a name for the time when the elements that are (temporarily) me are reabsorbed back into the universe and stop being replaced.   The particular elements that were part of me at any given moment, including the moment of death, have all been elsewhere, and elsewhere is where "I" will be --- dispersed, a part of the smoke, the tree, the waterfall, the atmosphere.

I find that image satisfying, comforting, exciting.

That doesn't mean I'm tired of my life.   In fact, acknowledging my temporary status makes me more ready to know a range of experiences, and to treasure perceptions of many kinds --- certainly more ready to see the wonder and rarity of momentary beauty, this warm sunshine on my knee right now, the whoosh of a gust of wind through the trees, the glitter of light on a strand of spiderweb moving in a lighter breeze.  In the wide span of the universe, what an absorbing coincidence each moment is!

There are a couple of important pieces to this issue which I haven't fully worked out.  One is philosophical, and has to do with consciousness, the mind:  what is it, and how does it relate to the body?   I've read some treatises but so far none I've come to own.

The other is pragmatic and cultural, and has to do with body image:   why do we (especially "Western" cultures) so despise a body which is aging, being drawn by gravity, getting ready to rejoin the universe --- and can we change our minds (whatever they are!) and stop seeing those body changes as bad.   That's another post.