Friday May 27, 2022; 9:57 AM EDT
- I perceive a time when grandpa would get down on the floor and tickle me until I cried, then I begged for more. A time when my good friend Dave looked me in the eyes, then gave up his life to the water devil. A time when Mt. St. Helens blew her top, and my future wife melted into my arms. A time when my daughters became women and brought forth daughters of their own. A time when I grew old and melted back into Earth and the Moon, and the Sun and the Stars.#
- All of this is within my consciousness, and the time is now.#
- We are frequently admonished to live in the present- in the now. But honestly, I find this difficult to do. Yes, I can live in the now when I am in the flow; but more often than not, the now contains memories of the past; and anxieties and hopes about the future. Einstein taught us about Relativity, and Star Trek taught us about the Space/Time Continuum. But I think the story of our embodied minds teaches us what it means to be human.#
- From the eastern sciences of consciousness, we have learned how to meditate. How to observe our minds and the thoughts that arise spontaneously. How to quiet our minds, if only for a little bit of time. In the western tradition, we have used the scientific method and technologies like magnetic resonance imaging to look into how our minds operate biologically. We are beginning to understand our embodied minds as vast neural networks that are structurally coupled to our Earthly environments, each with a unique history. Consciousness appears to emerge in a flow of fractal neural patterns; sensations cohere into feelings, which can become moods forming states of mind. Human language allows thoughts to emerge that can cohere into ideas, flowing into attitudes and worldviews about life.#
- This is a huge simplification, an abstraction. And that is what we humans are capable of doing with our embodied minds. We have evolved to tell stories, to abstract our experience of the real world- precisely because the story tellers before us survived and reproduced to tell there stories to us. And I think that at its most fundamental level, it is a story about time. About human time. It is a story about life- because Life eats Life. Like our stories, we have a beginning, a middle and an end. We are connected to all of life- reaching deep into the past, and perhaps deep into the future. Our consciousness arises embodied in our body, with a beginning, a middle, and sadly, an end. I believe our Consciousness ends with the end of our body.#
- I perceive a time when the way of life of indigenous people came to an end and they were forced onto reservations. A time when the sun set on the British Empire. A time when the Roman Empire fell. A time when the civilization on Easter Island collapsed. A time when Western Civilization collapsed. A time when the Human Race overshot the carrying capacity of Earth. A time when we tipped the climate into a runaway greenhouse causing extinction of human beings and most of complex life.#
- All of this is within my consciousness, and the time is now.#
- Which is why sometimes I wish I could just simply live in the here in now, but that seem to be an idealized goal that only a few sages on mountain tops manage to achieve. We ordinary humans bring forth into our consciousness concepts of time as a means to survive, reproduce, and tell our story. We are able to learn from those that came before us from past time, and project our understanding to those that will follow us in future time. And we can act in the here and now to change the course of events that will flow into a possible future.#
- I think these thought because I am driven by instinct to do so. I want my children, and all children down the line to live a good life as I have. With their heartbeats beating to the rhythm of their feet, with blood coursing through their veins as they make love and create new stories for their children. I want them to have all the time in the world.#
- I perceive a time when we look out upon the storm gathering on the horizon and collectively decide to change our minds. A time when we realize Earth is our only home and we better take care of her. A time when we understand we may be alone in the Universe, the first species born to a planet that can language with each other. A time when we learn to fit our needs into the needs of the rest of life, and become a regenerative life force. A time when our species as a whole enters into deep geological time, in conversation with this beautiful planet we call Earth.#
- All of this is within my consciousness, and the time is now.#