We are Process
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Allen Watts: The Nature of Consciousness
Setting the Spirit's Course
It is late in Santa Marta. I have been up compiling travel information for hours. I thought to meditate to some Allan Watts and instead of drifting off, there awoke a ready spirit in an exhausted body.
He spoke of the myth of the ceramic world, tracing our idea of the world as "made or fashioned" back to the book of Genesis, and walked through the steps Papa Intellect Western Thought has taken with this ultimately unsatisfactory view of the world. [I've provided the video if these steps interest you] Ultimately we reach a stage where we posit the universe as something different. Rather than being made, we are the living idea that exploded outwards from a Big Bang. Which is just to say a moment in which this world, all life, proceeded from. We are the furthest point of a lightning crackle reaching outwards 20 billion years to this moment, which we all share as one. We were not created, separate from cats and chimneys and toaster ovens. The world is simply such that such as these would come to be. This leaves us to think of ourselves and our world like a can of paint, thrown against a white wall and dribbling down. And now is simply as far as the dribble down has reached.
The notion of identifying ourselves as process rather than object, ought to relieve us of the pestering question we otherwise are obliged to ask ourselves: What does it mean to be a human being? Under a process framed world view, the worthier question is what is the world? And the first and perhaps only thing we can say about the world is that it is a world that peoples people.
Somewhere once, I head the world, and by necessity our consciousness of it, described as water flowing in a river downstream. When the river reaches the edge of the cliff, it splits apart into tiny little individual droplets, with little sense of our previously harmonic direction. If this sense of separateness is what it means to be human, then we have no reason to fear either death or the loss of our humanity.
But of course all of this is just myth designed to tear us free of a more flawed myth. It does nothing to posit a new purpose for our lives. We must take the next step and say:
The meaning of life is to better know the world's nature through our experience within it. If one finds this learning to one's enjoyment, then by God LIVE!
Make of it what you will.