(selections from J20071218)

No complete entities, other than all.

• ‘all’ – a word for comprehensive unity. 
• whether unity IS outside the head AS it ‘is’ inside the head may be questioned, but it seems a healthy idea.
• Having a word for “the whole” does not make it an “accurate” idea.

I, as Manu, am not a complete entity, if an “entity” is understood as something separate from its surroundings.

This is similar to saying that “separation” is a relative term. 

I remember the first time I wrote on paper that I was not Manu anymore.  A budding consciousness of identity and lack of identity.  I am far older than Manu, although age may not be an unquestionably appropriate category, since I have also never been born.

“Ego-1” is “Manu”.  “Ego-1” may often most easily be identified with a person’s given name, birth name, the name a person is typically called by friends, family, acquaintances; it is a persona.

It is important that we grow out of Ego-1 as we grow up.  First Ego is a fine way of primary education, but it is incomplete.  We gain orientation and familiarity with our bodies, our families, clans, social circles, communities, cities, states, countries, world, etc., in continuously expanding circles.  We eventually are to realize that our “individuality” is, from some perspectives, an illusion – even if a fine one, a helpful one, a necessary part of a process, and not always or completely an illusion. 

The word “individual” is from Middle Latin “indīviduālis,” equivalent to Latin “indīvidu(us)”, meaning “indivisible.”  As we should know, we really ARE divisible, conventionally speaking.  We are not really “individuals.”

It is fine and well for someone to identify with first ego and say, “I am separate from you, from my environment.”  But eventually, it is important to learn that we are also NOT separate.

Here are some perspectives concerning you, ego-1, the conventional ego:

• You are temporary.  i.e. Ego-1 is temporary.
• You, as primary ego, will most likely die – that is to say, cease to exist in a way that retains your current distinguishing persona, traits, qualities, characteristics.
• Even apart from dying, you are constantly changing.  In many ways, you are not the same you from one second/hour/day/year/decade/century to the next. 
• You are a complex structure, consisting of many parts.  In some real sense, you are not one, but many.
• Most of the time, your heart beats, your lungs breath, your blood circulates, your digestive system operates, and your cells function without conscious effort or guidance, so often without consciousness period.  Your consciousness (primary) is a mere part of the largely automated system that is your body, which itself is part of a larger system.
• Body facts to illustrate the constantly changing nature of bodily ‘self’:
• A 70 kg body would have approximately 7x1027 atoms - that is, 7 followed by 27 zeros. Of this, almost 2/3 is hydrogen, 1/4 is oxygen, and about 1/10 is carbon. These three atoms add up to 99% of the total.[1]
• In a study published in the Annual Report for Smithsonian Institution in 1953, scientists found that 98 percent of our atoms are replaced each year.[2]
• A typical human body is estimated to contain approximately 100 trillion cells.  So many of these cells are constantly being replaced.  Consider the following:[3]
• The average age of all the cells in an adult's body may turn out to be as young as 7 to 10 years.
• Cells from the muscles of the ribs, taken from people in their late 30's, have an average age of 15.1 years.
• The average age of cells in the main body of the gut is 15.9 years.
• The cells lining the stomach last only five days.
• Red blood cells, after traveling nearly 1,000 miles through the circulatory system, last only 120 days or so on average.
• The epidermis, or surface layer of the skin, is recycled every two weeks or so.
• An adult human liver probably has a turnover time of 300 to 500 days.
• The entire human skeleton is thought to be replaced every 10 years or so in adults.
• The heart as a whole is generating new cells, but no one had measured the turnover rate of the heart's muscle cells by the time of this article.
• Brain cells were under debate at the time of the article.  Some areas do generate new cells.  Cells from the visual cortex, however, seem to be as old as the person.
• About the only pieces of the body that last a lifetime, on present evidence, seem to be the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens cells of the eye and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart.
• Aging may occur because (a.) the DNA accumulates mutations and its information is gradually degraded, (b.) the DNA of the mitochondria lack the repair mechanisms available for the chromosomes, and/or (c.) the stem cells that are the source of new cells in each tissue eventually grow feeble with age.[4]
• “People behave their birth age, not the physical age of their cells, [because] a few of the body's cell types endure from birth to death without renewal, and this special minority includes some or all of the cells of the cerebral cortex.”[5]
• If you were without other humans, a.) you probably would not survive long, and b.) you probably would not reproduce.  You are not independent in any absolute or long-term sense.
• You cannot live apart from air, water, food.  You are constantly in flux.  You are constantly exchanging material substance with your environment.  Thus, you are not separate from your environment, but you are part of it, and it is part of you.  Identity expands now. 
• As much as you are your body, you are air, water, earth, chemicals, atoms, etc.
• As much as you are mind, you are your body and your environment.  Your mind is not separate either.
• Your consciousness itself, you did not choose, conventionally speaking.  Nor do you ultimately control it, conventionally speaking.  You are driven by desires for life, food, sex, pleasure, rest, love, et cetera.  You may say that you choose whether or not to pursue certain desires, but the desires themselves spring up within you beyond your choice or control.  No matter what you ever do, you are serving your chemistry, which is part of the universe’s chemistry.
• Abstractly: What is in your mind is what is outside of it.
• What is in your mind is what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel. 
• And what do you see, hear, smell, taste, feel?  Your environment, self. 
• Your character is a ‘creation’ of your environment.
• Nothing is “your own.”[6]  Your body-mind-character self is a complex deriving from your parents and your environment.  i.e. You are an evolving morph of your parents and your environment in combination. 
• If I am this sentence, I am inside you, part of you, or more simply … you.

You cannot wall yourself off from the This of which you are part.[7] 

While you cannot escape yourself, you are also elusive, slippery, ephemeral.  You are an oxymoron, a sharp dull.

What to learn?  Two things, or three:

1. You do not exist.
1. “It cut itself into smaller and smaller pieces, until it found that nothing was really there at all”
2. You are everything, in the broadest possible sense.
3. You do, of  course exist, and You are simply you.

And all are true, even if from different perspectives and definitions.

And I think all are critically important.

Ramifications:

• We are all in This together.
• We are not ultimately separable from one another.
• The true best interest of the temporary “individual” is the best interest of the whole, atemporal/omni-temporal.
• You have a part to play in everyone’s well-being, and everyone has a part to play in yours.

What am I saying?

Get beyond ego-1 and finder a greater self to serve.

Stretch.

- - - - -   - - - - -   - - - - -  

So are there two levels of consciousness? 

One - conventional,

One - that which is inherent in All?

The universe as a plant:  we are flowers of consciousness.

Nature sometimes seams to me to be all in a dream-like state, sometimes trying to wake up.  Nature seems to have forms of dementia, schizophrenia (in the etymological sense of the word – split mind). 

Her consciousness is split into so many pieces; each of our neural systems is part of it. 

Scattered, split. 

Is She awake, asleep? 

 - - - - -  

All the religions are attempts.  Let them offer windows, but not tie back.  Windows, not fetters.

As I said long ago, “words are not themselves the things to which the words refer,” but signs, symbols, indications.  All words are Game.  They are “true” only in that they are part of Truth.  Truth is only “comprehended” in part.  By necessity.  Truth as a whole is not an object to be grasped, but is the only subject, something we must be.  – and something we are, all the time, all together, in every way, without beginning, without end.

I liked it when the Old Boy said, “He who knows doesn’t say, and he who says doesn’t know.”

- - - - -

[1] Statistics from http://education.jlab.org/qa/mathatom_04.html .

[2] From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11893583 .

[3] “Your Body Is Younger Than You Think.”  New York Times.  August 2, 2005.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

[6] Except everything.

[7] Some people like to call This ‘God.’  Other people do not.  Either is fine.  Both are names for the metanomenal, in a sense.  If one adopts the “God” term, one should just be aware of the distinctions between this God and its lesser mythological/religious manifestations, which are mere personalities.