That there are trees, forests and rivers, valleys, oceans and rocks to trip ourselves on, all testify to a world that is real, substantive. Through our senses, we perceive this universe composed around us, seemingly fine tuned to human and any life. Composed, when looked at in a miniscule way, of dancing quarks and leptons, subatomic particles that appear and disappear with observation, we never can know the absolute position or velocity of these small building blocks that unfold into the larger world.
There are some philosophers in the distant past who felt the essential substance of life was water. Heraclitus, the ancient thinker, said we can never step into the same river twice. He was correct there are constant changes occurring, eddies and flows, pebbles moving this way and that, rocks overturning from the push of waters, and erosion of the banks, all make it a fine example of the foundations our universe springs from.
The miracle to me is, as the very small, water-behaving, or even fire-behaving essence congeals into matter, it congeals and becomes stable, predictable on our human scale of things. It’s not like the first break in a billiards game, where the potential of the paths of the balls are almost unpredictable, it is more like mid game, one ball sitting on the edge of the cup which when approached by a cue ball with back spin, will drop right in every single time, with no scratch ball even.
Perhaps the most interesting facet to human life is our ability to perceive and reason. Before us, lie great thinkers who recognized a great divide between mind and matter. We may have an idea of the perfect chair and even attempt to manufacture one. But that ‘matter-ed’ chair will eventually break, or chip from wear, while the ideal chair will live on permanently, forever almost. Besides ideality, there is the time factor that poses a divide between mind and the world around us. We see that due to the arrow of time and entropy, everything in our universe has a definite birth, a maturation, and a ‘death’. I use ‘death in the particular, as all energy is conserved and really the matter is just transformed into something that transcends what it couldn’t achieve in it’s previous state. But I digress. The point is, in our minds, we can strongly think of an apple rising from the ground, floating to the branch and twig of it’s tree, when in reality, we know this is impossible. A man who is aging to his fifties can recall his childhood, even imagine things in the past or future. The arrow of time doesn’t apply to mind, and I say thankfully! How static things would become, how uniform and bland, if we were stuck in the moments of passing time. It would be like viewing individual frames, still lifes in slow succession, as opposed to being allowed to make of reality a movie being played at willed and various speeds. We know if we want time to pass, we can get busy doing something, and if we want it to slow, we can calm our activity.
But wait. Are there two main facets to reality then, as opposed to one, those two factors being mind and matter? William James found certain pure experiences to be absent of this duality. If one is stabbed by a sharp object, the experience and thought of it are the same. Painful and unpleasant. If one beholds something beautiful, they are always moved and lifted. In both cases, the outside objects, objective, line up with the interior subjective experience. There becomes a common consciousness between the knower and the known. Thiis, what James called ‘pure experience’, to me is a unifying bridge between the wide gulf of mind and matter.
Though pure experiences may be limited, and the rest the time we have the gulf between perfect ideal thought of chairs, and those manufactured, on perhaps more occasions than we admit, reality becomes One, not dual. Our inner reality tunes into our outer reality, destroying the perceiving subject an perceived object. These then, are moments of clarity, although they can be as unpleasant (being stabbed) as they can be pleasant (beholding something particularly beautiful.)
