BEING THE TIGER
This section only provides background for whatever it might be that penetrates us occasionally, an epiphany as though we were struck by lightning. How we understand it depends on what we think our creature nature really is.
Our understanding of the human body, where it came from and how it works, has changed dramatically. No longer are we seen as puppets who have somehow come to life, due to some transcendent force in the sky — usually imagined as a human-like God who connects with us through breath or fertility.
Now our understanding is that we are an Emergence from the whole of infinite existence, creatures that have resulted from multi-millennial forces interacting over immense time spans. Sub-atomic quantum mechanics expressed in DNA-defined living beings have — through evolution and chance — survived and accumulated into the beings we are. Death is defined as the end and dispersal of consciousness, but the “end” is only an illusion produced by time. In quantum terms, there is no time. At the quantum level everything keeps existing.
We know we are here because of the preceding versions of life — including maybe a hundred hominins long “gone” — and therefore we expect that we are evolving towards some new version of ourselves that is better equipped to survive in a world that is constantly unfolding. But we are acutely aware that we may end as a species.
In the last century we have been through many developments in the understanding of minds as supported by the subtle configurations of bodies as the most likely ground of change. We will not sprout wheels. Many people, particularly those demographics feeling that they are losing numbers and powers, are willing to force their own version of “de-evolution” by going to economic, social and martial measures to eliminate “others” whom they consider weak and unsuited for survival — maybe just undeserving.
Since all life is one, all connected, this determination to have control may destroy all of us. Others speak of love and compassion, wanting to save everyone, considering even the malevolent and destructive to be redeemable, as the Universalist Christians claim. But they may preserve the seeds of what destroys us. How can we sort this?
Looking at my descriptions of Evil I see that it is not love that is lacking but empathy, the ability to feel what it is to be someone else and feel what they feel. If the torturer felt what the victim was feeling, how could he or she continue? I’ve known a lot of people, even virtuous liberals, who did not have the ability to empathize, operating rather on principle or approval from others. Perhaps it is a step of evolution that their genes have not provided.
Or maybe it’s a lack of cultural endorsement and training, because a sub-culture is counting on “forting up” behind walls to preserve their kind. The essence of a Method acting course is learning how to “become” someone else by assuming their physical characteristics, knowing their context, and drawing on appropriate memories recorded in the actors’ own bodies.
The idea is to become the “Other” and thereby understand them from the inside out, rather than judging them from the outside. Jump over the walls. This has enormous value because so many stories are about attempts by an individual to fit into a “place” in the environment, often one constituted of other people. What must one do to survive? We need to know. Which stories can teach us.
Yet for many survival is best provided by not knowing. The famine-caught mother lagging across the desert with her dead baby on her hip and an empty container in her hand has stopped thinking. It is her body that keeps going, doing what it has been doing until it drops. Knowing would do her no good.
For centuries we have valued brains over bodies in what we called “Enlightenment.” The problem is not to eliminate rational logic, but to extend it by recovering all previous dimensions, some of them going back in time as far as fish. Now that we have re-united flesh and thought, we begin to think of consciousness, awareness of the world, and reflexivity, our ability to think about how we are thinking, to see the consequences of what we are doing, and to reflect on the effectiveness of it.
Something like extended empathy has got to be the next step in evolution. Awareness joins consciousness. The proven plasticity of brains gives us the ability to understand “again,” in a new way.
An individual creature follows a line of development. The infant masters its body and senses. The child extends attachment to family, then friends, and then community. Gradually empathic awareness of others opens to other people, other forms of life, and the planet itself. What comes after that?
Does quantum mechanics provide the same kind of mysterious forces that once were thought to come from the supernatural? Natural as quantum mechanics may provably be, the forces cannot be understood except through technology and math that are not natural — in fact, take years to learn about. Quantum theory is invisible to the senses, only perceptible in the brain by reason. Yet we see that the senses are what organize us. How do we reconcile them?
One objection to the loss of God is the assumption that without authority we won’t know what to do. If God didn’t forbid very bad them, we’d do very bad things. We’d take children from their parents like Boko Haram or the US Government. We’d hoard money and torture extradited enemies, even kill innocent people. But empathy, which is an ability that develops inside people, is a strong moral corrective that protects survival of ourselves and the world. It is not God but empathy that guides us.
What does it feel like to be a tiger? This idea does not call on us to love the tiger, but to save the tiger by understanding what it needs to survive from inside — what the tiger needs. This is more than just embodiment but begins to be incarnation — being meat — in the way that Christians claim that the theoretical All-Powerful but not-quite-real became human flesh, a call for God to understand by inhabiting. This does not mean we should literally eat smart people in order to be smart. But it would be good to feel what the tiger senses as it walks in the jungle, to feel the jungle and sense meaning in it. The jungle is a goblet that holds the tiger, which is the wine.
“Besides logical schemes and sense perception we have come to recognize that there is also a powerful felt dimension of experience that is prelogical, and that functions importantly in what we think, what we perceive, and how we behave.” (Eugene T. Gendlin)
How do we keep order in our existence without simply repeating whatever we already knew from before? How can we experience our lives anew without imposing rules from another time and place, another person? It appears that physiological thought at the molecular level is based on sensation — therefore it is necessary to be aware and to use the sights, sounds, tastes to make “symbols” or metaphors, which are the means of thinking — amounting to “felt meanings.”
But “felt” does not necessarily mean present in awareness as words or even concepts. The phenomenon is more like a “gut feeling” or intuitive subconscious understanding of what is harmonious and “right”. It is something “experienced” but not concrete, a wholistic interaction with the world. Art strives to explain this, but empathy cannot be bought. Nor can the holy.
“Experiencing underlies every moment’s special occurrences of living. . .Experiencing is a constant, ever present, underlying phenomenon of inwardly sentient living.” (Gendlin) It is an aspect of consciousness but a large part of it is unconscious. We value brains and logic too much, “showing our work” but neglecting the rest of the body and its interaction with the world. We value consciousness too much, blocking out the rest of our experienced identity in what is never conscious, simply recorded and reacted to by our flesh, all that rushing of fluids carrying molecules, all that elasticity of muscles, all the electromagneticochemical messages sending code.
We refuse incarnation (physical being) in hopes of identity immortality when we know very well that we are borrowed from the universe and will be returned after we have added our being to the universe. The real meaning is in relationship to every element, every muon or quark, every song or poem, every mark we experience or create anew, because that is the reality of survival. This is managed, in part, by creating liminal moments, worship. Sometimes, maybe because of some quantum mechanical shift, a moment of lightning strikes through us, an epiphany.
