THE WOMB/WORLD
The world is a womb. Every person is created by experience, partly chosen and partly imposed, always inescapable, always in relationship. Our experience now teaches us a completely new way of thinking about human beings. I will try to describe what that is, and — more importantly and as a product of my education — look for the implications about the change in terms of meaning and behavior.
First, humans as a species has developed over time from a sequence of small changes, most of which preserved elements of everything that came before. We are continuous with everything that came before. We are not different or separate. Second, all life forms arise from the surface of the planet, the interaction of molecules and the forces that affect them, mostly as they exist in water. The oceans are the amniotic fluid in which our origins float. We capture the same fluid formula in our blood.
Living beings develop and exist within a narrow range or stream of conditions, which exist as if between banks, one that is “not enough” and the other that is “too much.” If life goes up either of those two banks, it ends. Some of those sides are obvious, like temperature, toxics, violence — but others are subtle and slow maladjustments, like salt, blood pressure, and other dissolved features that carry things like oxygen.
The point of all this is the whatever else life is, it is a stream and it cannot be stopped without ending existence. The Euro/Xian idea of creating a steady state in which a person or nation can rest without change is a phantasm. It doesn’t exist. If a living being dies, it stops. It does not translate but keep identity. Death/stop means dispersal.
The next powerful fantasy is that a single human being can exist without relationship to anything else. Currently we entertain the notion that even a part of a human can be kept alive as a “brain in a bucket” — a person made into a computer with no hunger, no sex, no secrets. — those inconvenient features. This cannot be done.
In actuality we all come from crowds and hordes of people who moved through places and times. Throughout life we stay in relationship with hundreds, not only in thought, but usually as necessary suppliers and consumers of what we do, which was taught to us by our experience when we first formed from that little ball of first cells, the blastocyst, which without a uterine wall to nourish it and locate it, will simply die. The warmed and fed chemical ability to respond will create the new tissue that can carry heart/lungs and brain.
Not only the DNA links and bits will affect the results, but also the isotopes and timing of the nourishment being delivered, plus the many wave patterns of the mother’s existence from her heart rate to her voice. Being pushed out of her body does not end gestation, but forces the new being to continue developing in a detached world, hopefully softened by receiving arms and eyes. This is the early part of a lifelong arc of exchanges and progresses.
M. R. O‘Connor’s book entitled “Wayfinding” points out that the instrumentations that have expanded our consciousness and control of the world into an infinite expanse we can hardly grasp has also ironically interfered with the subtlety and learning of our own bodies. But as we become more able to look into the business of cells, we also find new kinds of them. We knew so much without knowing we knew it.
“Scientists have found multiple types of cells in the hippocampal circuit: head-direction cells discharge in the way our head is pointed on the horizontal plane, and grid cells fire as we roam the environment, building a coordinate system for navigating. Place cells fire at a unique location in space, what is called the “place field”.
We’re told that monkeys have “gaze-direction cells” but rodents do not. Different animals can differ in the developmental timing and content of their hippocampus, the key organ. Though mammals have two of this feature, they are never discussed in plural and neither are the possible differences between the two sides. A focused book, “The Hippocampus as Cognitive Map” by Lynn Nadel and John O’Keefe (listed by Amazon as costing nearly a thousand dollars) contains much basic information that leads to issues like childhood amnesia (the brain’s capacity to register hasn’t developed yet) and lifelong but transmuting memory.
Our elegant and elaborate minds have developed from the need of one-celled microbes to pursue food, elude predators, and maintain a mini-chemical lab. Today we tend to think in diagrams, little maps, but O’Connor points out that in early days creatures didn’t draw maps, but simply remembered sequences associated with places. Even now in rural places you might be told: “go down this road until you come to a little bridge, then turn right and go until you see a dead tree and then . . .” In fact, a recent joke was a stranger being directed according to a “house trailer that used to be there”. A landmark can exist in memory only. But you had to be there, Charlie.
Our minds travel to places our physical selves could never go. We fly over the banks and streams into worlds we have assembled from what we know but that have no physical existence. Particularly in urban settings we are defined and guided by rules we made up about simple things like keeping to the right or knocking before entering. At the same time we can design and build something like the World Trade Towers over years, and knock them down again in minutes over issues that are barely understood by most people.
We have a literally irrational concern for babies, who have barely established identities much less participation in the world order, and for the disabled because they establish mental and emotional banks to our civilized lives. Kill too many babies or disabled people, and your loss may be next. Maybe even you. Until there are Hutu/Tutsie atrocities when your neighbor/friend comes over with a machete. The unreality of the ideas permit the reality of murder. This apparently begins at the level of apes, since chimpanzees have been seen marching off to make war on other chimps.
Where is the evolved sense for that? The banks of reason? Is the expulsion from the womb of the world what we mean by death when we say it is a kind of birth? But birth into dispersal in the world.
