WHAT IS FELT MEANING?
I’m not trying to found a new religion or even form a congregation. I’m not doing therapy which by definition requires a second person to help investigate one’s system but not be destroyed by what is found nor deceived by relief. I’m not doing philosophy which is rational exploration of logical thought over a long period of time, using other people’s writing. Most people wouldn’t think of my inquiry as “religion” which they connect to institutions, experts, and buildings.
The best label I can find is “felt meaning.” It is inquiry into what the body and brain do with the constant input of electromagnetic or maybe magnetoelectromagnetic information carried by the senses — not just the five or six obvious senses, but also the hundred or more cellular monitors of specific influences like temperature, pressure, proximity, saline solution level, compass orientation and more, usually subtle and subconscious.
Our very being is as much determined by the stream of coded messages going through us as are the necessities of food and oxygen streaming through us. If any of this stops, we are dead. If we turn our attention to how we are “doing”, what we discover is “felt meaning.” It exists at the very edge of “consciousness” and probably is not accessible for non-humans, but all living creatures from the one-cell microbe to the President of the US are the product of this constant movement of the outside through the skin, in and back out again, after subtracting what is needed to be alive. This is plain fact.
All living beings began with the humble skin-enclosed basic microbe, and as evolution has preserved the best of the mutations through time, much of the previous version has survived as a platform for innovation. Thus the book called “Your Inner Fish,” and also the constant battle to learn how to handle every other version of life before us that has developed its own ways of coping, erupting through our best intentions.
It is accepted that the main ways of coping with danger are the alliterative “f’s”. Flight, Fight, Faint, and I would add, “Fawn.” Fawning on the powerful is not just for sycophants — it begins with infants charming mothers and puppies claiming care. Fainting or playing dead is a fav of reptiles. Flight works best for the littlest, so they become the Fleetest. What the thoughtful would like to say is “go Figure,” but that’s what you do AFTER the emergency.
Smaller and less obvious techniques by which the unlimited and “plastic” (meaning adaptive and morphic) mind preserves itself are things like forming habits to save conscious decisions, assumptions when you don’t really have enough evidence, repetitious compulsion whether or not the act worked last time, loss of memory, imitation of admired others, redundant mechanisms like PTSD flashbacks, and a lot of other things we really should know about.
We still can’t really control sex and violence, though laws and vigilance plus the general influence of calming and capture-capable communities help to keep them under control. The conventionalities accepted in one time and place might be quite different from those in another. That is, behavior that is outlawed by one culture may be ignored or even encouraged in another. The qualities that would save your life here might there cause your death by starvation, machete, predatory animals or traffic. This is easier if a consistent way of living is stable over a large area and over a long time, which is why it’s so very difficult in a time and place like ours, a mosaic of change.
One would like to think that the “best” could be defined as those who survive, but that’s redundant and arbitrary. Now that we have at least a limited amount of control over deciding the order of hierarchies, who are we to justify who gets to survive? The limits of being human are challenging when it comes to morality.
Few dimensions are as gripping as those that come to us through “the extended mind.” As momentous as the original “emergence” of mind and consciousness, is the ability of humans to empathize with those around them, which means a shared mind capable of handling far more information and forming emotional understanding of it.
This means a morality that is not only based on intimate attachment, making us love and protect our immediate family and befriended others, but also a much wider responsibility to all people. Beyond that, imagination can extend into animals and landscapes. We can speak for a stone.
But it also creates more dilemmas, more injustice, more uncontrolled and uncompensated tragedy. Our emotions have not evolved enough to handle so much. Many survive by limiting themselves to a small familiar world where people share values, but also risks. Is this another defense: the Familiar? It works until some larger force comes along and changes everything. Invasion, climate, disease — they wipe away so much. But Freezing is also destructive and ends up preventing growth and connection to the larger world.
Another solution is to create a world based on theoretical thought to be actual, like a particular version of the world, like Christianity based on the thought of one personality which was then subverted by Emperors and politics. Humans can invest so deeply in such a constructed world that they can no longer perceive the evidence of anyone else’s construct or even the consequences of their own assumptions.
But there is no safety in any constructed world and all human worlds are constructed. Our best hope for a moral future is the protected gestation of infants to at least the end of the third year and then the happy extension of their minds to increasingly include others of every kind. Sociopaths are easy to create in a world dependent on drugs, force, and wealth.
But the forces of creation work all around us. Consider these photos for meditation.
