Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Inner Peace

  • …that Peace which the world cannot give…

    …that Peace which the world cannot give…

    If you are a subscriber to the guilt ridden miseries of Western religion, then peace will indeed be unobtainable. Those who have been wise enough to hitch their wagon to the rather more useful philosophies of the East will tell you a very different story. The Order for Evening Prayer may be sublime but it does not offer peace.

    If I once believed it impossible to change one’s entire experience of life, and the mind itself, I was wrong.

    If I once fretted about free will, or its absence, I wasted my time.  Whatever worthy philosophers or earnest scientists might opine, I have discovered that I do have agency and that I can and have made my life my own.

    I have turned my mind: a personality once full of melancholy and guilt, pessimism and despair has now become something a little different.

    Not a sparkling wit perhaps, no genius or greatness.  No outrageous happiness or overwhelming abundance of energy and exuberance.  But a quiet peace, an acceptance of a life that is, no more longing for something different, or better. No longer questioning existence, mine or that of the world itself.

    No more seeking answers to impossible questions, no quest to see the mysterious face of an unfound god.

    I do not claim that there is an “I” a “me”, let alone a soul, an eternal existence in the sense of a continuance of whatever it is that has lived these 68  years.

    But I experience and therefore, to plagiarize Descartes, I am.

    And that has become enough.

    Each day starts with an hour’s meditation, a disappearance from the mundane, a flight to some far plane. A haze of quiet content.

    And then perhaps an hour or so of slow, languid exercise. Think Tai Chi or Yoga and you will be close enough, but mine is of my own making and I am my own master.

    To my surprise and great satisfaction I have discovered that my extended and gentle routine of exercise deepens and reinforces my meditation.

    My mind becomes filled with peace, joy even. Time seems to vanish.  Deep contentment fills my mind and my body.

    Endocannabinoids, say the scientists.  Some of us are apparently rather better at producing them than others and to my surprise I seem to be very proficient indeed.

    I have always exercised; an entire life has been spent in hills and mountains, walking and skiing in the Alps. Even now each day I will cycle or wander the fields and hedgerows for a few hours, with my stick and my thoughts.

    But this other stuff, this slow and extended stretching and reaching, using the body’s own weight, lying out under the dappled shade of a large quince tree – is altogether of a different nature.  Intensely slow, completely silent. Prolonged, without thought or words, a being, simply existing. And a mind, a soul, whatever you will, full of utter content.

    How would I explain it to someone who has not felt it, how must I put into words feelings which don’t really have the language to describe them.

    Do I exaggerate some may wonder, am I talking my own book to buoy myself up, to make something of myself which I am not.

    I do not, I am not, but take it as you wish. With a pinch of salt if it pleases you.  Or don’t. These days I only write when I have something pressing to say, some new discovery to record.  And I talk mostly to myself and for my own benefit.  But then if some may use my words to pull themselves from darkness into light as I seem to have done, I will be glad of it.

    I could of course state the usual caveats, in my still lawyerly fashion. That I may be sitting in the eye of a storm, or be perched on the edge of a treacherous and crumbling cliff without knowing it.

    But I will not, for I sense that they are no longer necessary.  While I do not expect to live in quiet content for the rest of my days, the scales have been removed from my eyes. I no longer look through the glass darkly. I know that I can find my way back, stumble out of the perennial blackness which has so often blighted my life.

    How has it come about? And why now, after so many terrible years?

    Why does anything happen in this vast unfathomable lottery, this life, this infinite and little understood eternity.

    In my case this change has arrived largely through acceptance, by refusing any longer to question, to seek. By giving up, if you like. By throwing my hands in the air and refusing to bother. By ceasing to complain about the iniquities of our species and by looking for good rather than evil.

    I have so often worried about my place, that I find myself in comfort and safety – in a state so very different to that so very many have to suffer.

    But perhaps with the right attitude I could find peace these days in a hut on some savannah or a rush house in a rain forest.

    I only know that I find man’s concerns so endlessly absurd, but that complaint or worry is futile and wholly counter productive.  Greed, brutality, envy – all the deadly sins – will likely always be with us. And to play one’s part properly is to do one’s best to avoid falling into those habits. To try to remain calm and non judgemental, to look around at our world with wry humour and to shrug one’s shoulders.

    Take me as you find me, believe my words or not. It is all one to me.

  • The Road to Nowhere

    The Road to Nowhere

    I could have said “Damascus” but I am ever wary of expressing any of my experiences, even metaphorically, in the idiom of any particular faith.

    As I have always taken great pains to point out, I am not a particularly good person. Or bad, come to that. Just a middle of the road and by now rather aged Englishman who has had a series of what others of a more conventionally religious persuasion might call revelations.

    It could of course be that I experience what I want to see or hear, or that which I expect. Although I do not believe that to be the case.

    It is by no means on every occasion I meditate that I seem to sense a different reality, perhaps a higher level of consciousness. It is highly unusual not to feel peace and warmth when I turn inward, but it is not every morning that I feel a connection with something other.

    Mornings are best for me. I wake, have a very large cup of coffee, flick through the headlines (ignoring the great majority of what is offered up as news) and then meditate for an hour. My mind in the morning is very clear and soon after waking, my mood is suitable. In the afternoon or evening I sometimes fall asleep when I meditate (although I am often unaware of my state) and my mind does not have that clarity it usually has first thing in the morning.

    I recall some time ago writing that I was often refused entrance at the gate to some alternate or other reality. That I would approach the gates and be refused entrance, usually by a form which seemed to be human. A black knight, once, in mediaeval armour plate would not let me pass. Wise men I had assumed were sages of some sort were unable to show me the way. All very symbolic – in a sense, perhaps I was not ready.

    More latterly, the human element seems to have disappeared but I am in some difficulty to describe what has taken its place. And yet I become irritated by those who talk of the inexpressible, the ineffable, the numinous. What I felt is describable in words; the difficulty may be that I am uncertain exactly what it is I felt. Feel. It is becoming clearer, more pressing perhaps but there is still a vagueness to it.

    In any event, this morning I did read one article of interest. The Guardian’s John Norton had written an article “OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it“.

    Now I have been a man of science in the past. An admirer of human ingenuity. Convinced like physicist Frank Tippler that the way to “god” is through science. I had always been somewhat impressed by Teilhard de Chardin – I still am. He was a scientist as well as priest and believed the universe’s purpose is to evolve to supreme consciousness, an omega point, unity with god. God will be ‘all in all’.

    But that article in the Guardian made me lean far further towards de Chardin and away from Tipler. And my meditation seemed to support the conclusion.

    I had been toying with an article entitled “Water into Wine” pointing out that the process is far from miraculous. And that the only surprise at Cana was the instantaneous nature of the transformation. Otherwise its just physics and chemistry. And these days no doubt, the process of creating C2H6O is pretty well instantaneous. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Big deal.

    But reading that depressing tale in the Guardian made me forcibly and strongly aware that I had simply missed the point. The point being that science has a great, gaping hole in it. It lacks a soul. It is bereft of meaning.

    Like so many tech Titans, Sam Altman claims to be a messiah, a saviour of humanity.

    “Most of them belong to the church of technocracy, of which Altman is a charismatic member. Devout members of this sect believe that the world is terminally screwed-up, and that the only way to fix it is with tech. They are ecstatic about AI because finally a technology has arrived that apparently could fix everything – economic growth, healthcare, productivity, education, even the climate crisis. Strangely, though, warfare seems to be missing from the list.”

    OpenAI seems to be backsliding on its previous insistence that its technology should not be used by the military. Hmm, how very depressing. Altman is seeking $7 trillion and seems to be set on owning the entire world.

    And then I closed my eyes and drifted off for an hour. I sensed a something which put Mr Altman and all his Titanic companions into a small box in a far corner of the room. Mere greedy children whose supposed altruism has a very hollow ring.

    What was it I felt? Oddly similar to what my friend Keith Hancock describes. A reality so vast and so superior that humanity, its petty cruelties and vanities, became utterly insignificant, meaningless. I’m no so sure that what I felt was wholly benign. Certainly in no way evil, but way above and beyond human concepts of benignity or good and bad.

    And I felt with great conviction that Julian of Norwich was right: “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.

    Like de Chardin, Keith talks of evolution. Of greater things to come for consciousness. A rising up, a meeting, a confluence with reality, a deity, call it what you will.

    And I’m with him on that, as I have always been with de Chardin. Perhaps technology and science are good things but their goodness pales in comparison with what is really “out there”.

    And those who create and wield technology can be very flawed indeed. Their true aim certainly does not seem to be to connect with the divine, to move to something bigger, better, greater. Further up, further in. For all their talk, for all their Brave New World, in my peregrinations this morning the technosaurs, the Titans were revealed as mere pygmies.

    Sorry Sam, but that’s just the way it is.

    And love, what of love? So many mystics, so many seekers of the divine write of love. I can not. The word doesn’t suit me although the concept does. So yes, I sensed something great and outrageously good this morning but I can not bring myself to call it love. Semantics maybe, but love seems such a human word. Benignity perhaps, something overarching and extraordinary. Perhaps after all that is what people mean when they talk of love. Personally I find the word oleaginous, but maybe that’s my mistake.

    Anyway, there you have it. Call it what you will, make of it what you will. I was left with a strong feeling of having arrived. Got there, got the point, seen through the veil.

    And I hope and expect my journey to continue.

    “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!”

    Illustration: William Blake, The Annunciation to the Shepherds, illustrations to Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, the Thomas set (composed 1809)

  • Beyond

    Beyond

    The urge to write seems to be a purge, to be taken from time to time to express what it is one believes one has learnt. To be cleansed and purified in mind by the art of manifesting in words the inner workings of one’s soul.

    I have come out. Not in the sense of some base sexuality but in a declaration to myself that I believe in something rather than nothing. That I believe in mind or rather, perhaps, the “soul”.

    Transcendence, what a word. To witness an existence beyond the normal or physical level. How they laugh, the materialists, how they scorn belief in anything that can not be measured, weighed or dissected by man.

    And yet it happens, it is there and to those who have glimpsed such states (even if rarely or from afar) it seems obvious that the world’s ills stem in a large part from our species’ unwillingness or inability to see beyond the dark and brutal struggle for physical survival on a rocky outcrop in the middle of nowhere.

    A young organ scholar professed to me his disbelief in the Christian faith and I to him but we both met somewhere on that magical field of transcendence. The western choral tradition is, for some, an avenue to beyond. It provides a glimpse, a view through a mirror darkly, of another world altogether.

    Aspiciens a longe we sang, set to the music of Palestrina.

    I look from afar:
    and lo, I see the power of God coming,
    and a cloud covering the whole earth.

    It was a dark and cold winter’s night and the ancient church was lit by candles. Family and friends were there, and the Matin Responsory reached them from a few unseen, unaccompanied voices hidden from sight in the South Transept of this lovely building. Would that we sang with the perfection of the Gesualdo Six but perhaps our efforts made our case well enough.

    In that place, at that time, nothing else existed. Wrapped in beauty, nothing else mattered. Power and wealth, greed and struggle seemed laughable and the route to paradise so clearly marked.

    I do not seek to convert, nor ever will. There is no-thing to which I cling, in any doctrinaire sense. No-thing to which I would direct our unhappy and misguided species.

    But with ever increasing clarity I know.

    I know what is not.

    Much, so much of what we do and think and believe is “not”. And yet what we could become is so very different.

    In those quiet moments, in that ethereal place beyond the mundane I know what is. And I know that it is something rather than nothing.

  • Lost in Thought

    Lost in Thought

    Lost is often a good thing. Thought may not be so good. You can choose how to lose yourself and into what you wish to become immersed.

    Choose wisely and the result will be happiness. Choose without wisdom and the result will be misery.

    There are many different types of thought and you are better to switch most of them off any time you can. Unthought, you might say, is usually better for the soul than thought.

    The most damaging type of thinking is worry. Fearful speculation as to your future. Guilt and regret about your past. The destructive, repetitive patterns become automatic, deeply embedded. Therein lies the route to mental illness and depression.

    The most life affirming thought process is passive awareness. Drifting lost in life, drinking in the silence and wind and natural beauty. Does this even count as thought? Possibly not but it does require some mental effort to enter and remain in that state.

    Another important category of thought is that mental exertion necessary to provide you with the day to day means of survival. Work thought, one might call it. It can not be avoided but it can at least be rendered less harmful. Or more positive.

    Work thought for many can be a mental hell, torture of the worst kind. Largely because work for most people involves thinking thoughts and undertaking tasks they find boring, distasteful or abhorrent.

    Work thought is usually made much worse by the sort of activities which it entails and the people you need to work with. Or, worse, much worse, work for.

    Work should be pleasure (can be a pleasure) but for most it is a grind at best or a very hell at worst.

    The young need to prepare for work by knowing themselves and understanding what type of life will bring them fulfilment as well as basic needs.

    If the young ignore their soul they are unlikely to be happy adults. Some, perhaps, will get genuine satisfaction out of commerce. If they approach commercial life honestly and without greed, then there is no harm in that.

    Where would we be without the village butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker? Not that butchery is a palatable occupation these days; nor ever was.

    The problem of course is that even such simple traditional occupations have now become all but impossible to pursue as an individual. Eaten up as society is by chains and big business. Who wants to end up on the factory floor or, worse perhaps, the office. It is one thing to be a jolly village baker, quite another to be swallowed up into the belly of some leviathan churning out loaves by the million in glowering industrial gloom.

    So if you want good work thoughts, which will enhance your life rather than lead you down the path of black depression and futility, you need to choose your occupation very carefully.

    Some, like the Stylites, will find fulfillment sitting on a pillar of stone in the desert. Living perhaps on bugs and rodents and rainwater. A perfectly valid choice.

    Some may find satisfaction in academia. Others may actually enjoy life in a competitive investment bank where greed is good and the wolf rules the Street.

    Although that is hard to believe.

    But lost in good thoughts, lost in reverie, barely aware of anything but the silence and the wind in your face. That is the right kind of lost. And the right kind of thinking. For those who seek true happiness anyway.

    That is where you should spend most of your time. Hearing the crashing of waves on the deserted sea shore, being aware of the shrill cry of the gulls.

    Being engulfed in the scent of the flowers in the fields around you, with thought (if it exists at all at such times) restricted to finding your path and keeping yourself upright.

    Wherever and whenever possible, anneal your mind. Heat it up and let it settle in new and better ways. Shake the snow globe and let the fresh, new, beautiful white water crystals cover and heal the rigid patterns which develop as our mind seeks to automate and deaden our lives.

    Meditation is the key. To put your mind into such a state that the old lines of thought melt away and life can be started from a new beginning each day. To churn up your mind and to allow it to reset itself in new and healthier patterns. To lose dull work thoughts and damaging obsession. To let go, to fly, to swim, to soar and preferably never to land.

    Or if you have to land then to do so as a fledgling, a child. A being not weighed down with useless prejudice, habit and stultifying routine. A reborn adult who has replaced damaged, rigid thinking with new paths. New joy and hope. Clear spring water in place of industrial sludge. Optimism and novelty. Newness, not decay.

    It can be done and for some of us this becomes our life’s work. Or at least, the most important part of our lives.

  • A Funny Old Monk

    A Funny Old Monk

    My 26 year old son is clearly a perceptive fellow and he hit the nail on the head when describing his father as “a funny old monk”.

    I have been monkish since childhood but my journey really began after spitting out convention 30 years ago and disappearing into a black hole.

    Wandering lost over the past 30 years, I began my explorations by reading the mystics. William James was a profound influence as was Evelyn Underhill. Followed by so many others.

    I have not read any of that stuff in more recent years. I have lived by experience more than words. Years living in the mountains of Switzerland and on the bleak beaches of Northern France. Snowboarding and skiing and long, long wild walks in the wind and the elements. Practicing everything I could usefully lay my hands on from hypnosis to meditation, from music to strenuous physical exercise.

    Days spent in contemplation in the churches of renaissance Venice and elsewhere. An endless search for the divine, for meaning in a storm of deafening and meaningless noise. Years spent wearing the dark lens of pessimism, despite the beauty all around me.

    But today I was struck in the deepest and most profound manner by a post on Mystical Experiences of Reality by my friend Keith Hancock.

    He referred to a paper called “Spirituality and the Transformation of Consciousness” by Merv Dickinson.

    Just reading the paper was enough to give me the sort of experience described as “peak” by Abraham Maslow. I recognized each and every word in that paper. Mr Dickinson could have written it just for me.

    I will leave you to read the paper for yourselves should you so choose, but it was startling to see my own life over the past 30 years described with such unerring accuracy.

    Let me make one thing clear: I do not confuse my journey in any sense with a descent into “goodness”. Or, worse, an ascent. I have never had any desire to be Mother Teresa, since, firstly I have never much fancied a sex change and secondly I just don’t believe the world works in that way. I’m sure the old biddy did a splendid job with the needy in Calcutta and that her canonization was richly deserved. But no amount of Mother Teresa clones will make much difference to an unenlightened world. Or to the world’s poor and needy.

    What I believe will (or would) make a difference is a shift in perception. A radical and widespread alteration of consciousness.

    Dickinson puts it this way. Consciousness has two orthogonal planes: run of the mill “anthill” consciousness which we all develop during childhood and adolescence and then the sort of gnosis one perceives during those moments of enlightenment, when the nature of reality seems to become clear to us.

    If we are lucky, we may get occasional glimpses through the veil. As we progress in life, some of us who are seeking an altered perception find we are granted increasing access to that other way of being. We begin to feel we are living at an intersection between the two modes of consciousness and it becomes easier to look upon the world and its ways in a kinder and more benign fashion.

    It also becomes far easier to be kind to ourselves as we increasingly feel that we have discovered the way. That we no longer need to ask the “Questions”. The black lens of pessimism is replaced by an altogether rosier and more optimistic hue.

    Because, it really is a kind of blindness the way some of us are forced to live. Throughout much of the history of this blog I have taken a rather despairing view of the human ant heap, but I see now that any condemnation of our behavior was naive and wrong.

    We can’t help it – it just “is”. Mostly, we can not see beyond the day to day struggle for existence. We behave the way we do through knowing no better. We evolved to survive and that is what ordinary consciousness teaches us to do, come what may. So that most of us are determined to “climb the greasy pole” at any cost, as Benjamin Disraeli so aptly put it when he was elected as Prime Minister.

    Those who are granted a glimpse through the curtain to a different reality can see that it need not be always thus. But that until the majority of us can see that different reality, no amount of Mother Teresa lookalikes will manage to turn this place into a heaven on earth. My hope is that day may arrive.

    Looking back to the beginning of my long, long journey I can see that I was a man in a hurry. Reality was not to be served up on a dinner plate. Not to me at any rate, although I was always puzzled that it happened that way to some. My friend Keith for instance with his spontaneous revelations. And those who received sudden conversion on the road to Damascus or elsewhere. After considering a koan or two perhaps.

    No amount of reading, none of my practices really achieved very much over the years. Partly perhaps because I was still consumed by the pursuit of wealth. My climb up the greasy pole.

    Very recently the scales seemed to fall from my eyes much more regularly. It has been rather like an ascent through the Stygian gloom of heavy cloud cover into glorious clear blue skies and sunlight. Carried there by my own wings rather than the metal sarcophagus of modern air travel.

    I think it has been partly because I have given in, or given up perhaps. I think the endless isolation has undoubtedly helped, intensified as it has been this year. The atmosphere of apocalypse has been cathartic and educational.

    I am increasingly inclined to let go. And I am increasingly able to do just that. I am more often to be found at that crossroad, that junction between the two orthogonal modes of being.

    It is a comfortable place to be. I think I will remain there.

    Oh and by the way, I’m the weird old chap on the left. The equally weird nutter on the right was someone we met at the Norman keep in Dover one day. Claimed he lived there and that the date was sometime in 1100. My son found it hard to tell the difference between us.

  • A Finger Pointing to the Moon

    A Finger Pointing to the Moon

    Master Po say “Grasshopper never mind finger, go for moon”.

    Well he probably put it rather better than that, but I think I have got the sentiment correct.

    Ever since childhood I have had a fascination with Eastern philosophy and mysticism.  While I never rated their clothes, and always preferred Byrd and Tallis over kabuki & noh, if I had to choose a favorite creed it would be a mixture of Zen Buddhism with a hefty dash of Taoism.

    All that going with the flow!

    After so many years of reading, I have recently come back to this very apt Zen koan. I don’t want to do any more study.  Grasshopper he say….. no more words.

    The direct experience is more important than the teaching. The teaching can only point you in the right direction, the reality, the experience of reality, you must find for yourself.

    Though my tone is mocking, I believe this very profoundly. As I believe passionately in much of basic Buddhism.  I can do without the nutty tinpot gods and pure lands but those guys knew a thing or two about how to be a decent human being, as well as how to find personal happiness.

    Because unless you are a happy bunny yourself you can’t spread the good word to others. I never did like Jeremiah. Or any of those miserable Old Testament Prophets.  God, were those ancient Jews a miserable bunch. Give me happiness any day over slavish obedience to a cruel old misery like Jehovah.

    My eastern friends had no problems with a horrid deity who kept slapping them around the face and sending them pillars of salt, exile and slavery. Sodom.

    I’m wittering. Let me be more concrete, come to the point.

    You don’t need books of words to open the doors of perception. And for gods sake, if ever there were a case for the burning of books, then it is those written by modern self help gurus which should take the first lick of flames, the first match.  All those guys want is …..well perhaps I should let them speak for themselves?

    “Power of Now”, my arse.

    Help me, help, I’m waffling again. There is a serious point in all this rambling, I promise.

    Nirvana – we all want it don’t we? Although the literal translation from the Sanskrit can be a little disconcerting – “a snuffing out”.

    The closest approaches  I have made have all been chemically or physically induced. But then our every emotion is chemical anyway, if we did but know it. We are our chemicals.

    My most profound moments of peace have tended to come not when poring over obscure texts but when out doing something in the real world.

    The spiritual boost, the feeling of peace after mat exercises on the gym floor. The rhythmic movement of paddles through water on a sun filled sea. Lying on the grass on a dark, dark night staring incredulously at the milky way.  Chanting in Latin to music written by a 16th Century Spanish priest.

    The moan of winter wind in the trees of my cottage garden, the drifting of my mind in meditation.  The strange effects of self hypnosis.  And yes, a microscopic dose of psilocybin now and then on a day when the world seems not so very benign.

    I am sitting here now, in the dark, in the quiet, quiet English countryside with the blowing wind as my only companion. I feel great calm. I have no need of Mr Chopra, nor Mr Tolle. Nor any of their ilk.

    I write but not so that you will read. I write as experience. I write to tease out my own truth, as catharsis.  I write for myself.

    It is in writing that I can explain myself to myself. It is in writing that I can find out who and what I am. What I mean, what I feel, where I am and where I am going.

    I write to experience the moon, not to see the finger pointing at it.

    stillness
    stillness
  • “I” do not exist

    “I” do not exist

    I have felt with increasing certainty recently that the Buddhists are right. We have no separate existence, no soul, no fixed place in the universe.  Richard Dawkins is my prophet of choice.

    We are mere replicators, a collection of raw matter on or in which certain instructions have been printed as to how we will replicate and hence cause our species to propagate into the future. Mere machines perhaps, little better than the algorithms which drive our computers, or which will drive general purpose artificial intelligence when it arrives.

    No one wrote those instructions; they just evolved over the ages from the interaction (the chemical interaction) of matter.

    That we are lumps of matter in no way different from that which makes up the rest of the universe is hardly in doubt.   We know that the chemical elements which constitute our bodies were put together in the center of stars.  Helium and nitrogen were the first and lightest.  The rest followed.

    Why then do we feel “separate” from the rest of the universe? Why do we feel different than a speck of dust, a doorknob or an ocean?

    It is our consciousness, our awareness. Our ability to witness the universe and what is happening in it.

    But what IS consciousness and is it in any way “special”? Perhaps consciousness is merely what it feels like to be a replicator, a machine made of chemical elements on which a set of algorithms runs.  We are information. Our memories are mere information, stored chemically in ways we still do not understand, in biological wetware.

    The algorithms in our body use the information contained in our memories to navigate the world for the purpose of replicating.  Memories enable us to make predictions based on existing data.  We need prediction to cross the road safely and to guess where our next meal is coming from.

    Part of our minds are totally autonomous of our waking or normal consciousness – a machine which runs the heart, generates blood, extracts energy from food, excretes waste. To spread the species. To replicate.

    We feel fear because our memories tell us some situation is threatening our existence in some way. We feel aggression because we live in a universe where we have to eat other to survive. We feel love because our algorithms need us to engage in sexual reproduction.

    All of this is programmed into our matter. A written set of instruction spread throughout our body.

    Who then is the observer? Who is it that is aware? It is not “I”, not “me” or “you”.

    Consciousness just “is”. It is what happens when an organism is sufficiently complex.  We are complex adaptive systems with feedback loops. “I” is simply what it feels like to be in the middle of this collection of complex adaption and movement. “I” is simply a construct which enables this mass of matter to recall memories (information) from the past and use it to predict the future. To predict for the sake of carrying on, to survive.

    So “I” am no different from a lake or a dog or an asteroid. I am just more complex, I have a few more moving parts. My software is lengthier and is better able to steer my future.

    What therefor of free will? What of imagination and creativity and art? They are by products of my instructions, the information which makes my body tick. The truth is we have absolutely no idea whether free will even makes sense in the context of an apparently deterministic universe. Leaving aside the many worlds interpretation of quantum weirdness, free will may be just another illusion. It may, once again, be what if feels like to be this set of matter running that set of instructions.

    Did the first life feel what it was like to be a Eukaryote? Did the first animals feel what it was like to eat, feed, fight, excrete?

    Perhaps not but as the complexity of their wiring increased, awareness of sorts dawned. Consciousness of sorts is probably wide spread in the universe. A worm probably “feels” “something”.  The sun perhaps; heat and light; the caress of water; the smell of raw earth,

    And so on up to humanity and beyond.

    Does it worry me that I have decided “I am not”? Not really, it is a relief.  I will continue to explore the nature of consciousness with relish, but I don’t think I can help my odd ways any more than a monster like Adolf Hitler could help his.

    At bottom, emotions of worry, guilt, contrition and remorse are pointless. We are what we are; we are “not”.

    It wasn’t me m’Lud….it was my programming.