I had drinks with Phil W. tonight. And a Biddie Burger - which is meat and fixings, wrapped in a tortilla and then deep fried. But I'll get to that inevitable reprise later.
He has a rare congentinal gastrointenstinal disorder, which combines the worst laws of thermodynamics with gastric juices. He gets acid reflux and his esophogus narrows, making his stomach a pressure cooker.
One of the ways he deals with his condition is by eating yogurt, to ensure he has flora in his system to aid digestion AND to get protein in his system that has already been partially digested.
I read in Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts, which is another great way of treating digestive ailments, by placing the book in the bathroom to encourage adequate time for voiding, that the Portuguese Man of War is actually several distinct organisms that work together.
We think of ourselves as being a distinct organism, when we ourselves are an almalgam of entities, ourselves forming elements of being greater than ourselves.
Driving Tracy to Boston I had two epiphanies.
One was that the section of the drive over the Alleghenies from Morgantown, West Virginia to Cumberland, Maryland - not the Cumberland Gap.
The other epiphany is that the brain is itself a victim of its own delusion.
I feel that I should apologize to my brain for saying this, in case it decides to revolt and stop letting me type.
The brain in perceiving itself as a being, in ways different from the stomach perceiving itself as a being, attempts to differentiate itself as something more than an organ.
The trick to releasing self from the imposter of being is learning to release the brain from a self-constructed prison.
I think this is another place where ideas of the divine instersect, that those moments when we all are at our best, are those moments when we feel someone else is driving, when our best intentions become real, effortlessly. These are moments of true self, released as they are from the encumbering limitations of our brain as being, and releasing the brain from the encumbering delusion of being.
Imagine if we attached the whole of our identity to our hamstring muscle. That hamstring muscle would have an awful burden to bear, preventing us from walking or running as efficiently as we might if we simply let the hamstring function as a muscle.
The brain's primary function is to serve as our sensory emissary in a perceived world, to process and store information and experiences, much as an exploratory satellite. But when we force the brain into fulfilling a role of being who we are, rather than a tool for experiencing the world, we deny the organ its full potential, and deny the fuller-ness of our being.
Having grown up in a world of philosophy dominated by logical positivists, I feel that I lack a fuller understanding of how philosophical ideas shape the way we perceive our world as much as mathematics and physics. Understanding and disseminating information in such a way that it can be passed on from generation to generation, with a structure for discourse around those ideas, is part of the role religion should play, outside the boundaries of academics or government or science. Those bodies have structures that are more clearly defined.
Discoveries and discussion related to right life require a little more of a stage to move in, a little more drama in the narrative, a little more simplification and boiling down of the essence.
The trick then is dissemating the essence effectively without having the concentrated version, packaged for consumption by future generations, become mistaken for the totality of understanding. It would be like mistaking wheat for bread, with all those bread eating liberals condemned to hell. That's another aspect of wikiligion I find so compelling.
Undoubtedly, somewhere along the line, the new movement will need to be replaced by another movement, but I think expanding the discourse around our shared values will help advance those ideas with greater clarity and with less chance of co-option than closed systems.
