JANUARY 6, THURSDAY

ON THE ROAD TO MOKSHA

I realize that I am not going to figure out the problem that baffled me two days ago. What is has meaning in an absurd chance universe? What is absolutely real? But maybe I can be aware of what the problem is for me, anyways, without finding a satisfying way to resolve it. I am beginning to think that the real is not out there somewhere. I am beginning to think that the real is within me and the kind of an animal that I am determines what is real. It could even be that that the kind of animal I am isn’t really interested in the solution to what is real, it could be for me that the meaning of life is just feeling along to try and figure out the meaning of life, not in finding the meaning itself.

Maggie, my son Tom’s dog stayed with me last week for a few days. Maggie, I think, doesn’t have a problem with what is real. Maggie is a similar product of evolution as me but she has evolved in a different direction. Maggie is motivated, made alive and fully aware, in similar ways to the way that I am made alive and feel fully aware. Something inside her is driving her, driving me. I am tempted to say that the difference between us is the difference between the emotional and the rational (I being the rational one), but the more I think about it the more my own rational awareness seems to be simply a heightened emotion, a way of feeling along.

Both Maggie and I are feeling our way along. These feelings are built into us and for each of us is out of our consciousness. One big difference between us is that I can put these unconscious feelings into words and can examine them more objectively than Maggie can. But even as I say that I am not sure it is true. Maggie can distinguish between what is objectively real out there and the way the she responds emotionally to what is out there. What she doesn’t respond emotionally to she ignores if it doesn’t show signs of either harming her or giving her pleasure.

A very simple example of this, I think, is when we go on a walk together how we behave. As I walk I am either thinking about things that are happening in my life, which are emotionally more important to me than walking, or I am paying attention to plant forms that touch me in some way. When I have my camera with me, and I always have my camera with me since my iPhone is my camera, I will take a photograph of something that touches me. But the point is that it is what touches me emotionally that I think about or respond to with the camera. And that is true of Maggie. She looks around some as she trots along, but she is mainly concerned with smells, she noses in one spot and then another and sometimes she insists on stopping and carefully smelling around a spot. She probably picks up information from what she smells, but she is not collecting information, she is being touched in some way by the scents on the ground with some touching her with greater intensity than others and she incorporates this somehow into her experience of passing through the world. She doesn’t wonder what a smell means, she cares how it makes her feel, whether it attracts her or repels her (all of this said with great confidence as if I know what is going on in her head, I’m just projecting).

Since there is usually no one else on Jones Mountain I have thought of getting on my hands and knees to sniff at what she has responded to. But I don’t do it, not only because my knees would get muddy, or I would have trouble standing back up or because I would look ridiculous. The reason I don’t do it is because I know it would be ridiculous, I wouldn’t smell anything except the rotting leaves. It is ridiculous because I can’t enter Maggie’s emotional world. I also can’t explain why Maggie, a dog, is attached briefly to me as a human, or why I as a human living alone like having Maggie around. Both are emotional responses that are somewhere in our DNA, out of both of our consciouses.

Both Maggie and I like discovering new things and figuring them out. I can put this into words, Maggie settles for whining or barking, but in both cases our feeling along is based on our inner visceral drives which are embedded in our DNA (which, remember, are a product of chance).

The point, for me, is that Maggie lives in a world rich with sensation and meaning based on her emotional experience because of her dog DNA, embedded there when sperm meets egg, which somehow creates her emotional world and creates mine. It has to be, that is the way that evolution works.

So I am not sure that there is much of a difference between the way the Maggie is impelled along through life and the way that I am. We just have different DNA.

And this, somehow gets me to meaning and the problem that I had a couple of days ago. Maggie’s meaning and my meaning are both emotional responses to the world based on our DNA and experience. Both of us live in a universe that began inexplicably with the Big Bang and through evolution resulted in Maggie feeling her way along in the way that a dog does and me feeling my way along in the way that I do. Both of are also social creatures. The other animal, besides humans, that Maggie responds to with great energy is other dogs. Every encounter with another dog evokes intense curiosity on both sides combined with both fear and attraction. She has to suss out the relationship she has with every other dog. And I do the same with every other human, sizing them up in one way or another and being friendly or indifferent, again not in a deliberat way but because of something in my DNA that makes me act in this way.

And while Maggie finds endless clues to this relationship in every aspect of what she smells or the tiniest of gestures, I do the same with other humans. All dogs look alike but every human face for me is different. I am very good at recognizing faces even when I can’t remember names. It is how I sniff around.

And from this introduction through Maggie I am trying to get to what makes the universe in which there is no absolute meaning, no purpose except the infinitesimally slow progress of chance evolution and the survival of the fittest, however that can be defined. It is all random chance. It is meaning less, it is absurd.

But not to me. And why not? Because, I’m guessing, of my sniffer, my way of feeling along to see what touches me by enlivening me, what threatens me and what I value. My inner visceral drives which impel me through life without my understanding them or even being conscious of them are what give me meaning. I am of course impelled to find food and shelter and impelled to propagate children and to train them. I do that because I am impelled by something within me to do that. It is what gives my life meaning. The meaning rises from within me. It is what made me find the red sunrise this morning beautiful

The sunrise is not beautiful in itself. The sunrise is red because the angle of the sunlight through the early morning atmosphere filters out the colors of white light allowing only the red wave length through. That is an over simple explanation that my friend Don, a scientist, who is also color blind has given me. It doesn’t matter that he can’t see red, red is only a wave length, and there are a huge number of wave lengths that we can’t see at all that he is very interested in. Science is objective, carefully measuring, science is nothing to get rhapsodically emotional about. But I respond to the color red emotionally and feel good when I see the sunrise.

But of course the same thing is true when I look at a woman. If the sunset is not intrinsically emotionally beautiful and just a wave length, the same is true of a beautiful woman. She is not beautiful. I say she is beautiful because something in me responds emotionally to a woman of child bearing age, something that is beyond my understanding. It is in my male DNA. And for some reason my DNA is more attracted to some shapes of noses or ears or eyes or lips than to others. And whatever I am attracted to I call beautiful.

Both of these are simple, probably stupid, examples. But I think they help me to explain to myself why the indifferent, objective, chance, absurd universe is so intensely alive for me. It is not alive, I am alive in my DNA driven responses. And these inner visceral drives that come from my DNA impel me along to sniff around at everything with as much attention as Maggie gives to what she smells on our walks.

But put in a different way everything in the universe is impelled along in its own way, either by its physical properties rubbing against the physical properties or when matter is able to replicate itself through DNA through the drives embedded in the DNA. That is as true of Omicron viruses as it is of Maggie and me. We are all impelled along in our interaction with every thing else. In this way the entire universe is furiously alive from the white hot churning in the center of the sun to blind amoebas at the black bottom of the ocean.

There is no absolute meaning, there is only fusion meaning and amoeba meaning and Maggie’s meaning and my meaning. In one way the universe is all sound and fury signifying nothing between one Big Bang and the next, but in another way, for me anyway, and it is my way out, the universe is furiously alive with one being’s meaning colliding with another being’s meaning, almost in a cock-eyed way.

If there is any absolute meaning it is this pulsating life force embedded in physics and chemistry and finally in the center of biology, DNA.

But, as I’ve discovered, when I sniff like Maggie I don’t smell anything. I can’t be Maggie. The only real life force that I can feel is the visceral life force within me which is pulsating away even when I am barely aware of it.

That explains for me why I can shut off the rest of the world as so many religions do. Many religions strip the rest of the world away, and even see the rest of the world as an illusion in order to center on the visceral forces within us, me. The five chakras of the spine or whatever you want to call it, supreme consciousness, becomes most real. The most intense life I can feel is what is bubbling inside me. All of a sudden I can dismiss the 13 billion year until now, and the endless eons after now and the immeasurably huge universe that dwarfs me and makes me totally insignificant, and instead I can focus inward and find that the most real thing is the life force bubbling within me.

And that’s all for today, folks. Because all this self centered consciousness has worn me out and because, as you’ve noticed, I don’t quite know what I’m talking about. I’ll take up this effort to put my finger on meaning at some later date when I somehow get some unexpected flash of illumination. Until then.