Within you, without you
But what I want to start from is not daffodils, but life. This is something I want you to think about. Is life an experience you're participating in? Is life something that you do? Or is life simply an ability you possess? How would you personally define life? How do you personally see life? What exactly are you referring to when you talk about my life? What is life to you?
While you're thinking about that, let's look at the life experience of a daffodil. In the image above we see the (arbitrary) four stages of the flower of the daffodil opening. We see change in the flower, the part coloured yellow. We don't see much change in the green parts, say the stalk. But see the stalk is what connects the flower to the earth. But what else is the flower connected to? What about the environment? The sunlight? The rain? The soil? What about the bee or other insect that seeks the pollen or nectar contained in the flower? Now think about all the other possible connections which can involve or include the yellow daffodil flower.
Life is all about relationship
Existence is a principle, creativity and interaction is a process. All existence is change, all existence is relationship - this is my personal mantra. Life can therefore be seen as a process of creativity and interaction where the creator and created are one just as where the perceived and perceiver of the experience are also one. This is how we get to the principle and the process which is the basis of Qultura simply because it's not possible to exist without being in relationship with everything else that exists. I can remember somewhere Professor Robert Sapolsky possibly during one of his lectures at Stanford University defining life as a relationship with an environment. "Life begins when there's a relationship with an environment," which is how I remember him putting it.
The physical form itself is not important. By physical form I'm referring to a rock, a plant, a tree, an animal, a human being, even a planet. Life is what happens in the space between the physical forms. The physical form is just a vibration of energy interacting with space according to a rhythm or pattern arising out of memory. It is this pattern or rhythm, or energy vibration which determines whether the form is inanimate and reactive, or animate and responsive, or animate and responsive. This is all there is in reality - energy and space, physical and meta-physical.
You see you can think that your body is your body, your brain is your brain, and your mind is your mind, but this is just your assumption. For sure you are experiencing life through your body, mind and brain, but you have no way of proving beyond all reasonable doubt that you are your body, your mind, and your brain. All you have is language, culture, concepts and a social consensus that tells you that this is so. All you have are your thoughts but what is a thought but an emotion or feeling, or something you create and project through your mind through sounds and images relative to your sensory perception? It's an energy vibration you're projecting outwards into an environment, into space.
This is where I wanted to use the image of a bell to start off this blog post, but you're going to have to imagine a bell. You are no different from a bell. Your body and your brain is in reality an empty vessel. If you hit a bell the bell will ring, if you get hit you have a few more variables but fundamentally there will be a response and it is that response is what we can call life - the relationship between you and your environment. Your body is a vessel, just as your brain is another vessel which via a sensory nervous system responds to various stimuli. Human intelligence is a concept, just as human consciousness is a concept, just as God is a concept.
Separateness and the imbalanced perspective
The key issue here is one which seems to have plagued Mankind throughout and that is the imbalanced perspective which arises out of a false belief in separateness between form and space, between individual and environment, and between self and other. All too often we focus on the form and disregard the space, assuming space to be nothing or emptiness, when in fact it's environment and relationship.
The imbalanced perspective comes from a certain gnosticism in the belief in separateness. We regard ourselves as beings separate from our environment, fully autonomous and independently capable of change from within ourselves despite the fact that there is no evidence to support this belief. How long do you expect to survive without breathing? Without access to water? Without access to heat? Without access to light? Without access to food? What if there was no ground for you to walk on? How would you know how to live without contact with other human beings? How would you communicate without language? These are just several examples of things which come from your environment and which define life as a relationship between you and your environment and also between you and other.
Much of this has come from what I tend to refer to as contamination of the mind which comes from mental and social conditioning, religion, ideology and a great deal of tradition - particularly (but not exclusively) in the West - which distorts your perception and perspective of reality. As a result we all go through a period of confusion between what is really real and what is only relatively real and this is what distorts our perspective of everything else, ourselves, each other, our environment and even of life itself.
This would not be such a major issue but all too often by the time most people have the chance to figure out some kind of existential reality and meta-physic their social and cultural reality tends to prevent any significant or meaningful change from taking place in their lives. Contrary to what many people seem to believe there is no hierarchy in nature. Nature is not concerned at all with the individual or even an individual species, but with the development of the environment and ecosystem as a whole. Nature and biology is all about relationship, particularly relationship between the individual and the environment. It's all about checks and balances, with one species in relationship to other species and the environment. This is something that many people don't seem to understand about the environment. Climate change is relative to biodiversity and the ecosystem and vice versa.
The notion that Mankind can do something to correct climate change is ridiculous but see here we all are. There is no way we can correct climate change any more than we can bring someone who has died back to life. Pretty much everything Mankind has done to change the environment has resulted in disaster. Just like life, the environment involves so many variables that we cannot comprehend it. The simple fact of the matter is that the individual can never completely control an entire environment. This is just outdated Freudian thinking.
Life is the experience of existence
In fact we can take this one step further and dig deeper into what we mean by control, such as having control or seeking control. From my own individual perspective attempting to seek or gain control over anything is an exercise in futility. Think about it. Whenever you try to control anything, anything at all, what you are attempting to do is to invert the natural order of things so that the individual controls the environment, when in actual fact it's the environment which controls the individual.
Control is an illusion just as much as death is an illusion and being an individual is an illusion. I often make the distinction between individualism and individuation, which is the process of experiencing life. For ease of reference my interpretation of individuation is one similar to that espoused by the Chuang Tzu, which is the later text of Taoism, written by Zhuangzi a Chinese philosopher from around 4th century BC and the Warring States period of Chinese history. The Chuang Tzu is essentially a handbook for the Taoist mystic and shaman and is distinct from the better known Tao Te Ching, written a couple of centuries earlier and better known. My previous Theravada path and practice can be taken to be based around the same principles of the Chuang Tzu.
This is pretty much the polar opposite to what we understand to be capitalism which I see as a traumatizing ideology. Trauma is force, drama is the absence of force. Capitalism is only as natural as trauma is natural. This for me is not so much opinion as what I feel to be a universal truth. Most people's experience of capitalism is synonymous with an experience of trauma. Think of all the traumatic experiences which arise out of capitalism - poverty, slavery, exploitation, destitution, homelessness, unemployment, and other man made social issues. Capitalism creates issues which cannot be resolved easily. Poverty and inequality are both incredibly complex social issues which no society comes anywhere close to resolving. Indian society has an appalling issue with poverty and inequality despite the fact that there are different forms of spirituality developed out of India. Even in the West, both poverty and inequality are complex social issues which no political system has so far been able to resolve.
The separateness and divisions we think of and talk about do not exist in reality. There is no difference between the experience and the experiencer, between perception and the perceiver, between the creator and the created, and so on. There is no separateness or division between you and your thoughts, feelings, emotions and so on. The separateness and divisions only exist in language and cultural beliefs.
There is only existence and non-existence but you cannot separate existence from non-existence just as you cannot separate form from space because form is defined by the space and environment. Form is just energy in space. Form is physical, because energy is physical, but space (and consciousness) is meta-physical. Years ago when I was more heavily interested and involved in the paranormal I always explained my interest in the fact that inanimate physical objects never behave autonomously. If you have a pot or a mug on a kitchen worktop that pot or mug will never autonomously move or fly through the air. Something meta-physical always makes that pot or cup move. This is no different from our physical bodies. Without life, without a relationship with an environment our physical bodies would just be corpses.