Peek-a-boo, I see You - The Flame of a Candle.

Probably the greatest mystery facing human kind is "where am I".  Of course we can find the locus of our 'selves' rather easily. For most people, they understand it to be their body. I am quite certain for all people, it *is* thier body, but their are likely some who have a different experience.

But where do you understand "you "to be *in* your body? This is the great mystery which has given rise to, well, nearly every religious and physcological belief system.

It seems clear to me that this event I experience as myself is an elecrochemical event. Something about how neurons and neurotransmitters and other chemistries in my body, and in the untold other organisms that inhabit my body, and a certain extent the events going on in the physical world outside my body, give rise to me.... to my "I". All of these things that give rise to "me" are , as our theories go, physical, concrete things.

In saying this I include energies as a "physical concrete thing". What I mean is, for example, current theories on light have light acting as both a wave and a particle. It is exactly neither and both. There is an electromagnetic field and "perterbations" in that field are experienced as light. The same is true for mass (I'm pretty sure about this, although, honestly I can't walk down the explanation road as well as I can for light). Mass is some sort of interaction in the boson field. Protons and Neutrons are understood to be the interaction of a certain type of three quarks each, and how quarks interact is based on energies, or waves, also in certan fields.

So while we (i.e., the respected, peer reviewed, scientific community working on such thing, of which, I am not a member, but just an observer) understand all phenomina can be explained by particle/field theory - or concrete object/energy theory - noneone I've experienced has used that to explain my sense of "I", or anything I experience.
An external observer can find my neurons, and analyze the soup they are sitting in, and mess with them so that my sense of self is messed with. They can induce me into unconsiousness, they can make me see more blue (e.g., colored glasses). They can blind my eye input and defen my ear input, but they cannot stick a probe into my "I". They cannot point to me amongs all this goo that gives rise to me.

In that sense, and with an analogy that fails on any close examination, I am a spark in my brain, or I am a flame on a candle, but in truth no-one can see the spark of flame glowing in the bed of my neurons, should they happen to open my brain.

So this "I" is a complete mystery.

Every sentient being has it. In fact that is how I would define a sentient being - as a functional biological thingy that has an apparent sense of I (though I am not at all certain what the test could be for this, and whether there are organisms that have it but can't express it). I think sentient beings must needs be complex - that is to say what we percieve as independently function organisms with complex nervous systems. Casually, I would say plants are not sentient, but I am less certain about bugs and such.

Where is this I? It burns in, from, by body, but where can the flame be seen. Where does the spark exist? Maybe I is the the collected and constrained perturbations in all the fields of the mater that makes up my body. Maybe I exist in unique field that is only perturbed when other fields are arranged just so.

Yes, sounds like crazy talk, but lets back up again to the electron, for example. Most 'lay' people concieve of the electron as a thingy. A tiny tiny particle with a charge (what ever a charge is, don't ask them). But detailed analysis reveals that electrons are neither little particles nor 'waves of energy' but rather some sort of disturbance in what is call the electro-magnetic field. Oft repeated experiments can show electrons behaving as particles, and electrons behaving as waves of energy, and no-one yet has developed an robust explanation of why. Or rather, how the two characteristics of "particle" and "wave" can be explained by a theory of what the single electron thingy is.

It is from an interaction of electrons and protons and neutrons - all wierd thingies in their own right, that I am built. They are the candle and wick. They are the electrodes. I am the flame. I am the spark. But nobody can find me.

So, how is this related to buddhism? Well I think that Buddhism, more than any other school of though, has been devoted to understanding what this spark is. How is it dependent on physical realities. What makes it burn 'content' or 'suffering'. A huge portion of Buddhism is devoted to more derivative content such as psychology, but a fair portion focuses on what is the fundamental reality of I.

And from among the many Buddhist sects, I think Soto tries to demonstrate the flame. That, for me, is the beauty of Shikantaza (roughly "just sitting"). It is in this just sitting, very still, for a fair period of time, we can experience the flame of I, the spark of I. We can see I flickering and dancing in the candle of the body.

Many things can perturb the flame of I, cause it to flicker and sputter, but zazen, and studying the implications of the eight fold path can help us attain and maintain, help us realize, a more stable flame. A flame not blown by .... well the analogy does break down for me. I don't want to force it too much because I don't exactly think 'I' is a flame. But it is like a flame, burning in a place that no one can directly see. Burning in the wax of the body.

Peek a boo.... I think I see you.

Ramblings on a Goo-blob and the Right Dharma 'I'

In an interview I heard, W.Thomas Boyce M.D. (author of a very interesting book about the difference among sensitive and robust children called "The Orchid and the Dandelion") said something to the effect of "every child is born into a different family".  Meaning that because of the impact of no or previous children on the dynamics of a family, or perhaps just natural change that goes on in a family over time, that family is substantially different by the time the next kid shows up.

This got me thinking about people in general.

But first, a diversion into biology.

Open and close your eyes. With that event the picture you 'see' probably goes from full-of-content to black (or there abouts.... in fact really observe, and you will notice there is still content). This effect tends to give us the notion that the image that is falling on the retina of the eye is what we 'see'. Many people know that this is objectively not true, but few know it intuitively.

There are many demonstrations that show it is objectively not true. For example, if I highlight the nose portion one sees with one eye closed, and how it tends to 'disappear' with both eyes open. Or the fact that each eye has a blind spot on the retina, and yet only the very skilled (I'm guessing) can ever skrintch their minds up just so to see it. Or various optical illusions where the colors or motions we see change as the surrounding context changes. All of these show that what falls on the retina does not make it to perception unmolested.

But optical tricks do not quite invade our intuition. I think most people, if forced to describe it, would come up with the 'projector model' of vision. That somehow what falls on the retina is carried by the optic nerve into the brain where it shows up on a screen (sure with a little post processing to account for optical illusions and no-nose and the like) and a little person views that screen and that is what vision is.

The interesting news is that there is no little person. The interesting news is that the image we see with eyes open (or closed) is just chemical stuff happening in the locus of our brain in the neurons, somehow associated with our consciousness.  We are the little person watching, but of course, there is no little person. It is the activity of a blob of soggy neurons. The function of the eyes certainly contributes a large amount to what we imagine (and 'imagine' really is the best word for the process, because, in fact, we don't 'see' but we 'imagine an image' or we 'imagine a sound' etc...) we see, but we do not image only what the eye contributes. Other structures in our brain are part of the overall goo matrix and they also contribute to what we imagine we see.

I am, my consciousness is, the imagining of a goo blob. It has no physical reality other than electro-chemical signals being exchanged among neurons. I do not experience anything directly through my sense organs. I experience the impact of those organs on the imagination processes in my goo blob. These processes are very complex and many things influence them and can set them off kilter.

Drugs, illness, biological (structural) variations all impact how my goo blob works and, thereby, the reality I experience.

Brad Warner has quoted Gudo Nishijima as saying 'There is one reality, but we all experience it differently.' This, I believe, is a fundamental truth that is very difficult to internalize intuitively.

By 'intuitively' I mean the way we react to things prior to any analysis of "what's going on".

I often think that two healthy people in the same location must be getting the same data about any event, and so should reasonably come to the same conclusions about that event. I am now coming to realize how false that assumption could be.

The influence of our sensory systems on the image we have in our consciousness of what's going on is strongly influenced by our senses, but they do not have absolute rule.  Things like disease, biological difference, past trauma etc... all have real lasting physical impact on our goo blobs such that no two people can actually experience the same thing the same way.

Let me re-iterate this thesis, because I think it is rather surprising... it is physically impossible for two different people's consciousness to necessarily experience the same external events the same way, much less the same internal events such as pondering a particular thought (e.g. lines from a sutra).

Granted we can often be close to one another in our experiences. There are similarities in how we perceive things that have been brought on in our goo-blobs by natural selection. We tend to align more on older, more basic to survival events that have commonly impacted how our goo-blobs are structured. It is very rare to see someone genuinely enjoy an arrow through the gut, unless their goo blob is extremely altered in its functioning by unusual chemicals.

So how we function is certainly open to the 'we' commonality -- there is no real being who is not experiencing their life by means of electro-chemical events in their goo-blob. Therefore, yes, we all experience life by means of goo-blobs and the general rules of how gloo-blobs function apply to all of us.

But notions of a specific experience are much harder to put in the 'we' bucket, particularly when we get into the realm of ideas, and out of the realm of direct external experience. Everyone's specific goo-blobs are structured differently, and by 'structure' I mean BOTH the physical interconnection of neurons AND the soup in which neurons sit and operate that mediates the signal jumping from one neuron to the next. This is a constantly active and changing biological system. There is no stasis.

'We all mourn the passing of XYZ' is an absolute predictive falsehood (of course one could consider a limited group of people who were all interviewed and reported mourning, but as a predictive face it is entirely false). 'We all get tired if we don't have enough rest' is probably closer to true.

The main purpose of this ramble is to get to the point of 'I'.

There is a silly notion proposed by some Buddhists that 'I' is a terrible way to think.... and that one should always think in terms of 'we', and there are some who proudly use 'we' for all manner of observations they have never tested on the population they are speaking to such as 'in Soto Zen we believe.... XYZ'.

Many in Buddhism identify 'I' talk as a sort of delusion; an 'egocentric' view of the world; bad.

My view is these notions of ego=bad are based on poor translations of the 'original' concerns wherever they might be buried in sutra's etc... mixed with old Western clinical notions of ego (which hold little sway among modern psychologists), mixed with ill informed popular notions of ego, mixed with the fact that even our Buddhists elders can have gotten something wrong as they tried to figure out the world. Certainly much information about evolution and neuro-biology was not available to them.

Thus, to extend the wisdom of Dr. Thomas Boyce, no two people are born into the same world. It is a fundamental truth that each person can only experience the world in their unique way. 'I' is the most honest and true expression of what you know. Stick to it. We can work it out.