Stream Of Conscienceness

My mom says we didn't evolve.

But then, when I go for a walk and see a flock of geese calmly trotting beside the sidewalk, there's some part of me that wants to run at them screaming, with my arms flailing, just so I can see them all scatter in the face of my might.

Am I meant to believe God wrote that into the fabric of my being? And did He also write the part of me that says, "no, the geese have done nothing wrong, they deserve the sanctity of their peace"? I suppose that part does seem a little more holy. But what of the part of me that worries "people will think you a loon", with no regard for the geese at all?

Is God a joker? Did these oddities just somehow correlate to the chances of survival for some league of my ancestors?

These both seem like ridiculous explanations. I probably shouldn't expect to know the mind of God, anyway. Maybe it's just a thing I don't know, can't understand. Or maybe I am just more than my origin.

It's curious how often instinct makes a liar of hasty observation. Real knowledge takes time to cook, but even after a lifetime of effort it never seems to be more than half baked. Meanwhile instinct is like cookie dough, it's better if you just dip your finger in it a little and eat it raw.

Today I drank tea that was made on the other side of the world, and it cost me almost nothing. I am so much better off than most humans who've ever lived.

But sometimes I'm still sad.

Maybe the caveman was happy to marvel at the mysteries of the world, seeing swirling beauties in sheer doubt and ignorance that no modern man can dream of. Maybe the dark age peasant was happy to run their course, have their family and their religion and their time and their place. Maybe the context of right now just means a lot more than the context of history when it comes to happiness. Or maybe happiness is a lot more than its origin, too.

—

When I am not working,

I am not thinking,

I am not learning,

I am not relaxing,

I am not practicing,

I am not helping,

—

I am just lurking.

Waiting for that hidden switch to flip,

so I can breath again,

and skip the pain this time,

perchance?

—

I am just hoping

to wake and look at the moon.

Hoping she'll reflect enough of the sun,

to pierce the veil of everyday things,

and rearrange my prefrontal cortex,

so I can stop being a blood filled robot

for just a second.

—

For just a nanosecond.

So my consciousness can have,

a tiny little taste of being,

and being,

and being,

alive and free and awake,

real again.

—

But the more I seek the more I find that no matter where I walk, no matter where I look, even (especially) on a sunny day, everything has always just been faith all the way down. Faith in my own faculties, faith in laws of nature to be consistent, faith in friends & family. Faith that the similarities between me and the hooded man across the street are greater than the differences, so I can wave at him without it being too weird, that it's just a casual greeting, that it won't make him uncomfortable or ruin his walk or linger with him as an image of me — a stark pale sasquatch unfit to walk beside tailored lawns — intruding on his view of the world by being friendly even though I look vaguely like a badly drawn comic book villain who's been dressed up by some sweet & benevolent but ultimately inexperienced child of summer and given a place in a suburban world I never ought to have seen the daisies in.

The daisies are nice, though. I also see some kids prodding a worm that is burning up in the sun on hot concrete. They laugh and then skip away. I find the worm and block the sun with my shadow. It begins to wriggle again as it cools. Should I put it safely in the grass? What if it was trying to die? What if I put it on the wrong side and it must cross again, starting the suffering all over?

I put it in the grass.

The cost of not offering help is too high to be paid by worry at unintended consequences. Trying to do good always means imagining a future that doesn't actually exist yet, and steering us all towards the best one we can fathom. Sometimes people — like me — get paralyzed by fear that we're anticipating wrong, that we could accidentally mess things up. But sometimes people do the opposite, they get so convinced they're right about an imagined future that they're willing to sacrifice the rights/wellbeing of others now. Both of these can be catastrophic errors.

We exist now. We don't know if we'll even exist later, let alone what the exact conditions of that later will be. So we have to work where we're at. And that means I move the worm despite the chances that I might be accidentally hurting it, or costing it more pain in the future. Of course, I don't know what it's like to be a worm, even right now, all I know is that it seems better not to leave them burning up. And I'm striving for better.

That's the rational justification I make for the moral instinct I follow. I am sure that I am sure, but not sure if I should be so sure. Tense matters.

"I think therefore I am" has never seemed more wrong to me. It is too reductionist and also not reductionist enough. Too reductionist because it strips all that I am down into just the thinking part. Not reductionist enough because it doesn't go further and realize that simpler assertion: I Am.

After all, I must be more than just thinking, for how can I think without first being, and being unthinkingly certain that thinking is a thing I ought to be doing? And what good is thinking anyway? Does it bring me closer to the truth? Maybe. But why should I care about the truth? Because I must care. There's another thing I'm unthinkingly sure of. I am sure that I am sure, and in this case I know that the only alternative is insanity. Reason is a vital part of me, pursuit of the truth is essential to a mind.

Reason tempers me, and helps me get where I want to go unscathed by foreseeable errors. But for that to matter I have to know where I ought to be going first, and be willing to risk facing the unforeseeable. In other words, I need the virtues of wisdom and courage first, reason has moral & instinctual foundations. And these things are interwoven; my morals aren't just intellectual, but they are tempered by reason, and my intellect isn't just moral but it is directed by morals. I find this is true of most of me. My courage isn't well-thought, in fact I am more courageous when you give me less time to think. I'm more generous when I connect with people's hearts. I'm more disciplined when I'm able to more complexly imagine my own future. Intellect is obviously a vital tool, but it isn't the only one I have. "I think therefore I am" severely misses the mark. I am, and I am a trifecta, at least — three great marathons running like a steady stream through time: intellect, morals, spirit. When one runs faster or slower than the others, the waters become turbulent, and I suffer and cause suffering.

Consciousness has never really been separable from conscienceness for me. Half-men in expensive suits try to assure me otherwise, they write long winded books about how faith is a biochemical ruse, morality a mere quirk of evolution just like the rest of me.

But we evolved eyes so we could see, right? Because photons actually exist, and carry information about their interactions with the last thing they encountered. So what force of physics carried the weight of virtue through my genome? Why are these intellectuals so certain that the wavelength of a photon tells us something about the "real world", but the fact that lying to your closest tribemates might get you exiled into an unforgiving wilderness doesn't tell us anything about the nature of the same "real world"? Are they really sure that "bad" isn't more than just negative feedback for a psychopath? And what of "good", isn't it more than just positive feedback for a successful manipulator? How is it then, that we can all recognize the evil even in those who have been successful with their ruses, plots & destructions? They got positive feedback for succeeding, is that not the ultimate measure of "good"? Then how can "good" come from that?

No, we all hold two rulers, and one of them is infinite.

The half-men's suits are threadbare and don't cover their chests. I can see their beating hearts crying in the void of self they've locked their faith away in. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But we're not built with hammer and nail. I don't know what with, but I know we're multitudinous ethereal somethings. Even when the half-men's eyes and words tell a story of confidence, I can hear the echoes of the loss ringing through the great empty chasm beneath their reason. It is foundationless.

But when my father told me a story, I believed him. Not because I had rigorous proof. Not because the story meshed well with my mental model of the world and had been vetted by reason. Not even because he always told the truth.

I just believed him. Faith is the evidence of things hoped for. What is hope? An expectation of the future. So when you discover that the moon orbits the earth in a predictable pattern, and you expect it to continue doing that in the future, that is just hope. Faith in the stability of reality is what lets you call those tools of prediction a "law of physics". Faith in the connection I have with my father is the evidence that tells me when he's telling the truth or when he's lying. But there's no pure reason to believe that just because something has worked one way in the past, it must continue working that way in the future. I mean, it must? Really? No, we're just hedging our bets because we have to.

Some of the half-men refuse to acknowledge the necessity of faith, and so they can't look at the nothing under their feet without risking insanity, which keeps them always climbing upward. Hence the abundant misguidedness of the march of progress, bringing us just as quickly towards nuclear bombs as it did mass produced fertilizer.

Then there are those who, by contrast, refuse to listen to reason, and they can't look ahead of them because they're too busy being unduly certain of whatever they happened to believe when they were young. Historically, these tend to get angry and threaten anyone who questions them with sure damnation. At least they have stability.

I met a whole man once though. He didn't say things he wasn't sure of, but wasn't sure of anything to a fault. He refused to be the blind leading the blind, and refused the idea that none of us can see anything at all equally vehemently. He was absolutely certain about the good will of his father, and offered personal testimony and the beauty of flowers in a field as his evidence. But if you questioned him, you'd find his wit was razor sharp. It only seemed dull at first because it was always sheathed in humility and kindness.

And I'm pretty sure he would've helped that worm across the sidewalk, too.