A Mountaintop, of sorts...

It seems ironic that in order to see some things clearly, we actually have to step back and loosen our focus on the little things that hitherto grabbed our attention. We can step back from a painting, or from a particular instrument in an orchestra, or hike all the way up onto a mountaintop, in order to take in the whole. Indeed, to see or hear more clearly, we must step back from the instrument, the painting or our lives, and hold less tightly onto the conceptions by which we had been recognizing these things and deriving an understanding of that which we were perceiving.

Perhaps play – the flexible, creative and free-flowing delight of children – provides far more than a pass-time. It is interesting to speculate that the species-wide activity of childhood sets before us a wisdom that is hard for adults, or even older kids, to fully appreciate.

Through the constant, everyday teaching that is childrearing, and herded as we are into schools, we are instilled with the procedures for understanding, as well as with our family’s or community’s agreed nature of our world. We learn the commonly accepted structures of existence, such as what reality consists of, the nature of truth, and the proscriptions of morality. We learn as well, the alphabets, arithmetic and logic that support these.

For instance, children are taught to differentiate between fantasy and actuality, and that the latter is what ‘is’ while the former is best left behind as a hindrance to moving forward in the real world. Reality in some communities includes one or another god. We also learn what to question, and what to leave unchallenged.

The wisdom in children is the natural ability to playfully create, without the assignments of what and how to think and act. However not simply 'released' from constraints, children were not bound to begin with. For adults to recapture the ability to 'think outside the box,' we are challenged in ways children are not.

Most human beings who have learned to live in community (i.e. domesticated) are implicitly, if not explicitly, prepared to live among others according to millions of little rules. These create a kind of cultural critical mass that encourages individually and collectively, certain thoughts to surface and certain behaviors to ensue, and not others.

And, like most inclinations, there are deviances. Those who ignore the social mores commit ‘crimes’ and are punished, and if these are more tolerable, merely given degrees of ostracism. Those who ignore the injunctions of truth may be ridiculed as liars and dismissed as hypocrites, although their manner of deriving truth may be simply different. For instance although there may be some overlay, the manner of deriving truth by a mathematician may be quite different from that of a judge or someone who is religious.

However, it is the strictures conveyed across a community regarding the nature of reality that captures my interest at the moment. In specific, it is in what we conceive as the nature of being human.

Our languages, schools, similarly reared human beings and our parenting figures have collectively taught us many things about being human. We learned that in many ways we are separate from one another, and that the boundary is at our skin. It is a way of conceiving of ourselves that overlooks our shared language and all the rest of the symbols with which we understand our world; our extended ‘common tongue.’ Moreover, it disregards the shared nature of our learned reality itself.

We learn that ‘I’ am separate from not just you, but from the rest of the world around us. Indeed, there has been a war raged with a some ‘success’ and much failure with the Earth. Sometimes we are able to shield ourselves from the insects, creatures and storms and each other. And sometimes we are not.

Interestingly, we are not separate from each other at all. Unlike the village idiot who sits by him or herself babbling incoherently, we share a common tongue, general understanding and social beliefs and behaviors whether we adhere to them or not.

Moreover, we are not separate from the Earth at all, but deeply interwoven in community. This extends in all directions.

For instance, though we have been taught that ‘each’ of us is one being and the census counts us this way, we are actually complex and deeply interwoven communities of vast multitudes of beings. For instance we are constituted of great numbers of bacteria, many of which are necessary for our survival (our dry body weight consists of a full 10 percent of such beings.) Not to mention the mitochondria, living with their own DNA within our body’s cells, without their more than 20-fold increase in energy, these bodies could not function.

Furthermore, we are indivisibly connected with the world around us, a observation easily noted by simply observing our breath. A friend explained to me just the other day, how the breath is a kind of umbilical cord – substantial, though hard to see with human eyes – connecting us moment by moment to the biosphere. Moving about within this ever-present womb, our breath connects us so critically to the rest of the world that the severance of this for only about a minute will lead to certain unconsciousness, and if continued, to death.

In addition, this breath has only became life-supporting to us because it has been ‘breathed’ by plants, extracting in their symbiotic way our ‘waste’ carbon dioxide, and producing the oxygen we so desperately require.

How the many other necessary and symbiotic relationships amidst which we exist, melt away the notion of 'individuality,' as is the nature of symbiosis itself. Such happens when we step back and take in the whole.

The way in which we learn to see, recognize and know our very selves is facing a momentous trembling. There is an earthquake, quietly reaching from the substrata of scientific discovery, that is reaching for the tapestry of self-conception, a weave that we assumed was strong. Indeed it is delicate, and under closer observation, the threads that we thought held it together suddenly look thin, or non-existent. There are other weaves, and other patterns taking shape before us.

Like reaching a mountaintop and standing there finally, weary and delighted, letting the eyes take in the broader range of vision that had been shielded by where we had been wandering, we release our focus from where we came from. Even though, or maybe even because further ranges may then be seen unfolding on the horizon, something happens on mountaintops.