He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
William Blake, Eternity
I find myself looking at things from a perspective according to which, from the moment our life begins, each one of us knows it all, absolutely all of it. We all know everything there is to know. The only catch is that we spend most or all of our lives almost entirely unaware of this unlimited knowledge of ours. ‘Hang on a second!’ I hear you protest. ‘What nonsense is this you’re talking. We do not enter the world knowing everything. A baby does not start its existence magically knowing the name of the capital of Denmark, or knowing how many minutes it takes to get from here to the local park, or knowing the normal supermarket price of a large pack of own brand cornflakes, or knowing that ‘sheep’ is the English word for those fluffy white things over there that are making that funny bleating sound.’ And, I admit it, you are quite right. We do not enter the world with that kind of knowledge. We do not enter the world with a knowledge of the arbitrary ways that human cultures use words and numbers to divide the world up into objects which exist for a while in space and time. ‘Okay, so you haven’t quite left your senses then!’ Ah ha! There you go you see. That’s exactly it. That’s just the problem. We do tend to leave our senses. To the extent that we learn to equate fluency in the use of words and numbers and the artificial distinctions they enable us to make with ‘knowing’, to precisely that extent do we learn to alienate ourselves from our senses, our only direct route to knowledge of the world. We enter the world as an organism, exquisitely sensitive to everything that surrounds us, we know the world, all of it, through feeling, through touch, through sound, through taste. We know it as one big everything that we are intimately connected to, even as we are mysteriously distinct from it. This might still sound crazy but, for me, it’s not. It is, actually, not even a particularly new idea. The words are a bit different but I wonder if, in some way, there was an intuition of this inside Plato’s belief that the acquisition of wisdom was a case of ‘anamnesis’, a word which means remembering what we knew before we entered our physical bodies. According to Plato, we start our lives in possession of perfect knowledge and then the trauma of birth leads us to forget everything and we have to start anew (this is an inexact paraphrase and possibly in some specialist sense ‘wrong’ but it will serve here).
As I said the words are different, I don’t want you thinking that I am a dualist, as Plato was. In a moment I am going to use words to make a philosophical distinction between the dualistic way that Plato divides up the world conceptually and the way that I prefer to do my dividing. But before I do that I want to say again, I wonder whether, although the words are different, there’s an important sense in which Plato and I are feeling and knowing the same thing here, the same everything. The words are different because we exist at different moments in space and time but all each of us is doing is translation; we are translating what we know through feeling, which is an everything that exists outside space and time, into the words and numbers which are the cultural sea that we swim in. I really love this thought. How does it land with you? Maybe see if you can try it on for size.
So, anyway, now for the arbitrary but I hope pragmatically useful distinction. I don’t hold with Plato’s dualism, his division of things into binary opposites like body and soul. I am a monist. For me, there’s just one kind of stuff. And, if there’s just one kind of stuff, as many philosophers and scientists now believe (see, for example Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff), I struggle to feel that it matters whether we call this stuff consciousness or matter, soul or body; such distinctions become quite meaningless. It’s all just stuff. So there’s just a whole load of stuff. I am stuff. You are stuff. Everything is just stuff. Maybe ‘just’ is a tad dismissive. Everything is wonderful stuff. And one of the things about this stuff is that none of it is separate from the stuff that is next door to it temporo-spatially speaking and, if you think about it, this means that there is, in a sense, just one big dollop of stuff that goes on and on and on; that makes it sound like a very boring person who won’t stop talking and I suppose you could take it that way but I wouldn’t recommend it. Life becomes more interesting if you can make the effort to listen.
However, even if we accept that it is ‘true’ that there’s just one kind of stuff and, therefore, just one big dollop of stuff that goes on and on and on, we would have to be blind not to see that it is also true that the universe is almost unbelievably complex and diverse. It would just be silly to pretend that the universe is not full of unique events – after all, quite apart from anything else, you and I and everyone else are all unique events extended in space and time – that arise and then disappear like whirlpools (see Interbehaviorism page). As with a whirlpool, we spring into existence when the unique set of conditions needed for our life to begin are met, and then we fall out of existence when that unique set of conditions no longer obtains. You are a kind of whirlpool. I am a kind of whirlpool. And the thing about these, to my eyes, beautiful whirlpools that we are is that each one can only be the exact whirlpool that it is because of the unique and evolving relationship it is in with the whole, the one big dollop of stuff. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that the whirlpool is a unique relationship, a unique relationship of the whole to itself. In that sense each of us is a particular incarnation or embodiment of the whole, the whole made flesh, so to speak.
I am using religious language here intentionally and, I hope, respectfully to again highlight my sense that what I am saying is not in any way original. We have always felt-known this. We have merely translated it in different ways. What I am pointing to here is that if we name the whole, the one big dollop of stuff that just goes on and on and on, if we name this ‘God’ as many have, then we are all ‘God’ made flesh. The form in which this ‘truth’, this ‘God’, this one big dollop of stuff, is expressed is continuously changing, but the ‘truth’ itself has, from the perspective I am offering, always been known and can never change. So, when I say that we all know it all, this is what I am referring to. For me there is a meaningful sense in which each human organism intuitively knows that it is ‘God’ made flesh, in the sense given here of ‘God’ as the one big dollop of stuff that goes on and on and on. We kind of feel it, even if that feeling is just a glimmer on the very edge of awareness, something that we easily dismiss as a trick of the light.
But often a glimmer is all we get; we do not all really know that we know. I am repeating myself a little here but I hope a different look (different translation?) might make what I am pointing to a bit easier for you to see. I am using the word ‘know’ in two different senses. The first ‘know’ is the knowing of conscious awareness. The second ‘know’ is the knowing of sensory, and emotional, experience, the knowing we experience in the body outside of language. If I am consciously aware that my senses are detecting the singing of a bird and somebody asks me ‘can you hear the bird singing’ I will say ‘yes’. If I am not consciously aware that my senses are detecting the singing of a bird and somebody asks me ‘can you hear the bird singing’ I will say ‘no’. My body knows that the bird is singing but my body is out of alignment with my conscious ‘I’ which in this moment is filtering out the bird song, and maybe a lot of other things, in order to focus on something else like, maybe, how to survive some existential threat. The conscious ‘I’ which filters out the bird song, which does not allow the organism fully to know what it knows, belongs to an organism that is in an aversive relationship with its context, it is seeking to escape something, and while escape is the priority, pleasure seeking or savouring often drops out of the picture altogether, becoming something for another time, ‘maybe in the next life’. This experience of non-alignment of the body and the conscious ‘I’, in a context of aversive relations is, maybe, one of the ‘reasons’ why we have dualistic thought. It seems like there are two different kinds of stuff operating here: a mind and a body; that ‘seeming’ is a real experience, so I don’t want to be categorical about it and say that dualism is ‘wrong’, words come into existence to give a name to something that exists like a whirlpool, and dualism is no exception to this, it’s a word and a system of thought that names a real experience of the world. I do want to suggest that this experience of dualistic non-alignment is an experience of suffering, and that the essence of suffering is the attempt to escape the inescapable, the simple but utterly mysterious fact of our bodily aliveness, our fleeting existence.
Why do we try to escape the inescapable? Because the experience of being alive is both wonderful and full of terror, each moment bringing us another opportunity for hearing bird song, another moment for connecting with something new whose ineffable once and forever beauty takes our breath away and seems unbearable, unbearable because each beautiful new something, including the something that is our own body, arises once like a whirlpool and in the next moment seems to have gone, swallowed up into the whole, never to return, leaving us bereft, broken, unsure whether to carry on when we know that all we can expect is more of the same, more awe and wonder, more love, more devastation and loss, more heartache. The attempt to escape the inescapable is illogical and futile but entirely human. It is an attempt to escape the pain of loss, and in attempting to escape pain we create suffering; we cling to life until our arms and hands grow weak and heavy and it is wrenched at the last from our despairing grasp. As the English poet and autodidact William Blake put it in the first two lines of his visionary four-line poem ‘Eternity’, ‘He who binds himself to a joy/Does the winged life destroy’.
The cultural context currently provided to most of us by capitalist consumerism is one that strongly reinforces this futile attempt to escape. Youth is fetishised, old age is stigmatised and, instead of learning to appreciate the unique flavour of the different seasons of our lives, we are encouraged to buy products and services that sell us a lie – the promise that we can stop time and enjoy some kind of a perpetual spring. And this is just one form that the big lie of consumer capitalism takes, the lie that says ‘Buy this and enjoy the good life pain free. Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.’ ‘Bind yourself’ to joy, says capitalist consumerism, and we consumers pay up and are disappointed again and again; we are like a person who catches a beautiful butterfly in a net, kills it and preserves its dead corpse between the pages of a dusty old book and then, wondering why it no longer delights them, goes out again with their net and catches and kills another one, squashing it flat in the same old book.
Is there an alternative? Blake thought so. The final two lines of his poem read ‘But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise.’ What I love about this rhyming couplet is the paradox it touches when it equates a stance of savouring the unique quality of each momentary joy as it unfolds with the experience of eternity. The big dollop of everything is past, present and future everywhere all at once. In this sense it, and every unique thing that forms a part of it, each momentary joy, each person, each you, each me, all of this is eternal. The big dollop contains us and, in a sense, we contain it. The unique events that each of us are occupy a particular site in space-time but without our presence everything else would be different. We could not exist without each other. We are connected not separate. This is the ‘true’ meaning of the somewhat overused and commodified new-age phrases like ‘your pain is my pain’. This is the ‘true’ meaning of the less often used phrase – Hmmm why is that I wonder? Maybe let’s say this more? – ‘your joy is my joy’. You and I have always existed and will always exist. But, and here is the catch, we only get to know and touch the infinite through finitude, we only get to experience eternity by accepting that we are a body that will die, by kissing ‘the joy as it flies’. Dualist thought tries to escape this paradox by positing the existence of an immortal soul or individual consciousness that is separate from the body, so that we get not to die after all. Historically, imagining this separation has often led us to denigrate the body as inessential or sinful, a cloak that hides our true natures, something of which to be ashamed, something to hide under a fig leaf. Monist thought embraces the paradox and embraces the body as the fleeting incarnation of the beautiful, eternal big dollop.
That is why, for me, the route to realignment of the knowing done by the body and the knowing of conscious thought is, before anything else, to listen to the body. It is through our breathing, sensing body that we come to touch and know the universe and that it comes to touch and know us. It is through the sensing body that we hear the bird sing. We need to attend carefully to the body’s subtle non-verbal language of tensing and loosening, learning in this way, not through analysis and instrumental reason, what it is that each moment needs. We live in a fear-driven culture that tells us to ignore the body, that praises us for gritting our teeth and pushing through pain and fatigue, that encourages us to treat our bodies as we have treated the earth, as an object, something out there, an enemy for us to defeat, tame and exploit, something from which we are entitled to extract every last drop of energy; this culture has numbed us so effectively to the fundamental character of existence that we often fail notice that, all along, we have been consuming own bodies, our own hearts, instead of providing them with the nourishment they yearn for.
When I attended a mindfulness teacher training course in 2021, one of the questions I left with was, ‘Why do we call it ‘mindfulness’?’ So much of what the course – which, by the way, was wonderful and life-changing – so much of what it taught was about, over and over, returning our attention to the moment-by-moment experience of the body, and about noticing how we habitually flee from the body and its simple but mysterious ‘isness’ into conscious thought, its addictive search for ultimate causes, its seductive certainties, its delusions, its specious answers to the question ‘Why?’ For me, we must and surely will continue to ask questions, to wonder about the mysterious nature of it all, to push back the frontiers of what can be fruitfully known using numbers and words. There is no retreat to Eden, no turning back the clock. This is the way it had to be. But, if we are to survive, please let this not be at the expense of the more fundamental work of listening to everything that we know is true even though it evades analysis into categories and quantities; let it not be at the expense of cultivating the wisdom of our bodies, and the wisdom of the earth, let our survival, on the contrary, be built on a foundation of learning to do intentionally what the non-verbal animal kingdom does instinctively, to live in symbiotic harmony with our bodies and the world that sustains them. Our bodies have always known, the bird that sings has always known, let us find a way back to ourselves, it is never too late, let us help each other to remember how to listen and respond to our heart’s own love song.
Yes To All Of It 