What If?
We are not who or what we think we are. That would change everything. What we think and believe. What we do and why. What we value and care for. Everything would change.
Sensory proprioception is a real-time, three-dimensional inner experience of our movement through outer space. In a similar, but a different way, the neocortex evolved a social image, similar to sensory proprioception, that represents an imagined ‘self’, or ‘ego-character’, that moves through the virtual-reality we call society and culture. The gaming world is a good example.
To play a computer game an ego-avatar is needed to engage and relate to a virtual-reality. We create a similar image of ‘me’ or ‘self’, a proprioceptive social surrogate, to play in our social virtual-reality, society and culture. That’s fine except, that reality is imagined. It is just an image. In order for sensory proprioception to do its job, we have to believe. Believing in sensory proprioception is natural, unquestioned. Not believing would mess everything up. The same is true for our psychological images. Belief is assumed.
Appreciating this belief default, why would nature question the images created by the neocortex? She would not. And because of this built-in assumption we reify the images and mistake our self-image or ego-image for an actual entity, independent from our imagination, and forget completely about authenticity or essence. This is our original sin or mistake. And we are still doing it.
We falsely believe that image is what and who we actually are. Compounding our personal mistake, everyone does the same. Everyone believes that they are their images, not only of self, but the collective ‘self’ called ‘culture’. Culture and self appear different, but are really two expressions of the same process. Once this mistake is accepted and believed, and it must be believed for the image to work, there is inevitable conflict between your images, my images and the collective. Unquestioned belief in these images often result in violent comparisons; pride, vanity, hubris, embarrassment, shame, and the rest is history.
The truth is, we are not a fixed ‘thing’. We are not that image. We are pure process. Like water flowing, movement creates the ‘appearance’ of a river. Stop the movement and there is no river. We are that movement, and that movement is the world.
As sensory proprioception ‘represents’ our relationship with the physical world, images of self and culture ‘represent’ our social virtual-reality. These images are powerful tools, pure metaphor or theater, but to mistake a tool as ‘the thing’ is crazy. Try eating the menu for lunch.
With low levels of attention, which is our collective norm, we ‘assume’ that the image is the thing. It takes heightened attention to see the falseness of this most unquestioned assumption. With greater presence and attention, we see movement, everchanging casual relationships, not things. This change of worldview, changes the world viewed. The conflicts we experience relating to images disappears, revealing what we actually are and have always been, movement, free, spontaneous, always changing, profoundly intelligent, kind, lucid, and appropriate. Dancing with the wind and the stars, celebrating the invisible forces we call life.
m