Psychotropism and Soul

As the means of seeing into workings of the brain become increasingly sophisticated we are apt to see a turf war between the caretakers of the soul and the pillars of science. It has recently been discovered that the absence of empathy sometimes displayed in autism is due to the lack of what have been termed “mirror neurons” in the brain. Mirror neuron is a name given to a category of brain response first noticed by experimenters upon monkeys. They found if one monkey performed certain simple behaviors that an observer monkey exhibited brain firing mirroring that of the performing monkey. A researcher whose field of study was autism wondered if a lack of mirror neurological activity might explain the absence of empathy found in some cases of autism. Subsequent experimentation determined this to be the case.

Might there be a bell curve of mirror neurological capacity with the likes of Mother Teresa at one end, autistic dysfunction at the other, and all the rest of us somewhere in between? If it were so it would certainly explain a great deal, and soon our instruments of experimentation will be sufficiently evolved to know. If it is so then empathy and compassion take their new place as emotional tropisms. And the laboratory regimen used to make this determination would probably be sensitive enough to make the same kind of determination about sexual disposition, predisposition to violence, and a host of other personal oddities. If much of our vaunted individuality turns out to be as mechanical as a wristwatch, where does this leave self-determination and the soul?

Actually it puts the burden right where it should be. It’s not what we are; it is what we do with it. Within the varieties of personal potential the question remains: What is the Who?

Awakening the Intelligence

There is a theory of language acquisition postulating that language is biologically constellated, and that words do not symbolize their referents. The implications of this view are: meaning is immanent and words become conduits of meaning by an imbued association acquired in the natural process of socialization. This seems an observation rather than a theory, and once understood it provides an opportunity to touch upon a fundamental property of intelligence.

From birth we are accustomed to forming observations into utterance, and through the vehicle of utterance we are able to convey such information as can be swaddled in words: made intelligible. But understanding is nonlinguistic, or perhaps better said: prelinguistic. And for all its efficacy, the habit of language predisposes the mind to live in words rather than meanings, and to consider that hearing words it has gotten meaning, and that framing words it has expressed facts. The innate intelligence that makes words inevitable is the substance of any power inherent in words, and context determines what is derived by the limitations of intelligence in any attempt at communication.

Be as they may, the implications of slicing time; it does not take language to build a clock. A large and very simple element of the awakening of the intelligence is the cultivation of the native prelingual comprehension of one's surroundings that is the foundation of normal waking consciousness.

Emptiness, Suchness, and the Meaning Saturated Gestalt

The terms Emptiness and Suchness will be familiar to students of Eastern thought. Emptiness is not the emptiness of bucket or chair. The normal emptiness of bucket and chair is an element of Platonic Form, of which my understanding is that the essential necessity of an object's function is the truth of its universal form. This is a thought provoking view, but there is another school of thought considering all forms to be Empty. Suchness refers to the observation that things are radically just as they are.

Emptiness refers to the fact of existence: of thing: of all. No thing contains anything in the Platonic way. If we insist that a baseball contains horsehair, or that a can contains beans, we are right as far as that goes; but let us consider "object" in a consequence-free matrix. For a pig a bicycle is meaningless: the seat, the handlebars, the wheels; utterly without implications. For this pig the bicycle is Empty in the way the way we are trying to convey. All things are Empty. They couldn't contain anything if they wanted to. Mind fills them with content the same way water stays in a bucket: by law of accident. When this is recognized, things can be seen as they are.

Once we get our mind around the Emptiness thing, we are in a position to understand what is meant by Suchness. No thing can deviate from the fact of it's existence: every Thing is absolute presence. Any and every Thing is flawlessly and exactly it's being: the perfect example of its Self, totally and radically existent, be it a philosophy or a grain of sand. This is Suchness, and Suchness is Empty.

Suchness and Emptiness by their very arch-reality are indifferent to human meaning, but only when we have an understanding of Emptiness and Suchness are we in a position to recognize that all life takes place in a meaning-saturated gestalt.

Does a Dog have Buddha Nature?

hmmmm