Duh De Ching
Flint and Steel
Flint is a rather plain-looking rock. Steel is a cold, dense metal.
Try hitting the steel against the flint and see what happens.
Archive for the ‘Life and Spirit’ Category
Flint and Steel
Thursday, March 18th, 2010Billy was in a Coma
Monday, March 15th, 2010Philip A. Gonzales
A true story.
Billy Was in a Coma
Billy was in a coma. Billy was an artist and a writer leading a tenuous way of life. That Camel-straight voice coming from his 5-ft, 2-inch frame and those darting, manic eyes had a way of getting everyone’s attention. About 2 o’clock in the morning, Billy was coming home from a good number of hours in active pursuit of his muses. He was riding an old motor scooter, stopping for a red light in the unforgiving summer humidity. Billy was not the kind of guy who used his rear-view mirrors, so he had no idea what hit him from behind. To the drunk driver, Billy must have felt like a bug on the windshield. Then Billy was in a coma.
Mama came right away. She had just the two boys: Billy and Danny. Their father had passed away when the kids were 10 and 12 years old. She couldn’t reach Danny for a couple of days. He lived in California. His girlfriend said that she wasn’t sure; he might have gone to Reno.
Billy’s mother would not leave his hospital room through the first few days and nights. His condition was unchanging; desperate. She prayed while she took a detailed inventory of her younger son’s life. Damn, I wish those boys got along better. she repeated to herself. Danny used to torment Billy into a frenzy. Every day there would be some kind of bloodshed, mostly Billy’s blood. The climax incident between the two boys found Billy punching his fist right through a plate glass window. Danny wheezed out his spasmodic laughter on the other side. After that, Mama was able to attain an uneasy brand of peace. You boys will put me underground.
, she declared whenever she saw them together. But her two sons never wanted to have much to do with each other from then on. Danny left home. Billy turned inward.
It was getting near lunch on the fifth day when Danny burst through the door of his brother’s hospital room. Hi Mama. What did that idiot do now?
She welled up and tucked her trembling chin into the folds of scarf. Not a word to Danny. Danny reared back and gave the fully-adjustable, $14,000 bed a karate kick that knocked Billy’s IV bag onto the floor. Billy was in a coma.
Danny picked up precisely where they had left off. You stupid motherfucker, Billy! You made me come all this way, and you won’t even talk to me. I always told Mom and Dad that you were just a steaming turd.
He jumped up on Billy bed and straddled him just around the ribcage. You’re a worthless asshole. Look at you lying there!
Danny made a trampoline. That’s it. I’m pulling the plug. It’s about time we were done with you, Billy.
Danny performed his amateur wrestling body slam directly on Billy’s solar plexus. Mom couldn’t hold herself back any longer. She howled, Danny, stop it! You boys will put me underground!
, moaning as she teetered backward two steps. Danny initiated a series of viscous bitch-slaps across his little brother’s face and neck. Glowing hand prints bloomed across Billy’s pallid skin. Danny was piloting his rant to a stall up at that hoarse, howling, foaming altitude.
Billy’s eyes popped open. An eerie, wet rattle reverberated down his tracheotomy tube. Danny froze. His chin began to jump and dimple. Mom withered to her knees. A nurse barreled through the door and dodged around her to see what was happening. Billy’s eyes glared, mired in his limp face. They fluttered. He went under again.
Now it’s three years since the accident. Billy walks with a limp and a cane, but he walks. Billy talks with a profound slur, but he talks. Billy loses track of things around him, but he gets through his day. Billy is alive, and Billy is not in a coma.
Your brain directs the life in your body, but your body let’s your brain know that you are alive in the world from moment to moment. If your body is deprived of sensory stimulus for an extended period of time, then it will die. But first your central nervous system – brain and spinal column – will sink into a coma. Sensory stimulus is what keeps you conscious; what keeps you alive in a sequence of moments. In a coma, your brain can deliver a generalized aliveness to your organs, but with no sense of the variations in stimulus that provide a sense of the moment. That’s the reason for the rapidity of sleep: there is no sensory stimulus in moment-by-moment sequences.
Danny came to jump-start Billy’s nervous system. Danny’s antics applied high voltage to Billy’s proprioceptive system, awakening Billy’s brain to the fact that his body was still alive in the world. Then Billy’s brain knew that there was a sequence of moments in which to be alive.
Reasons Happen for a Thing
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010Philip A. Gonzales
Reasons Happen for a Thing
For years, I tried to believe that things happen for a reason. I performed some uncomfortable mental contortions in an attempt to fit that idea into my cranium. Didn’t work; I still don’t get it. The term “for a reason” means that there is an answer to the question “Why?” So to complete the statement “Things happen for a reason… ” I had to say “… but nobody will ever know the reason.” For what reason does genocide happen? For what reason did that plane crash? For what reason will an avalanche fill her belly with that little mountain village? I give up. Turns out that our cognition is miraculous in taking us through the pleasures and perils of life.
Things happen. We sense the things that are happening. That’s cognition. But then comes our metacognition. It’s all over the map. Yes, things do happen. Life is not messy; chocolate is messy. Life is perilous. And we want to know why. When the largest Tsunami in human history hit Alaska, there were three boats in its path. One sank. The other two rode the crest of that 1,700-foot wave and the occupants survived. Our inner beings want to ride the crest of the bad stuff that happens, so we ask “why”. Just the act of searching for a reason gives us a feeling of rising above the struggles; it drives us toward refinement of our mental suvival skills. It’s very useful. There is hardly ever a clear answer, but we try to make survival more of a certainty by looking for reasons.
Reasons happen for a thing. Reasons and things happen almost simultaneously, but your brain begins to create the reasons within a very small fraction of a second after an occurrence that requires your attention. If you are using your senses to recognize the true nature of the world around you, then attention happens. Attention requires the use of three parts of your brain: the sensory, the emotional, and the action centers. It’s called the Triangular Circuit of Attention. Right alongside all this raw perception and attention, your left hemisphere chimes in as the “spin doctor”, in the words of psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University. That’s when the reasons happen, and they play a leading role in your survival. The more dangerous, confusing, or bizarre the occurrence, the faster your brain will kick into action searching for an explanation. New York University’s Joseph LeDoux (LeDoux Lab) has performed research that reveals the brain functions that arise as we cause reasons to happen for a thing. Author Laurence Gonzales (Deep Survival, Everyday Survival), writing in National Geographic Adventure, surveys the work of Pinker and LeDoux. Um, yes… he is my brother.
I remain open-minded. An explanation of how things can happen for a reason would hold my interest. I believe in God. But I think that the power of God is revealed in the patterns of our universe that, by their very precision, strike us as being largely random. In light of all the science that illustrates how reasons happen, I’m feeling pretty good about this little survival mechanism that’s been given to us. We live in a world of change, but we try to establish comfortable patterns. It’s in our nature to try to make the rough places plain. Peace is not inherent in nature, but we strive to create peace in our minds. Still, there is a looming question: Can I create peace in a healthy mind that recognizes all of the realities that my senses report?
As your “spin doctor” comes up with reasons, allow it to lead you toward a deeper understanding of your own responses to what happens, without judgement. Steven Pinker also calls the left side of the brain a “baloney generator”. Well, it’s up to you to determine whether your left hemisphere is going to generate baloney, or to provide you with an incisive frame of thought as you happen to your own life.
The Physical Scale of Life
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Philip A. Gonzales
The Physical Scale of Life
When I was 21 years old, I drove my BMW R60 touring motorcycle from Chicago to Vancouver Island. I did not sleep or eat indoors for two months. My world was, simply, The World. Many aspects of my being were transformed in ways that are still emerging to this day.
One hot summer day, I stopped for a rest in a northern arboreal forest. Even under the dense shade of the white pines, the air was throbbing with heat. I took off my shirt and sat down on the needle-cushioned forest floor to meditate and do some simple yoga postures. When it was time to emerge from my meditation, I became aware that my body was covered with mosquitoes: back, neck, legs, feet, arms, and face. With a sharp exhale and a wave of my arms, I stood up. The mosquitoes swarmed away. Somehow, my brain would not let me worry about it. As I emerged into the sunlight, I checked for mosquito bites, but there were none. Not one. And mosquito bites usually cook up some lusty, hot, red welts on my skin. Where was my being?
It is immediately apparent that you have being in your body. Your body is alive, giving signals all the time about its being. It moves. It has color. It is warm. It has senses. It communicates. You have awareness in your body. You have awareness in your mind. You have awareness of other bodies. And you have awareness in many other ways that you can’t easily explain; in ways that involve senses other than visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile. Where is your being?
Experiments have shown that a person in an anechoic chamber – a special room that keeps all sound from echoing; a perfectly quiet, isolated room – can hear primarily the low sound of his breathing, his heart beating and the whine of electrical current coursing through his nervous system. He might also hear other body sounds. He has a keen, detailed awareness of his own tissues and cells as they collaborate to maintain the sequence of life and death in his body complex. He has full awareness in his tissues and microscopic cells. Where is his being?
Where is life? There are limits to our five senses. We can sense the world. We can sense being in our bodies and our minds. We can sense being in our tissues and our cells. But where is life? Is it on all of these levels? Does the life inside all of us reach down to the molecular, atom, or sub-atomic scales? On the scale of matter, where does life occur?
The human body is living because of a complex relationship between chemical reactions (the molecular scale) and the flow of electrons (the atomic scale). The eyes, for example, can generate a measurable amount of electrical current from a single photon. That’s one photon! The structure and chemistry of the retina amplify that minute amount of current, making it possible for the body to live in a world of light and vision. And the current from the transduction of those photons bubbles up to the macro levels of the body structure in the storage of chemicals that help the brain function, the production of hormones like Vitamin D, and many processes that give the body life and movement and pleasure. The human body is teeming with such living interactions that take place on a sub-microscopic scale.
In exploring the limits of my senses, I cannot block an awareness of my life in molecules, atoms, electrons, and the entire family of sub-atomic particles that elude so many modes of study. Quantum physics would have our bodies actually living in a state that oscillates among the 11 dimensions of Membrane Theory. But do I live there? If my body and the bodies of living things around me have that same, underlying complex of life, then my meditations may have altered the chemistry in my body, spoiling the meal for those mosquitoes. That’s where my being was.