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Hedging my bets

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

When I was sitting with Kairos the other day, I was thinking about consciousness, about the reality of the world, about what matters, about ethics.


At the time, it seemed clear, if hard to articulate. Something like: there is no predetermined telos, but life, once life happens, seeks to increase complexity and resist entropy. Life does this through forms and relations between forms. Life does this through matter and the relations between material beings. Life is in matter. Life cannot be without matter. And life, to me, is the thing. Life that enables as much rambunctious flourishing of difference and variety in communion and communication by increasingly varied ways as possible. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, in this theory, but is not the be-all and end-all. It is one of the ways in which communion and communication occurs. It may be that all matter is conscious, or that all sufficiently complex matter is conscious, or that all life is conscious, but the smallest hydrogen atom communicating with another hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom to make something new and fluid is a more critical and fundamental emergence. We may as well celebrate that rather than consciousness.


And, ultimately, the mattering is in the doing and the relating; the mattering is in the impact of the vitality and creativity of the living planet.


Can changes in the consciousness of humans change the course of global warming and biodiversity loss and the polluting of the seas, soils and air? Well, to the extent that if the conscious thoughts, beliefs, and motivations of humans shifted. But I don't believe, I DO NOT believe that meditation does it. Maybe arguments don't either. In fact, I doubt they do. What I think changes human minds and hearts is experience - and that does rely on being conscious of the experience, but it also relies on the experience. That experience may arise from an insight in meditation, an NDE, a trip on magic mushrooms, or a crow that pays attention to you, a book that speaks to you deeply, another person's example, an acknowledgement that there are indeed more forest fires and floods.


The course of humanity will be changed not by a minority meditating, but a majority experiencing something that reaches into their core.


And sadly, you and I and Tane and the Dalai Lama can't make that happen, whatever we do or write or say. It will happen like life, through the material connections between material beings - be they fires and forests, protestors and corporations, individuals and the living earth.


So how is this hedging my bets? Well, I will not claim that one thing or view, one epistemology or ontology is true. I will cede hubris and accept with humility that I do not know what reality really is. All I can know is that life arises and what life seeks takes precedence.


After I wrote this, I read this passage:


Karen Barad advocates an ethics of “mattering” and “worlding,” which is “about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (Meeting the Universe Halfway 392–393). Barad’s theory of intra-action supplants the human subject as the locus of both “knowing” and “ethicality”: “We (but not only ‘we humans’) are always already responsible to the others with whom or which we are entangled, not through conscious intent but through the various ontological entanglements that materiality entails” (393). Attending to our ontological entanglements and “lively relationalities,” which cannot be circumscribed or defined in advance, is a rather formidable ethical/epistemological enterprise that reconfigures commonsensical conceptual landscapes. - Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self by Stacy Alaimo

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maplekey4
1月23日

I'm glad I read what you wrote before reading the quote. Lots to think about. I think I get the sense of it. Thanks.

いいね!
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