Bookmak 2025

Afterlife

When I was a very small child, I didn’t understand the fact of being a separate person. I repeatedly asked my mother “Why am I me?” who never really understood what I was getting at, but being a separate individual confused me, and I thought there had to be a reason. Though I never found an answer or an absolute reason for being, I have thought about the idea that being separate felt unnatural to me which feeds my current sense that we’re not as separate as we think, and that our consciousness may return to its original unity. In an interview about his recent novel “Secret of Secrets”, Dan Brown stated firmly that though once he was sure there was nothing after physical death, after researching this book he was convinced that individual consciousness survives the death of the body. He said that interviewing people that had had Near Death Experiences, they “walked the talk”, that the experience changed their view of death completely and restructured their lives accordingly. Having watched many videos of people talking about their NDE’s since my husband died, I’ve been impressed with their sincerity and desire to help others understand that we are more than our physical body. Sri Yogananda stated that “Death…is an experience through which we are meant to learn that we cannot die.” One reason I’m receptive to that idea is because I always felt that what looked out from my physical being was the same consciousness as it was when I was a child, an unchanged witness within that lies beyond this particular personality and physical body. No scientist has been able to locate a place for consciousness there. Basically, science can’t prove there isn’t anything after bodily death any more than that there is. In his novel Brown reviews the many factors that suggest a non-local consciousness and studies that support the idea of the brain as more a receiver/transmitter, a vehicle for consciousness to use what we learn, a portal to a larger stream of consciousness. In an article published in Frontiers in Psychology the authors suggest that none of the primary materialist theories explain consciousness as well as a non-local approach. To think of consciousness as fundamental, pervading everything, makes room for experiences that don’t fit materialist models. A growing number of scientists are looking at the intersection with quantum non-locality in their exploration of consciousness. What creates subjective experience is one of the hurdles a materialist model can’t get past. Art as the expression of subjective life is testimony to the importance of the qualities of being and not just the facts. Though the brain is involved in what we experience as consciousness, it can’t explain everything. Consciousness as the foundation of reality is an area to be explored that would benefit from more art to help us see it.

Nudge

Recognition

Seeing depends on recognition. We need to have seen something before to know what we’re looking for, to lock on to the sense of known. Even when we can’t identify something right away there can be a feeling of familiarity that draws focus. After more than a decade since neuroscience’s discovery of the importance of feelings to thinking, it is finally being acknowledged in media. Feelings come first, providing incentives regarding what needs attention. Feelings accompany vision as an initial assessment of what we’re seeing. They are far more nuanced than words can express, think how many different ways a beautiful day or a wild ocean can look. If we’re looking at another person, the inner mirroring of face and body language help us feel what another is experiencing. Besides our experience of our surroundings, we have art to show the deep movements of the heart. Artists throughout time have shown what’s it’s like to be human, to appreciate beauty, shudder at horror and gasp at what’s ugly beyond human understanding. Art is our vehicle to witness what’s not within our own experience and enlarge our understanding of feeling and intuitive judgment. Looking at the art that attracts you trains that sensitivity. Building faith in our response to what we see can strengthen our moral judgments to hold up against the flood of verbal justification. Realizing the importance of visual judgments could guide us in better understanding what is happening in our world. Vision shows what’s harmonious, what’s in conflict, where something valued has been defiled. Many of us felt heartsick at the demolition of the east wing of the White House, a place that belonged to the country, not an individual, and provides a recent example of how what is wrong is felt. The machine bites off a piece of building we care about and we feel it in our chest. Likewise, we recoil at human beings being thrown to the ground, treated with disrespect and carted off to cages. Destroying small boats and the people in them without evidence of wrongdoing is another ugly scene in our current reality horror show. The words and explanations don’t carry the weight of witnessing and feeling the truth of what we see. Understanding how powerful our vision is in seeing right and wrong, goodness and cruelty, comes with the responsibility to look. In a world full of distractions, it’s too easy to ignore what’s actually happening around us. Making decisions about where to give our attention is the first step in active awareness.

Joy in Action

Loss of Care

In the early stages of my grief after my husband died, I was grateful for texting because answering any question, especially about how I was doing meant falling apart. The distance and detachment of texting allowed me to communicate without losing control of my emotions. But the level to which this detachment now pervades modern consciousness worries me. Connecting to my last post about the condition of modern attention, I was struck while recently in Ireland, by a column by Joe Humphreys in the Irish Times focusing on the same direction. Referring to the work of an Irish based study group, Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, who draw on the work of Simone Weil and her philosophy of attention, Humphreys asks, “What, after all is the smartphone but a mechanism for drawing your attention away from the physical reality surrounding you?” It’s an important question. What we notice is what we care about, good and bad. With the lack of attention to our environment, the concern that should be generated by what’s being eroded isn’t there. Our image of our world is being blinkered by one small device. The loss of care, of feeling for our surroundings is a casualty of the phone-based lifestyle. The detachment I appreciated when grieving has become a pervasive default state, the full range of emotions flattened by the same inexpressive text. I think to myself of what I wrote about a friend’s piece last month and how deeply expressive each of the fonts of each of the layers of words were, adding a tone of voice and emotional attitude. What she’d done with the style of each font felt like a master orator’s persuasive tones in a monologue. The option to illustrate, in that piece, an open-mouthed reptile near the bottom added anxiety to the whole. It's not the words that are the problem. There is privacy in writing by hand as well as a level of intimacy that is hard to achieve with technology. Sometimes a letter arrives, and I know instantly who it is from, handwritten, hand drawn and collaged, the appearance says more than the words themselves. It’s a multidimensional depth of expression which is why letters are kept for life, expansive personal messages that say they care in every part. We don’t realize how much is lost when we only email and text, all content regimented, made uniform by the mechanism. We make more of ourselves visible when we write by hand. Taking time to look, to notice the world around us, seeing the needs of others and the condition of the environment build care for them. Thinking about how we express ourselves to others offers a choice of how much care we want to give.

Indecision