Exposure

Mental Entities

After a radio story on Thomas Edison, my imagination was fired up by his idea of humans as swarms of life energy units that persist for awhile then disperse and eventually join other energy units to form something else. As an image for death it’s more comforting than the image of a body decaying. It also puts emphasis on the energy of consciousness as opposed to the physical body. I’ve always liked the idea of a soliton as an image for a particular existence. Like the shape of an eddy in a stream that keeps its form as long as the conditions of the current and rocks stay the same, once the supporting conditions are gone, so is the shape. A similar dynamic occurs with a class. For a time we are a swarm of minds that each influence the other and bring out different qualities and ideas that none of us might have arrived at alone. It’s a mental organism that grows and matures over time. It’s a dynamic with its own qualities and behaviors. The mixing of different backgrounds and ideas fuels a broader creativity and the participatory energy has its own field of influence. When it’s time frame ends, the energy units disperse enriched by the shared experience and new understanding. The disintegration of any strange attractor (pattern of energy that holds its form) is a kind of death of a specific form, but the word shifts meaning with the understanding it was always part of a sea of energy flow that is constantly reorganizing. At every level from cells and systems, to societal groups and the larger fields of consciousness that organize the physical realm like a semester organizes a class, the patterns of collaborating elements of consciousness repeat at every scale. Too much emphasis on an individual physical body doesn’t give enough weight to the many collaborative mental entities with which we participate. When the entity disperses, the ideas and points-of-view are still available in the larger consciousness.