Consciousness is the great poem of matter. But consciousness isn’t really a response to the world, it’s more of an opinion about it. As miscellaneous as our brain is, with many separate domains, we feel continuous, one mind, one life. How is that possible if the brain’s a congress of specialists? The brain is a gifted illusionist. Here’s one of its best tricks: I seem to perceive the winter woods today in lavish detail, because whatever I pay attention to looms, furiously present, and saturates my awareness. An ice storm has turned a Japanese maple into a glass figurine. As I caress it with my eyes, the rest of the scene blurs, unless I shift my focus to something else, when that leaps into view─a female cardinal with taupe breast feathers and beak orange as candy corn sitting atop a starry fence. I don’t feel like I’m looking through a periscope, but glancing outside at nature in the round. A subtle sense of all that’s lurking in the rest of the scene lulls me into thinking I’m seeing the yard in a single eye-gulp. That bestows a sense of richness, but my awareness isn’t really panoramic. We’re more like a pair of binoculars with legs. Many things register in memory’s lodging house, whether I checked them in or not. Tomorrow I may recall the geometry of bare limbs against the sky, even though I wasn’t attuned to it…until now.

The streaming of consciousness is yet another sleight of mind. Afloat somewhere between done and undone, we ride a fluid present from moment to moment. Life feels continuous, immediate, ever unfolding. In truth, we’re always late to the party. There’s a time lag of half a second between perceiving something and becoming conscious of it. I don’t just mean the sort of reflex that makes a hand recoil from a stove before the mind says too hot! No, all our conscious acts are afterthoughts. Part of that delay the brain spends primping the order of events, so that the world will feel logical and not jar the senses. It takes time for a perception to reach the brain, for the brain to circulate the news, and the sight or tingle finally to hit conscious awareness. It feels like we sense things and know about them at once, but we don’t. Brain time isn’t world time. A little offbeat by design, we’re willing fools, who would otherwise be late for our date with life. We’d feel like we were constantly trailing half a second behind the world instead of keeping up with it. So there’s a butler in the pantry who backdates events. In famous experiments…the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet discovered that the brain processes an action before a person decides to act. If we really do have free will, shouldn’t the decision to act come first?

For years, Libet’s experiments have ignited controversy. Our legal system assumes that adults can choose how to behave, but can they? Or does the brain justify its choices by fooling us into thinking we’re free agents? Our days percolate a thick brew of choices obeyed, vetoed, or postponed. Some decisions require arduous thought. That’s how it feels, anyway. It doesn’t feel like an illusion produced by a brain that, for efficiency or to quash rebellion, lets us believe we’re in charge. What’s being decided probably determines who’s in charge, because a monarch isn’t always needed; sometimes a shop boss will do, or just a loud veto. Some days, and in some circumstances, we’ll have more or less free will, depending on what’s at stake. It was William James who observed that our first act of free will is choosing to believe in free will. We like life to be predictable, so we assume our brain is. Might not be. It might be far more flexible than we imagine, and have a full repertoire of ways to handle problems, depending on their severity or urgency.

All that happens offstage. It’s too fussy, too confusing a task to impose on consciousness, which has other chores to do, other fish to fry. We don’t like to rouse our slugabed mind unless we need to act or react. Pulling on a sock probably wouldn’t require veto power, whereas the impulse to call your boss “a half ounce of insufficiently mobilized prick dust” might. Still, we feel like we make all the big and little decisions, as we sail through the narrows of a day, choosing comforts, weighing risks, hatching ideas, generating feelings, adding new plot twists and characters to our life story.

There are many other sleights of mind, involving all the senses, including the carnival of optical illusions favored by brain scientists and magicians alike. Our bodies con us perpetually in a host of intriguing ways. One instance: pain in the heart or other organs is referred elsewhere because there aren’t nerves linking organs directly to the brain. As a result, our image of our organs is abstract, and the self one feels so sure of is really the possibility of self, phantom limbs filled with actual limbs, a body image partly imaginary, which often extends to include the family one belongs to, the car in which one drives, the carapace of a house in which one lives.

As I think these words, I hold a pen in my right hand, and look to where ink seeps from beneath my fingertips, skywriting loops and squiggles that linger and mean. All the while, I hear these words, which seem to be spoken out loud inside my airy skull. It would take pages to illustrate the hand moves, the ink flow, the pen mechanics, the eyes following that small motion, how the mind communes with itself, why it does so in words. Pages of illustrations? No, it would take the other kind of pages─senatorial assistants or court minions─ages to map the experience to the last detail. Skidding mentally, I think: In the Middle Ages, the sage pages rampaged in stages…on a wise beach. Instead, I write the word instead, am fleetingly reminded of bedstead, inbedstead, but brush that aside as another verbal skid, one faintly erotic, and refocus my thoughts on instead.

We’re not normally aware of such hesitations and detours. The mind feels transparent, an illusion that gives us a sense of control and agency. To think what feels true, little of the backstage action must intrude. Thoughts seem to rise as naturally as bubbles in water. Thank heavens we don’t have to supervise each muscle, dredge each memory, sign off on every transfer and exchange. Thank heavens we don’t have to coordinate the hundred or so muscles in the throat, face, and torso that work together when we speak. Thank heavens we can leave the Krebs cycle (in which oxygen energizes the cells) to the body’s experts, or we’d be fretting over it all day and probably grow so anxious we’d hyperventilate. We thrive on the illusion of spontaneity, of the body working magically, somehow exempt from cause and effect. Truth takes too much time. There’s all that messy analyzing, explaining, and verifying to do. For efficiency, the body just cons us and goes about its business, which, occasionally, we glimpse. At the level of flesh and bone, we all coast on innumerable lies, swim in deceits, thrive on amoral cost-benefit decisions. And yet, as lump sums, as selves, we detest lying in others, punish deceit, strive for compassion, and don’t like being conned. Go figure.

Thus far, no one has defined consciousness in a completely satisfying way, though many have devoted fascinating books to the subject. “Although it is part of my nature,” St. Augustine wrote in the fifth century, “I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How then can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?” We continue to ask the same questions today. Philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and poets alike have spent lifetimes trying to describe and define consciousness. Other books offer admirable accounts of past theories about it, so I’ll go straight to the current debate.

Here are a few of the main camps. Some people believe that consciousness is an essence given to humans by a deity and includes a supernatural entity like a soul; since it’s not physical, science can’t understand it. Some believe consciousness is completely physical, a mental state emerging from the neurons, and wonder how and why a biological system gives rise to conscious experience. In this second group, there are those who think a host of separate brain systems (vision, taste, hearing, etc.) build our sense of consciousness brick by brick; those who believe synchronized neurons, acting in unison, reach a critical mass that creates consciousness; those who believe consciousness springs from one specific area (a frontal lobe system?) rather than multiple areas; and those who blend approaches. Some people believe it’s a mental state that our sort of brain inevitably creates. Some believe it arises from quantum changes in the structure of the neuron, at the level of subatomic particles, where paradox reigns. Some believe consciousness is physical but that we’ll never understand it because a system can’t observe itself (how can you be objective about subjectivity? and, anyway, which neural activities produce subjective experience?). Some believe consciousness is physical and knowable but that we’re not intelligent enough to figure the brain out, though smarter beings probably could. Separate groups believe consciousness can best be understood through philosophy or psychology or science or literature. Some believe consciousness is physical but we’ll only understand it if we can find a way to blend the truths of science, psychology, philosophy, and subjective experiences such as art.

I may have left out a few camps. Some are open-minded, others vociferous, and the field is quickly becoming as abstract, self-enclosed, jargon-ridden, and contentious as a new movement in literary criticism. Everyone seems determined to invent his or her own terms while pointing out the foolishness of everyone else’s. Or as the physiologist Bernard Katz put it so well: “Certain scientists would no more use another’s terminology than they would use another person’s toothbrush.” Because defining consciousness is part of the puzzle, it’s hard for theorists to agree on the target of their discussion, except perhaps to agree that consciousness is sponsored by the brain. But, generally speaking, there are the consciousness-as-flesh people, the consciousness-as-ghost people, and the consciousness-as-divine people. I suppose there are so many differing views because many are right to some degree.

We may have to accept that some mysteries will remain because we evolved brains specifically designed to hide their workings from us. In any case, we can’t completely shelve our subjectivity. With us life-long, it pleases and defines us in crucial ways, and colors every attempt at objectivity. We need the revelations of neuroscience, but also those of psychology, philosophy, and the arts, which have much to teach us about the subjective experience our brain produces. We’re unaware of the urgent board meeting of our psyche, always in session, acquiring information from the world and the body, and running cost-benefit analyses, a labor of multitudes of cells, providing steady feedback to the brain. Instead we feel like solo masters of our fate, captains of our souls, the stuff of homily and poetry.

One problem I find with some of the theories about consciousness is their belief that it floats so far beyond the vigor of matter that there must be a luminous bridge we just haven’t discovered yet linking brain processes and phenomenal experience. That seems condescending to matter. We’re an arrogant, self-infatuated species, and whatever we argue to the contrary, we do believe we’re the pinnacle of life on Earth. Just as every parent has the most beautiful child, we have the most dazzling brain. Consciousness, what could be grander? Surely it’s more than a mere brain’s squishy parts? But maybe matter isn’t as mere as we suppose. We live in a rambunctious, dynamic, to us magical-seeming universe full of recombinable stuff. Consciousness is just one form of mischief matter can create. Quartz is another one. As are Jupiter, cactus, bombardier beetles, college students. Matter has legs, and it dazzles even when inert. If one day we venture beyond our solar system, we may discover some of matter’s other nifty tricks.

As much as I treasure our mind’s suppleness and high jinks, I don’t imagine it’s fundamentally much different from what other animals experience in lots of antique ways. Only that it seems starkly other because we’ve adapted to such different habitats, evolved a neocortex that likes ruminate on such things, and our brain provides all we know from birth to death. It seems more complex, and is, because we unfurl elaborate states of being. But that just means our brain is more convoluted, not that there’s a threshold past which neurons conjure up something supernatural. Mere matter can be luminous or licentious. Every animal inhabits a different universe. Senses attuned to its unique lifestyle, it perceives only what it needs to survive. Part of the thrill of being human is that we’re uniquely ordinary. We share most of our past and biology with Earth’s other animals. On the subatomic level, we share our basics with matter throughout the universe, with star hatcheries and space foam. But we’re also fundamentally different.

When male alligators respond emotionally to music, it’s for their own special crocodilian reasons. For example, one evening in 1944 scientists invited a French horn player to serenade an alligator named Oscar. Whenever the musician hit B‑flat, the alligator bellowed, as male alligators do as part of their mating display. The same thing happened when a cellist played B‑flat. Although there’s no report of dancing water surrounding the alligator, that happened, too, because part of a male alligator’s bellow is subsonic and makes the water leap like frying diamonds.

What happened in Oscar’s brain is anyone’s guess. But our own reptilian brain works just as mysteriously and mainly swims below our pond of awareness. Given the right note, it makes us bellow without understanding why. Then our higher brain, the storyteller, devises an explanation. Sometimes it’s an accurate one, sometimes merely convenient.  In the oldest swamps of the brain, we have a reptilian logic we’ve saved for millennia. Why part with functions that work so well? When we needed other parts, we added them. But we never lost the reptile core, inside the brain stem, which responds fast and dirty to any threat, real or imaginary. All it has to do is keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes, and that it does with ferocious and sloppy success.

The brain’s dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears. Maybe stronger brains will solve that problem in future days. I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don’t attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

***

From “An Alchemy of Mind”

The word “fractal” was coined less than twenty years ago by one of history’s most creative mathematicians, Benoit Mandelbrot.  He derived the term “fractal” from the Latin verb frangere, meaning to break or fragment.  Basically, a fractal is any pattern that reveals greater complexity as it is enlarged.  Thus, fractals graphically portray the fascinating notion of “worlds within worlds”.  Even we are fractals, with DNA maps nestled in each cell.

Traditional Euclidean patterns (squares, octogons) appear simpler when they are magnified; as you zone in on one area, the shape looks more and more like a straight line.  In the language of calculus such curves are differentiable.  But fractals, like dendritic branches of lightning or bumps of broccoli, are not differentiable: the closer you come, the more detail you see.  Infinity is implicit and invisible in the computations of calculus but explicit and graphically manifest in fractals.

Whether generated by equations, computers or natural processes, all fractals are spun from what scientists call a “positive feedback loop.”  Something -data or matter- goes in one “end,” undergoes a given, often very slight, modification and comes out the other.  Fractals are produced when the output is fed back into the system as input again and again.  The video below explores the famous Mandelbrot set.  When this equation is computed and graphed on the complex plane, it’s shows  an elaborate boundary, which does not simplify at any given magnification, unfurling in every direction to infinity.

Fractal artists do not create but explore, do not manufacture but discover.  They know well, the synthesis of man and machine.  For the fractal image is the face of chaos -determined at every point but wholly unpredictable, first-born of reason yet utterly irrational.

***

“What is a Fractal? by A. Beck

Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium gas hover in outer space; these are the birthplaces of stars.  Under gravity the clouds contract, heat up and eventually collapse.  Once temperatures reach several thousand degrees, the hydrogen molecules ionize (lose electrons) becoming protons.  The gas continues to compress until the temperature reaches 10 million degrees Celsius (18 million degrees Fahrenheit).  This is the hydrogen-burning phase and its duration depends on the star’s weight.  The heavier the star, the brighter it burns and the shorter its life.  In this stage of nuclear fusion, H+ protons join together to produce He++ atoms.  All heavier elements in the periodic table are created in stars.  During the fusion, matter also gets converted to energy, as light and heat.  Once all the hydrogen has been used up, the star, at its largest size is called a red giant.  From there it can become any of the following:

• Planetary Nebula

>Star continues to generate energy using hydrogen and helium; surface rises and falls until layers of gas spin off forming a gaseous shell known as a planetary nebula.

• White dwarf

>Small stars continue to shine as helium is produced, further contraction is prevented by the core’s electron repulsion.  White dwarfs have the mass of the sun and volume of the earth making the core incredibly dense.

• Supernova

>In massive stars nuclear fusion continues producing heavier elements and more energy.  Iron, once formed is very stable and harder to bind to other elements.  Eventually the star collapses under gravity and explodes massive amounts of gas leaving an extremely dense core composed entirely of neutrons (neutron star).

• Pulsars

>A neutron star spinning rapidly after a supernova explosion emits electromagnetic radiation: light & X-rays. These beams radiate in a circle because the star is spinning and looks as if it’s pulsing on and off.

• Black Holes

>Giant stars with an extremely heavy core continue to collapse under gravity; matter is squeezed into a smaller and smaller space.  Immensely dense, nothing can escape its gravity; not even light.

***

Did you know, many of the stars you see no longer exist?  Long dead, their light is only now arriving at earth.

***

Birth of a Star, 2mins: Hubble Site

I caress the world with my eyes and fall in love with everything I see.  I try to showcase the poignant delicacy and robust audacity of nature.  In awe of her shapes, textures and colors I wield my camera in service of her beauty.

My work seeks to hybridize logos (reason) and eros (emotion).  Parsing reality with scientific rigor and dreamy surrealism I attempt to excavate its latent unseen magic.  From the tiny hairs on a flower bud to the labyrinthine surface of fungus, I look for pattern and chaos in equal measure.

Fascinated by the natural processes of budding or decay I aim to bring originality to subjects that have been photographed a million times.  I am drawn to images with soul -inspiring, intense, tender, rageful, cinematic, outrageous or hysterical.  I love the palettes, faces and terrain of other cultures and the warm rich colors of age and abandonment.

An investigator, a documenter and poet of sorts I’m beguiled by the light that plays on a local creek and the quiet beauty of lichen on a rock.  This collection is a sampling of my various themes; I hope it conjures your curiosity and delight.

***

For full screen, click on bottom right corner of slideshow window.

[Show as slideshow]

For many hours each month I engage in my artistic pursuits; two of these are photography and mixed media collage.  When my kids bought me a digital camera for my birthday several years ago, I discovered the power of taking my own photos to use in collage.  Now I combine my drawings, real-life bits, scraps, pieces of scanned stuff and digital photos to illustrate poems, dreams, musings and random thoughts that filter through my head-heart like sunlight sifting through a forest canopy. Playing around with digital paintings and collages has become as basic to my life as …eating or sleeping.  Have a walk through my imagination, with yours.
***

For full screen, click bottom right corner of slideshow window.

[Show as slideshow]

The day we went to the sea

mothers in Madras were mining

the marina for missing children.

Thatch flew in the sky, prisoners

ran free, houses danced like danger

in the wind. I saw a woman hold

the tattered edge of the world

in her hand, look past the temple

still standing, as she was -

miraculously whole in the debris of gaudy

South Indian sun. When she moved

her other hand across her brow,

in a single arcing sweep of grace,

it was as if she alone could alter things,

bring us to the wordless safety of our beds.

Sad magician, happy playmate,

you father the sounds of light

bringing form to breath and awe.

Honey-mouthed,

your words keep wondering at bay,

wondering about the scent of hunger,

the aching stillness of a stone,

a fern’s solitude.

Your words move inside me

familiar, like a prayer

that haunts my lips

and holds my body frozen.

Your world, immense,

brave and trembling

seems larger than

the poet ropes

that bind its feet,

and trips its step.

Fallen and massive

your giant smiles

at these shackles,

his jewelry,

his crown.

What’s the latest book you’ve read?  

Who catches your eye?  

What do you ponder while falling asleep?

Inquiry is a quintessential human trait; but what makes each of us unique is our particular brand of curiosity and imagination.  This signature combo, which defines our essence, is the optimal place from which to source our power, our beauty and our highest sense of self.

___

cu·ri·os·i·ty [kyoor-ee-os-i-tee]
–noun

•    the desire to learn, know, explore anything
•    a novel or extraordinary object that arouses interest
•    a strange, odd or interesting quality

im·ag·i·na·tion [i-maj-uh-ney-shuhn]
–noun

•    the ability to form new ideas, images, be creative or resourceful
•    the aspect of mind which conceives ideas based on information from sense organs
•    an act of creating a semblance of reality

___

The forces of curiosity and imagination pull us towards pleasure and integration with the rest of the world.  Together they form a character profile in each of us.  If you follow their lead -boldly and triumphantly- they will take you everywhere you want to go.

Creativity is not always obvious.  It lingers, it lurks, it jumps out when you least expect.  As lofty as a sonnet or as mundane as a post-it note, art is pervasive.  Ancient Balinese had no special word for ‘artist’.  Painting, dancing, sculpting, making music were just things they did between chores.

Every sound you hear, sight you see or thought you think is an original act of creation.  You collaborate with sensory input to generate a new, unique experience, occurring for the first time in the history of the world.  Each day you invent at least one sentence that has never been uttered before -and do so effortlessly.  Creativity is our birthright, it eludes no one.

Imagination, a realm of infinite possibility, gives rise to all we can ever conceive, comprehend or concoct.  It is the mother of all novelty and the source of creativity.  Seemingly poised between inner and outer worlds, it mediates between the mind and body by bridging sensation to thought.  Imagination makes sensory experience meaningful, enabling us to interpret and contextualize it.  This shaping of awareness by our inner storyteller lays the foundation of all knowledge.

Just as imagination informs knowledge, what we know or don’t know affects our imagination.  When Watson & Crick dreamed up the double helix for DNA it was on the back of much study into the molecular structure of genes.  Newton’s mastery of math & physics afforded his creative insights in optics.  Joan Miró’s exposure to Freud and surrealist thought informed all of his art.  The more you know, the more fodder for imagination.

Knowledge and imagination seem to have a sort of symbiotic relationship; each is essential for the other.  Yet, according to Einstein, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  I am called to agree, not as a rejection of knowledge, more because imagination is a current act of creation –emerging, organic and alive.  Knowledge is based on historic facts.  The past, inert and fixed, is already obsolete.

Imagination generates hitherto unseen mental imagery, making it possible to probe beyond the confines of our perceptual reality.  It helps us weigh alternatives, solve problems, rehearse scenarios, combine facts and stretch knowledge in novel ways to devise new possibilities for action.

Imagination allows us to think about what is, what’s been and what will be.

Take our present moment, humans do not record sensory data unbiased as a camera does.  Perceptions are always assimilated by an inventive, agenda driven mind.  We actively generate our subjective experiences.  A study at Northwestern University monitored subjects’ brains with fMRI to track real and imagined memories.  They concluded that parts of the brain used to perceive an object overlap with those used to imagine it.  Your brain often cannot distinguish between imagining and actually experiencing.

Our past is also informed by imagination, both in how we lay down memories and conjure them up.  We all know memory fades with age.  Recent neuro-imaging studies conducted by Harvard psychologists show that brain mechanisms used to imagine are also used to remember.  Older subjects with a lack of imagination were more prone to suffer a declining memory.  Similar studies of severe amnesiacs with impaired imagining also affirm the link between these two processes.

All thoughts of a future are inherently creative acts -ideals, goals, predictions and fears, even the idea of our own death.  Imagination blurs the boundaries between actuality and fantasy.  Our beliefs, contexts and mental constructions form our framework for reality, which governs what we view as possible.  This in turn generates dreams -our call towards actualization.

It seems we cannot escape imagination’s pervasive contributions to our past, present and future.  But would we want to?  As imagination forges our reality it funds our ability to create stories, identify with others, assess minds, model motivations and develop moral awareness.  The ability to recognize our self in the reflection of others is central to the human experience.

Perhaps the ‘I’ is an elaborate narrative, a useful fiction we develop primarily in a social context, starting with our first ‘other’ = M(other).  It is, I believe, the most primordial story we have, maybe the most powerful.  In a way, we actually imagine our selves into existence.

Now why might we do that?  If imagination is the repository for all that’s possible in human experience, then perhaps we’re part of a universe which itself is a giant experiment in design space, evolution its minion and each phenomenon a hypothesis for testing.  Could we be the answer to a series of questions posed by a curious cosmos?  Imagine that.

Curiosity moves from inchoate yearning-to-understand to concrete requests-for-information, either in the form of actions or questions.  The actions often involve observance of sensory data -like a parent checking a diaper; the questions take the form of how, who, what, where, when, why in some combination -like a first year philosophy class.

A relentless, mysterious drive, curiosity is an ancient channel for life force.  Children stare, dogs sniff, bats listen.  Even the amoeba has a yen to inquire -with pseudo pods and cytoplasmic assessments.

~~~~

Imagine this:  On a park bench you spy a red envelope and wonder what’s inside.  Looking around there’s no one in sight.  Moving closer you notice it contains a letter.  As you lift the envelope questions cascade through your mind:  What kind of letter is this?  Who wrote it?  Why?  What does it say?  Should I read it?  Should I not?  As quick as the questions appear, answers follow:  Perhaps it’s a love letter or a poignant farewell note.  It could be a break-up or an epic confession.  Maybe it’s erotica or an elaborate to-do list.  Mystery beckons.  Even before unfolding the page you’ve conjured an array of stories –all vying to be true.  As curiosity and imagination mingle in creative abandon, you are revealed in the process.

Unfolded, the missive displays a strange spiral of foreign symbols spinning out from the center.  It doesn’t look like English and none of it makes sense.  Our curiosity is unsatisfied and so fires off further inquiry and imagining, as we seek to dissolve confusion.

Uncertainty is threatening  –a knife at the throat.  If there are questions left unanswered or a gap in information, the mind desperately seeks to fill it…even if it has to lie.  Curiosity, in its endless urge to make sense of the world, calls imagination into action.   Always demanding observation, it’s why we attend to the new, the strange and the unexpected.  For each question we pose, we tacitly assume there’s an answer.

Ever notice how children are insatiably curious?  Their minds have a gravitational pull towards understanding, almost at any cost (a great adaptation for memetic transference).  But what kids choose to ask about is a useful indicator of their character; it allows you to read their minds.  In some ways, who one is is a series of questions.  Curiosity –our unique, individual curiosity– is a major factor in the fingerprint of our identity.

Pure curiosity is a primal drive, like hunger.  Yet much of the world seems to be starving.  All kids start out asking questions, but as they mature, less and less ask the questions they actually want answered.  So why do they stop?  Do they run out?  Does curiosity dry up with age?  Have you ever wanted to know something but were afraid to inquire?  Why?

During childhood, grown-ups start responding differently to our queries -reinforcing some, discouraging others.  We’re trained to ask only those questions that are appropriate or easy.  Over time our wide-eyed sense of wonder wanes, leaving fear & doubt in its wake.  This reduced daring depletes the urge to step beyond the bounds of social protocol, cultural paradigms and conventional thought.  Curiosity persists, but bravado may not.  The questions still occur, we just don’t ask them.  We stop heeding this compass built in by Nature to guide us though the vast confusions of reality.

Fear is the main limiter of freedom.  Yet curiosity itself can offer the courage to negotiate around it.  When intrigue supersedes trepidation, we act despite our concerns, we ask despite our fear.  The desire to know that which we don’t already know may be the most powerful tool for transcending fear.

When you stop asking questions to the world, you stop asking questions to yourself.  Once that happens, the allure of life evaporates. What we give up is our rawest self…the part that’s most engaged, most alive.  To betray our curiosity is to betray our inner truth.  I view every unasked question as a kind of lie.  

Curiosity keeps the mind alive, it is our access to openness and transformation.  Without it we become closed, stagnant and dated.  To be a human being is to be in an inquiry.  I ask, therefore I am. 

It’s not clear that we’re born with imagination; curiosity on the other hand is there from the start.  Nothing characterizes wonder more than a baby.  Eyes wide and dazzled, they drink in their surroundings.  Every room is a festival of color and motion, a sensational parade.  It’s been said their consciousness resembles the giddy synaesthesia of psychedelic space.  How wild to start life as an acid trip.

Curiosity generates knowledge, knowledge expands imagination and imagination manufactures meaning.  As humans, we are meaning-making machines.  Our response to the existential query “What does this mean?” -is to make up a story by invoking our  imagination.  When something happens, we observe it, then we make up a story.  But we forget we do this and then believe our stories are true.  These stories are signature patterns that create context.  They are the semantic framework that governs your mood, outlook and quality of life.  Since your imagination is what conjures your reality, it characterizes your particular pattern of being, making it the perfect place to stand when you wonder who you are.

Wonder is where curiosity collides with imagination.  It means to be struck with mystery and awe.  Gazing up from the desert to a starry  sky, watching the birth of a calf, tasting your first mango –all these conjure fascination.  A state of wowed disbelief, wonder is the womb from which every question is born.

___

won·der [wuhn-der]
–verb
•    to think or speculate curiously
•    to be filled with admiration, amazement, marvel (at)
–noun
•    something strange, surprising causing awe & reverence
•    the emotion excited by what is amazing & astonishing

___

Finding ways to embody wonder and be moved by the world is crucial to staying open.  It keeps the psyche strong and heart supple. Pulled forward by the callings of curiosity, propelled further by imagination, your story is an epic, never-before-told tale.  Your unique sense of wonder is what makes you a wonder and is the ideal place to source your beauty and your brilliance.

The sun sets in wide orange bars.

Orion is hunting among the stars

above hillsides spotted brown and white

like fawns. Poems arrive as meteorites

Collecting them, I try my best to impart

impulses, the morse code of the heart,

but I do not understand the vernacular

of fear that jostles me until art occurs,

or why, knowing you from afar

spurs hours of working myself into the stars.

Well, I do know, but fight its common sense:

I try to stabilize us through eloquence.

It’s an old story, better told than I tell,

how artists shape what hurts like hell

(usually love) into separate empires

of lust, tenderness, and lesser desires

we can control. I barely control this one:

I wish we could feel in unison.

I wish you’d shield me from the winds of shame

that swirl up fast and sting like blame.

Some days the world feels uninhabited

and the trees look dark as arrowheads.

I wish your well-tamed inferno were mine.

My heart spanks itself. I can hear it whine.

A stranger’s fire, all flash and bone,

always seems to burn brighter than our own.

***

From ‘Origami Bridges’

At almost every sacred site on our Mediterranean tour the guide explained, “This used to be a shrine dedicated to the goddess, and then for mysterious reasons, unknown persons reconsecrated it to a god.” Suddenly, I was contemplating the overwhelming archeological and historical evidence that all early peoples worshipped some manifestation of the goddess. Indeed, women were priestesses of their religion, and property passed generally through the female line. But with the advent of Western culture, the goddess disappeared. In the three religions of the West - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - women were actually banned from conducting religious ceremonies.

What event in culture could have been so immense and so pervasive that it could change the sex of God? There are many explanations, but none satisfied me until I realized that the goddess started losing power about the same time people began to read and write. It occurred to me that the process of reading and writing could have changed the structure of the human brain and somehow shifted everyone into a patriarchal and misogynous mode. Sophocles once warned that nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. Well, the invention of writing was certainly vast. So what was the curse?

To build an argument for a strange neural anatomical hypothesis explaining a historical enigma, we have to examine how we evolved as humans. We are the only species of higher animals whose females have a feature of sexuality called menses, during which she bleeds and loses a significant amount of blood. Blood contains the all-important element iron, supplied by meat, so menses became the prod to encourage us to start hunting. The problem was that we were ill equipped to be predators, but for the fact of our exceptional cleverness. So we became more clever - and our brains got bigger, therefore so did our heads. But our babies’ bigger heads began to get stuck in their mothers’ birth canals, causing the death of both mothers and babies.

Nature’s solution to this was inspired. It pulled out all of the neuronal pathways that determine instinct and culture. All other animals have these when they’re born, but we don’t. We only acquire culture through a startling new agent we developed called language. Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.

The end result was that our brains split in two. Some 90% of our language centers were deposited and rewired in the left hemisphere of the brain, where all other linear functions reside, such as logic, arithmetic, causality, determinism and rationality. The remaining functions took up residence in the right hemisphere, where information was processed in a totally different fashion. It was more spatial, holistic. The right hemisphere can look at something and see the pattern and the big picture. It can figure out how to get out of a maze, it can see the parts to the whole, and most importantly, it can recognize faces.

Actually it wasn’t only our brains that split. Our visual field consists of two very different types of vision, namely rods and cones. Rods, which compose about 99% of our retina, see the big picture too, the parts to the whole. They see in dim light, and can pick up peripheral vision. On the other hand, cones are incredibly clear. They are for color, and they see in great detail. If you think about it, the cone vision of the eye corresponds to the kind of mental processes existing in the left hemisphere, and the rods correspond to the kind of mental processes existing in the right.

There is more. In addition to our brains and our eyes, our left hands became the passive, protective, receptive extremity - it holds the baby, or carries a shield - and the right hand became our agent of action. So we have a split brain and a split eye and a split hand, and now we are equipped with the secret weapon that no animal on the face of the planet can defend against: It’s called foresight.

About 10,000 years ago, the advent of animal husbandry and agriculture caused all our feminine attributes to rise to the fore. Just about every agricultural society of that time worshipped some manifestation of the Earth goddess. She was an all-powerful deity that replaced the numinous spirit world of hunter-gathers. She was responsible for bringing the Earth back to life in the Spring after winter’s decay. But then, for unknown reasons, even though the cultures all remained agricultural, the goddess began losing power. Next thing, she was gone.

There are many theories about what happened. Some say horsemen from the North conquered the goddess-loving people. Marx and Engels put it down to wealth, excess land, and archaic states. I believe it was an inside job. I think the thug who mugged the goddess was actually literacy.

A literate person has a totally different world view than a non-literate person. The first forms of literacy, cuneiform and hieroglyphics, occurred about 5,000 years ago, and were so complicated that less than two percent of the population could read and write. About 1500 years later came the greatest technological revolution in our history; that is, the alphabet. Now ordinary working people could learn how to read and write in a very short time.

And what would be the effect of learning a linear, sequential, reductionist and abstract form of communication on our culture?

I suggest that a culture adopting an alphabet would denigrate right hemispheric values because the alphabet is a left hemispheric mode of reception. And this right hemispheric denigration would manifest in two principal ways: Women’s rights would be taken away; and images would be declared abominations.

The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandants. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: “I am the Lord thy God there is no other.” The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art.

After the Jews, the second culture to enthusiastically embrace the alphabet were the Greeks. Sparta and Athens are two cultures that were contemporaneous in ancient Greece, therefore, through them, we can test my hypothesis. Sparta was a very cruel, fascist, militaristic society, which disdained the written word. Athenians, on the other hand, gave us a great collection of playwrights, historians and philosophers, and the first extended experiment in democracy. They sat about debating the merits and aesthetics of art. Yet the Athenians passed a law against women owning property which, of course, is the key to power in any society. Women were veiled and had to stay at home and couldn’t participate in public life. In Sparta, however, despite being a cruel society, women owned two fifths of Spartan property by the fifth century. They were also just as well educated as their men.

During the Roman empire’s greatest period of literary, legal and engineering triumphs, a new religion arose based on the oral sayings of a gentle prophet, whose name was Jesus. He never put anything in writing, but told his disciples to memorize his teachings. His message was a very feminist credo. Therefore women flocked to his new religion and, in the early days, played a prominent role in it; they founded churches, they were high priests, and they baptized others. All this until the words of Jesus were inscribed in an alphabetic sacred text. When that occurred, women lost their power. They were ordered not to baptize, to sit in the back of the church, and were no longer allowed to sing in the choir. The patriarchs of the church took the oral sayings of Jesus - which were focused on mercy, love and compassion - and converted them into a masculine ethos about sin, guilt, suffering and death.

Then, in the fifth century, the Roman empire collapsed. Literacy got lost in secular Europe. We don’t really know very much about this time, but the love of Mary, chivalry and courtly love arose during the illiterate Dark Ages, and only plummeted again after the invention of the printing press.

Now printed material, and the alphabet were available everywhere. And everyone wanted to read and write because they wanted to study a book called the New Testament. With all of this, came the possibility that ordinary Christians could interpret Scripture and Prophecy for themselves, thus the Protestant Reformation. First they rid the religion of Mary and all images. Then they descended to a level of barbarity that the world has never seen. People had been killing people for a long time for a lot of different reasons, but this was unprecedented. In England the Presbyterians were killing the Anglicans and in France the Catholics were killing the Huguenots. In Spain the Catholics were killing the Jews and the Moors. In every single country that was impacted by the printing press, people started killing each other over incredibly fine distinctions in doctrine.

The culture that gave us Shakespeare and Galileo and Newton and Bach had within it men that had a psychosis so extreme that they came to believe that their women were dangerous. Hence the witch hunts of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which somewhere between 100,000 and one million women were killed. Russia, which remained illiterate, had no witch hunts, but the countries with the highest literacy rates - Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Spain and Italy - were the most severe. And it wasn’t the peasants who were burning the women; it was the literate segment of the population.

It all began to change at the start of the nineteenth century, when two discoveries occurred simultaneously - photography, and the electromagnetic field. Both conspired to reconfigure society. I call it the iconic revolution. Photographs did for images what the printing press did for words. In the 1950s electromagnetism and photography recombined to bring us television, which has completely knocked the world off its pins.

Alfred North Whitehead once said that the major advances of civilization all but wreck the societies in which they occur. Certainly this happened with the invention of the both the printing press and television. Television requires an entirely different neural anatomical strategy to perceive it. When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book’s content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn’t matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture?

It’s no coincidence that the first feminist movement in 5,000 years, the Suffragette movement, occurred right after the invention of photography. The first real feminist movement was inspired in the sixties by the first generation that was raised on television. I am saying that we now live in a society that is awash in images, and not coincidentally, feminine values are rising rapidly. Women are regaining incredible rights. They’ve become priestesses again. We live in an image-based society now. Images have become more important than written words. The image of the atomic bomb in 1945 did more to change people’s consciousness than anything that was written about it. The image of the Earth beamed back from space in ‘68 had an electric effect on people’s relationship to the planet. Images are so prevalent that we get most of our information from them. We receive multiple layers of meaning within a very short compact picture, and that is what the right brain does best. Indeed, as our culture becomes more image-based, we’re balancing our hemispheres. Through this new re-wiring, we’re becoming a much gentler and kinder society. We’re witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It’s already happening. And I think that the good news is that it’s coming just in time.