What is it that exists between us and actually connects us?
Monday, 17. October 2011
What is it that exists between us and actually connects us?
A close friend of mine recently posted this opening question for a new theme: “… when our bodies are at rest, when we are asleep, what happens to our consciousness, does it leave the realms of our body and travel out into the ‘thinking space’ that exists between us?”
Personally I have no idea, no idea whether we ever “travel” anywhere, though I know there are cultures to whom dreams are very important. I’m not even concerned only about dreams, but rather the whole question of what is the glue, the attraction, the linkage, the substance between us that connects us. I don’t know what words to use.
Obviously, you are one terminal and I am a separate terminal and we send messages and speech but it’s a lot more than that, isn’t it, because we mean something to one another and we connect in the silent imagination of each and of course in our dreams and fantasies and moments of emotion.
So we are also a great deal more to each other than mere terminals.
Perhaps the reason so many of you were moved by Saint Steve’s demise, for example, is that you actually felt strongly enough about him to feel connected, whereas to me he meant nothing at all. Perhaps it’s the strength of the interest, the love, the hatred, the affinity, the contempt, the emotion that is the medium through which we most connect in terms of out minute to minute experience.
I don’t know. I’m asking you to contribute your own thoughts, with no stupid videos and no quotes from great experts. Just you. All of you who think and know a little about life.
What is it that exists between us and actually connects us?
Vincent Says:
Well I think we exist in two modes: separateness and connectedness. In separateness I am born alone and die alone. In between I have to look out for myself because … that’s the way it is. That is the one purpose in life I cannot argue with.
Everyone knows of the separateness. In some ways the connectedness may simply support the separateness, in the sense that I need allies, I need to court the person who may look out for me in ways I can’t perform for myself.
But there is something beyond all this, and it appears to play little part in today’s culture – at any rate in secular culture. I won’t speak in praise of religion because I am not in the flock. I’ll grant those who are the benefit of the doubt and suppose that they feel a connectedness. But I shall speak from my own experience only.
I sense at times of heightened awareness that we are all cut from the same cloth. I don’t mean just human beings, but all creation. We are part of the All. This is not a philosophical or theological theory but something dimly sensed; and comfortingly reinforced by the testimony of certain others, even if they are relatively rare.
I don’t see this connectedness as taking place in sleep particularly. Our dreams can be all sorts of stuff. I don’t see it in the form of any physical gregariousness even. I see it as going to a place beyond the everyday concerns. It doesn’t happen to me very often in terms of time cut up into weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds. I wrote on my blog recently about an experience that probably lasted three seconds, or maybe less. But something of the feeling of it has stayed with me, weeks later. Or in other cases, years, decades.
I repeat, it is not a connection between myself and particular persons but a connection with something larger. I don’t have any problem with calling it the All. In that space I can meet you, touch you, be close in ways that cannot be pictured in ordinary terms. Where ‘you’ is probably anyone, or any created thing.
RealSteveHolmes Says:
I’ve come to see paradox as normal in any given situation so your BOTH separate and connected is perfectly rational, in fact it fits perfectly my normal “outsider” type mood and suppresses that other, more loving feeling of being part of it all in some profound sense. That is worth a lot more attention. I shall return to this.