Thursday, March 12, 2015

You aren't what you eat

If you WERE what you eat (what a idiotic thought that has somehow gotten into common usage), then consuming a chicken would turn you into a chicken... right? Or a head of cabbage (we've all known someone who might as well have become one.) Or, if you take this out of the physical food realm, and into the neural food realm, if you WERE what you read, then everyone who read a Buddhist book, or a Gurdjieff book, or a Krishnamurti book, would become - after several re-readings of course - a Walking Buddha, or Dancing Gurdjieff, or Sitting Krishnamurti (the other one: "Tell them that there is nothing to understand.")

More appropriately, what you eat simply becomes YOU. The roasted chicken dinner is ingested, digested, broken down into constituent particles and goes to feed the cells throughout the body. It becomes what YOU are, rather than YOU becoming what it is. Same thing in the neural realm, watching videos, listening to audios, and reading books by all your favorite people. The material comes into the organism, mixes with the thoughts and feelings that were or were not kicked up during that process of ingestion, and then during the process of digestion which only proceeds minimally at best, the misunderstanding and confusion replaces almost all of it. YOU have not been changed by the material, but rather the material has been broken down, fragmented, fractured, disassembled, and distributed to various unknown parts of the neural map of the moment, such that it almost disappears entirely from short-term view and rarely enters long-term memory. So, one will - if they didn't give up entirely, which is the usual case - start the re-reading process over the course of sometimes years, and even then, not much of significance occurs. All of it has simply become the "YOU" of before.

If a person could listen, read (i.e., "eat" all that presumably delicious neural food) in a new way, perhaps something could change, but that would require getting out of the way when the material is being ingested, so as to not allow ordinary mastication (argument, criticism, and the running commentary) to take place. It could be described as taking Big Gulps and stifling the burp - "I believe I ate the whole thing!" - though an ear-to-ear smile, on the face or in the brain seems perfectly reasonable. But who can do that without becoming quite ill? Nobody...  but those who can, of course, and then DINING takes on a new meaning at a higher level.

After years of interacting with people on delayed-reaction Internet groups (Yahoo and Facebook) ostensibly organized to discuss those very matters Messrs B, G, and K devoted their entire lives, including much more recently over video conferences - you know, face to face and real time - it has become clear, over and over again, that people not only do not listen, they CAN NOT. This can be easily observed by their responses to what others have said or written to them. One knows whether another has heard what was presented, and one also knows when another has NOT heard a word of it, and this is usually because they were "masticating" non-stop during the process of ingestion. Their little mouths and lips and tongues and nostrils were overly active, but the ears and eyes and higher up the neural circuitry were dozing. That is, they only heard the noises their own nervous system was making while masticating, while completely missing the "noises" coming from the speaker or writer.

It is not so easy to read or listen or view material from the external world, without the internal noise all but obliterating the message beyond recognition. In fact, the effort to HEAR/SEE without altering the observations is another way to describe The Work, or This Thing we are doing here.

No comments:

Post a Comment