Tag Archives: Philosophy

The Parts in the Whole—The Whole as the Parts.

These are some old notes i wrote in my time when i was very much lost in depression and also drowning in the exhausting patterns of a human world of dogma and religious superstition, and wondered about the origin of the intuitive beautiful mystical experience that lies beneath. For the first time since i was taught to separate unity of the world into words, i felt the unity again, and i felt myself with it. Not through books or ritual. I didnt find it. It found me. The trees, the earth, carried me, when i broke down in cold streets of dogma. These notes i wrote to describe my experience of a time, when i could not carry myself, and nothing carried me. You see, the nothing, the dark side of the moon. The other side of the coin. The what you are not doing. These are the roots you are looking for. When flowers wither, resources return, new flowers grow. We are both individual flowers, and also as one the field that is flowering.

Sunset Sea Grass

Religion can be divided into two main parts. Dogma and spirituality. The one is misunderstood words, the other is tangible meaning. Every religion has a beauty at its core yet over time the essential parts got covered in a huge pile of trash made out of misconceptions of simple things. The reason I choose not to define my religious views in a single term is because of the high potential of words to be misinterpreted, so i took my time to describe the things i like to make myself remember a bit more thoroughly.

BEING A PART OF THE WHOLE
- When i am not there is; i am being carried by the whole of happening (which i call nature, universe, cosmos, or 'the force'). My heart beats without me doing anything. Parts of happening like me may disappear and the whole will still be. There is a feeling of belonging to and disolving into unity as a whole. A feeling of empathy.
- Like all parts, i am involved in a diverse dance of changes and interactions among the inseparable parts of the whole (both being influenced by and contributing to). There is a feeling of wanting to unfold, to flourish, to blossom, to be diverse and to dance, and this feeling is driving all parts, and expresses itself in me in the complex form of a reflecting and self-reflecting process that, while it can be limited from having to reflect on things like emotions, pain, illness, strong belief or habits, still strives to explore and to engage in diverse interactions, and thus to unfold and flourish and give life to diverse subprocesses (thoughts, relationships, etc). A feeling of curiosity.

BEING THE WHOLE AS THE PARTS
We are the whole, dancing, a unity looking at each other from manifold perspectives.
We are not a separated whole, we are a folded whole. A unity manifold. A dancing serenity.
Simultaneously we are both unity and diversity. Flowers need roots, roots want to flower. In this tension the web of life is spun, with raindrops that each reflect each other.
You can never be separate from the whole. The whole is always there. Thus if you miss the whole, it is not because the whole is gone, it is because where you are the whole is so busy being the part that it can not see that it is the whole. A wave doesn't find back to the ocean by growing a huge tsunami, a wave finds back to the ocean by falling. Being the wave it seems like falling and disappearing, being the ocean it is like breathing in. And as the wave disappears and becomes the ocean you realize that deep down you as a wave did always have this subtle dark and warm feeling and that this feeling was really you the ocean remembering yourself while you were waving. Where there seems to be nothing, where there seems to be the other side of the coin, the shadow of the mountain, the underside of the embroidery, the dark side of the moon, the wild weeds, the pathless woods. Where you feel happening beyond your attention, you feel the  remainder of the whole, that which you are missing. And to feel the remainder as something inseparable from that part of happening where you are, is when the universe remembers its unity. An ocean cant dance if the waves don't feel their hydrogen bonds. A tree can't flower if the flowers are cut off their roots. Thus this feeling of unity roots your mind, so you the unity can flower in beauty without always missing itself, the unity.

SO WHO ARE WE?
So cosidering these two aspects, it makes sense to think of each other as
not just being a part of the whole (as that leaves out your underlying emergence from unity),
but rather being the whole in the perspective of a (constantly changing) part.

WHAT ABOUT GOD?
How to live without god? Well, that's a matter of definition. If we use the word 'god' to refer to the most all-embracing of what there is, then it would by definition be impossible to live without it, as we would be a part of it. Now, i do appreciate the feeling often associated with this definition of 'god', but for me, god is an ill-defined word. I prefer the words 'nature', 'universe', 'cosmos', 'the force' or simply 'the whole'. To me, nature is the whole thing that we are embedded in; the soil on which existence is taking place. It is what is there regardless of whether we are aware of it. Nature is what we are, when we are not. I don't care so much about the word which i use to talk about it, however, as about the feeling i associate with it (since those feelings are the most direct signals our roots provide to not fall apart in an illusion of disconnectedness). It is invariably immediate, warmly intimate and deeply inspiring. Probably when you mean god, you mean the same, but i don't like this word, as it is often associated with bearded old men.

ARE YOU A PANTHEIST?
Secretly i am a pantheist (similar to what is defined here: pantheism.net), but the problem with this word is that when you talk with the wrong ones, they reply 'aah, you believe god is everything', but i want to avoid using the word god, as it has been made completely unusable over time, which is why sometimes, i still think i should better not call myself in any way... For in the end, words often make separate what is one.
rope, algae, sea, ripples
What do you turn to when you can not carry yourself? When you do not cling to the dogma of religion, where do you fall to? If you want no answer, follow religion. If you want to see the obvious, ask any tree why they trust the soil and the air they are growing in, and at the same time follow this question to the very end: Where is the boundary of your self? We are the universe observing itself from many perspectives in its beautiful dance, inseparable unity in manifold diversity. Why do the flowers blossom? When you have seen yourself and come all the way around, you will know that this very question is the same as the flowers blossoming.

Trees and Happiness

Look at a tree: They obviously like adventures and grow in the most diverse and intricate ways! However, do they look like they grow so that they totally uproot themselves for some kind of uber extreme adventure?
No. Unlike our modern society often does, trees grow well rooted. And yet they grow the most adventurous and complicated flowers!
See, a tree that uproots itself wont be able to grow in complex forms. It would be like hydrogen bombs: A terrible adventure for a second, but then mostly just really really dull pain and then no more adventures whatsover.

A tree knows, that rootedness and adventure don’t grow in opposites, they grow together. And happiness is the realization of just that. Happiness is obviously not pure explosion and monstrous adventure in total pain. And happiness is not pure rootedness with nothing to do.
It is not in the extremes, but within the tension of curiosity (yay adventures!) and feeling of connectedness (rootedness), where trees can grow to the most beautifully diverse (happy) forms.

So in practical terms if you want to be a happy tree: Plan for the future to have great adventures, but don’t plan so that you forget that the great adventure that can make you happy in the end will always rooted here in the present moment.
When there is suffering in the present moment, than we put our hopes in the future. This hope, is really part of being there for yourself as good as you can, in the present moment.
Trees dedicate some effort to have interesting adventures growing not just today but also tomorrow. But they don’t plan so that they can no longer grow well today.

They know that no flowers in the future can be so interesting as to cut your flowering today. Cut the roots today for the flowers of tomorrow, you cut the flowers of today and tomorrow. Stay focused on your well-being, here and now.
Thus: Be like a tree. And hug one.

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / CC-BY-SA-3.0 Published in the Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angkor_SiemReap_Cambodia_Tha-Prom-Temple-01.jpg
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / CC-BY-SA-3.0
Published in the Wikimedia Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angkor_SiemReap_Cambodia_Tha-Prom-Temple-01.jpg

The Soil that Extends Beyond the Anthill

While nothing can replace our wonderful modern medicine, the smell of live forest soil is a wonderful “drug” of its own. The complexity of its smell, somehow familiar, can be incredibly soothing, and earthing. And the soil is where we all connect.

When you smell the dirt you receive a call. Kind of a reminder of a world we are often a bit isolated from. It may seem discomforting and confusing at first, but pick it up and follow the call of the soil. For it is the call of your brain, the system you are most closely connected to, trying to make you realize the connections beyond the fringe of “you”. Why would it do that? Who knows, but there is an evolutionary advantage to feeling in peace with your environment, and apart from that an interconnected whole can not really divide itself, remaining connected despite all imaginably most diverse entanglement of its parts. It is the call of what is more than you. The call that makes evident to the you of your perspective the you that is all perspectives which is the you of your perspective. Suddenly you find yourself and you wonder what you where doing all along before that.

The soil is a reminder that there is a deeper soil beneath our human societies. And that the soil is a symbol of the real soil, as much as the real soil is the soil which is the symbol. A soil we can never loose touch with, but can merely be in illusion of having lost touch with. And when we happen to do so, it calls us. Or rather it calls itself to its senses. Nature outside of you, nature inside of you. What is you? You are the ocean, and you is a wave in the ocean.

You know why you love the nonhuman animals (assuming you don’t eat them). Because they feel the soil very clearly and don’t get mixed up in the abstractions of language (sometimes they do, but not as often).

We human apes live in a human society, but this human society lives in a bigger society. The soil is a reminder that we are not separate, but that we are always part of nature, and our societies are no different than anthills. The soil extends beyond the anthill.

the-soil-jar