Not a rebuke ...
Thank you all for your concerns and good wishes.
I have been having some health difficulties and been absent from CC for this and a variety of other reasons. Hospital time and serious infection kinds of stuff…not psychological or emotional distress….
Of course there’s no compartmentalizing any human experience whether that’s failing health and imprudent lifestyle choices, or death and taxes for that matter. I’ve enjoyed reading the “Can you forget the “I” thread and once again thank China for stimulating my social gland….
“I” am not like the greater majority of folk participating here at Canadian Content.
“I” am like every other human being who’s ever walked through the waking-dream that is human consciousness.
Those two statements aren’t contradictory despite the most focused and energetic deconstruction…
The “I” can simultaneously be unique and differentiated and yet continue to resonate with the pulse of every other human being.
The “I” that has some two-hundred and some odd bones, relies on the rythmic cadence of muscle contractions and provides a home for bacteria fungi viruses and parasites is the recognizable “I” that helps to bind us together as a species, but it is the differentiated “I”, a consciousness of uniqueness-in-all-the-cosmos that is the “I” of personal perception.
“Your body has 100 trillion cells, but only 10 trillion are human. The rest belong to the bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites that live on or in us. Some of these tenants are actually beneficial, aiding in the digestion process, for example. The majority of them neither help nor hurt us, but simply coexist with us. A few species, however, from the cholera bacilli to tapeworms and lice, can be dangerous, and sometimes deadly.”
Human Wildlife: Dr. Robert Buckman
The most fundamental and pervasive dichotomy facing humankind has always been that juncture between the “I” of physiology and the “I” of the undifferentiated conscience.
Sentience: 1. State of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness.
2. The faculty through which the external world is apprehended.
It is the state/condition of undifferentiated consciousness from which choice arises. From which the spirit is given meaning, from which intent and directedness spring. It is this “I” that defines our uniqueness.
Knowledge is the facility to process the process….to render understanding from the caprices of a phenomenological experience, to drift as both the flotsam and the jetsam of an intangibility beyond the ken of human intellect.
I fear we as a species have voluntarily abandoned our availability to that intangibility and that mystery. We have rather given ourselves completely over to the satisfaction of corporeal dénouement and stultified thinking.
I simply doubt that I can offer anything to people who appear to regard their existence as isolated and remote from all other consciousness while suffering the consequences of the choice of mutual disregard in the pursuit of personal self-satisfaction.
Once again I thank you for your interest in my absence and although I have failed far more often than I’ve succeeded, you will live in my thoughts as I hope I will live in yours.
