Zen and Interdependence

    Interdependence is a zen concept that frowns upon the tendency of our minds to isolate.  You cannot see the flower without seeing the stem.  The leaves are the flower and the ground is where the flower grows.  The air is what the flower breathes.  All are parts of the planet.  All part of the galaxy, part of the Universe.

I’m in the process of reading the third book of what I might conclude is a trilogy.  Although they are distinct subjects, they all intersect.  I started with Joseph Campbell’s “Primitive Mythology” .  Just finished Daniel Dennett’s “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” and have just started Reich’s,  “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past”.  All of these books linked by consciousness, more specifically, origins of consciousness, which I am finding is the origins of culture.

Anatomically modern humans, progressing from the middle paleolithic, one step removed from the ape-man, then traveling to distant planets in more or less 50,000 years.  This is not the work of genetics and natural selection producing a super organism.  50,000 years is not a long time in the scheme of things.  This is a collective effort by human  generations, over scores of millennia, infusing the brain with personalities and ideas which give us a sense of self.

Max Tegmark from Closer to Truth:  “The subjective experience that we call consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”  It is the sound of one hand clapping.