Are We?

Thank You for the Photo and the Kind Words.

I’m calling to thank you For the smile in your photo, The candor in your note, The tang in your box of tarts, And the hard crunch of a nutcracker You sent to replace the one I lost.

In the back of my mind, As we converse From opposite shores of an ocean, I find myself wondering… Am I the speaking? Are you listening? Are we the words?

Are we the truth or the telling? A secret or a whisper? Divinity or faith?

Does your sweetness connect with my whole From which parting would be sorrow?

You echo in my thoughts and feelings, My prayers and meditations, My yearnings and fears.

From whence dost thou echo? Shall I ever be with thee on the mountain? Shall I be ever with thee in the abyss?

If one of us dies Before your flight to me next summer, Shall the other visit an airport To view its empty sky?

Are we together forever Right now Or forever apart?

Please don’t feel guilty about stopping after the poem and skipping the philosophy. Who are we? Do we dwell in one another’s spirits, yet perpetually fall short of knowing one another as creatures? Given the depth of our connection, how is it even possible to feel distant from one another? Why are we plagued with divorce, war, betrayal, crime, and humiliation?

I recall a story by James Joyce where a respectable man fell prey to a momentary urge to shoplift. Police put him in jail, his boss fired him, his friends abandoned him, and his wife divorced him. One moment of weakness in pursuit of a degenerate thrill unraveled each thread that wove him into his community. His every sacred bond dissolved in the face of one profane choice. How well had they known him? How could a solitary impulse crush him so fully?

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? ― Haruki Murakami

You find yourself at a remove from a friend while reading her message and viewing her photo sent through the mail. But how about when she’s right in front of you? The light left her smile several femtoseconds ago, and sound departed her lips many nanoseconds in the past. Mapping a human takes time.

The map is not the territory. My map is always present to me, while your territory is always in my past. My map is always here, while your territory is always there. How deeply can I ever know you? I am always here now. You are never here now with me. Where and when are we?

Spacetime stands between us as a fleeting sliver or a vast gulf. Either way, it parts us. I may listen to your heartbeat with my ear against your bosom, or I may read your obituary. Your voice reaches me only as an echo, respoken in the audio field of my awareness. Likewise, I am all projection, all reconstruction, all simulation to you. We never touch. Intimacy is an illusion.

I hope those claims are untrue. I yearn for them to be wrong. They have never been properly tested against any alternative, so accepting them is a matter of pretence rather than knowledge.

Can a heart sense in more intimate ways than eyes, ears, nose, or even tongue and skin? I refer not to the beating muscle, but to the kind of heart Barney Clark held onto after doctors removed his biological pump. I refer to the virtual organ that sent input to Barney’s emotional matrix in the same way eyeballs fed his vision. The emotional field is as real as the visual field. Something feeds it.

Despite its role in sending input to a field of awareness, your heart may differ from your eyes. Your visual field is like a monitor, and your audio field is like a pair of speakers. The hard drive controls them and receives input from a camera and microphone. What if your real heart is not an external device? What if it exists only on the hard drive? What if it’s not part of your body as displayed on your somatic monitor?

Might you and I share the same hard drive, partitioned from one another by the binary equivalent of a corpus callosum? What if our hearts meet in the processor, not the peripherals? The deeper we go, the more we may be a part of one another. When we observe with eyes, ears, and a closed heart, we experience a mundane and petty world of bored clerks, angry ex-spouses, and jerks sticking bubble gum under chairs. When we observe with an open heart, a more profound level emerges — a reality which feels neither cold nor hard, a place where monks chant and eagles fly. Sacred feels different than profane.

A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. ― Max Gladstone

Divinity tugs like gravity, while identity prevents both merging and collapse. When you press your cheek against a lover’s flesh, an electromagnetic wall holds the two bodies apart. What holiness pulls together, personality keeps distinct. That which appears sacred, whether organ music in a sanctuary or softness in a temple of flesh, receives its divine mantle not from photons or sound waves, but from resonance with the heart. That which makes a hymn a hymn shall never be caught by a microphone.

Everything seemed so unreal — so supernatural — and I had to remind myself that it was. We weren’t human. We never were. ― Shannon A. Thompson

Why should patterns in your emotional field resonate less with external reality than do patterns in your visual field? Imagine a photograph of your mother. Photons tell you nothing about her true being except to the extent they resonate with… With what? Shall we call pixelated emotions emotons? What exactly does your heart collect as inputs for the pattern of a person? Born deaf and blind, you could know your mother perfectly, whereas, fully sighted but without a heart, you could not know her at all.

Look around: That is perception. It is always there.

― William T. Powers

Here’s what I want to believe. The heart perceives. It senses more directly than the eyes. We are wrong to imagine the heart constructing a second-hand emotional map inferred from patterns on our visual, audio, and somatic maps. Rather than being twice-removed from our loved ones in a perceptual maze, we know them better through our hearts than through any other channel.

And yet our most vivid insights recede. We fade from one another in a mist. We squabble. We hide. We seek. I don’t remember agreeing to this sort of alienation. It feels like there must be a purpose to it.

The structure of reality described here may someday be testable because it suggests a different flowchart for emotional information than does traditional psychology. Unfortunately, I’m not up to the task of predicting variables which may not always follow the normal channels of cause and effect through spacetime. Meanwhile, I shall pretend to believe what I want — I shall act as if it is true — while my critics pretend the opposite.

No circle in the sand is true. You will never find pi when dividing an imperfect circumference by a variable diameter. No real circle exists outside a cognitive field, and no sentient cognitive field will ever be devoid of circles.

Emotional fields also host eternal residents. God is like a circle, an eternal pattern where you and I meet. For now, the heart leads where the mind can not follow. Only feelings can reach into the fundamental nature of reality. Knowledge may one day reflect what wisdom dimly apprehends.