Our non-binary world

Lately I’ve been thinking about non-thought.

It’s not some trick of the brain; a person can actually think of what it is like to not think. Take, for example, your reaction to the color lilac. First, you have to get a picture about what color that is. If you’re like me, you may start with a category: purple. Then you may do some word association with all the various shades of purple you can remember. Words connect with images, images remind you of other pigments in the purple range, and, before you know it, or is it more as you know it, you find your internal awareness awash in a tidal flow that is hardly a simple bifurcation between the color lilac and everything else. And, while I’ll grant you that thought can include images as well as words (an admission which may lead you to wonder if thinking of lilac is actually a good example of non-thinking at all), I hope you will agree that there is something more to the experience of pondering the panoply of hues purple than meets the conscious eye, something richer, deeper, more complex. There may be memories. There may be aspirations. There may be emotions, musings, even transient timeless disconnections with the present ,interlinked with the simple experience of the thought of the word ‘lilac’.

What does it mean to be rationale, really?

Perhaps it’s not surprising that we prefer a conscious experience of precision, of clarity. Of this and that. Of right and wrong. Of on and off. Of black and white. Of you and me. We do, it seems, interact in so many seemingly binary ways. We categorize, often for the sake of making sense of so much complexity. We observe symmetries all around us and hence seek rules that may help us better understand certain fundamental foundations to this wild, weird, and wacky thing we call life. Rules can be nice. They help us structure, distinguish, predict. Such organizational schema enable us to study, observe, learn – and predict some more.

Until I ask myself to think about the color lilac. Because the journey of thinking lilac can lead me, if I let it, into a disorienting swirl of somehow being lilac, almost as if you’ve dropped me like some teardrop of conscious intent into a colossal paint can that softly spins as the essence of lilacness, a swirling hue of acceptance that resembles at first our solar system, then our galaxy, then the cosmos itself, borderless, limitless, and yet so very tangible, so very here, so very –

now.

This morning I read an excerpt online of “Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience”. The topic is the unconscious. The perspectives are the subjective experience of meditation and the observational objectivity of science. Both have insights. Each offers useful frameworks for understanding a world that seems to idle if it routinely run beneath the surface of our awareness. The article is fascinating; I hope to read the entire book. Yet the premise of the article, how it was framed, implied a certain dichotomy between the vantages, a dynamic push-pull tug-of-tension in which, ultimately, we may learn or decide that one side wins. I doubt this is the intention of either the article or the full published conversation. I could not help, however, wondering how, and why, we predictably prefer to refer to the ‘un’conscious as if it so eerie, ethereal, and separate to its intellectual alternatives. The predilection to compartmentalize allows scientific study, to be sure. It helps me remember an occasional few of the myriad of facts about how things work in the complex cosmos around me. Those facts can be applied in tangible if not always productive ways. The results are staggering, in terms of technology and our evolving capability for building, communications, and environmental impact. But do they advance our ability to make decisions about how we live together, how we care for the whole instead of its parts, how we collectively embrace the capacity we have to experience beauty, mystery, and love?

You may know that lilac, the flower, has quite the storied history. To the Celts, it was magical, a trait resulting from its alluring aroma. In Russia, it is thought to bring wisdom, if held over a newborn. It signaled old loves to Victorians and stands for the robust nature of New Hampshire residents. It has held a prominent place in paintings, perfumes, natural health therapies, and ancient Greek mythology. It also has a very short bloom time, flowering briefly, for just a few weeks, in early spring, making it elusive, ephemeral, almost fleeting. I wasn’t thinking of any of these things when I first presented the example of lilac, the color, at the beginning of this essay. I wasn’t thinking of anything at all actually, except that a world of binary existence is a bit like television before color. We called it black-and-white TV back then – as if there were only two shades of contrast available for viewing. How much more dynamic it was though to watch TV when it was first invented. How much better that encounter became when color was added. And how much more we continue to try to expand the experience of viewing life through technologic form factor advancements in virtual reality. Now that is a world truly created by zeros and ones, the language of computer programming. I’ve got nothing against that world; it offers many benefits. It’s only that there is a more complete one, a more holistic one, awaiting me right outside my front door. That world, the one I can step into at any moment, the one that I step through at every moment, doesn’t differentiate between zeros and ones, between consciousness and ‘un’consciousness, between on and off.

It just is.