I have been reading a science fiction series called Wild Cards, edited by George R.R. Martin, and written by a variety of authors. I think this style is called a mosaic novel. The universe they write in is one in which an alien came and brought the wild card virus. This virus causes incredible changes from the grotesque to the incredibly beautiful, from the powerful to fairly useless, in those who survive at all which is only about 10% of those who become infected. The virus seems to express in unique ways related to the psychology of the individual. One character has tentacles for a nose, another has the mental power to make people puppets and control them while feeding off anger and rage, another glows, another has beautiful wings and can fly, etc. Some are images of the Gods from other times, cat-headed Bast, Ibis-headed Thoth, etc.
It started me thinking about what kind of creature I might be if I were exposed to such a virus. I thought of fantasies and interests, my fascination for sexy vampires, my xenophilic interest in sexy aliens (of course sexy as I define it:) Or my interest in wings and faeries, spirits of the land, healing, magick and witchcraft. What an array of possibilities both wonderful and aweful! And then I began to think about what it would be like to be one, in the sense of one with everything (the punchline to a zen joke.) Perhaps, it is a good thing that we are discrete pieces of the universe and not one with everything. It seems to me that such an entity, if entity it was, would not have anything I would recognize as morals or ethics. How could it, if it was such a vast being that we were like tiny cells, microbes? Would such a being even notice the pain of one of those cells being beaten or tortured next to a sun going nova? Would how those bits treated one another have any meaning at all on such a cosmic scale? For the first time being one with nothing makes more sense to me than being one with everything, even if ultimately they are the same.
Mystics often get a sense of being a part of some vast oneness. Generally words like ineffable get used to describe it. I have even had experiences I think are similar to theirs, though who can know for sure. At those times I have had a sense of opening up and out, being so much larger than I am, and filled with a sense of light and love. I wonder though if that is just what this body is capable of producing in response to whatever it is we are touching. Certainly most people don't see heat but with the right sensors, infra red goggles, we can see it. The heat has visible existence all along but we just don't have the sensors to receive it. Not seeing or sensing something doesn't mean it isn't there. Our physicality restricts what we can know of the universe. It restricts what we can experience of reality to a very narrow band. Yet humans as a people are so cocksure that we know what reality is, what morals and ethics and beliefs are the right ones. Some humans claim to know the mind of God (s) through the writings of other humans that purport to be this Beings words and will. Such hubris! I have always rather enjoyed the cartoons around the theme of God coming back and seing what humans have done to this world given to them and being mightily affronted at the damage as any good land owner would be. Yet that is still just an image of God as if he/she/it were simply a larger human, made after our own image.
In an anthropology of religion class that I took recently one view of religion that was presented was the idea that it is basically a mistake because we anthropomorphize everything. We seem hardwired with pattern recognition programs which sees the human face in everything from leaves on trees, to clouds in the sky as long as the right lights and shadows combine. We give our Gods human forms, human names, human foibles, human desires, and human needs. I can't imagine that they would really be so small and petty. If they were truly vaster than we are then I think their ethics would be different than ours. I am not sure that they would worry about the letter of the law, purity, taboos, all the rules we attribute to them and use to divide people into the two most important categores, the ones beyond race, or gender, or age, or religion - Us and Them.
I stood at my window and tried to imagine that the trees and the grasses and the plants were something like hair coming out of my body. That my actual physical body was just another one of those hair-like things. Then I tried to expand beyond that to the swarm of insects I could see hovering in the air, and the bird that swooped by, the wind moving the leaves overhead. Then the timer on the microwave went off and for a moment I tried to add the bicycle on the deck, the waterpump, the deck and the house. But it all collapsed inward and I only had a faint intellectual sense of what it might be like. Probably a good thing too. It is too much to try and hold in one small primate brain. And I don't want to not care about those I love because they are only a miniscule piece of something vaster. I would rather feel that all of this is of great importance, at least to me. I would rather feel that what happens matters, at least to me. That I matter, at least to me.
Copyright © 2000 Kyril Oakwind