Colette Obrien

In-to-me-see. To see and be seen is the single most important psychological imperative.  Studies of infants in orphanages where they’re fed, warm and dry but not held– not seen–show that most of those infants will die. Severly abused children survive because they’re seen; the psyche doesn’t distinguish good attention from bad attention.

Do the stars care that I gaze at them in wonder?  If everything changes when it’s being observed, what does that say about the star’s recognition of the attention given by almost 7 billion humans, not to mention all the other beings that turn their attention to them each night?

Cat’s eyes light up in the darkness, like star-light they project into the void.  What do they see that we do not?

If eyes are windows into the soul, it is no wonder humans have gazed into the great eye of the sky and imagined gods and goddesses,  universal-mind, the infinite, the creator, the over-soul.

Like the cat, maybe we see many things held in that great infinite space, but without the ability to register our usual perceptions of light and form to give it meaning, we catch a glimpse and call it wonder, or awe, or mystery.

 That felt experience has made believers of humanity for millenia; believers of life outside our usual ability to perceive where the imagination and faith reign supreme and meaning beyond the mandane is found. 

Wonder

I do.

Oblivion derives from the latin, to forget, and is defined by Webster as the condition or fact of being forgotten.   To obliterate is to erase, leave no trace, destroy. Today it is often used to describe a place or a state of being. 

The idea that there is a place called oblivion is so radical to any thinking being it’s shocking to discover how prevalent it is in common conversation.  I would like to see this place. Is it like the image above? Has anyone ever been there?  Like heaven and hell the assumption is that these are actual physical places. Oblivion then would be a place of forgetfullness where memory is erased, but is memory any more real than a place called oblivion? Memory is an idea; an experience of the mind describing something or someone that is or was at one time Real. But memory itself is an abstraction not unlike the abstraction of nothingness, of not-being.

Current physics refuses the concept that something can be and then not be.  What is-is. What isn’t-isn’t.  Though it changes shape, all matter always was and will always be.  Life on planet earth was at one time star-stuff.  The original matter that was the star was something else before. Does that mean that the star is now in oblivion? If everything that ever was still exists in some form what difference does it make if it is remembered by the human mind?

The important thing is that it still exists;  the atom that became a star that became my cat, that will become part of a tree.  All one flow of energy in a constant stream of creative bliss; the music of the spheres.  And my little human life? What will it become and where will what I call ‘me’ go?  Certainly not to oblivion, and probably not to heaven or hell either.

A question for next time; does thought have matter?

Stored safely in travelers bodies upon return from exotic destinations are just as exotic bugs –travelbugs.   Catching a ride on high speed vehicles to colonize new planets, the darlings have “traveled” the world and today are more prolific than the w.w.w. humans are so fond of.

Where did  this interesting juxtoposition of terms originate?There are 145 million links on google,and though I didn’t read through all of them, the first few pages didn’t give the original derivation of the term.  How many links do you think there are in the bug world? Quadro-trillions? (If Shakespeare could make up words, so can I, and though today we think “he’s Shakespeare,  he’s brilliant.” When he made up the words he was just a guy and his mother would surely have protested at the proliferation of misspelled words on his pages.

Now, about those bugs, the difference between a home-grown bug and those brought from far away places is that our bodies recognize the difference and tolerate the home bodies with reasonable discomfort (reasonable discomfort being an oxymoron). While, on the other hand, they react violently to strangers, even when the stranger is no more of an actual threat.

Our psyche reacts just as the body; experiencing reasonable discomfort when those we know hurt, abuse, ignore, or violate our persons while fearing a stranger no matter how kind their intentions.  We trust known individuals to do what they usually do and distrust the unknown for we do not know what they may be capable of.