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Not long ago I read a cheesy sci-fi novel (most are cheesy), Constitution by Nick Webb, and found myself annoyed.  It bothered me not because the plot of an alien invasion was stolen from the young adult classic, Ender’s Game, but because of the character development.  Consider this: the story took place (or is to take place) 600 years into the future.  Looking back 600 years from our present time would take us back to the early 1400’s, when the Medieval Age was just coming to a close (unknown to them) for Europe and the Italian Renaissance and the Age of Exploration were showing their initial sparks.  Then, all of humanity believed in the primacy of the spiritual world, without question; then, there was no discussion about moral relativity or gender fluidity – rather, there was the truth, and those evil or bewitched people who deviated from it.  Then, the world was a cruel place where torture was the norm and leadership had near-absolute authority.  Then, men had legal power over their wives and children – in some cases, including the power of life and death.  
 
It was, to say the least, a very different world, and one would think that the people within it would also be very different.  True, they would still have many of the vices and virtues of all ages – conceit, a need for power, sexual desire, jealousy, loyalty, courage and so on – but those would be expressed differently and in different quantity.  The man-made environment would alter the propensity of certain traits.  Simple tribes would have greater group loyalty and less jealousy over possessions, warrior societies would value male qualities over others, and different levels of technology would choose for different traits – say, for strength over intelligence. 
 
In present-day America, we are cocky, confident and lost, all at the same time.  We have never been invaded in a big way (the War of 1812 was not big), we have never been oppressed by lords (as a nation; slavery is another issue), and we have never experience true famine or pestilence as much of the rest of the world has.  We are secure in our living circumstances and act it.  We can play around with cultural fundamentals like marriage and gender and class and race and all that stuff because we don’t feel pressured by the day-to-day need of staying alive – as most of the world through most of its history has.  Technology seems to be conquering all, so we do not feel oppressed by nature.  And, because everything is so easy, we feel lost because nothing serious, collectively, forces us to look for the inner strength that comes from surviving tough circumstances.  Even as we attack our own bedrock institutions - because we can – we feel the loss of that inner certainty.  And so, like fumbling and cocky adolescents, we strike out again and again at social strictures and then retract secretly within our fearful selves, vain and vulnerable at the same time. 
 
In other words, even though we are all individuals, as Americans most of us share certain traits that come from our natural and historical environment.  We do not act like Kalahari Bushmen or Chinese royalty from the Ming Dynasty.  We do not act like our genetic ancestors from 600 years ago, or our cultural ancestors in historic or present-day England.  We are as we are as a snapshot of time and place.  We were different in 1850 and will be different in 2150.  We will be way different 600 years from now.   But not in the world of the starship Constitution. 
 
In this imaginary world, we have invented a kind of quantum drive that allows us to skip through light-years of space, able to arrive in mere hours or days in worlds far, far into the galaxy.  We have found hundreds of livable planets beyond our own and have unimaginable physical wealth and security.  While there is still bitter rivalry for political positions of power, these are more ego games than struggles that focus on group survival (until, that is, the alien invasion).  And yet, in this world, everyone acts like a latter-day Captain Kirk, cocky and pushy and strutting yet somehow vulnerable – that is, like a current era American.  In a tip of the hat to our most recent years, women also act like Captain Kirk, and one wonders how sexual attraction functions among them at all.  With all the wondrous things that humans have opened up in this future world, they are still acting like cardboard cut-outs of us.  Not like the people of Dune (by Frank Herbert), where the spookiness of another time and place is often more gripping than the physical activity that creates the plot; no, not at all.  Instead, they are us, as portrayed by several bad actors who are also us. 
 
Which brings me to realize a few things: first, that I have a great longing for a new ‘us’ in the future; and second, that the question about who we are apart from our historical and physical circumstances is a deeply serious one.
 
First, I want the “us” of the future to be wiser, with the basics of life – things like race and gender and hierarchy – settled, giving space for those questions that remain unanswered and perhaps unanswerable.   I want the depth of our understanding of space, which I presume will be matched with the understanding of the physical world in general, to give us a greater depth in the understanding of self.  I want us to know that, as far as the questions and answers have led us on the outside world, so they will bring us further into our inside world.  I want us to be prophets or holy men who understand that our continuing quest to conquer the physical reality is also our attempt to find our deepest selves, hidden in the unfathomable vastness that is our genetic heritage and right.  I want us to exist beyond pettiness, in the greatness that our leaps into outer science tell us we possess in our inner space.  
 
Which brings us to the second realization: who are we in our greatest depths?  
 
Plato tells us that we think like shadow men because we only see the shadows of the perfect world.  Were we to turn our heads towards this real world, we would also turn our heads, in a manner of speaking, to our real selves.  Our attraction to the basic forms of nature makes us, in kind, see ourselves as only basic forms of nature.  In the book Lord of the Flies, which is the Biblical name for Satan, unschooled children behave in just this way, as basic forms of nature.  They have not been guided to look beyond the apparent to what is beyond it and so much greater.   In Plato’s world, the philosopher wishes to guide his pupils to be philosopher kings who rule from an objective height of complete knowledge.  And yet, in Plato’s utopia, the slaves still run about cleaning the toilets of the philosophers, a sort of refined Lord of the Flies.
 
In the New Testament, Paul also attempts to tackle the problem of finding our greater selves while among Greeks and Hellenistic Jews some 500 years later.  Says he, “Let us, then, be children no longer, tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine that originates in human trickery and skill in proposing error.  Rather, let us profess the truth in love and grow to the full maturity of Christ the head.” (Ephesians, 4: 14-15).  Here he addresses the environmental influences that make us into beings who are less than we can be, like the children of Lord of the Flies, or the Greeks in their ‘slave-ocracy’ – or the cartoon cut-outs of Constitution. 
 
Don’t let the proselytizing nature of his quest fool you – his is a serious look at who we could be if we weren’t subject to the childish (as related to Ultimate Reality) influences of standard human culture.  Paul, the one-time Christian hunter, has seen this greater reality.  We are let in on the physical dimensions of this reality by the Sermon on the Mount, which declares the normal concerns of humans – power, wealth, vengeance – as despised things of the past.  In this is not just moral clarity, but the truth: were we to not care about this shadow world, as Plato puts it, we would not continue to be shadows, or children, as Paul puts it.  The Sermon tells us not to care about these things of the world, but to look within for an ultimate clarity – which would be the true Truth of Plato.  In that world there would be no slaves for a master race, for there would be only on human race, bound, as Paul says, in one Christ; or as Plato would understand it, in Truth –but a truth he could not quite realize.  In this we must understand that Paul is not speaking of the gentle Jesus with the lamb and smiling children given us in Sunday School, but of the actual embodiment of Truth, as hard-core as Plato would have it, right down to the nitty  gritty. 
 
It is true that this truth is not reached by logic and reason alone, as philosophers would like it, because it is far beyond our small mental machinations – as it must be, to be greater than our normal selves.  Rather, it is, finally, reached in a personal way, through faith and the grace that faith might bring – that is, by the gift of the head and sum of all humanity - which is Truth.   
 
What depths this must give us; how space would open up for us; how the workings of everything would become so clear and so marvelous.  And how passing and small would our normal selves become. 
 
Now that I think of it, maybe the author of Constitution was right; maybe, even with quantum drive and the cure for cancer and so on, we would still be our petty selves.  No, we would not be the petty selves that we are now, but we would still be petty, our toys only that much greater, but our minds still set on the same things as always – power, physical gratification, revenge and ego glorification.  All those things that dictators must kill for to make them seem grown-up and serious, but which are still the things of children. 
 
Paul, I think, was right, as was the Sermon on the Mount: to grow beyond childish things we must put them away.  We must look away from the shadows towards the light, where we are given our greater selves.  Our greater selves do not lie in who our culture tells us we are, but in the light that binds us and everything together.  Plato knew, but he did not have the auxiliary power to leave his own orbit.  Now, in this, his future, we do.     
  
 
  
 
  
 
 
  
 

Today, a new essay, "Invasion," under Essays in the website.  FK

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“Everything we think, feel, and do – everything that makes us who we are – comes from the brain.  We are our brains.”  Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind.
 
Lipska’s book is a fascinating and horrifying read about a woman in her early 60’s whose brain was invaded by melanoma cancer cells.  This began a decent into madness in 2015, only three years before the actual publication of this book in 2018.  She survived thanks (in the end) to new techniques in immunotherapy, but went through a special kind of hell to get there.  She is probably not cured but only in remission, and knows it.  Like a lot of survivors of near death, she is now grateful for every moment she has of life.  This, in itself, is a blessing in disguise and worth the effort to give us this book.  But more important to the author, who studies brain pathologies for a living, is what happened to her when portions of her brain shut down. 
 
At times, her vision was distorted or her legs trembled uncontrollably, but far worse was what happened to her thought processes.  We sympathize with her as the disease progresses, taking away her ability to drive a car or subtract simple sums, but surprisingly, the true horror of her situation didn’t occur to her until after the disease had diminished.  Although she understood that something was wrong when her memory or thought process failed, she could not help but still feel “herself”; it was, rather, only in remission when she understood the extent of her illness, and worse, how erratic and selfish her behavior had been.  She had berated her husband, yelled at her small grandchildren, and often imagined that the whole world was fiendishly working against her.  And even though, as a brain scientist, she had always understood the importance of the brain, it was not until her experience that she fully understood that she was not really in control of who she was or how she experienced the world.  It was all, rather, up to the genetic make-up of a three pound mass of gray-pink matter that sat behind the protective barrier of her skull. 
 
Of course, from a scientific view she is right.  In my family, we watched with sadness as my elderly mother sank deeper into dementia, becoming someone we had never known.  It is a common experience.  And yet, with my mother, another persona emerged that was actually more concerned and caring, in its quirky way, than the world-attached persona of her younger self.  Perhaps this would have happened in time to Lipska.  Still, we do not want this to happen to us, and it is painful to realize that we are nothing more than the brain. The brain eventually dies and rots; ergo, so do we.  In light of this, dreams of eternity are nothing but children’s dreams to help us cope with the boogey man of death.  We find that the monster under the bed is nothing more than the relentless course of time. 
 
But there is something odd going on here.  In page 135 of her book, Lipska gives us a brief lecture on the workings of memory.  On short term memories: “If important, they’ll be stored.  If they’re unimportant, they’re not tagged for retention and will vanish.” Of course, we say, because we have already been told this.  But who does the tagging?  Who is the master engineer behind the machine that is the brain?  Lipska is a brilliant scientist, but it might be that her brilliance blinds her.  There is apparently something behind the brain, something often referred to as “mind” whose make-up has, and still perturbs, the greatest minds in theology and philosophy.  Lipska might be excused because the end of that discussion has not been reached – we still don’t know.  In this world we will probably never know.  So it is that the scientific mind often says, “to hell with philosophy,” and gets on with more practical matters.  But while it is the scientist who would be the one to work out a cure for brain damage, it is the theologian who would give us the better answer to who we are.  If I had just been in, say, a car crash and had damaged my brain, I would certainly give more due to the scientist.  If I were on my death bed, however, I would suddenly appreciate the theologian. 
 
I will not get into just who the “engineer” is behind the brain machine here, except to say that thousands who have experienced out-of-body experiences know that it exists, but to discover who we are, we have to look at something that is both simple and profound.  We have to clear our thoughts (if not our minds) of the idea that what we perceive, which is what gets processed in the brain, is all that there is and all that we know.  Rather, the brain is the mechanism for steering us around in the material world.  It works here and, by-in-large, only here.  In this life, we become focused on what the brain tells us, and eventually we become convinced that the person the brain imagines us to be is “us.”  Since the brain is an adjunct of the material world, it can only tell us definitively about the material world.  That is its programming.  Yet the programmer knows better, and is hidden in the mechanism of the brain, just as any creator is hidden, or to be found, in his work.  We are given inferences within the brain that lead us beyond the brain, which is what I am working with now.  With a little help from my brain, here is my attempt to explain the puzzle a bit more in depth: 
 
We have an awareness beyond our brain.  It does not operate in the narrow confines of our material world, but is rather aware of many angles to reality, and is at least vaguely aware of what lies beyond reality (beyond all creation, that is, God).  It is not “us” as our brain-linked personas believe.  The problem is, that as long as the sense of self remains linked to the persona of the brain, it cannot understand what is beyond it.  It is not the brain’s primary job to do this for us.  So it is that our quotidian persona is not directly in contact with the greater self (which includes the ‘engineer’).  Using Lipska’s terms, our brain cannot see our greater self in such a way as to relate it to the persona, and so cannot “tag” it for our memory banks. 
 
Thus it might be that we experience the greater self at all times but cannot realize it within the confines of material life.  Brains, however (as said) are not completely distinct from non-material reality (that is, they are not the soul-less machines of Descartes).  They are linked to the greater creation and to the Creator itself.  It is such that we are able to have OBD’s, or special prophetic dreams, or perhaps, in a way, special powers of healing and levitation and such that are ordinarily impossible within the ordinary world (I say “in a way” because an outside agency that is available to an expanded self might be necessary, however that might be).  
 
In sum, our brains are material extensions of our greater selves which ordinarily only work in the material world.  We usually become attached to them alone and so lose the ability to think outside of them.  When our body dies, our brain dies and rots, too.  So do (most) elements of our persona that are only attached to, or are products of, the brain (I say ‘most’ because life experience probably does have an impact on the greater self).  The problem with scientists such as Lipska is that they are so good at the brain function level that they may not be able to think of themselves outside of it.  They have taken the bait and are stuck in the trap of materialism.
 
This points to the reason why all the great religions tell us to lose ourselves, or to be as simple as children.  The more adept we become as the persona in the brain, the more greedily we cling to it.  At some level – with a vague sense that there is more outside the brain, or the material – the persona knows it is limited, but this only makes it cling to its limitations all the more.  Such it is that religions often tell us that our attachment to our physical selves is not only an accident of nature.  It is also a part of an egoistic will that wants to retain its own tiny domain.   In the East, this attachment might be explained as the deceit of the gods, or the lie of physical reality; in Judaism and Christianity, it is seen as original sin.   
 
It is the latter that I understand best, in part because it works so well.  In this model, the ego of the persona clings to the limited reality of the brain because it desires to keep its own will, regardless of the consequences.  This is the willful act depicted in the choice of Adam and Eve to disobey God and eat the apple.  The consequences of that act, then, have given us this continued attachment to the limited reality of the material world, including the brain. Because we now identify the brain as the seat of ourselves, it has made it almost impossible to get outside of it.  But to stay within it gives us selfishness and misery and ultimately, our deaths.  The greater self does not die, nor does it grasp for the tiny things of this world.  
But the brain does have us grasp at all it can explain– until the brain dies. 
 
 It is a brave lesson, this knowledge that who we think we are is only a mirage of the brain.  We can thank Lipska for her story, and hope that she continues her research for the benefit of us all.  But we should not be deluded.  There is more to all of us than what we are usually told by the brain.  There is around it, somehow, an engineer, and outside of this, something even greater that answers only to its creator.   It’s all there, all the time, waiting in the wings as the quiet voice.     
 
 

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The Beatles had a trippy tune on the White Album @ 1968 or ‘69, whose refrain was “Looking Through a Glass Onion,” and boy, at age fourteen, I thought I had found enigmatic wisdom…somehow, because I really didn’t understand it.  Maybe there was nothing much to understand anyway, but I think I see something of truth in it now, regardless of the clay feet of John Lennon.  Like a glass onion, I suppose I could expound on many things in it, but what I see clearly is that we, as our personas (who we think we are on a normal day), are really layered.  By this I mean that one aspect of our consciousness is often looking down on another aspect, objectively critiquing it from one perspective or another.  Do I like big motorcycles because, unknown to my running persona, I have to bolster my sense of manhood, a la Freud and his cigars?  Am I reacting to this woman in such a way because she reminds me of a bossy mother, or whiny sister?  Do I chase after heaven because I miss the all-encompassing comfort of the womb? (Freud, again).   Often this introspection begins when we suddenly notice, as if we were a specimen in a lab, that something we have been habitually doing is just plain odd.  Why this?, we ask, and then we grasp from our drawer of utensils a tool or two to try to explain it.   
 
This happened to me a month or so ago concerning a previously unknown habit I had, and still have, on the computer.  It is this: late in the evening after I have done whatever I normally do on the computer, from reading emails to a book on Kindle Cloud to the MSN news page, I pause to continue to look – for something.  I might hit “Weather Channel” a few times, but still I feel that there is something more that I must do.  I go to Google Search and pause, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and then stop.  I want to ask something, but I don’t know what.  I feel incomplete, but cannot find the right question that will end that emptiness.   I give a sigh, and turn it off for the night. 
 
As said, I was not aware of this habit until another layer in the glass onion became activated and asked: what the hell is this particular layer doing?  What is “it” needing to ask but cannot?
 
Given my proclivities, that question might be something about ultimate reality or God or such, which is revealing but not so much.  It is what my normal “I” does as a matter of course.  More revealing, however, at least to the layer in the onion who is now writing, is why I want to ask such things of a computer.  What has Bill Gates and his jumble of diodes and circuit boards and what-not have to do with cosmic truths?  That I give up shows that a part of me understands the folly of it; but that I search for the question to put into Google night after night shows that another part of me believes that, somehow, The Truth Is Out There (My apologies to The X Files).   
 
I think the answer to this is really part of the answer to the march of civilization as we can now see it.  While technological innovations were once slow and at times imperceptible, now we can measure advancement in days, and because of technology, we can all know about that advancement in even less time.  And while technology once almost exclusively answered the needs of the people to survive, providing such things as weapons and irrigation and medicine (as primitive as it was), now there is another dimension to it.  Now, technology answers the needs that were once restrained by the struggle to survive, or given us through religion; now, it answers, or tries to resolve, the insatiable inner hunger for fulfillment that drives us all.  The only problem is, technology does not first define that hunger, and without that, must dangle before us only the promise of tomorrow.  It must continue to tell us that tomorrow it will fulfill its vision, which is really only our promise to ourselves that we can solve all problems through technology – without any outside help, thank you very much. 
 
And I have bought it.  How could I not?  It is the dominating ethos of our times.  I must have, for otherwise, why would I reflexively hover over the keyboard every night wanting the answers to what bothers me somewhere and somehow like an itch?  Why would I think that I could find the answers to the questions that I cannot even articulate?  Like some political revolution based on the promise that it will give us all we need, many of us giddily trash the mansions of the past, expecting that such actions will permanently relieve us of our misery, only to find that our misery has increased, and our masters have become even more unbending and heartless.  
 
We, or many of us, have naturally given human or superhuman qualities to fields of inquiry meant only to resolve temporal challenges.  Like a sex-bot, they might seem to give us exactly what we want without argument, but there is something vital missing.  Humanity is not in a robot or a rocket, and neither these nor our other inventions can fulfill that deep need for fulfillment.  It is only something that understands us better than ourselves – that understands us as well as we can understand our machines – that can give both voice to our questions and the answers.  And, whether we like it or not, and we usually don’t, to get the answers we must reach for something greater than ourselves  In so doing, we must admit to our lack of power.   We must, in the words of religion, humble ourselves. 
 
When a civilization has machines that can move mountains almost as easily as God, it is hard to not believe that the civilization and its members are not gods.  Like a real-life spouse, however, extraneous gods do not do as we please, much less an all-powerful one- and -only God.  We don’t like this; we want it our way when we want it.  But like a programmed machine, we don’t have the mind of the programmer; we function, but we do not necessarily know why.  If we could articulate our basic needs, our first question might be exactly that: why do we function?  And our second, far more problematic still, might be: why do we want to question our existence at all? 
 
So I hover.  Perhaps those questions are exactly the ones I want answered, but I cannot admit it because I know I would get nothing definitive.  Yes, it might be exactly those questions that I want answered but know they cannot be, and so I pause as if confused when I really am not.  I know that no computer, or flying car, or even the cure for cancer will ever answer those questions, so I block the questions out, thinking that someday I will find the right keys to push on a machine that will relieve the itch.  I pause, hoping that I might find the right questions that a machine can answer.  I hover, almost believing that someday we will slip by warp drive into a future that is thoroughly controlled through our brilliance, where I will find the questions and the answers that will give me everlasting peace and joy and meaning and fulfillment. 
 
It is night now again.  I do not want to give up the computer, not just yet.  There is something that I want to ask it.  One layer of the onion does not consider the other, but goes on, Pavlovian-like, searching for a question that cannot be answered, not here on this device, not now, not ever.