literal limitation
embodiment and perception

In the minds of Western civilisations there is an epidemic; in our souls there may be a pandemic. These may overlap but they're not the same. Life is eternal, we are not. Through the mixing-up of religion and science, metabiology has been concealed by category errors.

Her death was my red-pill. This is all I know. When we can't see where we are we travel in circles, questions and answers dancing hungrily around problems, their connection not strong enough, deep enough, or clear enough to give us the meaning we crave.

On the other side of the looking glass I might appear to be mad. Words are dumb. Hidden assumptions muddying logic and feelings too.

Although I rarely speak, even in silence communication is inescapable. Proto-conversations scamper on, in sleep or awake; summoning models of reality. This is our nature.

Presence breeds reactions and an environment is born; in signs and significance life discovers a use.

Communication is primitive, fundamental. Some wriggling thing in the primordial soup unknowingly spoke; and its environment replied. In the beginning was the word, just not one we'd recognise.

Learning what things come to mean, moment to moment cells make choices. Multiplying, transitioning we become increasingly complex; individual.

Living things engage with their world, communicating with others however remote they seem. And understanding or not, they respond. Life sets out from conception, and in a microcosm of evolution ending with birth, the temporal struggles of new organisms begin.

The breath of life was named Psyche; but life commands breath not breath life. And life is everywhere, animating bodies, abandoning what remains.

A mind emerges from a biology, it is its metabiology; an awareness striving for fulfillment. Only the essential singularity of awareness separates one life from another. We are all part of one web, nurturing and being nurtured, nourishing and being nourished.

Body and mind, the heat of a flame, the wax and its form: in conception only can these be divided.

Yet still, distinct from the temporal struggles of biology and metabiology, matters of meaning remain extending beyond conception and death. Whether or not God exists it's what we imagine that counts.

I believe in reality. I choose to have faith, in what I'm not sure, but It's good.

Religions conflated a spiritual world with our temporal one, exploiting our dreams of a heaven on Earth. Secularism sprang from their ruins, and through scientism and other marketings, science has become its religion.

Science has no needs of faith. Faith corrupts it. Science is simple, absolute and barely human.

So rather than muddle and fudge when our conversations seek to find meaning in what our minds perceive; whether in universities; temples; churches or mosques; these could focus on the soul untangled from metabiology.

Scientism and fundamentalism square off. Reason left behind, we remain, peering into the abyss.

Evolution has no favourites. Whether we can be more successful than our cousins in directing the development of our own species who can say, but both our questions and reality are framed by the languages that we use; and their literal limitations unseen guide our choices as we try.  ►