(no subject)

[italiceyeball]

Alan Watts often talked about the illusion of the separation of body and environment. The self insists that the body ends outside the skin. Would the cell, if it could, tell us that it instead was the indivisible unit? That the body was just another outside, as far as the cell was concerned?

The barriers are not barriers at all. Doors, while sometimes closed, make passage implicit.

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"Although I don't feel qualified to advise you... Your persistence indicates a strong enough need that I am persuaded to speak nonetheless. Understand that I am not as wise as you imagine me to be, even if. Especially! If! you call me a fool. Use with suspicion."

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I've changed over the past few years. I wonder if anyone else notices.

Comments

[fredherman]

You've changed just in the last two days, at least in becoming more optical-illusiony.

I can't talk to my cells. If they listened, I'd tell a few of them to behave better, or at least work out a little. But they can't be that independent, since they tend to die if removed from their fellows and left unattended.

[italiceyeball]

The analogy holds I think. Of course it dies when removed from its environment: If we teleported you outside of Earth's atmosphere you wouldn't last long either. But, if cells could think, they might think of themselves in the same way people do: As individual and independent based on their observations. That is, they would see their border (cell walls, semipermeable membranes) in the same way we see our skin, and their environment(their immediate vicinity, whatever part of the body) in the same way that we see continents or planets.

The main thrust of this line is that there is no independence, that borders aren't real. The closer you zoom in to a membrane (whether it's a cell wall, human skin, Earth's atmosphere) the blurrier the dividing line gets... Until you realize that there is no dividing line. Everything merges into everything else, both physically and causally, at the intersections.

[fredherman]

How do you feel you've changed?