A Trinity of Absences: What We See, What We Feel, Who We Are

I wanted to pick up my cat--
Her fraught look said, "Please don't do that!"
Why did I leave her on the chair?
Gopinathan wasn't there.

1.

I just wrote this little poem.  It is not fiction--the only thing I changed was the location, for the rhyme--the phantom cat was staring at me from a bed, not a chair.  She looked quite different, as if she were woven into the surrounding tapestry.  I stood in the hallway by the entrance to a bedroom, the door of which was open.  Gopi loves to sleep on the bed in that room.  Sometimes when I pass by, she gives me a frightened look, hoping I won't go in and play with her.  (I like to pick her up sometimes and hold her over my head.  She doesn't always appreciate this, and this was one of those times.  Or was it?)

Gopi admittedly looked strange.  Her head seemed to have shrunk a bit and her eyes looked even more mysterious than usual.  It was definitely my cat, however; I assumed that the oddities were due to the fact that I wasn't seeing things clearly.  As I approached, to my utter surprise, Gopi disappeared like a pointillist portrait that becomes just a bunch of dots when seen up close.  My cat was an unmade bed; a rumpled bedspread convinced my mind that Gopi lay on it, staring up at me.  I walked over to tufts and folds, still completely convinced that it was her--until I was about three feet away.

                   Gopinath on the bed where I saw Gopinot.

This was a particularly vivid example of a frequent occurrence.  Yes, I often see what isn't there.  When I am lost in thought, say, trying to find the right word for a line of a poem, I am very unmindful of the outside world.  If I'm lucky and find the right word, the world reconstructs itself before my eyes.  Where are the keys?  I have no idea.  My wife tells me to think backwards in time and recall what I did with them, but this is impossible for me, since I was preoccupied when I put them down somewhere.  They must be on the desk, I tell myself.  And for a second or so, I see them clearly on my desk; then they disappear.  Then, for another second I might see them on the radiator.  Not there again!  I eventually find them, say, on my piano.

The previous day provided another example. At the Giant supermarket, which is gigantic, I got separated from my wife.  I saw her approaching me from the other side of the store.  As I approached her, however, her face began to dissolve into someone else's.  This happened twice.  At least I don't hear voices, I told myself.  "Tom!," she called from a distance.  I turned around immediately.  No one was there.

I am sure that we all have had similar experiences.  The brain likes to make sense of what it sees; it tends to see familiar patterns in something random, such as The Virgin Mary on a potato chip, a ghost in a photo, or a face staring at us from a rock formation on a Martian landscape.  We also sometimes see what we, sometimes desperately, want to see: an aural or visual hallucination of a newly deceased loved one, for instance.   In my case, the cat hallucination falls into the category of the brain trying to see familiar things; the keys hallucination falls into the category of seeing what one wants to see.

If we have a scientific view of the world, and if we are not mentally ill or in an acute stage of grief, these visions are brief and inconsequential.  

When Marley asked Scrooge if the latter doubted the former's ghostly presence, Scrooge told him he did: You are probably just an undigested piece of cheese, he told the spectral visitor.   Marley, in the 1951 classic film version of A Christmas Carol,  thereupon rattled his chains in such a frightful way that Scrooge became convinced of his deceased partner's reality.  The ghosts in Dicken's tale are vividly drawn, they possess the "flesh and blood" verisimilitude of his other characters.  In other words, here the supernatural appears natural.  This is, of course, fiction.  Visions sane people have tend to be fleeting and insubstantial.

There are also borderline cases.  Mental illness and mental health are to some degree social constructs; if we look at these two extremes as bookends and consider humans as books, we are all situated at different places between the two supports.  Most of us are lucky enough to have a position nearer to the mental-health bookend.  But it takes a lot of books to make a human shelf; others are in the unlucky position of being closer to the other side, madness.  The latter books are filled with hallucinations that have become the authors' reality.  Toward the mad end, hallucinations don't disappear like the brief smoke from a gutted candle; they remain a long time, like some underground fires that have been burning for years.

I had a friend, now deceased, a lovely, inscrutable book situated on the shelf of humanity more than halfway toward the bookend of mental illness.  She was a good poet, but had difficulty communicating--Perhaps she suffered from a high-achieving form of autism.  I was reading her first book of poems, when I came across the following lines:

Having arranged your own funeral,
you decided to attend it.

I liked that.  It reminded me a little of Dickinson, whose poems about the reality of death are both understated and shocking. Treating a corpse as if it were a living being in such a context brings home the reality of death.  You didn't attend your funeral, your corpse did.  I told my friend that I liked those lines and why I liked them.  She had no idea what I was talking about.  It seems that during that funeral, she had actually "seen" her deceased friend walking toward her. She carefully watched him walk through the main aisle of the church at the end of which, he, well, exited.  She had had a very close look at this apparition, who took a long time to vanish.  She was convinced, and remained convinced to her dying day, that she had seen him in the same way she had seen mourners-in-the-flesh at the service. My poet friend had a difficult time "fitting in"--if the book that was her life had been much closer to the wrong bookend, however, she wouldn't have fit in at all.

To sum up: minds often trick.  Sometimes what we think we see is a familiar image is an illusion overlying something else.  But is it only the mind that deceives us?

2.

I am typing this essay onto my computer, while sitting at my desk.  It is a fairly large computer desk, with several drawers and a section for my hard drive.  A  half-full coffee cup rests next to my desk lamp.  I put my hand on my desk.  It is hard, strong enough by far not to give way to the pressure from my hand; it does not adjust to my weight the way a soft mattress would if I should lie on it.  I stare at the desk’s surface.  Its color is pale green.

  

Now let’s look at my desk from a different perspective.  Wood is composed of 50% carbon, 42% oxygen, 8% hydrogen and 1% of a variety of trace elements.  Molecules of wood are held together by covalent bonds.  These bonds are quiet strong.

Now let’s examine the nucleus of an element.  The nucleus is so small, it is hardly there.  A speck of dust floating in Carnegie Hall, that’s about the size of the nucleus compared to the size of the entire atom. Electrons, which give atoms their properties, are even smaller.  The atom is therefore, over, way over, 99% empty space.  How can empty space be supporting my coffee cup?  Those numerous Atlases holding it up are those tough covalent bonds—What my elbow feels as it rests on the wood is the barrier made by the electromagnetic force of these bonds.  Matter takes up an infinitesimally small amount of the otherwise vast empty space of the wood.  In a way, there is just about nothing there.

Why is the color of my desk green?  Because the paint on the surface absorbs all wavelengths of light except a certain wavelength which, reflected into my eyes and then into my brain, is interpreted by consciousness as green.  Furthermore, if we put out the lights out on a dark night, (or close our eyes), there is no color anywhere.

This is an important point: black is the way our brain interprets a certain wavelength.  Colors do not exist without brains.  Nor are they fixed; some brains, such as those of a bee, see different colors than we do, because their brains interpret wavelengths of visible light differently.

Similarly, the form and texture of a desk arise in our minds from the sensory data it receives.  The substance of a desk is, therefore, a construct of the human brain.  A thought experiment: if I were a neutrino, I would pass right through the wood without colliding with anything and without feeling any electromagnetic force.  For a neutrino, the desk isn’t there.

It seems to me that inscrutable combinations of something “out there” with something in our brains constitute the world.  But for some scientists, as well as in classical Advaita Hinduism, the entire world is a construct of the mind.  The conclusion regarding the relativity of things, however, in both cases would be the same.

The difference between the reality of hallucinations discussed in section one and the “hallucinations” of our concrete world discussed here is that while the former are often brief, the latter last a lifetime, since they are constructed by the exigencies of our bodies, which last a lifetime as well.  As far as what’s “really” out there, nobody knows. Do we stop here?  We've discussed two types of sensory interpretations of a who-knows-what?  Is there a third?

3.

Yes, there is.  Sensory activity of the brain, and perhaps factors beyond it, is the method by which you construct you.

You didn’t choose your genes; you didn’t choose when or where you were born.  What do you choose then? Truth is, any choice you make is as non-existent in an absolute sense as is the color yellow or a fleeting vision of a cat that’s not there. 

What about free will, which most of us accept as an axiom. It is an illusion as well. You in a very real sense don’t make any decisions at all.  Functional MRIs have revealed that decisions are made by the brain before one consciously decides to do something.  Everything is outside of a person’s control for one good reason: a soul, a personal I, the conscious “decider”, whatever you wish to call it, does not exist either.

This is an illusion called Kaluzska's Triangle. Think of the lines and the circles as the apparatus of the brain.  It produces the white triangle that is seen by the brain, but really isn't there.  The white triangle is you.

Thoughts just happen.  Voluntary actions just happen as well.

This is science as well as classical Buddhism and Advaita Hinduism.  If you would like to read the science that supports it, you might want to begin with Sam Harris’s excellent book, “Waking Up.”  If you want to read about the non-existence of the self from an Advaita Hinduism aspect, read the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, or you may wish to read my blog, The Near-Death Experiences of Ramana Maharshi.  

The three characteristics of existence according to Buddhism are dukka, anicca and anatta—namely, the inability of life to completely satisfy you, the fact that everything changes, and the fact that there is no abiding self behind our thoughts.  This can be found in many texts; I suggest you read, What The Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, or one of my many blogs, e.g. Buddhism Through Pictures: The Four Noble Truths, Ramana Maharshi and the Rabbi, Ramana Maharshi and Cartier-Besson, Ramana Maharshi and the Five Skandhas, The Cosmic Dance, Everything and Almost Nothing: Consciousness and the Theory of Everything.

To many Westerners, and to many Easterners as well; to all those obsessively attached to their egos, this first might appear to be bad news.  But it is good news--and a relief--to the wise.

Does being nothing mean that we do nothing and just passively let things roll?  Far from it, far from it--even though a fatalist conclusion might appear justified at first.  Why should we try to make decisions when we really can’t make decisions? How can we grow in wisdom and love if everything is determined?  

That is the subject of my next essay, which will appear in about a month on this blog site.

4. 

That’s all for now--I think I see my cat staring, waiting to be fed.  We'll see.