doubt

Part 1

i went to tonight's class spaced out from a long weekend of work, too much junk food, and not enough sleep. the past weeks have been a model demonstration of the dangers of overcommitment, and - to make matters worse - i had an attack of doubt midway through our discussion of semiotics, somewhere between Darwin and Freud.

the gist of our discussion was how a whole cadre of thinkers, ranging from Einstein to Heisenberg to Marx to Nietzsche, ushered in a new emphasis on materiality during the end of the 19th century, overturning M. Descartes' precious apple cart in the process. what occurred to me, for the first time was:

perhaps the traditional (eastern) view of karma and the evolution (return) back to one's natural state is too anthropomorphized. perhaps the self and the body are more closely tied than the seers and rishis would like to admit. perhaps what the ancient nameless mystics glimpsed was not this now but rather a future now. by all accounts, diachronicity dissolves in the state of transcendence, leaving the individual:

present

the moment at hand

present

the moments that were

present

the moments that yet may be.

perhaps the evolution of Darwin is, in fact, the evolution of the Bhagavad Gita. humans are merely a point, not end point, and it seems a monumental act of hubris to attribute our present level and capacity for awareness onto the generations and species to come -

someday we will be nothing more than someone's common ancestor.

Part 2

i drove home after class and listened to an episode of This American Life. a man told his story of losing his memory in India, of having to look at his driver's license even to know what he looked like.

when a police officer told him he must have taken drugs, he thought and felt and believed like a person who had taken drugs. he called his mother to apologize; she told him they had spoken last week.

the police officer took him to the mental hospital. he woke the next day with bruises on his arms from the restraints; the orderlies filled his veins with holoperidol and Valium; he thought and felt and believed like a person who needed his veins filled with haloperidol and Valium.

the loss of his personality cast this man into the unknown. there was no memory; the building blocks of individuality were gone. there was no return to an eternal, blissful nature. faced with the nonexistence of a specific self, the man shaped his being by the behaviors around him.

how much of our own being is defined in this very way?

Post-Script

eventually the man, a Fulbright scholar, regained his memory.

the amnesia was a side-effect.