WHO CARES IF IT'S NEW YEARS EVE, AS LONG AS IT'S RIGHT NOW.
Despite being deaf, composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies in his lifetime. Hundreds of years and thousands of miles from the estate, writing tables, claviers, inks, pens, paper, mortar, and air of Napoleon-era Austria and Germany, I sit with tiny electronic devices nuzzling up next to my eardrums. My eardrums, designed by billions of years of evolution, transmit sound waves into my brain to be interpreted into music. Mine and Beethoven’s eardrums and brains are made from the same basic mold. Over the course of our lives, the organs changed to fit our personal experiences, but they were made to serve the same purpose.
His music was transcribed over the years and miles to be read and played by an exceptionally musically-talented group of people in Germany some time within the past thirty years. The music was recorded, probably onto magnetic tape, and eventually transferred to completely electronic signals inside a computer. These signals, keeping the ancient information intact, were sent across the world via the airwaves to my computer. I then copied the music onto my iPod to listen to it at work. As Beethoven heard the music in his head in the 1700s, I hear it similarly in my head at the end of 2008. Another ingenious design of evolution allows me to hold my iPod and manipulate the scroll-wheel to select a composition to listen to. In conjunction with my brain, my hands also type words that are stored in electric signals inside my brain. I am able to manipulate a plastic apparatus covered with letters. I’ve trained the meat-suit of my body to know by touch where letters are on a keyboard, and I can express myself through a written language that evolved from scratches on a cave wall hundreds of thousands of years ago by ancestors of the human race. The same device used to manipulate the keys on my keyboard was used to manipulate a harpsichord or violin or quill pen hundreds of years before me to help Beethoven write his symphonies that keep me company. The same technology used to put “my” words on a screen is used to hold all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, plus over 13,000 other pieces of music and spoken words, in a package smaller than, well, than my hand.
The same brain design that composed and developed the music of Beethoven and the technology of Apple Computers also is used to comprehend, experience, and make sense of it all, subjectively and personally, inside a meat-suit that identifies itself as Dan. Its identity comes from 27 years of life in modern America, vastly different from yet remarkably similar to the identity of the Beethoven meat-suit in its time.
This brain, this suit, used itself to look at itself today. Air exhaled by pressure changes inside of it spread across its hand. The hand became a microscopic New York; a tiny Earth. Billions of atoms and molecules congregated like so many humans on the cells of hairs and skin. They walked the mysterious blocks of the city, exchanging information and having chemical conversations, bouncing off of or soaking into each other. Another solar system worth of atom-people missed the hand-city altogether and went off in search of a floor, or the meat-suit’s clothing, or a desktop, or a cup of water. They will still be traveling tomorrow, not know that they are on car windshield, but still engaging in chemical conversations with those faraway atom-people anyway. Wherever they encounter each other, they know their kin.
The suit exhaled molecule-filled air many more times, contracting the bellows in its chest and forcing out mulitverses of atoms that it no longer needed to survive. It drank water, touched door handles, read words, spoke words, understood words, controlled mechanical devices using its wrinkled hands and feet and brain, heard sounds, pushed buttons, held objects, looked at the sky, tapped deep and powerful fingers on its lip, stretched rubber bands, used its mouth to talk with other suits about other suits, discussed music, judged the way its clothing appeared, contrived plans, executed said plans, made complex decisions, pumped blood, fired neurons, thought, felt, experienced, and lived. The meat-suit exchanged information and chemically conversed with the atom-people and the multiverses, exactly the same as and completely different from every other person on the planet, throughout history. He awoke to the fact that he was a part of it all; a major and minor part at the same time; a tiny atom and person and multiverse all in one. And always has been. And always will be.
He saw a little of why his hero is smiling all the time. We are all bodhisattvas, and we’re all in Nirvana, whether we know it or not. Once you see it though, you’ll smile more too.
His music was transcribed over the years and miles to be read and played by an exceptionally musically-talented group of people in Germany some time within the past thirty years. The music was recorded, probably onto magnetic tape, and eventually transferred to completely electronic signals inside a computer. These signals, keeping the ancient information intact, were sent across the world via the airwaves to my computer. I then copied the music onto my iPod to listen to it at work. As Beethoven heard the music in his head in the 1700s, I hear it similarly in my head at the end of 2008. Another ingenious design of evolution allows me to hold my iPod and manipulate the scroll-wheel to select a composition to listen to. In conjunction with my brain, my hands also type words that are stored in electric signals inside my brain. I am able to manipulate a plastic apparatus covered with letters. I’ve trained the meat-suit of my body to know by touch where letters are on a keyboard, and I can express myself through a written language that evolved from scratches on a cave wall hundreds of thousands of years ago by ancestors of the human race. The same device used to manipulate the keys on my keyboard was used to manipulate a harpsichord or violin or quill pen hundreds of years before me to help Beethoven write his symphonies that keep me company. The same technology used to put “my” words on a screen is used to hold all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, plus over 13,000 other pieces of music and spoken words, in a package smaller than, well, than my hand.
The same brain design that composed and developed the music of Beethoven and the technology of Apple Computers also is used to comprehend, experience, and make sense of it all, subjectively and personally, inside a meat-suit that identifies itself as Dan. Its identity comes from 27 years of life in modern America, vastly different from yet remarkably similar to the identity of the Beethoven meat-suit in its time.
This brain, this suit, used itself to look at itself today. Air exhaled by pressure changes inside of it spread across its hand. The hand became a microscopic New York; a tiny Earth. Billions of atoms and molecules congregated like so many humans on the cells of hairs and skin. They walked the mysterious blocks of the city, exchanging information and having chemical conversations, bouncing off of or soaking into each other. Another solar system worth of atom-people missed the hand-city altogether and went off in search of a floor, or the meat-suit’s clothing, or a desktop, or a cup of water. They will still be traveling tomorrow, not know that they are on car windshield, but still engaging in chemical conversations with those faraway atom-people anyway. Wherever they encounter each other, they know their kin.
The suit exhaled molecule-filled air many more times, contracting the bellows in its chest and forcing out mulitverses of atoms that it no longer needed to survive. It drank water, touched door handles, read words, spoke words, understood words, controlled mechanical devices using its wrinkled hands and feet and brain, heard sounds, pushed buttons, held objects, looked at the sky, tapped deep and powerful fingers on its lip, stretched rubber bands, used its mouth to talk with other suits about other suits, discussed music, judged the way its clothing appeared, contrived plans, executed said plans, made complex decisions, pumped blood, fired neurons, thought, felt, experienced, and lived. The meat-suit exchanged information and chemically conversed with the atom-people and the multiverses, exactly the same as and completely different from every other person on the planet, throughout history. He awoke to the fact that he was a part of it all; a major and minor part at the same time; a tiny atom and person and multiverse all in one. And always has been. And always will be.
He saw a little of why his hero is smiling all the time. We are all bodhisattvas, and we’re all in Nirvana, whether we know it or not. Once you see it though, you’ll smile more too.
posted by Aspiring Atman at 19:59
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