Poland — Cell pile
In the morning I asked I gentleman in his garden for water. He had a friendly German Shepherd and send me the scenic route to a small border crossing at a bridge over the river Neisse.
Poland is sandy near the border, I guess from back in the days when this region was a large ocean delta. This sand loves to stick to bicycle chains.
Sand reflects life’s impermanence pretty well. Mountains form and become sand, oceans form and become dry – and you and me?
The time scales differ but geological and human body changes are both physical change processes over time: by eating and drinking and breathing we constantly renew the physical cells of our body. So after being aware of the limited nature of language as one consciousness aspect, let’s now meditate for a moment on the aspect that humans are mind-body-systems in flux.
The “boundaries of language” Wittgenstein and we all run against exist in a dynamic biological context – your body and my body. It is the flesh of my fingers typing these words and is the flesh of your eyes seeing these words. The flesh of our brains is somehow thinking about these words and there is an ongoing narrator inside our consciousness commenting on our life journey in language.
The philosophical mind-body problem could also be called a “mind-cell pile problem” because taking a closer look that’s what humans really are: a biological cell pile.
And what a brilliant and beautifully complex functioning cell pile miracle we are! We start our life as a single cell, and then our rapid embryonic development based on cell division is only the beginning of a biological wonder. Just some iterations of breast milk consumption, diaper shitting, and personality development later, we wonder at things like “boundaries of language” when trying to articulate ideas around ethics and consciousness.
According to Buddhist phenomenology, we humans are bundles of impermanent factors (skandhas):
“As the second mark of existence, impermanence pervades all compounded phenomena. It forms an integral part of the theory of momentariness (kṣaṇikavāda), which asserts that phenomena do not endure for more than a moment (…) the Buddha explains that all formations (feeling, perception, etc.) and in effect all things are to be regarded as impermanent.”
Aligned with this Buddhist viewpoint is our capacity to modify our brain physically. Even after we are grown adults we can still change the structure and functioning of our biological brain depending on the stimuli we receive and our reaction. For example, when people train navigation skills or learn a new language, physical growth of the required brain parts can be observed.
Thus when we are running against boundaries of language trying to understand our consciousness, we do so as a constantly changing cell pile including our impermanent biological brain. Our brain is just another muscle which develops further when used.
Isn’t our ability for neuroplasticity a pretty cool opportunity? We can change our existential hardware and software in combination!
Poland’s sand reminded me how little I understood about the world. Do you understand quantum mechanics?
I don’t but I see a contrast between the fuzziness of quantum physics versus “written words” about our reality (words seem so fixed, permanent, binary … the word “hand” is not the word “foot”). Maybe that’s a trick our cognition plays on us so we can conceptualize ourselves in a seemingly stable world.
Where is your consciousness? Is your consciousness biologically alive? Do you carry it around inside your physical head while you live in 4-dimensional space-time on earth?
For the moment I let the meditation go and focused on cycling through Poland at 8°C in the rain.
The small villages in Poland looked deserted. I saw nobody at all in most places yet the smell of fires indicated there must be people living here. Few shops, here one can cycle for a day without passing any food supply option.
Displayed military equipment always makes me wonder how societies create war and peace over time – in perpetual cycles? Or are war and peace perhaps created by something inside our consciousness?
Who knows, perhaps as humanity we can kiss wars goodbye by cultivating more consciousness awareness … Why not?
The Second World War Germany started cost an estimated 75 million humans their lives. It’s easy to moralize about values from the safety of our cozy home but would you and I have stood up against the fascist regime if that had cost us our lives?
In the evening I pitched camp east of Żary. I was low on water and hoped to collect some rain for breakfast. It turned out all my bottles were filled by the time I went to sleep and I had to take the tarp used to collect rain water down.
Over breakfast I wondered about the beauty of nature. It’s not just our human cell pile called body that’s a biological miracle, it’s the entire biosphere we are living in.
Biological life, including you dear reader, is a beautifully integrated gift of complexity. Your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and your brain with roughly 100 billion neurons is one of the most complex things in the entire universe. I feel that this makes your biological existence valuable wherever you live and whatever you do in your life.
There were old animal parts tied to trees in the area I camped. Perhaps from hunters to lure foxes?
And when we take yet another step back? The entire process of the big bang 13.8 billion years ago and the universe expansion until today is a fascinating miracle. In our galaxy alone there are an estimated 100 billion stars. Pantheists, believers that god and creation are the same and that therefore god is everywhere in all things, would probably argue that god is in each of those stars just as god is in every water droplet on the trees.
Who knows what’s ultimately true … I don’t – do you?
A lot of military on the road later and a pretty large army base I cycled by. The friendly military police took a picture.
The forest in this area looks like in Sweden. On this stretch I only saw military vehicles on the road.
In Rudawica I had the first dog encounter of my tour – an over-motivated terrier who felt I didn’t belong here.
On many fields I saw straw bales from last year which created an autumn touch. I wonder what they do with it. Are there still nutrients in them? Perhaps the cows just need the fibers. Or perhaps these bales are wheat harvest byproducts and the straw is used as bedding material in animal stalls? I know nothing!
I cleverly took a “shortcut” which added one hour. The upside was that the sun came out and I could dry out my equipment. A lucky decision since there hasn’t been much more sun since then.
Being in nature on rainy days always feels special. Breathing in, breathing out. No traffic, no noise, no toxins, no internet.
Of course you and me don’t just “observe” nature in our consciousness – as humans we are nature and biological life ourselves. The whole orchestra from our sun radiating light, 8 minutes later this light hitting the photosynthetic cells in alga and land-base plants on earth, the carbon-oxygen cycle, our lungs. Aren’t these life-enabling processes and our biological bodies somehow beautifully integrated?
How often does your consciousness observe the fact that blood is pumping through your veins. How often that you breath?
Earth’s water cycle is a miracle too – 60% of the average human body is water. After a thirsty stretch I got plenty of water at a gas station toilet, enough to make a hot shower in camp.
For dinner I fed my cell pile a curry a friend had given me in Berlin. It felt like a last warm farewell from my Berlin life.
I started early and cycled through small towns in cold foggy weather.
At the edge of philosophy, the boundary of language – isn’t “just being” the key to moving forward? The letting-go of all concepts and just existing in some kind of consciousness fog?
Cycling can bring you into the now in many ways, such as freezing your toes. Have you ever experienced the simultaneous pain & joy of a restarting blood circulation in your extremities?
In the afternoon I reached the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše). This mountain chain is famous for being hidden behind clouds most of the year and also today they lived up to their reputation.
I got water in Karpacz, a spa town and ski resort which seemed pretty abandoned off-season.
I cycled up into the mountains and pitched camp. Mountain air in my lungs and a small river next to my tent singing stories all night – I felt happy.
Is there a free will within your consciousness? Or is everything predetermined by the laws of physics?
We are somehow simultaneously a consciousness and a physical cell pile made of atoms following physical laws – including our biological brain. What if our consciousness and physical reality are somehow made of the same existential material?
Shortly after sunset I could hear a wild boar just some meters away from my tent (oink oink). If there is a higher power steering all things, it has humor regarding the encounters it creates.
If there is a higher power steering all things, does it make sense to give “it” human attributes? Does it make sense to describe “it” in words considering the boundaries of language?
And what if our consciousness and “it” are somehow made of the same existential material?
The downhill out of the Giant Mountains was first icy, then peacefully foggy.
Out of the mountains the landscape changed to yellow grassland, with very few traffic between towns.
I restocked food in Lubawka (Poland) as I didn’t have Czech currency and wasn’t sure when I would find an ATM after the border – in the small towns they may believe in cash.
In Lubawka I found the few people I met exceptionally friendly and helpful. These were my neighbors and reflecting on World War II, I felt angry and ashamed for the terror the Nazi had inflicted on Poland during their reign of brutal oppression, systematic disinformation, and mass killing.
I didn’t need a complicated “ethical framework” to be sure that Nazi ideology and race-based discrimination were things I strongly opposed and I was willing to stand up against.
Where do such values in our consciousness come from?
Perhaps a larger question is where anything in our consciousness comes from. Do things only exist because we imagine them in our consciousness?
If that’s the case, we all create our reality continuously. And if we create our joint reality we create each other in our consciousness … I exist because you imagine me, and you exist because I imagine you.
It’s a powerful thing to think about creating one’s own reality and thereby the whole universe inside ourselves. Does your consciousness live inside your biological brain? If we create the whole universe in our consciousness it’s pretty amazing that we do this with only 1.4 kg of brain mass – but beyond the boundaries of language “restrictions” may not necessarily apply.
Maybe all “objects/concepts” we think about only create hurdles on our consciousness exploration. Free will, physics, theories of self – who knows what’s true anyways?
Perhaps we should just go with the most plausible reality explanation we can “think of”. In my view, humans seem to be a biological life form with a physical body and apparently we can use this cell pile freely as we want. And whether free will was ultimately an illusion or not, my biological legs were cycling me towards Asia and that felt right.
The power to shape our reality somehow seems to lie deep inside our consciousness – we don’t really know how, but it doesn’t matter for the fact that we are biologically “real”.
Poland, your mountains became sand just like our human bodies are cell piles in flux. On our expedition into consciousness, perhaps it’s a good idea to remain biologically alive.
Breathing in, breathing out (no thinking required).