What Do You Mean ‘I Don’t Exist’?
Do circles exist?
Well, if you mean “Do they exist in the wild, can we we find one?” then, no, because for all real-world things, roundness eventually breaks. Anything we call a circle, if we start zooming in on it, at some point reveals itself not to be a circle at all. At first we notice angles, at least at some microscopic level and inevitably, if we zoom down close enough, we find ourselves adrift in the quantum foam.
But so what? Circles are all over the place — on signs, in machinery, as balloons and bubbles and globes, in the roadways we navigate — and we certainly behave as though all that circular stuff is indeed circular. To say circles philosophically “don’t exist” when we have to call things circles to live a sane life, what use is that? It’s silly.
OK, point taken and point taken. So… where does that leave us? Maybe we could ask, do circles really exist? In other words, if all sentient life in the universe were to vanish in a flash of stipulation, would there be circles?
It’s a badly formed question. For certain purposes, we can take the view that circles aren’t real, and that is useful, sometimes necessary. For other purposes, it’s much more useful to take the view that they are real. But reality itself has no view. Reality could not possibly be less concerned with the question of whether “circles” are or aren’t “real”.
OK, wait a sec. I see where this is going….
All right, enough of that then. Look at those fish down there. The ones in the river. They are fish. Each one is an individual. We throw food on the water for them and they bob and scoop it up and they dive and the river takes them and they’re gone somewhere. Maybe they’ll come back later and we can recognize them by their spots.
Obviously, fish exist. I can’t say they don’t as long as I mind being slapped with one, which I do.
Now look around at everything — the sky and plants and people and buildings. They all exist, too. I can sit on a bench with my feet on the ground and toss acorns at a tree stump. If we can’t agree that this really happens, how can we even have a conversation?
Now look at your hand, the one that just tossed an acorn. Let’s imagine you’ve caught some mundane virus and right now, inside that hand, there’s a blood vessel in which your red cells and your white cells and virus cells are all jostling around. Imagine that a microscopic surveyor could stop a few of them, persuade the white cells not to eat the viruses for a moment, and ask them a few questions.
They are each asked, “Are you a bodily organ?” The question makes no sense to them. So it is explained that the red cells and the white cells are organelles of a “human body”, which is too big for any of them to perceive in its entirety. The virus, on the other hand, is not. It’s an intruder. The virus says, “But I was born here!” No one understands any of this.
As we are pondering whether a virus is or isn’t part of the body, someone joins us here on the philosophical bench by the river near the stump and says, “The planet is an organism, and everything on it and in it is just a part of one of its organs”. You ask, “What about a meteor? What organ is that a part of?”
Is a virus really part of the human body? Are we really part of a living planetary body? Is a meteor also really part of that body? Or not?
These are badly formed questions. They concern views, which are at times useful and at other times not so useful. Reality is not concerned with them.
Let’s look back at the river. Does it exist? We could drown in it, that seems pretty real, quite existy.
Is the sun part of the river? It sounds like a stupid question because we can literally measure the distance between the river and the sun. (Provided, of course, we set our units and tolerance levels, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
Look at that car there. Is the fuel part of its engine? If the engine can’t run without the fuel in it, just like it can’t run without the cables in it, then it seems safe to say that fuel is indeed an engine part, if we’re using the engine for its intended purpose, which is the only thing that makes it an engine rather than, say, a doorstop or a piece of art. Sure, we have to replenish the fuel, but we also replace cables.
Wait a minute, though, hold on. Does that mean the food we eat is part of our body before it reaches the stomach? When does that happen?
Maybe some food is never part of my body. Imagine a donut. Imagine spearing it on a finger and holding it up.
As you contemplate it, our guest on the bench asks, “Is your finger inside the donut?” You say no, it only touches the outside. Turns out, our benchmate is a wizard, who casts a spell and the donut floats into the air and elongates into a dough-fish of sorts. It dives down to the river, scoops up some left-over fish-food, then bobs back up into the air.
Is the food now inside the dough-fish? If you finger wasn’t, why would you say that the fish-food is? Some biologists find it convenient to consider the “interior” of the digestive tract as “exterior” to the body. Because at what point does the hole through the dough-fish become “inside” rather than “outside”?
The dough-fish disappears in a puff of redundancy, and we look to see that the river-fish have returned. They can swim because the water is not frozen. It’s not frozen because of the radiation in it. If we say the radiation is not part of the river, we are saying the fuel isn’t part of the engine. Once again we are taking views, which are irrelevant to reality.
Isn’t it only the radiation in the water that’s part of the river? If we attend to the radiation “inside” the river and ignore the mechanism causing it to stream in and out, we are making an arbitrary division, one based entirely on how our minds chop up the world to make it navigable. The river is what it is, when and where it is, because the sun is what it is and what it has been. The sun and the river and the fish and we and the viruses are what we are because of the ratio of matter and anti-matter in the very early universe.
It is useful to view the world in such a way that we and the fish and the river and the viruses and the acorns and the bench are real, that they (and we) exist. But on close inspection, the boundaries between and among all these “things” cannot be determined; there are only vague regions of continual flux, neverending transition. As the world changes, my body and mind must change. Our forms continually dissolve and resolve.
Reality is no more concerned with whether we do or don’t exist than it is with whether circles do or don’t exist. It’s all just steme (space, time, energy, matter, etc.) shifting its shape like a cloud. We are never extracted from it because we can’t be.
But isn’t this all academic? An acorn hits the stump or it doesn’t. Right?
To practice Zen is to drop our concern with the badly formed question. Here we are, empty of essence, our identities formed by all things, never separate. Still, sometimes the acorn hits the stump, sometimes it doesn’t. When it becomes clear that these both are views, when we stop imagining that any view is either real or unreal, it’s like discovering that the sun was never orbiting the earth.
Image: Creative Commons via Pixabay