The Ruminant Self

When I was freshly out of college and in love with exploring new ideas, an article appeared in Psychology Today by Dr. John B. Calhoun on what he referred to as “Conceptual Space”.  He basically proposed that the greatest threat to humanity was a lack of will to imagine the future as being different from the present. More to my upcoming point (hang in there) is something I gleaned the heart of that article from AI this morning (NOTE: I don't believe AI can write better that I do - I only use it for research):

Extinction occurs not when resources run out, but when a population can no longer conceptually figure out why they want to survive. They lose their purpose, leading directly to the lemming-like behavioral crash Calhoun proposed.

(Here is a link to a transcript of that Q&A session in case anyone is interested.)

https://www.theplumblossompapers.net/file-share/b0deb697-25c4-47d9-aa8e-c91467c7d439

This all intrigued me in the mid-1970s, I believe, around the time this picture of me was taken:

Is she not the very epitome of the zeitgeist of the 1970s? I love that word, German for “time-spirit”.  I take that as being parallel to 12^th century Zen Master Eihei Dogen’s famous fascicle titled On Being Time, sometimes translated as “the time-being”, which I like better. The pun value is priceless. “We do everything for the sake of the Time Being,” as translated by Ed Brown in Moon in a Dewdrop.

I sometimes chat with the young woman in that picture, my 28-year-old self, while trying not to go down a rabbit hole of shoulda’-coulda’-wouldas’ about my past. No use in that. What I really want is simply to remember her.

My friend Pat took the picture during her ‘Annie Leibovitz’ phase. She and I were roommates in Philadelphia, and I truly wonder whether I would still be alive without her.  A dear friend of ours, Janice, was sitting across the table from me. We were all three smoking Winston cigarettes, sitting in a dimly lit bar that had pictures of the Beat Poets on the walls (which is why we chose the place). My left leg was in a cast from hip to toe as the result of a motorcycle accident…aha! That dates it: a motorcycle accident I had on February 25^th, 1976.  The picture was taken several months later.

Why is it that I remember such details and yet I have no sense of my-self at that time? How is it that even the smell of the smoky pub is more vivid than who I was then? I am now wondering whether it was the vagueness of zeitgeist combining with the magazine article on “conceptual space” that creates the haziness surrounding the individual in the picture. Or I do I mean in my memory? I do feel a sense of me-ness there. And I just realized that I actually love her, as she begins to emerge out of the shadows. Stay with it, says the inner voice, she has a lot to tell you.

Nothing is ever lost, that is a fact declared by science. It is however, one of those pesky “truths that cannot be proven”, according to Kurt Godel (imagine an umlaut over the 'o'). We are in a time now when even time is pesky, collapsible and expandable, like a water balloon hovering over our heads.

Look at the young woman in the picture.  You can see she is still time-bound, and writers don’t like things to be time-bound. I need to bring her into the present and query her state of being. I think she was happy because she was with friends, and one of them took her picture. But something about the picture haunts me now. She looks stronger than I remember her to be. More self-possessed.

I want to reclaim her—without the smoking and the cast on her leg. Without the long months of physical therapy still ahead, or the broken heart on the horizon. Just that moment, when someone saw her as a work of art. When she was on the precipice of transformation by learning about Meher Baba, at the very beginning of over forty years of delving into the deepest mystery: the mystery of the Self.