Brimstone Lark

What is all this stuff that you’re perceiving? You see. You hear. You taste. You have a body, arms and legs, clothes and a heartbeat. You have a heartbeat in your feet and in your hands. It’s in your tongue and your eyes. You’ve got a never ending rush of thoughts and feeling, perceptions and reactions, perceptions and reactions.

Do this for long enough you develop memory.

And who are those people? They’re like you? There are other beings in this same situation? More bags of meat going through the same process? More people with names and with loved ones? When you see them you see yourself – they’re going through the same sort of experience that you are. Maybe they’re not having the same perceptions and reactions you would, but you’re built of the same machines.

Do this long enough and you have relationships, a network, romance, and friendships and family.

So basically you’ve been a continuous entity among others like you. When other people perceive you, you perceive yourself from the outside in. People have self perceptions which are rich with the layers of previous impressions, emotions, mistakes and successes, associations with good and bad.

Do this long enough and you have narrative and identity.

Some of it stops making sense. Why do people lie about certain things? Why do people choose to be blind from many truths? Why do people value things that are harmful? Maybe others have gotten it wrong someone throughout this process of perception and reaction, connection and association, narrative and morality. That’s not good. Its kind of scary- to know that there isn’t always an obvious answer. It’s clearly dangerous – maybe you too gotten it wrong somewhere. But you’ve also just realized that you can tell right from wrong, you might be able to untangle some of this mess and have things make sense again.

You’ve got agency and ideas about right and wrong.

You use that agency to figure it out. You realize that you’ve been wrong in the past and that you have biases. You’re mortal. But you try anyway to be right or at least less wrong. You realize you have values, things you believe in, a way that you think things should be – this isn’t stuff that you were just handed, but stuff that have gone through the pressure testing of your own living.

At the same time you spend time. You live a day. You sleep a night. A week passes. A year. You go to school, you graduate. You get a job. You get a different job. You’re dying. Slowly but surely, you start to see it happen to people you love. You project into the future and imagine the rest of your life. Do you feel afraid? Do you feel sad? Are you happy? What are the things you’re going to miss? Do you want more of those things in your life? Are you making use of the agency you discovered so long ago?

You feel your heartbeat in your feet. In your hands. It’s in your tongue and in your eyes. It’s all thoughts in your mind. You have perceptions and reactions. They’re here in the present moment.