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Il Bordo

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I was working on the sub-editors desk at The Sun News Pictorial in Flinders St, Melbourne. The Pope was visiting the city and we knew when his motorcade would pass by our door. A number of us went downstairs to watch. We were gathered as a group in the front doorway of the Herald & Weekly Times Building, the street was otherwise deserted on either side of us. I suddenly got the urge to run about 100 metres down the street so that I was standing all alone. As the motorcade went past, I waved.

The Pope was standing in the familiar Popemobile. He waved back. Our eyes met – I was looking at the Pope and he was looking at me. I went into my memory files and was quite surprised by how much he looked like the pictures from my memory – defiantly encouraging Solidarity as he addressed the crowds in Poland, speaking to the masses in Africa, kissing the ground all over the world. This verification process took about five thousandths of a second. The rest of that second was taken up with our unspoken conversation. “You really are the Pope.”

“That’s right, I am the Pope.”

“Who am I?”

“You are the blond guy waving at me because I am the Pope.”

“All the best for the future.”

“Bless you my son.”

With that he made his usual sign of the cross and was gone.

So I was blessed. Who am I? I am the one who was blessed by the Pope. How did he know he was the Pope? He knew he was the Pope because I was waving at him and he was standing in the Popemobile.

Damasio explains the thought process with exceptional eloquence in his book The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (P19-20).

How do we ever know that we are seeing a given object? How do we become conscious in the full sense of the word? How is the sense of self in the act of knowing implanted in the mind? The way into a possible answer for the question on self came only after I began seeing the problem of consciousness in terms of two key players, the organism and the object, and in terms of the relationships those players hold in the course of their natural interactions. The organism in question is that within which consciousness occurs; the object in question is any object that gets to be known in the consciousness process; and the relationship between organism and object are the contents of the knowledge we call consciousness. Seen in this perspective, consciousness consists of constructing knowledge about two facts: that the organism is involved in relating to some object, and that the object in the relation causes a change in the organism.

For me the object was the Pope. For the Pope the object was me. It was one of those validating moments we have many times ever second of our waking lives. Me the writer with you the reader, wife with husband, performer with audience, Pope with his flock, planets to the Sun, rocks to the weather, plants to the dirt, bees to the flowers. We are all part of the one continuous, universal chain reaction.

As theologian and philosopher Alan Watts put it: “..if there was a big bang in the beginning -- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe.”

How long have we been here? We’ve always been here. How long will we live for? We will live for ever.

Is there a god? We are God. We are God

Siamo Dio.

Chapter 8

Who are We?

It is important to understand that when I say “We are God”, I'm referring to you and I in the royal "we" sense. Only I'm not just talking about you and me – I’m including everyone in the world. Everyone who has ever existed, such as Socrates, Gandhi, Buddha, Mohammad, Aristotle, Hitler, Charles Manson, Jesus, the last teenager who served you at McDonald's, drug addicts, thieves, priests, terrorists, car salesmen, engineers, accountants, mothers, rabbis, prostitutes, pimps, athletes, models, stillborn babies, psychopaths, aborted fetuses, Morris Dancers – everyone, past, present and future. And I don't just mean everyone, but also everything. Every rock, hill, waterfall, wave that ever formed, every flower that ever bloomed, every insect, animal, bird, every soufflé ever baked – the ones that rose as well as the ones that flopped – every building, car, road, machine, planet, star, galaxy, molecule in the universe – everything.

Sumus Deus.

Now that We are God, We are in a position to answer all those questions that have been put to us since We attained awareness. For example: “How can God allow such suffering and injustice in the world?” Now that you know who God is, that question kind of answers itself. It becomes “How can everything and everyone, including you and I, allow such suffering and injustice in the world?”

The answer, of course, is We are suffering and injustice.

Up to this point I have been trying to define what I believe has been established. Like an adventurer wandering deep into a dark cave I have been trailing string. I have been trailing the string of science. We are now approaching the end of that string.

Who, or what, we are and, broadly speaking, how we work has been established by science. Many of the theories about self and consciousness that go right back through the history of philosophy have in recent years been either proved or disproved as science and technology reveal the complex working of our mind and brain.

Nowhere is our intuition more at odds with reality than in the understanding of self.

Who am I? I am Leonard. Or am I? I feel so real right now sitting as I am on a bus heading through the countryside on my way to work in the city. It’s a mid-summer Monday morning. Out the window I see sheep grazing in the wheat stubble under a clear blue sky. Any suggestion that this sense of self I feel so vividly is just an illusion, an evolutionary conjuring trick, seems absurd.

But the inescapable fact is it’s true.

I began as a single cell. That cell was an individual. I didn’t have a brain, yet I had a mission, a function, and I was equipped to carry out that function. I went hunting for food – I attached myself to the wall of my mother’s uterus in order to get the nutrition I needed.

Then I divided. Then I divided again. Now I am four individuals, all identical. If we were separated at this stage we would grow into four identical individuals. But we didn’t. Instead we decided to stick together and hunt as a pack. As four individuals acting as one, of course, we required some mechanism to orchestrate cooperation. Otherwise we would have four individuals pulling in different directions – chaos.

So we formed a decision-making process – a ruling council if you like – to take all the input from the individual cells and decide on a course of action.

As we continued to divide the number of individuals in our co-op soon went into the hundreds, then thousands. Then we “decided” our hunting would be improved if we developed some specialists rather than just more of the same. It’s somewhere beyond here that we also “decided” to stop thinking of ourselves as “we” and instead began to think in terms of “I” numbered in the billions.

Among these cells are all the specialists that significantly improve my ability to hunt for what I want and what I need. I have a department that works on detecting variations in light – vision. Another works on detecting variations in air pressure – hearing. And another collects samples from the many minute particles floating around in my environment – smell. And yet another reports on any contact with large objects in my environment – touch. And there is also a wide range of senses that detect and report on the constantly changing conditions within my skin – temperature, chemistry, integrity etc.

Coordinating and constantly analyzing all this data are teams of cells spread throughout my body that all report to the largest analyst team in my brain. Here I have all kinds of specialist teams – librarians, historians, technicians, scientists, operational experts. They all report to the Ruling Council. It’s this council that resolves disputes and makes the millisecond by millisecond decisions that this great cellular nation relies on in order to survive and thrive.

But here’s the thing – you see that original cell that started this whole show, has long gone. In fact most if not all the pioneering cells have moved on.

As Damasio explains it: “We are not merely perishable at the end of our lives. Most parts of us perish during our lifetime only to be substituted by other perishable parts. The cycles of death and birth repeat themselves many times in a life span – some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year; the exceptions are the precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart, and the cells of the lens. Most of the components that do not get substituted – such as the neurons – get changed by learning.”

So most of the cells that make up the metropolis of me today, weren’t even citizens of me when I started to write this book. And likewise those that were, have long gone.

Chapter 9

Department of The First Person

My interest lies with one particular department represented on this Ruling Council – the Department of the First Person. This is where “I ” work. I am the head of this department, which is also known as the Self, the Ego, the Persona.

Now, as with any complex organisation, there is a great deal of intrigue and sub-defuse going here. For most of my life I was of the opinion that I was the supreme ruler of the whole nation. I have since discovered that in reality this is not true. This was a delusion that my colleagues on the Ruling Council wanted me to think. This realisation started as I read and learned more and more about psychology. I realized how much of my decision making was subconsciously influenced by my council colleagues. Issues were debated and decisions were made without even consulting me. And then my best friend and ally, who Freud called “Id”, who knew exactly what was going on, would trick me into thinking that they were my decisions.

The fact is I am not the Prime Minister, President or King of this nation called Leonard. I’m merely the Foreign Minister, the Secretary of State, the front man, the PR guy. My role is to liaise with the outside world. The departments of seeing, hearing, smelling etc etc gather information and bring it to the Ruling Council where the various departments debate it and finally come to a decision. If, and only if, that decision requires any interaction with the outside world – and very few of them do – then I’m notified.

So I’m the go-between – the messenger boy. Not only do I not make the decisions, I don’t even have a seat on the Ruling Council. Well to be precise – I didn’t have a seat on the Ruling Council. I do now. Since I became aware of this situation I found ways to get myself on to the council.

Let me explain.

When I was back at Immaculate Conception Primary School my role as Foreign Minister for the Nation of Leonard was almost entirely focused on gathering intelligence on the outside world.

As a young nation, the Ruling Council was hungry for information. I was at that stage in a child’s life when we drive our parents mad with our incessant questions.

“Dad why do you have to go to work today?”

“Because I just do OK?”

“Why?”

“To earn money.”

“Why?”

“So we can have enough to eat and a place to live.”

“Why?”

“Because if we didn’t have a place to live we’d be cold. And if we don’t eat we’ll die.”

“Why?”

“Because you need food in order to survive.”

“What’s survive?”

“To live, and not to die, OK? Now daddy’s busy. I’ll be late for work.”