Microbes and the Universe
Gods of worlds, subjects of one
Conner instructs Duncan into a thought experiment, to close his eyes and explain his experience. I do this too. Stripping away the objects as I know them – my butt, my elbows, my scanty y-fronts. My experience is now just temperature, pressure, sound, and darkness. The biggest trip is focussing on the pressure. I’m not sitting in my chair anymore, there is just pressure around my body and I’m in a dark void.
By having consciousness of this subjective, incomplete perception we have the ability to move between the worlds behind the world.
Modern ape
What I had experienced as an emotional sleepwalker during my late teens and early twenties was what is known as the ‘extinction of experience’. This process is a product of our modern world and we get sucked into it in all sorts of casual, insidious ways. It is the cultural forgetting of our basic psychological needs, of our animalism.
The importance of the ‘irrelevant’ up-skill.
It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could be wasting my life while doing a PhD…