Monkey dreaming he is god, god dreaming he is a monkey? I don’t think we can ever know the answer, beyond the experience we perceive from one corner of consciousness or another.
I have the good fortune to live next to a tropical cloud forest in Monteverde, Costa Rica. And probably the capuchin monkeys in the area are my most constant visitors.
I love to see them, and from time to time, voluntarily or involuntarily, I have given them fruit. And then they come back and back.
I was watching them at length today. On the one hand, from the inevitable painter, and on the other, from the philosopher who seeks in her nervous and small gaze the answers to the only two important questions. “What am I, and what is God?”
Am I a monkey who dreams that I am God? Or a god, dreaming he is a monkey?
The issue here is that I pay too much homage to Sapiens, this definition in which we are half monkeys and half gods and with which we console all mysteries.
Sapiens is that right? Like a canteen in the middle of an intersection. I can choose the monkey, or I can choose the god. Perhaps that is the only prerogative of our tiny, powerful free will.
If I choose the monkey, I enter the persistent illusion of time.
If I play the god,…Oh! That is not a decision. Because “god” is, in the end, the fucking mystery of consciousness.
The only decision I make – more often than I would like to admit – is to forget about the All that I am in order to concentrate on the small expression of a monkey. The god is not perceptual. What analyzes this is the monkey, always looking for eternities where they have not been lost.
I say “god” like saying “papaya” or “feather” or “number two”. It is a term to define the mystery that I do not understand, but that is there, inevitable. I am aware. There is no way around this tough question. I exist and perceive.
The point is that I perceive even the thought that says I perceive.
The thing is, I don’t know if I ever think anything, or feel anything from the mystery of my consciousness.
I see this… Who? Who sees?
The body… The body sees. No, the body transmits the image. I perceive it… What the fuck is “I”?
Like a drunk-drinking unconsciousness, I perceive myself asking questions, searching for truths. (I only describe here how the consciousness moves). A la Amelie, I can’t help but imagine Ipathia, Plato, Jesus, and Buddha discovering this same truth: “I have no idea what I am. No idea.”
And I have no idea what I’m communicating with. No idea. I call him god. As if saying papaya. The name does not matter. I communicate with something, always. Inevitably. I perceive and communicate.
Do I perceive that I am communicating? I don’t know either.
I cannot define true communication. It connects, it is an experience. Communication is also illusory.
Beyond communication there is something. There is everything. Beyond is the mystery. The “other” that exists and I don’t know what it is.
Do I feel reverence for that “other”? I do not know. The CM tells me that feeling it is obvious. But how can I revere what I don’t know what it is?
Yesterday I read something that touched me: The skeptic reads all the books and still doubts everything. The religious person reads only one book and does not question anything.
It makes me laugh, because I can put myself in both perspectives, and both are right.
If I think of the Course (that “only” book that came to answer almost all my real questions), the experience of the Course – which is not in itself a pyrotechnic moment – is a permanent solution, a true “washing of sins”, incomprehensible and ineffable.
The permanent result of the forgiveness that defines A Course in Miracles makes it somehow impossible to doubt it. The ineffable experience that you are at Peace with something with which at some point you had a dramatic and violent war? That one? I can neither deny it nor doubt it. I live it, permanently.
First of all, whether “The Other” exists or not, whether we are a biochemical phenomenon separated from everything (even writing it sounds SO primitive to me), whether we are, at last, a monkey dreaming that he is god, the experience of living is present. Incomprehensibly.
And it doesn’t matter in the slightest, who dreams up this pod because Pink Floyd, in their Pulse concert in 1994, is absolutely awesome. 🙂
Thank you for reading me.