An Existential Thought

The most "real" world we live in is that of our fellow human beings. Without them, we should experience a sense of enormous emptiness; we could hardly be human ourselves, for we are made or marred by our relations with other people. The company of animals could console us only because, and to the extent to which, they are reminders, even caricatures, of human beings. A world without fellow human beings would be an eerie and unreal place of banishment; with neither fellow humans nor animals the world would be a dreadful wasteland, no matter how luscious its vegetation. To call it one-dimensional would not seem to be an exaggeration.

Human existence in a totally inanimate environment, if it were possible, would be total emptiness, total despair. It may seem absurd to pursue such a line of thought; but it is surely not so absurd as a view that counts as "real" only inanimate matter and treats as "unreal", 'subjective' and therefore scientifically non-existent the invisible dimensions of life, consciousness and self-awareness.

... A person, for instance, entirely fixed in the philosophy of materialistic scientism, denying the reality of the 'invisibles' and confining his attention solely to what can be counted, measured and weighed, lives in a very poor world, so poor that he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human habitation. Equally, if he sees it as nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms he will needs agree with Bertrand Russell that the only rational attitude is one of 'unyielding despair'...

... If we take the 'fourth dimension' - time - into consideration a similar picture emerges. At the lowest level, there is time only in the sense of duration. For creatures endowed with consciousness there is time in the sense of experience; but experience is confined to the present, except where the past is made present through memory (of one kind or another), and the future is made present through foresight (of which, again, there may be different kinds). The higher the Level of Being, the 'broader', as it were, is the present; the more it embraces of what, at lower Levels of Being, is past and future. At the highest imaginable Level of Being there would be the 'eternal now'.

~ Ernst Friedrich Schumacher "A Guide for the Perplexed"

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Watched a film yesterday with my wife, a little delightful chinese film titled "A Wedding Diary". Had a little dinner near the cinema. Bought a little tidbits for the show. A quite little moment with a loved one. Only the two of us. Nothing spectacular. It was not until now that a little realization came up. The moment we spent together are only known to us, and to us alone. No one else knows about this little encounter, this little 'insignificant' moment in time.

Insignificant it was in the larger scheme of things perhaps. There are many, many more moments of insignificance like this in my life perhaps. Yet, many years from now, in a future where one of us has left the other, this memory will live on in each other memories. It cannot be real to anyone else who did not experience this. Short and transient it was when i looked back on the memories of it. But it was real to me. Reality is passing only as long as we forget them. When we keep and recall memories in the present, they lived on forever. i hope to have many more moments like this with her.

~ dedicated to my wife ~