Biking the loop out to the creek, I stop on the way back just before sunset at a spot that affords expansive views of the foothills beyond town.
The sunset is nondescript, and the hills are uninspiring in a cloudless and slightly hazy sky. But a falcon — a kite, one of the most gracile and graceful avian species — appears shortly after I take my seat, and hovers above the field.
Its long, slender wings beat rhythmically as the aerial predator scans the ground for mice or other small prey. After half a minute, the kite tucks its wings back and parachutes to the ground, but it’s too far away to see whether it nabbed something.
Dusk descends, and the gloaming provides respite from the gloominess of the world. As it begins to grow dark, the kite reappears directly in front of me.
It hovers for 10 or 15 seconds, flies closer, hovers again and flies closer, repeating the pattern until it’s at the end of the field next to the quiet road, less than 50 meters away.
The sight of its long, silhouetted wings beating in the waning light of a bluish sky, with an orange glow rimming in the hills, holds the eye and heart so intensely that everything but that ineffable beauty disappears. The kite floats twice to the ground in an exquisitely elegant arc, and then flies off toward the foothills.
In the timeless aftermath of its absence, an aperture into essence opens. The land is bathed in benediction, inseparable from the human being, hovering for the moment above the world.
In a tour de force of anthropocentrism, a researcher into consciousness at the University of Essex disjointedly states: “If we can understand how different species assemble perceptual content, we can better understand how each carves up the world in time.“
Is it really necessary to point out that no other animal except humans “assemble perceptual content,” much less “carves up the world in time?”
It’s very easy to mock such muck, but it’s necessary to understand the general mind that generates it, and why it is given primacy.
When scientists don’t see where science belongs, and doesn’t belong, they come up with investigations that lead people, and the human prospect, in the wrong direction.
For example, the Essex scientist says with a straight face: “Our research group asks whether time, that stream of experience, unfolds in the same way for us as it does for the bee, the sparrow or the snail.”
To grasp why such a project is wrongheaded, one has to begin in the opposite direction that science takes. Instead of obsessively looking outward, and absurdly attempting to “investigate whether different animal species have different ‘timescapes,’ and the way their stream of perception is stitched together, updated, and structured as it unfolds,” one begins with inward observation.
Science is very important, but the primary intent and action of the human being is not to advance science, but to advance self- understanding and the understanding of human consciousness.
Without self-knowing, the idea we can gain insight into human consciousness by studying animal consciousness becomes absurd, and results in projecting our unexamined assumptions about human consciousness, like “the stream of experiencing time” onto animals.
The idea that animals, other than humans, assemble perceptual content is silly not because there’s absolutely no correlation between what human consciousness does and what animal consciousness is. Rather, because the storage of experience in memory in humans is vastly greater, and different, than even our closest evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees.
In short, without the accretion of psychological content in individual and collective consciousness, other animals don’t have the experience of time.
Yes, elephants and chimps have long memories, but the idea they consciously or subconsciously assemble perceptual content, much less “carve up the world in time,“ is ridiculous.
Rather than believe we can understand human consciousness by studying such things as the “auditory continuity illusion“ in squirrel brains, we urgently need to give precedence to understanding the illusion of time in human consciousness.
Time is inextricable from thought, and thought is inextricable from the accumulation of psychological memory and the illusory permanence of the self.
So when thought spontaneously falls silent during a beautiful event, the experience of time stops. Continuity in nature goes on obviously, but first as a mystery of creative unfolding rather than an object of scientific study. “The arrow of time” is one of the greatest illusions of human consciousness.
The Essex researcher gives away the game, and reveals the motivating illusion behind scientific studies of animal and human consciousness when he says: “Our hope is that understanding animal experience through the shared lens of temporality can provide a bridge between evolution and what it is like for humans and animals to inhabit the world.”
There is no “shared lens of temporality“ with animals. The experience of the stream of experience in time is the great chasm between humans and all other creatures with which we share the Earth. And indeed, with life itself.
Because even scientists are blind to this fact, the objectification and projection of time sustains the mindless objectification and extraction of the Earth’s “resources,” which is the underlying cause of the planetary extinction of animals and the decimation of the Earth at the hands of man.
Do we have to live in terms of the emptiness of psychological time? No, that’s the false continuity. We must learn how to end the psychological movement of thought/time if we are to begin to live in harmony with the Earth, and each other.
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