I Am Not

There’s nothing I can zero in on and say, “That’s it!” Actually, there is no “it.” I have Charles Eisenstein to thank for this new knowledge, though he has others to thank too. That chain goes backwards forever. There is no “it” to be isolated, identified, and profited from.

Perhaps.

A few days ago my younger daughter asked me where her tongue ended, how deep in her throat. Sadly, she has me for a father. I told her there are no beginnings and endings in the way our eyes and fingers suggest. What is Tongue without flavours, without odours, without saliva, without digestion, stomach, sound? I pointed out that my back is painful because my shoulder is still very stiff from the operation in August, which happened because I rode a bike to work, and crashed twice in three years, and so on, and on. I said that I don’t play with my children in rough and tumble games because of those crashes, and that she and her sister will remember this, that their Slightly Broken Dad will always be of them, in their associations and memories. And so on, and on.

I get depressed sometimes. Today I imagined rubbing myself out of the universe. But what am I for such an idea to make sense? How can what I am be taken from Universe? Impossible. I do not exist in a way that allows me to become null. Nor does anything else. We understand existence very badly. (And change is the only constant.)

To be is not to be. Eisenstein points to ‘being’ as our profoundest core concept; reality made up of ‘objects in existence.’ Objects, discrete, each Other to one another, sometimes affecting each other in physical ways, though mostly not. A lonely and cold reality, pitiless and pointless. Seeing this as a fallacy requires the upending of almost everything we ‘know,’ yet this is precisely what we are going through.

So what is competition, and what is cooperation? We cannot even know if asking such questions makes sense until we’ve developed a better understanding of reality. What is human nature? What is profit? Success?

People debate economics and money, finance and society, but the debate, the discussion, the thinking, is wrong at the very outset. I set out in this blog to question assumptions as deeply as I could, and found in Charles Eisenstein’s work a process of questioning that has undone me so deeply that I no longer exist.

Confession to the contrary: I want to be loved and respected. I write to be respected for what I write and how I think. Failure to achieve these ego-goals—goals I was taught to desire by my environment—depresses me. My depression seeps out from me into my family and beyond, into the future, unravels in unknown ways. And yet I don’t exist. I am patterns of change changed by the patterns of change I change by being changed by them. The universe is itself as everything, and Toby Russell is a verb, as are we all. And in this paragraph are contradictions I have not time enough to undo.

There, I got that off my chest.

There is no economics, there is reality. It is change, and it is everything.

Perhaps.

Demote money, promote wealth.