Everything Is Changing, Nothing Is Changing

Floating along in a forest of symbolic thoughts

Photo by Chi Xiang on Unsplash

1

The dog and I sat side by side on the sofa. My air conditioning system, a bucket of peony flowers in iced water placed in front of an oscillating table fan, was failing spectacularly. In my mind, the cool room laced with a peony flower aroma was a triumph. In the actual world, the weight of atomic oscillation totally crushed my feeble solution without even trying. The room was still unbearably hot.

This wasn’t the first idea that’s failed magnificently when released into the wild, which always finds the flaw, no matter how trivial, and crushes the whole concept like the deep ocean crushing a faulty submarine. Pish. Gone.

There are rules in the material realm. Good ol’Newtonian non-negotiable's in a world of billiard balls. Once those rules are divined, the world reveals a previously unknown predictability that can be manipulated. Plant a seed. Build a wing. Split an atom. They’re all versions of hitting the cue ball with precisely the right force, angle and spin to drop it into the agricultural, flight or nuclear pockets. Thank you universe. Nice.

But unsurprisingly, the universe is a far, far more nuanced and complex arrangement than mere mechanics can describe. There are realms that pulsate with mystifying, unfathomable graces. Consciousness. Time. The Observer Effect. Agency. “Given enough data,” suggest the mechanically minded, “and we’ll be hitting these things with our cue stick too”. But no. We won’t. Because some things lie far beyond the mechanical realm.

I accept my utter failure at air conditioner design, turn off the fan and reach for the dog’s forest bag. He watches me and lethargically accepts my agency by sliding from the sofa and pads slowly across the room, his head held low, panting softly. As I grab my water bottle I say encouragingly, “It’s not far”, and, “you’ll love it when we get there. You can go swimming my boy, swimming!” I’m conjuring up some canine enthusiasm: If we do such and such, then so and so will happen, and you love so and so. I try to reassure him in my habitually mechanically-minded manner. Billiard balls all the way down. What an idiot I am.

2

The universe is recreated in the human collective mind through words and symbols. Words and symbols are not the actual universe, but are the tools that symbolic thought utilises to reconstruct an image of the universe. Words and symbols are the reflection on a lake into which we stare.

Symbolic thought is not made of material drawn earthward by gravity. Symbolic thought is made of nothing at all, like the phantoms and spirits of the forest, bubbling up in the conscious realm, reaching into the material realm, as if consciousness itself had fashioned a cue in order to strike the billiard balls of material reality.

Symbolic thought is the interface between consciousness and the physical world, feeding into and out of itself, far more powerful than any of our mechanistic meddling has ever managed to achieve. Sure, a nuclear explosion is a forceful thing, but it’s nothing compared to the symbolic thought, packed with meaning and values that conceived of, invented and deployed a nuclear bomb in the first place.

But even non-material symbolic thought, and the meaning, and the values, all forged in the fires of consciousness over millennia, are subject to the whims and mood swings of the universe. Another rule? Okay. How about: The price of a ticket to existing is eventually not existing. End of. Is this a non-negotiable presiding over even symbolic thought? Mmmm.

Like any living organism, symbolic thought also has a lifespan. It’s born, it thrives and eventually, it dies. Once upon a time cave artists set to “work” encouraged by a set of shared and powerful cultural meaning and values. Today we can only guess how it felt to paint and witness cave paintings from inside the dark damp grotto because that specific blooming of symbolic thought that once tantalised the human mind in the Upper Paleolithic, has now gone extinct. We still experience the perpetual flood of symbolic meaning, but we no longer share a symbolic vocabulary of meaning and values with our ancient ancestors. That particular historical symbolic river of thought has formed an oxbow lake.

3

The dog peers into the water like a starving man wondering if his food is poisoned. We’ve approached the lake from the north side, so to reach the water the dog has to negotiate a slipway of granite, like massive lips that lead into a mouth of water. He does not like to take this plunge. There’s danger lurking everywhere and the dog acknowledges this fact far more readily than I do. He does not rearrange the world through symbolic nonsense. I wonder if somehow he has the advantage.

I walk backwards toward the lake encouraging the dog to follow. His trepidation will be overcome by his devotion to our tiny clan. Within a few steps the incline steepens and my only option is to plunge into the water. The dog is overwhelmed with excitement and can no longer manage his compulsion to accompany me, so he too leaps into the lager-coloured lake and paddles toward me with the panicky serenity he has when swimming.

I lie back in the water and float, staring up toward a blue sky that is not blue, nor a sky, and watch two herons creaking through the air as if they’ve taken a wrong turn in the Cretaceous Period and found themselves flying over two new mammals making fools of themselves below. As they fly by I am struck by the idea that given enough time, energy through evolution will form itself into shapes and forms of every kind.

Sometimes evolution takes infinitely large strides through time where nothing seems to change much at all. And other times everything pivots in a moment. I float in the lake as the dog approaches and it occurs to me, out of nowhere, that we’re in a kind of pivotal moment, The Pivot Moment perhaps, where the world is flipping from one state to another in relatively no time at all.

Our symbolic thought has created such a convincing parallel universe of ideas that the actual universe has taken second billing. We are more wedded to our values and symbols and representations than we are to the things they represent. And the material universe is being wrestled and shoulder barged just enough to move a few feet from its original position. Everything is changing.

4

Right now, in this Pivot Moment, we are suffering a period of rapid climate breakdown and mass extinction. The material world is responding like a billiard ball to the wallop from our cue of symbolic thought. And even the cue, those symbolic thoughts themselves, that thrived for centuries, seeming robust and in rude health even in recent living memory, are now suddenly perishing and morphing before our very eyes. Everything is changing. A new oxbow lake is forming.

There is a war being fought to decide which new symbols and ideas should rule for the next centuries. Which ideas should be nurtured and which should be drowned at birth. But it is not really a war, because inequality gives the powerful the tools to ram their desires onto an undefended world. The powerful force their will upon the world and throw deadly tantrums when they are resisted.

This is an uncertain time. We are peering into dark waters from a slippery lakeside slope. In the history of humanity the powerful have very rarely had the imagination to envisage a thriving future. Instead they have a yearning for a mythical past, so instead of facilitating the birth of new patterns of symbolic thought they resurrect the worst of the past and proclaiming it as the best of the future. There is no poetry in the hearts of the powerful, only an egomaniac urge for privilege and dominance.

My ears are below the water line, the world is muffled. I’m breathing deeply and rhythmically as my body floats on it’s own accord. I can feel the dog approaching as the frontier waves emerging out from his mass lap against my body. If I don’t do something the dog will submerge me below the water as he attempts too clamber upon me. But I do nothing, paralysed by the moment, frozen in indecision, fully aware of what’s coming yet incapable of aligning myself to the new reality.

And then its too late and I am under the water watching the world turn a frothing bubbling brown as the light refracts through a billion atoms and everything changes in a moment.