Holiness, Part I: The Person behind the Meaning 


Jim's theory of consciousness is the foundation for his theory of personhood. 

I've managed to reason myself into an awe-inspiring corner. Maybe I'll start with item 8 on my list of things to confess to my priest (I did this on Maundy Thursday): "I have been blind to the fact one cannot see with one’s unaided eyes the sparkling diamond of personhood, that is, the point of view of the person. One can only begin to understand that through peaceful dialog." Let me hopefully explain this, although ideally, you would go back and read my theory of consciousness.

No one but me can experience the fullness of my own consciousness, i.e. the meaningful perceptual hologram that I construct each moment of my waking and dreaming and the life-long-constructed, ever-shifting plan for my existence with which I have embued this hologram. Likewise, no one but you can experience the fullness of yours. We humans are like candles in the world; our percepts and concepts lighting the world into awareness and meaningfulness. No one has ever seen an atom or an electron, yet we do not doubt these things. Likewise, no one has ever seen a person in the sense that I am describing him/her. Just as we see traces of electrons in cloud chambers, we see traces of people in the human-built artifacts of this world. Behind the buildings and the statues of this world are the meanings and intentions of the people who build them. But I speak of an even deeper level: the person "behind" the meaning.

Let me spend a bit more time developing the metaphor of "the sparkling diamond of personhood." Things aren't red or green, you know. For example, physics tells us that the sky is blue because blue light is refracted more easily in all directions by the nitrogen in the atmosphere than the other colors. What physics does not tell us is why blue light looks like it does. Strictly speaking, it is not the sky that is blue, it is our perception of the sky that is blue. Our nervous system generates this color when it detects retinal electromagnetic energy in a certain frequency range. We often hear people raving about the beauty of nature. What they should be raving about is the beauty of our perception of nature. We are so trapped in the illusion that we see things "out there" that the latter mode of talking sounds strange and even egocentric. But, people, WE are the rainbows, we are the sparkling diamonds.

I am not a person with strong visual imagery, although I have a small amount of ability with visual language. What I do excel in, however, is auditory imagery, and more specifically, the generation of musical imagery. This ability was almost a pure gift, although I did put considerable energy into applying and extending the gift. I can do something that relatively few people can do, I have discovered. When I hear a sequence of music, particularly piano music or guitar music, I can just play it back almost as I heard it. But more than that, and this is the point where you just have to trust me, I can "hear" the music in my mind's ear. I can literally rehearse a piece of music in my mind without the notes (once I have learned them). My teacher, Elizabeth Maccia, being a good philosophical analyst, used to scoff at this and ask me where my mind was. I now have rejected logical empiricism as a complete world view, however. My mind is obviously occupying more than four dimensions. Not to get distracted, however, the point of all this is that my mind is a sparkling jewel of possible music. Other people's minds have various and differing facets, but all are sparkling jewels, nontheless.

Moreover, if this color-creating modality were not enough to strike us dumb with appreciation of our own beauty, I have not yet elaborated on human meaning-generating capabilities. Most children learn natural language, and a relatively small number of adults end up extending the language, both in form and content. Language is a social construct that no one individual invented or sustained. Language lets us describe actual events: "My gray cat, Midas, is lying on his mat just now," and possible, but not actual events: "The marriage of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton took place on April 1, 2006." Just think of all the possible actual worlds that have been created in works of fiction. We, the people, do this. We embue the world with meaning through language. This is amazing to me.

However, as you well know, some people are able to create meaning at an astonishing level of productivity, think Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Maya Angelou, Abraham Lincoln, Armisted Maupin, Adolph Hitler, Jesus Christ, and on and on through millions and millions of life. This is because behind any cross-section of individual language or speech, there is a person trying to express it. Volumes of metaphysical, philosophical, anthropological and psychological literature have been written about the nature of personhood. We speak about a person's personality, their soul. There are so many different accounts of the nature of personhood, just because each person is a complete individual. Sartre maintained that for persons, existence precedes essence, meaning that we can't say who a person was until the last say is said and the last deed is done. Yet these deeds and sayings are just like traces in a cloud chamber, they are NOT the person, only traces of the person. This is a mystery, and to me, this is a holy mystery.

I love this world of sparkling, intermeshing meaningful, language-bearing holograms. On a rare day, I can truly appreciate what we have in our lives: intersecting, yet separate versions of the Universe. Surely, this is what Jesus Christ, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and Sojourner Truth, and Mother Teresa were able to apprehend: they wanted to help people to live and to die because they realized how precious they were—precious jewels of the Universe. 

Posted: Fri - April 14, 2006 at 06:21 PM          

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