Lips of flame

 When I was working on my doctorate, I used to play the song posted below over and over again. Sometimes tears came into my eyes.  Why?  I couldn't tell you.  It helped me keep going when I wanted to give up. Don't ever tell me that pop songs can't inspire and help you to achieve more than you ever thought you could.

Who were my academic heroes back then?  One man I was especially influenced by was David Chalmers.  Chalmers' exploration of panpsychism, that consciousness is a fundamental fact of nature, as part of his discussion of the hard problem of consciousness, has influenced my whole world view to this day.  In high school, I poured over his book, The Conscious Mind.  I was reading a lot of Robinson Jeffers' poetry at the time and I found it remarkable how similar their thinking was, although Jeffers said life rather than consciousness.  I connected Chalmers and Jeffers thought with panentheism (pan-en-theos “all-in-God”) -- not to be confused with pantheism.  It was expressed by Paul saying,  “There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11).  I was also reading a lot of Loren Eiseley at the time.  In particular,  The Immense Journey profoundly impressed me and I also connected his thought about life, mind and consciousness with Chalmers' and Jeffers'. I melded them into my own developing attempts to grasp the meaning of existence into one concept that I understand fully but am not really able to explain.

 “If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.'”
― Loren Eiseley

 

“I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.'”
― Loren Eiseley

 

“We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.”
― Loren Eiseley,

 

"The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed. For it was truly man who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand over a heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since...a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of man.
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief in to the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."
~ Loren Eiseley