Free The World is My Mirror by Richard Bates

was more than its surface structure and had the potential to tell us something else. I wouldn’t have described it in these terms then, I would just have considered myself stupid for not understanding the detailed description of why some atoms are more active than others.
     
    The scientific account of nature renders the notion of a separate ‘you’ looking at the world as fantasy rather than fact. If everything in the universe can be reduced to atoms, subatomic particles and‌—‌ultimately‌—‌energy, then this account rules out actual chemistry teachers, schools and pupils. If we are being scientific, the world is therefore one homogenous blob that shapes itself into a colossal amount of variation over time, but retains the building blocks that make it up. One only has to consider the water cycle taught at junior school to appreciate that nothing dies, it just changes form over and over again. So is the sun the puddle’s tormenter and eventual killer or is it its transport to join other puddles in one hell of a cloud party? If we get attached to the puddle, splash in it every day and give it a name, we’ll recoil in horror on a hot day when the sunny grim reaper comes to call and takes away the best friend we’d ever had.
     
    So it could be said that all science is based on attempts to gain more accuracy and detachment from human hopes, wishes and myths about how things are. But it is not that straightforward. Let us take the brain for example. Research has established it as one of the most complex structures the universe has pulled out of the bag. We only have to look at the billions of neurons and the neural connectivity to appreciate the permutations and patterns possible. When I studied psychology we looked at how a neuron becomes active and sends a signal to another one. Along with other neurons firing at different rates, whole areas of the brain were alive with activity. The details are complex and beyond the scope of this section: simply, the characteristics of raw materials found in nature, such as calcium, sodium and potassium, are being used to underpin the activity of the brain.
     
    Where is the brain without this activity? Can we sensibly consider the brain on one side of the equation and the activity somewhere else? It does not make sense when looked at in this way, and yet we make the brain into an object, giving power to the noun over and above what is actually occurring; language is creating non-existent separate entities. It is so easy to get convinced and taken in by this trick because language has great power when we make the assumption that it describes a real world out there.
     
    I suggest that it is more the case that Wholeness can do braining in the same way it can do rivering and mountaining. And here’s the even more curious thing: braining is not separate from what it creates. You do not get rivers and mountains without the electrical activity of the brain. And yet, this assumption that the object is real, independent and ‘out there’, and the brain is representing the world ‘in here’ for a ‘you’ or a ‘me’ to see it and interact with it somehow, is clearly false. If we pause for a moment we see that is just not possible. Everything is too alive to be pigeonholed in this way. Current activity is all there is, even if memories are appearing that appeal to times and places other than the one right here.
     
    If this is grasped, language that talks about me and you and past and future has been exposed. It is nothing other than current activity: a timeless, unceasing energy that has no beginning and no end. The mind we talk about in our everyday conversations is no longer housed within the skull of a separately existing thing we call human. No, it is demoted or promoted, whichever way you want to understand it, to an expression of life itself. Gone is the notion of birth and death, and in come drying puddles, cloud formations and rainy days filling those little hollows