The spirit under the moonlight
The following is an entry from my journal.
I just got back from a long walk with the dogs. Local time is a few minutes past 9 PM. The temperature is low, though I am feeling warm right now. We are at a phase in the month where the mooning is growing. There is only a sliver of it that is visible in the sky. It will keep growing until it appears full. At least in my area, I can tell when the moon is full even without paying close attention to its shape, based solely on its position during sunset. The moon is full when it rises from the east while the sun sets in the west. You get to experience the moonrise in close succession to the sunset. It is early in the night, yet the moon is already close to where the sun is setting. This alone tells me that we need several nights before we get to the full moon.
Living in the mountains imposes some practical constraints, though it has the upside of experiencing the beauty of the world, potentially without filters and distractions. Just as I observe the moon, I notice the patterns in the behaviour of plants and birds. Each has its particularities yet there also is a unity to all of them. There is something there that underpins everything, such that a human is more than an amalgamation of flesh and bone, a plant is greater than wood and leaves combined, and so on.
I have said many times that I am not a religious person. Some mistake this to mean that I am an atheist or, at least, that I have no interest in spiritual matters. I think those are not the same thing. I know many religious people who I would not consider spiritual and the inverse. What I think of as the spirit is the facet of our being which is distinct from rationality, emotions, aesthetic faculties, and bodily functions or desires. It is not greater than them, as they all are part of the same system and can only be understood through it (to have a spiritual experience, I do it in my embodied version as a human and I cannot know for sure if there is anything else and how that is). Describing the spirit through this entry can only be done with words, which will have to be reasonable and must thus reduce the spiritual facet into a rational proposition. I will then limit myself to what a rationalist will find unsatisfying: “you know it when you feel it”.
To me, awe is such a case. I walk up the mountain, it is cold and mostly dark, until I reach the top. From there I observe the open vistas. There is moonlight all around me and I can hear the crickets, the night birds, and the frogs singing in concert. All I can sense in those moments is that I am being touched by something greater than me. The fundamental tension in our life is, I think, between our natural egocentism or subjectivity and the fact of our contextualised presence. As a conscious person, I see the world through my perspective, yet I know all too well that the world precedes me, environs me, and will outlast me. As such, I believe that “enlightenment” is when we reach a point of alignment and harmony between the ego and its environment, the part and the whole. This is equanimity to me, the capacity to not be disturbed by thoughts or phenomena which would otherwise blind you to your place in the cosmos.
I am aware that I do not have all the answers and am fine with not having them. What I can do is work with what is available to me, as faculties of sense, intellect, aesthetics, and as this spiritual dimension. There is a present here in which I have presence. I am yet another form of life like all others and there is no obvious ranking among us. I am but a tiny spec in an infinite universe and I am limited in my capacity to provide definitive proof about anything (perhaps beyond the everyday matters).
Still, these walks are fulfilling me. Through awesome events, I am being brought down to earth to be made more humble in realising how all of us, forms of life in a cosmic continuum of life, have something in common. If anybody cares to know, I am happy to tell them about these moments. I do not do it because I think I have the answers, but because of another basic capacity of our species: the joy of sharing, which is the essence of every community we can ever have.
Our joy while dealing with other people is when we experience something of a shared interest together. We may play a game, sing a song, hike in the mountains, do some pair programming, and so on. It does not matter what it is so long as we are jointly and honestly participating in the experience. Here, again, I discern this same dynamic of the part and whole, now in a social setting of the individual and its social milieu. Just how we find a balance with the world at-large, participation in a community presupposes a diminution of each ego. When we sing together, for example, we do not try to out-compete each other. Otherwise, we are not really singing, but doing a performance to ultimately overpower the others. Even if it is superficially the same, we can tell it is not really about the joy of sharing. It is the same with the cosmos, if I am acknowledging that I am part of the whole, I am necessarily admitting that I am not outstanding or special in any way.
Sometimes, I have people ask me about the specific school of thought I subscribe to. To my knowledge, the most correct answer is “none”. This is because I am not interested in debating for the sake of winning any argument. I do not do philosophy to be perceived as smart, thoughtful, and erudite. The notion of “being up to date with the literature” does not appeal to me. I do not care about attending conferences, being famous, becoming rich, etc. Those will likely distract me from finding peace. All I care about is to develop the tools that let me cut through all the noise of our civilisation to find the subtle qualities of the world: they are always there, but we are too busy to pay attention to them; perhaps too noisy and too full of ourselves to listen to the crickets.
When I experience the moonlight in the mountains, I know that it is not some “spectacular show”, like what we are all used to. I will not read about it in the gossip column of some magazine, it will not be reported in the news, nor will it be debated among the leading intellectuals of our era. It is, nonetheless, a moment that inspires awe and contemplation, and thus reminds me to be simple. If I share this, it is because there may be others who feel the same way and who do not have a need to engage in ideological arguments about whose “-ism” is the best. They all are a distraction, as far as I am concerned, because they all put rationality above the spirit. When you can connect with your environment, you feel content.