Chapter II: An Instant in the Garden of Paradise

On a moonlit night somewhere back in the collective memory of our shared past, a woman awoke in a terrible fright. She was lost… or at least she felt what we would describe as lost. She sat bolt upright a gazed in disquieted fear around a hearth crowded with lumps of shadows and near suffocated by the weighty smell of ash & sweat. She moved & this startled her to a near panicked state. Yet, she made no sound. “Where the f*** am I?” was likely her first thought… followed close behind by “What the hell is this place?, Why does it offend my…. ummmm…. senses…. so?”. These were likely the first thoughts any one of us had ever had. The first tangible thoughts of the self to self. Imagine that: the first thoughts ever thought by any one of us… the first thought of all time… being ones of disorientation. The irony, in case it be lost (so to speak) must be spoken. After thousands of years, we still are asking the same questions to self and to one-another each and every day.

In a World Religion class I had in undergraduate school, this idea was professed by one of the worst professors I, or any of my contemporaries, had ever had the displeasure of studying under. His classes were insufferable, not for lack of material, but rather for his inability to communicate his thoughts clearly. He might have been the only man on Earth that could raze the study of world religions to a landscape of wasted sand without a dune or oasis in sight. But that is not to say that the class or his lectures were worthless. To the contrary, the fact that I have ported this idea with me for over a decade & a half, while I have forgotten his name (though not the ‘F’ I eventually received in his class), demonstrates that he had succeeded in something monumental. He had introduced the idea to me & my melon has been chomping on it ever since. That the need to orient oneself is on par with the drive for sex, food & shelter was a breakthrough to the young and impressionable me. It resonated to the depths of my being. It felt right. He described it to the class of 12 half-asleep undergrads in a dark room buried under the cafeteria in the commons (a closet really). And the point was not lost to me that I was probably not the only one thinking “what the hell am I doing here” while thinking of the lunch menu and day-dreaming about my girlfriend in all of her naked glory rather than the shitty Iowa weather. That is to say, while he went on about the origin & probable significance of monoliths erected by Celtic dwarfs and the hypotheses surrounding what propelled long-gone mystical clans of people to erect “alters”, architectural calendars and other runes, he made a decent case. All of us, from time en memoriam have wondered not just what’s for lunch and who we plan to screw next, but at least equally why we are here and when class will end. The way he described the theory that some promulgate that these all represent various peoples’ attempts to orient themselves to the spinning heavens and to the surrounding landscape really spoke to me. And that got me to thinking about even more than when class would end. I continued to think about my girlfriend naked.

Specifically, it got me to thinking about why folks throughout the conscious ages have felt such a strong a need to orient themselves while other bipeds, and presumably, our genealogical forefathers/cousins presumably did not.

The answer I guessed was that something had changed. And, from what little I understand, the best theories at our disposal seem to indicate that something did change & it changed profoundly. Now, there are few among us who would argue with the proposition that software alone makes the machine. Often is the case that the newest version cannot even be loaded onto an older CPU, for want of processing speed, memory, &c.. What is clear about the historic record is that over time, somehow, we did indeed receive a series of hardware upgrades. The mechanism of how it happened or what the old hardware looked like, whether we are a new machine altogether or whether we are a newer version of versions that preceded us is interesting, but not discernable to me. What is of fundamental interest to me is the software we are running on & how we got the software upgrade. That is to say, was there a point in time where one of us homosapien folks received an install on demand download from a creator? Was there one moment in the experience of one of our distant ancestors when the lights went on, so to speak? When a flicker of consciousness beyond that of feeding, breeding & keeping warm entered the fray? When we became… well…. More spiritually like us? I think there was. When & how precisely I don’t know. What I do know is that the story sounds mighty familiar.

When I think about the woman who awoke out of her dreamy haze, huddling closely to her mate in a shelter slightly illuminated by the dwindling embers of the previous night’s fire, I think I can recognize her & empathize with her. She is to me the first one of us. That moment, in my mind, signifies the instant at which we became us. I picture her gazing through the entrance to the clans’ cave, out over the beach & staring, completely captivated, out over the horizon at the First Dawn. That moment marked the first sunrise witnessed by a truly sentient self-aware human. That is to say, morning after morning the sun had appeared to an audience that could not appreciate its eons-old dance across the sky. That is to say, all who preceded this Eve had failed to really process the Sun’s significance, much less their own. Their hardware had been capable, but the software that dictated its machinations had been in grave need of an upgrade. I contend the development of the hardware and piecing together of the model we represent came first. Some Q&A testing went on (supplying eons of intrigue for mankind to unravel) & when all was functioning to project specifications (and enough fodder had been provided to satiate lifetimes & generations of curious creatures), Eve was endowed with vX.0 software package & underwent a system reboot. From a system deployment standpoint, it makes sense to make sure the hardware is capable before one loads it up with software. Ah, but any good tech will tell you to always plan for scalability. If the calculations about the average percentage use of our brain capacity are at all accurate, there is plenty of room for future versions.
The analogy of human psyche/soma as computer software/hardware is surely a crude one which breaks down, as I am reminded by Timothy Witmer, rather quickly. Yet this metaphor holds for sake of discussing the moment described above; the marriage of mind & body, as distinct from the mechanical concert of brain & body that preceded it. We have the benefit, many years later, of more diverse metaphors than previous generations. What seems crude to us would have in the days of old seemed more fantastic and incomprehensible by far than the idea that the Creator “breathed life into Adam” or “made Eve from the rib of Adam”. I confess that to compare the corpus to hardware or the soul to software does not properly convey to the true nature of the body & mind, but the model holds for this discussion.