The First Person Singular

2. How I Come to Be Here

7 2 How I Come to Be Here How do I come to be here? How does a conscious individual arise in the material world, in a living organism? We awaken and, finding ourselves supported, stir and move, our movements assured of the continuing support of the ground. We find ourselves immersed in light and darkness; air; warmth and cold; and in the density of colors, tones, and textures.1 Awakened sensibility maintains contact with this boundless reality. This sensibility is not recording a multiplicity of sense-data; it is the reassuring sense of the ground that extends indefinitely beneath and ahead; the pleasurable sense of the continuity of light and darkness, air and warmth; the quickening sense of finding ourselves in lustrous and reverberant expanses. In enjoying the support and sustenance of the elements, sensibility intensifies into a sense of me being here. I feel myself in buoyant, fluid, or throbbing pleasure, in equanimity, composure, or apathy; and in boredom, melancholy, or anxiety. The I is anI enjoy, I endure, I suffer. A living organism is a material composition that holds itself together circulating fluids and distributing nutrients according its circadian rhythms. It excretes waste products and it is porous: substance leaks, evaporates from it, heat escapes. Lacks, determined by the composition it seeks to maintain, develop. An inner awareness turns these lacks into needs and wants, into hunger, thirst, cold, and fatigue. These open the organism to the outside environment, awakening the perception and action that seek substances to satisfy its needs.2 When these contents are assimilated —the liquid has been absorbed, the food consumed—an inner awareness in the form of contentment simmers over them. The sense of oneself is anI need, I want, I am contented. Our bodies see and hear by moving among things and manipulating them.3 In the shapes and colors of things and in their density, elasticity, or fluidity, they perceive forces. In the sheen of the knife they see its hardness and sharpness; in the shuddering patches of dull light in the mud they see gummy suction; in the continuous dense gray of the concrete they perceive the solid support of the sidewalk down which we advance. Our eyes and hands catch on to a real or possible relationship between the force in a material thing and what that force can loosen, separate, or set into motion. I find myself in perceiving paths ahead that support 8 T H E F I R S T P E R S O N S I N G U L A R my advance and a layout of things that yield to or resist my forces. I am where my bodily and affective forces are integrated, manipulate things, and confront obstacles. The sense of oneself that arises in a body in action is an I can. How our bodies are affected by outside forces reverberates as feelings of delight, fascination, repugnance, or boredom; how attention is focused and energies channeled on things reverberates as emotions of excitement, buoyancy, thrill, relief, or lassitude. The force in things that we can use to loosen, separate, or set into motion other things also exists in those other things; every objective is a possible implement in turn. Every practical initiative engages further practical initiatives. Practical activity is not terminated by the satisfaction of needs. The practical layout of paths, implements, objectives, and obstacles is staked out in the elemental depths with which sensibility maintains contact and tends to sink back into them. The laborer climbs the ladder to the roof, surveys the layout of the rafters and sheathing boards. Soon the hand grasping and wielding the hammer, positioning and pounding in the nail, shifts from an initiative into a rhythm that goes on by itself. The roof shifts from a viewed structure into the solidity of a support being felt. The purposive attention fades out, leaving an unfocused sensibility that enjoys the vibrancy of the rhythm of hammering in the radiance of the skies and the freshness of the breeze. A living organism gets hungry and thirsty as it needs to refurbish substances and energies used to maintain itself. But a kitten or an otter gets hungry and thirsty after spending so much of its energies in play. A human brain uses some 20 percent of the body’s energy, nutrients, and oxygen , but most of our mental activity is not engaged in problem solving of biological needs; our brain is largely employed in paying...