Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Monkey shines
I'm fascinated by the Monkeysphere article that is making its (second?) journey around the internets. If you haven't heard, the Monkeysphere is an idea detailed in an article written by David Wong. The articles intent is to provide a humorous explanation of Dunbar's number. The long and short of the concept is that the size of our brains is connected to our capacity for socialization. After researching ‘lesser’ primates, Dunbar and his team determined that the human animal is capable of socializing effectively with 150 other humans. In theory, that is the maximum number of human beings we are able to actively track and associate with before the population becomes too large and our ability to interact with other members of the community is compromised.
The article posits that Dunbar's number explains our species' inability to function in societies, drawing connections between terrorism and dropped hamburger patties at Burger King. I found the article genuinely entertaining, and felt compelled to do a bit more reading on the Dunbar concept, because it makes intuitive sense. For all intents and purposes, the people outside my circle of influence, i.e. the people I rarely, if ever socialize with, are of little to no consequence in my life. The article's premise, that we turn strangers into archetypal caricatures because we are hardwired to do so, makes sense to me. On one level, I know that all people are people, in that they have hopes, dreams, faults, etc, just like I do, but only those people I come into contact with and know on a personal level are truly 3-dimensional to me on a moment-to-moment basis. The rest really are background noise, or non-existent at all.
While I try to be polite and courteous, I reserve respect for people that I believe genuinely deserve it, so I cannot honestly say that I respect all people or hold humanity in any sort of elevated regard. And while I was aware that the rest of humanity likely sees the world in a similar fashion, I did not ever spend much time actively considering the implications of such perceptions. When you look at life in an objective fashion, you come realize that its value is entirely subjective, and that every life is lived as a slave to a mind which will subjectively interpret, store, and respond to stimuli in according to its own illusory understanding of the world at large. Each mind paints its own flawed picture and in nearly every picture on this planet, we are all filler images, if we exist at all. There will always be fools who worship celebrities and 'names', but even these people are nearly all irrelevant, particularly when placed on a geological timeline. Exceptions exist, of course, but most of those timeless names are more the product of our species' various religions than they are genuine significance and few are actively honored by those who worship their names anyway, so their relevancy is questionable at best.
It's an interesting avenue for thought and it ties in very nicely with my ideas of generalized spirituality winning out over the differentiation generated by ideologues and egotists. Our minds and bodies are the sources of our failings. The energy that powers us, that is at the core of everything, transcends the limitations of the Monkeysphere and all its subjectivist relativism. If every monkey is playing its own game of subjective "important/unimportant" or "worth caring/not worth caring", how can the argument be made for any sort of unified, singular, absolute spiritual vision or path? Even suggesting such a thing seems absurd, particularly in the context of a Monkeysphere-like, conjured reality. I believe our spiritual truth ends with the idea that we all have one. From there, I accept that any one of the world's various religions/faiths/cults could be right. When all is said and done, my only option is to live in a manner that does less harm, maximized my spiritual potential, and minimizes my intrusions on the lives of others. Of course, I have to make certain that I do not allow others to intrude upon my life, lest I find myself derailed by their influences. It seems to me, if all the other monkeys lived this way, we could simultaneously build a better world, live more spiritually legitimate lives, and satisfy our monkey-derived propensity for relativism. Am I wrong?
Labels: life, spirituality
Read or Post a Comment
<< Home