Invisible Half Man, 52nd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Speaking on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show, author Michael Pollen reminded me of something interesting. Brains, he pointed out, evolved to support bodies; bodies aren't a life-support system for brains. The brain controls our body's breathing and heartbeat, regulates various metabolic processes, and keeps us aware of various external threats and dangers. 

Going back to the age-old body-mind schism, people conventionally think that "they" are the mind, and hence their identity is somewhere in the brain. We exist somewhere inside our skulls, it's thought, peering out at the external world through the eye sockets. For centuries, science fiction and horror novels have obsessed on the idea of disembodied heads, brains kept alive in laboratories, and consciousness transferred to computers. But if the brain is merely a support organ for the survival of the body, and if personality, memory, and intellect are all but byproducts of that one particular organ, if we wanted to live forever, shouldn't we preserves the body below the neck instead of the head above?    

Body and mind are not two separate things. The brain is simply another organ, no different than the heart, lungs, stomach, and gall bladder. The latter excretes bile for some reason (I don't remember why) and the brain excretes thoughts and stores memories. Personality, intellect, and consciousness are all after effects of the brain's functions. "You" are your body, including the brain and everything that goes with it. "You" are as much your toenails as your awareness.     

All things are liberated and without fixed abode. When we think of water, we visualize it as flowing in rivers, pooled in lakes, and rolling in the waves of the great oceans. Of course, water takes many forms and flows over the earth and through the sky; it flows upward and it flows downward. It flows in a single winding brook, and it flows in the ocean depths. It rises up to form clouds, and it comes down to form pools. 

The way of water is to ascend to the sky, forming rain and dew, and to descend to the earth, forming rivers and lakes. There's nowhere on Earth that water doesn't reach - it reaches into flames and it reaches into rocks. If you look up the chemical composition of most minerals, you'll see H₂O somewhere in the formula. Our bodies are mostly water, and our brain is primarily made of water. We're basically skin-bags of water walking around and building things. Water reaches into the mind and its images, into wit, and into discrimination, and it reaches into the realization that we're just very clever forms of water.

Back on the 50th day of Childwinter, I noted that the warm weather meant that there's a lot of moisture in the unstable atmosphere, which portends thunder and storms. The thunder woke me up last night (water awakening water), and this morning I finally got out up of bed after a particularly loud thunderclap. It rained all morning, but despite the thunder, I'd hardly call the rainfall a "storm" - it fell reasonably gently, if persistently, and didn't try to take any trees down with it. It's let up now, and since today is a walking day, this skin-bag of water is heading out shortly to get in some mileage, more water flowing over the Earth.