1. The Universality of Early Experience
Sometimes, when I see children spinning in high-spirited circles and falling dizzily to the ground, I wonder if they're trying to grasp at the receding memories of their strange, intoxicating ride into Life. Or maybe they do it to glimpse again, the purity of undefined emotion that is expanding and contracting into a complex of forms. Only a faint impression remains of those earliest sensations—of motion and emotion, and swirling unfathomable images that blinked off and on. When the whirling stopped, I opened my eyes to a brilliant, still expanse of blue. Alien ribs and white leather encaved me, and I was aware of a warm, pleasant constriction of satin and clean, sharply frosted air. Outside this cocoon, already-familiar voices chimed their codes, and I wondered what it all meant.
Yet, though the sounds and the view (and the cold) seemed new back then—though all sensed reality was new—I wasn't. I was simply (for some reason), focused here, (wherever here was). As I looked out at this world through brand new eyes, I was already intimately familiar with consciousness, long before anything else made sense; and a single feeling of awe and wonder and unsullied pleasure seemed to ripple through me, into a world that was suddenly…apart somehow. That so many aspects of emotion were focused on a reality that was novel and unknown, and were recombining to generate curiosity, felt effortless and natural. As I lay there cozy and content, I was not surprised that I could think and feel. What bewildered me was my lack of comprehension. I was surprised to realize that I had no memory, no knowledge of this existence. It all seemed quite new, but strangely expected, as if a backwards extrapolation of some other set of …of… Such thoughts faded out, unanswered, unresolved and never quite forgotten.
When the voices outside spoke to me, laughed and talked amongst themselves, I knew that the sounds they made were communicating the fine details of this new existence, and that I was designed to understand them. Concentrating on some string of words, I let it echo in my mind in the hope of somehow retaining this piece and retrieving it later when I might understand its meaning; but I didn't know how to preserve form and pattern in memory any longer than it took for something new to be said. Memory seemed suddenly to be an abyss as tone, pitch, and enunciation slipped back into formlessness.
I took for granted that my existence was not confined to the physical world. This aggregate of atoms might be my form, but my consciousness did not stop at its boundary. It was as if a part of me had become focused visible light at this point in the universe, and now somehow, the parts of consciousness that existed in this spot were “me.” “I” was coming through this body at some point within that light, experiencing life as a human being. Though consciousness was concentrated, and siphoned through this body, somehow a more inclusive ‘me’, an invisible-light part, was also conscious though in some less convergent way.
Throughout my earliest years, I didn’t question that feeling because it had been there as soon as I had. Nor was I concerned that no one really acknowledged existence beyond human being. At that point, there was a whole world of words and wonder that I could not yet understand or describe so confirmation wasn’t sought, expected, or required.
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