The Three of Us
I’ve never really looked at life like this before. Well, I’ve always thought of myself as a trinity but their is a nuance in this new viewpoint or way of looking at things.
I was listening to the Ben Harper track “The Three Of Us” when I had an epiphany that this current version of me is a bit like a three piece guitar band like The Cream, Jimi Hendrix Experience or any one of the other amazing passionate and creative trios that have existed. Each member is an integral part and when one member leaves or passes the whole essence of the music changes. The identity of the band usually changes significantly.
- Body, Mind, Spirit. I’ve always
I am “me” or what I will call spirit. I have ideas, creative impulses and respond to external stimuli. I am the viewer of my memories and observer of my emotions. I use the information and data that I have collected and found empirically workable to base my actions on. I can also be impulsive, adventurous and erratic.
I have a body that I use to get around and to experience the sensations of being a human being. It is my vehicle but it is also to a degree my identity. I look at it in the mirror, I dress it in clothing that I feel good about. I let it get fat and pasty and then I repair it and make it slim and glowing. It is my possession and sometimes I confuse it with “me”. In many ways it is my most treasured possession and maybe that is why I have always (or up until recently) struggled with death. My body also has billions of cells and is packed with exogenous bacteria and virus that are separate entities to my own cells. So my body id somewhat of an extension of “me” that I use to represent myself to the external world and the other people that inhabit it. My brain is also an integral part of my body.
Then there is the third member of “the group”. My mind. I must admit that although I believe the mind and brain to have two seperate functions, this is based on a gut feeling and if you asked me to explain, I simply could not. Having said that I do know that I have memories and mental pictures, I can hear sounds and smell smells, I can create a visual of birds flying or rain falling, I can imagine the sensation of feeling cold and wet, I can conjure up the feeling of claustrophobia. I can go swimming and exploring my past. I have memories of my experiences which I know are always available because sometimes an external stimuli triggers a memory that I have never experienced. Some of these memories are abstract and some are clear and well defined. I am also very scared of losing my memories. That’s another liability of death.
How do I know this? Well, even if I have been re-incarnating for millennia I do not have easy access to my memories from these past lifetimes when I was teamed up with a different body, family and circumstances. Looking at this from my current understanding this makes sense because life could get pretty complicated if you did remember everything about your existence. Old grudges, lost loves, old social positions, old financial positions et al would create a chaos that would be hard to bear. So based on this observation I sort of have to accept amnesia as some sort of protective mechanism. Who knows?
Then there’s always the possibility that the lights just go out and what you have spent decades creating in the context of memories and experience, consciousness, accumulated joy, creativeness or even pain and hardship just disappears like a candle being blown out.
So “the group” has to break up one day. No matter what. Either completely or just losing one or more “members”. Losing the body is an inevitable part of existence, so that one’s a no brainer. A bit like losing your favourite drummer. I suppose it is like anything that you covet or simply love having in your space. You don’t want to lose it and the fear of loss could be exacerbated by the countless losses that you have had throughout eternity.
This is all speculation.
What I do know is that at this moment in time my group, my “three of us” is a composite of me, my mind and my body and I would like to keep it that way for as long as is possible within the bounds of health and happiness.
