Beginnings
(Not really)
Everything depends on everything else. Because of this, every true story could be said to have an infinite number of beginnings, because no matter where you begin, something led up to that moment. To tell my story, I could begin with my birth, but that doesn't seem like much of a beginning to anything. My mother is a complicated person with her entire own backstory. My father as well, of course, (who doesn't?) but does not play so major a role in my own story. Particularly not at the beginning of it. But ultimately, I suppose that's the point that I want to describe. Everything depends on everything else. Everything comes from somewhere or something which in turn came from something else, and back and back. So if I am to tell you who I am and where I came from, there are a million places to start. The later I start, the more I may have to backtrack. If I start earlier you will be inundated with details that are not useful. The "self" resides largely in the mind, I suppose - at least the common "self" of which most people speak, so perhaps the place to start is to describe to you the earliest memories with a major impact on who I have been in the past, who I am in the present moment, and who I am striving to be.
I feel like I've had so many beginnings in my life; beginnings which were so powerful that they overwhelmed the ends they were replacing. Providence met me many times in those hallways - I suppose most people would say "crossroads" - and for this I am grateful. However, the hardest parts are when there is an end, but no obvious next beginning in sight. God does *not* always open a window when he closes a door. Sometimes you're left standing there waiting. Sometimes you're rain-soaked to the bone and shivering while you wait. Maybe my problem was that I sometimes couldn't bring myself to close the door completely, and was given no escape as a punishment for breaking the rules.
This piece is about the most important lesson I've learned, and how I learned it. The concept was first introduced to me on an intellectual level by my Asian Philosophies teacher in college, and it was called "Interdependent Arising" or Pratītyasamutpāda, a major Buddhist doctrine. There is nothing outside cause and effect. Everything has some dependence on everything else. In nature we see the tree that starts as a seed and opening itself to the nutrients in the ground, left there by the last tree. The seed opens, turns the nutrients in the ground into wood and leaves and all manner of tree-substance and tree-existence. Then, eventually, having exhausted the resources, it dies, surrendering its resources back to be consumed by millions of other organisms, and probably even a few more trees if it's lucky.
Interdependent Arising is seen everywhere. The laws of physics themselves, the Grand Unified Theory which has been our scientific holy grail for decades, are king. They describe the motion down at the lowest level with which we are capable of interacting and that description spreads upward through scale to being the laws that describe atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, tissues, up and up until we're describing our own minds, the highest frontier. And of course, no computer so far as come anywhere near rendering that sort of complexity, so even with the right equations, what do we do with them?
If Grand Unified Theory is king of all physics, of all the world, then that puts our brains at the seat of the soul. The central processor for all that happens within the body and the mind (which are in no way truly separate), the brain has often been described as the most powerful computer. The brain is shaped by the molecules which describe it, arranged by the hapless code called DNA, the language in which life describes itself. It needs not only that blueprint, but materials in order to function, and much of that blueprint is describing what to do with those materials, then sending out instructions to the vessel - the body, the organ, the cell, to acquire them. The vessel both requires and is required by DNA in order to self-replicate and self-perpetuate, and here is the basic feedback loop of the biological system. As evolution occurred, this feedback loop became more and more complex and now, as humans, one of the most complex vessels so far, the feedback loops can be difficult to trace. In the case of the body, every single "system" - cardiovascular, reproductive, excretory, neurological, osteoskeletal, et al. - has an impact, direct or indirect, on every single other system, and the brain organizes and executes a very large portion of that intracorporal interaction. Where else would one look for the soul?
So we come back to the problem of a beginning. Everything that I am was caused by something which was caused by something and "back and back and back", so I'm still not sure how to begin, except chronologically, and starting with the earliest memories - the beginnings of me.