Travels I - Duncan in the Forest

Synopsis

1. On being in the world

The dog Duncan wakes up one morning to find himself tied to a tree. He implores the little mouse
Pico to chew through his bonds, which Pico does. They escape the scene just as his former
captors come along, thereby establishing a lasting friendship which leads to many discussions
about the nature of philosophy. The setting is the pre-human era some 25,000 years ago. Duncan
explains he is on a quest and Pico decides to join him.

In their first dialogue about philosophy, Duncan and Pico consider 2 ways of asking about the
world and the self: from within and from without. They consider truth (the perspectival limitation
of the answers, always filtered) and reasoning and its limitations, e.g. in comprehending infinity.
They ponder the nature of true and real, realizing their pointlessness and the existential question it
raises. They ask what this is all about? The quest for what? Out of a feeling that there is
something better, they focus on the Cosmos, in the quest for the unity of experience.

2. On death and basic questions

Duncan fights off a bobcat that attacked Pico and shows his courage. Pico is thus confronted with
death, but consoled by Duncan. They talk about how it is natural for the bobcat to seek out dinner
and fill its belly.

Their philosophical discussion centers on the self and its search for happiness - the life force
underlying action. They discuss the fantasy of afterlife and the perplexity of life’s purpose. They
dwell on identity and self-consciousness, on the ego and a process setting the boundaries of the
self called selfing. They consider the process of being - the ephemerality of being, parts and larger
contexts, union with all. Defining the self brings them back to the Cosmos as the full context.

Duncan relates to Pico what the quest is and how he embarked on it - reaching the mountain
and its secret as represented in a mandala once seen by one of his clan fellows.

3. On time and stability

Duncan falls ill and becomes feverish. He hallucinates during a whole day, mumbling about
elements of the mandala. Pico goes out to find cacao seeds to cure him.

Space and time are so relative, flexible. Everything passes through the Now, including all past and
future. Reality and our relationship with it, these are the foundational questions. What’s real?
Nothing lasts forever. All has a beginning and end. There is constant interplay between substance
and processes. In our thinking, we tend to favor substances and stability over processes and
change. When is a tree a tree, and no longer a sapling? We can look at things from either
perspective, since both are present in our view of reality. Time being a backdrop to the world, and
yet just a mental construct, remains a mystery.

4. On space, scale and relativity

Our duo is chased by bipeds but they escape over the hills. They meet an eagle, who tells them
about seeing the world from great heights and close to the clouds.

Adding space and scale to time bring about the 3 basic dimensioning factors to being. There is a
similarity of space to time, being uni-directional on a personal level - always forward. The
dimensions are imponderable at the edges because of the notion of infinity, which is non-
comprehensible by us. The importance of scale is introduced, big and small being relative. This
stepchild is largely unrecognized and without a descriptive vocabulary. These 3 dimensions create
‘our personal world’. They are more than just perspectives or opinions - they situate us in our
being. And further, we have sentience of it. But what about a tree? How does it ‘see’ the world? -
in reacting to it, as with scar tissue. And the bolder? No reacting there, but how is it situated in
the world - in its world? The dimensions define a thing in the world, but since they are relative, it
means essences are relative.

5. On the realms of being

Our duo witnesses a distant volcano and animals fleeing. They meet an emu or such, who
believes in long-lasting progress. They go up a gorge to reach the plateau yonder. On the wall,
they see a painted mandala and wonder about its significance.

Duncan tells Pico about the evolution of the universe, about its unfolding through time. From the
Big Bang came the physical realm in which the various elements we know today gradually came
about. At one point, life emerged from a primeval stew of elements and a whole new realm got
underway in its own evolution. Later on, cognition arose in some of the animals as they internally
represented the world they perceived through their senses - yet another realm to evolve. And the
universe is not still, but still evolving, with new realms to develop out of this last one.

6. On intertwining worlds

As Duncan and Pico search for the meaning of the mandala, a toad tells them some strange
garbled things.

As they travel on, they discuss how we view the world from a perspective, always. We cannot
ever say we see or approach the Truth. Every perception, every abstraction is a construed
perspective - useful yes, but also relative and hence subject to change. Reality, then, is variable.
Given this, we can realize that we don’t generally discover truths, we construe them. We make up
the general scheme of things within which discoveries are made. Thus, we make us our world.
And yet, the world predates us - we were born into it. The mental and physical intertwine in a
back and forth motion. In the end, we must agree that there are different versions of reality,
containing much shared but slightly different contents and ways of perceiving. Our personal
reality, then, is not fully trustable... but yet, it is the only one we have to trust. Even if it is subject
to change.

7. On structure and reality

Duncan and Pico come across a spider who warns of danger ahead - danger to the spirit. She
offers them a potion to better see reality, but it merely brings on anxiety after a brief moment of
bliss. They arrive at the cliffs and see a passage going up into the mountains.

The discussion centers initially on the dissipation of elements as we chose a unitary process view
of the Cosmos - flowing in and out of existence based on how I conceptualize the world. This
even puts into question the notion of structure and even the Great Unfolding which rests on it.
They discuss two aspects of the regularity underlying structure : perceptual and arbitrary.
Conceptual regularity [derived from perceptual regularity at its root] provides the stability for
structure. Any seeming arbitrariness flows from unknown laws of nature, themselves evolved from
within the Great Unfolding. A big question is what does the world look like without sentience -as
in before life? We must consider three levels of creating/interpreting the world. 1- we filter and
interpret 2- we conceptualize and shape an internal world 3- we create the outside world. We
create not instant by instant, but a whole system with a logic of its own.

8. On direction

Duncan and Pico stop dead in their tracks when they spot a leopard on an outcrop and don’t
know what to do. An owl addresses them and says there is no danger for now. They quiz the owl
and it responds seemingly with words of wisdom. This seems to explain something of the
mandala but remains naturally ambiguous too.

Our duo debate the duality of world as idea and world as is, seeing that it arises from a confusion
between the world and knowledge, between being and knowing. We do both of these, not fully
realizing how we mingle the two into one experience. Duncan hints at the need to thrust forward
in examining the mental realm and its emerging possibilities. And at the relativity of reason itself
and its eventual overcoming. Finally, they see the need to examine how we fit into the world, how
we feel and direct the self in relation to others, the moral perspective. And perhaps even going
beyond good and evil. They end on an upbeat note exhilarated by the quest for the meaning of
life.