Heroes Not Zombies

A determinist states that, in the same conditions, the same phenomena occur. However, the same conditions can never, by definition, obtain in the life of the self, because each, artificially isolated, moment of duration includes the entire past, which is, consequently, different for each moment…..the same situation never occurs twice in the being endowed with memory;…….neither the same cause nor the same effect can ever reappear in experience.

Leszek Kilakowiski

…no movement ever repeats. Looked at in enough detail, every event in the universe is unique….the more detail we note, the more apparent it is that no event or experiment can be an exact copy of another.

Smolin

I’ve shown this photo to many patients over the years. I call it “The Wounded Rock”. It’s a useful illustration of how what we experience, what happens in our lives, changes us forever. I know that with traumas we heal. That’s what all living organisms do. We are endowed with self healing powers. But healing doesn’t mean a return to a previous state. It’s something new.

Whatever happened to this rock changed it forever. That’s true of the big traumas. They change us forever in readily apparent significant ways. But as those two quotations I’ve shared with you suggest…in fact it’s true of the everyday.

There are no two moments the same. There are no two experiences the same. More than that, every single experience is an interaction between us as a subject and what we observe. We are changed by what we observe and what we observe is changed by our observation.

The world is not made up of separate fixed pieces the way a machine is. We are, all of us, in a constant flow of co-creation.

The deterministic view of reality falls down when it moves from the general to the particular. The more we consider the details, the clearer it becomes, that each person, each moment, each experience is unique.

I remain very wary of generalisations which reduce unique beings to items within a category. Of course I understand the importance of being able to generalise and categorise. It’s just I know how dangerous it is.

We must never ever forget that reality is as described in those two quotations. The universe diversifies to produce more and more uniqueness. That includes you and I. You are special. So am I. And so is everyone we meet and every moment we live.