Saturday, December 18, 2010

Cycles Of Life

Our bodies have two kinds of cycles. One is a constant correction of excesses from a standard. The other prepares in advance to meet anticipated regularly recurring changes with its own regularly recurring change. Our body responds immediately to cold when we go outside. Our body also regularly changes in temperature at night, without need of first experiencing changed night-time conditions.

These body rhythms gives us the idea, the model, the foundation for the most characteristic, meaningful, essential, and intelligent actions of our lives. Love is knowing those we live with and gratitude to them for living with us and making the small constant adaptation to us that we also make to them. Art is the adaptation in advance to the world, making new ways of life so as to return to the state of loving, and there closing a cycle.

These two different body rhythms also are the basis of a fundamental error, using one cycle as the tool of the other. Either we seek an optimum, regular, stable success in our varying creative adaptations to the world. Or we change our lovers, using the art of selection to acquire a mate promising better stability. The first is typically a male error, a failure to love, the second a female error, a failure to hold onto love. With regard to these rhythms, men and women practice a division of labor.

The surprise is that a relation between mental and biological things, between love and art, and homeostatic and circadian rhythms, seems to make everything more meaningful rather than less, which is what usually results from reducing mental things to biological things. Maybe it is because here the biological is in some way reduced to the mental, the physical rhythms themselves seen as forms of art and love, as was proposed by the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and revived in Einstein's definition of time as "what clocks measure".