Union and Separation

Death supplants life and life supplants death. The intricately woven webs of life are reconstructed anew with each generation. Species relying on each other at one epoch produce offspring who take over their ancestors’ positions at a later epoch. Each individual is but a small fragment of this “entangled bank”—to use Darwin’s phrase. To some, this realization is fractionating, disheartening, and lonely. To others, it represents a connection to all of existence. To others still, it represents a middle ground between separation and transcendence. Indeed, if one truly examines the nature of existence, both theoretically and empirically, one is left with an incessant search for the ‘demarcation’, ‘cutoff point’, or ‘dividing line’ between various phenomenological entities. Where do “I”—as an individual—begin and the outside world end? Where does one of my thoughts or emotions commence and another fizzle out? Come to think of it, where and how does thought differ from emotion? Such questions are at the heart of personal and collective exploration, and many of these inquiries are left unexplored and mysterious to this day. Among other culprits for the emergence of these mysteries, the fact that existence entails both unity and separation is, perhaps, central.

Even one’s connection with time bears the mark of such ambivalence. Where and when, for instance, does the past fade into the present, and the present into the future? By ‘where’, I mean where in the material brain does the sensation of this temporal transition register? By ‘when’, I mean when does it register in the chronological duration of one’s experience? As with the previous examples, it is difficult to decide on what should be a dividing signpost in one’s perception of time. Some brain areas, for example, may process a certain phenomenon before other brain areas. Similarly, the details of a phenomenon may be processed at different times by disparate neural and cognitive systems based on the specialization of those systems for different details. At a more philosophical level, even a linear conception of time may be infinitely broken down into infinitesimal units of chronological measurement. Is it possible that what some refer to as a “spiritual journey” is actually an individual’s attempt to unify such disparate elements of the self, the world, and existence at large? This remains an open question.       

In science, as in the rest of life, the dueling tendencies to synthesize, on the one hand, and to reduce, on the other, have been playing off of each other for centuries. It is as if there is a coevolutionary arms race within intellectual institutions between those who want to synthesize various theories and empirical findings, and those who want to cloister themselves, their disciplines, and whatever particulate units of existence they happen to be studying, be it atoms or genes. Even here, however, there is no clear or acute transition between synthesis (also holism) and reduction. ‘Reductionism,’ for instance, often misconstrued as an attempt to equate a phenomenon with a limited subset of its constituent parts, actually entails explaining the phenomenon under the purview of one scientific discipline with reference to another scientific discipline, albeit at a more microscopic level. This reanalysis via an alteration of disciplinary perspective is a clear instance of when the delimitation of a phenomenon is inextricably tied to its connection with other phenomena. Again, we have a union-separation dynamic.

Love and death are often juxtaposed throughout literature, music, and film. What may be at the core of this juxtaposition is the possibility that the former entails the ultimate subjective expression of union, while the latter, the ultimate subjective expression of separation. Taking romantic love as a representation of the first case, one believes oneself to be completely embroiled in one’s romantic partner—sexually, emotionally, and intellectually (concepts that are themselves difficult to disentangle). Lovers’ experiences and cultural writings—e.g., the tantric tracts—often speak of a sexual state of connectedness that entails the union of one’s body with the body of one’s sexual partner. For instance, one’s breaths and movements may be synchronized with the breaths and movement of one’s partner—both of which may bring about orgasm synchronization. Much of this synchronization may be related to the human mirror-neuron system, a system whereby two or more individuals’ brain states may mimic one another's expression at the neural level. Such a neural linkage may bring about an empathic convergence of thought and emotion. It is then that one’s corporeal sphere seems to dissolve and enmesh with the corporeal sphere of another. Put another way, one’s bodily gateways are opened up and one trespasses oneself and receives the other. The flip side of such romantic union is, of course, romantic dissolution, and heartache is often reported to be akin to death.

What is death but an ultimate separation from one’s existence? Piece by piece, various aspects of one’s bodily functions begin to fade, as they would throughout a debilitating illness. One may find oneself unable to walk, for instance, or use one’s kidneys or one’s liver. Likewise, little by little, one may begin to lose various psychological functions such as speech, memory, and cognitive ability, as during the various dementias. Such a discreet loss of psychological function is likewise evident in non-fatal maladies such as frontal lobe damage, where one’s long-term planning abilities may suffer, and hippocampal damage, where one suffers from an inability to form new long-term memories. The gradual decline of one’s life may be associated with such a piecemeal subtraction of one’s abilities and perceptions. Although the progression of decline may differ across cases, the gradual shrinkage of one’s experience is ubiquitous. Ultimately, one is separated from reality altogether.