Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

Eclipse Millions of the billions of living humans  have experienced  a total solar eclipse  The gigantic sun  is obscured by  the tiny moon in the right place  at the right time for just a few minutes Most of us experience  a total eclipse  of half the earth  every night The moon  becomes invisible for a few days  every single month when we can only look toward it's dark side the lunar night The serotinal beauty   of dusk and dawn may be eclipsed by an overcast sky The magnificence of the sunrise and sunset is often neglected  by busy people Here on earth the deep oceans are filled with life beyond the reach of sunlight in a world eclipsed by water The entire universe would be eclipsed absent consciousness  The same universe  would be present  but afloat and meaningless in a non-sentient void a void that probably comes and goes Aubrey Lieberman  2/22/25

  Life hurts Very early in the course of the evolution of life on earth, avoidance of noxious elements becomes critical, and some sort of sensory reception in this regard an important component of a primitive input and output system, enabling a wormlike creature to wiggle away from danger, and the development of a nervous system from which brains eventually arise, enabling more efficient avoidance of harm, a system with pain receptors in the periphery and complex behavioral responses to these inputs. If being alive didn't hurt sometimes, primitive creatures would not have survived or procreated, and larged brained beings would not have evolved. When a brain is big enough, complex enough, consciousness emerges as a phase transition, a repulsive stimulus is associated with an emotion, and the sensory experience humans recognize and describe as pain, common to all conscious nonverbal creatures as well. Large brained conscious creatures may experience pain despite the absence of physic...

  The world without us As an outcome of the evolutionary process that is now so familiar at some level to most of us, we are clever, highly social, and highly communicative creatures, our combinatorial intelligence unsurpassed, to our knowledge, for the present. Adult humans naturally seek the help of other adults, and children and domesticated animals, the products of human selection, and create tools out of inanimate objects in the environment, to enable survival. The abundance of help results in an abundance of company, a very large community arising from the evolutionary process. A lot of work is necessary to maintain all of the constituents that makes the community functional. Human parenting is particularly prolonged and physically and mentally demanding, a penalty for having a large and very complex brain.  When machines are available to do the work, humans default to having having fewer children and raising fewer farm animals for labor.  Non-procreative sexual act...

  Music Yo-yo Ma plays the cello for bison at Glacier National Park Glider pilots soar with hawks Gardeners tend their gardens This is the poetry  which really matters We are conscious empathic creatures bison and humans and all complex life forms The truth is that the birds and the buffaloes and the plants do not care about the strange behaviors of ambulant primates But without poetry and art and music we humans  are blind and numb and nothing matters While we live we are bound  to demonstrate our love for all that is life for the earth  and for the universe in all the ways that we are capable of This is the entanglement without which our hearts stop beating The question for the ages has always been and may always be why is there something  rather than nothing This is the answer Aubrey Lieberman 8/5/24

  We are they The propensity to empathize  is an evolutionary adaptation  mediated by our brains and bodies  enabling survival and procreation Empathy has valence although is generally assumed  to be good or positive  As empathic individuals we are able to understand the views of others and interact meaningfully  despite distinctive backgrounds  Empathy enables imagination A writer invents characters An actor may play many different roles A journalist may describe  a variety of experiences  and points of view  The essence of democracy  is the ability that all of us must possess in order to get along in order to avoid war and other destructive actions Our ability to empathize may underlie our ability to hold a variety of points of view in a variety of circumstances about an endless list of interests and concerns The complex adaptive machine that is the brain and the body in which it is enclosed has myriad of aptitudes a cornucop...