The Peril of Panpsychism.

I was just reading an old post about the night my Spanish guitar went west (or ‘went south’ to the colonials.) I remember the feeling of sorrow I felt at the prospect of casting into the tip on its way to lie broken and unwanted in some smelly old landfill site somewhere. And on recalling the fact, something crystallised in my mind – something I already realised but hadn’t thought much about before. What I was feeling was guilt, not loss.

I give some credence to the doctrine of panpsychism, you see (consciousness is present in every cell of material – the basis, as I understand it, of the old Sufi saying {originally ancient Indian, apparently}: that God sleeps in the stone, stirs in the plant, dreams in the animal, and wakes in man.)

So that was the real basis of my regret: not so much the sorrow of losing something precious to me, but the worry that I might be hurting its feelings. I feel the same way about most things I discard. It’s one of my oddities.