February 3, 2009
- Surveillance, Identity, and Meaning:
A Poetic Appendix -
- (removed via natural orifice surgery after a long incubation period) -
We are (at least) 4 dimensional beings moving erratically along a time-line, while consciously inhabiting only a 1 dimensional point of time-space.
When we act as if we are only 3 dimensional (trying to holdon to a particular configuration within that 1 dimensional point of time-space, seeking permanence, grasping, suffering), we are splitting ourselves, and painfully so. Because we are trying to stay, while it is in the nature of all things (including our self) to move.
A fish trying to hold onto a single current in a rapidly flowing river is a good analogy here. It is a false boundary that we create around our 1 dimensional point of time-space, in an attempt to keep some part of it as always-permanent.
Why put your lamp under a bushel basket that way? You’re only blinding yourself to the true ways of things.
Let your mind flower and reach out into reality. Be a lamp unto thyself. There is no boundary, except that which you create for yourself.
Our other potential identities hover around us in time-space, quantum-super-position-future-selves, potential pathways through time-space. Other stations into which we can tune our awareness.
If we consciously accept that we are causing our own suffering, and acknowledge that we are AT THIS VERY MOMENT painfully splitting our self by trying to hold onto some fixed idea of what our “self” actually is, then we can begin to absorb these quantum-like-splits and come back again to whole-emptiness.
But this isn’t something you can just reach out and “do”. You have to let things happen, observe them, and then engage them when you are confronted with an opportunity. Only by letting go are we truly in control.
Don’t see any opportunities? Are you sure you’re not holding on to a false image of your self as someone whom is never confronted with opportunities…? Start small. The opportunities are already there, or you wouldn’t want them in the first place. You just have to make sure that you’re ready to take adavantage of them!
This is the act of observing our quantum potentiality that always-is in constant flux around us. By engaging it and making conscious decisions as it flows, we begin to become more wholey a self, and more wholey empty. We are born as a form (body) holding energy (mind), and as we grow, experience life, and learn through our sufferings, we pull ourselves together into a bodymind-energyform-identity that is both fully form and fully empty.
But you can’t even begin to start this until you can accept that your present identity is still whole-yet-split, that it can be better and that you can make it better through your own conscious actions. This is how we learn to let go. As we do so, we begin to see that these false identities we hold onto are just splits in our already-truly-whole-and-empty-awareness-being.
If we get rid of these internal boundaries that both are our false ego-selves and that protect our false ego-selves, then we can begin to act from our true self, which is emptiness. This is not your “center”, it is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
We have to break down these boundaries in our minds, achieve one-pointed being-ness, solidify the emptiness of our information body, if we are ever to interact with reality on this level. If your identity is still trapped in any particular component form, then it will be washed away with by the increasing flow of information around and through you.
Big rocks. Small rocks.
For are we not “mind”? Are we not “awareness” attempting to take on form? What else could we be?
And once we understand the form of our true self as only pure empty awareness, “what then can unsettle it“?
Lastly, some relevant, yet sadly unused, links:
Not sure I’m following the main post, need time to let that settle. But in the meantime I must take issue with “Yes, we must. Welcome to the echoing electronic tribal sphere everybody. McLuhanism in action…)”
Everyone simultaneously watching live feed of the inauguration /is/ communication, /is/ electric speed, the breakdown of place and the re-tribalization of the audience. Just like that earlier piece about clocks, there’s an instant synchrony. Universal time means no time between places.
The back-and-forth exchange of text about the event /is not the same/. That’s fragmentation. Increased speed of communication is centralization, fragmentation and exclusion.
Watching the inauguration at home I was pleasantly shocked to see how few people in the audience were watching it through a camera or (far worse) a phone. It’s like Woodstock: if you’re watching it through a phone, you’re not /there/. Too many events I go to in the UK, everyone’s watching the event relayed through the 2″ screen of a darn phone. But the inauguration, everyone was actually there at the same time.
> these internal boundaries that both are our false ego-selves and that protect our false ego-selves
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s all I hear these days when anyone talks about ‘communication’. True communication is rather shared experience.
[Sorry to rant, but I'm re-reading 'Understanding Media' and I feel strongly about this stuff.]
Comment by speedbird — February 4, 2009 @ 9:04 am
Don’t apologize, I always welcome rants! Gives me a chance to second guess myself, and maybe help clarify things for both my readers and myself.
OK, I see what you’re getting at here. Definitely, shared experience, breakdown of place.
And I understand what you mean here too. But given the ease of the converting thought into text, doesn’t txt-ing (and tweeting on twitter) have more in common with speech, rather than printed text?
As I’ve mentioned, I do need to brush up on my McLuhanism, but it seems to me that txting and tweeting are more along the lines of shared feelings/thoughts/reactions in response to the tribally shared experience.
They are possible because we all know we’re watching the same thing. If we weren’t sure that our friend was watching the exact same thing, we couldn’t txt them: “OMG THIS IS SO HISTORIC” and expect that to mean anything to them. It is the shared visual experience that gives this communication any useful meaning.
That is, a txt or tweet is a reaction to the shared experience, but due to it’s instantaneousness (and I am not using ‘immediacy’ because that implies a certain closeness in space as well), the reaction also becomes a part of the shared experience of the shared experience….
Now, not only can we share in the same experience, but we can share our friends reactions to that experience while the experience is still happening as well.
And from there it’s only a half-step away from having these reactions become somehow present within the event itself, if we can only find a way to accepting that much communication data at once and still making it relevant!
So yeah, streaming video is a directly shared, intimate tribal experience. While txting (or tweeting) is a sharing of our reactions to that experience, which does serve to remind us that we’re all experiencing it slightly differently (and thus are fragmented).
But if that’s true, then speech does kind of the same thing, and speech was definitely part of the tribal atmosphere. Maybe that’s not “tribal” in the McLuhan sense though? I’m not sure.
Anyway, it seems like maybe we’re witnessing the ephemeralization of print media to the point that it can function in a somewhat more instantaneous, auditory kind of way. I think that’s what I’m trying to get at here, anyway.
Comment by Ian — February 4, 2009 @ 1:06 pm
Heh. Quite a little rant from me as well, it seems…
Anyway, I agree with you on the camera thing. So many tourists I see in Manhattan have a video camera glued to their face. Not only are the missing most of the experience of being in New York, I doubt that the videos they’re making are any fun to watch!
Comment by Ian — February 4, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
I just want to say I have experienced connecting with future selves and the energetic shift it entails. I also witnessed this enormous spiral structure that had several spirals within a structure.
Have you ever experienced this? I saw a picture of it called a “soul wheel” or something.
I think major life changing decisions connect you with these other possible selves.
Comment by Ted — February 4, 2009 @ 6:59 pm
No, I’ve never had any experience like that… Sounds interesting though.
I don’t quite know what I’m doing with all this, except that it seems to have something to do with the line from the Tao Te Ching that goes: “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?”. I am still waiting for that, above everything else. Cutting off the potentialities I’m karmically carrying around, in order to purify my awareness. Mine is a Jnana kind of yoga, I guess.
I tried finding that “soul wheel” image, but the only thing I got was the Wheel of Life image and a bunch of new-agey type stuff. Could you maybe provide more info? It sounds interesting.
The way I look at those kinds of visions and experiences is a “by their fruits you shall know them” kind of thing. What did I receive from that experience? What message was conveyed to me through it? I think the details of such experiences are less important than the immediate message I perceived from it. The more I try to understand the immediate message, the more the details can be seen as extensions of that core message.
Comment by Ian — February 4, 2009 @ 7:45 pm
I saw this thing:
http://www.crystalinks.com/12around1.html
That is a pretty good representation of it, only I was on the edge of one of the spirals. I could sense the other ones around.
But anyway this ties in I think to what you were saying- “Our other potential identities hover around us in time-space, quantum-super-position-future-selves, potential pathways through time-space. Other stations into which we can tune our awareness”
maybe you can jump around the spirals? I dunno. Its kind of funny thinking about it now but I had this vision 5 years ago reading Tony Robbins!
Comment by Ted — February 4, 2009 @ 9:00 pm
That’s cool! There’s a fractal quality to it that I like.
What I’m talking about though very much implies that we should be at the center of all these spiraling potentials. Or at least that that’s what I’m looking into. Maybe what you experienced is a different aspect of the same thing? I’m not sure…
Comment by Ian — February 4, 2009 @ 9:41 pm
yeah, the center is probably good. Like “know the white but keep to the blacK”?
But to be able to see it, I must have been moving in the right direction. I think all it was is that I was scratching the very surface of personal development and it triggered this vision. The idea that being aware of having a free will.
I was thinking the other day about aging. Some people really embody certain ideas. Like they are posessed by these ideas and become really rigid and the ideas run their course and so you age with the idea.
You know its like Mcluhan was talking about democracy dying out. Say you were wicked into democracy, you just eat breath, crap democracy. That’s suffering when its on the way out. .
Even people that say..make plastic packaging. They cling to that and just fill more landfills.
I mean there are people in obsolete industries that are just a wage laborer and still cling to it, let alone CEO’s.
Anyway, this tao stuff is starting to gell, keep it up!
Comment by Ted — February 5, 2009 @ 9:56 am
I wonder though if maybe keeping to the center is not always the best with everything? I mean in a philosophical sense I think it is, but in terms of action, you need to kind of “Touch down” and head in a specific direction.
I mean by pursuing being an artist…there are only 24 hours in a day. So that will eliminate other things like being an wilderness adventurer. At least for now.
For a while I was paralyzed by the implications of doing any action.
Plus we incarnate into a specific “shape” in a way and take on certain limitations of mortality.
So maybe knowing our origin and true limitless self is good to know, but also we need to know that we have decided to explore limitation for a while.
Comment by Ted — February 5, 2009 @ 10:04 am
But the center is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere… :)
This is exactly what I’m saying about collapsing possibilities.
And this is exactly what happens when you try to pursue multiple possibilities.
And this, I think, is exactly what I’m trying to get at in that space fire post…
Comment by Ian — February 5, 2009 @ 10:24 am
Like the atmosphere compresses the flame?
Comment by Ted — February 5, 2009 @ 10:29 am
Well, more that what we think of as limitations are really ways of changing our self.
I don’t know. I’m still not quite positive what I’m getting at there, but it has to do with willfully incarnating into a place that is designed to cause suffering, that is designed to be less than totally efficient, because that’s how we’re able to refine our self awareness…
Comment by Ian — February 5, 2009 @ 10:33 am