Let your mind be like the lotus leaf. Be subtle enough to hold thoughts on a level where you can understand them but be untouched by them.
Information will bead up in naturally coherent groupings and flow unimpeded across the sensory field of the mind.
The perfect gravy has no lumps.
Teddy just doesn’t get it. Gravity is how you get the lumps out.
ganananh tva ganapatim havamahe kavim kavinam – upamashravastamam |
jyeshhtharajam brahmanan.h brahmanaspata A nah shrivnvannutibhih sida sadanam
May we worship Ganapati,
the Protector of Noble People,
the Best Poet,
the Most Honourable,
the Greatest Ruler and
the Treasure of all Knowledge.
O Ganapati! Please listen to us
and take Your seat in our heart.
Check out the latest post over at Imaginging the 10th Dimension. Can’t recommend Rob’s work enough, and this one is particularly worth checking out.
Plus, he mentions Terrence McKenna, so I guess it’s no surprise that it interests me, eh?
Found this recently, although I can’t remember where. Perhaps one of the people I’m following on tumblr..? (feel free to drop your name in the comments if you think it was you, I’ll credit accordingly!)
Anyway, it’s “A comparison between a flame on Earth and a flame in a microgravity environment.”:
Yeah, cool picture. So what’s ‘the point’?
Well, flame has long been consider an symbol of creativity, assertiveness, and will power. It’s associated with the wands suite in tarot, and it might also be seen as the original spark of mankind’s dominance over nature. After all, it was fire that gave us the ability to cook food, keep away predators, and burn up underbrush (making travel, and therefore communication, much easier).
But it can be dangerous too. It’s what Prometheus brought us from the gods, and look what happened to him:
And it was tongues of flame that descended on the disciples at Pentecost after Christ was crucified.
Whether it’s a Titan or a Son of God, it seems someone’s always had to suffer in order to bring down the holy fires…
So then, what conclusions can be drawn from the effect of weightlessness on that candle flame?
Well, the difference between the two flames is that the yellow flame on the left is subject to gravity’s influence, while the blue flame on the right is not. And we first have to ask: To what can we liken gravity?
Wikipedia describes gravity as: “a natural phenomenon by which objects with mass attract one another”. And yet, in the very next sentence, it is described as “the agency which lends weight to objects with mass.” So mass, by itself, is kind of useless, unless there’s some other mass upon which it can act.
But if there is another mass, both of the masses act upon each other, and this gives them both “weight”. And weight is a measurement of the speed at which each is attracted to the other.
So what causes that attraction?
Here’s how Sir Issac Newton felt about it:
“That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”
Well, since science is not too helpful, lets look at this a little more poetically. What seems to be the symbolic difference to be between the two flames?
To me, the one under the sway of gravity is standing upright, burning brightly, and so suggests a certain healthiness. It seems livelier.
The flame in the ‘microgravity environment’ is spherical, suggesting a kind of perfection. Yet, it doesn’t have the same range of color and, seemingly, would not have the same range of movement as the flickering, gravity-bound flame on the left. The purely blue flame is still, lacking movement.
Wikipedia tells us that this is because: “In microgravity or zero gravity environment, such as on a circular orbit , convection no longer occurs and the flame becomes spherical, with a tendency to become bluer and more efficient.”
More efficient… Because there’s no longer any convection causing the soot to rise to the top of a flame, turning the flame from blue to yellow as the soot trails away. In zero gravity, any soot is burned off equally in all directions, and therefore, it cannot be seen and has no effect on the flame.
But when a flame burns within gravity, the soot is moved away from the source of the heat in a singular direction, making it much more observable. This is caused by the attractive force between the flame and the earth, as it pulls the source of flame down towards a union with the earth.
Gravity is something we struggle against. It’s the thing that forces us to keep our feet on the ground, the thing that makes us trip when we’re not paying attention. Without gravity, we’d be able to fly.
But without gravity, we’d never be able to stop floating away either. In the perfect sphere of flame, in the heaven of zero gravity, there’s no involuntary attraction or movement. No connection, no convection.
And with no convection, how would we know where the soot was?
It’s already moving anyway. If you need to exert control over something, it means you are trying to stop it from doing what it does naturally.
That is not to say that you should never block anything, just that it’s in your best interest to remember when you have done so!
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:
Just a couple of things I want to briefly share here:
1) The Globalization of Addiction:
- Finally got around to reading this little book review (couldn’t do it at the office as the site is blocked), that has been making the rounds at my corner of the blogosphere… Check out my notes on it (and some follow-up thoughts) here (also cross-referenced on the notes page).
- I also would like to add that, if we agree with Alexander’s take on addiction as a response to a lack of “psychological integration” (which I definitely do!), then there is a rather obvious solution for achieving that integrated state. It starts out: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”
(Not a perfect definition perhaps, but definitely a good pointer!)
2) When Talking on the Phone May Endanger a Child
- Great article at the New York Times. Not necessarily because of the article’s content (although nothing against it), but more so because of the way this particular study uses simulated reality.
- It is used to test something that would be impossible to test in real life: how much more likely children are to be hit by a car if they’re talking on a phone? You couldn’t do this in real life without killing a bunch of kids, which is obviously a bad thing, yeah?
- The simulated reality is used to create a scenario that can be minutely adjusted to test for a specific set of variables in regards to a specific hypothesis. It does not try to mimic real life, which I think will never truly be possible since we don’t understand real life well enough, in real life, as it is…
- But it does allow for very precise control of certain aspects, and what it finds, while perhaps not all that surprising, is still an excellent thing to have scientific statistics of: just HOW bad are children at not getting hit by cars, if they are distracted while crossing the street?
(And a little aside on science. I am not a fan of science’s current know-it-all attitude, and I think that the scientific method is only one of many ways to interact with, understand, and attempt to predict reality. But I do think that it can be very useful, particularly when its limitations are acknowledged and accounted for. It’s like Nassim Nicholas Taleb says (to paraphrase): “when we know what we cannot know, given a certain set of information, then it becomes much easier to use that information properly.”)
Was checking my horoscope for this month and I realized that Mercury has been in Retrograde for the past few weeks.
Well. It’s no excuse for shitty blogging, but this does give me a chance to explain my general take on astrology. Like most people, I think that the idea of the planets having any direct effect on my life is pretty ridiculous. Just because Mercury’s in retrograde, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some “cosmic beams” shooting down (out?) at me from Mercury, slowing down my blogical linguistics.
On the other hand, consider a clock. Say you have an appointment with a friend for lunch at noon. You’re sitting at work, typing away at some spreadsheet or email, and you notice that the big office clock is about to hit noon:
Now, when those hands both hit “12:00″, does some cosmic beam shoot out of the clock and “make” you go to lunch with your friend? No, of course not. Clock time is just a way to make sure that we all agree on when things happen, and “12″ just stands for the time when you both thought it would be most convenient for your lunch. And how do you know when it’s “12″? Exactly. You check the clock.
So too, I would say, does astrology work. The symbols and associations assigned to the planets, as well as to the various constellations and “houses”, are all similar to the numbers on a clock. The ancient people who came up with this stuff just had a lot of free time on their hands to watch the stars and track the changes that people went through that lined up with their cosmic-star-clock. Thus they were able to assign various traits and symbols to the different changes in the sky, because they saw the corresponding changes happening in the people around them.
Everything in the universe happens in cycles, and if you’re working from a paradigm where history is circular, then it makes sense that you’re going to try to make some predictions based on those circular cycles. Doing so is just human nature.
But how could they make sure their predictions were so accurate? Oh, I don’t know. You tell me…
