October 22, 2009
- Some recent thoughts… -
A series of connected ponderings, from last summer.
Jul 02, 2009 – The mind is not a corrupt police department, it is more like an incorrectly connected machine. Our parts just aren’t communicating. To limit the function of the mind to only those functions it is capable of when fragmented in this manner is incorrect. This is to consider a mind operating at 50% (for example) as something broken-to-be-fixed, as opposed to seeing it as a still ongoing organic process of self correction.
The mind/body is built to house and develop spirit/self. An incubator of sorts, it functions as a tuner/gatherer for consciousness/awareness. It is through our becoming more and more conscious, through awareness becoming aware of itself through our own increase of awareness within our “self” , that creation can explore itself. And where the mind is incorrectly connected, awareness reaches and impasse, and awareness cannot join with awareness.
We are the budding fruit of a vast tree-of-all, and we collect awareness like sunlight. Not collecting our awareness, but accepting awareness into ourselves, stop pretending we are not aware of what we actually are aware of. Eating this awareness, almost, as a plant draws nourishment from the sun. Perhaps this is similar to Gurdjieff’s ideas of eating impressions. Again, this shows that we are not broken or evil, we just are not done developing awareness within ourselves, in a complete, contiguous whole-that-is-still-part-of-a-larger-whole.
Aug 11, 2009 – The building up and storing of knowledge limits this developing of awareness within the self. By this, I mean knowledge about which we say “this is true, it is the way things are”. Such knowledge hems us in, limiting each new experience by forcing it to either relate to our previously accumulated knowledge or be discarded. The more knowledge we try to bring forward with us in this manner, the less new information we are able to absorb. Knowledge weighs us down, hardening our mind like death hardens the body. All knowledge is limited, and all knowledge therefore limits (the “larger you build the bonfire, the more darkness there is around it” metaphor).
We are trying to find completeness through amassing a definitive body of knowledge, but this will only end in failure. Knowledge is really just stale information, when information should really be a temporary kind of thing. Rather than eating and holding information as knowledge, we should digest it and let it pass away. By focusing on increasing our awareness rather than our knowledge, we can better reach into and unravel the details hidden within that very information. Knowing it ahead of time does not matter at all, if we can truly see it when it happens.
But when caught, held on to, and built upon, layers and layers of knowledge rise up, a Tower of Babel. Even crabs and slugs abandon old shells. This is the source of the false sense of a separate ego. We think we are the information that we store as knowledge. Consumerism is merely a macro-level manifestation of this inner tendency. “More” and “more” and “more” and we’re never happy, because knowledge doesn’t equal happy. Paying attention to information as it becomes relatively important, and further refining of our ability to use that information (by increasing our awareness), while staying happily rooted in “none” all the while, is much more satisfying.
Aug 13, 2009 – Thoughts do not create our reality, but they can help us to steer through it. Added to this is the fact that, although “thoughts” < “beliefs”, the only difference there is in magnitude and concentration. Thought/belief is a wedge, a rudder in the water of awareness as it passes around us. The thoughts “I want that” is like putting a finger in the water. The belief “I deserve that!” is like putting an oar in the water and paddling furiously (as long as you actually believe it and aren’t just thinking it).
Of course, to do this effectively, you have to be paying attention to the water. Just as your rudder doesn’t make the side of the river come any closer to you, your thoughts do not make things happen. But your thoughts can help you to steer through the myriad possibilities of what is happening, as long as you’re paying attention to them.
The problem is we haven’t figured out how to use thought properly yet. We currently use thought to build this tower of knowledge, both about our self and about the world. But this becomes the bushel basket over the lamp.
The alternative way of looking at this it to see all things as knowledge, all things, forms, sensations, thoughts, conceptions, as information. It all is already, and you are already completely within-and-a-part-of-it. The world is your external hardrive (or more correctly, you are it’s); there’s no separation there. Feel this in your nervous system, it is jeweled mirror samadhi, it is the self as experienced through the knowing of the 1000 dharmas-things.
We need to be able to unify and integrate these two aspects, because really, there is no separation between the two. Just as all magnets have both a north and a south pole, so too do we have both aspects withinour being. Exist as the conduit between the two, the space where the two arrows meet. That is your true self, your true identity.
How do you see these thoughts in light of that statement by Jung that “your book is your very soul” or something like that?
Comment by Ted — October 22, 2009 @ 1:52 pm
Well, I’d written this before I got into the Jung stuff, but didn’t have a chance to post it til now. Might not be exactly related, but let’s give it a try anyway…
I would say, given my somewhat tenuous hypothesis that perhaps Jung never made the final leap to union with the divine, that Jung still built an amazing blueprint of his own personal experience the Tower of Babel. He explored its make-up through and through, down to its roots in our collective unconscious. But perhaps this kind of quest is never ending, because there’s always more to explore. Perhaps, if searching for a sense of completion, one can only come to this through the extinguishing of the sense of self, and then to explore the infinite from there. First inwards, to completion, then outwards, to exploration?
As far as my thoughts on the gathering of awareness, I think that for Jung, going in search of his soul WAS an attempt to become aware once again of things he had been aware of earlier in his life. It’s said that he realized at the time that he had accomplished everything he set out to do, but that he had lost touch with some things he had considered very important as a child (namely, more mystical pursuits).
The feeling that you’ve lost your soul only comes when you are aware that something is there which you are not looking into as deeply as you should be. It was in going to regain his soul that Jung attempted to bring together his serious scholarly awareness and his mythic/poetic awareness into one complete whole. This is the function of the mandala, the unification of various diverse forced within the self, into one complete awareness. But again, perhaps the only way to unify such opposites is through the empty whole at the center of the self…
Also, the idea of unifying seemingly polar opposites is very gnostic/alchemical, and so very Jungian as well.
But what interests me the most is finding if there is a way to unify the process of individuation, and the process of enlightenment. I’m hoping for a perspective from which to look at all this which allows for both to exist simultaneously as important parts of the same pattern…
Comment by Ian — October 22, 2009 @ 3:53 pm
This is good stuff.
The expert in any given field is always the one who has gone through knowledge and out the other side to realising they don’t really know anything. At that point you can start to really /see/ for the first time.
Of course as an expert with steady employment you have to present a veneer of knowledge, for it seems that the machine that is the economy cannot cope with the alternative.
This is not to decry knowledge, of course. I’m all for teaching some knowledge at school. Knowledge is a kind of imperfect map. The trick is to teach it as imperfect. The good student will of course ask, ‘well, what was the point of learning all that guff, then?’ That’s where things get properly interesting. Issues of foundational ideas and paradigms; issues of communication; issues of following a path to the end to see what’s there.
Comment by speedbird — October 23, 2009 @ 3:09 am
As for individuation / enlightenment…
‘Dependent arising’ seems relevant here. (I didn’t actually know that’s what it was called till I came here.)
This analogy I have in my head might not work if you’re not an engineer, but I’m going to try it anyway:
Consider the engine in a car. It runs on a cycle with four stages: breathe in air & fuel, compress the mixture, burn the mixture, and blow out the waste through the exhaust. The pistons make this happen.
In a jet engine, all this happens at once. There is no sequence or order of events. Time has gone away. Except that there is still breathing and fire and motion.
Now consider the ouroboros. What is it doing?
Comment by speedbird — October 23, 2009 @ 3:21 am
This is very very good:
>> We are trying to find completeness through amassing a definitive body of knowledge, but this will only end in failure. Knowledge is really just stale information, when information should really be a temporary kind of thing. Rather than eating and holding information as knowledge, we should digest it and let it pass away. By focusing on increasing our awareness rather than our knowledge, we can better reach into and unravel the details hidden within that very information.
This is the problem with most InfoTech.
Comment by speedbird — October 23, 2009 @ 5:20 am
Speedbird, that first comment really hits the heart of the thing. Learning is done in order to no longer need to learn, something to go through to get to the other side of it. Something held onto, in order that it can be let go of. I think that’s key, and THAT just might be the paradigm for unifying individuation and enlightenment, as sort of peaks and valleys of the wave(length) of awareness/lifeforce/the-creative-principle-as-it-is-expressed-in-us.
With the jet engine metaphor, are you pointing out how a step-by-step process becomes lifted up into a constantly ongoing single process? I think I get it. I like that too.
As for ouroboros, I’ve heard two different explanations for it. One, that it symbolizes the false eternity of the ego (the unchanging state of being in the womb, safety and security at the price of stasis) and the other, that it symbolizes enlightenment (that which you see as outside yourself, to be devoured, is actually your own tail). Not necessarily ecological, but it could be seen that way too.
As for InfoTech, I think it MIGHT not actually be a problem. I’ve said a long time ago, on Tim’s site originally, that computers, the internet, and InfoTech in general (which I know are not exactly the same things, but they still all apply here) are training wheels of some sort. That is, in the McLuhan sense, that they are media, ways of building and developing “organs” that change our perception of (and involvement in) the world at large.
If InfoTech can take over the job of amassing knowledge for us, so that we no longer have to work so hard at doing it ourselves, we’ll be at a point never before seen in human history. It’s kind of a Utopian view, so the reality will probably fall a bit short, but the idea is that as we have to work less hard to attain knowledge, it becomes easier and easier to pass beyond it into true mastery. If the step-by-step process of InfoTech can reach a permanent ongoing state of “Jet-Engine-Ness”, then perhaps we as a species can finally lift ourselves beyond the knowledge gathering stage and into something beyond it.
Comment by Ian — October 23, 2009 @ 11:52 am
>> If InfoTech can take over the job of amassing knowledge for us…
Wow. I’s gonna have to think about that…
Comment by speedbird — October 26, 2009 @ 4:16 am
For starters, that’s the first sane description I’ve heard of what might lie beyond the Singularity.
Comment by speedbird — October 26, 2009 @ 4:19 am
Thanks, hadn’t really thought of it that way, but yeah, I guess so!
Comment by Ian — October 26, 2009 @ 8:54 am
Way back in the day, when optical disks were all shiny and new and people bought them /just because they had a laser inside/, the CD-R concept was called a ‘worm’ drive, standing for ‘write once, read mostly (or “many times”)’. This was basically because no-one knew how to make a re-writeable optical disk and they wanted their one-time optical disks to sound clever.
And I remember one wag pointing out that, the way computer use was going at the time, what the world actually needed was a ‘worn’ drive: write once, read never. Because that’s what happens to most files in reality.
Fast-forward twenty years, and I have my boss saying things daft things like, ‘Won’t it be brilliant in fifty years time when you’ll still have every photo you ever took on your hard disk?’ And I scream silently inside… :-D
Comment by speedbird — October 26, 2009 @ 10:04 am
Makes me scream too, an endless consumption of everything forever. Like those tourists (or parents) who never step out from behind the camera.
It’s a common problem in our society, “I just want to GET IT. I’ll enjoy it later, when I have more time, but I’m busy GETTING IT right now; I can’t enjoy it LATER if I don’t HAVE it!!!”
Almost sounds logical when I put it that way.
But that’s the price for externalizing our memory. It’s nothing to do with the technology, it’s just the bad way people use it. And people will ALWAYS use things badly, no matter how fancy the thing is.
Comment by Ian — October 26, 2009 @ 10:29 am
If you believe McLuhan, then the way people use technology is inherent in the technology. But he also said that technology can change. And also that artists, not engineers, see technology the clearest.
A wise man once told me that the only history that matters is ‘primary evidence’; that’s actual objects from the time in question. I discovered recently where this term comes from: the concept of ‘primary experience’: an actual interaction with something, not a second-hand reading of someone else’s account. I find infotech increasingly obscures the primary experience. Having said that, I do have clear memories of primary experiences of computing. These were always rooted in actual tangible structures; I mean, when I log on now my machine is a largely fluid ecosystem of operating-system-patches navigating an entirely fluid Internet of content. There’s nothing to get one’s teeth into. So I begin to wonder about regaining the primary experience of the machine: a standalone thing which we acquire, learn and love, and which ultimately ‘passes away’ (sorta) by being fully absorbed. Less of the kind of ‘rent-a-mess’ which we seem to be stuck with, which just begets bloatware.
Comment by speedbird — October 26, 2009 @ 5:31 pm
Well. That actually makes a bit of sense to me. It seems to at first anyway, but damned if I can explain it.
“Primary experience” sounds a lot like Zen’s “original face”, especially with this: “an actual interaction with something, not a second-hand reading of someone else’s account.” But I think with Zen, the second hand reading is your own as well, in that you’re reacting to a memory or a thought, rather than reality.
And I know what you mean about the fluidity of today’s InfoTech, there’s a lot of stuff we’ve built on top of really quickly, which can get scary. I used to have dreams where I’d be in some familiar building, but I’d some how slip down a drain, or find an elevator, and go down and down and down, and it just continued forever, one vast building. Wish I could remember what it was I’d seen down there…
Comment by Ian — October 27, 2009 @ 9:22 am
I suppose what we’re saying is that we’re moving (or in fact have moved) into a information-post-scarcity society. ‘Getting information’ has ceased to be an issue, and the wise will move beyond it.
I’m reminded of Descartes’ famous fevered dream-vision in which an angel imparts to him the scientific method in its entirety. In the dream the words ‘Quod vitae sectabor iter?’ appear, followed by the answer ‘Est et non’. Roughly translated:
‘What path shall I take in life?’ – ‘Yes and no.’
Comment by speedbird — October 28, 2009 @ 7:16 am
I agree, at least to a certain degree. Putting all our faith in it is obviously not so good, but I think the ability to source and make use of information will be much more important than the ability to store it. Even without the internet (assuming some kind of social collapse), we’ll still be able to store stuff for later.
Then again, there’s this. Maybe even a social collapse won’t stop the internet. DARPA wants space based broad band by 2012…
As for Descartes, the thing I’ll always remember about that dream is that he had it after he participated as a mercenary in the sacking of Bohemia, the kingdom of the alchemists. Never heard that part of it, though it is definitely interesting. ‘What path shall I take in life?’ – ‘Yes and no.’ I wonder what that meant..?
Comment by Ian — October 28, 2009 @ 8:31 am
Well I never knew that about Bohemia!
>> ‘What path shall I take in life?’ – ‘Yes and no.’
When I wrote that just now it made perfect sense all of a sudden. It’s the question you can ask once you can see through the fog of infowar. And the answer is an allusion both to binary and to the state beyond binary that can contemplate /both/ yes-and-no simultaneously.
I still recommend that book, ‘Descartes’ Dream’, if you’re at all interested.
Infotech is becoming a tower of babble that’s never completed. I’m beginning to think there’s a lot to be said for completion, a kind of closing of the circle.
Comment by speedbird — October 28, 2009 @ 10:48 am
… along the lines of ‘publish and be damned’. Live documents and continually updated operating systems feel like a step in the wrong direction.
Comment by speedbird — October 28, 2009 @ 11:08 am
I am interested, but I’ll need a little help. There’s quite a few of them… :)
Course, who knows when I’ll ever have the time to actually read it.
As for completion, it seems like to complete something kind of leaves out the analogue aspect. Only in the digital are things every truly completed. As for “published and be damned”, wouldn’t that go against the idea in your jet engine analogy? Or maybe I’m misinterpreting something. Course, with both “yes” and “no”, no reason you couldn’t have both the jet engine and completion…
Comment by Ian — October 28, 2009 @ 11:44 am
one last quote from Suzuki Roshi, which I think is relevant here:
In the thinking realm, there is a difference between oneness and variety; but in actual experience, variety and unity are the same. Because you create some idea of unity or variety, you are caught by the idea. And you have to continue the endless thinking, although actually, there is no need to think.
Comment by Ian — October 28, 2009 @ 12:19 pm
Top one, Davis & Hersh. Wow, they’ve been picked up by Dover! That is a mighty honour in the field of science publishing.
*
>> As for completion, it seems like to complete something kind of leaves out the analogue aspect. Only in the digital are things every truly completed. As for “published and be damned”, wouldn’t that go against the idea in your jet engine analogy? Or maybe I’m misinterpreting something. Course, with both “yes” and “no”, no reason you couldn’t have both the jet engine and completion…
This is where my brain starts to hurt and I know there’s something near.
For starters, the evidence of my own eyes tells me that ‘Only in the digital are things every truly completed’ is just not true. ‘Jet-engine-ness’ to me means a system like an egg or an organism that only makes sense as a whole, that loses something when it’s broken down into parts or sequence. That to me is the very definition of ‘analogue’. Take the dependent arising away from the chicken and the egg, they both lose. When the writer finishes the book, and it is printed and bound, it becomes more than a document. It becomes less than a document, for it cannot be edited, it cannot evolve by itself; but I am sure that it has also become more than a document. A book, by being made into a book, has gained jet-engine-ness. It has a kind of spirit that is lost when a system is dispersed into digits. When I open my computer to the world and everyone starts prodding around in it, I find its spirit is gone.
Comment by speedbird — October 28, 2009 @ 4:21 pm
So a ‘complete’ digital system can be analogue, like a bubble. And a complete analogue system looks like a digit.
I have NO IDEA if that makes any sense, even to me :-D
Comment by speedbird — October 28, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
Makes my brain hurt too…
If something makes sense as a whole thing, wouldn’t that make it analogue to itself, but digital within any larger system? One person is a whole thing in itself, but a person + anything else immediately becomes a binary (and hence digital) system.
Yet with dependent origination, nothing is ever simply on it’s own, so the binary/analogue separation breaks down. This is what Suzuki Roshi’s getting at, I think. The only true THING is EVERYTHING.
This seems like the old “wave” vs “ocean” argument (or wave vs particle, if you prefer). Really, the basis of everything is the analogue, but to have any thing, that whole has to become digital to a certain degree. “Through measurement, we shall conquer the earth”, to paraphrase the other part of Descarte’s dream…
Once your computer opens to the world and people start prodding around in it, I agree, you’ve lost any kind of hermetic computer-as-such. It becomes much more a wave-on-the-ocean, it’s the half of the internet that has a more thing-like-tendency (while the other half of the internet is a more fluid-electrical-wash). It’s a gate now, rather than a terminal point.
It’s a lot like the Tao, in that sense.
But the internet as a whole is a thing-in-itself, and that’s what you are accessing through the medium of the computer-particle-gate.
In a way, with the creation of the internet, computers reached enlightenment. Heh. :)
Comment by Ian — October 28, 2009 @ 4:46 pm
Ha, overlapped each other!
Exactly what I was trying to say, just much shorter. Very taoist as well. Within the black there is white, within the white there is black.
And now I’m leaving the office. Picking up groceries, laundry, then home…
Comment by Ian — October 28, 2009 @ 4:49 pm
With the creation of the internet, computers discovered the world of forms. Enlightenment must be the Singularity :-)
I have to admit, a book is not a book until it is read…
This is why listening to vinyl is a sacred act… ;-D
*
Basically I’m trying here to get my head round some pretty deep experiences I had at an early age, involving the standalone machines we had back then. Each a microcosm, a fragment of the hologram through which the world could be seen. Each a way-of-seeing. Each also a book, printed identically. Communication with a community of users without any exchange of data, how cool is that? The beginning of a wave of distributed processing, which has ebbed back to centrality and will presumably flow back to distribution. In a way, they have passed. In a way, they were always timeless.
I think what I need is sleep, seeing as we’re AAH!! hours ahead of you guys over here. Darn those pesky timezones…
Comment by speedbird — October 28, 2009 @ 7:53 pm
If you’re reading this tonight, don’t, go to sleep. It’s important. :)
But if you’re reading this tomorrow…
I see what you mean, computers looking at floating files of data on a sea of information (which is really nothing BUT files of data, one big data set in all). The metaphor’s running deep here…
But computers work as both the means of creating/storing/presenting that data, as well as accessing/updating/relinking that data. Without computers, there’d BE no internet. It is dependent on the existence of those very computers that look to it as forms, there’s no separation there.
The singularity/enlightenment, in this case, would then be computers that act as both Personal Computer and Server, a truly distributed field where all the computers can access all the other computers equally at all moments. Each computer would be a holographic representation of the entire internet, because the entire connected net of other computers would be accessible instantaneously from that one computer. The whole internet reflected in a dewdrop, so to speak.
Do that, make the computers something that can be carried on a person at all times, that can interact with each other wirelessly in real time regardless of distance, and make file exchange near-instantaneous, and bam, thats it.
That’s augmented reality, the noosphere, McLuhan’s Global Village/Tribal Echoland, and the singularity all at once (because computers are made conscious THROUGH humanity, not in spite of it). Plus my own idea of having computers acting as external memories, so that our minds can be turned toward other pursuits (training wheels).
Pretty damn cool Speedbird. Thanks for helping bring that one to life. I’ll try to write my thoughts up on this a little more coherently this weekend.
And with Darpa’s plans for a space based internet, it just might happen…
Comment by Ian — October 28, 2009 @ 8:21 pm
When I went on my Pilgrimage to the End of the Earth ;-D last year, I had a kind of epiphany along these lines:
The internet is just that: a net, which pulls information out of sea of pattern like a net pulls fish out of the sea. What’s important is not the net or the fish, but the sea.
Having said that, peer-to-peer networking is a deeply cool technology which seems to have been largely forgotten. Apple still do it, despite their recent borg-like tendencies, and I once worked at a site with an Apple network in which every machine was both server and client. Then a PC came for a particular application, which wouldn’t play along, and all of sudden we had a server, and everything was gone. Funnily enough, peer-to-peer always felt more private than client-server. Having to deal with a server always feels like a kind of violation, a sort of ‘please sir, can I go to the toilet’ moment.
*
This also runs through my head: :-D
On a silent summer evening
The sky’s alive with light
Building in the distance
Surrealistic sight
On Echo Beach
Waves make the only sound
On Echo Beach
There’s not a soul around
From nine till five I have to spend my time at work
My job is very boring, I’m an office clerk
The only thing that helps me pass the time away
Is knowing I’ll be back at Echo Beach some day
Echo Beach
Far away in time
Echo Beach
Far away in time…
Comment by speedbird — October 29, 2009 @ 5:36 am
I get it! The sea is there regardless of the net, and the information is there regardless of the Net. That’s genius. I’ve been having a little back and forth lately with a friend on Twitter about how insights/ideas/memes seem to happen to people at the same time, that the information comes from somewhere “out there” and that it finds appropriate receptors/minds to download that information to. And the internet is the way we put this together. It’s a net for both catching and for communicating.
Also, just saw these articles this morning:
On the 40th anniversary of the first internet connection, a look back on how a flash of insight and a 20-minute meeting got it all started.
Netbooks Are Only Part of The Solution
Comment by Ian — October 29, 2009 @ 9:30 am
Except I wouldn’t call the sea ‘information’, exactly. It’s only information once it’s in the net. Information is more like fish. The sea is like a precursor to information. I don’t know what you call that but the word ‘pattern’ seems to fit. So you stare at the sea for a while and you start to see waves. Where does one wave end and the next begin? Are ‘waves’ really there, or is out brain extracting ‘waves’ from the endless patterns of the sea? Probably a bit of both.
And when you do catch a fish it isn’t quite the same as watching the whales in their natural environment…
Comment by speedbird — October 29, 2009 @ 11:38 am
See, I would equate pattern with waves, whereas ocean would be more like chaos.
With regards to what your’re saving, I guess I mean:
pattern (you) = ocean = chaos = information (me)
information (you) = wave = order = meaning (me)
information’s there, whether we can extract it or not, only once we make sense of it does it have any meaning.
But we’re describing the same thing here, just using different definitions for the words. The process involved is either case is the same, and it’s a fascinating one (for which I have you to thank, since we’ve been talking about this since back on Ted’s FROH blog!)
In this case though, can we watch whales in their natural environment? Or can we only see them when they’ve been caught in our nets?
Comment by Ian — October 29, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
>> can we watch whales in their natural environment?
I’d very much like to think so, with the right practice.
*
I guess we are running out of obvious words to describe this stuff! I think all I’m trying to get at is the limitations of the Net. It’s training wheels (thanks for that vision!); it’s ‘give-a-man-a-fish’ science. I honestly have quite a low opinion of most of the information in the net. Though clearly there is a practically limitless amount of it.
Comment by speedbird — October 29, 2009 @ 4:21 pm
I think I’m sounding overly negative here, for which I apologise.
This is how I see it: the internet is full of information, which is stuff that other people have thought and written. This has all been extracted from some sort of precursor entity that’s all around us and which we don’t usually notice. The computer is a superb machine for doing this. If I have a computer, with some diligent practice I can begin see patterns in the soup and start to extract information. Nowadays everyone’s information is available to everyone else in the net. Our cup overfloweth. If I’m not careful I start thinking that the information in the net is the sum total of existence. In fact my computer’s real purpose has been obscured by all the noise. Though of course there are still patterns in the noise to be found because the noise represents the underlying soup. But the noise is not the soup of primary experience.
Comment by speedbird — October 30, 2009 @ 4:01 am
OK, I can’t resist this:
This is how I see it: the world is full of forms, which is stuff that other people have thought and made. This has all been extracted from some sort of precursor entity that’s all around us and which we don’t usually notice. The mind is a superb machine for doing this. If I have a mind, with some diligent practice I can begin see patterns in the soup and start to extract forms. Nowadays everyone’s stuff is available to everyone else in the economy. Our cup overfloweth. If I’m not careful I start thinking that the stuff in the economy is the sum total of existence. In fact my mind’s real purpose has been obscured by all the noise. Though of course there are still patterns in the noise to be found because the noise represents the underlying soup. But the noise is not the soup of primary experience.
:-D
Comment by speedbird — October 30, 2009 @ 5:49 am
HA! That is a beautiful culmination of this thread of thought, speedbird. I can’t stop laughing, thank you. :)
Of course, I can’t resist one last little thing:
At heart, I think we are that precursor entity. Everything else is just noise.
Comment by Ian — October 30, 2009 @ 9:23 am