about something: reading is one of the most productive uses of a body’s time. Perhaps that’s precisely the point: a body’s time. If the body’s time is pondered for a second, what comes immediately to mind is death, so how on earth is reading a justifiable part of that relatively short existence?
The soul.
The soul is universal and eternal and infinitesimally small and infinitesimally large and permeates everything.
But of course there arises the eternal question, the question that has plagued science and religion (to a lesser degree) from the beginning of time—I couldn’t help myself:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Perhaps a better rendering of the question might be:
What is it about something that makes us believe there should be nothing?
The latter question would probably be answerable, and that answer would be that we see the universal structure everywhere: it is present in the very smallest particles, it is viewable in the night sky and our understanding of astronomy, and you can even find it in reading.
What is this structure that we see?
(I can see we’re on a basic ontological search here…)
Mostly-empty space, is what it turns out to be.
At a cellular level, most of the atomic structure is a cloud, a haze, and a constantly moving something-or-other.
Have you ever seen a picture of a galaxy? Looks a lot like a cell to me.
I bet the universe looks like that.
But I suppose I’ve been avoiding the “why” question that I posed earlier.
Basically, I like to avoid discussing why questions because they inevitably lead to metaphysical inquiry, and metaphysics is not my strong suit because it seems to me to be based largely on things like belief. If I were to categorize the different kinds of physics, I would say that general, observable physics would be precisely that: observable. We can watch the rules and principles that we believe to be true actually happen—thereby offering a kind of “proof” for the them. However, metaphysics deals with things that are—rather unfortunately or very fortunately depending on how you look at it—almost always experientially based.
The words I chose to use there are very specific and I want to make sure that metaphysics—or at least Eli metaphysics—is not reduced to a purely subjective perspective. Just because metaphysical understanding has at least one foot in the experiential aspect of humanity does not mean that an entire blanket of personal experience can be thrown over the whole situation: there are always teachers that come before and disciples that come after any kind of metaphysical experience. In other words, you have to be prepared for the experience by some kind of coach who has been there before, and you will be so changed by the experience yourself that you will in turn attempt to guide others seeking metaphysical experience. In a lot of ways, the experiencing of why is a community project.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
“Happiness is the virtuous activity of the soul.” That’s some bastardized Aristotle for you, but he places this caveat on that activity:
over the course of a lifetime.
Inside the body’s time are two other times: the time of the mind and the time of the soul.
One of them marches steadily onwards (the body).
The other two are based on the initiative of the possessor.
The power of the mind is basically limitless, and the same can be said of the soul, but it takes time and dedication to develop either of them. It is for this reason that Aristotle decided that the virtuous activity of the soul needed to extend over the course of an entire lifetime.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that we will probably never know from a scientific perspective why there is something instead of nothing. If we take what we know about nature and apply it to the universe, then our universe is probably just a cell in the skin of the universal fabric that spreads its one fact throughout everything it touches: is-ness.
If God—capitalization intentional—exists, then he must necessarily be bigger than the universe: what good is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present god that isn’t big enough to be everywhere at the same time, able to out-muscle anything, and know absolutely everything?
No good. God isn’t dead, but it’s a fuck-tonne bigger than we could ever imagine, and I believe that her name might be Nature.
We call it Mother Nature and think of trees in autumn or lakes during the summer or snow drifts in winter and giddy springs, but our sight is very short. It is probably more likely that Mother Nature extends to the galaxy as well. The nature of the galaxy is to spin around a giant black hole. The nature of our solar system is to spin around the sun. It turns out that nature is probably extendable to the very reaches of the universe and—perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here—beyond.
What is the one incontrovertible fact about nature? Is-ness.
Nature is also imbued with a very slippery touch of magic.
Oak trees growing from acorns? Magic.
So, you’re telling me that we bury this in dirt, keep giving it water, and that’s about it? Yup. It turns out that the process (while infinitely more complicated in reality) is basically that simple. Imagine the entire earth as the brain and the products of the mental work the things that make the earth such a beautiful place—trees and streams and whatnot. The core and the movement and all the stuff we don’t see would be the world’s sub-consciousness and the visible stuff would be the consciousness. The planet would be the body. The soul would be the magic of the fact that it is.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
“Nothing comes from nothing.”—Many people said it, but notably Shakespeare
Because without something to work on, nothing gets worked on… the work stops. Realistically, we are probably here to develop as fully as possible the unique manifestation of universe that we are—that what the ancients believed at any rate. The truth of the matter is that we are probably an accident based on a pure numbers game:
“Billions and billions and of planets, huh? That ought to be enough for a while. Let’s see what happens. We can always make more next time. We’re not super busy.” Maybe we’re a product of nature attempting to create something that can overcome her at last, but she simply hasn’t quite gotten the recipe perfect yet.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Composed on Valentine’s Day
and related to love. These days, I can’t get these Laura Marling lyrics out of my head. It’s disconcerting because they are deeply involved with things that I would like to think of myself as being deeply involved in—if not presently.
I have an unhealthy relationship with love. To say that I love to love love, would be only to understand what Joyce meant. We are all pieces of love. Love is a part of the universal structure. Nature is love. It’s hard, sometimes brutal. Sometimes, when unrequited or scorned, it can be downright vicious. But it can be gentle and humble and sweet and lying dormant for ages. It’s not our awareness that makes us special creatures in the universe, it’s our awareness of our awareness (damned tautology) and the resultant reflection, allowing for reason that make of us unique manifestations of universal energy.
I don’t know if anybody has ever really considered it before, but perhaps humanity, with its layered awareness is actually a punishment.
The great order of the universe is composed of who-knows-what kind of logic. Perhaps it is those creatures that will beat themselves to death—physically or mentally—attempting to understand this awareness they have of the world around them that are the scorned creatures of the universe. Most animals content themselves to the understanding that they need to find food and shelter, procreate, and try to stay alive. Humans are different. We want more.
Perhaps that’s part of where love comes into play. It is a higher level of existence to understand the great cosmic order wherein part of staying alive is creating for one’s mate and progeny the ability to continue existence. It is the satisfaction of one of the highest callings of nature: survive.
In some ways, surviving is the easier of nature’s dual calling. Reproduction, especially for humanity—and this is where it can become quite a trying task to be a human—can take place in two different realms.
While at first glance it doesn’t seem as though these two worlds, as opposed to a unified one, would cause all that much harm: you simply have to pick. Ah, but the problem is, of course that these two worlds (the physical and the intellectual/mental) interact with each other, are inseparable from each other, and even exist in the exact same place at the exact same time. As is probably pretty evident, that one remove brings with it both the possibility of cataclysmic disaster and inconceivable joy—where the former is something like a cutting off of one’s self from their awareness and the latter is something like coming to a kind of harmony and balance within the universal spectrum.
Words, words. Nothing but sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears.
But love and the mind are not strangers to each other, and they are both on pretty decent terms with the body, so why shouldn’t love be the web that weaves them together and makes of itself such a delightful nuisance?
The love of the mind, the love of the body, and the love of the soul are all very different breeds of the same species. There are some people whose genetic makeup just clicks with your genetic makeup, and when your two parts come together there is a whole lot of joy, thoroughgoing joy. There are people who stimulate your mind in such a way that, though they might not be what you are normally physically attracted to, the fact that they stay in your mind—haunting it as it were—for so long and popping into it at such strange times that you can’t help but gravitate toward them. There are people you are drawn to, or who happen to cross your path, whose soul (unique manifestation of the universe) reaches out and connects to another soul such that there can never be a severing: it is as if they could actually communicate with each other through the universal schema of symbolization and communication which renders space and time impotent.
Sometimes vaulting into the heavens leaves one with as tendency toward flights of rhetorical fancy, but never fear because the fall always leaves one bruised and slightly more cautious the next time… slightly.
There are merits to all of them. It is very nice to have somebody there to take care of those bodily needs that seem to creep up as a matter of course for the human body—both men and women get the craving. It is also very nice to have somebody there to talk to, to listen to, to learn from, to teach, and to deal with the things of the mind. It is also very nice to have that soul mate.
Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult to find what people refer to as “the one.” To find a soul mate is incredibly difficult. The soul has so many strands, threads, strings, colors, styles, and whathaveyou that the chances of bumping into one that fits your particular network of soul whatever is pretty chancy I’d say—by which I’d mean nearly impossible. A mind-mate is somewhat more probable, as the mind is based on the structure of the universe—finding a mind that is structured similarly to yours can be somewhat trying, but determination and effort will find you attaining your prize. The body, with its physicality makes just about any tool capable of pleasure. The flexibility, shape, and size of each particular unit is taken into the alternate aspects of their partner(s), and it makes pleasure possible from just about anybody.
It’s hard to say whether or not the pyramid of pleasure is oriented properly with the soul at the top and pointing towards to the heavens with the base of the body holding us steadily to the earth—primacy being sometimes relative—or if it’s not something inverted with the point of the soul creating a fulcrum whereby the body and mind must remain in balance or the whole structure begins to lean and tilt with the potential for falling over completely. Either way, what we see when we look at the thing with the proper set of eyes is that they are all connected, all important, and all necessary of thorough investigation.
My loves are spread all over the world. I have not known physical love in a couple of months. A mind with which to commune would be pleasant in the extreme, but unfortunately the style of my mind makes me too pensive and standoffish to seek these minds out. The nature of my soul makes me a wanderer, a finder, and a perpetual bad bet for the long run. Of course it’s because I’m scared. Did you think I didn’t know that? Fear runs rampant in the parts of my mind that desire my own breed of greatness. The nature of the fear is something that might bear discussion, but it is definitely there.
At any rate, in my present solitude—which is not entirely un-welcome—I reach out to the ones that I have loved, the ones I will love, and those for whom my love transcends time and space. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been loved by those who have loved me—from family to lovers—and perhaps luckier to have loved those same people. I regret none of my relationships. My inadequacies and deficiencies as a human being have made me, unfortunately, a villain of the highest caliber, and I carry it with me every day. No regrets, no surrender. I love those people perhaps more powerfully now I see the effect they have made on my life. Share love today.
I have an unhealthy relationship with love. To say that I love to love love, would be only to understand what Joyce meant. We are all pieces of love. Love is a part of the universal structure. Nature is love. It’s hard, sometimes brutal. Sometimes, when unrequited or scorned, it can be downright vicious. But it can be gentle and humble and sweet and lying dormant for ages. It’s not our awareness that makes us special creatures in the universe, it’s our awareness of our awareness (damned tautology) and the resultant reflection, allowing for reason that make of us unique manifestations of universal energy.
I don’t know if anybody has ever really considered it before, but perhaps humanity, with its layered awareness is actually a punishment.
The great order of the universe is composed of who-knows-what kind of logic. Perhaps it is those creatures that will beat themselves to death—physically or mentally—attempting to understand this awareness they have of the world around them that are the scorned creatures of the universe. Most animals content themselves to the understanding that they need to find food and shelter, procreate, and try to stay alive. Humans are different. We want more.
Perhaps that’s part of where love comes into play. It is a higher level of existence to understand the great cosmic order wherein part of staying alive is creating for one’s mate and progeny the ability to continue existence. It is the satisfaction of one of the highest callings of nature: survive.
In some ways, surviving is the easier of nature’s dual calling. Reproduction, especially for humanity—and this is where it can become quite a trying task to be a human—can take place in two different realms.
While at first glance it doesn’t seem as though these two worlds, as opposed to a unified one, would cause all that much harm: you simply have to pick. Ah, but the problem is, of course that these two worlds (the physical and the intellectual/mental) interact with each other, are inseparable from each other, and even exist in the exact same place at the exact same time. As is probably pretty evident, that one remove brings with it both the possibility of cataclysmic disaster and inconceivable joy—where the former is something like a cutting off of one’s self from their awareness and the latter is something like coming to a kind of harmony and balance within the universal spectrum.
Words, words. Nothing but sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears.
But love and the mind are not strangers to each other, and they are both on pretty decent terms with the body, so why shouldn’t love be the web that weaves them together and makes of itself such a delightful nuisance?
The love of the mind, the love of the body, and the love of the soul are all very different breeds of the same species. There are some people whose genetic makeup just clicks with your genetic makeup, and when your two parts come together there is a whole lot of joy, thoroughgoing joy. There are people who stimulate your mind in such a way that, though they might not be what you are normally physically attracted to, the fact that they stay in your mind—haunting it as it were—for so long and popping into it at such strange times that you can’t help but gravitate toward them. There are people you are drawn to, or who happen to cross your path, whose soul (unique manifestation of the universe) reaches out and connects to another soul such that there can never be a severing: it is as if they could actually communicate with each other through the universal schema of symbolization and communication which renders space and time impotent.
Sometimes vaulting into the heavens leaves one with as tendency toward flights of rhetorical fancy, but never fear because the fall always leaves one bruised and slightly more cautious the next time… slightly.
There are merits to all of them. It is very nice to have somebody there to take care of those bodily needs that seem to creep up as a matter of course for the human body—both men and women get the craving. It is also very nice to have somebody there to talk to, to listen to, to learn from, to teach, and to deal with the things of the mind. It is also very nice to have that soul mate.
Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult to find what people refer to as “the one.” To find a soul mate is incredibly difficult. The soul has so many strands, threads, strings, colors, styles, and whathaveyou that the chances of bumping into one that fits your particular network of soul whatever is pretty chancy I’d say—by which I’d mean nearly impossible. A mind-mate is somewhat more probable, as the mind is based on the structure of the universe—finding a mind that is structured similarly to yours can be somewhat trying, but determination and effort will find you attaining your prize. The body, with its physicality makes just about any tool capable of pleasure. The flexibility, shape, and size of each particular unit is taken into the alternate aspects of their partner(s), and it makes pleasure possible from just about anybody.
It’s hard to say whether or not the pyramid of pleasure is oriented properly with the soul at the top and pointing towards to the heavens with the base of the body holding us steadily to the earth—primacy being sometimes relative—or if it’s not something inverted with the point of the soul creating a fulcrum whereby the body and mind must remain in balance or the whole structure begins to lean and tilt with the potential for falling over completely. Either way, what we see when we look at the thing with the proper set of eyes is that they are all connected, all important, and all necessary of thorough investigation.
My loves are spread all over the world. I have not known physical love in a couple of months. A mind with which to commune would be pleasant in the extreme, but unfortunately the style of my mind makes me too pensive and standoffish to seek these minds out. The nature of my soul makes me a wanderer, a finder, and a perpetual bad bet for the long run. Of course it’s because I’m scared. Did you think I didn’t know that? Fear runs rampant in the parts of my mind that desire my own breed of greatness. The nature of the fear is something that might bear discussion, but it is definitely there.
At any rate, in my present solitude—which is not entirely un-welcome—I reach out to the ones that I have loved, the ones I will love, and those for whom my love transcends time and space. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been loved by those who have loved me—from family to lovers—and perhaps luckier to have loved those same people. I regret none of my relationships. My inadequacies and deficiencies as a human being have made me, unfortunately, a villain of the highest caliber, and I carry it with me every day. No regrets, no surrender. I love those people perhaps more powerfully now I see the effect they have made on my life. Share love today.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Soul Searching
There is a perpetual hesitancy in the words of those that would attempt to put words to truths which sit outside the scope of language: all translation is loss, and doubly so when translating the matter of the spiritual world.
Science’s biggest problem is that it makes too much sense.
Religion’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make enough sense.
As with most things, the reality is not in the extremes.
There are always anomalies. That’s the point of them, to be. But one example cannot supply enough oomf for a reasoning, sentient being—at least, it shouldn’t. This seems to be where they both get in trouble. The one camp gives proofed evidence, and the other the evidence of faith and belief, which are rationally irrational.
It is at this point that everybody usually picks a side. People start saying that you have to believe this and that. Fuck them. Even that, using that particular word, would be abominable to some. It’s all about control.
So I have become a myopic spiritual vagabond.
I know because I see repeated structures, and that this sits nicely with me.
But I suppose I should tell the story of how my understanding of these terms came to be, so either buckle in for a quick tour of my spiritual upbringing or fast forward a bit to the parts at the end which are undoubtedly bound to be better than this rag.
My father is a music minister. He and my mother attended a Christian college in College City, Arkansas—while this seems like a preposterous name for a REAL city it is in fact a real place and home to Williams Baptist University. At any rate, Sundays were spent in church watching my father lead the music and learning more than anybody should probably need to know about any book (and that’s coming from me).
At any rate, as usually happens, unhappy children rebel against their parents. My morality and spiritual quest took a back seat for a couple of years.
Then, one day I picked up a book called The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I read it from cover to cover. It’s basically about what it takes to build a great society. What do you need? Great men. How do you get great men? Genetics? True, but is it possible to make them? It should be. Education. This is how the ancients viewed education: training the citizen to be the best possible citizen (and therefore human being) they could be. It is inside this desire to create a thoroughly decent human being that we find the questions of morality, desire, turpitude, and, alternately, the place of truth and honesty in the life of the citizen.
This was, in other words, the birthplace of logic. In the course of this logic, there cropped up the eternal question: what of the soul? The ancients went crazy. There is a whole science full of its own signs and significations that the Neo-Platonists got into where they were actually defining the soul—or attempting to do so. Over-zealous as they may have been, they did interesting work and proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that interest in this issue of the soul would probably not die out quickly.
It didn’t. It should also be noted here that, in the language of that era (and I believe most people are dealing with Latin here) soul, mind, and reason all translate as roughly the same word—think about that in terms of the good book for a second.
(Quick side note: I think that Christians are doing themselves a very great disservice in cutting themselves off from other potential readings of their book. There are incredible lessons in that book that get missed because we don’t know how to read it.)
Anyhow, with the fall of the Roman Empire came the Dark Ages and for 1000 years, with many of the manuscripts of the ancients lost, the Christian church grew.
Then came the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the bastions of Christianity started falling and making way for thinkers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Kant, Steiner etc etc etc, and the intellectual revolution was underway… but all great thinkers come upon the one question that will perpetually baffle:
“I say my good man, but what of this “soul” business?”
But it was essentially shelved and labeled “a bummer” because there was simply no way to know—I believe this was sort of the birth of Nihilism: if there’s no way to know, then what’s the point? Please, for the love of god, don’t go getting all technical with the definitions of Nihilism because I could’ve just have easily phrased it: if there’s no way to know, then everything’s true! To believe in nothing is actually quite a feat. At any rate, you catch my drift I’d imagine.
Steiner once said that the spirit surrounds the unique physical manifestation of itself, and then went on to describe it as something that actually penetrates through the layers of physical self and extends beyond, out into space. “In his later years, Velazquez never painted things. He painted the space around them.”
That’s where the spirit can be most easily seen. When it gets all mixed up with the physicality of the body, strange things happen.
All things that can be said to be share the similar trait of being. They are all connected by this, if by nothing else. And it could be said that that connection, whatever it is, is the universal spirit. People, animals, planets, galaxies, and whatever else was, is, will be are unique physical manifestation of the universal spirit—a bit like an arm hair or a pimple or a fingernail: never exactly the same, although they look awfully goddamned similar.
Well, I looked all over. I found eastern texts to contain a similar kind of structure, albeit in different words or a different style. It seems like there are four basic elements to human existence: the body (the seat of the spirit and the mind), the consciousness (sensations of external and internal sense), the subconscious (involuntary activity), and the spirit (the answer to the question: “why is there something instead of nothing?”).
Religions are usually a manifestation of a too-heavy emphasis on only one or two aspects of existence. The key is balance.
That’s a lie. The key is effort. Balance is impossible. One of the unique quirks of the universe is that nothing NOTHING is perfect (if only because nature doesn’t understand the terminology), and balance is a kind of perfection. One must try diligently to achieve that which they know is, in the end, not achievable because that is the path that will lead them towards knowledge of the world that lies inside of everything, that universal spirit that pervades everything, tearing through what we think is impenetrable, and making of us all unique universal manifestations, special, and ultimately dead, but that’s okay: to not enjoy sentience would be the greatest sin of all.
Heidegger has this thing about the four-fold: the heavens, the earth, the mortals and immortals. The earth is the consciousness: it makes the sensory world possible. The heavens are the sub-conscious: think the word “god” and you might be on to something. The mortals are the bodies that we receive: our unique manifestation. The immortals would be the spirit: immortality and eternity permeating every thing.
Science’s biggest problem is that it makes too much sense.
Religion’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make enough sense.
As with most things, the reality is not in the extremes.
There are always anomalies. That’s the point of them, to be. But one example cannot supply enough oomf for a reasoning, sentient being—at least, it shouldn’t. This seems to be where they both get in trouble. The one camp gives proofed evidence, and the other the evidence of faith and belief, which are rationally irrational.
It is at this point that everybody usually picks a side. People start saying that you have to believe this and that. Fuck them. Even that, using that particular word, would be abominable to some. It’s all about control.
So I have become a myopic spiritual vagabond.
I know because I see repeated structures, and that this sits nicely with me.
But I suppose I should tell the story of how my understanding of these terms came to be, so either buckle in for a quick tour of my spiritual upbringing or fast forward a bit to the parts at the end which are undoubtedly bound to be better than this rag.
My father is a music minister. He and my mother attended a Christian college in College City, Arkansas—while this seems like a preposterous name for a REAL city it is in fact a real place and home to Williams Baptist University. At any rate, Sundays were spent in church watching my father lead the music and learning more than anybody should probably need to know about any book (and that’s coming from me).
At any rate, as usually happens, unhappy children rebel against their parents. My morality and spiritual quest took a back seat for a couple of years.
Then, one day I picked up a book called The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I read it from cover to cover. It’s basically about what it takes to build a great society. What do you need? Great men. How do you get great men? Genetics? True, but is it possible to make them? It should be. Education. This is how the ancients viewed education: training the citizen to be the best possible citizen (and therefore human being) they could be. It is inside this desire to create a thoroughly decent human being that we find the questions of morality, desire, turpitude, and, alternately, the place of truth and honesty in the life of the citizen.
This was, in other words, the birthplace of logic. In the course of this logic, there cropped up the eternal question: what of the soul? The ancients went crazy. There is a whole science full of its own signs and significations that the Neo-Platonists got into where they were actually defining the soul—or attempting to do so. Over-zealous as they may have been, they did interesting work and proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that interest in this issue of the soul would probably not die out quickly.
It didn’t. It should also be noted here that, in the language of that era (and I believe most people are dealing with Latin here) soul, mind, and reason all translate as roughly the same word—think about that in terms of the good book for a second.
(Quick side note: I think that Christians are doing themselves a very great disservice in cutting themselves off from other potential readings of their book. There are incredible lessons in that book that get missed because we don’t know how to read it.)
Anyhow, with the fall of the Roman Empire came the Dark Ages and for 1000 years, with many of the manuscripts of the ancients lost, the Christian church grew.
Then came the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the bastions of Christianity started falling and making way for thinkers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Kant, Steiner etc etc etc, and the intellectual revolution was underway… but all great thinkers come upon the one question that will perpetually baffle:
“I say my good man, but what of this “soul” business?”
But it was essentially shelved and labeled “a bummer” because there was simply no way to know—I believe this was sort of the birth of Nihilism: if there’s no way to know, then what’s the point? Please, for the love of god, don’t go getting all technical with the definitions of Nihilism because I could’ve just have easily phrased it: if there’s no way to know, then everything’s true! To believe in nothing is actually quite a feat. At any rate, you catch my drift I’d imagine.
Steiner once said that the spirit surrounds the unique physical manifestation of itself, and then went on to describe it as something that actually penetrates through the layers of physical self and extends beyond, out into space. “In his later years, Velazquez never painted things. He painted the space around them.”
That’s where the spirit can be most easily seen. When it gets all mixed up with the physicality of the body, strange things happen.
All things that can be said to be share the similar trait of being. They are all connected by this, if by nothing else. And it could be said that that connection, whatever it is, is the universal spirit. People, animals, planets, galaxies, and whatever else was, is, will be are unique physical manifestation of the universal spirit—a bit like an arm hair or a pimple or a fingernail: never exactly the same, although they look awfully goddamned similar.
Well, I looked all over. I found eastern texts to contain a similar kind of structure, albeit in different words or a different style. It seems like there are four basic elements to human existence: the body (the seat of the spirit and the mind), the consciousness (sensations of external and internal sense), the subconscious (involuntary activity), and the spirit (the answer to the question: “why is there something instead of nothing?”).
Religions are usually a manifestation of a too-heavy emphasis on only one or two aspects of existence. The key is balance.
That’s a lie. The key is effort. Balance is impossible. One of the unique quirks of the universe is that nothing NOTHING is perfect (if only because nature doesn’t understand the terminology), and balance is a kind of perfection. One must try diligently to achieve that which they know is, in the end, not achievable because that is the path that will lead them towards knowledge of the world that lies inside of everything, that universal spirit that pervades everything, tearing through what we think is impenetrable, and making of us all unique universal manifestations, special, and ultimately dead, but that’s okay: to not enjoy sentience would be the greatest sin of all.
Heidegger has this thing about the four-fold: the heavens, the earth, the mortals and immortals. The earth is the consciousness: it makes the sensory world possible. The heavens are the sub-conscious: think the word “god” and you might be on to something. The mortals are the bodies that we receive: our unique manifestation. The immortals would be the spirit: immortality and eternity permeating every thing.
Friday, February 4, 2011
What’s the World Coming To?
A more appropriate question might be: what is it that I’ve become? As a result of the decisions I have made, as a result of the situations I have been forced to deal with, and as a result of the education that gave me the gift of sight I made a decision. I made it a long time ago. If there’s no sense in fighting it, then there’s no reason to fight it, and if there’s no reason to fight it, the best one can do is to simply step outside of it and provide an example of alternate possibilities.
It must be as a result of the possibilities that I have found in my own head that I see them in the world-at-large, but this hardly matters when you consider how narrow each individual path is, and it’s strange to think of how things rely on each other—what is the narrow without the wide?
There are very rarely things that are easily separable into even two. Dichotomies are only ever two by virtue of their prefix, for their further destruction into their own component parts rules out the possibility of ever reaching binaries. There is always a third, and usually a fourth, lurking perhaps unseen.
Black
White
Gray
Shades of Gray
All things mirror the universal structure. There are things. There are things we can sense. There are the things we do involuntarily. There is the answer to the question: why is there something instead of nothing?
Obviously, even this falls in on itself when we begin to see that the things we can sense have a parallel—or perhaps a perpendicular—that runs through the answer to the question when we “feel” one way or another about an idea.
An atom: protons, neutrons, electrons, and the cloud that hides the electrons and their movements… begging the question and subsequent un-answer.
If you’re gone for too long, when you come back you sometimes think it would’ve been better to have just stayed gone forever.
But then you get to hang out with your nephews, you get to spend time with the family that has always been there for you, and you get to spend most of your days doing what you feel like you need to do, the decision becomes a markedly more difficult one, doesn’t it?
It’s easier to be less disappointing when being it somewhere far away.
Or is it that I need my life to be my own, free from the tyranny and rancor of the bulk of humanity. It is difficult to know what to want, but that’s the most fruitful aspect of the human experience. It is inside those questions of what things are coming to, and being able to see them honestly, recite them faithfully, and understand them truthfully that we begin to watch the flower of our humanity take root. And when once taken root, the tendency for most plants—be they of the spiritual or physical nature—is toward growth.
Nurture the questions of existence. Breathe in the death you accept and exhale it as the possibilities of what the world could be.
Sometimes making words is like making love,
One makes meaning in the physical/mental/psychological
And the other the mental/psychological/spiritual
Realms.
It must be as a result of the possibilities that I have found in my own head that I see them in the world-at-large, but this hardly matters when you consider how narrow each individual path is, and it’s strange to think of how things rely on each other—what is the narrow without the wide?
There are very rarely things that are easily separable into even two. Dichotomies are only ever two by virtue of their prefix, for their further destruction into their own component parts rules out the possibility of ever reaching binaries. There is always a third, and usually a fourth, lurking perhaps unseen.
Black
White
Gray
Shades of Gray
All things mirror the universal structure. There are things. There are things we can sense. There are the things we do involuntarily. There is the answer to the question: why is there something instead of nothing?
Obviously, even this falls in on itself when we begin to see that the things we can sense have a parallel—or perhaps a perpendicular—that runs through the answer to the question when we “feel” one way or another about an idea.
An atom: protons, neutrons, electrons, and the cloud that hides the electrons and their movements… begging the question and subsequent un-answer.
If you’re gone for too long, when you come back you sometimes think it would’ve been better to have just stayed gone forever.
But then you get to hang out with your nephews, you get to spend time with the family that has always been there for you, and you get to spend most of your days doing what you feel like you need to do, the decision becomes a markedly more difficult one, doesn’t it?
It’s easier to be less disappointing when being it somewhere far away.
Or is it that I need my life to be my own, free from the tyranny and rancor of the bulk of humanity. It is difficult to know what to want, but that’s the most fruitful aspect of the human experience. It is inside those questions of what things are coming to, and being able to see them honestly, recite them faithfully, and understand them truthfully that we begin to watch the flower of our humanity take root. And when once taken root, the tendency for most plants—be they of the spiritual or physical nature—is toward growth.
Nurture the questions of existence. Breathe in the death you accept and exhale it as the possibilities of what the world could be.
Sometimes making words is like making love,
One makes meaning in the physical/mental/psychological
And the other the mental/psychological/spiritual
Realms.
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