Some random thoughts

This was a bit of a thought process that was triggered by Nic’s blog.

The context is a comment I made:

Objectivity – perhaps we could redefine it as the art of observing without any judgement or clinging – which means we can fully taste, feel, see, experience and be authentically who we are.

which led to the following:

We also need to acknowledge that it is a recursive process – the observer observing the observer and so on, and in this we are slowly freed from identifying with any of what we observe – which allows us to experience even more fully. It’s an interesting paradox – but ultimately takes us to the place where we realize that there is no observed without the observer, and there is no observer without the observed and therefore neither the observed or the observer have any inherit existence in and of themselves.

Without the space around me – can I identify anything that is me. Without the feel of the air against my skin, the experience of the light hitting my eyes, and then there is the experience of observing inside me – my stomach being hungry or full, my back being tired from sitting. The experience I have of ‘me’ is entirely dependent on all that is around me.

The things I am passionate about, the ideas I have – all of them are an addition to the mix of that which comes in and goes out of this pattern I call ‘me’. All of the people I encounter, the foods I eat, the medicine I drink. So then doesn’t this mean that the real ‘me’ is that driving force – the ‘dj’ mixing all of the music to form something new. And isn’t this the same pattern or energy that is everyone and everything?

Which I thought I’d post here – so that I can remember what I was thinking, and perhaps others could be stimulated in a similar direction  

darkness and light

The sun has just set on Sunday. And while the humans are in their church buildings or getting ready for the week’s work, the mountains shine and the trees raise their arms in salute to the marriage of father Sun and mother Earth. This endless cycle of day and night, darkness and light, waking and dreaming, life and death.

The plants know this, that which we’ve forgotten. We see only the struggle, or the moments of bliss, but the Earth knows this mystery as we do deep down, because we are the Earth and inside us is the Sun. The mystery that all is good and well and everything is as it is.

Writing

Staring at a blank page..

Knowing that as soon as I write I take something as complex as the information in the mind and convert it to this simple of symbols that contain this mysterious thing called meaning.

We so easily get seduced by these words, these representations of thought. Through words I get to have a glimpse of what is going on in your mind. The way you perceive this reality, or rather the way reality is perceived by you. There’s a big difference..

Just rearranging these words causes it to take on a whole new meaning. Is reality perceived, or do you perceive reality.  Is there an existing reality that we look at, or is reality existing as a result of our perception of it?

So words are flexible and versatile, and helpful in connecting us – but the danger is getting so caught up in the words that we lose sight of what they’re pointing to..

Reality? Perhaps, or they give the illusion of reality. Perhaps the illusion of reality exists only in the words that create it. That’s the mystery…

In the beginning… was the word…

Echoes

an electric storm..
thoughts racing through the mind.
what is real?
is this all a dream?
perhaps everyday we are born anew and every night we die
the past being an echo,

an electical impulse,

a chemical reaction.
nothing is real..
and yet it seems so …. real
universes colliding
what is right or wrong?
the programs and the software that makes us who we are
the need to fit in
and yet looking at it all from a distance…

who is it that is doing the looking

and who is observing the observer observing the observer….?

 

 

What is love

Is it something you feel, something you do, something you say?
Is it a sense of connection with the other or being able to see the world through their eyes?
Or perhaps it’s about being fully who you are and allowing others the same grace..

The view from outside Eden

As humans we generally see ourselves as being the superior species on Earth – more advanced than the rest of the living beings. We certainly demonstrate this in our actions. I sometimes wonder, though, if this is just a product of some kind of delusion. Of all of the living entities, we’re the ones who don’t quite fit in.

We pride ourselves in our advanced technologies, and yet they are nothing compared to the profound technology and ingenuity of that out of which we have emerged – Nature.

We have this belief, or experience, of being separate from Nature. We enclose ourselves in houses, cars, air-conditioned buildings. We enjoy going ‘out into nature’, as if it’s some kind of theme park.

But the thing is, we are this. We are Nature. Perhaps our vehicles are really not much different from sea shells or some form of exoskeleton, and our ability to communicate over wire or through the air is just another step in our evolution – like the evolution of the eye or the sense of smell. Perhaps what we create is just a subset of the creative energy that developed this technology by which we think and move and have any sense of self at all. It does, however, seem to be an awfully costly experiment. The spread of the human is very similar to the spread of cancer cells, cells that seem to have forgotten their purpose, and consume the very body of which they are part and that gives them life.

And then there’s consciousness. We have the ability to reflect on ourselves. Trees have consciousness too. They are able to respond to their surroundings, dropping their leaves when it gets cold, and grow towards the sun. It’s not the kind of consciousness we experience, but it’s a form of awareness none-the-less. Yet when I compare a tree to a human, a tree is a whole lot less stressed and at peace, just being what it is and doing what it does.

Humanity is a rather strange experiment….

The Destroyer of Worlds

I read this article today: July 16, 1945: Trinity Blast Opens Atomic Age.
I’m also involved in a discussion at Sound and Silence entitled A Chenobryl Meditation.

Both mentioned the following quote from the Bhagavad Gita:
Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, who has come to annihilate everyone.

This got me thinking about, well, a lot of things. One of them being the power we have as human beings.

The religions that have a more dualistic perspective tend to see humans as being largely powerless, and put the power in the hand of two opposing forces of good and evil, that are seen as being seperate entites to humans. So God has the power of good, and the Devil has the power of evil.

But these events make us realise that these powers are in fact in us, not so much as good and evil, but it’s just the way it is. In the basic building block of matter, the atom, lies the power to destroy. And in our hands, as human beings, lies the very same power – to destroy the Earth out of which we’ve come. It is easy to see this as one side of a dualism, but to forget that we must potentially have the same power for the opposite – “good”, whatever that may be.

Nature isn’t so dualistic. It took the destruction of stars to generate the materials with which life is built. The very act of eating, which gives us life, requires the destruction of life. But it is out of our own fear of death and destruction that we build these weapons, forgetting who we really are. That while we have the power of death, the Destroyer of worlds, that same power in us is the power of Creator. Perhaps we forget who we are because we fear the responsibility of our own power..

“As long as there are large numbers of people who fear the responsibility of their own power, religions will continue to dominate the landscape of human development.”
(found here)

Words and AI

I’ve been playing around with the concept of AI for a while now. A few years back I wrote a couple of AIML bots, but I’ve always had this idea that it must be possible to write something that allows a bot to learn based on general input, as opposed to someone telling it what to say. The problem with this, however, is that words outside of an experience of living have no meaning in and of themselves.

As a kid I would see something, or smell and taste something and by hearing the sounds that people made I slowly started to associate these sounds with the experience of seeing, feeling, tasting etc. Later on I learnt to associate these sounds with visible symbols – words on paper. The problem with computers is that their interface to the world of experience is through a human being, or a simulation of human senses. So until this interface to the realm of experience is more refined, they will always be vehicles of human words, rather than having an experience to which the words point.

Why the name?

My other blog is all about rhythm, using rhythm as a metaphor for life, and I want to keep to that track. But, there are times when I just want to write for the sake of writing, without having to think of how to fit it into that metaphor. So it’s sort-of a jam-session, with no real structure. Just seeing where it all goes.

I’m also involved in conversations in a few other blogs (I’ll post links to them when relevant) and I find I’m often guilty of thinking aloud, in that something they say triggers a line of thinking that’s not related to their blog. I used to spend a lot of times on forums, and there you just start another thread, whereas in a blog it’s a bit more tricky. So – what I’ll do from now on is continue my thoughts here, and then just link to this.

So – watch this space…