Archive for the thoughts category
Wednesday, Oct 8th, 2008
Categories: thoughts
So last night I tweeted that I needed a break from humanity and was gonna watch some good ol’ David Attanborough nature documentaries. I selected the classic “Trials of Life” series and went for the episode on Living Together. I figured some inspiring examples of inter-species cooperation would be just what the doctor ordered. It worked wonders.
Then this morning I check my email and find my daily question from the Gaia social network that’s crafted to illicit a thoughtful bit of daily blog writing on the service. I usually pass, but today’s was “What makes us human,” so I just couldn’t resist. Below is my response:
SImply, our desire and ability to call ourselves as such. As long as there are those who choose to identify with the myriad of traits, habits, and physicality known as human, then there will be humans.
For me, what makes us alive would be a more interesting and satisfying question than what makes us human. No doubt, humanity as a species has managed what would seem to be a unique feat in its ability to perceive and adopt nearly every evolutionary strategy we observe in the world. But it remains that none of these strategies, abilities, or modes of being were invented by humanity. We have simply collected all of life’s/evolution’s hard-earned knowledge and experience into a single vantage point.
This could be considered exceptional, but it could also be seen as selfish, greedy, arrogant, a fatal flaw even. In the words of Sir David Attenborough when speaking of the many species that have learned to live cooperative existences with other species, “We ourselves have very few such relationships, voluntarily, with other species of animals. Except of course with those animals that we have domesticated and enslaved. But back in our evolutionary past we doubtless had many. Today maybe, we think we’re so powerful, or have become so detached from nature that we think we no longer need them.”
I would say that it is our need to identify as human, to separate ourselves and consider our species as somehow something more than all the forms of life that is our tragic, perhaps fatal flaw. As in the timeless story of King Lear, it is only naked ambition and blind pride that allows one to believe the earth is one’s own to cast dominion over, to divide up, to offer as a gift to our offspring, and for this, a day of reckoning surely awaits.
Last night I fell asleep on the couch after watching the first half of Across the Universe. I think the detail and music and idealism inspired my dreams in some way. I woke up around midnight after having a really fantastic dream and did my best to write it down right then and there:
I dreamed of a tech-geek wonderland along the side of bear mountain.
A loose network of kids from the country who got together in a big comfortably furnished cabin to discuss their ideas and work on their projects. Boys and Girls, Men and Women banded together in a common goal of making cool things that worked.
There was the gregarious, heavy-set guy and his super lightweight, 6 seater, person-powered tank- offroader vehicle. A central bench supported on columns with wheels at the end in a wide stance, it covered ground in a bouncing motion, its center of gravity very high due to its oscillations, moving quickly and erratically due to low friction with the ground.
There was the shy girl doing the study of the bird species that like to peck out indecipherable messages on keyboards. The messages were never the same or held any repeatable pattern, but somehow this was the method of hiding the message they were so obviously encoding.
The radical non-processed food crusader girls who had seen “Processed” years ago and had given up on any kind of factory-made sustenance long ago. One of them did a presentation on the varying shades of yellow that corn could grow in, and be coaxed to grow in for various purposes. The most yellow corn possible actually causing sparks when it was touched, and the most mildly yellow good for some kind of nutrition deficiency or eating disorder when very finely milled.
The cute girl next to me and the excited, self-deprecating way she talked of their long obsession with not eating farm or factory processed food. Liberating goats and cows from barns in dramatic missions of naiveté and adventure.
The excitement with which I waited for her to get to her presentation about a mobile application she had been working on that involved mapping and GPS. How I excitedly suggested we all exchange contact information and band together our geek pursuits into a larger, more important coordinated pursuit.
And always testing our crazy contraptions and inventions on the steep, dynamic hillside of Bear Mountain. So well-known to us, yet so varied and powerful, always able to throw up the unexpected, to push our ideas and inventions to their edges, to their maximum capacity, where they are fantastically destroyed, or fantastically and unexpectedly succeed.
While I have spent most of my life as an idealist, I do not seem to be able to continue such a world view any longer.
Idealism: The property of having high ideals that are usually unrealizable or at odds with practical life.
Central to the idealist view is seeing the world not so much as it is, but as one would like it to be. Due to all humans’ inevitably anthropocentric view of existence, my “as one would like it to be” part was always solidly in the framework of a world most ideal for humans.
My recent inquiries into the ideas of non-dualism have begun to shatter these anthropocentric views on existence to the point that the very notion of a world that is ideal for humans now appears to be the very root of the unsustainable moment of madness our world currently reflects. Humanity, so concerned with the self-perceived majesty of its deluded powers of observation, now seems to me a truly flawed evolutionary experiment. Our evolutionary path towards dominance through brain-centered intelligence has imbued us with such a large set of intractable discontinuities and paradoxes that conflict and suffering are at the very foundation of our species’ existence.
But perhaps evolution itself is a process of perpetually flawed experiments. Forever interacting with a shifting landscape of reality over time, there could never be a life-form that perfectly responds to and accommodates the dizzying array of inputs that the harsh physics of both reality and the surrounding life-forms responding to reality output in a near infinite play.
I say no life-form as this is a classification which humanity and all other species and evolutionary experiments are intractably subordinate to. But life itself… it is something beyond classification. Life, in its totality. Life as the complement to the part of reality that is non-living, and even beyond that, the whole system that is life and non-life in perpetual balance with each other - here may be an idealism that actually exists. But it is not a point to be reached, a state to strive for, or an accomplishment to laud. No, this ideal state is forever and perfectly in process in every moment. For while there is no life-form that evolution has ever birthed to reality in perfect, perpetual balance with the world, there is also no perceivable time or place in which the game of life is not ever-present, nor ever out of balance. It is only in our perception of the details of life, the fractured moments of limited perception that our mind holds so dear, that humanity is doomed to see the need for suffering, for desire and for change. When the truth is there is never any need to bring about change, for change is forever. Change is perfect. Change is the face of the ever-present balance that our brain perceives in multiplicity and our soul accepts as one.
I do not call myself an idealist anymore because I no longer strive to be at odds with “practical life.” Practical life - that which is already occurring and is forever is where I now choose to exist. For even though this practical life is all that is, it is humanity’s unique distinction that allows us to choose to think otherwise. For it is only the mind that is capable of creating that which is not, while existence is simply that which is.
I ordered a new book from Amazon this week, You Were Never Born
, by John Wheeler. After reading a physics article (that I can’t find now) calling him a “poet physicist,” I began a search for books by theoretical physicist and Einstein collaborator, John Archibald Wheeler at Amazon. Instead, You Were Never Born by a totally different John Wheeler came up. It wasn’t what I was lookin for, but it had all 5-star customer reviews, and the first one, titled, “Probably the purest teaching I’ve come across,” intrigued me. It talked of a technique of spiritual teaching using “pointers” as a method to allow one to see one’s true nature. It is a recent book from a field known as Non-dualism whose principles were familiar to me, but whose name was not. On reflection, my very nickname, Y2, is a kind of non-dualist question/statement. Why two? Since of course, there is only one. This is the central precept of non-dualism in reaching its purpose, self-knowledge.
I’ve only read the introduction and have not yet gotten to the meat of the book, the dialogues, but already the book has affected me. Particularly Wheeler’s contention that there is no effort, special place or time, or work that needs to be done to reach true awareness of the truth of existence - what he and non-dualists call presence-awareness. Since presence-awareness is always what we truly are - it does not fade or change from waking to sleeping or due to changing emotional states or thought processeses - there is nothing that needs to be done to become aware of it. From this perspective, the very idea of enlightenment is a falseness and an impediment to reaching for what need not ever be reached for. So the logic of non-dualism goes, if enlightenment is a state that one must reach that is not currently attained, then a separation is required, which is against the aim of a non-dual state. The non-dual state is described as the consciousness or awareness that every experience, thought, emotion, and object of the world rests on. All of these are illusions of separation while the truth of awareness is infinite, unchanging, and forever.
At least, thats what I can describe it as at this early point in considering the teaching or pointers that John Wheeler has laid out. So far I’ve found the act of simply acknowledging (accepting? appreciating?) the state of being-awareness that is beyond thought and emotion is, as one questioner posed, a bit like a dog chasing its tail. Wheeler writes that the mind cannot process or think this state of being. It is not a concept. It is beyond thought. A fascinating proposition, but as of yet I must admit to difficulty in recognizing this state without cognition.
However, I do believe there was a time in my life that I may have been in acceptance and peace with this state for a moment and perhaps now look back on Read the rest of this entry »
“Losing the lighter-toned water ice leaves Iapetus’ dark side even darker, creating a yin-yang world where there is no grey.”
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/10/11/saturnmoon_spa.html?category=space&guid=20071011163030&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000
i think, for me, the wonder of the heavens derives from the idea that everything we’ve ever thought of, or ever will think of, is already out there, hurtling through that ever-expanding darkness.
are we dreaming it or is it dreaming us?
I just finished watching “A Scanner Darkly” for the first time. I downloaded the hi-def 720p HD-DVD rip off of bittorrent and enjoyed the amazing clarity and detail that only animation can provide through my Infocus projector projecting onto the living room wall of my apartment at 1024×768. I find it a bit ironic … A Scanner Darkly is a very paranoid movie, pretty much a rumination on the mental and emotional state of paranoia throughout. The main character is paranoid of every entity he interacts with, his friends, his girlfriend, his boss, himself, and most of all the very high-tech 3-D surveillance police state that he works for. In some ways it is true, we live in a police state. More than ever, surveillance cameras, federal wiretapping and internet snooping programs and efforts are moving forward and coming online. But back to the irony, here I am, publicly blogging about a movie I watched that was downloaded off of bittorrent. Perhaps this is folly (though, who’s to say I haven’t already bought the HD-DVD of Scanner Darkly and just downloaded a version because I don’t have an HD-DVD player to actually play the disc), but I think it says a lot about the state of law enforcement and its attempts at “total information awareness.”
Read the rest of this entry »
When I discovered my dad’s William Gibson books as a teenager, my view of reality and the possibilities to come in our technology-infused culture was forever changed. His vision of a net-connected world and the information black market it thus created spoke to me on a deep level. It has been interesting to see current culture catch up with his prophetic visions, while at the same time his books have moved backwards in time to the point where he now writes about the present. It seems a telling characteristic of our time that science fiction, once the harbinger of things to come, has now reached a point where it can only struggle to explain the character of the present, accelerating so rapidly that only the eyes of prescient futurists can make any attempt to take true stock of the changing world we now move through so rapidly. Such is the case with Gibson’s latest, “Spook Country,” an examination of America post-911 as only William Gibson could tell it.
A statement Gibson makes in the video below again reminds me that as unnatural and destructive a force humanity can appear to be, there is no escaping the fact that we are still, in fact, a force of nature. Or even, humanity is nothing more than another aspect of the force that is nature. From the viewpoint of an animal species moving through evolution, perhaps this point in human history is really not so strange. Read the rest of this entry »
My friend A over at Rainbow Ruminations recently introduced me to the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi through this post. It has already inspired me in my daily life, and is very much in line with the Buddhist teachings of compassion that Vipassana has awakened in me. It is so easy to use the difficult situations and/or bad moods of the environment and people around you as an excuse to have a bad attitude yourself. It is perhaps more difficult, yet so simple to take the opposite tack and see every one of these external situations or moods as an opportunity to exemplify one’s saintly nature. This is the true meaning of our lives on this planet. Continuing the trend of words through pictures, I am posting my desktop background with the newly added text of The Prayer of Saint Francis.
link to desktop background version
(photo courtesy of Giant Ginkgo)
Not a real haiku, but fridge haiku just sounds so much better than fridge poetry. This message from who knows where caught my attention from the bottom of the fridge just now. I have no recollection of how it got there.
