A Matter of Opinion

Ontologically, I boxed myself into a corner.
A point of view always remains, right, René?

Life (and Death, for that matter) is a matter of opinion,
i.e. a matter of consciousness,
i.e. (again) an opinion made of matter.

So, before you kick a random stone on the road,
ask yourself:
“Does it consider itself alive?”

Notes:
René = Descartes

Euphonious Apophenia

1.
Unsolicited, reality streams.
If your ear’s already trained to the sound of reality, you hear nothing but random noise.
If, however, your ear is epistemologically* still new, you hear marvelous melodies of meaning.
2.
We all start out as equal.
But then we get preferred, selected, chosen.
In: the beautiful (as the mind’s eye sees it)! Out: the ugly!
3.
We keep trying to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio**.
We seek more signal, we seek less noise.
We find more discrimination, we find less harmony.
4.
Reverse the polarity of your preference:
Let the pattern-hunting mind find nothing but noise.
Heal thyself from your euphonious apophenia***.
5.
In: beautiful!
In: ugly!
Out: no difference!

*Epistemology, or theory of knowledge,  is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.  It addresses the questions:  What is knowledge?   How is knowledge acquired? What do people know? How do we know what we know?  (source: wiki)

**Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR): is a measure used in science and engineering to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise.  “Signal-to-noise ratio” is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange.  (source: wiki)

***Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.” (source: wiki)

Fear No Emptiness

Truth is tribe-specific, mind-specific, moment-specific, fear-specific information.
You make a sound (whatever it is that your culture designated for a given fear)
And - bam! - everybody’s mind stops agog: “What? What?!”

I know one thing: there is no one thing, i.e. there is no one truth, i.e. there is no truth.
I left some blank space above and below for you to process this information
out of the singularity of your emptiness.

Fear no emptiness, certainly not your own!
"Boo!-ddha" is but an alarm call for: "beware of informational fullness."
Empty your mind of fear.

Your (and my) skull is a soup bowl full of alphabet; tip it over.
Fear no information.
Let mind spill.



notes:

Buddha: from Pali, lit. "awakened, enlightened," pp. of budh "to awake, know, perceive," related to Skt. bodhati "is awake, observes, understands" (etymonline.com)

Un-bullied by Meaning

My genes walked through the snow peaks of Africa
and through the endless sand dunes of Volga time.

Was not in a rush.

Picture 8* of the Ox-herding series, I simply circle
around your mind’s emptiness like a bird of word-prey.
Waiting for meaning.

No bull.

*Ten Bulls/Ox Herding Pictures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox_Herding_Pictures

Krishnamurti vs. Krishnamurti: Divorce of Meaning

Some wake up to an alarm clock, some to a rooster call, some to a spreading aroma of coffee, some to a lick of the dog’s tongue.  Here’s a Jiddu Krishnamurti line that woke me up one not-so-distant morning…

“Seeking is never born of humility.”

Indeed.  To seek is to desire something different from “this.”  To seek is reject “this,” to reject this “now,” to express – even if only internally – a sense of dissatisfaction with Reality.  To seek is to want more.

Jiddu Krishnamurti:  “Seeking is never born of humility.  Isn’t it?  The desire to achieve, to arrive, is part of the pride which conceals itself as seeking.”

To seek is to desire.  To desire (from L. desiderare "long for, wish for," original sense is "await what the stars will bring," from the phrase de sidere "from the stars," from sidus (gen. sideris) "heavenly body, star, constellation") is to star-gaze.  To star-gaze is to ignore what is in front of you, to ignore what is under your feet, to ignore “what is.”  Thus, to seek is to lust for the sky.

Seeking is ambition.  Ambition (from L. ambitus, pp. of ambire "to go around," as in ambulation) is to walk away from “what is,” to escape one’s existential coordinate in search of a better one, to leave only to arrive only to leave again, never being wherever it is that you are, perpetually dissatisfied with each and every point of one’s journey, always improving on “what is” as if it is never good enough.I get it, Jiddu: seeking is arrogance, acceptance is humility, and arrival is but the first moment of departure.

Jiddu, you woke me up.  And put me right back to sleep.  All at once.  I follow your logic as it so eloquently leads into this seemingly unstimulating Nowhere where, as you posit, Everything is. 

I, like Jiddu’s fellow-philosopher and name-sake U.G. Krishnamurti, struggle with this version of "this."

From 1947 to 1953, U.G. Krishnamurti regularly attended talks given by Jiddu Krishnamurti in India, eventually beginning a direct dialogue with him in 1953.  U.G. related that the two had almost daily discussions for a while, which he asserted were not providing satisfactory answers to his questions. Finally, their meetings came to a halt. He described part of the final discussion:And then, towards the end, I insisted, "Come on, is there anything behind the abstractions you are throwing at me?" And that chappie said, "You have no way of knowing it for yourself". Finish -- that was the end of our relationship, you see -- "If I have no way of knowing it, you have no way of communicating it. What the hell are we doing? I've wasted seven years. Goodbye, I don't want to see you again". Then I walked out. (from Wikipedia).

So, it’s Jiddu Krishnamurti vs. U.G. Krishnamurti, in a Kramer vs. Kramer style divorce of meaning!  Who’s right?  Who’s wrong?  Ugh – like U.G. I’m seeking certainty as if confusion isn't good enough!

But what a beautiful dilemma, isn't it?!  Is search for something better, indeed, a form of arrogance?  Is desire for improvement a failure of humility?  Is star-gazing a failure to accept that we are the very dust we stand on, even if this dust is star-dust? 

Or is humility overrated?  Is it perhaps that acceptance is nothing but passivity without which there'd be no hope of finding cure for cancer?  And ambition (with its ambulating away) isn’t running but, in fact, the necessary form of getting unstuck and repositioning to a more adaptive existential coordinate?

Was Jiddu awake or simply dreaming that he was awake?  Was U.G. asleep or simply lucid-dreaming?   Am I a butterfly dreaming that I am Zhuangzi or Zhuangzi dreaming that I am a butterfly?

Off we go!  And off we stay...

Resources:

Syadvada

In Search of Right Epistemological Light

Vincent van Gogh, 1885, small studio in Antwerp: walls “pinned” with reproductions of “fanciful, peculiar, unheard of” Japanese prints.  As Japanese art has begun to colour Van Gogh’s experience, he searches for the right light. 

“Last year I painted almost nothing but flowers so as to get used to colours other than grey, […] pink, soft or bright green, light blue, violet, yellow, orange, glorious red.”

A free-standing opinion is always a black-and-white figure/ground fiction-of-a-fact.

“And when I was paining landscapes […] this summer, I saw more color in them than I did before.”

Indeed, seeing reality “as is” is a skill of willingness.

“To make the journey in one go from the north to Spain […] Is not a good thing, you will not see what you should see – you must get your eyes accustomed gradually to the different light.”

Indeed, seeing reality “as is” is a skill of sensitization.

“I came to the south and threw myself into work for a thousand reasons – looking for a different light, believing  that observing nature under a brighter sky might give one a more accurate idea of the way the Japanese feel and draw.  Wanting, finally, to see this stronger sun, because one has the feeling that unless one knows it one would not be able to understand… […] Because you paint a bit of sunny wall from nature, well and truly according to our northern way of seeing things, does that prove that you have seen the people of the east?”

Indeed, seeing reality “as is” is a skill of self-deception. 

We are inescapably ourselves, each mind with its own perceptual prism, with its own subjective lens; each mind – its own, idiosyncratic point of view.  To see reality “as is” we would have to transcend our sensory apparatus, we would have to step outside our own bodily selves, and see what our eyes see.  But how can we?  What we see is thrice-filtered information: first, filtered by the specifics of our eyes, then, re-filtered by the selectively-attending specifics of our attention, and then re-re-filtered by our discursively-interpretive minds.  Sure, we may try to drop the mind-filter, we might even possibly put our historically-unique attentional sensitivities (to, say, yellow) aside, but then we still are only looking through the rods and cones of our eyes.  Reality – “as is” – is always out there. 

And so we paint models of right light…  There is no such thing-less thing...

References:

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Penguin Classics

Mindfulness is Ignorance (Bliss) on Demand

Ignorance, they say, is bliss.  As I see it, there are 2 kinds of ignorance:

1.  ignorance of un-awareness (mindlessness of something that can be known)

2. ignorance by choice (a conscious decision to ignore that which cannot be known)

Which type of ignorance is bliss and which is existential loss?

Let’s see if we can briefly sort this out.

You’ve heard this: the past has already happened, therefore it doesn’t exist; the future hasn’t happened, therefore it doesn’t yet exist; thus, here’s nothing but Now…

So, here we stand, sandwiched between the Past that’s already gone and doesn’t exist, and the Future that hasn’t yet happened and therefore doesn’t exist, in the proverbial and pre-verbal here-and-now.  This is all there is!

To ignore this “Now” (the only “thing” that exists) would be the ignorance of un-awareness.  This kind of mindlessness (lack of awareness of the present moment) is an existential loss.  How come?  Because here’s this moment: here it is, it can be known but, if untapped, it remains un-lived.

To ignore what’s outside of this “Now” (i.e. to ignore what cannot be known) would be the ignorance of bliss…  Can this kind of bliss be available on demand?  Sure.  How?  Through mindfulness.  

Mindfulness is a commitment to what is (i.e. to this Now), accompanied by a conscious choice to ignore whatever isn’t (i.e. what cannot be known such as the future or what no longer exists, such as the past).  Mindfulness is a form of ignorance on demand, i.e. a form of bliss on demand.

Pledge allegiance to the Present!  Ignore the rest.  

Not always, of course.  Can’t live in the now 100% (got to reminisce a bit, dwell a bit, plan a bit, worry a bit – that’s all natural mind-stuff).  But whenever you feel like it.  On demand, that is.