To quote one of the many people who conveniently paraphrase my thoughts before I get around to phrasing and expressing them myself:

“(Man) is born first of all into and contained in myths, meanings, ideas, images, words, creeds, theories, traditions. They stand irrevocably between him and external reality, so that he is not naked, and it not either. Everything in the world is hopelessly enwrapped in mythical garments; nothing is just what it pragmatically is… Naked reality is fundamentally out of reach. When man came into this world, he ipso facto had entered into One ongoing, continuous, and all-comprehensive Dream, a dream from which there was no awakening since this dream was his real world and life, his ‘reality principle’. What we call consciousness is just as much part of this Dream as are the many particular literal dreams (which normally are thought to belong to ‘the unconscious’) “

- Wolfgang Giegerich – in his article The End Of Meaning and the Birth of Man

http://www.cgjungpage.org/pdfdocuments/EndofMeaning.pdf

howtoheuristic asked:

Do you have a fully or rather-well formed concept of who you are that you seek to project or is it in bits and spurts? Shards of “oh yes, well this is how I would like to appear because this is how I am”?

Or some combination of those or something completely different?

No, I don’t have too detailed a concept of myself. So far as I’m concerned I’m a transitory being who is different from one week to the next and so I don’t try to give off any particular image because I don’t remember who I was and what habits and opinions I had last week, so I think if I tried to present a consistent image it would just come across as if I were lying. For a similar reason I find that I can’t not tell the truth (or at least my current version of it) when asked because I know I just wouldn’t be able to keep up with any lies told. Trouble is, people expect that whatever I’ve said to continue to be my truth, when in all likelihood it will change with time and context. I realise that that can come across as fickle, which is why I tend not to volunteer stuff unless specifically asked.

I just try to make sure that anything I project is how I really see myself at the time (which means I usually repress emotions initially until I can figure out if they are fleeting or a more consistent trait). But a major part of who I really am is accommodating and adaptive. I don’t chameleon and mirror consciously or for any particular purpose, it’s just how I spontaneously react to the external world – both material and social. Because of this, I feel as if I have so many different sides to me that it will be a lifelong study for me to understand myself. I always look back at something I’ve written years or months ago and think – “Did I really write that? It sounds like me, but I don’t remember being that knowledgable/assertive/supportive. Hey, I’m actually pretty interesting/intelligent/witty/caring.” It is only then that I get any sense of why people seem to like me, in general.

This is all further complicated by the fact that I never know that I have much of an opinion on anything one way or the other unless I get a specific prompt – or ask myself – and write it out in detail, after which I may change my mind about my opinion at any time. My worldview is constantly changing – or at least growing – because I try to stay completely open-minded in order to accommodate each new piece of information that I receive so that I’m not discarding anything that may become relevent when it comes to analysing a topic.

So, all this said, I can’t expect anyone external to be able to make an accurate judgement of me of their own accord, which means that when I express one of my many facets of being, I want to make sure that it is understood as clearly as possible by whoever is witnessing it. If I’m judged positively or negatively for who I really am, that’s fair and I totally accept that person’s opinion of me, but it makes me frustrated to be judged – again, whether that be positively or negatively – for who I know I’m not.

I found a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote a while back that I now use as my email signature: “Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.” That’s the only code I’ve ever lived by and so essentially those are the only traits I purposefully project into the world. If people know me as anything else, it’s probably their own projection or a misinterpretation.

The question I continue to be confounded by is: Why does it matter so much to me what anyone else thinks? Generally speaking, I don’t really care whether or not someone likes me and what they think of me (unless it’s one of the few people I let myself become attached to, then I care too much). It’s possibly a neurosis based on existential angst: what is the point of being here and living this specific life if it has not been accurately witnessed/recorded by others?

When I am observing people, or people-watching to put it in more socially acceptable terms, I watch their behaviour and try to ascertain the internal thought process behind the actions, or try to figure out the rationale behind how they physically present themselves. It can be most entertaining watching people play out their role in the ballet of everyday life.

Here’s a more detailed description of one of my more memorable observees to give you an idea of my thought processes: Back when I was working there was a guy who got on at the same skytrain station as me and we’d travel together from skytrain to seabus and over to North Van. I started noticing him when I was trying to find inspiration for the look of the character I had invented for my novel. I knew that he had noticed me, we always sat in the same section and we occasionally sat right next to each other when no other choice, and at one point we almost smiled at each other but we kept to the strict standard of commuting – no eye contact, no smiling. The Commuter’s Code never fails to amuse me.

After a few months I noticed that he sported a tattoo on his arm. It was written in some language that I’ve not seen before or since – perhaps some sort of Slavic script. Every time I saw it I’d wonder why he has a tattoo that nobody can read. Is it a secret code for others who can read it? Is it something personal that means something specific to him but that he doesn’t want others to know? Is it deliberately cryptic to give people a way of opening conversation with him? Is it merely a phrase that wouldn’t look so good in the English script?

I’ll never know the answers to these types of things without asking, but I can’t help myself from generating possibilities and then observing closer to see if I can figure out which is most likely. And then in the next instance that I come across a similar thing, I’ll have already done the “possibility generation” groundwork and have it stored somewhere in my head, which means I can hop straight to the “most likely” analysis, which means I can size up what I think to be the person behind the person pretty quickly, which – if I bother to say it out loud – makes me look insightful if I get it right or misguidedly judgemental if I get it wrong.

I don’t know why I don’t just ask directly, rather than feeling the need to set up a hypothesis to be proven right or wrong – I think I just like the feeling of getting things right, and being thought of as insightful, while getting things wrong isn’t such a big deal as the information is just added to the storehouse for next time I need to make a guess. It must annoy other people, though, particularly if I make a lot of wrong guesses about them. But in some ways it makes for a far more fun or interesting conversation to get it wrong and then have them argue their case as to why my assumption is wrong, than if it was just a straightforward question and answer leading to a simple factual exchange…it’s almost like it enlivens people to reaffirm their identity, or makes them realise that their behaviour can be interpreted differently to how they experience it, and the vehemence of their denial of your misinterpretation gives an indicator to how attached they are to that particular trait or quality about themselves.

For this reason, I’m often watching my own image and behaviour too, making hypotheses about how other people may be perceiving it, and modifying my behaviour/explaining my context if I believe they may be perceiving me to have motivations or rationales that don’t exist. For example, if I walk through a cloud of smoke I will want to hold my breath but will  try so hard not to let anybody notice that I’m doing so in case they interpret that as me somehow passing judgement on their smoking when, in fact, I don’t mind that at all but I just don’t want to have to unnecessarily breathe in second-hand smoke. I don’t want them to think I’m making some sort of social comment when I’m not, because that will probably lead to them making a mistaken judgement of me and so they will then have the wrong impression of who I am.

I just hate being misunderstood and misinterpreted. It is important to me that I am perceived exactly as I understand myself (or as close to it as possible) so I am always grateful when somebody reveals that I am presenting differently to how I think I’m projecting because then I have the chance to clarify and correct their perception of me.  I will often over-explain or over-adapt to make sure that this is so.

Rationalise. Compartmentalise. Repress. Sublimate. Rinse. Repeat.
What happens if we surrender?

 

Ripped from the womb, ejected into a world of separate states; born with the innate desire to reincorporate everything we perceive as outside of us in order to feel whole again, yet limited to a body and mind that can only experience one track at a time which allows no second chances, no do-overs, no next time; a being limited to three dimensions suspended in linear time, thus making it impossible to integrate everything that is available.

Whether we stay on a chosen track, wander off the path or go off the rails completely, we will suffer because we’ll never get what we want. It doesn’t matter if we have what we need. We”ll ALWAYS want what we don’t have and we can never have it all.  Trying to get over this suffering by denying it, fighting it, distracting ourselves from it or emptying ourselves and desiring nothing except what flows to us, is it all misguided? Becoming an observent ghost for experience to pass through…is that any better or worse than using the body and mind you’ve been given to make choices and direct yourself, to place yourself firmly on the board in the game of Choose Your Own Addiction? I don’t think it matters a bit, from a universal perspective, which way we go about things, or even that a choice needs to be made one way or the other.

 

The only way out would be to truly believe that we are all one and to have complete faith that EVERYTHING happens, and so everything that can possibly happen that is not experienced directly by our discrete self is being experienced by another part of our connected self… But even if we believe that, how do we make ourselves connected enough to FEEL as if we are directly experiencing all these things too?

How to flick that consciousness expansion switch?

How to feel, to concretely experience, what we intuit?

How to be God, rather than just one facet?

It’s back full circle. Wanting what we can’t have, what cannot be…yet.
Because the sum is presently only conscious of itself as its parts, not as a unification of those parts.
But it’s only once all the parts are examined and understood, that they can be unified and then transcended.
And as soon as that happens we will have to start all over again as we’ll just be the proverbial little fish in a bigger pond. It’s a neverending process.

So the only thing we need do with our time is endure our existence. Whatever we do with it and whatever comes our way, we should aim to greet life with as high a spirit as possible. Greet every experience with an open mind and and open heart – with curiosity and fascination and love rather than doubt and boredom and fear. Attach to everything that comes our way, fully and completely, then let it go when it is ready to go. The universe may or may not conspire to let it come back to us at some point to be experienced again in a different way. In the meantime we’ll be riding the next train that has entered awareness into the next phase on our journey.

I believe that completely surrendering in this way is the only way to remove the external and self-imposed limitations that block mankind from experiencing genuine, long-term joy and peace.

So 2013 is my Year Zero in this respect. I want to be bold, to turn my back on the illusion of security, to instead be completely present to the ever-changing flow of life.

Are you with me?

I’m sure this will be especially helpful for all you tl;dr types out there.

Anon friend: Some questions arise:  Will the Big Crazy Shit be explained? Who’s in charge and capable of making these people immortal? How does that happen? Are the human bodies not being inhabited simply going about like the not dead yet zombies at the start of Shaun of the Dead? And, of course, what does it all mean?

The thing is, I’m not really too interested in answering those questions – this version of reality just is, and I’m more interested in how the souls behave within those circumstances, rather than the ontological, world building aspects. Though if I did write something based on this idea I know that I’d have to answer those questions eventually, at least in a basic way, by the end of it, I’d rather let the reader come up with their own ideas. It’s more powerful to leave that element of wonder in there…

The whole idea of writing this came about just because I was pondering a way of looking at the world which would encourage both myself and other people to make the most of the current moment while living as empathically as possible -  to pose the questions:

• How would you live/what would you do if you knew that you’re only going to live 24 hours in the body you woke up in today and your only job was to record the experience of life, bearing in mind that you will have to live 24 hours in every single being that exists, so any suffering you create for others you will have to live through yourself?
• Are you able to go through 24 hours of intense emotional/physical suffering in order to keep your status as a soul with free will or would you trade it in for a life of passivity and force-fed virtual reality?
• Would you even be going through intense emotional suffering if you weren’t attached to any one identity/ego/personal story for more than 24 hours?

At the same time I was thinking about the analogy between life and role-playing video games where only the one character that the player is controlling has anything like the illusion of free will and a purpose, whereas all the other characters are just programmed to act within very set parameters – tied to a specific place with specific actions and lines that are only brought forth if the main character interacts with them (the analogy obviously also extends to books and main characters v supporting and background characters – the concept is the same whatever the media – book, film, video game…)

I have been approaching the idea as: God creates us in his own image and we create characters in our own image and so on up and down the levels of created reality, each level up in the nested set being increasingly omniscient/omnipotent. Each created universe being a metafiction inside another metafiction into infinity and eternity.

“God” as a metaphorical Russian Doll set of insightful and imaginative writers trying to understand and convey their experience of life is a concept that I have thought about a lot this year.

Suppose:

Some Big Crazy Shit happened at 12.35 p.m. PST on December 23, 2012. Time is now cyclical: there are only the same 24 hours looping over and over again. And there are only 100 souls still on Planet Earth to go around the billions of sentient beings living on it, who usually function on an autopilot program based solely on the content of the memory banks they had at the point just before the Big Crazy Shit happened. At the beginning of each 24-hour period, each of the souls wakes in a randomly assigned body/mind, with access to the full database of that being’s memories but no other knowledge of themselves or the world except that:

• they are a soul assigned to experience the world through the being they are piloting
• they will only get 24 hours to pilot that being.
• when the 24 hours is up, the soul will have all of the information collected in that period wiped from them and will be transmigrated into another randomly assigned body.
• all the experience that they collect in their 24 hours as this particular being will be transmitted to an alternate universe where it will make up part of a simulated world needed to sustain a civilization of souls being kept prisoner in a world that has no physical features – a whole amorphous blob of trapped souls who cannot actively create any experience for themselves.
• they will be reincarnated as every single sentient being on the planet once, and then their mission will be over and they will be made gods – immortal and free to do anything they can imagine
• they must live the full 24-hour period inside each body: if the body should die accidentally or be murdered during their tenure, then they will remain inside the dead body until time is up
• if they should kill their body on purpose then they will swap places with one of the billions of souls living in the “simulated world” prison civilization and be forced into an unending virtual life of complete passivity with no free will.

Are you with me so far? Okay…

In my 24 hours as Kate, I – soul 58 – have worked out that once in a blue moon some blip happens that makes time move forward properly into a new 24-hour period, the experiences collected by souls are not wiped and transmitted as usual, but compiled and added as new information to the storehouse of  memories in the mind of the body they are piloting and the soul must spend an extra 24 hours in that body. And because I’m still here, I know with absolute certainty that it’s blue moon day today. I’ve decided to share the above information with you, because I have this strange hunch that you might very well be being soul-piloted today, and strange hunches, especially no-risk ones, are always worthy of some action, in Kate’s experience.

So, soul-whatever-number-you-are, if you’re in there, it’s so nice to be in contact with another real, live soul! I’m sure that barely ever happens…What do you make of all this? Pretty fucked up, no? But kind of enjoyable too – we’re the chosen ones – how lucky are we?! Though it’s a long road ahead and no mistake. Probably. Who the hell knows what day we’re on and how many incarnations we have left? We might be five days off being gods for all we know!

Anyway,  I hope you made good use of the last 24 hours since they’re gonna be the once-in-a-blue-moon brand new memories for your current Automaton. If these automatons could experience anything I bet it would  feel very odd for these ones being 24-hours ahead of most of the rest of the world but they’re just not going to notice are they, until some other soul gets into them and thinks “Ah, hang on, this one thinks it’s Monday and everyone else says it’s only Sunday! That’s odd. You’ve been piloted before sonny jim!” (that’s how I worked out the Blue Moon blip thing btw, in case you’re wondering).

I’m curious, what do you plan to do with your automaton with these extra 24 hours piloting them? If you’re not in there, um, hello Automaton. Tell me, what’s it like finding out that you’re an empty walking time-capsule for us souls to navigate?

I’ll be being you, unless I’ve already been you ;o)
*ponders*
or maybe I even was you before that Big Crazy Shit happened,
*strokes chin*

58

P.S. I’m not making this up…
P.P.S. Though I probably am.
P.P.P.S. if you’re Automaton, would you like me to free your soul from sim-world-prison when I’m made a god?

I think we are. My theory of life, the universe and everything has recently been reduced to two words: Everything Happens.

In other words, everything that can possibly happen is happening simultaneously on infinite levels of reality. Each conscious entity is deposited in a particular time and space, our job being simply to bear witness to specific possibilities which allows them to become manifest. We choose what we experience, from all the possibilities allowable within the parameters of our personal programming. In other words, we have free rein to weave whatever path we wish, based on the variables presented to us in each moment, limited by the physical and biological etc framework that we are born into.

Article: http://www.livescience.com/25589-are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation.html

The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.

SLIDE SHOW: Violent Beauty of Our Evolving Universe

In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.

He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.

To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.

As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.

CREDIT: J.F. Colonna.

View full size image

The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.

Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.

ANALYSIS: Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer

The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”

We are also living at a very special time in the universe’s history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question “why me why now?” (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)

If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It’s as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.

Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.

Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their “theory” of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our “God” really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?

CREDIT: Boston University

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Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.

ANALYSIS: Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer

If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.

If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question “why does God need a lattice?”)

If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.

If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined “stacked” levels of reality, “we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time.”

To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, “In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”

If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix’s manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.

To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov’s novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.

The sensationalist media is just part of the motive, as availability of guns is only part of the means by which something like this happens. Using a tragedy to debate *any* point is missing the point. Even by writing this, by making this point, I am missing my own point.

Our society is blindly following the tracks that our past has laid, and will continue to do so so long as we try to find a single cause to blame, and put our energy into our egotistical fear and anger, and fight wars with each other assuming that only one side can win.

Everything in this world is thus turned into a No Man’s Land. True empathy and compassion is the only way out of it. Are we capable of that as a civilisation? As a species? I’m really not sure. And that is why I feel so deflated.

Note: I’m absolutely FOR gun control. I just think that the time to debate it is at ALL TIMES OTHER than as an emotional reaction to a tragedy such as this. Attention at this time should be focussed on helping the people involved in dealing with their trauma. When the emotion has died down a little, the nation will be in a better position to have a RATIONAL debate about the causes and what can be done to prevent further tragedies. When the emotion, the fear, the anger has subsided, when people stop pointing fingers at each other as a way of protecting their own rights/opinions, then we’ll all be in a much better position to empathise with each others’ concerns, and hopefully come to some sort of compromise based on compassion rather than fear.

So you’re standing in the kitchen looking at a tin of baked beans, and you’re thinking: whoop-di-doo, it’s a can of baked beans. Right?

 But then you get to thinking about some of the things that needed to happen in order for that can of baked beans to be right there in front of you at that moment:

 - the can needed to be designed by someone

- the can needed to be shaped into that shape by a machine

- that machine had to be designed and built by various people

- the best metal to use in the can, and the coating was the result of however many hours of scientific research

- the natural resources to make both can and canning machine had to be mined from the depths of the earth

- the mining machines had to be designed and built by various people

- the metal deposits had to be discovered by someone and sold to a company that could extract it

- the label is made from paper that was milled from a tree that was cut down

- the tools for both cutting down the tree and milling the paper had to be designed and built and operated by various people

- the tree once cut had to be loaded onto a truck which was designed and built by various people, and driven by someone cross country, using gas that was extracted from the earth by a company that was set up to do such a thing by someone who was knowledgeable and rich enough, to employ the right people and buy the right tools which had to be designed and built by various people, and the gas itself had to be driven or shipped or flown by transport designed and built by various people

- the label had to be printed using machines designed and built and operated by varioius people, using dyes sourced from…

- the label was designed by various people based on the marketing research of various other people

- the font used on it was designed by someone

- the picture of the beans was taken by somebody trained in food art, using equipment designed and built based on a process invented by etc…

- the beans inside were grown from seeds planted, tended, and harvested by a farmer using knowledge based on thousands of years’ experience, using equipment that…etc

- same thing with all the other natural ingredients in the can

- all the unnatural ingredients had to be invented and pass muster with the scientific community as fit for human consumption

- somebody invented the exact recipe to be followed to make this particular brand of beans

- the product then needed to be branded and marketed

- the product had to bought by buyers who compared the product with other simlar products for quality and value

- the product had to be transported across the country (or countries) in order to get stocked in various shops, built buy various people, based on plans made by various architects in conjunction with various city planners and community partners, lit by electricity provided by…etc

- the can had to be priced and barcoded and entered into the shop’s inventory system, then stocked on shelves in a particular way as to attract the attention of shoppers

- the can had to be checked out of the store when you buy it, based on a computer system designed and built and maintatined by etc…

- all of the education that any of the people involved in any of these processes above had to be dispensed by teachers who themselves had to go through the education system, using information gleaned from literature that had been written by way of billions of hours of study of researchers past

- all of the correspondance that had to be carried out for any of the above business partnerships to function had to be successfully delivered by the postal/email system which in themselves rely on a myriad of other things that I can’t even be bothered to follow into their rabbitholes at the moment…

- and that’s before we even begin to get into how all of these people manage to communicate in any kind of common language at all..

 And that’s just SOME of the things.

There’s an entire bloody universe in that can of beans if you look deeply enough. If you truly consider each thing that you encounter and how it has come to be in your presence (or all the things that have led to YOU having come to be in ITS presence at that point in time) then you will just be mind-blown in awe at how amazingly connected and interdependent everything in the universe is. Something as simple as a can of beans has come to be only because of a huge web of historically and culturally connected individual events and because your brain likes to think linearly you cannot possibly follow all those strands of web back to their origins and extrapolate their future destinations at the same time without it imploding. Your brain can’t do that and still allow you to function on a social level. But that doesn’t change the fact that all those strands in the web are there. It all happened somewhere on the perimeters of your conscious perception of the present moment.

 So what do we, as humans do? We think: “Right, can of beans. How boring. What can I do with them to create something better/different?

i.e. we just take for granted how it came to be, in order to think about what it could potentially be, thus extending the web ever outwards. We simplify and “big picture” the entire process in order to take it to the next level, to grow, to evolve, which is great, but by doing that we completely forget to appreciate what already is and has been.

What is the lesson to take from all this?

That there’s practically an entire universe inside EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL THING OR PERSON?

That as we grow ever outwards into greater and greater complexity as individuals and as a society and as a civilization and as a species we lose appreciation of  where we came from, feel a disconnection from the source, and that leads to greater boredom, lesser spiritual awareness but greater creativity?

 I don’t know. That’s all I’ve got at present. Thoughts?

Shine bright,

Gleaming eye in the sky at night:

It’s just you and me

And the haze that surrounds us.

Sometimes when I look

I see myself reflected in you.

Red and yellow glow

Then go.

You are complete.

I wish I were you

And everyone would stare

And wonder at the beauty

Of me.