that same old fff 3am post again
i-am-your-idea said:
how can reality be seperate from our imagination? i think seperate-ness as we know it is a construct of the ego. once we lose that our superficial distinctions between things, we can view everything as one. and then afterwards recognise seperateness but pass no judgement upon it.
i forget where i am in all this.
actually this is making a ton of sense to me on second time reading. i admit i just thought yeah yeah, this is another thread about cosmic ordering. see how cynical oprah winfrey makes you. i retract all the harry potter crap.
you are my idea
you can read a lot about consciousness being "that which divides" - the idea that it is "human nature" to categorise, that everything you know exists in a framework composed of comparisons of difference. so, an apple is like a pear in many ways, but it's the ways in which it's not like a pear which makes it an apple. without pears, apples would be different to what they are now. in your head, anyway.
the problem for me is that i don't think an ego is required for this, if you take ego to mean, that part of a conscious creature that has ideas about itself. by that definition of ego, everything that is alive has one, to some extent.
it is in our nature to "pick things out". it's how the senses work. and again, all living things have senses - it is part and parcel of being alive. a mind born with no connections to the outside world would not be alive, or at best, it would be like the zero-dimensional point creature in Flatland, who eternally sings "me me me me me! lovely me! i am me! me me me!" because it can only contemplate itself - and, if you break open the cognitive shell and speak to it, it just assumes that what it hears is itself. (disclaimer: this would not actually work. because in an infinitely small space there is no room for any complexity, no array to be reordered, no volume in which change can occur: therefore no consciousness.)
so there is no such creature. the zero-d point entity literally has no space to be in. in our world, which has space and extent, all living things build a boundary between themselves and everything else, and its external senses depend upon that which is allowed to break that boundary, or that which will just break it anyway. photons; air vibration; bullets; shit; a salt gradient or, worryingly, a magnetic field if you're a bacterium.
i don't sense practically all of the ridiculous omnidirectional howl of exotic particles scouring right through me this very moment. likewise, a bacterium doesn't hear you shouting at it. but we pick out other stuff; that is how both we and amoebae are built. i need to be able to divide hot from cold, red from black, salt from sweet. so does a slime mold, in some sense.
but a living thing is also aware of itself internally. senses point both ways. and in creatures of what we call "higher consciousness", that awareness is also aware of itself - it builds, maintains, changes a fuzzier picture of itself within itself. that is ego:
a function of the senses.
so there is one very direct sense in which our imaginations are real: they are a process which runs on a real bedrock. really, there is a direct causal chain of events right from mind itself down to however much you want to spend on really powerful microscopes. mind is a process of self-affecting change in your cognitive network, which arises from the various interlocking systems in your body such as the nervous system, the lymph network, blood vessels, tissues; these themselves are built out of cells which are themselves cognitive networks which form their own boundaries; some even say that the complex cells of animals, vegetables and protists, with their internal structures and their little labelled functions, are actually more ancient, simpler cells
that were invaded by entire, smaller cognitive cells - like a beneficial parasite, the "cellular organ" that drives photosynthesis in modern plants looks suspiciously like an entire cell of ancient blue-green algae; and then you jump down to molecules and their catalytic cycles; and then you're in the atomic realm and it's all about exchanges of energy states and electrons being passed back and forth; and
then it gets complicated. we are tornadoes made out of smaller tornadoes made out of ...
there is no room here for extra soul. there are no magic hops on that structural ladder down to the planck length. what some people call spirit is right there: in the ever-ramifying changes of the real. there is no ghost. the ghost is a
category error. life is not
stuff. it is
what stuff does. there is only stuff doing stuff. and what stuff it does. we only see ghosts because we are geared to assign
intent. it helps us stay alive. it's just that there are many false positives.
there is no room for god either. the god of the gaps automatically dies, snuffed out like the zero-d creature that cannot think.
there are no gaps. therefore, no gaps for god to be in.
we think with our eyes and our guts and our tongues and our enormous swollen sex organs. our brain is a trifle in comparison. my trifle has fuck-off big cherries in it, which is nice, admittedly.
psychologists dared to call this massive dominance of consciousness over ego, this basic consequence of being alive, the "sub"-conscious. like it's underneath, inferior - it's even sometimes described as something consciousness does and not the other way round! but it's not sub, it's seriously meta. ego is a fucking blip in the middle of it, or, a hazy smear, depending on how much energy you throw at it in how small a space.
so this is not human nature we are talking about.
it never is. this is
life.
an ego is not required to discriminate.
so, the eastern doctrine of abandoning separateness alternately disgusts me and seduces me.
on the one hand, it feels like
fighting life. there is no living creature which is not aware of itself to some extent and therefore has something at least analogous to an ego. at best, if you want to draw up pecking orders, there is some degree of complexity, some order of magnitude of interconnectedness, that is required before a conscious thing can turn in on itself and have a full-on ego; but even a single cell still reacts to itself, rebuilds itself in its own image, maintains a boundary between itself and the world. it's
that deep an instinct.
on the other hand, sometimes you realise you have let go of something, stopped seeing a difference between things; sometimes you realise that you let some idea of yourself play itself out and die. and when you look back at how you felt before you realised you had done it, you realise you were feeling
mighty fine. you can't even remember any more what that idea of who you were fully was; you can only dredge up a fuzzy holographic smudge of it.
... but then what if you let all those reflexive ideas die, and became purely a thing that observes and reacts to the outside without ever turning in on itself. it really is like staring into a void. it would the death of the part of you that knows itself. which is surely the basis for your knowledge of other people. that is what reflexive thinking
has become for - the social realm. the abstract domains of language, symbolism is
good. what is society if it's not grouped pattern processing, a group of creatures that share knowledge about the best environment to make, with the minimum loss of complexity. this ability to reshape the world evolved out of pure chaos. why throw it away?
which ideas are the useful ones? that is the point of passing judgement. that is what we do so well and what god does so fucking badly. people look at the universe and mistake it for god.
it's not there. we have to discover what is good for ourselves, and to do that we have to know ourselves. the universe is very beautiful without god.
the eternal tao, on the other hand, is fab, it's true. but ultimately it becomes something merely occasionally satisfying that helps you relax. actually, you have work to do and feelings to be feeling.
amen.
i keep forgetting all of this.
