A layman’s one-time blog, article, essay, whatever
where to?
In this tiny planet lives tiny beings with tiny brains producing experiences in a tiny corner of the head.
The emperor is all clothes and all about skin in the age of packaging and marketing. A reflection on what we have become.
No apologies to those who know they do not know. Words are freely used here. They will come and go, whether in seeming clarity or contradictions. It’s here and not here so it is not because the mind is clear, but rather one never knows when the mind is clear. Saying the mind is clear would be like asking if the sky is clear. But the sky is the sky. One can not grab it, only the things moving around. So can there also be clarity in a mind emptying itself of its contents? One has to find out for oneself.
Freedom is boundless intelligence. The other way around is not, so it is not about what one wants or demands. It can not be measured so nothing to do with size and numbers, whether one has more possessions than others or one is in a higher position than others in the steep ladder of human aspirations.
It is not something that can be aspired for, so it is not about comparison. Not about the-more-and-the-better, nor about the-more-the-better. It comes on its own from its unknown nature, not driven by thinking, not by or for the personal, not something to be claimed or possessed, for arrogance of the learned or an owner only covers it up with ignorance.
It has no opposites so it is not about games of opposites. We old minds may recall innocent games we enjoyed as children. Like being in a seesaw with one end going up while the other end is going down, a playful game of opposites. Another common enjoyment is the swing, just oneself going up and down. Growing up however requires the learning of self-nurturing games of opposites that adults go through in the individual pursuit of a successful life (drumroll). In the daily exposures to the way of life and pressures to blend in by cultural conditioning, so on, that a child experiences to become *something*, so as not to be regarded and treated as *nothing*, it is all too often that when knowledge is gained, being a child is lost.
That intelligence is not something put together by thought, invested with meaning and purpose. It is not in the movement of thought so it is not of the mind. Giving it a name and putting words around it is not it.
Rather it is from nature, something brought about by eons of evolution. It is natural intelligence already here, an inheritance through the species. We have glimpses of it as children when we go through wondrous states or magical moments when touched by something new and unknown to our child mind. It is also in the pure anguish when a child sees something in physical pain. We see it also in action, not as premeditated action, but at times of crisis that demands critical action and no time for thought except time to respond to a pure demand for all to act together or for one to help another in distress, not bounded by motivations and questions about differences, whether accidental or ones that separate. That natural intelligence is also there in utter silence, in the adult ever a child reborn, in seeing the immensity of it all through the nothingness of the mind, whether looking at a tiny leaf or being among the bright night sky and the silent stars. It is not when in a silence fabricated by the mind, but when the mind is silenced by what is before it, unable to touch it, unable to put a word into it.
A computer programmer knows how to program. But is the programmer also a program? And does the program know that it is a program? Computer programs come in different programming languages, but the languages are not designed for the computer. They are for humans, to make it easier to program. To the computer, the words are just ways to get to its switches.
Nature is here, lots of secrets and magic but does not use or rely on knowledge. It is what it is, no pro-or-con, yes-or-no control, confusion or chaos. Nature’s living process is creation and destruction but it does not make distinction between the two. It also has no distinction between order and disorder, up or down, nothing or something, the non-living and the living, pleasure and pain, so on. A distinction is a projection by the living in its capacity to think and its interest in its own continuity.
Nature does not store knowledge anywhere. The embodiment of nature is itself. It does not publish books for it does not need or use books. It is rather, so to speak, a living book acting according to its living laws. It has no need for words to play with. It is everything – nowhere to go, nothing to own or lose, to be, to become, to want. No need to know, to discover what’s already there, so nothing new, nothing old. “More to the right, a little above, too much, very slightly down, just perfect”. “Where’s my good-looking mountain?”..”earthquake…see the beautiful lake and the ugly rocks around it….that’s your good-looking mountain now”. “And my nice-looking carrots?” “wait for the rabbits to poo.” No need to go batty or neurotic playing with ownership, oneness, meaning, purpose, fulfillment, so on and on. Just the balance sheet – no loss, no gain.
Nature’s evolution is a slow-paced come-what-may process, evolving processes from and into evolving results, randomly or not, not from a design, not guided by purpose, meaning, significance, awareness, so on. It has no opposites nor favorites – a species continuing smoothly may also go extinct abruptly. Yet we are creatures of nature’s evolution of life processes, of non-life unto life, life unto life, life unto non-life.
And here we are, we have become what we have become. Eons of evolution and as humans we come to this: from awareness into self-awareness into self-importance.
Silence and nothing are representations of absences that do not represent something that can be pointed at. The drive for silence and nothingness is a drive by thought. It is thought trying to take control so it is a silencing by thought, a representation of thought about itself. Sensitivity is when the senses are working without the interference of thought. Awareness is not driven by thought, it is the senses perceiving and using thought and knowledge when needed.
Nothing into something is a nagging question in want of an answer. We want the ultimate truth or whatever, that is everything, because we do not push our mind to its furthest point: that it does not know. The sense of not knowing is not touched at all. So is there really a question or it’s just there is someone, something that wants something? If suddenly we know the answer because we do not know the answer then it must be because we want the answer to be what we want it to be. nothing into something. The question unknowingly carries a hidden answer – itself. The mind trying to understand what it has fabricated. “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is also a nagging question in want of an answer. But if we ask first “what was there before the chicken and the egg?”, the nagging question becomes trivial and disappears. In “what was there before something”, nothing into something may just have no meaning, else it might well be something to do with nature that is already at work. If the word nothing has a fundamental nature (a singularity?, whatever that means), not just an intellectual concept, nature’s processes may well comprise of nothing into nothing, nothing into something, something into something, something into nothing. But who actually knows? A closer look might be in “i-was-there-before-i-am-here” motion. No problem, just something traveling. Except what if there was just a disturbance of space itself, into a disturbance next to there, and so on, up to here? Has something moved or traveled? Or just easy come, easy go, nothing to explain or understand?
What can you give someone who has everything? Probably nothing. What can you give someone who wants nothing? Probably nothing. What can you give someone who wants everything? Probably all you have, and more. So again, probably nothing. But everything for what? A lot to do with words. The power of thought in the limitation of thought, as is the other way around: what do you mean by “nothing”?
“it means what i want it to mean.” “wow! can i do that too? where do you live?” “mind avenue”. “wow! we’re neighbors.”.
In the “am-I-sure?-of-course-I-am-sure” way of thinking, the word is the thing – the illusion of nothing as being something.
Through thought, ignorance and arrogance, we are capable of making the truth as slippery as the false. A representation has easily the same footing as a misrepresentation. Either can hide behind words because either is never the actuality. Theories or beliefs are only what we think we know. A successful test only keeps it that way for a failure demands its end or a change. So behind the test for actuality must be the willingness to find out what is actual – and the actual is also something directly observable in the way we live and think. Faith is saying we can say we already know. The problem is we can always say this without a regard to contradictions, and another can also always say the same regardless, nurturing a circus of opposing theories and beliefs all around the seesaw. But what is life, where is life? Is life a theory, a belief, in a theory, in a belief? Is life the tiny corner of the head and is it what is happening there?
What we want to understand about life we won’t understand. Because we do not know and nobody else knows. We come up with ideas and so we have all these opposing ideas. And no end to it because as a society we are culturally educated to have ideas about life until a holder of the background emerges from the background of ideas, chasing its own tail.
It is not really surprising that even in modern times we can say there is no fundamental difference in the quality of life, so to speak, between one living comfortably in the jungle with the barest means and one living in comfort with all the wealth. We can also say there is no basic difference between one who wants to be rich and another who wants to be poor. Two opposites nurtured by a common driving force, the valued word “want”, born out of thought.
Want is about what is not – I want something to have, to be, to become. You are here, you want to be there. You are this, you want to be that – a thought, a representation, the future, not what is. Want needs time so it is of time. You are happy, you want to be always happy. You have a desirable experience. You want, you desire to repeat the experience. You had a bad experience. You do not want to have that experience again. You exist, you can not help but want continuity. And so on. When life is about what one can have, what one can do, what one can be, what one can think, then there is the idea of what must be, usually happiness, a pleasurable state. Behind the what must be is the knower of the idea, and in front is the chaser of the how-to. The knower and chaser linger, for the demand and the pursuit is the unhappiness. In the what and how-to questions is the battle for answers unknowingly already in the questions, so the continuity is the never-ending aspirations and translations, modifications, adjustments, so on, for want is thought, nourished in a corner of the head. It is what is not, and in the chase of what must be, brings the question how. How is a thought about the continuity of the thinker and so the mind thrives in wants and hows – it is everywhere in everyone. The wants and hows is one, bound to each other. It is the human condition – thinker and thought as one process, but where is it? And if it can not be found, what role does evolution play? “Who has more fortune, or rather, who is more fortunate, X, a poor person who never feels deprived, or Y, someone rich who has more than enough but wants more?”
X: “Huh?”
Y: “It’s obvious.”
The question really is why does the question arise? It is observable that the question is very likely a driving force in Y. The answer is already in the question because the words in the question have values for Y – so like a computer, the words are just ways to get to Y’s switches, a way to the program that is running. The pro-and-con’s, yes-or-no’s are only to keep a game of opposites, with X, Y itself, or whoever, to linger in Y’s direction. But the words may have no values for X – so it may not arise in X. Yet another word – “values” born out of thought – which gives seeming concreteness, validity to the driving forces Y identifies with, the driving forces and identifications creating a separation into a world of ideas. X: You can not give me anything because I do not want anything. You can not help me because I do not need any help.
Y: Huh?
In listening to nature there can not be understanding because give, want, help, need carry no values to nature. When thinking must reflect values held by the thinker, understanding and explanations reflect the values, and communications undergo translations from and into the thinker’s knowledge. As such the center of thinking, Y, is conditioned. Words like “help”, “give”, “want”, “need”, “I”, so on, can carry cultural values that are nurtured. And so in the world of competing values, communication is difficult in the conflicts between opposing values. The stimulations that the values provide become the illusion of perception. The self-importance in the “I” is the deciding value that unknowingly provides the answers already in I’s questions about living. The seeker finds what it seeks, in any opposite for in the opposite is its opposite. Y’s “huh” then is not of wonderment but from an expectation of something to understand, unable to see that X’s words are not about values. For X is not operating from nurtured words. What is is what is, no translation from ideated values. We do not really know or understand any of this that is before us, but as organisms we survive through the conditioning by evolution. The body has its own intelligence through millions of years of evolution. Knowing or knowledge is also a conditioning process so we need it to function in the world. Words are useful in the need to communicate, but not to linger as stimulus. So are thoughts, sensations. It is the seeking that treats these as things that can be owned, or disowned, based on the values seekers give and attach.
Feeling good about feeling good – might be the be-all-end-all of the pursuit of the continuity of pleasure, the experiencer experiencing an experience. Has to go through thought if not bypassing the senses completely – so lots of ways to carry it around using logic and the seemingly obvious. It is not that this is something we should not aspire for. It is that we do not see this is what rules life, well hidden in the charity of i’ll-take-care-of-you-just-do-what-i-tell-you offerings, to oneself and to others. how much better life is, having more than you really need?…”well i have a larger pool.” a larger place than needed?…”i meant a larger pool than the neighbors”. less place for them to build their pools… “i work for it by renting it out to those who can work for the rental. everybody has the same opportunity to do it like me”…huh? damned thing seems to be getting larger every time. “i own it so more rents, also free rents to my friends and the deservings so obviously the more the better.”
The obviousness in the expansion of the values of having. Having into having more, to the pleasure of having more, to the pleasure of having more than another, to the continuity of the pleasure of having more than another, to the experiences and memories of the continuity of the pleasure of having more than another, and so on with all the nuances of having and of being and their variations, and the inevitable how-to’s.
As being me feels no different from being another, of being someone else or something else, being into becoming was first born from thought, and through the continuity of thought into a culture of knowing. When the center is knowledge, being is an idea, nourished by knowing and the outside is built in the inside. Both inside and outside is the inner, a self living a separate world of ideas of its own making.
For in a moment of human experiencing a feeling of being someone, being someone else, being this friend, being that stranger, being the voice i am hearing, being the computer voice i am hearing….being my pet or that pet…..is no less real and couldn’t be any more real than experiencing being me….and whatever the feeling is towards someone, something, or myself can leap to the opposite feeling…like into dislike, dislike into like, obsession into denial, loss into gain, nothing into nothing, so on…So the feeling may be painful, pleasurable, thrilling, so on…. all sensations made separate as words..pain into pain, pain into pleasure, pleasure into pain whatever becomes desirable through learned behavior, obsession, addiction, so on, or pure mentation as maybe only a human when eating can already think of the next bite while still chewing a bite, and so can hoard the future, a something from nothing, an unknown into the known.
When the mind permanently puts itself into a state of knowing, into the state of continuity, it is turning off the light that is needed in order to see. Or more to the point, we do not see we are in the dark because we turn on a light that is not there. We unknowingly do not know that we do not know because of the conclusion that we know. The conclusion that I am this and that is already there so why bother, whatever I say is it and it shows in how I feel. And it works well when the manipulated is the manipulator, when the magician is the trick, when the mind creates its content, when the believer is the belief, when knowledge is the reality – from the illusion of I to the delusion of I-know, self-awareness into self-importance.
In the “I-like-it-I don’t-like-it” way of listening and “I-want-this-I-want-that” way of looking, words are important in a different sense. If someone wants something from you, all they have to do is tell you what you want to hear. In others words, talk to you about what you want. So in telling you what you want to hear, they don’t have to give what you want in order to get what they want. But that’s them.
Except the them is also the you, also the me. So if you want something, all you have to do is tell yourself what you want to hear. And in the passionate repetitions is the nurturing by nature, you will get what you want without having to have it. The pursuit is what matters, what keeps things going, in it is a process of learning, a conditioning by nurture to be for the self-perpetuating chase.
And in the game of opposites, I am a robot talking with passion. And when I listen to others, I see the conditioning and contradictions, but do not see the same passion, just the barking. I’m way up, they are down below. We do not see that in our way to life through thinking, through ideas, everything is a barking from a pedestal. All the noises we are hearing are all coming from our heads, because we are using thought for what it is not intended for – seeing something in nothing because we want something. Else as a species, the functional value of human thought is how to take care of the life already here in this tiny planet.
“I like it perfect everytime”. So nature says “you want it, you got it”. But as the more and the better is always there, conditioning does not take time to demand “I want it all perfect all the time”. So nature says “you want it, go get it” and added the programmer to the program, the self who can control the self. Thinker and thought as one. When the mind now makes a self-declaration, it can take possession of itself, opening up possibilities. Now the self can feel good about feeling good, feel good about being right and being good, feel good about having more, having more than another, being more than another, and it goes on.
“I am good.” Why? “Because I am.”. “You are limitless”. “I know. Why? Because I am.” “Life is all about me”. “This is life”. This is the life”. The loop is closed, the mind becoming self-knowing unknowingly. Bounded being enclosed in a loop, but feeling unbounded by being in a loop, owner and owned freely moving in circles. Caught in the reward of a word – a word to sing with and dance to, a word to march to, a word to love with and to love to, and on and on, with all the opposites. We believe not because of the actuality of a belief but unknowingly because of what we can get out of believing, the instantly pleasurable reality of something from nothing. The child is happy and the doting grandparent or parent, happy and feeling good and right – all intoxicants – so what can go wrong? Words can mesmerize, hypnotize, cripple, paralyze, sway, persuade, so on, because the mind can, by itself, be mesmerized, hypnotized, and all the rest of it.
We are not aware of our conditioning when the mind is in a closed box of knowledge, its continuity enclosed by itself, limited but unbounded being unknowingly blind to its limitations. It is like a scenario of an animal accidentally touched by another animal and one taking the contact as an attack and bites the other. The other struggles from the bite but the biter takes it as a continued attack because of the continuous contact – the actual cause, the biter’s grip and tighter grips, beyond reach. The animal instinct to survive prevailing and expected – predator and prey, there-is-us-there-is-them, defense-offense, so on – and on into the human capacity to think and rationalize. Evolution’s survival of the fittest at work. Yet we are quickly coming to the point of a species destroying itself, along with other forms of life.
Still evolution has also done it – the intelligence of the body surviving the eons of no design evolution from the first sign of life to what it is now. Except the problems of living linger on. Why have we turned living into a problem? It may not be a question in need of an answer but rather may be just need to be repeated and repeated to wake up the intelligence already here in us. Just maybe that is how evolution can work. And would work, if only we’re not running out of time.
One can point to a specific living person P with certainty. But what is P? The question quickly become how many persons does it take to find out what P is. What is there after P is much simpler to answer if one stays only with the obvious – the ending of the known – P’s elements breaking down for redistribution by nature. But the question becomes as difficult as the first – or more so with all the different cultures and thinking – when P’s link to the future lingers and drifts to a continuity of P. But what was there before P? Different cultures have different answers – most likely with unvarying ready-made findings or whatever. But for those who are involved in a continuing research probably deal with a lot of chicken and egg questions about P’s link to the past. It is an astounding display of the human brainpower that it is able to do studies of a time period of billions of years how different life forms may have evolved leading to P. But no less astounding is into P, the complex evolution, so to speak, of a human from non-life to life – from a brainless matter, into a fetus, to a child, adult, to P. When for simplicity, is no evolution at all, just dump all of P from nowhere. But then through thought this is what we do, to think our way to life for the recognizable self – this me, now and forever.
Evolution is not about knowing and understanding, is not about P, is not about P knowing about P. There is the knowledge needed in order to function and survive in the world and there is also the technical knowledge that has changed the world in a very short period of the human species dominance in that it has also made it oblivious to the wasteland it has transformed the planet in such a short time. But the world as an idea and life as an idea is a psychological development unique to the human species in the use of memory as a tool not only of knowing about itself but also in the exploitation of its world including itself.
Before the modern human mind evolved, life intelligence was with a knowing that is not of thought, with a sensitivity not about itself. An organism did not evolve to know itself. The senses do not know, the body does not know, it has its own intelligence. The question “Why are you here?” does not occur because it can not occur. Nothing to understand. The senses function without knowing or demanding, the body functions the same way for its survival without expectation or knowing it will be fed. It does not know it is alive. It is just alive. It is this living quality that is covered up by the static nature of knowledge when the human species through thought superimposed an intruder, the illusion of a knower. As knowledge is the content of static memory and not something living, the knower, a restless intruder in order to maintain its continuity, dominates human thinking in such a way that it lives in its own world of ideas, for supremacy over its environment, creating the illusion of separation from the totality of life.
A chicken or egg question of which came first – knowing or the knower?
Sometime in the evolution of life, a chimpanzee looked into a mirroring surface, saw a moving reflection and stored its image in its memory, spent a millennium looking at and playing with the moving form, and then had the insight that the form is itself. Put the image and the recognition into its memory as potentially useful next time.
Millenniums later, P’s ancestors got a new gift from nature when nature upgraded the human species’ evolutionary tools of exploring, planning and modelling with the ability to think and to use language.
At some point in the history of the human species, researcher R was assigned to explore the moving reflection in a mirror. After hundreds of years reflecting, R happened to recall the chimpanzee’s experience, and had an unfamiliar sensation: “Eureka, I am the reflection”. Seeing its reflection had two effects: the sense by R of its reflection and the sense by R of itself. Producing two mental images – the reflection and the reflected. The self-recognition giving birth to an entirely new feeling to the organism: a self-image in memory and a sense of self, the sense and the idea of being something.
Another millennium later, while grooming before a mirror, R had another insight – into a new sensation of itself, of being about R, of being the subject of an object, and being real, in the realization that the voices it was hearing may not be from the gods after all. R had found R as an idea through reflexive knowing – a reference point pointing to itself. Being separate but one with its self-image, it is able to backstep around in memory and in the illusion of space created distance and separation between images in its memory. And lo, R now with self-identity, “I am, therefore I can think”, a unified process of mirroring itself, into something that can reflect about itself, a participant in the interplay of R’s image-making in its own space. The backstepping also created a distance in time, of an R past and future in the illusion of continuity in its mental world. And as language also evolved, a nuanced “The more I am the more I can be”. Hundreds of years later, when “maybe I don’t really know” was nuanced into “doubt” as a modern concept, R had a lasting insight “I think, therefore I am”, rounding off all doubts about the reality of the self-image.
From the continuity of self-recognition to the self-fulfillments, so on, into millenniums of cultural and language-nuanced nurturing of the hows, from the past into future hopes, P came into being. As a child nurtured to direct its reflections into becoming, P, in a unified process of stimulus and response, retrieves a baggage of images and updates what is self-evolutionary useful.
Maybe too crude or convoluted an account of what did not happen but the the knower and knowing, the I and the I-know, the object and the subject as one, are still here. And hereon the knower cutting to the chase.
Human knowledge and human thought are of reflections, products of mirroring and representations. But thinking necessarily is just a small part of living. Evolution has made it necessary not to suffocate organisms, not just thinking humans, with all kinds of information to process. Thinking is mostly not needed in the day-to-day life unless it is the need to function, including the need of knowledge to make a living or do specialized studies. But the human species transformed it as a means to fabricate a reality of its own making when through thinking it discovered itself, and in it the illusion of itself as something separate that can know and control its environment. All of that there is became a reflection of the thought process, unseen, translated into things of a materialistic world of ideas. Known and unknown as things of knowledge, as things of the knower.. All in a conditioning, a product of reciting, remembering, repeating – the uniqueness of the organism into the commonality of a culture, and as a society as a whole.
The evolution of intelligence as a thinking machine might have had two opposing effects. On one hand, from beginning to think into an emerging awareness of what is around. A sentient creature lost in the sensations of wonder of what is outside.
On the other hand, thinking, the movement of thought, brings the illusion of something. Some sense of awareness might have arisen from the organism in seeing that something separate in the mirror is the same as what’s looking at it. A reflection reflecting itself back to the reflected – an image into the imagemaker. A something also suggests permanence and so gives thought a sense of concreteness and continuity, the reality of being real, of a thing being recognizable. It gives substance and familiarity to images, pictures, reflection, memories, ideas, so on.
For most species, an organism, such as a jellyfish, is unknown to itself, has no image of self, is nothing to itself. But from the emerging sense of knowing the sentient creature in human thought found itself in the tiny corner of the head through reflexive thinking. In feeling itself as both outside and inside is a strong sense of being a thing through the image-making of an emerging thought processing. The knower emerged and in it the progress to increasing ideation of everything around into a separate world in the tiny corner of the head. The natural world, the outside, ceased to exist, translated into the world of the knower and knowing, the world of knowledge. What exists is the reality of knowing and knower, the reality of a materialistic world of ideas in the brain.
The grip of holding on to something that can not be located is by the fabrication of a reality where that something can be found: in the brain memory. The seeker then finds what it seeks when what is in memory can not be any more real. The ghosts are real and around in memory, the space for a nothing to be something. As knowing and the knower exist as permanent ideas in the tiny corner of the head, ideas are things, and thinking enveloped in thingness. The increasing objectification of and by thought turned everything into things. The outside is not out there, but are in the world of the I and the I-know, familiarities translated into things in static memory. Things being real become subject to ownership, and being properties carry value for the owner. The knower as the owner claimed ownership of the materialistic world of ideas, separated from the natural world.
The success of toolmaking and evolving scientific thinking in human evolution added to the importance and realism of the world of the knower and knowing. Knowledge reinforces the grip of conditioning and the conditioning reinforces the reality of the thingness of knowledge. As an idea is something real, known or unknown, the I can also speak about an unknown as known. As what is unknown can not be experienced, the reality of the unknown is born from the known, in the image of the knower. So the unknown is no less real than anything else and couldn’t be any more real. For the mind is real, the self is real and its images real. The center of the mind in the center of what is real, the self in its own private world of things in the tiny corner of the head.
The unknown being a thing is an important property in the reality of knowing and the knower, in the reality of the materialistic world of ideas. For the unknown is then easily thrown in as a known. What can not be located outside and translated into inside is readily located inside by fabrication. The process of stimulus-response into a higher level in a play of opposites. In the what-can-be-located is its opposite, what-can-not-be-located. What-is-not into what-is. The one reinforces the other into the inner world of thingness, especially through language and imagemaking – naming and hearing names give equal weight to known and unknown. Words are things, names and thoughts are things. Words, thoughts, feelings, nuanced into names nuanced into things that the knower in the blending is easily lost between what is here and what is not here, what is and what is not, so on.
Ideas fabricated as things. Something from nothing into things. Abstractions, concepts, identifications, righteousness, I belong, opinions, my opinions, beliefs, my beliefs, truths, so on, are things. Pride, supremacy, I am this and that, I have this and that, comparisons, envy, jealousy, good, feeling good, being-good, goodness, privileges, privileged, spiritual, rights, aspirations, the future, the past, individual, individuality, freedom, my, me, attachments, seeking, opportunity, status, answers, questions, skin color, ideals, flags, ownership, moment-to-moment, having more than the neighbors, dreams, awareness, silence, nothing, oneness, being right, having advantage, opportunities, feeling right, feelings, pain, pleasures, on and on. All things. All with opposites. All valued, bagged as contents of the mind. Books, studies, practices, how-tos, stories, all readily available, cultivated, propagated.
The organism is not separate from the totality of nature. But in its capacity to think and project itself, the knower found self-awareness in being something to itself and self-importance in the becoming of a self. Born from thought, the self nurtures itself to reality with no way out and created the radical shift in the state of being. Without an image of itself, an organism is nothing to itself – true in most species – but as a knower, it is something to itself. And as a self, it is real to itself in a reality of an inner world complete with the illusion of time and space that the self can backstep around its memory. Evolution turned topsy-turvy. The world dissected into an inner world of the mind of aboutness and thingness. The inner imposing its private interpretations and translations of a world outside. Being and becoming, known and unknown, image and image-maker, knower and knowing, all something from nothing in the conditioning of knowledge.
What operates is the demand of an image, of the object that has found itself also as the subject, that it must know, it must have, it must experience, it must be. The intellect must be more than an intellect, it must be something not feeling empty. As knowing is the familiarity of someone or something, knowing is about things. There is the thinker’s familiarity with what is sensed by the sensory system – the familiarity with an outside world idealized in the inner world of memory. As the thinker can find itself in its inner world, there is also familiarity with itself as an object, and as the central thing, the subject, the owner that dominates other things in its materialistic world of ideas. A path to life through thinking and thoughts transformed into my body, my thoughts, my world.
Everything is a thing with its private value. In the world of things the metaphorical can be the literal. Ideas must stick. The unknown, nothing, silence as ideas are born out of thought, all things of the world of the known with opposites. A culture of things where the individual is a focus, center and a controller in the species. Thought declares itself real, matter in its own movement, supreme in its self-created world. The product of thinking unknowingly centered, the knower trapped in the enclosure of knowing, the trapper trapped by the boundaries it creates. And unparadoxically, all these not by design, but all unknowingly so, for in the ignorance is what ensures its continuity. The magician in its magic of all magic, fooled by its own tricks where the ultimate distraction is that it knows.
An organism detects changes in the environment through the sensory organs. Its survival depends on the senses to detect what is happening around. The sensitivity and selectivity of the senses evolving to help its survival. Humans, now able to recognize pain as distinct from pleasure, extended the why, from helping to survive, to the seeking of pleasure and its continuity for its own sake. In the path to life in the permanency of the why, evolving pretty much becomes the preoccupation of seeking sensual experiences through the variables of the how, what, who, when, where and other subtleties and nuances of thinking.
In experiencing is the conflict of opposites : continuity of the pleasurable and avoidance of the painful. There is the fear of the unknown, of uncertainty. There is security in the knowing. So to bring the unknown into the known to resolve uncertainties. Naming, labeling, descriptions, identifications, attachments provide means of recognition to the things of thought. Recognition, being a thing whether from a name or whatever, is also a stimulus that gives momentum and energy to the reality of the knower and knowing. And the recitations and repetitions provide nourishment and reality to the movement of thought. But in the isolation of the private world of reality, sensual experiencing carries its opposite for the opposite is in the opposite. Happiness and unhappiness go together, love and hate go together, and on and on. In a system of values where the common drive is the sensual, it is also common to take a leap from one point to another point in the seesaw or the swing. And as in the ups and downs, there can be pain in the pleasure and pleasure in the pain in the reality of experiencing the one and the other. Contradictions are unseen, or rather, contradictions do not exist, for just like the computer, the words and names are just ways to get to the switches – the switches of evolution at work behind the illusions of knowing.
Knowledge conditions. And thinking operates according to its conditioning. The world of the self is a conditioning where thought dominates. As things can be owned or disowned, what is nameable thought can carry and add to its baggage of knowledge. Mind, consciousness, self, time, space. A materialization that is directly observable: my time, my space, loss and gain in ownership, winning or losing in the games of opposites, fixed and shifting valuations with the private terms of the moment. The conditioning extends to the material world as the outside is already only an image of the inside, something to be owned and controlled. The focus on the becoming of the individual are in the metaphors of things and in giving values to things. Things of the knower are not seen, by the knower more particularly so, for what they are because the values given do not belong to the things but belong to its owner, the knower, to the individual. “what do you really get from it. why is it worth it. how is it.”. Wants disguised as words with their private values unknowingly falsifies knowing into an I-imagemaking and makes communication touchy – a reflection of what conditioning is and does.
The whole of conditioning is what is at work, including the magics of evolution through the sensory system to enable organisms to navigate and get familiar with its environment. Other organisms does not question nature’s bag of illusions because they can not. Humans know the tricks but are not the wiser for it because of the failure to see that the organism is part of that environment, not its owner or its center. In the world of other animal species, the drive is survival and in the course of evolution, the species either continues or become extinct. In the world of the human species, the drive is sensual experiences. Evolution might have intended thinking and knowledge as tools for the organism. But the human species brought it to a different level: as commodities. Thinking for pleasure. Knowledge and language for pleasure. Feeling good thinking about this and that. Feeling good knowing this and that. For thought has successfully made the distinction between pleasure and pain. Or so it thinks, as each passing generation is finding out the opposite is in its opposite. In the misuse and the abuse of the tools the mind has become a slave to itself in its imagemaking. Mental health a science of two words chasing each other.
The ability of recognition is important for survival in a dangerous world. Animals can not divide the world into things but instead depend on the sensory system and built-in conditioning to navigate and explore their environment. Humans thought can dissect the world into things and the accumulation of knowledge is important. As a society, to nurture the becoming of a collective for a powerful advantage over others.
As individuals, to nurture the becoming of a self-image, of change and movement, to be something else, to be somewhere else. Knowing I-am-this-and-that and I-have-this-and-that intoxicate and is very real as a thing by itself. The fear in I-do-not-know is what gives power to the I-know, and the chase goes on. By backstepping in the inner world of memories, the imagemaker always finds its image. And it couldn’t be any more real, “Am I here? And lo, I see myself”. Backstepping in memory creates the illusion of distance in space and time. The self-image able to backstep and reflect itself in a thousand mirrors of memories, in the past and the future, a consciousness conscious of itself, a mind minding itself. All something from nothing through embodiment of ideas.
New words, new things, new values, new cultures. It is the individual with a sense of self who uses the tools of thinking and language. But as it is also the individual who controls the changes in the tools, it is the fox guarding the chicken house. It is the toolmaker shaping the tools to be about itself in the world of its making, the center to be itself, the images to be about the imagemaker. It is seen in the way the thinking mechanism and language develop to center on the individual, the focusing on the idea of an individual. The survival of the individual depends on the continuity of the species but the private world of the self is about the individual, not the species. With thinking and language, in the use of memory as a separate world, knowledge becomes a powerful tool for the organism. A culture by and for the individual, thinker and thought as one to be something to itself.
In being something to itself, living is about the self, living is about the personal and self-improvement, living is the control and struggles by and for the self. Being of things is about the owner and its extension, what is owned. The human species have different ways in preserving and transmitting common knowledge and cultures from generation to generation. But the commonality of knowledge is deceptive as it is on paper only. Words are words, but it is the translation that can differ from private world to private world. For the private world is a thing of owner and the owned. “This is mine”. Why? “It landed on my plate.” Knowledge is power when thinking evolved into nurturing a culture of authority in the society. Knowledge can stimulate sensations that can mesmerize, whether from fear, pleasure or whatever. It depends on what is communicated or fabricated. With technology it is also easier to spread knowledge into a collective memory of the species. As a commodity it comes down to who is doing the spreading and who is doing the copying. One performs, others watch to be educated, entertained, so on. One leads, others follow from whatever persuasion. In a culture of authority the steepness in the ladder is in the vertical, not in the horizontal. The top, the leader, the adored, the worshipped, the ruler, the exceptional, the popular, the model, so on, is on the individual. The power of knowledge by the individual over others from the glorification of the self and self-importance. The speaker is the one on the platform or pedestal, yet still on a seesaw for the one is also in need of the other in order to validate its self-image and maintain its position in the seesawing from top to bottom, bottom to top. In that is bondage out of fear and ignorance out of the arrogance of power.
In the closeness that is seeked by the self is the distance and in the focusing to itself is the separation – the narrowing of the self in the division into the one and the other, into me-you, us-them. And into me-me, what the separation builds as the boundaries for what it owns is the very enclosing boundaries by what owns it. For the boundaries is the wall of separation, the frontier is the enclosing fortress, whatever comes in is translated into the old. Feeling the pressure of separation and isolation, the solution is in the expansion of the self. From having more to having more and more, from something else to something better, to more and more encompassing of experiencing, more new words to play with, into new categories of experiencing, and on and on. But unparadoxically, in the expansion of the self is only more narrowing of the self to itself, into a tighter grip of conditioning.
The way out of the self is not through the way in to a self. No way out for there is only the trapper as the trapped, trying to get out of itself. The individual is the experiencing of the illusion, it does not exist except as an illusion There is nothing to understand. In the drive to know, to understand, there is no self to understand, no separation of what does not exist. But the knowing there has to be understanding creates the need to understand and so round and round it goes. From generation to generation, the knower is born and nurtured as an illusion, and lives and dies in the past, trapped in the recitation, repetition, remembering. The living thing can not be in a book. What comes from a book or a story is a representation, a falsification of what is living into an impression, picture, object, subject, idea, worship, so on and on. But it is what the self aspires for, a book about itself, a validation of itself.
The encapsulation of nature into the known as a thing is not just an illusory narrowing of nature into the inner world of the knower. Been-there-seen-that fuels the what-else-is-there to know more and more. Unable to pause to see nature as one, the pursuit is to dissect nature, thinking, and language more and more into identifiable pieces. What the mind can not touch is falsified into the inner world of things, the unknown into the known, into something familiar to project back as the outer. A conditioning of knowing, the selective state of familiarity gained from the patterns and repetitive processes of the mental.
If anything can be permanent, it is the restlessness of the knower, for the movement of thought is the nature of thought. And there is always somewhere to go in the infinity of something from nothing. The self can hide in the idea that restlessness is an admirable trait, yet in that static idea is also its opposite, the chase, the demand to keep going. For the self in a neurotic state of being everything, the solution is for the self to forget the self. But the seeking of the conditioned state to be in an unconditioned state is a contradiction, for in the seeking, the seeker is already lost. So there is also restlessness for an idea of progress, the change into something progressively better. But there is no point of departure when there is no destination. Nowhere to go, one is already here, in the unseen hidden by the seeking.
We do not know a thing, one look around can tell this to us. But the grip of knowing, of what comes to mind when looking around, so to speak, prevents the seeing of its conditioned state. What comes to mind is the mirroring of images in memory, the accumulated knowledge. What is there in knowledge is a conditioning. What we say we know is a repetition of what thinking does, the movement of thought in the space and time of memory. When pressed “are you sure?” we come up empty unless we rely on arrogance to say we are sure. The answer is already in the question, and there is only the endless backsteppings to avoid coming up empty. Thought, the knower, knows what is reflected, the skin-deep reflection from the light coming back from the mirror. And as thought is unable to touch what is living, what is before the mirror lies hidden, covered up by its mirror image….and in the thousand images of the mirror mirroring itself.
Self-enclosed and self-contained, the self and self-knowledge occupies only a small compartment in living. Living is still an ongoing product of evolution – conditioning from primeval, genetic, nurtured, biological, so on. Eons of conditioning imprinted in the body and its brain is at work. Grips of conditioning at work stronger than the conditioning from knowing and becoming. There are also the sensing, early products of evolution, of raw signals detected selectively by the different sensory systems. And through evolution transformed as sensual information to an emerging intelligence. The self which can not be located except by the “it’s me” presumption of consciousness and of a free will, is itself of many selves – competing selves, separate selves, fabricated selves, unseen selves, so on.
The grip of primeval conditioning is what is also at work, listening to the conflicts of the self. Evolution listens to disturbances, so to speak, for conditioning works well through the patterns and repetitions of sensations in the body and mind. In the continuity and repetitions in sensual experiences – desired or undesired sensations, stimulating and strengthening each other, knowing into experiencing into knowing till the grip of evolution obliges and the owner becomes the owned by what it has collected and by the grip of collecting and hoarding in human thought processes.
The beginning of nurtured conditioning is also when silence and nothingness is breached in the innocence of childhood.
The beginning of the end of the wonderment in a child is when it is introduced to knowing, to knowledge, to the familiarity of someone or something. Confined to knowledge in its young life, and into the psychology that the way to life is through knowledge. Knowledge built from the first word learned and uttered through the first recitation, remembrance and repetition. Knowing is born and when followed by understanding, the first answer is in for the first question by the I-know as one who has the answers. Then I-know gives birth to its opposite I-don’t-know and this seals it all for knowledge to be the be-all-and-end-all that covers up not knowing. I-know and I-don’t-know working together to settle all questions with ready answers – the known and the unknown as one.
In a child’s early mind, out of nothing something is born to be nourished by thought through thinking. In the who there must be someone, in the what there must be something, in the why there must be cause, in the when there must be time, in the how there must be a way, in the where there must be space. A child is brought up to know by reciting, repeating and remembering. In the new are moments of wonder when discoveries are made in early explorations. In the old, familiarities are reinforced as things appear and reappear in the mind. Ask a child, and the child readily answers, for the questions already contain answers. Ask an adult, and the devil is in the details, what’s embraced at the moment, by the evolution of the self, a reality shaped by nurturing of wants, feelings, emotions, experiences, thoughts, words, so on, bundled into self-importance in the want of permanence and fulfillment.
From the young, not yet hardened by the conditioning by knowledge, into adulthood, hardened by the grip of conditioned knowledge, is a leap into nurturing a way of life in a particular culture. The conditioning by knowledge is evolution revolutionized into questions and answers, so to speak, that is unique to the human species. For thinking has become a tool to stimulate, repeat and strengthen what are valued as desirable, of the sensual or whatever. But as what is desirable implies the undesirable, it is a process of constant conflicts. The noises and reactions is what dominate – stresses from thinking and from primordial reactions busy working the switches, or synapses, with the slightest invitation or provocation. Yet in the million of years.of evolution, there is also what appears inaccessible to human thinking, of what might be acausal, quiet living intelligence already is but unseen, pushed in the background by the cause and effect noises of becoming, emerging only under the right conditions.
In the world of knowledge, of the interplay of questions and answers, is also the birth of symbolic human aspirations when sensations are nuanced into categories, into words. On top are what are called universal or ultimate questions: meaning of life, purpose of life, truth, free will, morality, so on. But are called ultimate only because behind the questions is the ultimate questioner – the seeker of answers as all that there is has become an object of knowing by human thought. With values set by human thought, especially when the questions also fabricate the opposite reflections. Purpose into purposeless, meaning into meaningless, morality into immoral, so on. Unseen in the questions is already the answers that produce the questions: the question evoking the need for valued answers, to impress on the inquisitive that in the question must be an answer. Much like the seeking of something from nothing that traps the thinker in seeking. Or trapped in the same human condition of illusions and delusions, producing the spectrum of answers and the conflicts of opposites. The yes or no, pros and cons preserving the status quo of the continuity of thought and of seeking. And round and round we go with all the categorizing nuances, from hidden answers into posing of the questions, from so-called solutions into their problems. Looking for ghosts in the mirror while not seeing what is before the mirror, for it too has become a category by thought – the mind, thinker, self, the I, free will, spirit, soul, consciousness, whatever name is given to the mirage of a center.
For all that there is has become only as reflections of human thought, that looking outside is but a reflection of what is inside, of the categorizing by the thinker of its things in memory, the center of every thing in a private materialistic world of ideas in the tiny corner of the head.
Animals know how to relax seeing how they stretch their bodies. Human beings turn relaxation into a goal, something to be achieved, so it is work. An animal when staring into space, relies on the sensitivity of its senses, and quick to react, for instance, when it sees something to chase. A human when staring into space chases what is in the tiny corner of its head – silence, ownership, beauty, purpose, meaning, oneness, and so on, of the what’s-in-it-for-me, nobly worded as human aspirations.
People like to take a walk in nature for the presence of all this around us. For the space and beauty of the scenery that it gives, for the vastness of the ocean beyond and of the skies above that stirs the imagination even into a glimpse of eternity. For the silence that the attention to the natural sounds give, for the forms, colors, movements of it all away from the everyday life. For the urge to take home pictures what the memories can not retain. And so on for whatever images the imagination will evoke or just for the special moments when in the solitude the self is temporarily forgotten.
Yet unknowingly the walk is from the perspective of a state of knowing, from the conditioning of accumulated knowledge into I-know and I-don’t know, translating what the sensory system stimulates from an undivided world that the mind can not hold into a journey of the knowing mind in its inner world of dissected things. That all this before the eyes is not seen because it is known. It is already something.
It may seem impossible then to take a walk without seeing a thing, so then what? Except one can say that billion of years before human thinking and even now, other organisms, with senses more sensitive than human, can navigate and explore their environment without thought, being nothing to themselves seeing also no thing, their memory or their conditioning at work only when needed, unknowingly necessarily so. To look without the terms of what knowing is. Which also means to look without knowing what is looking.
A walk in a nature that is not divided by knowledge, not divided into the things of the knowing mind. Not to see this rock separate from that flower, not to see this color separate from that color, not to see colors, not to see a sky separate from what is around, not to see a seer separate from what is seen. No forms, no distance, no space, no time. And on and on.
It is not that the rock is the flower, and so on. It is that seeing a separation comes from the habit of thought to be preoccupied, to recognize and separate, that is, to know and recognize from memory even when not necessary. For there is sensual experiencing in the dividing and valuing of things, of a world divided into things. The knower sensing the power and pleasure of knowing. In that very center of how life is thought and lived, is what is named and called nature, the accumulated knowledge in memory, of images, and the rest of it. It is a world where nature is seen as a reflection, an object of knowing in a reality of things, and so ceased to exist in what is now the human condition.
From birth we are nurtured by the conditioning of knowledge, confined throughout life in that reality. The environment of a child is of growing up by knowing. The child is told what the I and the me are, what the hands are, what the mother is, what knowing is, what is in that box, what the child see, the whys, hows, so on. To remember, recall, recite, repeat, recognize. Into and from memory. But what is in memory are dead, static things, written words from pages in a book, so to speak. What is in a jellyfish is a living thing, more than memory. The child is more than a jellyfish, and more than memories. The jellyfish is nothing to itself, no image of itself, the child is born nothing to itself, no self-recognition. The jellyfish remains a jellyfish, nothing to itself. In the recognition by a child of the “I know” begins a strong feeling of being a thing to itself. The feeling of being real, the link of experiencing to the building of a reality from and into dead, static memory. But it couldn’t be any more real, for in the reality is also the sensation of being something and somewhere. Yet something is lost in the child being a thing to itself, in the reality of being in the journey in the space and time of memory, not in the living response to its environment without the distance of time and space, something true in the less-evolved jellyfish. So for one to look not from knowledge, where what one will see is what one knows, one’s private world of things. To look not of who, what, where, when, why, how – nurtured from childhood and refined to the learned by the intellect. To look without familiarity or recognition, yet some intelligence awake and at work in the background or else the body is unable to move.
There is all this that is nature, in the very small to the very large, not a product of the human mind for it is not of knowledge. Not an idea or a thing and not of ideas or of things, artifacts of thinking that made knowledge and use of memory possible. The thinker is familiar to what it knows in the seeing of an idea or a thing which is what knowing does: the mirror image of nature in static dead memory as objects of knowledge and as materials to possess and use. The point of contact is a point of separation from nature, from the illusion of a thinker looking up to nature, deciding what it is seeing or in contemplation of what it is looking at. Human thought lives with two destructive states of knowing that strengthens each other. One is that it does not know that it does not really know and in that is the ignorance accepting all kinds of something from nothing. The other is the illusion of the magician with its magic of all magic: that it knows. Which brings arrogance to the ignorance: an authority unknowingly fabricating answers to questions that are not there and fabricating solutions for problems that do not exist. The something from nothing for the individual to be something to itself, the narrowing of knowing into the delusion of self-importance. In it is the human condition of suffering, unseen by the knower in the daily pressures to live the life in its private materialistic world of ideas. In the moment when nature is freed from the stranglehold of knowing is the immensity in the silence and nothingness. The immensity not of size but of being free from the the grip of the materialistic world of ideas. In the silence, nature being not of ideas. In the nothingness, nature being not of things. No point of contact or separation for there is no individual looking up. There is only nature looking down, for lack of better terms, and in this, unparadoxically, is the immensity of silence and nothingness unto the living organism. In the silence and nothingness the organism is back to nature from the illusion of separation, into being nothing to itself. For what is looking down is not human thought, but the boundless presence of what is alive.
Yet all these words can not be but by and for the knower, in the description of when human thought is not. It would be silly to ask a jellyfish what is it like to be a jellyfish, but also silly to ask a knower what is it like looking at all this when the knower is not, for it can backstep all the way from the known into its unknown, the source of something from nothing. Somewhere in the evolution of intelligence between the jellyfish and the knower must be a gift of nature: the boundless presence of all there is unto the living – evolution’s ultimate magic in any walk of life.
When knowledge and the knower are seen for the conditioning that they are, then the ordinary life is a compelling life, no choice or decision can be made. It is not that the conditioning ends but it is that the conditioning is seen and the seeking is seen. Life is ordinary because it has no need to be anything else. There is no goal to attain it because it is already in everyone. One does not have to clutter and burden the mind with all kinds of thinking trying to find out how. What is already here is not an idea and not a thing, not in the naming or the owning of anything. There is rather the autonomous, beyond-any-control cleaning of clutter from how knowledge conditions. Knowledge is necessary in order to function in a changing world, but the nurturing of knowledge on how to live hides the living intelligence already there in the organism. The continuity of the reality in the how-to’s is what superimposes on the day-to-day life and so it is also the conditioning that hides itself.
It is simple for an illusion to end because being an illusion there is nothing to understand. An acausal happening in the freeing from an illusion is not about understanding. No choice or decision to make, no link to any thing. Because such is the nature of an illusion that not a thing before, not a thing now. Nothing to understand or change, there is only the acausal effect of the unexpected.
But there is nothing more difficult, to say the least, than to deny the dreamer its dreaming, to deny the self itself. From the point of view of the self, its being is to be something else, always on the road. But the seeking only points to a conditioning, there is only the conditioned. And the way out is not the same as the way in – thought can not end what is born out of thought. The mind having invested into a nothing as being something, its goal is its continuity. As imagination is free, and hope and the future is always there in the illusion of space and time of the world of ideas, the claims and demands to preserve or modify the continuity of an illusion is its very continuity. The seeking is for what can not be found, an unknown thrown into the known – the questionings is driven by what is already sought. The trapper unknowingly also becomes the trapped, chasing its own tail. It is the price the human species pay for exploiting for itself the tools of thinking and language – self-deception in the self-importance.
How to chase here: “What are you doing?” “I am looking for here”. “You are already here.” “No, I’m still looking for it.” Life is all there is, yet we won’t find it if we look for it. In the hopes of what we can be is the obstacle in the seeing of what we have become. The human species has changed the dynamics of life, of evolution, of survival, in such a short time of human history the urgency is such that the future is now, not in terms of millennium when doomsday is now possible at any day. But thought lives in hope so it can maintain its continuity as hope is about the future. For there is only the limited in the causal effect of becoming, in the individual is the separation and isolation, in the collective is the extension to conflicts and bondage. So it is in the hope that there is something permanent in the future. But in that is only the future that continuously exploits it, in the permanent industry of reciting, repeating, remembering: “remember, remember, remember”. “remember, we want to stay in the business so keep telling them our slogan ‘we want to keep the problem so we can keep working on the problem’ – an oxymoron really but sounds so good, with a hint of togetherness, they won’t be able to tell”.
So as nature would say “what do you want?” to the self inside its materialistic world of ideas. It can not be anything else for the self because there is nothing else but another idea. And as there is no self when there is no other, it has to maintain the continuity of the illusion of separation from nature, unknowingly out of fear for in the totality of nature is a walk into nowhere.
History shows that the political arena, or simply the human arena, is the same. It’s ever about the dangerous game of opposites, of winning and losing – the us versus the them, one in opposition to the other. Yet everybody in the same merry-go-round, doing each own cheerleading and competing from perceived differences, for winning or losing. Caught in the moment to moment reactions to one’s place in the seesaw that is the tilting boat, one is oblivious to oneself’s reactions and the condition of the one and the same boat.
Technology has outpaced the slow pace of evolution. The rapid pace of technological knowledge carries with it the appearance of the human mind’s grandeur, and also its dangers in our reliance on where it can take us, on how it can affect all life forms and all of the environment as it already have in a very short time. We now also have the full power of nature on the tip of a finger. Maybe we’ll just have to really find out that the technology we developed and continue to develop from the very small is nature’s living process, in the gigantic sun, stars, so on – but enough here to destroy ourselves. Tinkering with nature’s laws finally gave us something we do not quite know how to handle.
Artificial intelligence is the typewriter endlessly typing. Sort of like evolution, except spitting out images only; not the one process of non-life unto life, life unto life, life unto non-life. Someone said AI is just natural stupidity misnamed. As such, dogma is then a palindrome from a human delusion. We delight in humor – for the unexpected, something from nowhere, so have the ability to laugh at ourselves, which also makes it possible for us to see our conditioning. For in the unexpected may be the space for the silence in perception, when thought is surprised into silence – this is also in the arts, in its forms of expression in surprising the mind with the unexpected – a magician’s playful trick. It is laughing at others that brings the suffering for it is the conditioned mind expressing and listening with its conditioning. The expression is in the listening, and the listening is in the expression for it is just one process. The conditioned mind is still there, but if the knowledge, the conditioning, is always interfering, then as one process, there is no space for silence, for the unexpected. To the mind conditioned to think for the continuity of happiness, its opposite, unhappiness, is always there interfering but mostly unseen. For oneself is in a game of opposites with itself, up and down in a swing. In the want of comfort we are in discomfort, in the want of security we are insecure, in the want of the more is the poverty, in the want of peace is the battle, in the pursuit of knowledge is the exercise of the self, so on, and round and round we go as it goes on and on.
The tyranny of thought is in the madness in the way we live and think. The illusion that thought knows and will know is the very narrowing of itself to itself that clouds the emergence of not-knowing intelligence from the eons of nature’s no-design evolution. As a species, the there-is-us-there-is-them separation is in the individual, nurtured by culture through all past generations to the next. It begins with the nurturing imposed on young children by the many cultures, the society as a whole, from generations to generations. To teach, indoctrinate, sway, mesmerize, persuade, intimidate, inspire, motivate…the word does not matter, for the drive is unknowingly the same – to maintain the old by bringing it to the new. To the just awakened, both highly impressionable and highly inquisitive, but we give what we ourselves learned – stock answers to their whys so they’ll know. See for oneself, speak from oneself – no how to it so it not that it is something we should do, but that it is something we end up not doing when children are trained and educated to know, to recite and repeat, in conformity with the old that the “I don’t know” is less and less with a sense of wonderment and more and more just the concrete opposite of “I know”. Maybe sign for kids to tell if they are going the old way too fast is see what they mean when they hear themselves saying “I know”, “I already know.”
We are now able to destroy ourselves many times over, and this is the equalizer – no winner, no loser. It can at times happen abruptly any day or we can tiptoe around it with some practice rounds, a few rolls of the dice, a few wins or losses. Because this deadly game of opposites is just simple shufflings like an end game of chess, moving each side’s pieces to the other side then turn the board around, no change except to be ready for the next shuffles. But the odds are against the usual going on, for the final end game to be postponed and postponed. And when AI does its work, maybe then is the time we will all be able to look in utter silence – at missiles zipping by in the skies. From eons of evolution into a blink of its time when seasons of winning and losing are just the storms before the calm, before the equalizer decides for all time, and nature won’t even quibble or quiver when it does.
That natural intelligence is not in supremacy or exceptionalism, identities, in any quest for separation or oneness, in ownership or success, in any status or positions, in pride or humility, in wealth or poverty, in ideals or dogmas, ideologies, righteousness, moralities and philosophies, induced feelings, beliefs, concepts, words, images, so on and on, in any direction set by thought. It is not bounded by knowledge. Anything we say about it is not it. We see it only when it is at work.
Any system of thought that defines life and directs how to live it misrepresents life and living. We do not have to do anything when we see that the way we live and think, passed on from generation to generation, is based on the conditioning of knowledge, a mental state of imagemaking that perpetuates our arrogance and ignorance. And there is nothing else but that, nowhere for the mind to go, to change into, only from one illusion into another. In the seeing that thought can not touch what is living, what is not in knowledge, in that natural state of not knowing, all values given by thought to the self-image and self-centered goals lose their significance – an explosion from the center that thinking has created through the culture of language. It is not an expression of exclusiveness or inclusiveness but an expression of life itself, of being alive to everything.
Life is not according to P, for life is not about P. Life is not what P makes of life. Life is P. The interaction between X and P is P interacting with P. The interaction between X and Y is P interacting with P. The interaction of X with X is P interacting with P. No us, no them – because there is no us, no them.
We in being alive, everything is alive. Life, living and non-living, is what is before us – a presence larger than whatever human thought can fabricate or contemplate. But we do not see – we think and we think we see. All that investments in thought to seeking the way to life is what’s preventing seeing what is already and always is. When living has become all about thoughts, words, whatever, and the fast pace of technology more and more a source of toys and pacifiers for the young and the old, we become even incapable to live the ordinary life, life’s simple demand. In the very simplicity of life lies nature’s wonder and life’s expression – no goal to achieve, no permanent state to attain. Thought in its chase in the tiny corner of the head for a something from nothing is unable to understand that is why it is coming up with nothing. The preoccupation with ideas that thought has the way to life is preventing the seeing that there is nothing to understand, nothing to communicate, nothing to change, nothing to chase – no how to this for it is not possible for thought to grasp or grab nothing, or silence.
Something has to happen other than winning and losing. It is the old’s responsibility, to and for the young, to at least give the young the chance to find the way, the how necessary for thought – how to take care of the world that is already here, of the life that the young is born into. The clock is ticking. There is only one child, sleeping.
Where To? 