Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

The compass was invented before the clock because what direction you were headed was more important than what time you arrived.

Capitalism, though at this point in time perhaps a rather necessary evil, still has its darker cancerous effects on our lives and our consciousness of ourselves. People use social media now to brand themselves as if being a commodity for people to buy. People reduced to becoming cheap whores plying their wares to a world where mere packaging and appearance is more important than content and substance. Success in life measured in terms of popularity and financial profit and conformity to the next upcoming and transient fad. The fading of the last ghostly vestiges of our personhood behind the many-layered masks of a now gawdily-displayed and hypermediated "us" charade.

---

Being is not a noun. It is a verb. And such a verb that instantiates itself in three distinct tenses--was, is, and will be. Think about this. An action performed by any noun whatsoever that embraces states of pastness, presentness, and futurity.

Not only that, it instantiates qualitatively, as any predicate of a subject, generating the miracle of identification, description, location, and modality. Something can BE possible, necessary, contingent, real, unreal, and impossible.

Thus whatever else we mean by being, just by its grammatical use it denotes the pure agency of the subject introducing itself as the spoken--as an action of something existing purely as opposed to not existing.

Being is thus whatever can be put forward as whatever is the case. It is the inherent representative power of word, a sort of creatio ex nihilo, as making itself known AS whatever, wherever, whomever, and whenever. Being is essentially epiphanous, awakening, and revelational all at once! The best metaphor is light--in its twofold power of making manifest AS and of making manifest THRU. It is the magical bridge between being simultaneously spoken and spoken about---between creating and being created.

Find your defining metaphors--the ways you naturally and without forethought tend to see and understand and become inspired to create and to explore. Become familiar with the inner narrative guiding your life---the real one not the one handed to you by your society or school or church. The one that gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps giving you hope for what is possible and good and worth staying alive for. We cannot live in a past that no longer exists. We cannot live in a present where nothing changes. We live in the imminent future--- haunched down like a stalking cat in the next 10 seconds of whatever arises. Be with that. Perch yourself squarely on this sparkling cusp of the just coming to be. This is the only place where our life is happening, crammed full with promise, inspiration, and wonderment. As Emily Dickinson said, "I dwell in possibility."

---

---

It only hits home that consciousness is quite literallly everything when we actually lose it. No more world..No more self. No past, present, or future. Not even unconsciousness. That's how lit up everything is by this little burning flame inside our brains.

Like a mobius strip the inside twists back on itself to become the outside. Travel either way long enough and you will come out the other side. Dreaming that we are dreaming, we find ourselves awake. Escaping the mirage, we must go thru the looking glass.

"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes"----C G Jung

Inside mirror world, everything operates the same as on this side of the mirror. Same laws and properties and objects. Thus there must be a mirror on the other side of our mirror reflecting the mirror person and their world to themselves. Thus to them WE are the reflection in the mirror, a mere mirror world where everything is identical except for the transposition of left and right. It is this inherent symmetry of the two worlds that creates the near indistinguishable simulation of each as the other. Perhaps our own consciousness of the world is itself in such a symmetrical relation to the physical world, only as some sort of holographic reflection of one to the other. The interface--the reflective "surface"-- being spacetime itself.

Hymn To The Dawning Noosphere

Welcome to our ravaged and cluttered world,

Where everything is in disarray and scattered apart.

Descend now into our rough terrain of shipwrecked debris and clods of matter,

Hyperlinking together everything to everything else smoothly into some new allness,

Each thing noticed..each event pondered...a glowing icon clicked on transporting us elsewhere.

“The paranormal is trying to get our attention. Reality is not what we think it is.”---Jeff Kripal

On being conflicted...

“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"---Song Of Myself, 51. Walt Whitman

It is my suspicion that things are only allowed to be real and present to us in order for us to move and go about our business. Take a traffic light for instance. One you stop and go at practically every day. Little if any thought whatsoever is required to use that for our own driving purposes. The traffic light thus never assumes the form of a present and in-itself thing. It is a largely unconscious source of a stimulus to either stop or to move on. The only time we would become conscious of the traffic light as an object instead of as a tool would be if it started to malfunction, like taking too long or giving us conflicted signals. The somnalescence of our usual being-in-the-world disrupted, awakening us to the fact of the traffic light's sudden individual existence.

Think about that for a second. Our everyday mode of going thru our day being in that state that consumes the least energy and attention--on autopilot-- UNTIL something wrong happens or something malfunctions--independent objectness or "present-at-handedness" only something that happens AFTER being largely swept along inside our meticulously automated and chronologically synced-up world. We are only jolted into real-time awareness by what breaks the pattern----by whatever interrupts our smoothly-revolving and soporific carousel ride. Objectness only a subset of the problematic and the haywire. Consciousness the high-energy consuming state of being suddenly hypervigilant about what is happening to us and so trying to diagnose it.

Just as heat cannot exist for a single isolated molecule, so too is morality nonexistent for the solitary soul. Separated from the constant jostlings and bumpings of others, the lone soul has little need for thinking in terms of love or hate and good or evil. He is simply and absolutely in a primal state of animal freedom, obliged only to find joy and meaning wholly within his own pursuits. Thus is morality exposed to be an entirely socially-constructed pasttime. Selfness is another. Which is why when a loner hears others encouraging each other to just "be yourself", he chuckles to himself: "Ofcourse! What else is there to be BUT myself?"