Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

You can tell you are acting from your programming when you enact the same behavior that you are angrily condemning others for. "Eye for an eye" is not just a barbaric moral code. It's a powerful algorithm embedded in our cultural software that has only resulted in senseless massacres and endless wars and unabated hatred for thousands of years. And we have to free ourselves from it. Every last one of us.

Fascists, leftists, trumpers, liberals...what faces do you summon in your mind that allows you to hate with such impersonal labels?

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it." — Freya Stark

Think of your mind as a car you are given at 6 yrs old. For 12 years you are taught how to drive it, control it, and maintain it. In college they show you how to get around in it and achieve success with it with a "car-eer".. As the years go by this car is used to reliably navigate all the twists and turns and dead-ends of your life. As you age it begins to break down and doesn't run much anymore. One day you die. Then you wake up on the other side and suddenly you realize that what was once your car is now really a fantastic starship ready to explore the universe. Buckle up kiddo. The ride has just begun!

Life may not have any purpose, but that doesn't mean it's not meant to happen. A work of art or music or dance for example cannot be said to have been enacted for any specific purpose. And yet it was enacted spontaneously and naturally, solely for its own sake. Life has meaning precisely because it has no purpose to fulfill. It is not a machine designed for our own uses. Every moment happens just for you and you alone, just for that moment. Dwell attentively with whatever happens. Let what arises come and go like the passing clouds in the empty blue sky.

"Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word 'accident' has meaning."--Friedrich Nietzsche

“The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.”― Hakim Bey

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Witticisms are not made up. They are discovered. Inspiration is not willed. It comes to you. The poetic is not fancied. It is unveiled. Truths are not fabricated. They are stumbled upon. This is the power of the flow of language underlying our entire experience. The intuitive feel of things becoming conceivable and possible and present thru the spontaneous and creative interplay of words and metaphors and images. Thru the practice of a most artful relinquishment and stepping aside, language will surprise us by speaking forth itself from its own reservoir of inexhaustable sense-making.

Most of our day is spent in programmed mode, where we are just floating along barely conscious and reacting only to new things that stimulate us or provoke emotional reactions in us. It takes a degree of sustained effort, which over time can be developed into a habit, to notice things that are not stimulating us. Things that are happening just beneath the surfaces and yet are full of thought-provoking intrigue. Barely discernible or overlooked details and nuances we just take for granted and never really appreciated before. I call this "mindful noticing" or "thoughtful consideration."

An experience of some happening as a succession of projected still frames will only ever be understood in terms of inference and "filling in the blanks." Hence the necessary logic of cause and effect and the invisible transmission of some lawful or even necessary "force" between discrete events. But when you run these stills together, as on a movie film, and project them before you, the events are suddenly experienced as flowing together and morphing and changing in accord with some inner implicate order or fatedness. We then see and experience directly the arising and fading away of moments in a continuous stream of happenings, no longer confined to merely inferring their causation and filling in the gaps between static frames. We thus see the movie, while actually an illusion, as reality itself is experienced, full of import and direction and self-guidance, but not as conceived, as discrete successive images impossibly connected with each other and empty of any of the fluent properties that would intuitively unify them. We only reason and infer where we are not experiencing, among the puzzle pieces of a fragmented realm only reassembled thru abstract thought and memory.

Laugh. Laugh freely and laugh often, even when no one else does. For the entire universe is on our side.

One becomes magic simply by tapping into the flow of the dream. We realize that nothing about reality is static and set in stone. That everything is in flux and mixes together thru the properties and qualities they are manifested thru. We have direct access to these qualities as the qualia of our immediate experience--the sensory and emotional and imaginative pigments making us up and connecting us to our world. The flow inside us merges with the flow outside of us, and out of the alchemy of their impossible infusion arises the dream-steered wonderment that we call magic.