Creative writing and artful observations

[Magical Realist]

The ever roaming nature of attention, effortlessly shifting from a TV show playing in front of us to a feeling we're having to a memory of some event in our past to a thought we just had, strongly suggests to me that all these events we alternately notice and blank out are not discrete or separate from each other in any sense but somehow occupy a common space and time which consciousness constantly traverses with ease like a bird flitting from one tree branch to the next. There is a copresence of all these events to us that allows them to be accessed directly and immediately simply by noticing them suggesting the fundamental unity of our inner experience with the objective world beyond us. Not a unity of being so much as a coalescence of form or interconnecting wholeness.

[Magical Realist]

All rational explanations and theories are abbreviations or summations of intuitionally-grasped truth. They are abstractions and generalizations trying to compensate for the lack of phenomenal manifestedness of specific and lived experience with their own version of absolute certainty. Not truth per se, but an idealization of truth as a coherent and self-contained system of formulae and principles and laws designed for giving the mind an illusion of the real without any concrete experience of the real. As if abstractions could ever simulate the prima facie presence of the real to consciousness. No theory and mathematical proof for example could ever match the unshakeable certitude with which I know that I exist. It is an intuitively-grounded fact of all my experience and knowledge. It is the sole place where my consciousness and reality meet and necessarily presuppose each other. It is not rational or logical, but it is self-evident and absolutely given.

[Magical Realist]

One can never infer the overall pattern or whole just from examining its parts, especially when, like a car or the human body, the parts are diverse and all different. But there IS an intuitive sense that there IS a whole due to the simultaneous and harmonious functioning of the parts. Nothing empirically confirmable, but an assumption nonetheless. Reality is like this. The diversity and contradictions of all our experiences in life may initially suggest only randomness and chaos. But over time the unfolding of a pattern begins to emerge. We thus acquire thru living our lives a nagging hunch, a growing suspicion, that there is more to it than just this. That it has a unknown and perhaps unknowable meaning that transcends all particulars--an overall form or unity that is being hinted at in everything that is happening.

[Magical Realist]

We seem to get easily snared in the trap of binary thinking. Of defining things in terms of two absolute and irreconcilable opposites. Male and female. Life and death. Good and evil. Human and machine. Light and darkness. Real and illusion. Derrida was all about deconstructing this kind of thinking and showing it to be inherently flawed. I accept that. While it seems to be widely popular among the masses, always inciting strong emotions and inevitable conflict, it lacks a certain finesse and subtlety that reality always reveals in itself.

Take the binary "consciousness and unconsciousness", often assumed in philosophical debates about the nature of the mind. Here we frame consciousness as more or less an on/off switch. You are either conscious or unconscious and that's it. But I don't believe it is. Think more in terms of a dimmer switch. Think also of all the varying shades between consciousness and unconsciousness. Trances, dreams, hypnotic states, drug-induced hallucinogenic states, brain-washing, fugue states, meditation, visions, sensory-deprivation, psychosis, and so on.

There are, it appears, many liminal or "in between" states between lucid consciousness and total unconscious. Gradual increments from being totally aware and in control of our minds to being unaware and under the control of unconscious influences. To me this strongly suggests an underlying potential unity of consciousness and unconsciousness. Of focusing on some phenomenally present datum while blanking out the bulk of other data. If we take Huxley's filter theory seriously, we can say that consciousness itself only arises by negating or filtering out other things we are experiencing. There is, iow, a dialectical or reciprocal relationship between our phenomenal experience and our unconscious experience. Between what we perceive as real and present and what we feel as ideational and latent. Consciousness and psyche intertwining in an elegant and mutually creative state of being. This is why the path of Wholeness is one of imagination, artistic expression, symbolic play, fantasy, intuition, meditation, spiritual ritual, story-telling, and introspective observation.

[Magical Realist]

“Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a ‘defeatist’ or a ‘doomer’, or claim you are ‘burned out’. They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that ‘fighting’ is always better than ‘quitting’. Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel – intuit – work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance – refusing to tighten the ratchet further – is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

"The machine exists to create dependency. It is essentially a mechanism of colonisation. The history of modernity is the history of the spread of the Machine mentality to all corners of the Earth..." --Paul Kingsnorth

[Magical Realist]

Between the hectic mania of actually knowing the answers to the ultimate questions and the gnawing angst of not knowing, the gods granted us the gift of belief---a sort of half-way point between knowing and not knowing. It's a way of handling the "truth" in our own way and making it something we can easily set aside now and then as life demands.

[Magical Realist]

All physical things are still there whether I am observing them or not. All ideas are there whether I am thinking of them or not. And there are many things that are there whether I can even conceive them or not. Grasping the nature of this manifold "there" is the quest of the true philosopher.

"Your salience landscape is the way in which things stand out to you as important, relevant, or connected. It is shaped by your biology, your personal history, your culture, your state of mind, and your skills of attention. It is the background that makes intelligibility and action possible."--John Vervaeky

[Magical Realist]

There is very little that we do or think or feel that is expressive of some discrete and individual self. Nearly all of it is totally reactive to some other person or statement or sensory stimulation or event happening independently of us. This pattern of autonomous robotic reactions is ingrained into us biologically thru millions of years of evolution and thru our raising from birth. And it is practically identical from one human to another. Even our own blurted out thought processes, which we passionately claim is our own, are largely scripts we have learned to recite on cue thru our many social interactions.

What room is there then in these split-second reactions for anything like the outputs of an innate and independently-thinking self. Where do our own minds, free floating in some idealized ether of pure impassivity, come into play, when so much of our being ourselves is just being something we were all programmed to be? Slow down. Quit just reacting to everything around you. Distinguish the "supposed to" from what you really feel. And let the mud settle in the water before doing and saying what you really want to do and say.

[Magical Realist]

Physicality basically comes down to the complete absence of interiority. All physical things are posited as pure externalities--the whole and every part and particle of them conceived as yet more things adjacent to and suspended in a surrounding and interpenetrating space. There is no escaping this outsideness of itself. There is no possibility of containing anything because there is nothing inside it but more beings being outside in space and opened to other beings. At no point do we come upon anything like an inner essence or being-in-itself folded up inside its surfaces. Nothing is sequestered from the relentless atomicizing and quantification of spatiality. Which is simply to say physicality by its very nature excludes intrinsicity or subjectivity absolutely. What then does this say about the human body?

[Magical Realist]

Where do thoughts go when they die? To the Noosphere of course!

"A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence… [O]utside and above the biosphere, there is the noosphere… To a Martian capable of analyzing sidereal radiations psychically no less than physically, the first characteristic of our planet would be, not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phosphorescence of thought.”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955)