The soundtrack of my life is the overheard din of distant machines running. The sputter of the big rigs downshifting on the nearby highway. The buzz of unseen airplanes on a sunny afternoon. The ghostly toot of the nightly freighters steaming into port. The gentle blare and clickity clack of the midnight train making me cozier beneath my blanket. The nostalgic droning of lawnmowers during summer afternoon naps. I somehow find comfort and safety in the background thrum of the world indifferently going on without me.
In the scientific materialist's universe, probably the most important thing you could be would be a star. There are SO many of them! 200 sextillion of them by recent estimates! We are hopelessly biased by being extremely rare tiny critters living on a planet. The things we think are important are not what the universe deems important. Why so many stars? What's the point? Is the universe just one vast foundry for mass producing giant flaming balls of gas? I like to think there is much more going on behind the scenes than this.
I sometimes suspect that we are now living in what may be called a defunct reality. Someone in our future at one time went back into our past and changed something, cutting us off from the real timeline and leaving us to chug along on our own steam in a sort of disconnected bubble reality. And so as time goes on this false reality will eventually decay naturally, with events happening that make less and less sense until it will never have happened at all. It is in a way a paradox since this timeline has to be around and still real enough to bring about the time traveler who goes back and changes our history. Will we make it? Time can only tell..
It is a fact that if you removed the brain from a living person and placed it 3 feet in front of them with all its nerves still connected, that the brain will still seem to that person to be behind their eyes and inside their skull. This shows that the "insideness" of the brain as experienced by a person has nothing to do with where it actually is and is in fact wired into it.
In the great hierarchy of the physical universe, from galaxies to people to quanta, two ontic absolutes reign supreme. We begin at the highest level with the concept of the newtonian force--a purely felt and unseen exertion/repulsion across space and thru matter as embodied in such phenomena as gravity, motion, inertia, pressure, and resistance.
Descending the ladder from the macro to the micro, we finally reach the other extreme, of the massless and luminous ether or field of light. Everything we understand the universe as operates on metaphors of these two substrates, of what moves and exerts force, and what illuminates and reveals being. How do these two realms connect? From what mysterious essence did they diverge?
We see in the originating event of the Big Bang the instantaneous creation of force and radiance, of the metaphor of the explosion where force and light are expelled from one common point. But try as we may we cannot put these two domains back together again. The macro domain of gravity will not couple with the quantum domain of light. Force's essence is in its tangibility, its visceralness, while light's essence is in its visibility or manifestation. It all ties into the two fundamental sensory modes thru which we experience the world--of the felt essence of motion and resistance, and the visual essence of light and darkness.
We will only understand physical reality fully when both of these essences are synthetically unified as one irreducible metaphor--as the revealing force, or the felt radiance. Some third metaphor that makes conceivable one mode of existing as both felt and as seen in essence.
One metaphor that seems to meet this criteria is the act of the spoken word. When we speak, we are basically exerting an outward transmitted force thru the movements of our jaws, lips, tongue, throat, and diaphragm. Alternating waves of compression and rarefaction ripple thru the elastic air striking the ears of listeners. Here it resembles a medium more akin to light, generating images and feelings in our minds almost instantaneously. We decode the tones and frequencies and sequences and disruptions of the vocal sound into meaningful information., In the case of music we respond more with feeling the tones and melody in an emotional way. So, the exertion of tangible force that reveals and manifests like visible light? The meticulously precise vibration of air inducing a "seeing", a sort of trance, of invisible patterns and connections? "In the beginning was the Logos."
"Douglas Kahn’s insistence on the pervasiveness of allegory finds resonance in a contemporary cosmological view. Within particle physics, since the 1970s, string theory has been an actively researched model for understanding the universe. Rather than visualizing the smallest particles of matter as miniscule points, string theory posits that quarks and electrons may be visualized as sub-microscopic “strings” that vibrate, much like on a musical instrument. The tone at which a string vibrates determines its physical form. At present, they remain invisible and are thought to exist in other manifold as-yet-invisible dimensions. Many theoretical physicists, including Stephen Hawking believe that string theory could be a “theory of everything,” a fundamental way of describing the makeup of the universe. Auditory culture is thereby extended to the smallest particles and the largest galaxies. Pythagoras was known for saying, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres,” thus also linking the visual and the aural."--- https://www.sensorystudies.org/picture-g...res_image/
Listening is the oldest and most fundamental of our senses. We were listening before we left the womb, comforted by the heartbeat and muffled voice of our mother. When we are lying on our deathbed breathing our last gasps, they say we can still hear the voices of our loved ones. All other senses may fail, but listening can never be shut off. There are no ear lids. In sleep we can still hear the noises that either soothe us or jolt us awake. The patter of the rain on the roof or the sudden thunderclap. The snoring of our lover or the bump in the night. If you listen really well, you can hear the ringing treble of your own nervous system singing inside your head. The pulsing base of your own heartbeat inside your blood vessels.
When we really listen to others speaking, we are reaching out and snatching their fleeting words in midair and feeling them empathically as if we were uttering them ourselves. This is called listening with our "third ear". When we talk we are also eavesdropping on our own voice, tracking its pitch and cadence and meaning to precisely steer the course of our speaking. Reigning in gently as it were the jerking tug of what needs to be said next.
So listen well my friends for the distant callings of the world. Sound out the fathomless chambers of your unlit being. The universe is whispering in your ear in a thousand secret and always surprising ways.
“And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.”— Charles Bukowski
"The story of Charles Bukowski’s transformation into an artist unfolds like a hymn to the defiant spirit. It has all the familiar themes of a literary outlaw: booze, poverty, rage, and tumultuous love. Yet, at its core lies an unwavering devotion to the written word—a quiet, enduring flame amidst the chaos of his existence.
Through the long years of obscurity, Bukowski toiled steadily in shadowed rooms, crafting his art with no promise of recognition. His dreaded fame, as if summoned by fate itself, arrived only in the later chapters of his turbulent life, a testament to the slow, relentless rhythm of his resolve.
In his roaring younger years, he was an aloof bum living on shit jobs and wits.
He worked in slaughterhouses, dog biscuit factories, bloodbanks in Frisco, and hung posters in New York subways. He was a shipping clerk, a truck driver, a mail clerk, a newspaper errand boy in New Orleans, and a “holder down of barstools throughout a dull alarmclock nation, supported by shackjob whores.”
To me it is pivotal to remember that all science and history and literature and politics and philosophy and religion comes out of the pure and unfettered interplay of language and conversation. We would all still be in our caves drawing stick figures on its walls if the infinitely creative magic of using words, of making communicable and vivid sense out of chaos, had never arisen.
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Materialistic science is most assuredly true. No other model of the universe provides us with such an accurate and predictable understanding of its inner workings with such uncanny mathematical precision. BUT.....it is NOT to be confused with reality itself. For instance, standing in front of a mirror we justifiably assume everything we see in it is a flawlessly faithful reflection of physical reality. Of your body standing before it and the whole room surrounding you.
But that doesn't mean it IS reality. It is still only a simulation of what is real---an illusion even--that we project realness into. If I raise my hand I can definitely see my hand raising in the mirror. Well then, you say, it must be the same as reality. But speak and the mirror will remain silent. Touch your reflected hand with your own hand and you will feel no hand. Only the cold glassy surface.
But most striking of all, the mirror only ever presents reality as if it were a totally objective third person dimension. But this is a lie too. The only way you can experience the dimension inside the mirror is by NOT being in it---by being fundamentally outside the mirror. And this outside reality you are really in is always first person and subjectively experienced by you. The illusion of a world existing independently of a first person pov and of you as just one among all the third person reflections in the mirror, isn't real at all and never will be. Your third person mirror image experiences nothing and is simply not real in itself. It is a mere soulless replicant of you without intent or consciousness. A simulacrum made totally out of light..
So the mirror has obvious though subtle limits, just as materialist science does. Just remember, the hologram, however successfully accurate and real it may feel, is not the reality. Don't get trapped inside mirror thinking.
Jan 18, 2025 10:01 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 18, 2025 11:38 PM by Magical Realist.)
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