Quote of the day

[Magical Realist]

“The universe had to fall apart into dust first to become its majestic, incredible, infinite self. What makes you think this breaking, this trauma, this destruction, won’t be the making of a more powerful you too?” — Nikita Gill

[Image: emission_nebula-256985-400-300.jpg]

[Magical Realist]

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
– Tom Stoppard

[Magical Realist]

“I thought perhaps she was crazy, but she was only highly intuitive.”
― Carl Jung

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“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

[Magical Realist]

“Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.
We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.”
― Lana Del Rey

[Magical Realist]

“Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.
Now in this ocean of pearling currents,
I’ve lost track of which was mine.”
― Rumi

[C C]

“Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.
Now in this ocean of pearling currents,
I’ve lost track of which was mine.”
― Rumi

"Rumi encouraged Sama, listening to music and turning or doing the sacred dance. In the Mevlevi tradition, samāʿ represents a mystical journey of spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect One. In this journey, the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth and arrives at the Perfect. The seeker then returns from this spiritual journey, with greater maturity, to love and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination with regard to beliefs, races, classes and nations."

Sounds close enough: the "we're all fundamentally the same materializing monism" view rather than separate beings. Thereby his "I’ve lost track of which [pearl of my soul] was mine" metaphor could be applicable as an alternative appearance for what death could be like. A transitional illusion for escaping the endless variations[*] for all eternity of this person's life history (IOW, this individual body and personality and its past and future modifications which the "I" seems to be limited to, never becoming anyone or anything else.)

The escape from that situation being that -- without memory anchoring experience to a particular personal identity -- there might be an intermission period after death of being objectively lost in a sea of countless mind-states before getting snagged onto the specific memories of one again. Becoming "trapped" in another subjective identity that seems to be a sequence of short-lived changes from birth to extinction.

But a misleading impression of "traveling" from one identity to another, since the generic properties of consciousness are already simultaneously abiding correlation-wise with all brains and alien cognitive systems (including the countless modifications of the so-called "same person"). Immediate (rather than reflective) awareness is by definition or necessity the discrimination of treating a particular cognitive interval in a long sequence of such as if only it is real (maximum focus). Each division is a solipsist, believing only the information configuration it is holding exists. "Only my knowledge of THIS moment is alone manifesting, only the 'I' belonging to this moment partakes in substantive reality."

- - - footnote - - -

[*] I.e., time doesn't literally flow in Everett's multiverse or Many Worlds Interpretation, so it arguably equates to a kind of unpredictable (variegated) block-universe in terms of personal experience and evolution. Though an objective descriptive model would be a map of all the different versions of the cosmos in that meta development, not just THIS "timeline".

"That isn’t the end of it. The single wave function describes all possible universes at all possible times. But it doesn’t say anything about changing from one state to another. Time does not flow. Sticking close to home, Everett’s parameter, called a state vector, includes a description of a world in which we exist, and all the records of that world’s history, from our memories, to fossils, to light reaching us from distant galaxies, exist. There will also be another universe exactly the same except that the “time step” has been advanced by, say, one second (or one hour, or one year). But there is no suggestion that any universe moves along from one time step to another. There will be a “me” in this second universe, described by the universal wave function, who has all the memories I have at the first instant, plus those corresponding to a further second (or hour, or year, or whatever). But it is impossible to say that these versions of “me” are the same person. Different time states can be ordered in terms of the events they describe, defining the difference between past and future, but they do not change from one state to another. All the states just exist. Time, in the way we are used to thinking of it, does not “flow” in Everett’s MWI. " https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-m...ds-theory/

Versions of Jane Smith in highly differing universes are not the same person in terms of sharing the same memories of those different states of Jane Smith believing themselves to be part of the same life progression in "their cosmos". But that itself highlights the flimsiness of what distinguishes the different selves in parallel universes from different selves extending in time. The differences belong to the set of all possible physical configurations that a person can be in from zygote to corpse in a coffin. Some simply consider themselves to be linked (the same person or identity) due to carrying memories of the others. "I gradually flowed from who I was five years ago into who I am today, but we're all the same Jane Smith" would be the folk psychology or commonsense proposal.

[Magical Realist]

The escape from that situation being that -- without memory anchoring experience to a particular personal identity -- there might be an intermission period after death of being objectively lost in a sea of countless mind-states before getting snagged onto the specific memories of one again. Becoming "trapped" in another subjective identity that seems to be a sequence of short-lived changes from birth to extinction.

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the ten thousand things. When actualized by ten thousand things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”
― Dogen

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“I've often noticed that when coincidences start happening they go on happening in the most extraordinary way. I dare say it's some natural law that we haven't found out.”
― Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

[Magical Realist]

“Watch carefully
the magic that occurs
when you give a person
enough comfort
to just be themselves.”
― Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

[Magical Realist]

“I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”
― Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange

[Magical Realist]

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread."--Edward Abbey