Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Reality

  • Seek and You shall Find

    Seek and You shall Find

    In the mental world, in our interior “reality” we can find whatever we want. Whatever we are looking for.

    For us this may appear to be reality. And indeed this is “our” reality. But it would be a great mistake to assume that others share that reality. It would be an even greater mistake to impose our “reality” on theirs.

    If you are seeking “god” you are likely to find him. Or her or…it…or some cross gender thingummy-bob. If you are seeking meaning in emptiness as do those in the East, again you are likely to find it.

    If you seek to deny meaning, yours will be a frightening reality but you will find it nonetheless. You will find empty, barren nothingness if that is your wont. Perhaps that is what depression is.

    I would not care to dispute the meaning which people have found. Just so long as they can accept that it is their meaning and that while some others may share it, it is almost certainly not any sort of universal truth.

    I do believe in certain absolutes but again I must probably accept that these things just appear to me as absolutes. And that others will deny their applicability. Good and evil – what are these except stories we have told ourselves? Do they really exist in the material universe? Well I believe so, but I wager you will find an equal number who do not. Perhaps good and evil exist only in the mind. In the absence of sentience good and evil can surely have no meaning?

    I have quoted love and the abolition of suffering as moral imperatives. Many will ridicule such an assertion, and, who knows, perhaps rightly. Perhaps they are absolutes merely in the minds of those who seek them.

    For those of us with minds which are not too damaged (mine probably just about qualifies) we will find what we want to find. I seek peace, in a metaphorical as well as literal sense. In all shades of meaning. Quiet, absence of conflict, a place “Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea”.

    And to a large extent I have found it.

    Others seek turmoil and conquest, noise and battle (commercial or physical). And that is no so difficult to find; it is around every corner.

    Universally applicable or not, subjective or objective, the internal machinations of our mind leak out into the exterior world. Our thoughts become words. Our words become deeds.

    I don’t suppose my detractors would find such a statement too controversial.

    And so if my mind believes in the nothing, in the meaningless of all things, then it is not just my life which will become meaningless. People may read what I write, my family will notice my behavior and my actions, as will everyone I come into contact with. They will be affected (and badly) by my infectious pessimism.

    And so yes, from thought great good and appalling evil, or even simple banality, arises. Especially if we are the sort of energetic fool who insists on proselytizing our internal states to the world at large. Personally, I have neither the energy nor the charisma. Let alone the desire.

    But for those who do, the logos becomes reality writ large. What starts as a quiet thought in a single mind, what starts as a cankered and twisted desire can all too soon become not only the reality of the mind which created it, but that of countless others as well.

    In the beggining was the word (or thought). Seek and you shall find.

    Eventually. Whatever it is you are looking for. But let everyone seek and find for themselves.

  • A Time to Live

    A Time to Live

    There comes a time when you have had enough of “learning” and feel a deep need for “experience”.

    I seem to have dipped my toes into every exotic corner of human endeavor over the decades and probably have a pretty good feel for what is out there.

    “Out there” in the sense of human learning, intellect, endeavor.  Philosophy, psychology, religion, physics.  Biology, chemistry, law and finance. Computers and artificial intelligence. The vastness of human knowledge in the 21st Century means that we can only have a glancing appreciation of each such subject, nonetheless this enough to make us aware, to know that others know.  Even if our own knowledge of other’s specializations can only be skin deep.

    I have not needed to know where every sparrow fell.  But I have needed to know what we know; in general terms.

    I now feel a deep need to know what we do not know. We are like goldfish in a bowl: our limited senses and intellect must surely shield us from much of what is truly out there in reality. If there is such a thing as reality. If reality is not created by our own thoughts.

    My mind is choc a bloc with everything from the nature of time to magic mushrooms. From my conviction in the futility of conventional religion to my faltering attempts to code machine learning algorithms.

    A time comes perhaps when you should turn to the experiential and leave, for a while at least, the intellectual.

    If the adult brain has plasticity, then I want proof.  I can write without effort and so I will carry on. But with an obsessive mind unable to multitask, further intellectual research has to be dropped while I find out for myself whether I can “change my mind”.

    Recently for instance I have been “experiencing” art without thinking about it.  Sitting in front of the London Mustaba or Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast to see what they have to say to me, while taking care not to dig to deep into what such works say to others. Not to dig, as I am won’t, into the intellectual; to eschew the learned historians of art in favor of my own raw feelings.

    It is time to “feel” the universe for myself. To cease to see it through the words of others and to experience it directly.

  • Out of my Skull

    Out of my Skull

    What does it mean to be out of your skull? Is it a detrimental term or may it have hidden meanings and use?

    I have been thinking recently about collective delusion.  Where society or a segment of society comes to believe something to be true which is in fact false.

    There are many examples. I have “faith” that religion is a collective delusion. It is a series of stories we tell to explain our own origins, to find our place in a fearful world. It has no basis in fact but whereas we collectively agree that Father Christmas is a fiction, woe betide those who dare to say the same about [insert your favorite deity/prophet].

    Getting out of your skull is not about mindless drug or alcohol abuse. Or at least not the way I mean it. It is about distancing yourself from your own ego. It is about questioning every thought you have ever had about god, the universe and everything.

    It is about deciding whether the answer really is “42” or something else entirely.

    It is about questioning every aspect of yourself, your thoughts your behaviour and the reality you believe you see around you.

    To some extent this can only be the realm of science. Maths and the microscope, maths and the Large Hadron collider, maths and the cosmic background radiation.

    And yet science can be aided surely by getting “out of your skull”. By abandoning dull convention, by thinking new thoughts, by daring to challenge the many collective delusions we have invented for ourselves.

    It may be that the Doors of Perception can only truly be opened by mystic experience. Or by dreams or the mind travels of the shaman. Or the deep meditation of the experienced monk.

    Those of us less brave or determined might achieve a shift in perception by letting go. By renouncing old ways, thinking new thoughts, daring to do new things. By shaking ourselves up, by refusing to bow to convention and collective delusion.

    Few would wish to experience the Dark Night of the Soul and yet we must achieve at least some view through the doors of perception if we are to grow.  To escape the wheel of existence, we must seek to free ourselves from dull mundanity.

  • Art as a lens on “reality”.

    Art as a lens on “reality”.

    You may be forgiven for mistaking the image above for photo montage. But it is not: it is the London Mustaba project, a temporary (and contemporary) work of art, and it floats on the Serpentine,  in Hyde Park.

    It is Christo and Jean – Claude.

    When I saw it it struck me as hideous, so I went to see the accompanying exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery.  I soon became converted to “oil drum art”.  I saw a stark utilitarian beauty in their structures.

    I had loved many other pieces of their work; to be honest, I am not sure why. The sheer audacity perhaps of altering vast natural landscapes with a “valley curtain”; of disguising structures like the Pont Neuf in Paris with wrapping.

    It is also about shock – jolting you out of the mundane. The Mustaba on the Serpentine struck me as an alien spaceship and suddenly I saw the beauty.  Yes it is man-made, mechanical if you like, but in an Ian Banks “Culture” sort of way; it is huge, colorful, magnificent and daring. It ought not to be there and perhaps at its centre there lurks a “Mind”.

    As so often these days I am trying to see the world through different eyes: to use a different lens to understand “reality”.

    To intuitively grasp that in a sense, all reality is subjective; a figment of our own minds rather than an absolute.

    Shocks like this help.

    Our senses allow us to experience only a small part of the universe. We can only see lightwaves of a particular wavelength. We sense time even though it may not exist. We believe we have a past and a future even if in reality the present may be all that is granted to us.

    Expressions such as “mind bending” are perhaps not so trite after all.