This post was inspired by a thread with Marko in my previous diary (on Street Prophets -- I'm getting errors trying to publish there tonight, so maybe this will work):
So a new diary is shaping up here; how is it that one person's view of the circumstances transforms their world into an entirely different experience from the next person who begins with the same circumstances but a different view? I like the idea of "steerage of the world" as juxtaposed with the idea of "navigating the terrain."
On Saturday I was at my parent's house after Mom's birthday on Friday. I was sorting through my remaining possessions stored in a trailer in their garage, and had emptied the trailer out into floor of the garage to make it easier. I'm thinking in terms of "kits" rather than individual items; as much as possible, I want to be prepared to take care of my own daily needs. So daily tasks all have kits of associated stuff, bath kit, sleeping kit, medicine kit, kitchen kit, working kits. Everything left over out of these kits generally is one of those trinkets whose value is in its story, its associations, its memories, and not in the thing itself. I'm down to one (big) box of that stuff. Heh. It's progress.
One of my remaining possessions is an old Shopsmith, the first revision of the first "experimental model," model number 10-ER, built in 1948. It's a multitool -- easily convertible from a wood lathe to a table saw to a drill press or horizontal boring machine, to a 12" disk sander, with attachments that add bandsaw, jigsaw (in picture), belt sander, planer, and probably some I've forgotten.
I don't have all the attachments, just a jigsaw at this point, but that's beside the point -- this tool is Quite a Thing. When taking it to the mountains of northern Arizona from Phoenix, I once dumped it out of the bed into a parking lot; so this time I decided to drill out the plastic bed liner in my pickup truck, in the corners where steel tie-hooks attached to the bed frame had been covered over.
I needed a hole saw, and I figured Dad had one -- when he found it, it had about 10 different sizes of saw concentrically arranged and held in with two pins threaded at the top with a screwdriver slot on their ends. When Dad handed me the hole saws, I was standing over a small cabinet that is part of my shop kit. In it is a drawer with a little pouch of tools that included the correct size screwdriver for these hole-saw pins.
Before I leaned over to get the screwdriver out of the pouch in the drawer, I looked at Dad and commented, "So my life seems to go like this a lot these days, for some reason; the tool I need just happens to be right at my feet; I just have to bend over and get it." Now Dad's a hero for all the times he's listened to me say something incomprehensible or irrational and decided just to smile at me, a big smile that makes it okay, whatever else it is.
But, what else is it? Is this just my imagination, or coincidence, or is it just that I'm looking at things in a different way? Similar objects tend to be in the same area where they'll be needed, like tools in a shop; so it's no surprise if a tool in the shop is at my fingertips, which are in the shop, for a task I'm doing -- in the shop!
Yet we've all had the experience of tools that are supposed to be in the shop or tool chest not being there; and so they are at some other unknown place wherever they happened last to be used or absently set down. Some people's experience in these matters is more of the latter, where it seems like every single thing they need is somewhere else, and not in the same place as the other stuff they need; so the task at hand comes to walking around a lot, then doing some more walking. After seeing this phenomena in the world, I am always happy to notice that it doesn't happen to me very often, not lately.
Rationally, again, this is because I tend to be patient in cleaning up and putting things back where they belong; and for those with the opposite experience, they know that they are leaving tools out, but think they'll remember where they are if they need them and anyway "I'll finish this tomorrow and then put everything up." Still the outcome is predictable.
But there is, I believe, much more to the story than admits of a purely rational explanation. The trick to seeing it is in the ability to adopt various points of view. Although what I'm talking about is really more than mere perspective; I'm talking about the ability to adopt at will different paradigms, different views of the world, different philosophical assumptions, different types of logic, depending on the situation and one's own present state of mind.
For example, there's no compelling reason to think about abstract arithmetic when building a building or a device. But there is every reason to do so when designing or engineering the same. So one may adopt an artist's perspective in designing a building while becoming meticulously precise in stress calculations, layout, and construction. The experience of union, of love, is available to us in any such state; but that is more of an energetic posture than an activity or mental system. I highly recommend the practice of adopting and maintaining an open-hearted posture in every activity.
The Quantum Nature of ... Nature
In response to recent wildfires, a request was posted for collective visualization of rain. I reposted it and commented:
To my best understanding, what we think of as material reality exists most of the time in a nebulous cloud of probable events. The waveform that collapses to create physical reality does so in response to interacting with consciousness, such as the consciousness of a scientist taking a measurement in a quantum experiment. I think there is a much greater encompassing consciousness that is observing our universe into precise reality out of the cloud of possibilities; so we do not, with our small consciousness, create our whole reality, but we can participate in its creation to a large degree. The world will go on without us, but we need not be completely at its mercy. Anyway I do think the possibility of a group of people collectively visualizing a particular natural event and pulling out of the cloud of probability is very intriguing. And in a case like this, totally worth a try!
I know some hard-core materialists hate this "interpretation" of empirical results, but as Plato said, this war between the idealists and the materialists is a battle of Gods and Giants that has always been raging. In any case, this is what I "know" about it. So there's that.
Adventures in Consciousness
I've told this story before, but to cut to the chase -- I pick up a book off a friend's bookshelf with the title Adventures in Consciousness; say to myself, "Okay, I'll have an adventure in consciousness," then open it at random, and I start reading the first paragraph of another book entitled The Education of Oversoul Seven, of which my friend has two copies. He gives me one of them about a minute later. Go ahead and read that again. And coincidentally (ahem) the subject of that book is stuff pretty much along these same lines; how we participate in the manifestation of physical reality with our pure conscious intent. So, there's that.
The Glass Bead Game
This book by Hermann Hesse was deeply formative for me, hopeless utilitarian utopian that I am. Written about the same time that Jon Von Neumann was formalizing the technical description of a "computer" in the 1940's, Hesse imagined a future society based around the inter-disciplinary, indeed pan-disciplinary, symbolic manipulation of characters which had the capability to elegantly express relations between any schools of thought or discipline. These symbols began with glass beads strung on wires, which later came to be used as counting devices -- in other words, an abacus-like device. As actually happened in our history, the symbols associated with the columns of an abacus were eventually themselves used as the basis for the computation, so the beads were no longer needed -- everything was expressed in the symbols, or hieroglyphs, of the game. The Games themselves were compositions in the style of a symphony, a combination of artistic expression and sacred communion, though the devotion is toward the quality of mind which acknowledges and seeks out these interconnections weaving everything together. All one has to do is find them, these connections, and revel in the meaningful interpretations of their juxtaposition; so the idea of research is transformed into something more like the weaving of a tapestry of ideas, using a kind of language that Hesse imagined as symbolic.
Being passionate about mathematics, I know that one dream of the mathematicians of prior generations was a system of notation called the "Universal Characteristic" -- a way of expressing number that contain within it all calculation, replacing the labor of mental arithmetic with symbolic manipulation. So this is an idea in the same vein as The Glass Bead Game. And so, there's also that.
Another Possibility for the Helm
Aat some point in reading Hesse's book, perhaps when the Music Master was telling young Joseph Knecht that the truth had to be lived, not taught, and would not be found in any books -- I had the thought that, it is possible to view the world in which I find myself as just such a system. Is it possible that my experience is happening inside of a kind of language? That matter, material reality, is written out in the symbols of quantum particles and their ilk?
If this is true, the implications are profound. But it does offer some tenuous thread of explanation for the fact that meaningful unlikely coincidences often occur to people, especially to those who appreciate the meaning. Is this a message from some other level of being to us, using the material world, phenomena themselves, as a screen projecting information to us?
And if this is the case, the perhaps those meaningful coincidences when we are on a good track, or the discouraging disasters that warn us off of repeated mistakes or bad ruts, perhaps these are just the beginning. Perhaps this consciousness has much more very specific and precise information for us -- to give us in the rich language of our material, temporal theatre of existence and mind. If so, then we must adopt a different posture to our physicality in light of its purpose and use.
I do find it interesting that there are very few good explanations for what we are supposed to be doing "here" - in this sort of animal body, on this sort of planet, etc. It's highly weird when you put the question in cosmological scale of time and space; but strange enough simply that no one has the slightest idea, from what I've been able to gather from four and one-half decades of careful attention to the issues.
So when I speak of steerage of the world, it is not with the conceit that I, alone, create this reality -- for in that case you, therefore, are figments of my own imagination, extras on the set of my life story about me and my accomplishments. No, that is silliness -- what I'm really talking about is the experience, my own experience, of looking at events in the world as parts of a conversation -- but it is someone, something else that is steering that conversation -- and by this I mean, meaningfully influencing real events, as much or more than I.
I know that just being able to participate in the conversational aspect of "reality" -- when I pay attention to it -- changes my entire experience of being in the world; and so I am steered into deeper waters, unexplored.... As yet.