Consciousness

and one day it came…

Dear Mark,

Is it a folly to think this pawn is trying to escape the game by kiting through the frame?

To me, the pawn made the kite and has now found a way to fly it into the power zone so it can pull it into the air right through the restrictions of the fields on the board. I have much sympathy for the pawn. I made the pawn. From clay. I also made the kite and the thread. I glued the thread to the board so it looks like it’s attached to the kite. Also, the kite is painted on an old chessboard. But I painted a cloudy sky behind the kite. And a window.

I read somewhere there once was a military man who studied physics. Having found atoms exist mainly out of empty space. He looked at the wall and figured the wall therefor also exist out of empty space and very little wall. He thought it must be possible to go through the wall using the emptiness. He ran as fast he could and hit the wall at maximum speed.

The freedom of kites seems like the freedom of mind. I can think myself being the kite and fly with joy into the wind and into the power zone. I can pull the pawn up into the air. Right through the constrictions of the game. I can be the pawn. Or the thread. Or the board or the window. I also like to be cloud. White and soft and floating. And then I can have planes fly trough me or rain drop from me.

But I can’t seem to make it through the wall.

All the best,

Bruce

What better folly then a composition of things in a drawer.

The things in the drawer were loosely gathered to demonstrate unconscious assembly as a pattern. No thing was more important nor more powerful then any other thing. No thing was hustling another thing over a position of relative importance. There was no center of things, rather they were somewhat  dispersed. No thing that tied them together but the walls and the bottom of the drawer. Much like everything else.

See for yourself.

A friend send me a link to an article on a blog called “Raptitude” by David Cain. It is a conscious life-style blog in which David shares his quest for a life dedicated to becoming a better human. I’ve been reading some of his writings and it triggered me to react on his article because it is perfect to react to. The article is about 9 epiphanies that changed David’s world. People are passionate about finding realities underneath the cloak of anxiety that promise better things through insight. Guru’s and spiritual teachers, even if they present themselves as humble and mundane, make a life out of this attention grabbing from the kindle wood of human bonfires. Not that I think David pretends to be a Guru of any sorts. I like and appreciate what he is presenting and he seems genuine. It’s more that the reactions of people make me want to take some counter positions to investigate the relative truth of epiphanies. One persons epiphany can somehow at the same time be an other persons Beloni.

Here is the original blogpost from David. Underneath my reaction.

Fonzee - January 31, 2011 at 5:26 am.

First of all– this is great. I love the topic. Here is an exercise for what ever it’s worth. I’m changing all concepts of your epiphanies to see if other perceptions also make sense. Not as a counter argument, but as a way to liven up the extend to which we can mind-bend our concepts and stretch them beyond the limits of concepts.

1. You are not your mind.

mmmmaybe — but maybe:

1. You are your mind! That is exactly what you are!
(Unless you take drugs, then you are out of your mind).
Man is mind. The only reason to think you exist outside of your body-mind system is fear of death and the unknown. Once you accept you are scared to not exist and it’s your ego doing that to you, you can embrace the one and only mind-in-movement you have and nurse it well. Be your mind! Really own it. Take responsibility to continuously re-esthablish it.

2. Life unfolds only in moments.

mmmmaybe — but maybe:

2. Time is an agreement, so are moments. Even little moments are a creation of perception. Try this experiment. Maybe ego works like the lens of your mind. You can FOCUS it on moments and details or a year or a millennium or endlessness. Just like you can focus a lens on something near or far. Moments don’t exists unless you insist to focus on them and make them your epiphany. Moments don’t exist, they are the result of your perceptual focus.

3. Quality of life is determined by how you deal with your moments, not which moments happen and which don’t.

mmmmaybe — but maybe:

3. Quality of life is mostly accidental. You have to be lucky to slide through life a tad fortunate. People who think they can beat nature will also die in the end. If you are lucky, you will not suffer too much. A lucky mix of IQ and EQ will get you a better hand then your neighbor. Being good for your mind and knowing yourself (in movement) betters some things. But on the whole, luck kicks self-improvement’s ass.

4. Most of life is imaginary.

mmmmaybe — but maybe also: are you insisting it’s not real? Try to run through the wall! But lets assume imagination.

4. Imagination is thought based on reality. If you are born with a brain and no senses, you will not have thoughts. We need input! Imagine all the people, once you’ve noticed ‘people’. Imagine peace, once you have experienced peaceful moments. Image this word. Does it look like the pictures you have seen of it?  Imagine a fart. It’s all thought based on reality. Man is mind. Mind is thought. Man is based on reality. You are thoughts (which includes silence). If you experience emotions, they only become part of your awareness system when you focus on them and reflect on them. Life is not mostly imagination — it’s mostly reality derived. Imagination is what we (can) make of reality.

5. Human beings have evolved to suffer, and we are better at suffering than anything else.

mmmmaybe — but maybe also: — there is no ‘goal of existence’ and certainly not suffering.

5. Natural processes include suffering and procreation. All life ’suffers’ live events. You laugh, you cry, you live, you die and o, yeah, fuck. Pleasure and pain are involved. It doesn’t mean a thing. You are not controlling that. A plant does not control changing sunlight into growth. It exists and one of the things it exists through is changing sunlight into growth. It just does. It grows and withers. May I say we are very successful in procreation? There are an estimated 7 billion people now on earth. Humans have evolved to their current state through procreation without any further reason.

6. Emotions exist to make us biased.

mmmmaybe — but maybe also: — it’s probably a definition thing, but ‘exist’ troubles me here.

6. Emotions are always exactly right. Emotions are you experiencing your fear, anger, joy. They make us hide or run for danger, fight enemies or hitch up. All basic survival tools. They are never biased. Only a cognitive reflection on an emotion can produce the label: biased. Natural behavior is not the bias. Rational based doubt of instinct and cognitive dissonances like “Emotions exist to make us biased” ARE biasses. People who are looking to fill a void of uncertainty in their existence are biased to believe epiphanies that sooth their ego’s to sleep.

7. All people operate from the same two motivations: to fulfill their desires and to escape their suffering.

mmmmaybe — but maybe also:

7. People are largely unconscious to their motivations. They will do anything to survive, including all kinds of suffering.

People live their lives mostly unconscious, without any idea or direction whatsoever. Consciousness is overrated. Just like intelligence. People are mostly herd animals copying each others behaviors and repeating things nobody has an explanation for. They have a hard time distinguishing between pleasure-aimed behavior to relief short term agitation and long term health balancing actions. How can you even tell when you are constantly in a process to re-focus on all kinds of things and constantly minding your way through staying alive?

8. Beliefs are nothing to be proud of.

mmmmaybe — but maybe also: — it’s not about pride or shame. Believing is the result of feeling safer through repetitious claims on solving the anxiety of existential fear.

8. Belief is people repeating other people’s beliefs.
Believing is based on repetition. In order to believe something, you have to remember it. You need language and concepts. Then you remember it because you repeat it. You get used to it. It feels safe and then you believe in it. Believing is habit created by repetition. Say it enough and your thought will think it automatically. Our entire language is based on repetition, rules and beliefs. Beliefs work very well to survive and they make us a pretty dominant animals. For a little while in the history of this planet and our animal-kind our population grows — sort of, until nature changes unfavorable to our current human form, then we go. Beliefs are the tools of success. Planes are build based upon the believe we can fly. Your cellphone is a believe system. The internet is a system through which we exchange all our believes 24/7. “what if i talk to my screen and it will write my thoughts” is a believe that can induce the creation of an interface without keyboard.

9. Objectivity is subjective.

mmmmaybe — but maybe also:it is not a solipsistic world in which you are the center, just like earth is not the center of the solar system.

9. Objectivity is a very exclusive, important agreementYou need more then one person to create language and identity. One person is nobody. Language is the tool to point at another, creating ideas of another. You and me. Remembering you and me creates permanent subjects, who then can agree on things like objectivity to agree on the idea we are talking about the same thing. Objectivity is the key to agreement on the content of our communication being the same for you and me. It is all about really establishing the best possible connection. In calculus, it means you make the beams that support the building exactly the numbers and sizes in the drawings. Things collapse otherwise. Communication collapses if it is only subjectivity.

Manitas de Plata was illiterate, but he played like the best of writers, like the best of painters - brutally direct with no mercy for himself. Just concentrated. Pointed and hard like a rock and soft like moss on it. Almost seemingly clumsy without a plan, following the heart of traditional patterns in flamenco. Stumbling in and picking up speed all by itself. Notes playing Manitas. Also he was the reason i wanted to learn to play the guitar.  When I heard him play on my parents record player — i think i was 7, i told them i wanted to learn to play the guitar. And so it went.

I just found the tune and there is a good movie and good sound!

It’s not that Manitas has this great flawless technique, actually, on the contrary. There are may other flamenco players that have much better techniques. Paco de Lucia, Tomatito, Ricardo Nunez, all are stunning technical players. Manitas often starts off playing like a smuggler. He is messy. But as you listen in, it will take you because he lets it take it. No wonder Pablo Picasso supposedly said (I disagree) he was a lesser painter then this guitarist a musician. But it’s understandable because music is performed in a forceful stream of consciousness, especially with an audience, where painting happens in a series of movements, often without audiences. The force of a stream of consciousness shared with audiences demands a very deliberate and focussed attitude tied in with a total acceptance of presence.

Anyway — here is my “Manitas” — an ode to the artist that hooked me up — and thanks for the inspiration.



Produced by Lutein van Kranen & Mark Fonds at www.sunderling.com
Peter Arends (accordeon) - Mike Kamp (bass) - Dave van Beek (percussion) - Mark Fonds (guitar)

Fixing debts these days seems to be turning into a game of sudden death. How big can a folly grow in the presence of experts and specialists before everybody can clearly see and experience it’s stinking fumes? The pseudo science behind modern finance, that has grown it’s own meme in borrowing for investment returns and insuring against losses on unpredictability, is a staggering example of how all explanations point back at greed and fear or both. Man is the ultimate, selfish animal. Europe is at the brink of collapsing under it’s own ambition of being a unity of people because it’s leaders and bankers are prone to think of themselves first when arranging for their plan-B. Because they exemplify the norm, everybody is in for the ride. Of course it is a self defeating strategy. The beast is trying to die itself out of death. We are now just watching who is killing who, one by one, in order to jump the ship first. Ow, wait… but what if there is no water in the sea?

Do you feel like watching a reality show that is going to hurt you really hard in your own reality, lets say, the rest of your life? Start digging in. It’s always on, and happening now. Two amusing channels are Yves Smith’s Naked capitalism and Satyajit Das Blog.  And this is what i ran into today – I can’t help to, sort of sheepishly, laugh at the next quote from Edward Hugh at Roubini, because it’s probably right on:

So rather than being over, what the debt crisis now may be entering is a new stage, where one sovereign bond after another is being chisled out and sent off to join their Greek counterpart in the isolation ward. Actually, in this sense the present European Sovereign Debt situation does rather resemble the plot of the well known Agatha Christie detective novel “And Then There Were None“. As told by M. Christie a group of ten people, all of whom have in one way or another been previously complicit in an earlier death, are somehow tricked into travelling together for what was intended to be a short stay on a secluded island. Once there, and even though the guests are apparently the only people on the island, they are - somehow, and one after another - systematically murdered. So, in a way which may eventually come to foreshadow scenes from the forthcoming meetings of the European Financial Stability Facility management board, each morning one guest less shows up for breakfast. One by one, and little by little, each participant becomes mysteriously overcome by a seemingly inexplicable bout of some fatal variant of what could be termed “systemic instability syndrome”.

Interestingly there are a whole bunch of bloggers and opinion makers getting their keyboards dirty on commenting Paglia’s rant on Gagaism in defense of the latter. It just feels like what is missed is the part where Paglia has her way with the same thing Gaga has her way with — a dance around the tree of calling who is who in authenticity land. It occurs to me that we assume there are somehow unwritten rules as to that what we say we are and what we say we think and what we are and think — are somehow related. Obviously that is not a necessity. In pop culture one can say anything for the saying of it. Sing anything for the singing and mean nothing. Anyway, this is what they did to the fleshdress after the MTV awards…

Tom Gliatto in the Huffinton Post has a good scoop on Paglia’s piece.

A new theme arises: domestication. Strolling through the Amsterdam zoo Artis, we stumbled upon the Domesticated Ass.

From the wikipedia: Domestication (from Latin domesticus) or taming is the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. A defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans.

So how about humans domesticating other humans? How do we artificially select each other?