REPERCUSSIONS & REVERBERATIONS (As if anything Matters)

Ism – the Theory of Everythink

So here I am, reading ‘Cell’, Stephen King’s latest. Apparently there’s this fatal virus that you catch from a cell phone. A nice premise for a Science Fiction story.

Anyway, the main character, Clayton Riddell, is in a tizzy. He’s got to get home before his son switches on his phone while all around him Boston burns.

I ask myself, Why? Why does he want to do that? What makes him want to save the life of a particular other (and it’s never really saving, just prolonging life temporarily a few years at best) when the whole world is dying?

No one sees it. No one notices that anything’s wrong, in fact we expect one another to care more for one’s own brood than for a stranger. Now, isn’t that strange? The peculiar thing is we all expect people to care for one another to varying degrees. Okay, an international flight goes down. And on the news they report how many passengers came from the home country. Weird. And is a whale worth any more than a sheep? And does a creature accrue extra worth the fewer of its species remain living?

This is what I mean by human idiosyncrasy, the common misconceptions that we go along with, with the crowd.

Isn’t there a bit in the bible where someone points out to Jesus that he didn’t acknowledge his mother, and he asks back, ‘Who is my mother?’ Something like that. It possibly relates to something like this.

So anyway, what I mean to do is address some of these attitudes and givens, and demolish them. Let me pose a mind experiment or two. Methinks from now I’ll refer to this blog, and my ramblings, as:

Ism – the Theory of Everythink

Virtual reality check

A nice meal . . . tastes good . . . satisfies my senses . . . nerve impulses to my brain . . .

State of mind

Wonderful music . . . sounds great . . . resonates inside me . . . nerve impulses . . .

State of mind

Basho’s haiku . . . conjure up images, sensations, moods . . . and within my brain electric currents . . .

State of mind

It seems to me that everything one experiences boils down to subjective experience. Bear with me, as I pick away at the warp and woof of that insight. Let’s solve for once the question of whether a tree falling down in the forest makes a noise if there’s no one about to hear it.

Everything that I sense reduces to neural activity. That must be so by definition – that is what a ‘sense’ is, right? A way and means of perceiving the outside world. And so seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling are in a sense delusional, or at least illusional.

Everything else also: all the other ways I experience life. Everyone that I relate to. The stuff that I work to possess. Hell, even the activity that I do. Am I walking, cycling and swimming or is this just what I imagine myself doing; it could be – undoubtedly is – just electrical impulses travelling to and from the concerned muscles.

Cripes, even this body! All that I’ve got to go on is mirrors and the poor evidence of my eyes. I’ve never seen the back of my head.

Thoughts and emotions swirl within. That’s all that they are; they’re no more real than the rest. Those stacks of card-houses. No more substantial than huts made of straw, bricks or sticks.

Virtual reality. Who’s to say that the universe as we know it isn’t simply an elaborately constructed virtual reality world a la Matrix which we’re all hooked up into. You wouldn’t know the difference. And really, there’s no difference in paying attention to playing the game in this or in a Second Life.

I’m not saying that equally as inconsequential, not necessarily.

Both could just as well be true.

The Matrix Reloaded?

Woke up this morning with a novel concept. Yesterday I’d managed to beat the blahs – my tremors of anxiety – when I’d realized (again) that this isn’t real. What I see and feel is not what’s happening. The world is not the way that it sees, and neither am I. So I waved my wand, and cried ‘illusion!’ I crept back from my head and from this instant into the global, depersonalized everything and every-when, and it all came in (or out of) focus. Just like that. Magically. Would that I managed to that whenever I had the need.

So maybe I’ve been ruminating on that on some level since. As I say, I woke up this morning – as you do – but on this occasion I did not leap automatically into considering the orchestration of My Day. I hung back, refrained and led that tendency in check.

Which all seemed to resonate nicely.

“Aha!” I sensed (if not ‘Eureka!’), could it be that this is a better way to proceed? Don’t habitually leap, I told myself, straight into your Self. Let’s try it in another fashion. Ease into the day gradually, trying to retain the taste of nighttime being. Act and operate under the aegis of that diffuse and universal soul. Dream walk for a spell, in other words.

Could it be that the condition of sleep, usually considered the poorer cousin of consciousness, is actually nearer to our natural state? Maybe in that regard, in that aspect, our thinking has been wrong. Let’s hypothesize that, in the same way that the selfish gene may be thought of as the basic entity that drives the organism to replicate, possibly the thoughtless, receptive, decentralized sandman is actually everyone’s master.

Every morning we are given the opportunity to arise with that pinch of sand in hand. We are reloaded, rebooted and reprogrammed. Will today be the day that we learn from the lesson? Or as the light grows – shades of ‘Groundhog Day’ – do we yawn, stretch and sink back into darkness?

Hey, I don’t know the answer. I’m just – and no, ‘kidding’ is not what I’m ending with now – musing.