Out on a night wander through Waterloo Park in Ontario, with Aaron Schwab (http://www.aaronschwab.ca/) and Andriy S.
Discussing the dilation of pupils, sensory isolation, conscious feedback interpretation, the evolutionary significance of language and lightsabers.
9 Comments
Hey james, interesting question you guys brought up. What was the original spark that gave birth to consciousness? I feel like the spark was the question itself, as in “before” or rather in a space when conciousness ceased to exist the pondering of the question, where did my intelligence come from gave birth to the intelligence itself. The infinite quest to understand is what keeps the loop going, and in turn is what gave birth to the process itself. perhaps this doesn’t make much sense to others but it appears to me that the understanding of nuances of our reality are given to us in paradoxes. The rational mind has a hard time processing information that so to speak contradicts itself, then it is apparent, as you guys were mentioning earlier that what we experience can only be as real as our interpretation allows us to see.
I love your concluding statement Erik: “what we experience can only be as real as our interpretation allows us to see.” Interpretation is a system of languaging experience in an effort to explain it to our conscious and rational minds. If our syntax(internal languaging potential) is not able to make relative sense to an experience it will usually be omitted from consideration. Unless one has a preconditioned pattern to investigate such experiences and find objective validity to them. Therein expanding their original syntax to incorporate new experience. This is one of the things I love about the internet. It allows you the opportunity to find information on basically anything. The double edge of this being that a lot of that information can be misleading and send you in a strange direction. To me, meditation is a great practice to keep one centered in themselves. Creating an internal point of reference for new information that is founded on self-awareness, instead of exogenous information.
I also really liked concept of consciousness arising out of The Question. This resonates with a few other philosophies on the reason behind Being that I really enjoy. Take a look at this short doco video from Spirit Science http://youtu.be/I7GJ-8SY068 . It explains consciousness through Sacred Geometry and the Flower of life.
There is a hidden tragedy to language: because people know each other only through symbolic representations, they are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
There will always be conflict between friends and lovers, not because their communication is inferior… but because they commune with each other at all…
Language is a tool that we created for helping us to try to understand shared concepts, but when we then use words as a filter to try to understand our own thoughts, it can cause a distortion in our minds and in our lives. For example: when you love, what language do you experience that Love in? The word “Love” had no need to exist at all, until someone wanted to try to tell someone else what they were feeling – and even then the word is open to interpretation.
And when you package your thoughts or feelings down into a word or group of words in your own mind, you may be discarding much of your total un-filtered experience. You are also assigning other people’s preconceived notions of those words onto your experience and could be skewing it in your own mind from that point forward.
Language is both a blessing and a curse and we must try to be wise enough to recognize when it’s helping us and when it’s hurting us… It is definitely a tool of male (direct-action, problem-solving) energy and using it for everything, indiscriminately, is a mistake that can keep us from ever truly knowing ourselves or each other. People invented words – and they will never be even remotely sufficient to describe the infinite complexity of our thoughts.
Far too many relationships end short over the required use of language for validation of feelings… when sometimes, all people need to do is look into each other’s eyes to know all that needs to be known 🙂
That is beautiful Phillip, thank you.
This takes me back to my studies in discourse analysis and a really great analogy for explaining how our language influences our worldview. Think of yourself wearing a pair of glasses with multiple layers of glass. Each piece of glass is a discourse that you believe and as such warps your view of reality. Reality is only ever experienced by an observer and thus we are never really seeing the true reality. I think this is a bit far from what you were all talking about with regard to the birth of intelligence but certainly language is such an important factor in how we form ideas. I think that Shakespeare may have had insight into this as well:
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;”
Wonderful addition to the conversation Jane. I wonder if one could add to this metaphor by saying meditation into the present moment is removing theses lenses by releasing ones attachment to the preconditioned thoughts that create them?
Thank you.
Mr. James,
Can you explain that idea from Neitzsche that you mentioned in the Video? It sounds like an interesting philo.
K like, um,
Erik, that was tight. Maybe consciousness hasn’t been born yet, though. I mean, who No’s? I’m all about yes’n.
Phil, totally agree wit ya on some of it. To me, it’s important to ask people to define the words that they use. I believe that ignorant has been explained to me a bunch of times as ‘Agressive’
The word passion used to mean suffer.
Suffering of chris*
It’s come to take on a very different meaning over the past couple-a years.
J-m’s You’rock
Hey BeAutonomousSymbiotically,
The quote I used was from Daniel Pinchbeck Discussing Nietzsche: “the deed creates the doer, almost as an after thought”. As far as I am aware the original quote from Nietzsche is “‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.”
[Noting point: What I understand about this concept is based more on hearing Pincbeck discuss it and my own personal contemplation more then any actual study of Nietzsche.]
Thought is potential, action is reality. Until one expresses an action which reflects the state of being one wishes to embody, it is still no more then a potential. By creating an action(a deed) outwards into the world with this intention, it creates or perpetuates a chain of events which will lead one to more fully become the state of being(the doer) reflective of the action created. It serves to manifest to the surface of ones life physical and experiential evidence of ones expression of being. Helping to create a deeper belief of those elements of being within oneself.
I often consider this concept in relation to “fake it until you make it”. If you wish to be more confident with yourself, act confidently around others. If you want to be successful, act successful. If you want to be peaceful, do peaceful things. If you want to be a healer, heal. It is the observation of action that perpetuates reality unfolding. So choosing consciously which reality you wish to observe, serves to help create that within yourself. NOTE: I would encourage one to have a compassionate consideration of others in mind when in the midst of this process.
It is important now for me to make a distinction towards encouraging Conscious Action: Action taken with the conscious intention of creating a specific reality to share and live in. Your life is art and yours to create. Be aware of what you are bring forth and it’s meaning.
To paraphrase a concept presented in the film Walking Life, All thought and no action is as worthless as all action and no thought.
* if anyone has more to add to this concept, I would encourage you to bring it to the table.
_Blessings
“…language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia