Come together, over books.

I like to do a lot of reading. I’d like to give you an idea of some books that have recently served to stir around the soup inside my brain. I will do my best to share what it is about each book that has left an impact on me.

Hofstadter is a proponent of non-duality. This book endeavors to explore the nature of the thing that people call a “soul” or a “self” or simply “I.” To him, those words refer to the same thing, which is not made of a separate substance from the material world. Rather, it is something that emerges from the world of subatomic particles swirling about, bashing into one another without any clear cut boundaries. The interplay of symbols we know as “I” comes out of a process of making simplified representations of things that exist on the exterior of sufficiently complex nervous systems.

Hofstadter says that the “self” is an illusion, but although thinking of it as real involves a magical jump, it is an illusion that our exquisite gift of experiencing the world as an individual is dependent upon.

Integral theory is an operating platform for your brain. For those of you who haven’t read Wilbur, I dare you to give this work a try yourself. I found the IOS, or integral operating system, to be an amazing and deeply penetrating tool to sift through information overload.
Also a proponent of the awareness of our non-dual nature, Wilbur makes a case for the truths of the worlds “Perennial Philosophies.” Integral Spirituality, among other things, is one of the most poignant attempt to salvage what is good in them against the searing valid criticisms lumped against religion from modern and postmodern thinking.

I am currently in the process of reading the Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck. A deeply personal account of his process to make sense of a chaotic disintegrating world, he seems very confident that all signs are pointing to light on the horizon.

Drawing on just about everything from science and religion to ancient mythology and psychedelic experimentation, this book so far seems like quite a promising read.

Something, or nothing?

Nothing? or Something?

Before I get going here, I would like to start off this post with a public service announcement:

Have you run the anti-virus scan on your living room?  Is there spam in your conversations?  Are there any unused items on your mental desktop?

Weed out the useless robotic patterns of “normality,” and actually start giving a shit about your real needs.

(lets hope i don’t get sued for using this image)

With that out of the way, there are a couple of concepts that I would like to tie together today.  I’d like to talk about physics, psychology, and most important of all, kids movies.

What kid in the western world didn’t grow up seeing the movie, The Never Ending Story?

In this movie, a ravenous force known as “the Nothing” rips the magical world of Fantasia apart at the seams.  The Nothing is fueled by one of the most abundant resources in the universe; a virulent silence of the imagination.  Where ever there used to be fantasies, the nothing rears its ugly lack of a head.

I wanted to find a visual aide to represent the Nothing, but if you look around you may discover that its a little difficult to symbolize and conceptualize such an elusive, ineffable thing as nothing.  I did an image search, but sadly it seems that all the pictures that came up were pictures of something, even if that something was only blackness.

If one has a hot cup of tea or coffee, and it is  left alone in a cold room, eventually the room will get a tiny bit warmer, but the drink will get much colder.  After the temperature of the room and the drink become the same, no more movement of heat is going to occur.  This state is known as entropy.

At one point, scientists thought that the big bang was like that cup of tea, and the cold blackness of the universe was like the cold room, and eventually all of existence would fizzle out into a state of maximal entropy or heat death.  In the end the Nothing would rear its ugly lack of a head.

The desperate search for objectivity in physics has traditionally involved stripping down things to their basic building blocks and forces in order to understand them and to remove all unnecessary superstition.   This stripping down, or reducing, is often called “reductionism.”

This view spread out from physics and eventually came to dominate in the realm of psychology.  If the brain is physical, lets destroy the concept of mind and break it down into the little itty bitty pieces, eh?

Here’s where the silliness comes in.  While people who spent their time thinking about the mind were taking this rigid, mechanical view of how we think and experience, something very confusing and surprising started to happen in the world of physics.

Thats where we start going down the rabit hole.

I’m  going to avoid talking about that strange and surprising twisty twirly confuseling thing and let you look it up yourself.  Maybe you could watch the movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know”  or perhaps you could read Wikipedia’s introduction to quantum physics and go from there, but there is way too much to cover.

But to summarize without going into details, the physicists have come to a point where it seems that the act of observing and perceiving the little pieces may cause them to take one configuration or another.  Like by peaking in and looking actively shapes the pieces.

Or another possible interpretation which is even stranger, is that wherever there is a variety of possibilities, they all exist as branches of parallel worlds that break off and separate from one another.

At this point a bunch of science guys start arguing about whether the nature of mind and perception actually alter and organize the tiny bits of things.

So back to entropy.  Entropy involves things being ordered and full of energy, and moving into a state of disarray, dispersed energy, etcetera.  In all closed, isolated systems, entropy tends to increase.  However, entropy can decrease in an open system, in which heat is being sucked in from a source outside of the system.

So it seems that life is negentropy.  It takes things and puts them into order, and creates heat.  As a matter of fact, the science guy from the quantum mechanics thing that pissed off a lot of the other science guys (including Einstein) with his interpretations wrote a book called, “what is life?”  He says that life is a system that sustains itsself by importing negative entropy.  His name is Erwin Schrodinger.

Schrodinger came up with this imaginary experiment about a cat. 

There is a 50/50 chance that some decaying radioactive isotopes will cause the hammer to burst the bottle of poisonous gas.  So when you measure the subatomic particles your observation is either killing or rescuing the cat.

This is at the center of our physical existance 

This is at the center of the milky way galaxy

The onslaught of the nothing is indeed endless, but it is nothing compared to our power to create with our imagination.

Do with it as thou wilt.