conversation on change

This notion of living and I are in a constant struggle. It seems so basic on so many levels but so completely elusive.

“Do you know that pure intent has a direct impact on changing sub-particles? This Japanese monk/scientist would focus on a molecule of frozen water and make its shape more intricate simply by focusing on the intention of changing the molecule. It is really crazy when we think about all the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics and what that means about the world and our relation to it; our identity in accordance. We still operate as if it is the age of Classical Physics and haven’t really changed our fundamental views about reality to match the new science.”

“What do you mean? Science has become a major part of who we are. We are parts TV, parts computer games and video games and congested city life, crowded clubs and sky rise buildings. We store parts of us in computers, in cell-phones, in pom-pilots and GPS tracking devices. We depend on our elevators, cars, kitchenware, stereos and CDs. Like people, we love certain technologies, are indifferent about many, and dislike some. We quote TV show lines and have a ready to hand comedy; we become the music through our proclaimed musicians because it is easier, and we do not have to take what seems to be a long time when music is right there beckoning us to stay away from the early stages of squeaking disjointed attempts at making music…. or practicing any skill for that matter because patience in a fast-paced world is difficult to come by.”

“But that is because we use science in what it gives us, but we are less responsive to how it can change us. If we are living the age of all that… an age that in many ways Quantum Mechanics made possible from the silicon chips to our neuro-brain physiology studies, to Aero-Space Engineering ; if Quantum Mechanics is the most valid option today, what does it really say about us, about the kind of world we live in? It seems like an outlandish question to ask but not when we think about what entanglement means. Entanglement allows two particles to be at the same spot at the same time; it allows a sub-particle to be in different places at the same time; it allows certain sub-particles to exist timelessly. So what you might say, but then are we really separate? If the gist of the theory is that we are part of a living universe in which everything fundamentally is the same and changes that happen to you affect your spread out sub-particles that exist on the same frequency or wave function, then we change the world by changing ourselves, and the world changes us by changing. We change who we are by changing our attitude…. We are no-longer bound in reconfirming who we were from memory but by thinking of who we can be…. What we would like to be and let that simmer… let it grow slowly till the desire for an unknown can over-come our practical disposition to draw from our preset patterns that assume: if it is working, don’t fix it. This desire made it possible to experience creating something new by thinking of a different way, a non-precedent. It is the thrill, the excitement, the over-whelming rush of being…. being alive.”

“So to allow science to change you, you allow yourself to believe that you are not separate; that objects never really touch; that we are part of a living organism and what we think sends changes through this organism’s network; that matter is not nearly as full of energy as vacuum. The latent energy in a Hydrogen atom is more than the stars and planets and matter in our galaxy up to 20 billion light-years. We know that emotions are real. They are carried are different combinations of neuro-peptides and our bodies and minds are not so separate, we are not so separate from everything else so we are never alone. We can feel alone when we are with people and feel most revived when we are alone.”

“Yeah yeah….. and?”

I couldn’t help but chuckle …. True so? So what really does that mean?

“So if we are never really separate, then we intrinsically find greater meaning in connecting with people through understanding them; observing them; feeling them out. It is the desire to let who you believe you are down for a moment and let yourself be open to who they are. When you get a glimmer and you go for more you will gradually understand something new…. Feel something new … when you do you see then you really have the free-will to choose between what you know and what is new. In crowds we generally harmonize over issues of the moment but that only means that we have an ability to harmonize with others if we choose to be open to them. It is most difficult when others want drastically different things than we do and I see it happen all the time in negotiation but if you are ready to sit on the table of negotiations again with a new proposal that fits the criteria then you have got a deal. That demands that we constantly think up of new ways and speculate on new possibilities.”

“Good…. if we are part of a living organism then we have always owned our past, present, and future but really haven’t owned any of them at all.”

“That is simply non-sense… you completely lost me here!”

“The past, present and future create a way for us to view this world. We are part living in it being caught up in its moments… the beautiful and the mundane but we are also the watchers, the thinkers-in-retrospect, the dreamers of possibilities, the actors in the reenactment of our favorite fantasies. We want to make sand castles our permanent homes for that is what we are … that is what time is, what we are, what our universe is: an imprint of reality in which we are allowed to observe and create. With time as another construct, this moment has happened today and yesterday and tomorrow, during creation, and with quanta, it also never happened. Our attachment to the need to define, the need to own, limits our possibilities. We limit those possibilities to what we think we can handle. All I am saying is that I think that we should raise the bar of possibilities on ourselves and others.”

“If emotions are grounded in reality, then they are as valid as reason, as revealing and concealing as reason. Understanding the function of an emotion does not stop us from feeling it, but it allows us to feel it bare, without the baggage of past associations. Maybe when certain emotions assert their presence; when they withdraw they show us that they are still there but have “nothing to offer us”, maybe then they are telling us to allow the withdrawal to sink in because we know that the passage of possibility echoes from nothing. And maybe when we feel so calm yet with a latent energy that is bubbling right under the surface, maybe then we are feeling the “presence” of harmony; maybe that in itself is an emotion.”

“Emotions are grounded in history, in our associations, our patterns and our ways of interacting with it in blocking all that is negative till it drones us or letting it overwhelm us is a product of a history of the suppressing, rendering as secondary or irrelevant."

“If the world is more vacuum than stuff, then it is it is the way of the world to show through offsetting against the empty. If from profound boredom comes all that we can conceive of as pure possibility and energy in pure possibility is what drives its carrier to engage with it, and in engaging a mode of its being to a processor(s) in which we know it. From the re-stirring what is already there comes “newness”. Our experience in a moment of the “unfamiliar” tells us that there is an unfamiliar. The newness comes from the capability of our minds, and our bodies to engage in different modes and acquire content. It comes from the potentiality in wood to burn, to break, to pump nutrition or the trees to lean towards the sun. So a question is what are we capable of? And what is our environment capable of?”

“It seems that in all this possibility, when we engage with what we know in how we know (familiarity); it gives us what we know or allows us to forget the “object” of our engagement and to us it is “not there”. In so it is not a possibility but a certainty. To forget what we know through familiar ways forgets that it is forgetting (and in so we are constantly jolted back, we remember and associate.) But if we allow the tension in remembering that we are forgetting passage like we do through engaging with what we remember to forget, then maybe we will forget what we know through our expectation of an “unfamiliar”. Our history tells us that we find it easier to draw from the “familiar”; our mind’s tendency to bring from the left brain (security) hinders our (right brain) in its drive to take risks, our body’s awkwardness with unfamiliar motion or different ways of breathing makes it easier to fall back onto what we know.”

“In ritualism, we can forget that which we engage with and can forget captivation in the ritual and carry it on as a monotonous task and institutional routines in our insistence on the routine in ritual. But in a world of technology where change is fast-coming and ever-present we can forget that which we engage with in the whirlwind of change to meet change’s demands that we have set to meet that change.”

“If we only allow sand castles to inspire us, to leave an imprint in us that motivates us and holds us captive in its awe for however long the sand castle wishes to stay and allow them to get washed away by the waves when it is time for them to go…. To make room for a new home, a new sand castle. Then some sand castles stay forever and others wash away before they form. I love to float in the possibility of a new discovery. What I get a kick out of most though is learning something new about what I thought I knew. Now that is a challenge! At that moment the sand-castle changes form…. And that moment of transformation is intense. What is beautiful about you is that I saw in you something so familiar… I felt that I have known you all my life, yet I felt the novelty of all that is new and exciting about you. I felt that I will always think of you and felt the possibility that I will never see you again to the possibility that we will plan a trip together or randomly meet somewhere again.”

“So let all possibilities grow…. Live in all the possibilities and when you do, you are less afraid of the chronology of time because you have lived the countless possibilities. To let go of our obsession with definites and tangibles, only then does timing become as important as content.”

conversation in the open

“You know, the treatment of animals in parts like the middle-east seems inhumane. I mean they kill them by chopping their heads off; they make dogs live outside in the cold and offer them left-over food.”

“Partially, but I would say that for quite different reasons. It is because if the dog in your backyard is poisoned by your neighbour, and you go to file a lawsuit against them, they will dismiss you with a shrug and say: we are too busy with people dying; what a dog to that? But relative to what… is it humane to trap poultry in cement warehouses where they have no space to move, no stimulus, nothing to engage with but the overwhelming noise of their clucking? Isn’t it more inhumane to deny an animal its purpose in life, engaging with its environment than to kill it in a manner that invokes “human” disgust of gore, for after all it is less painful for the animal to die executed than it is to die electrocuted? (The major nerve is severed almost instantly and the blood drains in a few minutes.) It might even be befitting to kill the animal a violent death, an awakening of a function and a portrayal of the kind of life it led, for a subdued death is simply a forgetting of “man” of the violent detachment the animal was subjected to. But if by humane you mean, most appealing the modern human notion of refinement then yeah.”

“Then why would you say that poisoning a dog is inhumane.”

“I think the word inhumane isn’t really befitting. It is an allowance for beings to engage in their world and accepting them as part of a major portion of our environment that create for us an avenue to view the world and understand it. To kill a dog because it activating its function (barking) is a denial of that principle.”

“Then why can we kill an animal to begin with? How can we eat?”

“Animals kill each other, animals die after mating and animals don’t fear death, or in other words the future of being attacked resulting in death; they respond to the function of fear in protection. In other words, they activate the “carriers of significance” to their function in protecting.”

“They fear nevertheless; they feel pain.”

“To recognize that which is animal is to recognize that death for nutrition is a fundamental aspect in all that defines a living being. It is Aristotle’s definition of bare life. We are bare life (not only) and in so we find nutrition in the same way.”

“If we agreed on the broadest parameters: to live is to recognize that living is in engaging and to kill for nutrition is bare life; wouldn’t that say: that human beings live through engaging; we engage through hunting animals as a sport; we engage through making and buying leather couches and fur coats; we engage with technology and live in overpopulation and a mode of our engagement is mass-production, mass-consumption. How can we mass-produce food if we don’t alter it, accelerate its rate of growth, prolong its lifespan, if we don’t trap chickens in caged spaces. Our engagement with animals alters them and their environment. It might seem like a defeatist statement in either saying: let’s engage and damn the environment since we alter it anyway or in saying: let’s not eat animals but I think it is more complicated than that. I would say that we have to err on the side of preserving the environment.”

“It is true that our engagement, even in observation, alters the world but I don’t think the solution is in looking at man and animal and leaning towards one or the other. In other words, I don’t think the problem is in our lack of looking at end results and encountered objects (or living beings), but in understanding engagement. We are not different than animals in distinct criteria but rather in our ability to conceive ourselves as the something other. See I don’t believe that this something other is that which is not-animal, but a possibility other than our current engagement, our present self. When we speak of shunning the animal in us, we forget the care animals give their new-borns, the unconditional loyalty that dogs display towards their owners (while they own them), and the complete captivation that drives them incessantly to engage with their “perception” of the environment as the only thing there is. Humans have the ability to condition, to define and remember, and to contemplate pure possibility. Pure possibility comes from profound boredom (the beings that refuse themselves and as such present themselves as “nothing to offer” but in a way in which we cannot escape because they show in their respective beings that which is boring, as an offering of no further possibility of acting or letting anything act). This profound boredom points to the possibilities of being-thrown-in-the-world (other ways of engaging, other ways of picking up and attuning to beings through different ways of activating our inhibitor in its disactivation). The pointing to pure possibilities is unequivocal and indifferent, present and perfectly inaccessible. The process of revelation begins with calling to possibility in profound boredom and unequivocal indifference. It seems to me that we have skipped that stage.”

“What’s the significance of such process in helping us?”

“To begin with that which is the closest to the animal in us as profound boredom is to captivation is not to side with the animal, but to be in closest proximity to it.”

“It seems to me that we are in the closest proximity to that which is animal in our captivation, our abandonment of consequences outside our current mode of living.”

“The danger lies in the fact that if we simply live in the mode of lending ourselves over to our animal captivity offers no possibilities but the present engaging. It is not that it offers no words, no experiences and no logic but it offers us nothing that not already given in captivation… the current mode of logic, the pattern of experience and the conventional stringing of words. It wouldn’t be a danger if in rendering to captivation, we abandon our acting on our capability for language, logic and social interaction, but we do not; we simply render those to captivation, animal captivation. (I would say Heidegger missed that end of proximity but only because he doesn’t show how we move from pure possibility to engaging but asserted that it is the historical-collective’s great task to unravel that.)”

“Would the cement cages and zoos be the new mode of our engaging with technology, a necessary by product of the age of over-population, mass-production, revolutionary technologies, and mass consumption?”

“Again the problem isn’t in the by-products. It is not in what we allow and what we do not allow. It begins with holding possibilities in a state of profound boredom, in absolute indifference. Any question can be asked, any inquiry made. In so we find many questions that we are missing in our current debates and pondering. Moreover the media’s structure is de-contextualized, biased, framed and filtered with only enough time to state and reaffirm common conceived notions, because to speak of anything that is unconventional needs more air-time than is in the interest of such companies. The spectrum of discussion has parameters of proper and improper. The questioning of such parameters and speculating of what ifs is very minimal. We have to ask ourselves what are we enabling in the world (mass consumption, mass production, comfort, ready to hand, efficient, schedules, finance log books, junk food, individuality in a lack of non-virtual community, incredible technologies, possibilities of ultimate body functionality, any-time-any-place to state a few)”

“But wouldn’t you say we have a choice in all that in eating or not eating junk food, choosing mass consumption or not, and having or lacking a non-virtual community.”

“Enabled does not mean lack of choice, but means a choice that is not structurally offered by the hegemonic structure or system (in our case the play between governments and private corporations in creating common avenues to experience our world). To eat healthier is more expensive or more time consuming if not both, to have a community is to seek one or slowly create your own. It is because that which is disabled is not easily accessible in a world that runs on easily accessible that the difficulty arises.”

“In so we ask what are we disabling with our enabling (and vice versa)? We ask what do objects, people and the world reveal to us of its nature through different associations? Water and surfing is not water in the shower, or in puddles of rain, or a thundering storm. To engage in a debate to prove a point is not the same as to put your idea to the world to alter and modify. We ask of functions (the function of anger in pointing to a threat, the function of sadness in pointing to an emptiness or joy in displaying a fullness and energetic calm) Through functions we ask of benefits and drawbacks of different ways of engaging and we ask of what is effective. I don’t think Heidegger would point to any questions precisely because it is the asking of all questions, but rather a point that is crucial is that our world is made by the anthropological machine which is a historical production. In so history in its contextualization, in its sequence, in its discernable patterns is ultimately the vessel in which possibilities are placed within. It can be revealed as such: as patterns, as sequences, as benefits and setbacks, as potential risks and securities.”

“But Heidegger did not saw how pure possibility leads to concrete questions or patterns?

“Pure possibility does not ask; it only points to, but history can ask, the ontology of words can ask (preserve as pre-serve, belong as be-long) and observed functions (of emotions for example) can ask. If we can make asking more important than framing than maybe we move from defining to understanding. Understanding such as that contextualizes and gives a clearer picture that although it has less judgements of good and bad, it has more reasons to why, how come, what possibilities, what risks and solutions.”

“Do you know that when we acknowledge the pain, sadness or disappointment in certain situations, we feel the pain, sadness and disappointment but when we refuse to acknowledge such emotions, when we block them we experience that emotion heightened. See an emotional wave lasts only minutes but a predisposition of our thoughts to wallow in an emotion or block it only amplifies it. It is like what we were taught in self-defence classes: when you are held against the walk in a choke-lock, your initial reaction is to push back instantly; if you let yourself relax and melt into the wall, you loosen the grip of your capturer, but also gain a force much more powerful than resisting instantly. Our most heightened fears and pains are the ones that appear as unaddressed phantoms that have been rehashed or blocked over and over. See this is not to say that to acknowledge is to see as the only possibility, but rather to change, we must begin in acceptance. ”

“The main difference I think is that we think about things… stuff and their respective characteristics in what they are, but Heidegger would look at what the relationship is telling us and in its telling what is it is being concealed. We look at binaries in opposition, but what binaries lead to one another, are chasing one another and in so are a process. It not the acceptance or rejection of technology, but rather what it tells us about how we should relate to it; guide it and be led by it. It is not that I am, but that I am becoming and catching up with myself at the same time.”

“We think in the moment; we meditate through clearing thoughts; we think patterns and chronological chains of events; we think from memory and in retrospect; we think through analysing, through conceptualizing and speculating. How can we use those processes to work with our emotions and intuition and guide us?”

“The simplest and vaguest answer is openness to questioning, reorganizing, reformulating, and receiving those signals of our disinhibitors, a conceiving of something new. It is in drill, practice and repetition. To meditate, we practice meditating over and over again until it becomes second nature. In a way it is old material reformulated in new processes and new content processed through old processes. So long as we find the new in the old and the old in the new we are chasing the binaries towards each other.”

“If technology shows us our ultimate potential in unity and functionality; it also shows us the destruction and terrors that are ever-present in its possibilities. We are undertaking a reorganizing of our biology, our environment and more than ever yielding them to show us offerings that are most tailored to our conception of perfection. Do you think we are heading towards the ultimate perfection and infinite potentiality or are we heading like the Black Widow’s male in our exuberant excitement towards that which stimulates us, towards death and our ultimate destruction? A more important question is can we reach either?

Unfuzzying the Fuzzy

Although it seems that there is a “drop in public confidence in religion and religious leadership” as “American religious life has shifted to include more elements defined as spiritual”, the percentage of people that are self rated spiritual and religious in the Forced Sample is 74% and those who are spiritual but not religious is 19% (majority are still S+R). So what really changed? Were people before religious and not spiritual? Probably not, but then spirituality did not differ from religiosity (and if it did, then not as much). As spirituality detached from religion, the definition of what is religious grew narrower: “As spirituality has become differentiated from religiousness, however, it has taken with it some of the elements formally included within religiousness. Therefore, recent definitions of religiousness have become more narrow and less inclusive.” Spirituality became about the individual quest for this “higher”, and religion became the institutional, ritualistic, formalized structure of “goodness”.

What is really interesting though is that those spiritual but not religious place a high emphasis on group experience related to spiritual growth and those who are spiritual and religious consider themselves more spiritual than religious precisely because spirituality is the end that the “personal” has to aspire to and work towards and religiosity as a way to obtain that “higher”. The interdependence of “personal” and “organized” or “collective” is not resolved in either and they don’t differ in their view of the nature of the Divine. They have differed in the spiritual’s unease with the practicalities of religion (or practice) and the nature of the institutional, and the religious apprehension of a “personal” that defies a collective decisive structure and set of rules and in application fails to meet its purpose.

Yet such practicalities (such as: feeling a desirable inner affective state such as comfort, anxiety reduction, security, problem solving, concern for others aimed at obtaining a better world) that illustrate the function of spirituality or religiosity, took a back seat to their common goal of “higher connectedness” or closeness to a “higher being”. So if it takes a back-seat in questionnaires, then why does it not take a back-seat in life? It is because spirituality and religion are thrown into reality in which they have to find their niche and in so become applicable and in so attainable. Is the function of religion or spirituality less important than their goal? If anything, I would say that it is our hope in resolving some of the tension surrounding the meaning of both “religion” + “spirituality”.