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.”