Spirit. The formless bound in matter.

The spirit quivers like a flame. Formless, changing, moving, dancing. Matter is so solid, a life can hold a spirit if it dances, how can matter ever in its grid??

Sometimes one feels the visceral heart rending pain of the free flowing spirit when bound or tried to be gridded, in matter. Matter seems to snap to grid. Perhaps for matter read the mind. It grasps momentarily but all its efficiency of memory tries again to snap to grid the spirit. And then it cries. Because it is not so. It cannot be grasped in memory, in facts, in language, in matter. It can be just apprehended as ephemerally as life itself, lightly, it can only be lived. It exists only at the point of flow, the fount, the source. Beyond it matter and memory carry it in grids which is simply untrue. It cries and cries and cries. And in perhaps that moment of crying, at the source of living, finds itself again.

Anaximander

At each age our thinking evolves a little bit further. At the earliest times, perhaps an awakening, or dawn of awakening of consciousness, the world taken as given with starry skies above, the roots below, the nature which gave sustenance as well as threats to existence. The mind grapples with the 'known' and understood reality and all the reality that still defies understanding, and tries to put the life amidst all that in some narrative coherence with some meaning, justification and eventual fairness. 

Then came the age of believing the centrality of earth, and the roving heavens around us. Perhaps aided by more observation, a culmination of thinking, a cumulative chain of thoughts and observation reaching a tipping point, trying to fit the known and unknown in a new model of reality.

Then came more observation, more instruments, printing press, a frothing and networking of knowledge, a bigger reality revealed like those squares in minesweeper. And now we have an entirely different model of the universe from a few hundred years ago. 

I just wonder what the next few hundred years will reveal about the known and unknown in our universe.

*

It makes philosophic sense in one way to put the earth/us in the center of the things. We see the world from our heads, the reality exists as a construction of our perception. Time exists because we are here to feel it pass. 

At some point, my personal experience reveals all time as being eternally present. That all that is to be is there already. We just roll through it, live through it. And if you wander down those paths, a huge veil of confusion, clutter and random binds of your own nurturing are thrown at you. As if the mind on reaching some invisible no-go zone reacts against itself. What sets this no-go zone? Knowing the world we do, our matrix, our model of living, and knowing, there'll be little value if everything is known. I do not wish to know. I do not know what leads future to my head in the present. Is it not wishing to know that throws up the resistance with its own sand and soil thrown over its own eyes? My fight against myself because something random has unclipped in this shabby universe.

And I get all emotional. I wouldn't call it shabby, even though nothing seems to respond to my cries of help, I tend to agree with Anaximander and his mercies of time. I am too little, too insignificant a thing to be bothered with. A transient drop of water in the ocean of existence. Gone before the ocean even begins to suspire. Who or what will match my rythm or wavelength. It is not even a message in a bottle which survives time and waves, it is a faint whisper to the stars, a wave or ripple I send out which amidst all the noise of this world and the emotional tugs and messages to heavens will get lost in the crowd. 

So it is momentary, the wave of emotion passes. What stays is this wonder. This wonder at the universe and a sort of frustration with myself. Can deal better with all this. Can write better sentences. Can have better attitude. Can have more patience to hold in tears which come bubbling out given continuouusly scraped heart. Can just decide, as they say, to be like this, and not like anything else - just a good attitude, sunny disposition, and cheerful smile. But where does one put away the tears? By just skipping across the river on the stones of good cheer, ignore the river completely. When completely alone, perhaps dip into it, but leave a part of you outside to pull you out.

*

Anaximander: “Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens according to necessity; for they give justice and recompense to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.”

I love the words the ordering of time. He begins with apeiron, and then one can see him tracing reality arising from eternity and in time, falling back to eternity. The imbalance arises as things separate, try to balance each other, I like to think more as a dance step and merging and flowing into each other that needs to be mastered with restraint rather than any two separate elements separating. It is one, yet it parts with itself, for play perhaps. And meanwhile, for us, in our time scale, we live out a small portion which just happens to be a pixel, never whole that way, but in itself, the reality is whole, and everything is sorted in time. The only problematic factor is the ego, the I, the self, which feels. Perhaps that's why the ancients suggest its abosrption, its dissolution, its assimiliation into something of a bigger scale or its letting go. It is too much to ask the universe to bend itself to a little pixel. the way a human body cannot bow to one atom of its existence, or one quark. Too much. Scale issues, plane issues. So it is simpler to let go of the ego, any expectations, and dance to the rhythm and flow of the universe. Perhaps if any resolution, or wholeness, it lies that way.

As to the narrative resolution, that is just our mind, at this plane of existence. One needs to transcend this plane, and I don't know how, and it cannot be explained in the same grammar of living as this plane, the way one state changes. One is physically different chemically before a workout and after a workout. One's thoughts are different. So perhaps - this, that we do not control ourselves. We can just about help shape our environment, our chemicals to an extent. And they all together play on us and create the internal scenery which lead us to different kinds of actions. 

Sometimes it is words that help shape the environment, and hence hence hence their magic. Like Anaximander opens this in me. I didn't wake up knowing or planning it. It is his magic. And one cannot plan or control with these things. One just about learns to dance. 

Do we ever approach truth?

 Do we ever approach truth? Beholden to moments, we transcribe the moment's truth, meanwhile we change, and reality itself shifts and changes. What then is truth? 

Perhaps it is found only in true dynamism and motion, being true to the moment in front of us, with eye on a distant horizon which perhaps has little chance of shifting in our known experience or the world's history's known experience. The few ideals of excellence, beauty and goodness, and best efforts always. 

It is not a homily but my thoughts are towards the end often directed to a personal action, or a way to be or see the world.

A brief instance of time on this earth

For a brief instance this life, this time on Earth, then it passes. We are born into an established pattern of kingdoms, countries, cities, customs, we live either within these or carving our own spaces in these broader structures, and then we pass. Earth goes on. The cities too keep going on, and countries too for a while, for a few hundred or thousand years, then it too passes. Like sand dunes, forming, reforming this backdrop of life.

Where do we sit? At this wonder at this fleeting period. As Fry says, everything is alive with a fire. That we are here is wondrous. That the world is what it is, it is. That we are given instances to keep beginning ourselves again and again. That in outward circles from self, we try to make sense of the world and per our capacity and understanding, help it along a bit. The world will carry on inspite of us, it lives its own life, of which we are like an individual cell to human body. So as well, while we are here, smile, love, laugh, spread good cheer...

It all passes fairly quickly. This brief candle...

Standing on shoulders

I read about the Nobel prize 2025 in medicine. On immune-system research.

Bit by bit over years scientific knowledge & understanding is built. Every new generation stands on shoulders.

A lifetime is devoted to extend or to gain a few drops of new understanding. Over lifetimes, these drops build up the fountain at which every new generation learns. Slow process this learning but a work across generations. Every new set of people learns what has been understood so far, and then builds on that understanding. Which becomes the new ground to learn.

Guess it is a worthy pursuit to devote oneself to see what the ages have seen over time, and see whether standing on those shoulders, if you can see something else. Perhaps leave it as a note or two for those coming after.

It passes

 

The grammar of reality

The logic of stars

And this human life

It passes, it passes, like froth on the sea-side sand

The sea persists

The stars persist

The sun persists

We pass

Life persists

Yet I pass

And why must it be so

Is not the question that has any answer ever

Perhaps the place of no questions

Is home

Perhaps the place where no answers are sought

Is home

Perhaps in forgetting, in absorption

Is home

Knowing is alien, half, confusing, partial, a process, a step, not home

Home is unknowing, forgetting, dissolving,

Rendered in the grammar of the stars, the logic of reality

This I, which is just a temporary placeholder

It passes, it passes, it passes.

Reading David Chalmers' Reality+

There are two questions. a) Whether we are in a simulation or not? And more importantly, b) does it really matter?

As to the first, that there is any reality at all, is perhaps a question that the simulators, if they are evolved enough, and are seekers of truth ask themselves. And hence by making a simulation, and seeing it evolve in timescales otherwise inaccessible to a life-form, they seek the answers. I think a simualtion is a natural response, a logical way to seek answers for finite life-form facing time-scales beyond the ken of its living scale. 

But, if the simulated wonders about the same question, it perhaps can mean two things – the simulation is not varied enough – coincidences, probability, math, there is perhaps a limitedness of the number of languages that the simulated even wonders about it. Something to do with opening assumptions of simulations, perhaps a few more factors are needed. Or perhaps infinity is the simulator's dream as well. That just points to the obsession of the simulator. 

We perceive the world through our head, we know it only through our insides, be it chemical signals or light and wave signals. We know nothing more. So if we are asking the question, perhaps we are in a simulation. It is anyway a simulated perceived world in the head, never known. As to in whose simulation, perhaps it is a deeper question for them, for the simulators. Our being matters little but our questions are perhaps the same as theirs.

*

The more important question is, does it really matter? From the perspective of a living being, the question about simulation is the question about mechanics of the world, about science, existence, chemistry, astrophysics, quantum. Science itself shows that this is all appearance. But it doesn’t change the basic fact of living. There is no decent exit except what provided in the natural course of birth and death. Meanwhile, my personal take is whatever it is, it is quite wonderful. Yes, it is not always great and there are pains and aches from life sometimes, there is unpleasantness, at times there’s voices, there’s the wonder at the sanctity itself. But still still still, being here is plenty. That we can begin where we are and try to make the best of whatever seems to be on the table in front of us is good enough. Perhaps that is a personal take. Perhaps yes, we are simulated. Either way, it is wonderful that there seems to be this something. It is a brief candle, this life, will pass before you know it. Meanwhile, have fun and do well and good. Take care of yourself and your surrounds, in expanding circles that you can sustain. Be well, do well. Enjoy the wonder of the being when you are quiet enough to do so. There's just this inner flame, the fountain, irrespective of the number of nested simulations there might be. There’s little else.