It Will Change

This idea of change, or the transformational essence of being-in-the-universe, has almost the quality of the Godly to it.

While some people hate time and see in it all the troubles that afflict humanity, I see time in exactly the opposite way: as something which can be invoked in times of stress to coherently reposition our consciousness vis-à-vis the object inflicting us with anxiety, to say, "this situation will change, be patient".

Indeed, this is an example of a "coherent organization of information". Time, in fact, means change. If I'm not particularly liking what I'm feeling right now, and if I know, in fact, that my feeling state is largely a function of impersonal processes like digestion (food we eat), rest (how much sleep we get) and activity (not being active enough), in addition to temperature (hot or cold), electromagnetic, chemical and atmospheric pressure effects, then I am organizing my consciousness (mind-brain) to literally correlate itself with external constraints which become known to humans through the signs we experience in our consciousness.

The idea behind this notion is that the feelings we feel can be managed by certain beliefs, which have to correspond in some essential way to the previous dynamics that have organized our nervous systems. The KKK fanatic only believes what he does because his "semiotic background" - basically a traumatizing environment where people are always upset about something, raising their voices, speaking cynically and negatively from tensed and agitated bodies: there is this fundamental dysregulation to their autonomic nervous system which repeatedly compels belief states from dynamically enlivening feeling states that semiotically contain the information that formed their early-life feelings around the other's they were forced to entrain to.

When one accepts and understands that our bodies contain information i.e. our musculature, flexion or absence of flexion, necessarily "under-write" the emotional and cognitive states we embody, it'll become apparent how infants and dogs and chimps understand adult human behavior: through their sensorimotor dynamics. Such a view means that what is taken into account is the meaning of the behaviors we show: the dog see's a reflexive turn of the head by me, in terms of the dynamical-orientedness of my intentions. My body already says whether I am or am not interested in relating to you. Baby's, Dogs, and other animals, can sense when we function from an egocentric (self-concerned) or allocentric (other-concerned) perspective, and hence, respond to us from those expressed cues. Facial-language, eye gaze and body movement conveys this information. It is more accurate than most people are willing to admit, so conditioned are we by the ludicrous individualism of the contemporary cultures we inhabit, that many people would consider the idea of another person knowing them and their motivations for acting better than they do - simply from a study of the subject matter in a scientific way - would and in fact does annoy them. The mind that secretly knows that it hides from itself does not want to be perturbed from its slumber and awakened into a state of cognitive dissonance. No one likes stress, and yet, the only way to change a system that is on the road to destroying itself and all other living systems is to try to make the transition easier - to remind the person that "what reality feels like from here is fundamentally different from what reality will feel like when you pass through this".

Scary states of perception often make their mark through our stomachs, which is fitting, given that the stomach literally "digests" the things we eat i.e. put into our selves. Perhaps, indeed, the emptiness in our stomach which accompanies a state of depression, fear or intense anxiety is a semiotic message from our gut to the brain: "you must suffer this to get back to a place of coherence", or, perhaps, it is the voice of the other-side, the part of us that indulges in behaviors that deny basic semiotic processes, speaking, or commenting, on the minds desires to care - to help itself - but which the stomach-vagus-right brain network considers threatening to its functional logic. After all, the body wants to survive: it'll even push us to damaging relationships through dissociative processes, just to keep that enlivenment coming: the enlivenment of "winning", of chasing after sex, toys, games etc. Your brain wants that - and since you are in fact your brain, "you want that". The you, furthermore, can paradoxically project itself to a future situation and know that "change will come", even as it experiences the effects of self-denial i.e. not going after what you want and feel you need because you know, as a scientific fact, that a system which undergoes change will eventually find a new stability, which for the experiencing consciousness essentially amounts to a new sense of self.

I have lived as multiple different selves, so much so that it is befitting to describe my life as transformations from "intensely self-absorbed and criminalistics", to "devoutly religious" in an orthodox fundamentalist sort of sense, to finally, taking an interest in the sciences and its simultaneous objective withdrawal from what one wants to the case, to a caring interest in the many phenomena of the world which attract human interest.

I have absolutely no doubt that each stage constituted an important transformation, from a state of complete unrefinedness i.e. a maniacal belief in my own invulnerability, to a point, or threshold, where traumatic experiences affected me, such as a nervous breakdown, a state of general fatigue which can truthfully strike anyone. The solution, as it is for anyone who wants to live, was to "find some ultimate meaning". Everyone lands on something - some idea, which they use to regulate themselves. No one is exempt from this process.

Yet, unlike the vast, vast majority of people, religion didn't satisfy my needs - or resolve my conflicts. Already being a massive reader, I kept reading, with a particular sense that I didn't want to be a wishful person who thinks he knows the truth, without interacting with other knowledges. I sensed, correctly, that fear underlies where we allow ourselves to look: the person who trusts reality doesn't fear to look. He looks wherever others have found meaning, and, as mindfulness practice suggests, allows him or herself to non-judgementally gauge what the meaning of this is.

Science - not scientism - but the methodology of science, so simple and natural yet incredibly seldom practiced in its proper way, proved to be exactly that sense of coherency that I liked earlier, but which seemed, if I just stayed on this path, as something which would yield dividends, personally, spiritually, and, perhaps, financially too.

This is what I want people to know: that there are REAL people in this world who have touched the base of being, and have come to accept the necessity of uncertainty not as a general truth, but as something that must be exercised when a reasonable point has been made, and we allow ourselves to be swayed by reason i.e. by natures signs. If you and me are the same and apart of the same process, then change, of course, ought to come from without as much or perhaps more than it can be said to come from within.

a reply to: Astrocyte

If you and me are the same and apart of the same process, then change, of course, ought to come from without as much or perhaps more than it can be said to come from within.

If the universe is the one thing then..........within what?

Is there a belief that there is the 'one thing' (the universe) and a separate you with an inside and outside?

a reply to: Itisnowagain

I'm not understanding your question.

Nobody really knows what the universe is, yet the idea of it being "one" is merely an empirical fact that nothing you can say or assert can contradict. All the sciences and the very fact of history record the facts of cause and effect under different domains - in nature and subatomic matter, in animals, insects, trees, fungi, rhizoid, bacteria, virus, and yes, the human mind.

Human beings evolved from organisms that incrementally built up an "intersubjective semiotic structure". The base of our phenomenology is our embodiment, our movement, and how we experience ourselves in relation to the embodiment of others. This is such a take-for-granted complementary dynamic, yet we rely upon existing narratives/ideas in the semiospheres we interact with (cultures) to be able to think in certain ways, hence, we are where we are, oftentimes not knowing why we do what we do. We even settle for quasi-maniacal beliefs which grant all sorts of freedom to be in any way, as if this wasn't just another form of babbling.

So this is an important point itsnowagain: the universe is dynamically contiguous - it extends infinitely in all directions in space, while on Earth we exist in biospheres which have co-evolved with the background presence of oceans and a geothermal planet. Individual organisms are called "dissipative structures", which manage to recreate complex geometrical symmetries across space-time within itself, whereas as a whole, it exists in functional-loops with the outside world. Causation is bidirectional between the "base" processes of organized matter "trapped" in the system of chemical dissipation we call a living body, as well as the body's emergent product, the mind, functionally driving on how the system organizes itself.

Mind, then, is what arose when primates discovered fire and began recognizing the intrinsic existence of things. Imagining this scenario always gets me feeling a state of awe: this actually happened. At least a million years ago - as measured by all the archeological, anthropological, climatological and biological reconstruction, humans eventually became more and more 'entrained' to the pragmatic value of fire, but at the same time, the awe, the inwardness, that the fire could be controlled by the human: does this not seem like a living myth - a myth we actually once lived, which exists in us at a genetic level, still waiting to be appreciated by society at large? The fire is enlightenment - mind, remarkably, was stirred forth by a regular daily interaction with fire, eating food with the fire, and communicating around the fire. Technical skills with hands, knowledge of how to cook food, and communicating in the proto-language that preceded the emergence of the language you currently utilize to think, was formed here, semiotically, by the fundamental propositional nature of the natural world around humans.

I'm writing you all this so that you can appreciate that there appears to be some fundamental relationship between the quality of "mind" and the planet Earth itself. Mind evolved through an organism on the Earth; and it was the environment of an Earthly "garden" that stimulated into being the human imagination, and the consciousness that grew from it.

The Jews have a term for this: the Shekinah. Perhaps, indeed, our consciousness is not "ours", but an emergent property of a semiotic process happening within the Earth itself. Now that's a hefty idea, no,!? Makes a lot of sense if you bring the sciences of systems and the science of semiotics together, and see where it takes you.

This, in fact, kind of reminds me of Avatar. EYWH - not unsurprisingly (given all the Jews in Hollywood) is a permutation of the tetragrammaton for the month of aquarius. James Cameron apparently likes the Hebrew theme, because he named the people the "NaBI", Hebrew for "prophet". The planet is alive - living - and the souls can be felt to be living within the trees themselves. Ain't that a beautiful image? Could it possibly be that emergent i.e. can exist literally produce phenomenon at such a refined level?

To answer your question: there is one process. The process began as a material process, which became chemical, then biological, which has given rise to mind, and then consciousness. That's the science of the matter - and yes, it might differ from New Age ideas about how reality works, but thankfully the epistemological appeal of science allows us to build up coherent diagrams for how things actually work, not how we imagine/wish they would work.

Additionally, consciousness can manage to experience profound states, so profound that the system begins to "transcend" the physics of the environment it exists within and around. But these states are not sustainable, particularly in environments like cities, or where other people are i.e. the "species attractor" effect of one conspecific on another.

So I have no problem with duality or non-duality, the whole issue is solved for most people, which implies a monistic reality of some sort with a structuring which we barely understand.

Where is mind after death? I would assume "here". These sorts of questions will one day fall within the ambit of science.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Yes it will, change that is.

Interesting.