Are you a word, an image
that you cling to,
that is claimed to have “control of all the other words”?
Wordless Wednesday… Not!
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All Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Einstein, Spacetime, and the Fallacious Belief in a Central Ego…
Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein taught us about how space and time are not two entirely different things but are, together, one. However, most people just do not get what that means, psychologically and fundamentally, including a lot of supposedly smart scientists. Years ago, when i was much younger, i used to hang around the quantum physicist Professor David Bohm, whom Einstein fondly called his “spiritual son.” Bohm was a famous scientist in his own right and when we discussed things, i was already well aware of the implications of spacetime and what that meant psychologically and on a larger scale.
Space and time are not two separate entities; together they are one. If you look at nature and people merely with psychological separation, with psychological space, as most people do, that very separation helps to support and produce an abstracted, psychological “I” or “me.” If you perceived without such (learned) separation, the “I” or “me” need not exist (which would be fundamentally way more accurate). If you say, “I will be trying to be ‘good’ so that I can eventually get to heaven,” you are supposing that you are something separate from time (in time)… rather than the actuality of being what time is. Your brain consists of matter (which often functions to react as thoughts), and matter is space, spacetime. Of course, we have to use time (in the physical world) to get to work on time or to be at a specified meeting on time. To use time to get somewhere psychologically or spiritually, however, is largely fallacious. Wishing to advance over time spiritually presupposes that you are “in time” and are not what “time is.” Mentally manufacturing a separation between you and time (except for certain time-oriented physical things, like the ones mentioned… and for using our crude, unfortunate language system) is often a process of wasting energy and is inviting great deception. Both the aforementioned psychological space separation and the psychological time separation are illusory; together, both help to create the fallacious and selfishly separate ego. (One cannot be in communion with the timeless if one is a series of fragments of time that erroneously presuppose that they are “in time” advancing spiritually.)
Eternal and orderly phenomena can exist (in humans) without the ego (i.e., without any psychological center). As we have often suggested, the central ego is essentially fallacious and illusory. Habitually looking from (and “as”) it is an illusion; it is a fallacy that most people habitually cling to. Like a man who thinks that he sees vast water in a desert — you know that age-old mirage — and insists on fishing in it non-stop, stay completely with the ego if you wish.
When discussing things in public with people, we can still politely use the word “I,” while (all the while) being fully aware of its fallacious and deceiving attributes; it is one of the misfortunes of living in a society with a barbaric system of language. Professor Bohm diligently worked on helping develop a more accurate and scientifically evolved system of language, which he called the Rheomode. Later in life, Bohm learned of the Native American Blackfoot language, and also of other members of this Native American language family, all of which are very strongly verb-based and do not divide the world into solid categories (i.e., nouns) but, instead, describe in terms of processes and related movements. Link to short Professor David Bohm Video.
Green Treehopper … Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019
Our Neural Networks and the fallacious “I”…
Our neural networks — much like a computer — are hardwired and conditioned to accept and fully believe in a central (free-will oriented) regulatory agent whom we call “I.” This “I” to each of us, seems very concrete, dependable (i.e., always there to control), and stable. We never deeply question whether such a “center” really exists in the first place. I maintain that there is no legitimate “I,” which, of course, seems contradictory, (due to the crude structure and barbaric evolutionary phase of our current language system).
When one talks to people about there being no “I” they tend to feel rather apprehensive, threatened, and psychologically uncomfortable. After all, to them, one is threatening the very core of their psychological framework. Our physical body, the organism, perceives largely through the eyes. The eye tends to be what focuses on and examines things. A similitude exists in us (mentally) between the physical “eye” and our concept of the “I” of the mind. We say that the “I” examines; we say that the “I” perceives; we say it was decided by “me.” The brain’s associative patterns are, in pretty much everyone, deeply hardwired and conditioned to constantly be referring to and depending upon this “I.” (The physiology of the brain is much like a walnut, and scientists have — repeatedly, in different human individuals — surgically divided the two halves, producing two separate fields of consciousness in each skull, each permanently existing with no clue as to what the other half is thinking.) Our conditioning for so many mental things is deeply pre-programmed in us, and many factors, including physical health, past education, brain chemistry, and genetic influences, pretty much nullify any real “free-will” completely, whether we like it or not. We must act — not react — carefully and diligently, and we cannot do that if we believe in a lot of crap that isn’t true. In 1932, Albert Einstein told the Spinoza society:
“Human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free
but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions.”
What we are saying is that this “I,” in a tremendous way, is fallacious and unnecessary. Clinging to it is like clinging to that childhood Raggy Ann Doll that was mentioned years ago in one of my earlier blogs… clinging to it as if it was real, alive, and a dependable pal. We could live perfectly, compassionately, and timelessly without clinging to our fallacious “I”s. Scientists, as was mentioned before in my blogging, have suggested that our universe likely operates in a totally different way than what we think is happening now… and they, the writer maintains, are correct. It was, many years ago, when i understood the fictitiousness of the “I” and the foolhardiness of the concept of “free-will,” when real security, profundity, insight into eternity, and real order came… (and not before).
This life is relatively short — in the few years that we have to live — and if you don’t get it right, via understanding and insight, if you (instead) continue to cling to a lot of rotten, crude fallacies, then the consequences are eternal (and not nearly as sweet as they could be). There is great beauty and timeless splendor in life if life is seen without much illusion.
Neural Networks or maybe just Queen Anne’s Lace … Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019
on Experience
Experience… what is it, and why do we exclusively depend upon it? A lot of people say, “I’ve learned from experience”; or they say, “I will learn from my experiences.” Many people go on expensive and lengthy vacations to far distant places to get “exotic experiences.”
Experiencing has its place. However, it is very limited. Many crave “new” experiences… but are such experiences — all based on patterns of recognition — really all that “new”? I am suggesting that fundamentally, intrinsically, they are all very much the same and are not really so “new”; they all depend on — and add to — patterns within the field of the mundane known. (That is why many of us retain a deep, inherent sadness, even though we travel to places that should seem new and exciting. Merely existing as a brain that is based primarily on patterns and the recognition of patterns… is sorrow. But that is what most of us were trained to exist as.) Most of us were brainwashed to crave various “wonderful” experiences (i.e., more and more experiences)… through commercials, magazines, examples in books, and by what friends and relatives say and do. (Experiences are never enough, though, because they are essentially limited. But nobody tells you that.)
Evading experience (on the other hand) can be a very childish thing, wherein one endlessly sits cross-legged, for example, thinking that one is accomplishing something special. (You know… all that phony so-called meditation stuff, which is really a glorified form of self-hypnosis.)
Is the experiencer all so separate from what the experience is? If one examines intelligently, the answer is rather obvious: “No.” We look with (and “as”) accumulated patterns and labels at things, pigeonhole them in the rather musty memory bank system and call the experience “new.” To really see something new, perception itself must be dynamically new, fundamentally different, and not based on old, stale systems (and patterns) of observation. Most people are incapable of that, and you don’t get it by sitting in a corner with your legs crossed. Additionally, you don’t get it by reading traditional so-called “religious” books that have been severely distorted over time.
There is a deep, orderly intelligence that is a true spiritual blossoming that is beyond the thoughts and fabrications of man… beyond all of the rituals, stone temples, and concocted patterns. (Those fabrications are all old, and the timeless, miraculous new does not dwell as them.) Deep intelligence is a dynamic harmony, a deep order that effortlessly flows between experiencing and going beyond experiencing. (Constant experiencing and “accumulating” only builds up the illusion of the self.) The “going beyond experiencing” factor (or dimension) is never planned or mentally arranged for. Deep, spontaneous newness and dynamic creativity are never part of a plan or contrived methodology.
Wildflower Pods … Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019
Love exists beyond mere separation…
Instead of being images “about things,” can the mind perceive beyond all of the absorbed mental patterns and labels that it has accumulated? In actuality, most minds are a result of the accumulation; (i.e, they actually are the accumulation). This “accumulation” often intrinsically involves “looking at things via separation” as one of its core attributes.
Perception beyond mere pigeonholing can take place. (We are not suggesting that one should not label things; we are suggesting that one need not always be doing it habitually. It takes dynamic intelligence to go beyond robotic habit.) Real perception, beyond the mere separation between subject and object, can take place. However, it takes real innocence, real simple-purity to do that and, unfortunately, the masses are (for the most part) incapable of that. (However, corruption does have its trivial perks.)
Nothing between us… Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019
The Patterns of the Mind
The associative patterns of the mind, what are their functions? Do they exist merely for us to acquire, accumulate, attain things (including food and shelter), and differentiate with (and from) an element of separation? Do such patterns dictate — to us — what we see?
We usually look at things through labels, through images that we have learned. A person often distinguishes things (at a distance, separate from himself). The patterns that we hold dictate what we see. However, we are these absorbed patterns; we do not actually hold them; they are not separate from what we essentially are. Real wholeness, real integrity, real love, may involve looking beyond the patterns, beyond the old, stuffy mental accumulations, beyond the labels, beyond the mental separative distance.
Three in One … Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019
Goodness beyond the self…
Unpremeditated goodness is often rather motiveless in that it disregards mere efforts to satisfy the self. Satisfying the self is crude, gross, unevolved, and is what most people do. There is a goodness that is unattached-spontaneous, free of the illusory ego, simple, beyond fragmentary thought, and innocent in the way it acts. It is not a mere reaction but, rather, something else is involved. That “something else” is the whole, or is a perception of and from wholeness. Wholeness doesn’t depend upon illusory parts. Parts and fragments — especially when they are illusory, and most of them are — are not what wholeness covets. Wholeness is highly intelligent action, though not merely of the intellectual kind. Wholeness is action, not mere reaction.
Mere reaction feeds the self, with all of its gross demands. The self, in fact, is a product of mere reaction. Crude reactions nourish and sustain the self. Without such reactions, the image and repetitious movements of self would not be. Wholeness operates differently than what reactions and fragments entail. In wholeness, a vast intelligence operates. There is little vastness/intelligence in what is fragmentary and isolated.
Orange Fairy Cup Fungus at the base of an Oak Tree, Illinois … Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019
