Namaskar Brethren…
My inner Stillness / Source of Being has been especially resonant in my temporal consciousness today.
I’m becoming much better at remaining in the state of “No-Mind” / mere-“Being.” This inner Source of Being/Awareness is timeless, self-restrained, infinite equilibrium.
“Time” only manifests for each Individuated Consciousness. Each experiences a different “refresh/sample-rate/frames-per-second” and the ‘dimension’ of time is a unified, bi-directional/bi-poled spectrum (past to future, future to past are both equal in the reality of how change projects “through time”). Spatial and temporal “movement” or change cancels Itself out at the infinite scale of All Existence leaving perfect, self-restrained equilibrium of all impulses.
It is humorous, in a compassionate way, that many think (as I once did) that a state of Total Enlightenment is something you “achieve” once and that’s it. Rather you must strive to retain it for longer and longer periods until you finally abide within it; kind of like how a ball must bounce to a stand still (each impact on the ground being moments of enlightenment coming more frequently and lasting longer).
After a person’s first experience of enlightenment, their ego reestablishes almost immediately, which then applies the fading enlightened perspective to their personhood and human world. This is appropriate; you are meant to utilize this received wisdom, but not attach yourself to how the wisdom manifested in that particular place in your personal time-space. It is people’s egos attaching to their perception of wisdom; which restores to prominence, and puffs up, the ego, thinking it should take credit for the perceived achievement of enlightened wisdom.
Most self-ascribed “enlightened” people are really more deeply and sophisticatedly veiled and entrenched self-deceived egos. Again, it is appropriate for you to use the wisdom that is revealed by your “contact”/reUnion with Universal Consciousness to take harmonious moral action in the world. But our choices and behaviors are most just and harmonious with the “Universe” (our True Nature of Universal Being) when the driver/impulse behind our actions flow directly from Universal Consciousness that is found at the core Source of Awareness (“Life-Force”) found within ourselves.
"One Love,"
UnityPrime
Showing posts with label perspective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perspective. Show all posts
March 20, 2016
March 8, 2016
A Paradox: Struggling Against Our Own Humanity
//Remembering What is Worth Remembering//
None of us can get through life without making serious mistakes. Most of the time we do our best to do what we think is right in an imperfect world, using the scattered pieces of information available to us, trying our hardest to make choices we think will lead to a better future--a future that is always totally unknown and unpredictable. On top of this less than ideal environment for even knowing and understanding what the right decisions to make are, our countless imperfections, our engrained impulses, our baser instincts, our unintentional short-sightedness, and the constant struggle we have within ourselves, often lead us astray. Inherently, "to error is human," and, in fact, all life in existence struggles to the make the best of things in a chaotic world and necessarily makes mistakes along the way. What is more important than the mistakes themselves is that all that can be learned from them, is, and that newfound knowledge is proactively applied to do better in the future.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore, nor excuse the impact of, those mistakes we make that are excruciatingly painful to others and ourselves, made in our darkest hours, when it seemed there was no light to guide us as our own light had faded in the darkness of the pain and the fear. Though, were we, and those we've loved but deeply hurt, not victims of our own blind humanity in the times we were truly lost? Must we judge the character and value of a person's entire life based solely on their worst errors?
Can we accept that we all share, among a great many other things, the common experience of inducing pain and sorrow we never wanted for ourselves or our loved ones? Can we all agree 'we are not magnificent'--that with all our natural flaws, whether they include in any particular person a mental disorder, disability, or malady, or none at all, we do our best to find a sense of happiness and safety, even if we are looking in all the wrong places? Is it not true that we all abhor living in fear, being controlled by sadness, bitterness, and regret, and that we quite often do things that seem to make us feel better in the moment but leave us just as empty as before? Is it not clear the 'human condition' is an inherent paradox, and to be human is to be a walking, talking paradox of mixed emotions and mental conflict, having only a dim perception of the real world whilst possessing dangerously limitless but immature imagination?
We all want to be loved and remembered fondly, despite the very serious, yet very human blunders we've made. I, for one, believe our best qualities and greatest achievements are the only things of value worth remembering once we are dead and gone...
//"We're Living at the Mercy of the Pain and the Fear Until We Dead It, Forget It, Let It All Disappear"//
"Yeah, yo
This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone and the violent rhythm
And though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em
We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear (yeah)
Waiting for the end to come, wishing I had strength to stand
This is not what I had planned, it's out of my control
Flying at the speed of light, thoughts were spinning in my head
So many things were left unsaid, it's hard to let you go
I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got
Sitting in an empty room, trying to forget the past
This was never meant to last, I wish it wasn't so
I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got
Yo, yeah
What was left when that fire was gone?
I thought it felt right but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
I'm trying to figure out what it's like moving on
And I don't even know what kind of things I said
My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead
So, picking up the pieces now, where to begin?
The hardest part of ending is starting again!
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got
This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
(I'm holding on to what I haven't got)
But you listen to the tone and the violet rhythm
Though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em
We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
(Holding on to what I haven't got)
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear"
None of us can get through life without making serious mistakes. Most of the time we do our best to do what we think is right in an imperfect world, using the scattered pieces of information available to us, trying our hardest to make choices we think will lead to a better future--a future that is always totally unknown and unpredictable. On top of this less than ideal environment for even knowing and understanding what the right decisions to make are, our countless imperfections, our engrained impulses, our baser instincts, our unintentional short-sightedness, and the constant struggle we have within ourselves, often lead us astray. Inherently, "to error is human," and, in fact, all life in existence struggles to the make the best of things in a chaotic world and necessarily makes mistakes along the way. What is more important than the mistakes themselves is that all that can be learned from them, is, and that newfound knowledge is proactively applied to do better in the future.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore, nor excuse the impact of, those mistakes we make that are excruciatingly painful to others and ourselves, made in our darkest hours, when it seemed there was no light to guide us as our own light had faded in the darkness of the pain and the fear. Though, were we, and those we've loved but deeply hurt, not victims of our own blind humanity in the times we were truly lost? Must we judge the character and value of a person's entire life based solely on their worst errors?
Can we accept that we all share, among a great many other things, the common experience of inducing pain and sorrow we never wanted for ourselves or our loved ones? Can we all agree 'we are not magnificent'--that with all our natural flaws, whether they include in any particular person a mental disorder, disability, or malady, or none at all, we do our best to find a sense of happiness and safety, even if we are looking in all the wrong places? Is it not true that we all abhor living in fear, being controlled by sadness, bitterness, and regret, and that we quite often do things that seem to make us feel better in the moment but leave us just as empty as before? Is it not clear the 'human condition' is an inherent paradox, and to be human is to be a walking, talking paradox of mixed emotions and mental conflict, having only a dim perception of the real world whilst possessing dangerously limitless but immature imagination?
We all want to be loved and remembered fondly, despite the very serious, yet very human blunders we've made. I, for one, believe our best qualities and greatest achievements are the only things of value worth remembering once we are dead and gone...
//"We're Living at the Mercy of the Pain and the Fear Until We Dead It, Forget It, Let It All Disappear"//
"Yeah, yo
This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone and the violent rhythm
And though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em
We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear (yeah)
Waiting for the end to come, wishing I had strength to stand
This is not what I had planned, it's out of my control
Flying at the speed of light, thoughts were spinning in my head
So many things were left unsaid, it's hard to let you go
I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got
Sitting in an empty room, trying to forget the past
This was never meant to last, I wish it wasn't so
I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got
Yo, yeah
What was left when that fire was gone?
I thought it felt right but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
I'm trying to figure out what it's like moving on
And I don't even know what kind of things I said
My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead
So, picking up the pieces now, where to begin?
The hardest part of ending is starting again!
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got
This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
(I'm holding on to what I haven't got)
But you listen to the tone and the violet rhythm
Though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em
We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
(Holding on to what I haven't got)
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear"
January 12, 2015
Highlights of the History of Astronomy and the Basics of Solar System Astronomy
Historical:
- The ancient Babylonians kept vast written records of astronomical data.
- Since the 7th century B.C., the Chinese kept highly accurate records of astronomical data.
- Plato and Aristotle formulated a geocentric model of the solar system describing the Earth as the center, with the sun and other planets revolving around the Earth in perfect circular orbits and the planets simultaneously having epicyclical orbits about their solar orbits to explain "retrograde motion" of the planets observed from Earth.
- In the 2nd century B.C., Hipparchus improved the geocentric model slightly, made the first (relatively) precise observations of stars, and developed the apparent magnitude scale measuring the apparent brightness of a star on a scale of 1 (brightest) to 6 (faintest).
- In the 3rd century B.C., Aristarchus was the first to propose a heliocentric model of the solar system (in which the sun is the center, and the planets revolve around the sun) but his work was largely ignored.
- Ptolemy's sophisticated and far more detailed improvement on the geocentric model was so successful that it remained the near-universally accepted model of the solar system until the Renaissance.
- During the Renaissance, Copernicus developed a detailed heliocentric model of the solar system utilizing a great deal of mathematics that successfully predicted the astronomical patterns of solar-body movements, and whose work was built upon by Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.
- Galileo, who developed the first relatively powerful telescope of the time, was the "father" of observational astronomy, and through his telescopically-collected observations discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter, that the moon had craters, the sun had "sunspots" (which he happened to correctly explain the nature of), observed that Venus (from the perspective of Earth) went through luminary phases similar to the moon, and used his observational evidence to directly support the validity of the heliocentric model.
- Later, Kepler used the couple decades of accurate solar observational data collected by Tycho Brahe and his own intellectual conceptual insights to develop his three law's of planetary motion (1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci, 2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time, 3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit).
- Then came along Isaac Newton, who developed the "universal law of gravitation," which very precisely explained mathematically the heliocentric model movements of solar-bodies and made extremely accurate predictions for the future motions and positions of solar-bodies.
Non-Historical:
- Only approximately a maximum of 2,000 stars are visible with the naked eye.
- The Earth's average diameter is 7,918 miles.
- The solar system has a diameter of approximately 9 trillion miles.
- 1 lightyear ≈ 5.88 trillion miles.
- The radius of the observable universe is approximately 14 billion lightyears.
- The apparent encompassing sphere of the heavens about the Earth is called the "celestial sphere."
- 88 constellations are officially recognized by the IAU; that star patterns not formally considered constellations are called "asterisms."
- The apparent path of the sun across the celestial sphere is called the "ecliptic."
- Modern astronomers use a "photometer" and an apparent brightness scale that ranges from -30 to +31? (+31 was assigned to the faintest object detected by the Hubble telescope) {each increment = a ratio of 2.5 from the next increment in degree of brightness}, the Sun measures -26.75 on this scale, and the next brightest star, Sirius, measures in at -1.44.
- Astronomers use "declination" (the angular measure above or below the celestial equator) and "right ascension" (angular measure in units of "hour" {1 hour = 1.5°} relative to the "celestial meridian" (0° in longitude) to define the location of astronomical objects.
- The point directly above (90° perpendicular to the horizon at your current location) is called the 'zenith.'
- A star is said to "culminate" (reaches its highest altitude in the sky) when it is on the celestial meridian.
- The daily paths of stars around the celestial axis are called "diurnal circles."
- To find the "North Star," Polaris, you can use the 'pointer' stars, Dubhe and Merak (which are at the end of the 'bowl' of the Big Dipper).
- The stars that never 'set' below the celestial horizon in the Northern/Southern hemisphere are called "North (or) South circumpolar stars" respectively.
- The band about 16° wide around the sky centered on the 'ecliptic' is called the 'zodiac,' which ancient astrologers divided into 12 constellations, or "signs," each taken at 30° increments of longitude.
- The Earth’s geographical equator remains tilted at about 23.4-23.5° to its orbital plane about the sun.
- The 'vernal equinox,' which occurs about March 20, is the Sun’s position as it crosses the celestial equator going north and is the point on the celestial sphere chosen to be the 0h measure of right ascension.
- The 'autumnal equinox,' which occurs about September 23, is the Sun’s position as it crosses the celestial equator going south.
- During the equinoxes, day and night are equal in length.
- The 'summer solstice,' which occurs about June 21, and the 'winter solstice,' which occurs about December 21, are the most northern and most southern positions of the Sun during the year in the northern hemisphere, and that at these times we have the longest and shortest days, respectively, in the northern hemisphere.
- There are two measures of "day": the 'solar day' (measuring the time interval of Earth’s rotation using the Sun for reference) and the 'sidereal day' (measuring the time interval of Earth’s rotation using the stars for reference).
- A sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds long, requiring the use of leap-years and leap-seconds.
- The Earth’s axis of rotation shifts extremely slowly around a imaginary 'cone' in space once about every 25,800 years (which is called "precession") and is caused mainly by the tug of the gravity of the Sun and Moon on Earth’s equatorial bulge.
- The Arctic Circle and Antarctic Circle mark the southernmost and northernmost latitude, respectively, at which the sun can remain continuously above or below the horizon for 24 hours (at the June solstice and December solstice respectively).
- The Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are the northern and southern latitudes, respectively, at which the sun reaches zenith only one time a year.
January 11, 2015
Wisdom Concerning the 'Self' (from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds)
[The following quote's are some of the ones that were compiled by Maria Popova in her article on brainpickings.org :]
Mindfulness in the Present Moment
"I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" — Henry David Thoreau ('Walking' - 1861)
"On the Shortness of Life" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC – AD 65)
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it."
[…]
"You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!"
[…]
"Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
Knowing Who You Are
"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."
[…]
"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of nature.'
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin." — Alan Watts ('The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' - 1966)
The 'Fixed Mindset' vs. the 'Growth Mindset'
"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
[…]
"There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training." — Carol Dweck ('Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' - 2006)
Never Cease to Ask Questions and Pursue Answers About the Unknown
"By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded…
While our thirst for knowledge may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this particular world." — Hannah Arendt ('The Life of the Mind' - 1978)
On 'Perfectionism'
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
[…]
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing." — Anne Lamott ('Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life' - 1995)
On Evaluating the Validity and Usefulness of a New Idea
"The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method."
[…]
"1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result." — Carl Sagan (' The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' - 1996)
Get Lost to Find Yourself
"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"
[…]
"How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us."
[…]
"To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." — Rebecca Solnit ('A Field Guide to Getting Lost' - 2005)
Be Like Water
"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."
[…]
"Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. First it is turbulent like Niagara Falls, and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring on a hot summer’s day." — Bruce Lee ('Bruce Lee: Artist of Life' - 1999)
Making 'Good' Out of 'Evils'
"Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of."
[…]
"To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, fifty sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry — never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling — I mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing."
[…]
"Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness… And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."
[…]
"We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable." — Maya Angelou (Documentary: 'Facing Evil with Maya Angelou' - 1988)
Living by Your Own Standards (the Basis for 'Happiness')
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people."
[…]
"Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: ‘A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.’"
[…]
"It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being." — Eleanor Roosevelt ('You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life' - 1960)
Mindfulness in the Present Moment
"I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" — Henry David Thoreau ('Walking' - 1861)
"On the Shortness of Life" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC – AD 65)
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it."
[…]
"You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!"
[…]
"Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
Knowing Who You Are
"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."
[…]
"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of nature.'
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin." — Alan Watts ('The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' - 1966)
The 'Fixed Mindset' vs. the 'Growth Mindset'
"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
[…]
"There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training." — Carol Dweck ('Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' - 2006)
Never Cease to Ask Questions and Pursue Answers About the Unknown
"By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded…
While our thirst for knowledge may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this particular world." — Hannah Arendt ('The Life of the Mind' - 1978)
On 'Perfectionism'
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
[…]
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing." — Anne Lamott ('Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life' - 1995)
On Evaluating the Validity and Usefulness of a New Idea
"The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method."
[…]
"1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result." — Carl Sagan (' The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' - 1996)
Get Lost to Find Yourself
"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"
[…]
"How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us."
[…]
"To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." — Rebecca Solnit ('A Field Guide to Getting Lost' - 2005)
Be Like Water
"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."
[…]
"Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. First it is turbulent like Niagara Falls, and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring on a hot summer’s day." — Bruce Lee ('Bruce Lee: Artist of Life' - 1999)
Making 'Good' Out of 'Evils'
"Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of."
[…]
"To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, fifty sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry — never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling — I mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing."
[…]
"Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness… And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."
[…]
"We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable." — Maya Angelou (Documentary: 'Facing Evil with Maya Angelou' - 1988)
Living by Your Own Standards (the Basis for 'Happiness')
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people."
[…]
"Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: ‘A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.’"
[…]
"It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being." — Eleanor Roosevelt ('You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life' - 1960)
January 4, 2015
Press Release & Background Info. on My Album
First: a mass, global press release for my music album and my record label has been published to over 500+ media and industry outlets, as well as the blogger-sphere and social media which you can check out here!
Second:
[Transcript from my Kickstarter project video presentation.]
"Hello Everyone!
My name is Matthew Morgan, though I usually go by Matt, and I am a 30 year old partially-disabled army combat veteran who is currently nearing completion of my college degree. There is a major abundance of detailed information about me on my Kickstarter project page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wisefromwithin/wise-trip-eptm-album-completion) and especially my blog pages, so I won't bother covering all of that here....
On the internet and when referred to as a music producer I go by the alias "WiseFromWithin." This alias is simply a reminder to myself and others that true wisdom concerning anything (even right down to the very nature of existence itself) must be rooted and developed forth, first, from a genuine and deep understanding of 'thyself.'
I am seeking your support in investing in the completion of what is my debut album as a music producer, called Wise 'Trip' EP, which is currently in the "demo" stage. There is plenty of detail about my project on the project's pages, including where to go to listen to all of the songs, but I'll give you some background information on the concepts and meaning behind the album itself and a couple of the songs--information that you will not find anywhere else.
Both in the album's title and the 1st track's title, Destiny 'Trip,' the word "trip" has a double meaning, which is why it is in single quotes. It both means a trip, as in a journey, and also a "trip," as in a mental high that the music is intended to induce in the listener. The album concept is to explore the different, important aspects of human life through the use of music that serves as accurate metaphors for conveying those ideas in a way that is more emotionally engaging, more intuitively understandable, and more enveloping of consciousness for the listener, than could be achieved through words.
Destiny 'Trip' is a song that does not follow a standard musical song structure, as most of the songs on the album do not. Destiny 'Trip' is structured musically to be a metaphor for the human lifespan, with each of its stages represented in the proper, relative proportions. It begins with early childhood (which is the piano intro). It suddenly builds up, transitioning with a crescendo into the song section representing the phase of later childhood and adolescence.
The point in the song where there is only a duet of intertwining countermelodies, represents the transition in a person's life between adolescence and adulthood--a time when they retain their excitement for life, but, as a person, feel considerable uncertainty about who they are, what direction their life should head in, and also is the time when the person often feels alone in terms of not being able to understand their destiny through what advice others have to offer them--only they, them self, can figure all of that out use their intellectual conflict plays itself out (represented by the two countermelodies). When the rest of the music reenters, the person is a young adult, still filled with a sense of discovery and excitement about the world around them and how they are just beginning to understand how they fit in to it all.
When the song reaches the point where it modulates to a new key, speeds up, and is beginning to fill with even more energy--this represents the stage in a person's life when, who they are as a person, is stabilizing and settling into an identity the person at least partially understands. At the same time, the person finally has some degree of grasp on what meaning and purpose they want their life to have--in other words, what their destiny is; and they move forward with the next phase of their life that roughly spans between their late 20's and late 50's (the phase in one's life that begins musically at the point in the song when the "bridge" transition ends with the energetic drums entering and landing in the next section of the song).
At this point in a person's life, they are fairly confident in themselves and what they want out of life, and they also are applying--through their actions, not just their words--the values and ideals they identify with in most everything they do. The heightened energy and slight swagger of the music in this section intends to represent these ideas.
Finally, in the music (with the moderately loud atmospheric splash and instant drop in tempo), as in a person's life, a point of "old age" is reached, where everything seems to suddenly slow down while the person still retains a sense of dignity and identity that they had during the previous phase of their life. As the song ends, like the end of one's life, their is a last moment of uplifting melody--the last beats of the heart. As the person's heart, and the music, sounds its final note and their breath slips away, so too does the music, gently and brightly fading into the rest of the universe....
The piano melody that can be heard repeating throughout the song is like a spiritual "marker" that uniquely identifies that particular person's consciousness, regardless of the countless changes it goes through throughout their life. Destiny 'Trip' is, overall, positive in its portrayal of the human life, not to ignore the negative realities and experiences that exist in real life, but because the whole purpose of my music is to uplift and inspire the listener to make the most of their life in the most positively-minded way possible--in part by reminding them of the common experience all humans have in life and in death. Keeping in mind that death as a part of life for us all helps a person realize that one day, all that will remain of them is their legacy--the memories others have of them and the influences they had on the world around them during their life, which will reverberate throughout all eternity. Keeping this truth in mind motivates a person to make better, more positive choices in how they live their life and in how they interact with others and the world around them.
The last song I will explain here, to further show that every song on the album has a strong conceptual basis that drives each songs' theme and motifs, is "A Brief History of Memory." Even though this is one of the songs I wish to expand on in terms of its length, the theme and motifs, which are already represented in the song, are based on the concept of a person, who could be anyone, and probably has been all of us at some point in our lives, who is quietly reflecting back on the memories of their life history. The positive and negative emotions associated with each of those memories is heard in the harmonies of the first, quiet section of the piece. As the song transitions into the second section, the music is composed to convey the sense of wonder, mystery, and uncertainty that that same person feels as they try to make sense of how those memories relate to their life in the present and how those memories should influence the way they move forward with their life in the future.
If you would like to learn similar background information on the other songs, you can be rewarded with a 30 or 60 minute phone conversation with me (among other incentives), depending on your donation amount. Be sure to check out all of the incentives; they are all good rewards for your support, regardless of the amount you choose to donate. The truth is, even the smallest investment on your part will make a big difference and will be greatly appreciated.
I sincerely thank you for your time and careful consideration. I know there is a lot of information to digest about myself, my music, and my record label. It's up to you how deep you want to go into the details of these things, but if you choose to dig deep, you won't be disappointed--I am an "open book" as they say, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I have always been a kind, loving, considerate person who is grateful for every achievement and contribution I have been able to make to benefit my fellow human brothers and sisters. I offer you all my best wishes. ONE LOVE..."
Second:
[Transcript from my Kickstarter project video presentation.]
"Hello Everyone!
My name is Matthew Morgan, though I usually go by Matt, and I am a 30 year old partially-disabled army combat veteran who is currently nearing completion of my college degree. There is a major abundance of detailed information about me on my Kickstarter project page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wisefromwithin/wise-trip-eptm-album-completion) and especially my blog pages, so I won't bother covering all of that here....
On the internet and when referred to as a music producer I go by the alias "WiseFromWithin." This alias is simply a reminder to myself and others that true wisdom concerning anything (even right down to the very nature of existence itself) must be rooted and developed forth, first, from a genuine and deep understanding of 'thyself.'
I am seeking your support in investing in the completion of what is my debut album as a music producer, called Wise 'Trip' EP, which is currently in the "demo" stage. There is plenty of detail about my project on the project's pages, including where to go to listen to all of the songs, but I'll give you some background information on the concepts and meaning behind the album itself and a couple of the songs--information that you will not find anywhere else.
Both in the album's title and the 1st track's title, Destiny 'Trip,' the word "trip" has a double meaning, which is why it is in single quotes. It both means a trip, as in a journey, and also a "trip," as in a mental high that the music is intended to induce in the listener. The album concept is to explore the different, important aspects of human life through the use of music that serves as accurate metaphors for conveying those ideas in a way that is more emotionally engaging, more intuitively understandable, and more enveloping of consciousness for the listener, than could be achieved through words.
Destiny 'Trip' is a song that does not follow a standard musical song structure, as most of the songs on the album do not. Destiny 'Trip' is structured musically to be a metaphor for the human lifespan, with each of its stages represented in the proper, relative proportions. It begins with early childhood (which is the piano intro). It suddenly builds up, transitioning with a crescendo into the song section representing the phase of later childhood and adolescence.
The point in the song where there is only a duet of intertwining countermelodies, represents the transition in a person's life between adolescence and adulthood--a time when they retain their excitement for life, but, as a person, feel considerable uncertainty about who they are, what direction their life should head in, and also is the time when the person often feels alone in terms of not being able to understand their destiny through what advice others have to offer them--only they, them self, can figure all of that out use their intellectual conflict plays itself out (represented by the two countermelodies). When the rest of the music reenters, the person is a young adult, still filled with a sense of discovery and excitement about the world around them and how they are just beginning to understand how they fit in to it all.
When the song reaches the point where it modulates to a new key, speeds up, and is beginning to fill with even more energy--this represents the stage in a person's life when, who they are as a person, is stabilizing and settling into an identity the person at least partially understands. At the same time, the person finally has some degree of grasp on what meaning and purpose they want their life to have--in other words, what their destiny is; and they move forward with the next phase of their life that roughly spans between their late 20's and late 50's (the phase in one's life that begins musically at the point in the song when the "bridge" transition ends with the energetic drums entering and landing in the next section of the song).
At this point in a person's life, they are fairly confident in themselves and what they want out of life, and they also are applying--through their actions, not just their words--the values and ideals they identify with in most everything they do. The heightened energy and slight swagger of the music in this section intends to represent these ideas.
Finally, in the music (with the moderately loud atmospheric splash and instant drop in tempo), as in a person's life, a point of "old age" is reached, where everything seems to suddenly slow down while the person still retains a sense of dignity and identity that they had during the previous phase of their life. As the song ends, like the end of one's life, their is a last moment of uplifting melody--the last beats of the heart. As the person's heart, and the music, sounds its final note and their breath slips away, so too does the music, gently and brightly fading into the rest of the universe....
The piano melody that can be heard repeating throughout the song is like a spiritual "marker" that uniquely identifies that particular person's consciousness, regardless of the countless changes it goes through throughout their life. Destiny 'Trip' is, overall, positive in its portrayal of the human life, not to ignore the negative realities and experiences that exist in real life, but because the whole purpose of my music is to uplift and inspire the listener to make the most of their life in the most positively-minded way possible--in part by reminding them of the common experience all humans have in life and in death. Keeping in mind that death as a part of life for us all helps a person realize that one day, all that will remain of them is their legacy--the memories others have of them and the influences they had on the world around them during their life, which will reverberate throughout all eternity. Keeping this truth in mind motivates a person to make better, more positive choices in how they live their life and in how they interact with others and the world around them.
The last song I will explain here, to further show that every song on the album has a strong conceptual basis that drives each songs' theme and motifs, is "A Brief History of Memory." Even though this is one of the songs I wish to expand on in terms of its length, the theme and motifs, which are already represented in the song, are based on the concept of a person, who could be anyone, and probably has been all of us at some point in our lives, who is quietly reflecting back on the memories of their life history. The positive and negative emotions associated with each of those memories is heard in the harmonies of the first, quiet section of the piece. As the song transitions into the second section, the music is composed to convey the sense of wonder, mystery, and uncertainty that that same person feels as they try to make sense of how those memories relate to their life in the present and how those memories should influence the way they move forward with their life in the future.
If you would like to learn similar background information on the other songs, you can be rewarded with a 30 or 60 minute phone conversation with me (among other incentives), depending on your donation amount. Be sure to check out all of the incentives; they are all good rewards for your support, regardless of the amount you choose to donate. The truth is, even the smallest investment on your part will make a big difference and will be greatly appreciated.
I sincerely thank you for your time and careful consideration. I know there is a lot of information to digest about myself, my music, and my record label. It's up to you how deep you want to go into the details of these things, but if you choose to dig deep, you won't be disappointed--I am an "open book" as they say, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I have always been a kind, loving, considerate person who is grateful for every achievement and contribution I have been able to make to benefit my fellow human brothers and sisters. I offer you all my best wishes. ONE LOVE..."
December 26, 2014
Insights from "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl
[Book Section 1 of 2: "Experiences in a Concentration Camp"]
-Book is an answer to: "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?
-Concerned not with the main figures, but of the xp. of the unknown and unrecorded victims.
-Capos: prisoner leaders; fed decently; often more brutal to reg. prisoners than the SS; demoted if "ineffective".
-Stripped of identity; known by number; prisoner numbers, not qualities mattered.
-Moral/ethical debate nonexistent, only the instinct to survive; only the most cutthroat saved themselves at the expense of others.
-"These former prisoners often say, 'We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.'"
-Three phases: initial period of admission (into camp), distinguished by shock; the period when well entrenched in camp routine; the period following release/liberation.
-"Delusion of reprieve": condemned man has the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
-Consequential decisions (even life-and-death) treated with no regard or seriousness by the decision-makers.
-Stripped of any connection to former life; only had 'naked' existence.
-A grim humor developed (only thing that could now be taken was their life); affords an aloofness and ability to rise above any situation.
-A curiosity over the fate to be befallen; a objective detachment as a means of protection.
-The thought of suicide was widely entertained due in part to the hopelessness of the situation.
-The fear of death subsides after the first few days.
-"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior."
-Entering the second phase, a "phase of relative apathy in which he achieved a kind of emotional death," a self-defense mechanism characterized by blunted feelings, unmoved by the suffering around him.
-"It is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all," that "hurts the most."
-Insult is more rousing of indignation than the cruelty or pain itself.
-"Regression" occurred in camp inmates - a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life, characterized by very simple wishes and desires.
-How helpful is it to dwell on imaginings of good food when you've adapted to poor food (applies to other things as well), "for the sake of knowing that the sub-human existence which had made us unable to think of anything other than food, would at last cease"; more harmful than helpful?
-"...my body, is really a corpse already"; great mass of human flesh behind barbed wire, crowded into a few huts, which rots daily because it has become lifeless.
-When in an austere environment, seemingly small decisions about how to deal with circumstances end up having a profound impact on a person's mental state and willpower.
-"The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ...The salvation of man is through love and in love."
-"I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss.... In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment."
-"Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance."
-The prisoner finds refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence by escaping into the past, finding solace in nostalgic memories.
-An appreciation of the beauty of art and nature develops far more than ever before.
-Meaning is found in the smallest of significances.
-"...suffering completely fills (disperses through) the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little."
-In such difficult situations "a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys"; "grateful for the smallest of mercies".
-Comparisons of wellbeing and luck were strictly relative to the experience of the person making the comparisons.
-"Freedom from suffering" was the primary source of any relative 'happiness'.
-"Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated... under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value."
-Resigned to fate, combined with a great apathy.
-Guilt at the idea of escaping the situation when all the others would not be able to.
-A continuous fluctuation between hope and despair in the last hours and days of captivity.
-"We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be 'somebody.' Now we were treated like complete nonentities. ...Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded."
-"...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
-"...there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision... which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate."
-"...in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally... any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity.... ...the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
-"...there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. ...not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."
-"It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. ...A man who could not see the end of his 'provisional existence' was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future...."
-"This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote - out of reach and, in a way, unreal."
-"Regarding our 'provisional existence' as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless."
-"One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate...."
-"Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it."
-"The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay."
-Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."
-"We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life.... Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct."
-"He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."
-"When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life."
-"Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being."
-"'Freedom' - we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. ...Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. ...Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true."
-"...no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them."
-"A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely."
-"We were not hoping for happiness.... And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness."
-"...for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare."
-Book is an answer to: "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?
-Concerned not with the main figures, but of the xp. of the unknown and unrecorded victims.
-Capos: prisoner leaders; fed decently; often more brutal to reg. prisoners than the SS; demoted if "ineffective".
-Stripped of identity; known by number; prisoner numbers, not qualities mattered.
-Moral/ethical debate nonexistent, only the instinct to survive; only the most cutthroat saved themselves at the expense of others.
-"These former prisoners often say, 'We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.'"
-Three phases: initial period of admission (into camp), distinguished by shock; the period when well entrenched in camp routine; the period following release/liberation.
-"Delusion of reprieve": condemned man has the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
-Consequential decisions (even life-and-death) treated with no regard or seriousness by the decision-makers.
-Stripped of any connection to former life; only had 'naked' existence.
-A grim humor developed (only thing that could now be taken was their life); affords an aloofness and ability to rise above any situation.
-A curiosity over the fate to be befallen; a objective detachment as a means of protection.
-The thought of suicide was widely entertained due in part to the hopelessness of the situation.
-The fear of death subsides after the first few days.
-"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior."
-Entering the second phase, a "phase of relative apathy in which he achieved a kind of emotional death," a self-defense mechanism characterized by blunted feelings, unmoved by the suffering around him.
-"It is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all," that "hurts the most."
-Insult is more rousing of indignation than the cruelty or pain itself.
-"Regression" occurred in camp inmates - a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life, characterized by very simple wishes and desires.
-How helpful is it to dwell on imaginings of good food when you've adapted to poor food (applies to other things as well), "for the sake of knowing that the sub-human existence which had made us unable to think of anything other than food, would at last cease"; more harmful than helpful?
-"...my body, is really a corpse already"; great mass of human flesh behind barbed wire, crowded into a few huts, which rots daily because it has become lifeless.
-When in an austere environment, seemingly small decisions about how to deal with circumstances end up having a profound impact on a person's mental state and willpower.
-"The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ...The salvation of man is through love and in love."
-"I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss.... In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment."
-"Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance."
-The prisoner finds refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence by escaping into the past, finding solace in nostalgic memories.
-An appreciation of the beauty of art and nature develops far more than ever before.
-Meaning is found in the smallest of significances.
-"...suffering completely fills (disperses through) the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little."
-In such difficult situations "a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys"; "grateful for the smallest of mercies".
-Comparisons of wellbeing and luck were strictly relative to the experience of the person making the comparisons.
-"Freedom from suffering" was the primary source of any relative 'happiness'.
-"Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated... under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value."
-Resigned to fate, combined with a great apathy.
-Guilt at the idea of escaping the situation when all the others would not be able to.
-A continuous fluctuation between hope and despair in the last hours and days of captivity.
-"We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be 'somebody.' Now we were treated like complete nonentities. ...Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded."
-"...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
-"...there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision... which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate."
-"...in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally... any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity.... ...the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
-"...there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. ...not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."
-"It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. ...A man who could not see the end of his 'provisional existence' was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future...."
-"This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote - out of reach and, in a way, unreal."
-"Regarding our 'provisional existence' as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless."
-"One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate...."
-"Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it."
-"The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay."
-Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."
-"We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life.... Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct."
-"He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."
-"When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life."
-"Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being."
-"'Freedom' - we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. ...Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. ...Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true."
-"...no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them."
-"A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely."
-"We were not hoping for happiness.... And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness."
-"...for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare."
December 19, 2014
Some Perspective on "Knowledge"
//Excerpts from:
"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"
("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") — Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)//
"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened...
"The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character...
"Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see 'forms.'
"...What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers!
"...The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths, which are possibly harmful and destructive, he is even hostilely inclined.
"...Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
"...The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one...
"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities...
"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
"...We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us...
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins...
"We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth...
"The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions...
"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world...
"One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind...
"As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.
"...When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man...
"Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available...
"Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue — for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification...
"If each of us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence...
"We produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way."
"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"
("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") — Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)//
"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened...
"The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character...
"Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see 'forms.'
"...What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers!
"...The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths, which are possibly harmful and destructive, he is even hostilely inclined.
"...Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
"...The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one...
"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities...
"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
"...We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us...
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins...
"We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth...
"The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions...
"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world...
"One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind...
"As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.
"...When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man...
"Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available...
"Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue — for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification...
"If each of us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence...
"We produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way."
December 17, 2014
A Few Thoughts Concerning the Human Condition
//Society and the Impact of Selflessness vs. Selfishness of Individuals//
Institutionalized human morality, in all areas of social life, is ultimately rooted in and defined by the need to inhibit the aggregated impact of the self-centric intentions and impulses of all the individuals that fall within the societal framework. Does a person knowingly act to achieve personal gain at the expense of others, or does a person seek to achieve personal growth by making the struggles of others partly their own, and investing in the betterment of all, for the sake of all? Is it not true that building a network of true friends through a well-meaning and steady application of selfless behavior brings lasting flexibility, strength, and happiness to one's life, whereas creating a network of people that are distrustful of you, through deliberately selfish behavior, begets fleeting gain and a lasting counter-effort of those wronged, whom always prevail over the selfish individual in the end? Only a dedicated effort on the part of every individual towards genuinely appreciating others and the benefits of the diversity that exists amongst us all, faithful application of active listening, proactive, routine, deep reflection about one's self and their social environment that leads to true insights, making a consistent effort to apply those insights to maximize the benefit of all, being actively compassionate and forgiving, and having a willingness to consistently establish truly well-intentioned relations with others can bring forth lasting balance, peace, and happiness throughout all of society. Is it not then in all of our own self interest to be selfless in our interactions with others and our collective social institutions? Perhaps most people lean towards selfishness because the idea that being selfless is more beneficial to themselves than being self-centered appears paradoxical, or at least counterintuitive.
//Human Perspective//
It is just incredible how self-centric humans tend to be, and how much unnecessary suffering results because of it. We are capable of so much more than we have already accomplished thus far as a civilization, because of this tendency towards self-centric thinking in the individual. Even after my perspective widened exponentially over the last several years, I still find it difficult at times to avoid self-centric thinking, but it is easier to do once you let your self accept that you are a very, very small part of a much grander picture.
Our Milky Way galaxy alone is so large it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles/sec, 100,000-120,000 years to cross from one point on the edge of it, through the center, to the opposite edge. As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if it were reduced to 100 meters in diameter, the Solar System, including the hypothesized Oort cloud, would be no more than 1 mm in width, about the size of a grain of sand. There are between 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and contains at least 100 billion planets. On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the "habitable zones" of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way Galaxy. 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting sun-like stars. The oldest known star in the Milky Way is at least 13.82 billion years old and thus must have formed shortly after the Big Bang.
The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (the nearest galaxy to ours) are a binary system of giant spiral galaxies belonging to a group of 50 closely bound galaxies known as the Local Group, itself being part of the Virgo Supercluster (containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters within its diameter of 110 million light-years), which is itself a subcomponent of the Laniakea Supercluster (consisting of 100,000 galaxies stretched out over 520 megalight-years).
Just in the part of the universe we can see, there are over 100 billion galaxies and the approximate diameter of the known universe is 92 billion light-years. The diagrams below help the average person to understand how small we really are and how beautifully vast our universe is; and there are many very good reasons to believe that our known universe is just the very tip of the iceberg.
So how many stars total in the visible universe?
About 10 octillion stars (10 trillion billion stars). Writing that out gives us: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Care to start counting from "1"? Each star system has a chance at harboring life. Honestly ask yourself: what are the chances that we are the only intelligent life in all the universe? There is no rational basis to think of our own self or civilization as being especially "special." We are all interconnected with the rest of our incomprehensibly vast and diverse cosmos, and we ALL ought to start thinking and acting like it as we proceed on with our lives.
//Choosing Our Path//
Life really is an incomprehensibly vast ocean of possibility. We each are merely, drifting consciousnesses, floating independently along paths of our choosing. Occasionally, they cross paths in meaningful ways. More rarely, a couple choose to abandon the independent path they would otherwise have taken, and take a risk that the path and circumstances of the journey that they agree to share together will provide greater fulfillment and happiness. Yet, no matter the path we currently travel, we must always remember that there are an infinite many others we can choose to follow if we find our current one becoming stale or untenable....
Institutionalized human morality, in all areas of social life, is ultimately rooted in and defined by the need to inhibit the aggregated impact of the self-centric intentions and impulses of all the individuals that fall within the societal framework. Does a person knowingly act to achieve personal gain at the expense of others, or does a person seek to achieve personal growth by making the struggles of others partly their own, and investing in the betterment of all, for the sake of all? Is it not true that building a network of true friends through a well-meaning and steady application of selfless behavior brings lasting flexibility, strength, and happiness to one's life, whereas creating a network of people that are distrustful of you, through deliberately selfish behavior, begets fleeting gain and a lasting counter-effort of those wronged, whom always prevail over the selfish individual in the end? Only a dedicated effort on the part of every individual towards genuinely appreciating others and the benefits of the diversity that exists amongst us all, faithful application of active listening, proactive, routine, deep reflection about one's self and their social environment that leads to true insights, making a consistent effort to apply those insights to maximize the benefit of all, being actively compassionate and forgiving, and having a willingness to consistently establish truly well-intentioned relations with others can bring forth lasting balance, peace, and happiness throughout all of society. Is it not then in all of our own self interest to be selfless in our interactions with others and our collective social institutions? Perhaps most people lean towards selfishness because the idea that being selfless is more beneficial to themselves than being self-centered appears paradoxical, or at least counterintuitive.
//Human Perspective//
It is just incredible how self-centric humans tend to be, and how much unnecessary suffering results because of it. We are capable of so much more than we have already accomplished thus far as a civilization, because of this tendency towards self-centric thinking in the individual. Even after my perspective widened exponentially over the last several years, I still find it difficult at times to avoid self-centric thinking, but it is easier to do once you let your self accept that you are a very, very small part of a much grander picture.
Our Milky Way galaxy alone is so large it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles/sec, 100,000-120,000 years to cross from one point on the edge of it, through the center, to the opposite edge. As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if it were reduced to 100 meters in diameter, the Solar System, including the hypothesized Oort cloud, would be no more than 1 mm in width, about the size of a grain of sand. There are between 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and contains at least 100 billion planets. On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the "habitable zones" of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way Galaxy. 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting sun-like stars. The oldest known star in the Milky Way is at least 13.82 billion years old and thus must have formed shortly after the Big Bang.
The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (the nearest galaxy to ours) are a binary system of giant spiral galaxies belonging to a group of 50 closely bound galaxies known as the Local Group, itself being part of the Virgo Supercluster (containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters within its diameter of 110 million light-years), which is itself a subcomponent of the Laniakea Supercluster (consisting of 100,000 galaxies stretched out over 520 megalight-years).
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Just in the part of the universe we can see, there are over 100 billion galaxies and the approximate diameter of the known universe is 92 billion light-years. The diagrams below help the average person to understand how small we really are and how beautifully vast our universe is; and there are many very good reasons to believe that our known universe is just the very tip of the iceberg.
So how many stars total in the visible universe?
About 10 octillion stars (10 trillion billion stars). Writing that out gives us: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Care to start counting from "1"? Each star system has a chance at harboring life. Honestly ask yourself: what are the chances that we are the only intelligent life in all the universe? There is no rational basis to think of our own self or civilization as being especially "special." We are all interconnected with the rest of our incomprehensibly vast and diverse cosmos, and we ALL ought to start thinking and acting like it as we proceed on with our lives.
//Choosing Our Path//
Life really is an incomprehensibly vast ocean of possibility. We each are merely, drifting consciousnesses, floating independently along paths of our choosing. Occasionally, they cross paths in meaningful ways. More rarely, a couple choose to abandon the independent path they would otherwise have taken, and take a risk that the path and circumstances of the journey that they agree to share together will provide greater fulfillment and happiness. Yet, no matter the path we currently travel, we must always remember that there are an infinite many others we can choose to follow if we find our current one becoming stale or untenable....
"Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you… Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and your self alone, one question… Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use." — Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan)
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