Pavel Somov's Blog, page 24

Glass Fully Empty

Is the glass half full or half empty? Neither. The glass just is. It has nothing to do with ether the quality or quantity of what is "inside" it. The contents of the glass are not inside it: from the perspective of the glass itself "its" contents are outside it and therefore are not its, not of the glass, have nothing to do with glass. The glass is always just what it is.

(No Subject)

Awareness does not age. Body ages. Mind gets junked up with info. But baseline awareness remains "as is."

I, a Plurality

A (pattern-interrupting) thought to ponder:

We would get a better sense of who we are if we started thinking of ourselves as a "we" not an "I," as a neural plurality rather than a neural monad.  (Not, as a Royal We, but as a Neural We.)

So, instead of asking yourself "Who am I?" try: "Who are we?"

The above ("Who are we?") is a big picture question.  Here's how you could also apply this thought experiment on a narrower, more psychological scale.

You know how there are times when you wonder: "Why am I so inconsistent?  Why am now this way and at another time that way?"  These kinds of inconsistencies are hard to reconcile when we think of ourselves as an "I," as a neural singularity. But as soon as you switch from an "I" to a "We," the paradox of our inconsistency falls away.  We are metazoan, multi-cellular organisms.  Brain is not an organ but an organization, a neural community of billions of neurons, organized into firing patterns.  Each firing pattern is an "I" of sorts and they clash and compete and come in conflict and, now and then, work in amazing unison (union).  When you switch from an I-based view of your mind to a We-based view of your mind, your apparent inconsistencies will suddenly make sense.  You'll have moments of realization: "Hmm, this is an old part of me, an old neural firing pattern, that got programmed long time ago and it was just triggered... And, yes, a different neural "I," a different part of my neural community, a different neural aspect of my Neural We just kicked it... So, no, I am not crazy, I am not irrational or inconsistent, just multi-faceted, varied, nuanced, complex - it's just that one of my many minds (one of my many "I-s") has shifted and the view has changed."

My position that each of us is not a unified "I" but a variable Neural We is akin to Robert Ornstein's concept of "Multimind." Robert Ornstein also gracefully called human mind a "bastard hybrid system." Here's a link to Ornstein's paradigm-shifting book Multimind: a New Way of Looking at Human Behavior.

Play with this.

[pattern-interruption series]

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I write this to my universally orphan self. 

And to yours (we share a Home of Essence as different as we are in Form).

Unborn, undying, unmade (i.e. unproduced (i.e. original)) we are.

I never was, I never will be, but I still am, calmly as an Autumn breeze (strike that, at the moment as a deep winter breeze, more like it). 

No, not cool, just empathically cold, warmed over with paradox.

As ever, as never. As still.

Audience runs through these words DUI-like in last-year Audis. 

Not a Neural Monad

We would get a better sense of who we are if we started thinking of ourselves as a "we" not an "I," as a neural plurality rather than a neural monad.

Nothing Less

Buddha is an-ness. Buddha is space that is aware. Buddha is a field of awareness. Buddha is the consciousness of living matter before it is differentiated into namarupa/name-form.

(No Subject)

Living Tomb

(No Subject)

Mind is a nest of illusion. Empty the nest.

Mind is a Nest of Illusion