Euan Semple's Blog, page 26

Life

“Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.”

– Ilchi Lee via Whiskyey River

Being here

I’m going to go off grid for most of my trip. Being in France is always an intense experience and I don’t want to distract from this by fiddling with my phone. So, I’ll see you all in a wee while.

Brace yourself France

Off to my favourite country in our campervan. No plans, no deadlines, just some rough ideas of where I might head.

I’ve been to France pretty much every year since first staying with my Aunt who lived in Cannes when I was about 15 which is now a frighteningly long time ago.

Several motorbike tours, family holidays and conference appearances, one, in Aix-en-Provence, even in French!

Can’t get enough of the place.

Identity

I haven’t link blogged for years but three of my friends recently posted on the topic of identity and their different perspectives are fascinating.

Doc Searls on the technical aspects of managing online identity.

Gia Milinovich on the philosophical aspects of digital identity.

And Dave Pollard on reconciling our different identities.



I know most people don’t click on links in blog posts but these are three smart people and their posts are well worth reading.

Religion

Jesus wasn’t a Christian, Siddhartha wasn’t a Buddhist, and Lao Tzu wasn’t a Taoist. They were individuals who stripped away everything but the essential truths about life that are in all of us if we have the courage to look.

We are capable of following the same process; peeling back the layers of convention and societal indoctrination that tell us how we “should” live our lives, seeing through our ego’s desperate attempts to convince us to be afraid and isolated, realising that life is living through us, all of us, and that forgiveness and love are the universal truths that lead to the peace that we all seek.

We don’t need to follow someone else’s path, and we certainly don’t need to be subject to the dogma, rules, rituals and power structures that all religions have used to bury the universal truths even deeper than they already are.

A losing battle

Our ego loves battles. There’s nothing that our “poor little me” relishes more than an excuse to indulge in righteous indignation, a battle to wage against someone who disrespects us, a stupid, rule, even an object that doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter how small, or unimportant, or unintentional the trigger. “You’ll do! Bring it on”

But often our assailant isn’t even aware of the fight to the death our ego believes it is involved in. They probably aren’t even aware of our existence. Objects aren’t even aware, full stop!

But none of that matters. It’s not them we are fighting with. It is ourselves. We are fighting with our made up idea of how the world should be.

It’s a losing battle.

Pottering in the van

I have just had a couple of lovely days meandering around Hampshire and Dorset in the van.

First overnight was in Ovington, which is a very pretty village near Winchester, and the second night was on the Isle of Purbeck.

The joy of the van is being able to take my time, stick to small roads, and enjoy wherever I end up.

These tangled webs

I know we are late discovering The Sopranos but Mollie and I finished series three last night.

Such clever, clever writing. The complex interweaving of themes; morality, duty, misogyny, racism, violence, family, love, is so powerful and so thoughtfully played.

Tony Soprano’s trials and tribulations are such a good exploration of how malleable our stories are and how absolutes of right and wrong, truth and falsehood are naive pipe dreams.

On a walk yesterday Mollie and I were discussing how academics, particularly philosophers, can dance on the head of a pin arguing over theories that are entirely made up and how those theories, if taken seriously by those less skilled in spinning tales, can lead to huge ideological shifts in how we see the world.

And yet we cling to those stories as if our lives depend on them. As if without them we would be meaningless.

And we don’t want that do we…

Changing the world

If our only experience of the world is based on the stories we tell ourselves about the otherwise meaningless grey mush that surrounds us then why don’t we make up better, nicer stories?

What’s stopping us?

[I just realised that although I wrote a few posts in sequence you may not read them that way! This previous post gives context for my apparent solipsism]

The hard problem

Does consciousness emerge magically out of sufficiently complex matter, or does it pre-exist and encapsulate the real world?

I find it funny that the word magically is appropriate here because science has literally no idea about where consciousness, the basis of our entire experience of life, comes from.

Without our mind’s ability to take in stimuli through our sense organs, and then interpret that information in the context of previous experience, the “real world” doesn’t exist.

We have no idea of what is out there independent of our mind’s interpretation.

The real world as we experience it, which is the only real world that we will ever know, depends entirely on the stories our minds make up.

The real real world is meaningless without us… that’s if it exists at all.