Tag: Consciousness
Dimensions: {Vibe}
Revival [6]
I decide that the origin is clearly not what matters. It goes against my grain somewhat to accept this, because wasn’t that what got me onto this story in the first place? Wasn’t that the intriguing question: how did it all begin? Still, nobody knows, and no one I met and talked to about it was able to give me any further hints or pointers.
There’s the legend of the two guys in their twenties and their dare, and there is the tradition that has established itself over time, and that’s all there is to it. Does there need to be more? Of course, everything has a cause and an origin somewhere, and probably this is somehow known: in the fabric of the common consciousness, unspoken, unexplained. It just happened, we all know it just happened, we kind of understand how it happened, and we’re all right with that. Or is it a case of avoiding something, some uncomfortable truth? What could possibly be uncomfortable in a truth about an event as friendly and as inclusive and as welcoming and as joyful as the Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll on the last Sunday of June each year?
I resolve to let go. This obsession with clear causes and rational effects. I’ve had, against all my expectations and severe reservations, a marvellous time in the unclothed company of strangers who turned out very much to be friends I hadn’t yet met. This belief I’ve held always, borne out by experience.
We are good people. Yes, we do terrible things—the litany of our offences against each other, against the planet, against the animal kingdom, against our own soul, reads like a catalogue of monstrosity, and we’re never more than an inch away from some appalling misdeed or other—and yes our history is littered with catastrophic failures of humanity, and yes: you watch your news and you feel a moment closer to despair before you’ve had a chance to change channels, but… take a Sunday afternoon like this in almost any town in England, or in any country, really, and, away from the agitation, unstirred by some cause or other, some issue or concern, given a set of basic parameters —that the fundamental needs be covered, that the fabric of the community be intact and healthy, that the framework that allows human beings to feel safe and appreciated be in place and not threatened by crime or corruption or despotic politics—you will find us getting on with each other, pretty much. Across generations, across creeds, across ideologies, across gender, across ethnicity, across religion, across our own little preoccupations, and large ones too, across the spectrum. It’s not spectacular, and it’s not difficult. It’s human, it’s normal. And yet, it is still remarkable.
This, I decide to hold on to. As a thought, as a hope. I know some will find me naive or deluded. I realise at this time of confrontation and conflict and unbearable regression into isolationist rhetoric; in this feverish atmosphere of allocating blame and guilt and shame while searching for simplistic solutions, it may sound almost glib to say: ‘we are good people.’ But think of the alternative.
Think of what it means if we decide, in the face of everything, that we are as terrible as the dreadful things we see? Then whatever makes whomever among us do wrong, in whatever way, will have won: we hand our worst version of ourselves victory over ourselves. Because yes, the bombing of children in war zones, the dumping of plastic by the container load in the oceans, the burning down of refugee centres, and the shooting of students at high schools: they’re all done by us. People. Like you and me. That is the horrendous truth, but it’s also—and that’s much harder to comprehend and as difficult to accept—the reason there is hope still. The people who do the most terrible things from which we recoil in disgust, they are not a different species. They are innocent when they are born and grow up with hopes and dreams of their own. And then things go wrong. Over time, bit by bit, through circumstances, through personal choices, through the need to survive, through the culture we’re born into, through what behaviours are reinforced. Through illness. Through despair. For every person who does something destructive, violent, inhuman, cruel, there is also the person they could have become. May yet turn into, given the chance. And vice versa.
So if we give in to despair, surrender to cruelty, and accept violence and destruction as the norm, then we feed them. We give our energy to them, we make them stronger. We start to meet hatred with hatred, instead of with love. We start to build walls, instead of dismantling borders. We start to arm teachers, instead of disarming society. We crank up the tension, instead of defusing situations, we add fuel to the wildfire, instead of extinguishing it, and planting new trees.
They’re simple choices, really: whichever version of ourselves we nurture will grow strong. And so I take my leave of Bournemouth & Boscombe and its famous Nude Beach Stroll. I salute you, good people, there, by the coast: I thank you, you’ve given me much food for thought and made me see my world differently. I wish you well!
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Critical Mass
‘What if,’ Sedartis muses, ‘consciousness is not a matter of characteristics or substance or physics or chemistry or biology or the nature of the configuration of brain cells or the genetic make-up or the design, divine or otherwise, of the brain or its configuration with the rest of the body, but merely a matter of connective concentration: get enough nodes on the network—in your case, the brain—to connect with each other at high enough speed and frequency, and you reach the point at which the network—in your case still the brain—becomes aware of itself and can start making decisions that are self-conscious.
‘Apply that principle to any other network capable of processing information—computers, chips, civilisations, planets with technological infrastructure and already conscious entities on them—and you enter the exponential acceleration of intelligence. Why? Precisely because it is networked to the level where it can become conscious. What if Consciousness is nothing but this: enough capable nodes on the network, Critical Mass.’
I’m inclined, unsurprisingly, to consider that a real possibility…
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The Sedartis Effect
Sedartis is full of little insights which are borderline annoying. They are annoying, because they are obvious, and it’s possible only to be borderline annoyed with them, because they are obviously true. They are the kind of insights that make you wonder: why has nobody pointed this out to me in, say, year ten or eleven.
Since joining me, unbidden, uninvited, and taking up quasi-permanent residence by my side, he has sprung them on me at irregular intervals, which, on account of their irregularity, at least retain a mild but welcome element of surprise.
‘The reason time passes faster as you get older, relentlessly, is very simple,’ he informs me. I did not ask him about this, I was just looking out of the window of yet another moving train, this time to Dorset.
‘I imagine it is,’ I say, having for some time felt I had my own plausible theory about this.
‘At the age of one, one year is a hundred percent of your lifetime. That makes it really long. So long that you can’t fathom the sheer vastness of its duration: it is all of your life so far.’
I’m not sure that I can fathom it now, but for different reasons…
‘By the age of ten, that same year is now only a tenth of your lifetime. In absolute terms, it may be as long as any other year, but you don’t experience life in absolute terms, you experience life in relative terms, always: relative entirely to you. Your year is now just ten percent of your body of experience. By the age of fifty, one year has shrunk to a fiftieth of your lifetime: if somebody offered you a fiftieth part of a pie you’d barely think it worth eating. But it’s still a year, and it’s still a slice of your life. And aged a hundred, your year now hardly registers at all. You may well lose track and forget how old you are: was it a hundred and two or a hundred and three years ago now that you were born? Does it matter?’
‘This all makes perfect sense to me,’ I say to Sedartis, which it does, but: ‘why are you telling me? Now?’
‘Because you’re obviously at that point in your life when your perception of time reaches a tipping point: your life expectancy nowadays isn’t quite, but may soon be, about one hundred years, so around now, as you’re halfway through that more-or-less century of yours, your feeling of losing your grip on time will accelerate, and because you’re now no longer moving away from your birth, but towards your death, you will find this more and more disconcerting.’
‘What, more disconcerting than I find it already?’
‘Of course. But think not for one moment that you’d be happier if you lived longer.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Because: if you were to get to the point, say, where you habitually had an active conscious lifespan of ten thousand years, it would not feel that much longer than it does now: as you’d get towards the last millennium, each year would only be between one nine- and one ten-thousandth of your lifetime. That is about the same as three days for you are today. You would not experience a hundred times more than you do today, you would simply stretch your living out over a period a hundred times longer. And nor should that surprise you: when your life expectancy was thirty years or so, people did not generally think, our lives are so short; they simply did all their living inside those thirty years. No one would argue that Alexander the Great, for example, or Mozart, didn’t really get that much living done in the thirty-odd years of their lives.’
‘No,’ I say, thinking, a tad wistfully, of Tom Lehrer, ‘that, I’m sure, no one could argue.’
‘It is, in a not entirely obvious way, not unlike the Doppler Effect: the sound waves coming towards you are compressed so they appear to your ears higher than they do once the source of the sound has passed: now the waves are getting stretched, and so the pitch seems to drop. Of course, time is no wave, and the comparison is clumsy at best and misleading at worst, but if nothing else it’s another example of how your reality is shaped entirely by your experience of it. You may, if you like, refer to the phenomenon of a relative experience of time as the Sedartis Effect, I shan’t hold it against you if you do.’
{Memories of the Past}
a surreptitious glance in a doorway: you
had been waiting for me
but how long?
i can’t remember, i remember
seeing you at the cinema and us
exchanging glances
(those were the days, mostly, of
glances)
and us not speaking, i was too shy, you shy too
so i started walking
across the river, there: a cafe, old style; what
was i doing in there, could it be, really, that you
waited
outside while i was having coffee inside?
or did i pop in to see if i liked it, but didn’t, or whether you would follow (but why would you? it was an old style cafe; and you didn’t), so i
popped out again, straight away? that seems more likely, certainly it seems more
reasonable…*
you were in the entrance as i came out and i saw you again and you me and it was clear
you’d been waiting for me, there
in the doorway
but still we didn’t speak
how was that even possible: it was obvious
you had been waiting for me, yet
we didn’t speak, i not to you, you not to me
i was incredibly young, you a bit younger,
there by the rhine, in basel, at that time
of glances, mostly, and quietly aching
silences
you were there too maybe two, three years later
now on the southbank
in london
you looked different, a bit, though not much
you had those same eyes, longing
uncertain, a
querying glance, that
glance
that i must have had too
it was the era of glances, of not saying what any of us wanted, ever, of
uncertainty, being afraid
but of what?
of being found out
of revealing too much
too much to the wrong kind of person, of being
vulnerable
literally, viscerally, in danger of injury, death
or afraid merely of actually having, enjoying, living a moment, such one
brief encounter?
who knows
those were days of unspoken desires
at night time
near rivers
only this time i actually asked you
for a light
or you me?
i you or you me, one of us asked the other for a cigarette or a light or for both and
another glance was exchanged and a flame lit up and in that flame we did not look at each other again, we just looked at the hands touching, cupping the cigarette, and that
once again
just was that
how curious
how timid, how cautious, how wary i was
of you
always
and yet how much i wanted to be with you
still
and then there you were in st james’s park: another you, another glance
i on my way home
you on your way where? i didn’t ask and you didn’t say
it was nice
there
to finally meet you
at night, late
by the pond, not the river
to feel your hands on me, taste your lips
such a long time ago now
such a situation between two and three, thereabouts, in the morning
when that park is not closed and not open but we both were
closed and open and there: those were the days
of such stolen moments, so
rare
i miss them no more than i miss you
and i don’t miss you, i’m just maybe sorry
a bit
that it took me so long to pluck up the courage to finally meet you
albeit briefly
we wasted, it seems, a few opportunities, you and i, but
you live and you learn, and nothing
but nothing
can be rewound, reconfigured, restored, it can not even be really
relived, it can
of course be
in one way or another
remembered, redeemed?
to what end? none other than to know that there was such a thing as a path, a trajectory,
or an arc:
a semblance of something resembling a story
a sequence of inconsequential instances, now implanted, the shapes
along which the currents of time have mostly been channelled, each curve, each bend
not just leaving traces but forming them too
until
at last
there’s a torrent
and the river, the brook or the stream
floods its banks and
ignores
these patterns, these half
designs, half
instinctive behaviours half
needed half wanted half detested half worn and half
overthrown memories
only half
ever
because the half that sits underground under consciousness under skin under mind
remains there forever somehow, and
so be it
albeit not always appreciated not always valued not always wanted or loved
you are always
a part of me still, and
welcome
to stay
whatever became of you, i do wonder
and then i forget that i ever did
because life goes on and
there are many more rivers to cross and bridges to burn and transgressions that must be traversed and
comings together
to fathom, just
know that i never not wanted
to know you
{Vibe}
What kind of a consciousness is it that knows itself to exist but doesn’t know why? In what way does that make sense? In what way does it not?
The quest.
The longing to learn.
The yearning for answers.
The learning to yield. If only my brain were better at retaining information. What is ‘information’? And when it is not ‘information’, what is it then, that we get, if we get it, at all? What, if anything, can be known, can be felt, can be appreciated, understood, can be experienced or imagined, or both? And is there, but is there a difference?
Remembrance of things past and future. The energy stream, and the particles. Obviously, the waves. The idiosyncrasies. Material flaws. Cracks that let the light shine through. Nonuniform irregularities.
Quantum behaviour…
< 8 The Leopard (and His Spots)
9 Memories of the Future and of the Past: Walks on Water >
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Critical Mass
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Revival [6]
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EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).
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{Memories of the Past}
This post has moved. You can now find it here.
EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).
If you are the owner of the link that brought you here, please update it; or if you know them, then please do let them know.
Thanks & enjoy.
EDEN by FREI 