I like your blog!

Love,

- Orthy

All things are interconnected – we feel we belong to something ‘larger’ which as you say is not a very good interpretation. In fact, the whole of the universe exists in each of its parts, much like a hologram. Humans have spent a very long time fragmenting themselves from the whole.

That makes us exceptionally stubborn in our perceptions, even though reality is quite flexible. Our faculties – including language – have been honed for thousands of years to process only specific frequencies in the universe. Humans sort of crowd-source their reality as they go along, but this only confirms that we are in fact creators, if misguided by our own tendencies to fragment and live only ‘now’ and ‘here.’

Which means, to me, everything is real – every dimension, every possibility, exists. The interconnectedness of all suggests there is relative meaning everywhere. The fact that we process only limited parts of it in limited ways should not stop us from accepting the totality.

This book has got me thinking about a lot of this recently:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12486204-the-holographic-universe

Second I wanted to comment on this thought: you said, “One thing I had thought about before is: We interpret the world into art. And then we interpret art into more art. What if the world is a piece of art? What if someone was inspired by something to create it?” .. This idea is what I’m going for at the end of the “The meaning of life via dictionary.com” poem in my notes. I conclude the poem with one of the definitions for “life” in dictionary.com. That definition is “Nature or any of the forms of nature as the model or subject of a work of art.” I think the definition is referring to drawing or painting a subject “from life” as opposed to from a photograph. But I like the second meaning if you read into it a little deeper.. that nature itself could be the model or subject of God’s work of art.

I understand your premises, and the idea that all of existence is what it “is” because we interpret it to be that way. You conclude that this means nothing has “meaning.” However I think you could just as well say everything is “meaningless” as you could say that everything is entirely and inherently meaninFUL, and we just choose pieces of its meaningfulness to call “real.” It’s kind of like the old philosophical idea that we contain all knowledge, but when we come to learn something new, we are just “remembering” the new thing from the wealth of knowledge that we already contain and have always contained since birth. My point is that there isn’t a clear definition of “meaning.” I think what you are saying is that things do not have inherent value in and of themselves; we give them value through our interpretation of them. It’s impossible to know whether that is true, though, because we can only know the nature of the world or other worlds or concepts of worlds insofar as we can can observe, imagine, and interpret them. I think you are getting at that, too. I’m not posing an argument really… just some additional ways of thinking.

We can’t really know whether things exist in and of themselves because we only know things insofar as we observe them. I can agree there. But when you talk about things being the same or different, I have two comments. One is that I feel like things have to be different in order for life to exist, specifically in order for motion to exist. For instance, let’s say that space were inherently the “same” as an electron. Then how would anything move? There has to be a difference between space and matter in order for matter to move through space. I think it’d be a difficult case to argue that motion isn’t “real” in and of itself. If you wave at me, are you just “interpreting” your arm waving through the air and it’s just a coincidence that I interpret the same thing when I look at you? I suppose that you could say yes, that there is a world of interpretations that we all share which is somehow separate from the world of things in and of themselves, and we can’t know whether that world of things in and of themselves has objective reality.. we can only know our world of interpretations. But we have to have something concrete to base those interpretations on, don’t we? Or is that just my perception of how I think things should be? So I’m again trapped in the world of interpretations. I think I’m coming to the same conclusion you do, that logic is part of this world of interpretations and it cannot lead us to knowledge about things in and of themselves. And I see why you turn to feelings.. because it’s impossible to describe what is “real” without defining “reality” and any definition is just going to be based on our interpretations. But even “feelings” are just interpretations! Am I just saying all of the same things you’re saying? Probably.

I think it’s good that we can at least question these things, though, and fun to attempt to imagine things beyond or imaginability. I think both of us end up where we started, though.. realizing that we can’t really know the things we try to conceptualize that are beyond our perception, like a world beyond our world, a something ‘outside’ of spacetime.

Now I’m just daydreaming. The world is really fucking crazy. It could be an infinite number of ways, but for some reason– or for no reason– it’s the way it is. It is the way it is, whether “is” is just our interpretation of something else or whether our world is just a collection of interpretations and “something else” doesn’t exist objectively, either way we have to do what we can with what we got. Hmm, that last sentence made me think, we have to have something concrete to interpret, don’t we? An interpretation has to be based on SOMETHING, doesn’t it?

I hope we’ll have some answers when we die and we can find each other and look back and both go “OOHHHH, duuuuh! Of course, this.”

(i) Everything and More, by David Foster Wallace (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-More-Compact-History-Infinity/dp/0393339289/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320212859&sr=1-1), which tackles both the history of our “contrivance” of infinity (and it’s ultimate mathematical taming by Gregor Cantor), and also the frustrating infinite regress of abstract thought self-reflection.

(ii) Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis (http://www.amazon.com/Logicomix-Apostolos-Doxiadis/dp/0747597200), a biography of Bertrand Russell and his attempt to found logic in extrinsic truth, only to set the stage for Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

The practical offshoot is this: the nature of logic (and by extension, language) is such that most self-reflections (or “interpretations”) must be, by definition, incomplete or inconsistent. So you can either declare it unknowable (which is can be liberating, especially in the context of ideology), or take the interpretation it on faith (or even a coin flip) and allow that things will contradict it and that’s O.K. It’s a weird world.

You could argue that the obstacle to overcome with meditation is the meditation itself.

It’s a tough question for sure. But I do think they are related – either they are the same, or completely opposite. I do know that in both cases, cracking a smile comes naturally.

Flow requires that there is work to do and obstacles to overcome.

You could a game out of achieving inner peace, and the terminator would be when you finally suspended your pesky ego