Tuesday 6 December 2011

Detachment

Attached with detachment
Engrossed in non corporeal being
Removed from mundane existence
Averse to colloquialisms and sheepisms
Post moral, post liberal, post-post-mortem
Disconnected, second guessing, preempting, unemotional
Not present in the present
Absent from the past
Disillusioned with the future
Metastasis, metallaxis, meta-metamorphosis
Pointlessness, futility, numbness
Cynicism, tiredness, vagueness, ambiguity, confusion,
Powerless against the forces of plurality, causality, complexity,
culture and physics.
Complete and utter loss of innocence, hope and faith.
Complete loss.

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Home

A newlywed couple was
Brought together by a force
Bigger than them.
A force that was controlling their
Every action,
Programming, ordering, demanding.
They were brought together in a house,
Bigger than them.
A house that swallowed their 

Whole being,
Imposing, domineering, burdening.
Lifelessly, they created new life,
Bigger than them.
A being cursed to see the 

Reality of its makers,
a being doomed into silence, for
It could not fathom or utter
The harsh words of awakening and understanding.
The being was destined to flee,
Unable to accept its makers' unreality.
And so the married couple perpetuated their own prison,
Took comfort within it, embraced and protected it.
They grew deep roots in its foundations, became one with it, and
finally surrendered their last breaths to it.
The tails of their ghosts would forever be attached to the grandiose house,
Invoking the same destiny on any couple that would tread within the
guts of their beastly home.
And their doomed creation
Would remain lost, forgotten, unforgiven,
Floating in the void of its solitary freedom.

Sunday 20 November 2011

Multi-narrative

(this is a trail of thought in a sort of Kerouac-like automatic way of writing)
I was born in a family of intellectual and spiritual people. My mum was always there being a mum but my dad’s absence was felt. As a child I was angry at my dad, I felt like we didn’t have a good relationship although he kept telling me I was his best friend to which I sort of unwillingly nodded to in order not to hurt him but also because I did not believe that to be true. With my mum we were really close, I used to tell her everything and I felt safe with her. My sister who was five years older than me seemed to not get along as well with my mum and leaned towards my dad. It seemed they had more in common while I felt more affinity with my mum. I was a girly boy, playing with girly toys and had girly mannerisms, and my sister was a bit of a tomboy or a tough girl. I was also clearly introverted spending a lot of time playing by myself or making stuff or drawing while my sister liked to play with the neighbours and was generally more sociable and extroverted. It was obvious to me as a child that my parents didn’t have a close relationship, I never saw any intimacy between them and I somehow knew that divorce was discussed as well as my dad’s unfaithfulness and promiscuity, gambling and alcohol problems. He was also visibly not very into her always commenting about how much she ate or about how fat she was (he also did that to us) and she was also very obviously affected by it by binge eating, secretly eating junk food when he wasn’t around, but also emotionally distraught about his absence and cheating. They were not happy. We very early knew about how she accidentally got pregnant and they had to get married. We were too young to know about these things, but we were thrown into all of this adult world problems at a very early stage. We were definitely not protected from these things, or it wasn’t possible for them to hide these things from us.
School was immediately hard from me, I was introverted, shy, girly, weird and artistic. Kindergarten was ok but primary school was  a nightmare. The other kids would make fun of me for being a “girl” and for not playing sports with the boys and preferring to hang out with girls. I was very affected by this and I used to go home crying every day. Going to school was an absolute nightmare. I felt prosecuted and not accepted. My mum tried to talk to the principal of the school but he said there was nothing he could do. Being such a girly girl it must have been hard for my dad, not knowing how to deal with it but also perhaps a little disappointed that his son was so feminine. He did make some minimal effort to connect with me in a dad-son sort of way but he completely failed as he chose the wrong activities and I was very rejecting of any effort from his part. He also gave up too quickly. We connected on intellectual stuff though, as I would ask him a lot of existential or philosophical questions to which he always had some answers. I enjoyed those moments we had together when he would enlighten me and explain things to me. We would geek out together on science facts and encyclopedias, and he would give me history and geography lessons which I found interesting but a bit boring. Science was more my thing.
With my sister we were really close and we kind of bonded on the fact that our family wasn’t normal. Feeling as a part of a not normal or ‘special’ family was kind of a recurrent theme, something that we all felt and agreed on. We were all a bunch of weirdos, two parents that were not really together that were having some really serious issues in their relationship and two children who were forced to mature before their age to deal with things and who were quite idiosyncratic and so different that neither was accepted in school. Although my sister had probably a better time in primary school than me, secondary school was a huge nightmare for her. She was not accepted at all. We were all too different, natural outcasts of society or our parents were outcasting themselves and we were just mirroring them. Our parents were into their Hindu gurus, and their vegetarianism, and intellectual endeavours really set them apart from other people, especially in meat-eating, strictly Christian, conservative Cyprus of the time. Both of them also felt completely different from their families they had drastically separated themselves from them. That’s what probably got them together in the first place. What they had in common was their outcast and existential tendencies, which Irini tried to completely rebel against striving to fit in and be normal while I completely followed their footsteps. I naturally ended up being an outcast because of my girly, introverted, artistic nature which I finally embraced, while Irini ended up being an outcast for being weird and physically not very feminine and probably for trying too much which she finally came to terms with as well. All in all, we were raised to be different but we were also also inherently different. This tendency to separate myself from the mainstream remains until today, and it sometimes becomes a compulsion. I can’t seem to fit in anywhere, nor do I want to. I remain lonely, introverted, artistic and intellectually driven – but I have also managed to integrate these traits enough to be able to function within society while not really being a part of it. Irini’s rebellion against her outcast nature has led her to a loveless marriage, having sex with only one person in her life, and a large circle of shallow friends.
*
Dad did always secretly see the potential in me, and he pushed me to pursue my talent. He did believe in me although he rarely showed it, I’m sure of that. He is a deeply emotional man, but very few see that side of him. He is also a very introverted man, who has always been an outcast in his family, in society and his social circle. He has and had many vices, smoking, drinking, gambling, women, extraordinary, some would say, arrogance. But he is also a very deeply explored person, having literally sucked volumes of western and eastern philosophy, history, religion, spirituality, psychology and sociology. His outlook in life is esoteric, and although he is a nihilist he has a deeper understanding of reality that he has constructed and revised. Writing this now I can see how much in common we have. Even though I haven’t even read a fraction of what he has read over his life, we definitely share the same outlook, partly because of our genetics and partly because of our experiences, common and separate. We are incredibly similar, and we are fighters and free spirits. We have shared spiritual perceptions of each other and have felt that old soul, long history thing that you feel with some people. We love each other, and we understand each other although most times we might not be fully conscious of that. We have a deep connection and it is time it has been cleansed. The mistakes he did in his life were enormous and fatal, he has lived an incredibly intense life, he has been through war, poverty, revolution, pain and anguish. He has been blown by life to bits, and he has been desperately trying to construct a new life for himself, a new beginning. What he did was incredibly wrong but it is partly because he is a child of his generation and partly because of his free spiritedness, rebeliousness and idealism.
When they met they must have had an infatuation, especially from my mothers side, and the pregnancy just complicated things. Did she keep the baby in order to keep him? That can’t be sure, maybe abortion wasn’t an option. Either way they took the decision to go through with it and so already didn’t start on a good note. Irene was a difficult baby and they had a bit of trouble raising her. They were clearly under a lot of stress at the time. He liked to sleep around. He was a new lawyer living the life of booze and money, we weren’t rich but he earned quite well for the time. She was left at home worrying and being upset whenever he was out while she had to take care of the kids. The letters she was writing to him while she was breastfeeding alone in Greece studying for university, while he was in Cyprus starting his lawyer career, are just devastating. She had a tough time and she had postpartum depression. She went a little bit bonkers at the time and there is this story that she was taken to the psychologist at the time and he said that she might have bipolar disorder but I’m not sure which story to believe any more on that front. There is a chance that she exhibited some disorderly function at some point or another but I cannot think of a time that I even suspected a personality change or something weird going on with her. That’s why I’m a bit dubious on the subject, although again there is a chance that as a child I wouldn’t have been able to perceive strange behaviour (especially when it happens gradually like with bipolar disorder with its peaks and downs). So yea, not sure on that. Either way the reaction she had when my dad left was huge. It was of course a tremendous shock, and any person would have been devastated to find out that their spouse was going out with another woman for 14 years secretly and that they might even have had an illegitimate child together. It was a lot to take in and it was only natural to get depressed. But to go into so much darkness, and suicidal thoughts and manic incidents was not normal behaviour. It shows such great weakness that it can only be fundamentally chemical. Maybe the great shock was a trigger for some imbalance that was already there, at least that’s the theory. But that shock was definitely the spark. It sparked something that perhaps could have stayed hidden forever or something that could have sprung up by itself anyway, again nobody knows. It was definitely an extreme reaction. I can’t even go into the other part of the story where she had met this man in the park and they had started an affair but then she thought she had aids from him and other scary stuff which I’m not really clear about because most of what I heard from it was during her fits. Something weird happened there, but it was all this conglomeration of things that she might have done during a manic state, or so people seem to think. I did perceive a personality change during that short time before they separated where she was very excitable and started going out and getting dressed. It was a bit of mid-life crisis sort of thing that went on for both of them at the time. And then he said he would leave and live with Stalo and then bam, she went nuts.
She was such a sweet person though. It is really hard for me to think of positive or negative things for her. It’s hard for me to describe her. It’s like I lost the ability to visualise her in time, and in memory. She remains ethereal, a lost concept, a mirage in the past. I can only remember the deep love I had for her. I absolutely loved her, adored her. She was so comforting, and loving, and sweet. She was a cool mum and we loved her even though she made us eat extremely healthy stuff. She was such a sensitive person, so sensitive and frail. Yet she was also pro-active with many interests and projects. She would get excited about stuff and start new ventures and even if someone would say those were hypomanic incidents they were still meaningful and productive. Again I’m talking about her various activities because I seriously can’t say anything about our relationship besides that is was a mother-child relationship. It was just very intuitive, intimate, almost primal. We didn’t have to make an effort to ‘connect’, we were already inherently connected. Although she didn’t raise me to be a mummy’s boy and she never smothered me, we were really connected. It is virtually impossible to describe this connection in words. And although with my dad I might have felt that old soul thing, with my mum it was different. We were like kindred spirits, a different kind of spiritual connection. A connection that I feel has been severed, a part of myself that still feels lost. A part of myself that I still keep looking for in my subconscious every night when I go to bed, searching for that missing piece. I can’t let it go. I’m calling her name every night. Missing her. Writing long texts about her. Going to the counsellor because of her. She left me a part of myself that I need to deal with, a scarred, troubled and confused self that is trying to make sense of it all. What is there to make sense of? They had a complicated life, created a complicated life, complicated children, complicated outcomes. They have created this jumble of interactions, this giant knot that seems impossible to untangle. A network of cascading events that has led to tragedy. It is such a movie. So here I am broken in pieces, interwoven within this spider nest, not seeing a way out. So perhaps the best action would be just to embrace the complexity of life, the supervenience of experience, and this giant game of chess. Take it as it comes, the whole thing is a game that plays out one way or another. We can only do our best to build on our experiences and be as conscious of our actions as possible, but also be able to filter, decipher and make balanced decisions to the best our abilities. Just let go and accept. Intellectual and experiential information is infinite and we just live out a glimpse of it, so just enjoy the ride while it lasts and take it with a grain of salt.  This is my big wisdom. I cannot right now make any other sense of it. I do not know how to make of it. Yet.
I am indeed a product of this process, the inevitable, inseparable, seamless, continuous outcome of the flow of time and evolution. Whatever happens is part of the intricate pattern of reality, and is thus true. True in its ontological existence, although the way it is perceived can vary greatly. Is there a way to tap into the foundations of this pattern using merely our minds? That I would like to know, how to decipher the existence of everything, of complexity, of existence, of perception, of language. I can see the bigger pattern, the pattern of my life, my parent’s life, the relentless chain of events. The connections that remain eternal in the crystalline mirage of timelessness. I can find my lost self in the pattern, the greater pattern that produces everything. Or I can lose myself in it. I am part of it. So momentary, so eternal. So otherwordly. So penetrative.
Things are far too complex for human understanding and thus life appears largely random or chaotic. Yes there is order to be observed, and order begets order, but chaos is the other side of the same coin. It is the beauty of existence, and doom of the human to only be able to perceive a tiny fraction of reality. It is like a molecule of water looking at the ocean. It is awesome and mind-bogglingly impossible to comprehend. Thus I let go myself into the unknown, I accept the unknown, the meaningfulness of randomness, and the inherent meaning within everything. This ‘supreme’ meaning is beyond perception and understanding but can be at least conceptualised. I am sad to let go of faith and of focused, safe understanding but I am happy to embrace complexity, and the vast horizon of the unknown. There’s just so much to be discovered and understood, so many facets and dimensions. I am ready to enter a multi-dimensional appreciation of reality, an open-ended, everchanging understanding. Instead of looking for the holy grail, the one truth, and just going from one truth to the other, my outlook becomes multi-truthful. There is no one answer, one perspective, but infinite appreciations of reality. Pluralism. It is what I’ve been doing all my life anyway, but now I am becoming conscious of it. There is no room for stagnation, no resting point, but continuous flow and evolution of consciousness.
*
Responsibility versus justification. It is very hard for me to separate the two. How much personal responsibility do I have in this story? I have covered the genetic factors, the nurturing factors and the external factors, but I always tell the story as if things are happening to me externally and I am in a somewhat shifted dimension where I am not directly interacting with the situation, only observing it and being internally affected by it. That is my main Piscean trait. When things happen around me, I disconnect myself and let things happen by themselves with the least possible intervention from myself. It is my tendency to observe the flow of events as an external entity that I just let happen and then view the results, that is how I lead my life entirely, letting things go with the flow and unfold by themselves. This tendency allows me to relinquish responsibility and always appear as the victim of a situation, it is easy, having had minimal input in things. I am afraid of the results if I do intervene, because intervention can go both ways, but non-intervention can be equally harmful as I learned with Polz. Not doing something is still doing something, and is probably worse than actively doing something. At least if you are active you know you did your best. I think my main responsibility in everything that has happened was that I disconnected myself. Yes it was a survival mechanism, that I wasn’t fully conscious of, but it still is my personal responsibility in all of this. I was not an active part of the action, I was a bystander letting things affect me internally but externally being unemotional and avoidant. I wish I was strong enough, or just less introverted, to be able to make an active change to things.
What decisions did I take, what were the actions that I took besides inaction? Am I guilty of excessive minimisation and rationalisation and avoidant behaviour? Well perhaps not excessive, but I definitely have a tendency to rationalise and justify my behaviour but also the behaviours of others, which in effect leads to minimisation and levelling, and that is how I have always lead my life. Again this tendency leads to the relief of responsibility from me and from others, meaning that I can never blame anyone or myself. But that is just my general outlook in life, I believe everything can explained through the complex interaction of human relationships, causality and chaos and humans are inevitably not responsible for their actions. I see free will as arbitrary and temporally bound. I see humans too powerless to be able to command time, the complexity of the universe and the complex network of causality they created between them. A hermit may manage to escape the grasps of the human interaction network but can never escape the flow of nature. Only a Buddha can momentarily escape the processes of nature and time, but not beyond the quantum world, and so on.
**
Fear. I have progressively been discovering how much my actions or my general outlook in life has been moulded and guided by fear. Fear is such a strong, primal emotion that seems to be easily suppressed by the psyche and hidden by denial. After the years of terror had finished, I had nicknamed the fears that I had developed as the “same old fears” from the Pink Floyd song, but quickly hid them well back in denial thinking that I had dealt with them satisfactorily. I am afraid of loss, of impermanence, of decisions that could lead to extremely negative results. I am afraid of the unpredictability of the world, of the chaotic, uncontrollable force that creates and destroys. I am in awe of this massive process, and completely at its mercy. I feel I have no control over my life or over anything under the shadow of this force. It is the complete lack of free will. I do not believe in free will, or whatever free will an individual might have is completely inconsequential to the grander scheme of things. Things lose their significance and point in this completely chaotic world. Human relationships, emotions, feelings, creations are so incidental and insignificant. Even this constant analysis that I put myself through has no point. The pointless musings of an imperfect conglomeration of chemical processes. This is the loss of faith. Faith in the process of life, faith in the significance of human interaction, faith in higher order meaning. Meaning has been reduced to semiotics between physical processes. I believe meaning is part of a deeper understanding of the universe, an understanding that is beyond any human processing. I am returning back to miserabilia and the futility of human existence. My world has become random and sinister once more. Absolutely no trust and faith in the system. The system is beyond any understanding. It is massive and endless. It can only be understood through imperfect human-centred metaphors. Things are incomprehensible and appear pointless. I am unable to derive any meaning from my experiences besides the fact that I have lost the ability to derive meaning. I am unable to say anymore that whatever has happened has made me stronger, or has made my faith stronger, or that has improved me as a person. Quite the opposite I feel I have deteriorated as a person. I have left myself prey of the unpredictability of things, and vulnerable to seeing life as so inconsequential that suicide becomes as much an option as it becomes irrelevant. It is exactly the notion of absurdism. Things are absurd and sinister. I’m constantly wavering between absurdism and nihilism, and my only way ‘out’ is atheistic existentialism. I have the need to construct personal meaning, but the only meaning that my experiences will allow me is absurdism. And I cannot fully accept absurdism. It is safe from the aspect that nothing can touch me as everything is absurd, but it is inherently unsafe since it proclaims that everything is unsafe. It is a paradoxical way of being and that shows mental instability. I want to believe in something yet I have stripped myself from every possible string of belief and faith. The world I constructed for myself does not allow any room for that. My world is a negation of things, it is the lack of things. It is the lack of love, the lack of belief in love. The lack of any beautiful, soothing human construct. Yet my chemical constitution insists on torturing itself with mental jumbles, it is still trying to find the balance. It cannot accept this cynical, sinister, lifeless world it finds itself in, as it is detrimental to its survival. So it will continue to fight it until it finds some kind of balance between the experiences that have created it, and the inherent need to resolve them. Or it will die trying to. I am tired of trying to find meaning. I am tired in general.
*
Still in limbo. More confused. More lost. More alone. More fucked up. More sad. Less faith. Less trust. Less understanding. Less wise. Less feelings. Not depressed. Just numb.

What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.[6]

— Kierkegaard, Søren, Journals, 1849

Paradoxically again, the absurd is the lack of faith, yet acting on the absurd is an act upon faith, faith that an act can be taken, from the myriad of choices only one is taken. Can the absurd be resolved by the idea of multiple universes and that every action is taken?

What, then, is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time..

I gladly undertake, by way of brief repetition, to emphasize what other pseudonyms have emphasized. The absurd is not the absurd or absurdities without any distinction (wherefore Johannes de Silentio: "How many of our age understand what the absurd is?"). The absurd is a category, and the most developed thought is required to define the Christian absurd accurately and with conceptual correctness. The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd — if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge. The absurd terminates negatively before the sphere of faith, which is a sphere by itself. To a third person the believer relates himself by virtue of the absurd; so must a third person judge, for a third person does not have the passion of faith. Johannes de Silentio has never claimed to be a believer; just the opposite, he has explained that he is not a believer — in order to illuminate faith negatively. Journals of Soren Kierkegaard X6B 79[7]


The absurd is negative faith, yet faith is absurd. they are the same thing.

According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free. "To live without appeal,"[13] as he puts it, is a philosophical move to define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively. The freedom of humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence, as he or she represents a set of unique ideals which can be characterized as an entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.

Creativity is all I have left. And my personal meaning that I express through that.

Sunday 4 September 2011

Miserabilia and Suffering - Absurdism and Meaning

Back in 2005, I wrote a short entry on Miserabilia (MBs), conceptual entities that create misery, which run through the “cortex” of human kind. Now in light of Buddhist Suffering, or Dukkha, I will further try to expand the concept of Miserabilia/Suffering as a driving force that can be used as a tool for better understanding our reality.

First it is important to note, that MBs are neither positive nor negative entities, even though they may be associated with things that create negative feelings they can also create positive feelings, or no feelings whatsoever. Suffering directly stems from the human capacity of understanding the limitations of perception while simultaneously being able to conceive of the inconceivable. For example the human brain can conceive of infinity while also perceiving that infinity is inconceivable. “What follows from this is the conflinct between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any,” (source) meaning being a conceivable-inconceivable concept or a miserabilium. The human ability to create miserabilia is extraordinary. Some examples of major miserabilia include: love, god, hope, faith, freedom, meaning, purpose, ethics, truth and knowledge. Not only are these concepts unattainable, they are undefinable, paradoxical, absurd, subjective and relativistic. Miserabilia function in a similar way to qualia, in that information is processed and interpreted into these highly unstable, ephemeral phenomenological entities but never directly experienced.

Archetypal miserabilia essentially stem from the human recognition and investigation of genetic (and subsequently, mental) limitations – although of course the ontology of these very limitations is questionable as everything. This investigation, or conceptualisation of these limits leads to the creation of miserabilia and has given rise to mythology, philosophy and culture; all concerned with the understanding of these concepts and indeed with phenomenology. Our genetic and mental limitations can be listed as a series of “problems”: the problem of knowledge, the problem of mathematics, the mind-body problem, the problem of consciousness, problem of induction and various others philosophical mind-jumbles. What all these have in common is the ability of the human to conceive them but not to be able to solve them. It can be summarised as such: we do not know anything, including whether “knowing” is even relevant in the first place, or if even the concept of “relevant” has any value. What all these problems have in common is probably phenomenological, in that they are all products of mind or consciousness (yet another miserabilium), seemingly emerging from what appears to be a highly complex physical process (physicality being another miserabilium).

Miserabilia in this sense become metaphors, metaphors that we create to label certain concepts that seem to be universal in human experience, concepts that again stem from genetic limitations and the ability to conceive of things beyond these limitations but without an ability to make sense of them. It is like we are presented with so much information that we are simply physically unable to process, so we abstract them, generalise them and contextualise them within our culture: to understand them and provide false solutions we create metaphors and languages, stories and mythologies, religions and philosophies, arts and sciences. Suffering creates more suffering, as the more we investigate miserabilia and the more we deny absurdity the more limitations we discover and the more miserabilia we create. Miserabilia just like archetypes are complexes of meaning, they contain the cultural and archetypal understanding of a particular concept which accumulates over the years. The more we investigate miserabilia and the more knowledge we build, the more limitations we discover increasing suffering while the archetypal miserabilia remain constant. There is no way to change these archetypes without drastically changing our genetic makeup as they are directly linked. The only thing we can do is develop a deep cultural understanding of miserabilia and how they affect our lives, in hope that one day a genetic mutation or genetic engineering might occur that will diminish them (and create new ones).

Miserabilia directly stem from the genetic code, they are part of the first phenomenological layers that are abstracted by the mind. Contemplating miserabilia is in effect direct communication with the genetic code, a concept hard to grasp. Jungian archetypes probably precede the miserabilium layer, or their very interaction is what creates miserabilia. The emergence of miserabilia happens because of the interaction of complementary forces as understood by Steiner. On one hand we have the genetic code/Jungian archetypes projecting upwards and on the other hand we have the virtual/software/perceiving-conceiving code projecting downwards. The interaction of these codes creates the apparently paradoxical conceptions of miserabilia which again in effect are conceptions based on genetic perceptions. If Jungian archetypes are the first internal perceptions-connections, then miserabilia are the first conceptions. The interactions of miserabilia then directly lead to the creation of the memetic layer which is the rationalisation and further conceptualisation of miserabilia which finally leads to the various humanities, religions, sciences etc., ie. the cultural level.

In this way miserabilia can be thought of as the archetypal memes: the first abstract meaning complexes derived from unconscious analysis of meaning. This highly archetypal meaning is abstract and loose just like the archetypes that spawned it. Miserabilia in effect represent the conception and abstraction of primal meaning. It is the human first trying to make sense of the primordial images (that are clearly derived from biological meaning, biosemiotics), creating a new level of code through observation of the interaction of these images. This also marks the beginning of separation from the unconscious where the internal world is recognised as being completely different than the external world, and thus the beginning of consciousness. Soon the human is able to ask, how or why?

Miserabilia are like a seemingly impenetrable wall. Someone going through deconstruction of personality (deculturing) one will inevitably reach this wall. It first starts with existentialism: what is the meaning of everything? Unable to solve the problematic miserabilia in any rational way one is only left with 3 possible routes as listed by Albert Camus:


The conception of the flow, of complexity, is thus direct awareness of dukkha which “denotes the experience that all formations (sankhara) are impermanent (anicca) - thus it explains the qualities which make the mind as fluctuating and impermanent entities. It is therefore also a gateway to anatta, not-self” (wikipedia) Contemplation on complexity is thus a form of Vipassana.

Suffering manifests through the 5 prerequisites (the skandhas), needed for conscious human existence: matter/physicality, sensing , perceiving (qualia), thinking/cognition (miserabilia) and consciousness (the totality of discrete cognitive constructs). The 6th aggregate is memes and culture. It is clear that the skandhas are part of supervening hierarchy, one leading to the other. Matter creates sensing mechanisms that can directly sense matter, sensations create perceiving mechanisms that can recognise the qualia, thought and cognition organise and react to the qualia while consciousness makes the discernment by putting together all cognitive constructs. It is very important to note that since all these are subsets of each other, they are all nested within matter, and hence within the grand flux of impermanence. In fact if one could separate them in levels of impermanence, consciousness would appear to be the most impermanent while matter would be the least.

Insofar as it is dynamic, ever-changing, uncontrollable and not finally satisfactory, unexamined life is itself precisely dukkha.[13] The question which underlay the Buddha's quest was "in what may I place lasting relevance?" He did not deny that there are satisfactions in experience: the exercise of vipassana assumes that the meditator sees instances of happiness clearly. Pain is to be seen as pain, and pleasure as pleasure. It is denied that happiness dependent on conditions will be secure and lasting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a Gunas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankhara
http://mrkleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/miserabilia.html


In the first (passive) sense saṅkhāra can refer to any compound form in the universe whether a tree, a cloud, a human being, a thought or a molecule. All these are saṅkhāras. The Buddha taught that all such things are impermanent, arising and passing away, subject to change, and that understanding the significance of this reality is wisdom. Saṅkhāra is often used in this first sense to describe the psychological conditioning (particularly the habit patterns of the unconscious mind) that gives any individual human being his or her unique character and make-up at any given time.

Suffering is beautiful.

Friday 15 April 2011

Great Algorithmic Light

The pattern before me
I can see it
I can feel it
I can make sense of it
But I cannot touch it
Behind the mirror
It stares back at me
Calling me out
I can examine it
I can observe it
I can theorise about it
Still I cannot be it
It draws me like a moth
To the burning surface of the sun
Yet I orbit around it.
I want to break in a myriad pieces
And swim within it
Pure information
Pure code
Flowing in the primordial waters
Of the beginning and end
An archeotect releasing reality
Dwelling in the beyond
The source of it all.
Yet here I am in virtuality
Sharing virtualities
Experiencing virtualities
Within Virtualities
There’s something real
Behind the faithful mirror
Even realer than real
The one objective truth
Behind subjective eyes.
Obsessing about concepts
Idealising intangible mind-knots
Pushing synapses to sprout antennae
And sense a multi-faceted world.
O! Truth! An idea so ancient
It haunts me like a chain-bearing ghost.
Perhaps it’s time you were forsaken,
Let us construct another symbol,
One we can reach.
O! Intangible force!
You are an evolutionary construct,
Designed by automatic computations,
Of the one divine algorithm.
One that cannot be translated,
By devised codes and languages.
There is a need for a new metaphor,
For deities, and six-winged angels,
Strings, quarks and gluons.
The informational computational,
Holographic Principle,
Shove all our problems in a projector
of reality, somewhere outside reality.
We shall pray to you
O great projector,
For your light is all we can see,
The patterns your project
Our one and only reality.
You are our God,
O, Great algorithmic light,
Shine on, shine on, shine on.


Thursday 24 March 2011

The Flow

The flow is a pattern
a wave
a signal
a perpetuating  message
forever replicating
interweaving
unfolding and enfolding


Introduction

The evolutionary play of quarks and electrons resulted in nuclei and atoms. The computational burst of atoms resulted into molecules and star systems. The intricate relationships between molecules created the fascinating living entities of DNA, proteins and membranes. The interplay of which created the many species of cells, which through an inherent need to reduce their entropy and ensure their propagation would congregate into organs and advanced interacting organisms. These organisms would grow interfaces that would mirror their predecessors, and in a game of survival of the fittest would evolve complex processing capabilities resulting in subjective perception, artifacts and cultural codes. These world views would compete with each other for survival, evolving into their very own realities. These realities would then evolve to such an increasing state of sophistication they would create more realities ad infinitum.

The Flow is inherently moving towards order and computational complexity. The Flow is universal Darwinian evolution. Evolution that applies on every layer with increasing complexity. Every layer is a code or a program that through interaction with itself writes a more complex program that displays the same behaviour as its predecessor in a more elaborate form. Layer upon layer the flow builds new codes that create new codes, each version computing a new state based on the previous one. Information is a single continuum of reinterpreted data projecting from a simpler state out to a more complex one. It appears like an endless seamless pattern with no beginning or end flowing out of and into eternity, a crystalline fractal, a message that forever reiterates itself.

Information

We can think of reality as made out of levels of abstraction that supervene each other creating a gushing torrent of change and complexity, which we will call the Flow. The leading theory on the origin of our reality is the Big Bang where matter and energy begun from a state of implicated information where all fundamental forces existed in a singular state to the expression of discrete particles and through various phases of interaction led to the creation of matter. Matter interacts with itself and other unknown forces to create the universe in the degree that we can observe and theorise in. This conception of reality is a product of human perception mechanisms, moulded by the process of evolution, which were built to recognise patterns, and which tend to abstract and categorise the information perceived based on the diversity of mental connections in the brain. The way we perceive the world seems to be ultimately dictated by our biochemistry, which itself is abstracted from simpler molecules, atoms and various supervening layers of existence. Our perceived reality appears to be populated by various processes that continuously interact in specific ways resulting in the outflow of reality. These processes which we will name entities, can be seen as expressions of existence but also as contents of mind (qualia), but most importantly of informational ontology.

An entity is anything that helps manifest reality (or reality is perceived as composed of entities). It can be thought of as a code of compact information, an active process that is able to express, interact, process and evolve. It is an information processing system. The way it expresses itself is through its property or quality (the information it carries), which will be called its force – essentially its interaction medium. These forces are expressed by the entities until one force meets another. The point where they meet can be imagined as a sensory threshold where the forces bounce back in recognition signaling to the entity that an interaction has occurred. The entity processes the impressed signal and expresses back an ever so slightly modified signal that will meet yet another complementary signal and reflect back and so on. What is effectively created is a continuous cascade of change in the expressive force of entities that comes about through impressions caused by entity interaction; this can be imagined as an 8-shaped loop. (see diagram) The sensory threshold is called as such, as it can be seen as a primordial sensory organ, where information is recognised/received and translated/transmitted as a signal.

Processing ‘within’ the entity continues in the same vain, where the incoming signal is shone unto the entity and loops within itself creating a continuous reflection within a reflection, amplifying the change that is eventually beamed as the modified expressive force. It can be imagined that each entity is in fact made out of an infinite amount of similarly interacting entities within entities. Although this description makes it appear as if these are discrete events that happen one after the other, it is important to note that it is a continuous seamless and timeless motion. The flow is a continuous singular unit of change, the entities that we can observe (due to our perception mechanisms that favour fragmentation of concepts) are like the cogs in a clock, all working together and are absolutely interdependent. This seamless interaction between entities creates a mutual field, enabling the entities to work as a unit creating compound entities that can carry out even more complex interactions, increasing in processing power – the mutual field can be thought of as a body of entities; a sum bigger than its parts.  Layer upon layer, the entities build up an increasingly complex network of interaction each more sophisticated than the next, a process that can be thought of loosely as informational Darwinism.

"Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference." (Lewes 1875, p. 412)(Blitz 1992)

The Flow is in effect the unified current of information that streams from entity to entity and from layer of interaction to layer of interaction. It is the currency of change, causing a cascading effect of complexity that multiplies from layer to layer. “Movement is what is primary; and what seem like permanent structures are only relatively autonomous sub-entities which emerge out of the whole of flowing movement and then dissolve back into it an unceasing process of becoming.” (source: Holomovement, Wikipedia) In effect, entities are abstractions of the flow, when we observe messaging entities we observe the currency of the flow, which is change. One could say that reality is in inherently informational in that is like a continuous relay of interpreted data and could be therefore computable (but not necessarily digital). Information is never lost, but it can be interpreted in a myriad of ways and continually changes configuration. "(This) new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement" (Bohm, 1980, 11)


Infoware - Elementary Layer

One of the first layers of interaction that we can observe or conceptualise is the elementary layer which contains entities with very little or no mass, entities here are defined only by their intrinsic properties and as pure computational/informational interactions. Existence here is qualitative rather than quantitative, as entities can appear out of nowhere and disappear into nothingness. It is the realm of quantum mechanics, a state of existence where information interacts with itself in an evolutionary game. Here we find the building blocks of matter, quarks. Each quark carries a threefold force (the colour force) that is absorbed and transmitted from one to the other, creating a continuous flow of information between them. This force is expressed in the form of force-carrying particles, the gluons. A network of 3 (valence) quarks creates the most stable mutual field (made out of a myriad of virtual quarks that are expressed during force interaction) resulting in either a proton or a neutron depending on the type of quarks involved. What differentiates these quarks into ‘types’ and from other elementary particles, giving them their unique properties, is probably yet another layer of interactions that follows the universal interactive system which we have yet to observe. Strings, M-theory and the holographic principle are currently the best bets to what is going on beyond the elementary particle level, but eventually something more holistic in vain of Bohm’s implicate order would probably be a general conclusion. The sophistication of interactions at the sub-elementary level is what has created this diverse family of entities that carry slightly different properties and thus interact with each other in ever more complex ways. It is important to note that at the quark level and beyond (and possibly in preceding levels) evolution of entities favours interactions that can be sustained the longest, which later evolves into the negative entropy tendency of cells and other living organisms (see Quantum Darwinism).

Hardware - Subatomic Layer

At the next level, we can observe proton-neutron interactions that are the result of the interactions between groups of 3 quarks. A proton itself can be thought of as the first form of matter as it can exist free in a stable form as a positively charged Hydrogen ion. The residual force created from the flow of forces between the 3 quarks within protons and neutrons, is the force that each of these nucleons carry that enables them to stay together in groups, creating nuclei. A nucleus is in effect a congregation of 3-quark networks, or what we call a system of networks. Quarks also hold fractional electromagnetic charges that when combined in 3-quark networks create whole values like a positive charge in protons and a neutral charge in neutrons. The collective expressive force of the mutual field of the nucleons draws another class of elementary particles, the electrons, that carry a complementary force, a negative electromagnetic charge. Although electrons are on a lower level of complexity (ie. a simpler code) than groups of nucleons, they have (through the interaction of entities that spawned them) developed the force needed to interact with entities higher in the hierarchy of complexity. This is one of the first examples of inter-level interactions, and it is this kind of interactions that add to and enrich the the encoding of reality. Inter-level interactions need not only apply to a movement from a lower level of complexity to a higher one, but also the other way round as can be seen for example through the release of the simpler photons through the interaction of nucleons or atoms.

Atomic and Molecular Layers
Atomic entities are in effect the totality of the code that arises from the interaction of the nucleon network (or the underlying quark system) and the code created by the electrons interacting with the nucleus (that creates atomic orbitals). The number of nucleons and electrons involved, and thus the complexity of their code, is what creates the variety of elements that we observe. The varied flow of forces between the electrons and nucleons results in a variety of properties within these atoms which, acting as their expressive forces, interact with other atoms creating complex compound atoms or molecules. The mutual field between groups of atoms is achieved through interaction between their electrons, creating an even larger diversity of interacting entities. The electron code that is perceived as surrounding the nucleic code acts as the sensory organ of the atoms, and like a primordial membrane fuses with the electron codes of other atoms creating compound molecules. In the macrocosm, the interaction of these compound entities brings them together to create vast bodies of molecules that result in a variety of stars and other celestial bodies that become gigantic beacons of entity interaction and production. These bodies carry out their own interactive game, transmitting and absorbing forces that help shape the known and unknown universe. Stars help create solar systems, whose constituent interacting planets and moons act as the processing power that expresses a mutual force unto other systems, whose interaction creates galaxies and superclusters and so on. The force that is exchanged between these supermassive systems of atoms is gravity. Dark energy and dark matter although still mysterious are thought to be the forces governing superclusters and beyond, increasing the rate of expansion of the universe.

Wetware

Within individual solar systems, the continuous exchange of forces and entities between planets and stars brews another microcosmic revolution. Molecules, through inter-level interaction, are modified and combined in surprising new ways eventually leading to a higher level of complexity, that of organic molecules. On Earth, organic molecules with Carbon and Hydrogen in their hearts, achieve immense processing power, that enables them to interact with each other in a way that was not before possible. Having reached a state of advanced sophistication, these entities are able to manipulate entities of a lower level to propagate and improve their processing power. A primordial game of survival starts here, with these intelligent machines cooperating and competing to create even more sophisticated machines. They do this by either incorporating other entities to become more complex or by interacting with similar entities creating vast networks that expand their power. These entities become what are known as organic macromolecules, complex entities that develop the ability to reproduce their own molecular code, but also construct new codes through interactions with other entities.

Membrane Layer
The interactions of biomolecules create increasingly complex structures, working together to create a mutual field bound by a network of compound entities known as a membrane. The emergence of membranes marks the beginning of a new and important level of entity interactions, as it enables a closed system for smaller entities to work in and thus increasing in processing power and interaction sophistication – this breakthrough marks the beginning of the ‘wetware’ stage. These entities exhibit even more advanced behaviours, and possess a simple memory system that is carried out by a network of biomolecular entities within the cell. These networks can be thought of as a primordial nervous system, relaying and exchanging information within and without the cell.
The large membrane-bound entities interact through cooperation and competition, their molecular complexity allowing them to sense the force of other entities, and to even mobilise towards a prey-entity. In an even more advanced game of survival they consume or aggregate with each other and lower level entities becoming the first entities to actively reduce their entropy.

These interactions result in the pinnacle of molecular complexity, a membrane-bound entity that contains smaller membrane-bound entities that are all working together to process and produce biomolecular entities. This body or mutual field is what we simply call the eukaryotic cell (although prokaryotes are considered cells in this context they would fall under the membrane category as they do not contain any membrane bound organelles).

Cellular Layer
Cellular entities communicate with each other through their force which is expressed as proteins and other specialised biomolecules that carry the code to be deciphered by the next cell. Again in a game of survival of the fittest, the cells fight for space and power and soon start to specialise into different functions and aggregate to create even more powerful processing units. The mutual fields they create between them grow in size and complexity resulting into vast networks of cellular entities that work together in unison to process, absorb and transmit information to and from other networks.

Multicellular Layer
Finally all these interacting networks come together under one roof, a grandiose entity that contains vast networks of specialised membrane bound cellular entities that contain networks of biomolecular entities that are themselves networks of atomic entities, which are networks of elementary particles. The mutual field of all these levels of interactions (around 12 layers) is a complex body of multicellular systems, like an insect or a human being. These entities are composed of specialised cell networks that can interpret reality in ways that were not before possible, and express a vast amount of forces that can be met with other entities for a continuous exchange of energies. They have cell networks that can move them through seas of lower level entities towards entities that possess attractive forces. These vast entities experience classic Darwinism where they compete for space and survival, reproducing and reshuffling the biomolecular data that make them up by continuously ingesting lower level entities to advance into efficient negative entropy machines or dissipative dynamical systems.


Software

Due to the influx of data that their multicellular sense organs are able to receive, their processing power inevitably increases, making them able to codify and store the information they receive in biomolecular form. The codification of sense-data marks the beginning of the ‘software stage’ and is mediated in earth-bound creatures by a specialised network of cellular entities, the nervous system. Through a not very well understood process, the incoming impressive forces that multicellular entities receive are processed within the nervous network and are stored as data for later access. The accumulation of this stored data leads to increasingly complicated responses or expressive forces that enables entities to exhibit decision-making among other behavioural patterns. Behavioural patterns first appear in single cells as complex computational interactions between biomolecules which later evolve into nervous system patterns in multicellular entities like fight or flee impulses, instincts, emotions. Over time the process of codification of this information becomes so elaborate that it can be stored and retrieved for longer, with its quality and detail maintained and optimized. The greater the detail of information there is, the more connections between these data nodes can be created within the nervous system. The reason the resulting entities are considered software is because there is no longer evolution of physical entities as it could be observed before. Instead, virtual entities are represented by networks of biomolecular entities within multicellular nervous systems. Complex multicellular organisms in effect become the most efficient sense machines, continuously recording sense data, storing them in hardware form and combining them in ever complex ways. Soon these virtual entities, the ‘software’, begin their own game of interaction and survival, exchanging forces between them and, having reached a critical point, creating their own codes and integrative levels.

The representations of physical entities that virtual entities use as their language can be invoked without a need of external stimulation. The biomolecular code that generates the virtual entities also continuously feeds them with information from its molecular interactions with other cells, molecules, atoms and quarks. It is clear that consciousness is a product of quark processes (and the unknown ones before them) as much as it is a product of biomolecular-cellular processes. The virtual entities in their turn build the various levels of complexity we experience as mental processes. The mutual fields of interacting virtual entities create continuously evolving patterns that are expressed physically through synaptic plasticity, strengthening or weakening connections between groups of virtual entities. The interaction of these entities is what human beings experience as the flow of consciousness, and is what constitutes the next supermassive powerhouse, the self.

Timeware - Cultureware - Memeware

The self is a virtual body of systems of networks of virtual entities, it is the sum of all virtual processes within a multicellular body and is aware of itself as a coherent temporal entity. The self identifies with the virtual contents of its nervous system, and can actively use them to perform complex calculations to make sense of the world that is presented to its senses. The processing of a self-aware entity rapidly increases in power and higher states of being are achieved where self entities communicate the virtual entities they possess to other entities, like humans do with language. The communication of virtual entities, marks the beginning of yet another level of interaction with meme entities passed between selves. Memes are groups of virtual entities generated and absorbed by self entities, which cooperate and compete to ensure their propagation. Memes grow in sophistication as the number of selves that transmit them increases, and the ways to communicate them diversifies. Memes lead to the creation of tools and other objects, buildings, ideas, concepts etc., populating the world with virtually conceived entities brought to the hardware world. Through the advancement of meme networks, selves gain the ability of devising new, more efficient ways of transmitting memes, and meme networks or subcultures (the evolution of families, groups, communities, organisations, countries, companies) finally reach a critical point of complexity, where they create a whole entity, a grand network of memes only limited by its ability to distribute itself, the culture of a group of people. Culture systems and meme networks ensure their continuous propagation through time by transmission to more and more groups of people. Cultures compete and cooperate with each other creating even more advanced networks of cultures, until they create a postulated global culture entity, the unified body of all cultures of a planet.


Pattern

A pattern emerges when looking at reality from the point of view of the Flow. It can be summarised as such: information > interaction > emergence. Information is a pattern or a message that is being continuously transmitted, interaction occurs when the message causes a change on another part of information and emergence is when a new piece of information resulting from this interaction is released. “Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns.” (Information, Wikipedia) Interaction is communication between patterns, and can be broken down to the 4 parts of an information processing system: input, processing, storage, output. Finally emergence is the result of the interaction where the pattern becomes more complex and creates a new integrative level ie. a higher level of pattern organisation (complexity). Emergence and integrative levels imply a supervenience where complex sets of information can always be reduced to a multiplicity of simpler interactions, with each layer being a child of the next one.

The process of supervenience also appears to have a pattern, what is observed as the body-network-system order. Entities can be perceived as autonomous processes where they appear as ‘bodies’ of information. When entities of the same integrative level aggregate together they create a network of bodies, and when these networks aggregate with each other they become a system of networks. A body of systems is a congregation of various systems and networks (and inter-level interactions) which creates yet another autonomous body entity which will then aggregate with other similar bodies to create a network, system and so on. For example we can  see a quark as a body, a nucleon a network of quarks, a nucleus a system of quark networks and an atom as a body made out of system of quark networks and electron networks. A body always appears to be more than the sum of its parts (emergentism). It is clear that information tends to cooperate in order to increase complexity (and reduce entropy) and this can be even seen in classical Darwinism where cooperation and hive-like operation is far more important than competition in the success of evolution. Thus we can see that the Flow can be intellectually divided into major integrative levels signified by body entities and minor integrative levels which are networks and systems. This seems to denote a hierarchy of some sort, from simple to complex it is obvious that it is all part of the same process where integrative levels and discrete entities are merely abstractions of the whole.
Nonetheless it is useful to look at the pattern in a fragmented way in order to abstract and deduce further patterns which can give us insight to parts of the Flow that we cannot see but also to enhance understanding of the part we already “know.” It is also interesting to see that the major levels and sublevels are not part of a continuous line but branch out in and diverge like a never ending tree fractal.

Some of the major levels of supervenience that we can observe are:

in bold is the evolution of the internal message, the force being exchanged by the apparent entities, the actual flow of meaning. Meaning builds syntax-complexes that interact by exchanging smaller complexes. The syntax of code is always based on a previous, simpler state of code. The flow from this viewpoint becomes a language that is able to

quark bodies - hadron networks - nuclear systems - strong force
atom bodies - molecule networks - compound systems - electromagnetism
celestial bodies - planet networks - solar systems - gravity
organic bodies - macromolecular networks - membrane-bound systems - 3D structure recognition
cell body - tissue networks - organ systems - biomolecular communication
living bodies - behavioural networks - memory storage systems - neurotransmitter

We can further conjecture some other levels like:
galactic bodies - cluster networks - supercluster systems - dark energy
universe bodies - multiverse networks -multiverse systems - inter-universe force
self/emotional bodies - meme networks -category systems - neurotransmitter syntax
rational bodies -family networks - community/tribal systems - memetic syntax
social bodies - religious/science networks - digital, coding systems - linguistic syntax
culture bodies -interculture networks -multi-cultural systems - historical syntax
global culture bodies - deculturing/post-scientific networks - post-cultural systems cultural syntax
truth bodies - truth networks - flowic systems - inter-universal-cultural-linguistic syntax

Truth, Metaphor, Knowledge
It has been stressed before that entities are abstractions of the flow, as David Bohm says:
"Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process" (Bohm, 1980). It appears that all we perceive are abstractions, qualia, interpretations of raw data. It seems that everything is a metaphor, and things can only be understood through metaphors and never directly. This is the nature of information and information processors, the pattern is there but it can be interpreted or processed in a myriad of ways depending on the processor. The message is always the same but the reading, the interpretation, the meaning derived is different depending on the information complex reading the message. We are metaphor-processing metaphors, living in a metaphorical world, communicating in metaphors. Knowledge and truth become metaphors both linguistically and virtually. This flexibility in explication of the flow is what drives complexity. Which returns us back to the questions of, what is truth, what is knowledge, whether these questions are relevant and whether metaphors have their own ontology. Is objective truth possible in what appears to be a strictly subjective world?

Our notion of self is an abstraction from the flow, our notion of reality and a world populated by entities is also an abstraction, the metaphors we create be it linguistic, philosophical, scientific or spiritual are all abstractions from the same thing. The very concept of the Flow is an abstraction of the ‘real’ anonymous, intangible, invisible flow. It is mind bogglingly beautiful. All is flux, panta rei.