ziplock

Hmm... Lot of stuff covered in the thread overall... Guess start with the video and evolve from there...

The opposition seen between science and spirituality is imo so naive. The two study the same phenomenon they just differ in method and focus. Science stands as an empirical study of matter, the physical, the external. There's always been an effort to remove the observer or "participant" from the study. Be it influence on the experiment, contamination of the information, or simple personal bias. Now it's become an understood necessity to account and accommodate for the observer and their direct influence on all results as a demand of nature, or reality, itself. We can no longer not do so.

The spiritual/philosophical schools of thought and the various organizations surrounding them turned the focus onto the primary tool or instrument for any experiment or study... Ourselves. It was an internalized pursuit as opposed to the external ones of the sciences. An "intuitive" knowledge as mentioned in the video. Now people are starting to see that their conceptions of reality that seemed at times so alien to the reality we know now are actually quite applicable. This, to me, makes sense.

I don't personally use emptiness often when speaking about things such as this. I don't believe in nothing. I've began to try to look at existence from a top down perspective as opposed to bottom up. I start with everything and take away from there instead of starting with nothing and adding. I find this a sort of fundamental difference in perspective that's been apparent in human history since it's beginning. In life there seems to be an overall direction, progression, location, velocity, behind existence. Following the cause and effect train leads you down the rabbit hole and you eventually say, "okay stop, just where did it start? What started it all!?" This assumes that before there was our experience, there was nothing. Then something happened, infinity had an orgasm, big bang, rapid expansion, gradual cooling, on and on, and "I am" appears on the scene and that's where I find myself today.

I start from the basis that there has always been something, or everything. What we experience is a relative take on this everything provided to use by our bodies, their particular materialistic nature, and it's relationship with matter. Our DNA in a sense carries the memory of the universe. It's as if it's saying this is the particular take that you will experience, as opposed to the infinite amount of possibilities there are. I mean, you really have to take the time to appreciate infinite possibility and the idea of it all having an existence as legitimate as the one we collectively dissect daily. Every possible variation of angle in how you walked from the door to the car in the morning. If all else remained EXACTLY the same in your life, this one thing can be expressed in an infinite number of ways, let alone the combinations of which that can be experienced, and in this vastness, here I am, experience one. This can be inconvenient, as bills that I neglect to pay do not go away, and directly influence my future in a predictable way, albeit the vastness of infinite possibility.

To illustrate how I understand and view subjects like the video imagine you stand in the middle of a field surrounded by forest in the pitch black with a trusty flashlight. Outside of the small scope of light your flashlight provides there resides an infinite amount of possibility. When you shine your flashlight on a specific area, it collapses all that possibility into one illuminated reality. You realize that even in the scope of your light you still haven't removed all possibility, you can only see those first few trees. You realize the limitations of your perception. But now, within the scope of your light, with what you have illuminated, you have converted possibility into probability. You look at the situation in an entirely different way.

Everything exists, self realized, self aware in essence such as ourselves. The relationships create a feedback loop of sorts. Input, output. When you then take part of the output, and reintroduce it as an input, there is a sense of self awareness. Everything in life follows this basic process. It's through these interactions, and our bodies involvement in them, that we see life the way we do, that we get the direction that we do. It's an out of chaos towards unified order direction. As one considers the physical nature of objects to appear empty, or even all encompassing, entangled, universally interconnected, one should also take in mind things along the order of thought, emotion, concept, identity, etc. If for instance a particle can exist as a wave, universally interconnected, then wouldn't it be reasonable to assume what we understand ourselves to be, our minds, our identities, share the same quality? That our minds exist infinitely, and our body, our DNA, have then provided this relationship, this progression, this evolution, this perspective on it.

I'm quite tired and stoned. I feel compelled to leave it at this for now and attend to the other things in life. I'm not happy with how this linguistic journey turned out. The trouble with this subject is the very interconnectedness that's trying to be defined. It leads to so many directions, so many fields, so many approaches, that it's easy to get swept away in the tide. Will most likely make follow up post even just to satisfy my own obsessive compulsive need for clear conception.

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Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.