[ziplock]

Good afternoon verk

Tons of groundwork must indeed be laid, but what about when that groundwork is finished -- or nearly finished? For example, consider your fetal development. Your steps toward maturity from fertilized cell to infant were myriad and gradual, yet at the end of that gradual journey was a sudden, dare I say, trigger mechanism which catapulted you from the only world you had ever known into a wholly new one: removing you from your former closed system and placing you squarely within an experiential grid whose mystery is matched only by its vastness.

The problems that I face when looking at things this way is how does one go about drawing the lines? What classifies as sudden? How does relativity tie into this? Can something that is sudden from one view point be gradual in another? How does the trigger mechanism work?

To add another analogy to draw from... Let us look at it like a joke. A joke is a gradual process of setting up the various groundwork that the joke depends on. Once this is done, the punchline is delivered, a realization occurs, we perceive the humour in it, and we laugh. For arguments sake we'll say the more unexpected the punchline is, the more sudden the realization, the funnier the joke. The punchline then would be the triggering mechanism, no? Once it is delivered, it hits the switch that makes you laugh at the rest of it.

This makes a good case for the presence of the trigger mechanism. A lot of individuals use the analogy of a joke to describe their spiritual experiences. Looking at the anatomy of a joke more... The punchline is part of a gradual evolution and is as dependent and relative to the rest of the joke as the joke is to it. The punchline of one joke won't work for the punchline of another. The efficiency of the punchline is also dependent on the listeners expectancy of it (ever read some Buddhist based literature that tells one not to expect anything during meditation/the path of enlightenment?). It's efficiency is also dependent on the listeners knowledge and deduction. What happens when one deduces the joke prior to the delivery of a punchline?

I find that viewing it as this mechanism that flips on a trigger is circumstantial. Viewing it as a culmination of forces and energy that accelerate the processes within the system to be much more accurate. The groundwork is then these various processes integrating and adding to the net energy of the system. As this energy increases, the processes have more to draw on, accelerating them. This continues until the system in a sense overloads itself and is blown apart. The overall energy has changed (for instance say through the systems processes it converted whatever into Nitrogen, etc, so now the energy present after the overload contains more Nitrogen) and from this changed energy a new system based on processed components starts to bring itself together.

It's then not so much seen as state1 -> transition -> state2. It's a process that at certain points concentrates energy. This is how I look at martial arts. Form1 -> Transition -> Form2 becomes one fluid process the transition and the form inseparable from one another. Water. The trigger mechanism isn't dependent on a certain set of forms, it's instead a process that manifests when the contributing factors are in place. It cannot be monopolized or owned by any particular school of forms or thought.

In hindsight of course my wording could have been better. That is something I will remember for the next time.