Irving had taken a steamboat up the Mississippi from New Orleans, had stopped at one of the "serene and dilapidated villages" that "border the rivers of ancient Louisiana," and had been there beguiled by the strangely joyous life of the tatterdemalion Creoles.
And a reader comment with some optimism about our species:
There are people who are trying to... evolve humanity on a spiritual level. Some call this the "5D reality" and some call it crystalline gateways, lol. Some major hoogey moogey there. But in my own meditations, it seems to resonate with the idea that we are capable of switching timelines, changing tracks, weaving in new threads entirely. I get the idea that the gods really love that shit. It feels GOOD. I think that's why we're still around.
Now that I'm re-integrated in the human world, I have a product recommendation and a sports highlight. My new favorite shoe, when I'm not wearing Vibram FiveFingers, is the Camper Peu Cami. It's not quite as low-profile as the Vivo Barefoot, but it's shaped even more like an actual human foot, and it's very stylish.
And check out this move by a player on my local soccer team, Brianna Alger making a defender fall down without even touching the ball.
revealed this whole show we call life, and the universe in which it appears, to all be imagination, if looked upon as something other than myself. If I look upon it as myself then all of it is real.
That's a new idea to me. I mean, a lot of people say the self is an illusion, or the physical world is an illusion, but I've never heard anyone say these illusions are directly linked. It reminds me of an image I saw years ago, I forget where, that turned the observing eye inside out. Instead of putting the world on the outside, and your mind on the inside, looking out of your head through your eyes, this drawing put the physical world on the inside of a circle, and outside the circle is consciousness or God, and the circle has a bunch of tiny holes. Those holes seem to be you and me looking out at the world, when really it's pure consciousness looking into it, from different perspectives.
The second bit is related to the popular idea of "enlightenment", something I've been skeptical of for a while. The idea is just too pretty and tidy, and I figure it's just a simplified way of talking about a lot of different ways to improve one's emotional health or spiritual understanding, with no clear place to draw a line.
But Snider has a great metaphor for how a clear line could be crossed. He says it's like one of those magic eye images, where at first you just see a bunch of meaningless dots, and then suddenly you figure out the right way to look at it, and you see a shape. And once you know how to shift your perspective in that way, it becomes easy.
]]>Consciousness is the all. Besides it there is no other. So we are putting anything and everything under this umbrella. This is why I use the term absolute consciousness. This term refers to my beingness, and the selfsame beingness of not only myself but the singular all-encompassing and all-inclusive void beingness or intelligence of everything.
...
It's radiating from you right now, as you, right here in this moment. It is effulgent, visceral, radiant, and absolutely void of any objectivity or subjectivity whatsoever.
This made me recall personal experiences of learning to play piano. My conscious awareness was mostly located in my dominant right hand. As I became more skilled and the left hand got involved it was as if someone else was controlling it much of the time. That in turn reminded me of all the neurobiology research showing that the mind is not a coherent construction, but composed of many different modules competing for access to the central self aware part (or frantic confabulator depending on your perspective). If attention is a neurological illusion then it tints the whole original conceptual framework.
And from Matt over email:
]]>Perhaps the reason no one challenged your claim that attention can home in on something without us knowing it, is that people intuitively grasp how attention is more cloud-like than laser-like.
We can be thinking about an anxiety-inducing project at work, have a song stuck in our head, briefly be annoyed at another person on the train, and have a memory surface all within the space of seconds. It's easy to fail to realize that a part of our mind began replaying a song it heard from someone's smartphone before we boarded the train. We may suddenly wonder why we're thinking about so-and-so from college only to trace the memory to the fact that we've been replaying a song internally. We may or may not know why the song entered our thoughts at all.
If there's any activity that can be said to cause the most suffering, I'd say it's this: thinking about something without clearly knowing that you're thinking about it or knowing the negative effects that's having on your body.