Why can’t being alive by my motivation for living?
I was walking down the street, had just passed a piazza, on my way to school, remnants of the beautiful day still playing in the sky, a man was approaching the same space that I was. Bikes were crowded on either side and instead of stopping we both squeezed our shoulders in, allowing each other to pass, including his little dog. And at that moment (as with all moments) an idea surfaced from my subconscious and muddled around in my conscious for a little while, testing the waters. The more I make them wait the more frustrated and bored they get, and if I can’t pull them from my brain through my mouth they usually go back home, waiting another day to poke their heads out and say hello.
I’ve been referred to as a sea otter, and I like it a lot. I remember one time at the beach, at the aquarium, and a faint memory comes back to me. I don’t know who I was with, but the walls were dark green, black, but green if there was light. Or maybe from the water, the reflections that are just as much a part of the walls then the material itself. Just a second, a young boy, wearing black, turning a corner into another room straight ahead, and it’s blurry. The substance is there but the classifications aren’t, maybe that’s why I can’t let it go: I can’t understand it.
Am I uncomfortable not knowing something? Is that why I walk around thinking, pondering, trying to learn? Walking on that same strip, at the same time when the same man was walking with his same dog. The same bikes, the same space, the same time, the same idea, just a different permutation. A different form, but the same purpose, the same aim, the same function. Whatever that is, if there has to be one, I don’t know.
The first idea was that we move, we change shape in order for others to move and change shape. We work together even if we don’t want to talk about it, even if we don’t know each other nor ourselves. We do it, what, to survive? Surviving infers many things; animalistic, another classification albeit closer than human. War, fear, aggression, and then the individual was born. I think survival is about as independent to human thought as gravity is to the universe. Two ideas, made, created, their creations implying a continuous need for them to exist.
The second idea: I don’t know anything, and that makes me happy. No expectations, no assumptions, no bullshit. Not even ignorance, because knowing how to not know goes away as well. Empty? Free? Both? Letting things go, letting everything go, even the idea of letting go, but again, another “philosophy” that is born by the death of another idea. Why do I keep trying to murder ideas? What’s my problem? Am I in love?
My motivation to learn, to know, I want that to be my knowing of nothing. But nothing, the same, the different, who are they? Nothing, everything, to define it as such has to invoke a relationship. A relationship, things are starting to make more sense, this isn’t “good” this isn’t “right.” Dualities at the same time, the need for one another, squeezing their shoulders inside themselves to let others pass by more easily.
Good, function, the end result. Why is it that we have to destroy the universe with knowledge? We build it back up again, the way we want it, but still being a part of it, hypocrisy. Circles, constant circles, finding the relationship and then escaping it, letting it escape, go away, float somewhere else, not having to hold on to it: letting it go, letting it grow.
Identity, something that makes something the same or different. Classifications, hierarchies, putting things in their place, locking them up, throwing away the key. Intellectual humility? The art of being a scholar means to learn how to be a student, learn how to be a slave to the mind, accepting without question, questioning within limits, learning, getting smarter, and then finally, finally being able to rebel. Why not rebel during the process? Why not rebel in the beginning? Why not never start something that we have to rebel against? A society needs an enemy? We create societies, we create enemies, we create the needs, we control. Power.
I was reading La Politica (Politics) the other night. Aristotle was talking about education, saying how Plocrotes thought it meant to help others find truth, giving people the tools, teaching people how to think. Aristotle saw it more as the continued betterment and improvement of institutions, that is the goal of education. Both, for me, punch this sense of followship, a path lined out, all we have to do it start walking. Don’t mind the things around the path, the hard questions have already been figured out, the hard work is done, just follow me, and I will show you things you already know…
I don’t know what education is, but I know what I would like it to be. I lied. I don’t even know that. Ideas, education, learning, knowledge. We’ve destroyed learning and knowledge with themselves, time to find other words to fill their gaps-NO! Building a house requires it to be built on something else, a replacement, a change of the same, making it still the same because it is different. Opposites, language games. English has about 500,000 words, more than double Spanish and 5 times more than French. Easier to bullshit with more words? Easier to say the same thing again and again? Yes. The same thing again and again, isn’t that what we all keep doing? Vocabulary is important because it is then harder to hear the bullshit, it covers it up, it makes it taste good, and we eat it. We eat it all up, because we’re hungry. We want to think, we want to be happy, so we believe. I don’t want to believe anymore.
Nihilism, the belief that nothing matters. Bohemian Rhapsody, a connection, a relationship. Identity, being something, but why the need to break things down? We are going in circles, moksha. The idea of finally being able to be liberated from the recurring reincarnation cycle and go to the worldly paradise. Right now I’m trying to find the relationships, make the circles as big as I can, and then let them go. You see how linear time is almost un-escapable?
Is it the only way we can understand? I want to expand myself, I want to cover the earth with my hands by using my mind and body. I need to keep traveling, but if all places are the same place? I’m always traveling.
Intellectual humility, I was talking with a teacher about the genius path towards enlightenment. It bothered-bothers me, the path set up for all of us. We just have to walk, the way is labeled. We can walk slow, easily, walk on by, go through the motions. We can run, work hard, become geniuses. We can do both, we can do neither. Why is it that if we stop walking, if we leave the path, that we are either lazy or crazy? Can they be the same thing?
A question about history, I was obscure because I tried to tell the truth. “This could be for anything.” EXACTLY, as I am trying to find the molds and not the copies. I assume them to be there, fallacious? The templates, fundamental ideas, not ones that we keep replacing. The reasons, a different kind of knowledge, and I see it in school. To exploit those that exploit us, keep the relationship even, keep it equal, keep it the same. Keep it identifiable, classifiable, keep the need.
I’m all over the place and I’ve never been so lost. Words pouring out of my hands like drugs, do my ideas not like where they live, are they trying to escape? Or could it be my body trying to get rid of the ideas that it does not like. Can we live together? Are they really leaving? I’m trying to grow, not to get taller nor bigger, nor smarter nor more intelligent. I don’t know what it means, and I think sometimes it’s better that way.
Intellectual humility: holding your breath, accepting truth to be true, going through the motions. After the first phase is over then can we open up, the path becomes wider, the same one, however. Why does genius have to be academic? Why can’t I know nothing? Why can’t I be happy to be alive? What’s keeping me from all these dreams?
Myself. My identity.
Time to get un-known.
-Anthony
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
happiness, an answer to the riddle
You ask my definition of reality? Well, in that case...
...Reality is everything that we are afraid to question.
I've gotten some great responses and questions to continue our conversation, but first would like to try to talk about my adventures in the Cinque Terre and Viareggio, with a little deja vu and a Senegalese friend I never knew I had (but should've).
So before going off and camping in the Cinque Terre I went to the grandmother's house of one of the Italian families. Easter lunch was on the menu: tortellini in broth as well as a salted bread, both Tuscan traditions, artichokes, lamb, salad, and chocolate. Before this however we were introducing ourselves while entering the beautiful apartment on the east side of the city. Hand shakes, hugs, "nice to meet you"s, the like. All real but none more than when I met Semi.
Just an ordinary man from Senegal, 23 like me, but there was an instant friendship between the two of us, something that was there, or maybe it was that we understood each other instantly. He spoke very few Italian words, and my French isn't up to par, so he mostly said "americano" and I mostly said "si". One of the most humblest people I've ever met, and I only met him for a few hours. What was even better was the hand shake as I left, as if we had known each other for years, had practiced for days, it all flowed, it all made sense. The look in his eyes, pure friendship before we knew each others names.
I don't really know how else to explain it, the whole lunch was spectacular, hanging out with a family and feeling a part of it, the language barrier almost non-existent.
In the afternoon I took a train to meet some friends in Portovenere near La Spezia in Liguria (yahoo maps will help). The first night I had to hike to them, as they had found a spot off of a dirt road to camp. Walking in the dark is scary, and walking uphill with a backpack full of rice is equally as challenging. But the stars helped, and the darkness was relatively soft and subtle, except every so often rock shadows appear to be panthers.
The next two days we camped wherever we ended up when the sun was close to setting. 26 kilometers by the time we left, with Monterosso and the beach our welcoming party. We took the train back to Florence, gather all of our stuff, and went home for the night.
The following day would have been lost if it wasn't for another friend in Viareggio. Last minute decisions meant back on the train to go back to a place we had been before. More lounging on the beach, taking in the sun, living the dream. But the train was strange. After only a half hour I got the feeling that we were still camping, that we hadn't gone back and slept in a real bed, the days turning into one, time coming together. Someone else, this time in the form of anxiety. Kept looking at the sign, at the door, trying to find our way, where we are, where we were, what was happening in that train car. "We've been here before!" And I echoed the thought with my own voice, as I turned around to see the same graffiti on the same advertisement. There had to be hundreds, but the graffiti was exact. "And there's Tony's water bottle!"
Sitting on top where bags are held, I had thought that I had brought it with me back home and had left it there, but it rested with still water in it, and that was when we all stared losing our minds.
We had to run to the train, a different track, a different day, a different time, a different space. We entered and then walked through 2-3 cars in order to find 3 seats, and when we did we sat down, paying attention to nothing. It just so happened that we were on the exact same car in the exact same seats as we were the day before, coming back from Cinque Terre, as we were now going to Viareggio. A coincidence? A very rare one indeed, we were caught between realities. We travelled through time and our brains and bodies knew it before we did!
I think it would now be a good time to continue with a rather dense and maybe even mystifying train of thought. But before that I wanted to reiterate what I thought about thought a few moments ago. It can be a form of mental manipulation of everything that we experience, collectively, as a group. This could also be a good definition of existence if we need that to be cut and dry. Our brains have the ability to group and cross reference loads of information at the same time, and I understand this as having the capacity to link all that we experience into something, maybe a circle, maybe this idea of one from many, the relationship that they have for each other (as they both are the master and the slave). More doors are opened then closed, but it's a nice place to pass by on any journey.
Freedom, from my understanding before I wrote my last email, was a sense of mental freedom from ourselves and what we think. A task of trying to break down the barriers that force us to control thought, classifications that take away from our ability to make things interact. And I saw what I was doing with this blog and these emails: trying to liberate myself from myself, trying to understand what it means to understand. Trying as hard as I could to stop thinking and stop acting the way I learn to through the use of language, ideas, and people. I don't want to sever myself, but I want to be able to realize the conditions and try to understand why I think and why I do, or why I think I do. To me ideas are powerful before they are powerless, but at the same time this power has to be taken from somewhere, has to be created, not from nothing, but from the mental manipulation of what we experience, that is to say, by thought.
So we have this thought that manipulates itself. That makes me want to bounce up and down, jumping for joy. What in the hell does that mean? Does it have to have a meaning? Do we have to put it in a box and label it and keep it from other boxes that don't look like it? I surely don't think so and get the strange feeling that I am repeating myself with different words at a different time in a different place, but if that is true then all these places and all these times are connected, from the way that I think, and that wouldn't make them different. This tells me that these subdivisions don't exist, at least not in my reality because I question them all the time. Maybe I don't want them to exist, but I find that I am much more susceptible to progressing my capacity to think when I argue with myself, strengthening those points that have strong foundations and changing those that don't. Most of them, if not all of them, don't stand the test of questioning. Which is why I think we can be afraid to do it. We don't want our realities to go away, we don't want what we think is true to not be true, so we hold on to our ideas as tightly as possible not realizing that we are keeping other ones from going through us, from passing into our brains and being changed by us. Not to say that this is a constant but rather continuous. My brain tells me it's the same thing. But only at the same moment, which would be all moments. And now I'm more confused as ever, and that makes me happy.
We create to understand, that's what I said. We take what we live, what we think we have, and we make something out of it. We call it nature, we say it does this and this, we continue to observe it and therefore trust both our observations as well as our capacity to observe, another duality if you will (even though it doesn't have to be that way). So we don't understand the universe. So we create subjects, a beautiful tool called language, from which stems many things. We change this language and make other subjects, subjects from subjects, ideas, from ideas, spinning our web to try to encompass this universe that we defined before we knew what it was. I am arguing that we have to define it in order to begin to understand it, discussing the object and not the subject, much like Plato's cave, much like I felt a long time ago writing an email just like this one.
We manipulate our creations in order to understand, and we do this by thinking. Simply by thinking. That's the change, that's the constant. Does it have to always be there? Are we always thinking? What is thinking? The circle continues...
We study the end result, forgetting the process (I see life as a process and not as an end result). We understand the end, not the beginning, and everything in between? Where does it go?
We can't separate ourselves from our ideas, this one we have nailed to the ground. We are our ideas, it's all we have: thought. Our thoughts aren't independent because they need an inspiration, something that happens with the cross grouping our brains to when they are thinking. Could thinking be a way for our brains to relax from trying to survive? Do we have to think to survive? Can we survive without thinking? What's survival? Surviving what? Because we don't live forever, for as much as we can define life and death. So what's the point? Becoming children again? Forgetting all we learned because we don't like it? Do I not like what I know? Is that why I'm changing it? Maybe I'm looking for happiness and I see it in chaos.
Since nothing could be independent that would mean that nothing was free, in the mental sense. We have to define freedom in order to understand it, and we understand it by throwing words at it, a strategy. But the words change, and so does the definition, and I have a hard time understanding this change, even though it's a constant, that it is static. An idea that is always in flux is never in flux with respect to the concept, as the concept of continuous change never changes. Thanks, I needed that.
I don't want to control my thoughts with abstract ones, I want to free myself from myself, I want to be happy. I want to release all the programs that I downloaded, I don't want to be a machine anymore, I want to be an animal. I want to walk I want to dream, I want to survive by thinking, by writing, by confusing myself, by making my circle as big as I can. Pi stays the same, the concept grows, and for me this means that it doesn't get bigger, but rather that it gets stronger. Stronger to be able to let things go, to be able to float, float in space. Isn't that it? Isn't that the answer to our question of the universe? Floating in space, mass, a thing. An idea in one word: universe.
-Anthony
...Reality is everything that we are afraid to question.
I've gotten some great responses and questions to continue our conversation, but first would like to try to talk about my adventures in the Cinque Terre and Viareggio, with a little deja vu and a Senegalese friend I never knew I had (but should've).
So before going off and camping in the Cinque Terre I went to the grandmother's house of one of the Italian families. Easter lunch was on the menu: tortellini in broth as well as a salted bread, both Tuscan traditions, artichokes, lamb, salad, and chocolate. Before this however we were introducing ourselves while entering the beautiful apartment on the east side of the city. Hand shakes, hugs, "nice to meet you"s, the like. All real but none more than when I met Semi.
Just an ordinary man from Senegal, 23 like me, but there was an instant friendship between the two of us, something that was there, or maybe it was that we understood each other instantly. He spoke very few Italian words, and my French isn't up to par, so he mostly said "americano" and I mostly said "si". One of the most humblest people I've ever met, and I only met him for a few hours. What was even better was the hand shake as I left, as if we had known each other for years, had practiced for days, it all flowed, it all made sense. The look in his eyes, pure friendship before we knew each others names.
I don't really know how else to explain it, the whole lunch was spectacular, hanging out with a family and feeling a part of it, the language barrier almost non-existent.
In the afternoon I took a train to meet some friends in Portovenere near La Spezia in Liguria (yahoo maps will help). The first night I had to hike to them, as they had found a spot off of a dirt road to camp. Walking in the dark is scary, and walking uphill with a backpack full of rice is equally as challenging. But the stars helped, and the darkness was relatively soft and subtle, except every so often rock shadows appear to be panthers.
The next two days we camped wherever we ended up when the sun was close to setting. 26 kilometers by the time we left, with Monterosso and the beach our welcoming party. We took the train back to Florence, gather all of our stuff, and went home for the night.
The following day would have been lost if it wasn't for another friend in Viareggio. Last minute decisions meant back on the train to go back to a place we had been before. More lounging on the beach, taking in the sun, living the dream. But the train was strange. After only a half hour I got the feeling that we were still camping, that we hadn't gone back and slept in a real bed, the days turning into one, time coming together. Someone else, this time in the form of anxiety. Kept looking at the sign, at the door, trying to find our way, where we are, where we were, what was happening in that train car. "We've been here before!" And I echoed the thought with my own voice, as I turned around to see the same graffiti on the same advertisement. There had to be hundreds, but the graffiti was exact. "And there's Tony's water bottle!"
Sitting on top where bags are held, I had thought that I had brought it with me back home and had left it there, but it rested with still water in it, and that was when we all stared losing our minds.
We had to run to the train, a different track, a different day, a different time, a different space. We entered and then walked through 2-3 cars in order to find 3 seats, and when we did we sat down, paying attention to nothing. It just so happened that we were on the exact same car in the exact same seats as we were the day before, coming back from Cinque Terre, as we were now going to Viareggio. A coincidence? A very rare one indeed, we were caught between realities. We travelled through time and our brains and bodies knew it before we did!
I think it would now be a good time to continue with a rather dense and maybe even mystifying train of thought. But before that I wanted to reiterate what I thought about thought a few moments ago. It can be a form of mental manipulation of everything that we experience, collectively, as a group. This could also be a good definition of existence if we need that to be cut and dry. Our brains have the ability to group and cross reference loads of information at the same time, and I understand this as having the capacity to link all that we experience into something, maybe a circle, maybe this idea of one from many, the relationship that they have for each other (as they both are the master and the slave). More doors are opened then closed, but it's a nice place to pass by on any journey.
Freedom, from my understanding before I wrote my last email, was a sense of mental freedom from ourselves and what we think. A task of trying to break down the barriers that force us to control thought, classifications that take away from our ability to make things interact. And I saw what I was doing with this blog and these emails: trying to liberate myself from myself, trying to understand what it means to understand. Trying as hard as I could to stop thinking and stop acting the way I learn to through the use of language, ideas, and people. I don't want to sever myself, but I want to be able to realize the conditions and try to understand why I think and why I do, or why I think I do. To me ideas are powerful before they are powerless, but at the same time this power has to be taken from somewhere, has to be created, not from nothing, but from the mental manipulation of what we experience, that is to say, by thought.
So we have this thought that manipulates itself. That makes me want to bounce up and down, jumping for joy. What in the hell does that mean? Does it have to have a meaning? Do we have to put it in a box and label it and keep it from other boxes that don't look like it? I surely don't think so and get the strange feeling that I am repeating myself with different words at a different time in a different place, but if that is true then all these places and all these times are connected, from the way that I think, and that wouldn't make them different. This tells me that these subdivisions don't exist, at least not in my reality because I question them all the time. Maybe I don't want them to exist, but I find that I am much more susceptible to progressing my capacity to think when I argue with myself, strengthening those points that have strong foundations and changing those that don't. Most of them, if not all of them, don't stand the test of questioning. Which is why I think we can be afraid to do it. We don't want our realities to go away, we don't want what we think is true to not be true, so we hold on to our ideas as tightly as possible not realizing that we are keeping other ones from going through us, from passing into our brains and being changed by us. Not to say that this is a constant but rather continuous. My brain tells me it's the same thing. But only at the same moment, which would be all moments. And now I'm more confused as ever, and that makes me happy.
We create to understand, that's what I said. We take what we live, what we think we have, and we make something out of it. We call it nature, we say it does this and this, we continue to observe it and therefore trust both our observations as well as our capacity to observe, another duality if you will (even though it doesn't have to be that way). So we don't understand the universe. So we create subjects, a beautiful tool called language, from which stems many things. We change this language and make other subjects, subjects from subjects, ideas, from ideas, spinning our web to try to encompass this universe that we defined before we knew what it was. I am arguing that we have to define it in order to begin to understand it, discussing the object and not the subject, much like Plato's cave, much like I felt a long time ago writing an email just like this one.
We manipulate our creations in order to understand, and we do this by thinking. Simply by thinking. That's the change, that's the constant. Does it have to always be there? Are we always thinking? What is thinking? The circle continues...
We study the end result, forgetting the process (I see life as a process and not as an end result). We understand the end, not the beginning, and everything in between? Where does it go?
We can't separate ourselves from our ideas, this one we have nailed to the ground. We are our ideas, it's all we have: thought. Our thoughts aren't independent because they need an inspiration, something that happens with the cross grouping our brains to when they are thinking. Could thinking be a way for our brains to relax from trying to survive? Do we have to think to survive? Can we survive without thinking? What's survival? Surviving what? Because we don't live forever, for as much as we can define life and death. So what's the point? Becoming children again? Forgetting all we learned because we don't like it? Do I not like what I know? Is that why I'm changing it? Maybe I'm looking for happiness and I see it in chaos.
Since nothing could be independent that would mean that nothing was free, in the mental sense. We have to define freedom in order to understand it, and we understand it by throwing words at it, a strategy. But the words change, and so does the definition, and I have a hard time understanding this change, even though it's a constant, that it is static. An idea that is always in flux is never in flux with respect to the concept, as the concept of continuous change never changes. Thanks, I needed that.
I don't want to control my thoughts with abstract ones, I want to free myself from myself, I want to be happy. I want to release all the programs that I downloaded, I don't want to be a machine anymore, I want to be an animal. I want to walk I want to dream, I want to survive by thinking, by writing, by confusing myself, by making my circle as big as I can. Pi stays the same, the concept grows, and for me this means that it doesn't get bigger, but rather that it gets stronger. Stronger to be able to let things go, to be able to float, float in space. Isn't that it? Isn't that the answer to our question of the universe? Floating in space, mass, a thing. An idea in one word: universe.
-Anthony
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Dinner and Pi with the Moon
I swear the moon's been following me. Or maybe I have been following it. Or maybe we've been following each other, both trying to understand.
Pi is a letter. Pi is a number. The letter pi is greek, and the number pi is unknown. I guess you could say that even the letter is unknown as it will never know itself. It can't give itself meaning and a purpose, that is where we come in. The number pi, in mathematics, represents the ratio of a circle's perimeter to it's radius. What's interesting is that the circle is not a polygon as it does not have any measurable sides. What's even more intriguing is that we don't know exactly what that number is as it just keeps computing and computing for what seems to be longer than eternity, even though we label it a mathematical constant, meaning that it will never change. Are we admitting that we will never understand it? I guess we don't have to understand all of it to figure out how it works i.e. how we can make it work with other principles and concepts.
A few weeks ago me and a good friend of mine were trying to find sine. Not trying to compute exercies with it, rather trying to refind it, rediscover the concept, create it again.
We couldn't do it. We had never learned it in math class. And I think this brings out a very interesting point. What's with all these finished products? For some reason we have all these things that are done: concepts of the various school subjects, concepts of religion, the universe, language, etc. But for some reason we never study them. We do, however, have an excuse: philosophy. Philosophy makes us feel good because we know that if we ever wanted to know that we don't know that we would have a way. But I don't think one subject, whatever that may be, will ever to be able to tell us the whole story. That's why it's the whole story: many parts, the same story nonetheless.
So this pi that we think we know is used to play with triangles. It works, it works perfectly, even if we don't understand it. In fact, we can't understand it, because if we do its purpose will cease to exist. And I think that this can be applied again to the concept of a god. Something that we make up in order to understand, an "imaginary friend for adults," and we use this idea to put an end to our thinking. We die, in a way, by giving ourselves this "new life."
But I really wanted to talk about all these ends and wonder why the means and the struggles are left in the dark. Let's take history, a great subject for debate (as well as a common one in my ramblings). We study the greeks, the romans, the egyptians, the history of art, of music, of science. Modern history, contemporary history, modern-contemporary history, contemporary-modern history, as well as contemporary-modern history of the art, music, and science of ancient greeks, romans, and egyptians. But for some reason we never really study in depth our concept of "history." We tried to define it last time, with peculiar results. Are there other ways to understand things without asking questions? And again we find that opposites have to exist at the same time in order for them to be valid i.e. life and death, universal concepts and impermanence, good and bad, relative relativity, etc. These ideas, our ideas, that we have seen, are one in the same. We take the circle and make it in to a line because it's easier to control thought that way. We don't give ourselves an out: just a range. And once we get to one extreme in our quest for knowledge and truth (just pick any -ism out there), we're forced to turn back, even though the next step (in the circle) is right in front of us. We have made that wall. Is it easier that way? I think it makes it easier for us to see it as difficult, which is why I think we feel it's a virture to be balanced, to stay in the middle of the range of the line that we took from the circle. But if we have this circle, this trust in ourselves and our ideas, then we'll always be in the middle. But I think it's important to first liberate ourselves from the line, without being self-righteous about it. Maybe that's what I mean when I say freedom.
I'm still studying hieroglyphics at the university (the egyptology class), and they are really interesting. They're not just symbols, they also represent phonetic sounds. There's a grammar and an intricate way of saying and expressing things that is both similar to what we are doing at this very moment as well as completely another way of looking at language. My mind has a field day trying to find the egyptian in me.
I guess what I really wanted to say was: we create to understand. We understand by manipulating our creations. We then study the by-products of our creations without ever studying our creations themselves. We can't seperate ourselves from our ideas; nothing is independent. Nothing, in this case, is free. Not even freedom.
Talk about a 180 (which just happens to be pi radians). That was fun. Till next time.
-Anthony
Pi is a letter. Pi is a number. The letter pi is greek, and the number pi is unknown. I guess you could say that even the letter is unknown as it will never know itself. It can't give itself meaning and a purpose, that is where we come in. The number pi, in mathematics, represents the ratio of a circle's perimeter to it's radius. What's interesting is that the circle is not a polygon as it does not have any measurable sides. What's even more intriguing is that we don't know exactly what that number is as it just keeps computing and computing for what seems to be longer than eternity, even though we label it a mathematical constant, meaning that it will never change. Are we admitting that we will never understand it? I guess we don't have to understand all of it to figure out how it works i.e. how we can make it work with other principles and concepts.
A few weeks ago me and a good friend of mine were trying to find sine. Not trying to compute exercies with it, rather trying to refind it, rediscover the concept, create it again.
We couldn't do it. We had never learned it in math class. And I think this brings out a very interesting point. What's with all these finished products? For some reason we have all these things that are done: concepts of the various school subjects, concepts of religion, the universe, language, etc. But for some reason we never study them. We do, however, have an excuse: philosophy. Philosophy makes us feel good because we know that if we ever wanted to know that we don't know that we would have a way. But I don't think one subject, whatever that may be, will ever to be able to tell us the whole story. That's why it's the whole story: many parts, the same story nonetheless.
So this pi that we think we know is used to play with triangles. It works, it works perfectly, even if we don't understand it. In fact, we can't understand it, because if we do its purpose will cease to exist. And I think that this can be applied again to the concept of a god. Something that we make up in order to understand, an "imaginary friend for adults," and we use this idea to put an end to our thinking. We die, in a way, by giving ourselves this "new life."
But I really wanted to talk about all these ends and wonder why the means and the struggles are left in the dark. Let's take history, a great subject for debate (as well as a common one in my ramblings). We study the greeks, the romans, the egyptians, the history of art, of music, of science. Modern history, contemporary history, modern-contemporary history, contemporary-modern history, as well as contemporary-modern history of the art, music, and science of ancient greeks, romans, and egyptians. But for some reason we never really study in depth our concept of "history." We tried to define it last time, with peculiar results. Are there other ways to understand things without asking questions? And again we find that opposites have to exist at the same time in order for them to be valid i.e. life and death, universal concepts and impermanence, good and bad, relative relativity, etc. These ideas, our ideas, that we have seen, are one in the same. We take the circle and make it in to a line because it's easier to control thought that way. We don't give ourselves an out: just a range. And once we get to one extreme in our quest for knowledge and truth (just pick any -ism out there), we're forced to turn back, even though the next step (in the circle) is right in front of us. We have made that wall. Is it easier that way? I think it makes it easier for us to see it as difficult, which is why I think we feel it's a virture to be balanced, to stay in the middle of the range of the line that we took from the circle. But if we have this circle, this trust in ourselves and our ideas, then we'll always be in the middle. But I think it's important to first liberate ourselves from the line, without being self-righteous about it. Maybe that's what I mean when I say freedom.
I'm still studying hieroglyphics at the university (the egyptology class), and they are really interesting. They're not just symbols, they also represent phonetic sounds. There's a grammar and an intricate way of saying and expressing things that is both similar to what we are doing at this very moment as well as completely another way of looking at language. My mind has a field day trying to find the egyptian in me.
I guess what I really wanted to say was: we create to understand. We understand by manipulating our creations. We then study the by-products of our creations without ever studying our creations themselves. We can't seperate ourselves from our ideas; nothing is independent. Nothing, in this case, is free. Not even freedom.
Talk about a 180 (which just happens to be pi radians). That was fun. Till next time.
-Anthony
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