I knew that this piece was going to ruffle feathers, and indeed since posting there have been a number of unsubscribes.
I find it interesting, there is this pressure to conform to a message, amongst the readership a kind of narrow expectation that demands to be fulfilled, and general lack of any desire to be anything but entertained.
This piece is not entertainment.
It is not written to meet any jaded expectations.
Nothing here conforms to any message other than one within the words.
The images are genuine.
The source is not comfortable.
The situation is not ambiguous.
Thank you for reading and liking, it is appreciated.
Whether it is a recital or a dirge is I suppose the question.
There is this condition, and I think its time for those who sense the change to have some communication, rather than just dealing with the ostrich mentality of the masses.
Most of mankind is mobilized to extremely primitive urges. This does carry consequences.
I just think it requires a tremendous effort to create fictions and then force them on the world as truth.
I try to actually keep in mind that these fictions span everything people are involved in, from the very notion of what makes a person to the hideous devastation forced on the world.
Let me ask you a question, if I may, do you think for a moment there could be a balance to life?
If the answer is at least a 'maybe' then do you think it is mankind that lives it?
Supposing your answer here is again, at least a 'maybe' then is it possible that all of this is internal?
Personal?
What does it take, if anything, to allow mankind to drop the fictions long enough to get even a glimpse of this reality?
Is it even possible?
I ask a lot of questions, but apparently they need to be presented as hammers, or explosives for people to notice them.
Mike, see if our cells are cocreating fiction for our identity:
“ You Are a Story Cells Tell Themselves
How biology shapes selfhood as a story
DIDIER HOPE
APR 06, 2025
Our sense of being a unified, coherent self, the feeling of "I" may be one of the most compelling and persistent illusions we experience.
Recent advances in neuroscience, cellular biology, and philosophy suggest something remarkable: what we experience as a continuous, commanding consciousness might instead be a narrative construction a story that trillions of cells collaboratively generate to coordinate their activities.
This post explores how our perception of selfhood emerges from biological processes, examining the scientific evidence that challenges traditional notions of unified identity and proposes a new framework for understanding consciousness as a collaborative narrative rather than a central command center.
The Cellular Foundations of Perception and Response
At the most fundamental level, even single-celled organisms demonstrate surprising capabilities for sensing and responding to their environment, the basic building blocks of what eventually becomes consciousness in complex organisms.
Research from the University of California, San Francisco revealed that simple yeast cells possess sensory mechanisms that can be manipulated through carefully engineered illusions, causing them to misperceive their environment and ultimately self-destruct.
"The ability to perceive and respond to the environment is a basic attribute of all living organisms, from the greatest to the smallest,"
noted Wendell Lim, senior author of this study. "And so is the susceptibility to misperception. It doesn't matter if the illusion is based on molecular sensors within a single cell or neurons in the brain". This finding suggests that the capacity for environmental interpretation, and misinterpretation is fundamental to life itself.
At the cellular level, identity emerges through gene expression patterns that instruct "a neuron to be a neuron, and a white cell to be a white cell". These molecular processes enable cells to distinguish themselves from others, a primitive form of self/non-self recognition. Andrew Chess of the Whitehead Institute and MIT studied how neuron cells distinguish themselves from one another, finding that different cells in the brain make different types of Dscam protein, giving each cell a distinct molecular signature that functions as a kind of cellular identity marker.
The Fragmented Self: Neuroscientific Challenges to Unity
The notion of a unified, commanding self faces significant challenges from neuroscience. Studies on patients with severed corpus callosum (split-brain patients) conducted by Michael Gazzaniga demonstrate that each hemisphere can exercise will independently. In these experiments, when the word "WALK" was flashed to only the right hemisphere, patients would stand up and walk out of the room. When asked why they did so, they would confabulate reasons like "To get a Coke" rather than acknowledging the actual prompt.
Even more striking, when shown different images in each visual field (connecting to different hemispheres), patients would correctly identify both with their respective hands but then create a narrative to explain their seemingly contradictory choices.
For example, when pointing to both a chicken and a snow shovel, one patient explained,
"That's easy. The shovel is for cleaning up the chicken".
This suggests that our sense of unified decision-making may be an illusion, a post-hoc narrative constructed to explain behaviors initiated by different parts of the brain.
As clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks explains, "We have this deep intuition that there is a core... But neuroscience shows that there is no center in that brain where things do all come together". This absence of a central command headquarters challenges our intuitive sense of having a singular, unified self directing our actions.
Narrative Identity: How Stories Create Selves
The narrative view of identity proposes that who we are is fundamentally constructed through the stories we tell about ourselves. According to this perspective, "individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self that provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life". This narrative integrates our past experiences, present perceptions, and anticipated futures into a coherent whole.
The pattern-theory of self (PTS) advanced by Shaun Gallagher suggests that the self emerges from a cluster of interacting dimensions, with the narrative dimension playing a special role that "cuts across the other dimensions". Through our narratives, we engage in self-definition, integrate disparate experiences, make them intelligible, and ascribe personal meaning to them. These narratives aren't merely descriptive they're constitutive, actively shaping our sense of who we are.
Importantly, this narrative construction isn't confined to conscious self-reflection. Cognitive science suggests that narrative organization is a fundamental way our brains process information, with special "narrative modules" potentially creating autobiographical coherence automatically. As philosopher Katsunori Miyahara argues, "narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice" that emerges through our physical interactions with the world.
“The ecological self is deeply rooted in the materiality of our planet—its biodiversity, continents, and waters” Arne Naess / Stephan Harding
If we consider the trillions of cells that comprise a human body, each with its own patterns of activity and response, a compelling question emerges: how do these disparate entities coordinate to produce coherent behavior?
One answer might be that the narrative of selfhood serves as a coordination mechanism, a shared fiction that enables diverse biological systems to collaborate toward common goals.
Research into the emergence of information processing in biological systems suggests that even at the cellular level, primitive forms of information storage and processing may exist. As organisms become more complex, these capacities might evolve into more sophisticated forms of coordination through narrative structures.
From this perspective, consciousness isn't a commander issuing orders but rather an emergent property of cellular collaboration, a story that cells collectively generate and respond to. This story-making process isn't deliberate in the conventional sense but emerges from the interaction of countless biological processes, each responding to its local environment while contributing to collective behavior.
Illusions as Adaptive Tools
Rather than dismissing our sense of self as "merely" an illusion, we might recognize it as an adaptive tool, a useful fiction that enables complex coordination. As Daniel Lemire notes,
"Narratives are hacks to help us cope with the world".
We construct simplified stories to make sense of overwhelmingly complex phenomena, attributing outcomes to individual actors rather than understanding the intricate systems involved.
These narrative simplifications aren't necessarily defects but adaptations that make the world comprehensible and actionable. In a similar way, the narrative of selfhood might be an evolutionary adaptation that enables the effective coordination of trillions of cells without requiring conscious awareness of all the processes involved.
Collective narratives also function beyond the individual level, shaping group behavior by incorporating values and beliefs about social reality. These shared stories provide blueprints for collective norms, influencing both cooperation and conflict between groups. This suggests that narrative construction operates at multiple biological levels, from cellular coordination to social organization.
Implications for Identity and Agency
Viewing the self as a narrative construction of cellular collaboration has profound implications for how we understand identity, agency, and our relationship with larger ecological systems.
If our sense of unified selfhood is a useful fiction rather than an objective reality, personal identity becomes more fluid and constructed than traditionally conceived. This aligns with research showing that "making a 'self' is an active, ongoing process" rather than the discovery of a pre-existing essence. Our identities are continuously being written and revised through our interactions with the world.
Regarding agency, this perspective doesn't necessarily diminish our sense of choice but contextualizes it within biological and narrative frameworks. Our decisions emerge from complex interactions between cellular processes, environmental influences, and narrative structures. Agency might be understood not as command from a central self but as the emergent capacity of a biological system to respond coherently to its environment through narrative integration.
“Life is fundamentally one… The development of life on earth is an integrated process” Arne Naess
Finally, this view encourages us to recognize our embeddedness in larger ecological narratives. If our sense of self emerges from cellular collaboration, then we might similarly understand our relationship with other organisms and ecosystems as collaborative narratives operating at different scales. This could foster a more integrated understanding of human identity within biological systems rather than separate from them.
The narrative illusion of selfhood represents not a deception but a remarkable biological achievement, a coordination mechanism enabling trillions of cells to function as a coherent whole. By understanding consciousness as a story that cells tell themselves, we gain insight into both our biological nature and our narrative construction of reality.
This perspective invites us to hold our sense of unified selfhood more lightly, recognizing it as a useful but constructed narrative rather than an unchangeable essence. It suggests that identity is neither entirely fictional nor objectively fixed but emerges through the continuous interaction of biological processes and narrative integration.
The story of who we are continues to be written at every level of our being, from cellular responses to conscious self-reflection, creating the remarkable phenomenon we experience as selfhood.”
Do you think for a moment that such a linear, rational description has the slightest hope of describing reality?
Do we, as mankind, honestly believe that the foundation of existence can be grasped as a thought?
Can we imagine that the same people who mangle animals in experiments can fling open the doors to beautiful possibilities?
I used to think, and I used to believe that all the people are somehow more right and true than anything I might live, but then I began to notice something.
I started to realize that success was going along according to the message.
So I reported on my own, and it has caused several to run away screaming.
This then supposedly represents the pinnacle of evolution?
I wonder.
The understanding of Dr Reich and Mr Lucas are transformative in the extreme. I place my own vision into this context, and it expands. So, here in this piece are so many questions that are open ended.
I ask about The Flow.
I ask about poison.
I ask about damage.
The images presented are genuine. When one is presented with experiences, one can stuff them into fictional boxes. One can unsubscribe from them. One can work to understand them as the totality with which they are presented.
Does mankind actually create reality, or does mankind give fiction a power and an ability to override any natural way of perceiving?
I wonder.
I do know that thought does not have near the power granted to it. An ability to create a linear narrative, a rational image does not mean for one moment it is anything more than a fiction.
....also, the stock 'psychic stability' account has 'intuitive' weight, and default degree of potential truth, yet often remains little more than psych narrative and doesn't hold up well beneath light of many 'stabilising story's' emerging as explicitly destabilising elements, or at least in contexts of radical destabilzation that point, janus like, potentially both directions at once. Cursory review of psych report lit confirms this at least beyond doubt, and anything less ambiguous is, well, narrative preference.
I tend to the explanation of the bottom line to experience of any kind is the feature/condition/whatever of awareness.
Can awareness be seen as a nascent form of consciousness?
Does consciousness itself really mean an individual form of awareness, a unique but limited point of view?
I would like to think so, at least at times.
Regardless, awareness is not effected by thought or what is placed upon it. Unlike narratives awareness has no requirement of explanation whatsoever. In fact, there is really nothing that can be said about it at all, because once we start talking and thinking about it, we aren't talking about it at all, but on the experience or the qualities of that which participates in it.
Not the Awareness.
What is really cool to me is how much this acts just like The Way. The Flow. There is no defining it, no line of little boxes to put it in. At least, I've never found any.
So is this mysterious Way, this Tao, something that is participated with in accordance with what we name 'awareness?'
On a deep level this feels congruent.
So perhaps as a concept, awareness isn't even enough to really begin to include the scope, the sheer breadth of this living experience.
That's okay, in fact I find it awesome, because as Lao Tse wrote all those thousands of year, as soon as one starts talking about the Tao, one is no longer participating in the Tao.
Always interesting, but regularly ends with reflection on potential appropriation use-value of various ultima nth high falutin theologies/ metaphysics as bi-polar bargaining stage negotiation of vastly overlooked middle ground.
The Tao is The Flow. You can feel it flowing. You can feel the motion, but as soon as you start to think about it, the connection vanishes and one moves into a linear subject-object space.
I've been taken to the woodshed more than once over this, so I want to point out that rational subject-object linear space is very useful for doing lots of things. I have never claimed it isn't useful, and I'm not doing that now.
If you stay in this space, however, you will never know The Flow.
Dr. Reich said that Orgone was sentient in its pure state, and I have to agree that we aren't simply talking about batteries and stored chemical interactions that result in electrical discharge.
Thus the awareness, the flow certainly has its own will, and as I tried to describe in the vision of the tiny beings that sing inside, the entire cosmos and ourselves is the result of them.
If you consider this as a possibility, I believe it may help with your question; Incarnation, this entire manifestation is a living, breathing act of this flow. Therefore nothing here is a simulation, everything works according to sophisticated lattices of depth and dimension, weaving into and out of time and existence.
The weave is awareness, and all this means and more.
A few, very simple thoughts on this. Firstly, neuroscience cannot get to 'the very deepest levels' of anything. Poetry is nice, and persuasive in its way, but that aside, NS admits this. In terms of relatively crude chemical processes even, it's been stuck somewhere around the medula oblongata (??) a while now. Secondly, none of this is revising anything essential in 'tradition' - unless by 'tradition' we mean post-enlightment western 'rationality'. It's actually pretty much on trad point, only somewhere around half-way. Lastly, the fact that 'we' 'create narratives' is obvious to point of utter banality. Sorry...but just. Then there is the sticky psych-business-as-usual issue that the fact of people hallucinating ladybugs, unreality of ladybugs does not make. As cellular reality has its own 'narratives' - just as any common cold does. We also might ask what is meant by 'we', when this is precisely what is negated, and how 'our' 'narrative constucting' tendency appears most explicit where 'depersonalisation' is found. I'm not suggesting that offers any easy answer, but it is a rather suggestive elephant, and worth considering I think.
Unleash the Joker, the truth berserker incarnate.
For Years, They Got Away With It… Until The Hitmen took one shot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZPohYalv4
The question, and how I like to frame it...
Humanity is going to take the hit.
Will it be something truly horrific?
Or is it the Zen Masters' stick?
Yes.
!
Thanks for reading liking and commenting Stan.
It is the unheimliche , the grey unknown nebulous zone , that they think is normal . So much is missing . Powerful images . Thank you
I knew that this piece was going to ruffle feathers, and indeed since posting there have been a number of unsubscribes.
I find it interesting, there is this pressure to conform to a message, amongst the readership a kind of narrow expectation that demands to be fulfilled, and general lack of any desire to be anything but entertained.
This piece is not entertainment.
It is not written to meet any jaded expectations.
Nothing here conforms to any message other than one within the words.
The images are genuine.
The source is not comfortable.
The situation is not ambiguous.
Thank you for reading and liking, it is appreciated.
Maybe the African Grey can give an appropriate poetry recital for the Circle.
Whether it is a recital or a dirge is I suppose the question.
There is this condition, and I think its time for those who sense the change to have some communication, rather than just dealing with the ostrich mentality of the masses.
Most of mankind is mobilized to extremely primitive urges. This does carry consequences.
I did not understand your message in this piece.
Nature,
I do not understand greater mankind.
I just think it requires a tremendous effort to create fictions and then force them on the world as truth.
I try to actually keep in mind that these fictions span everything people are involved in, from the very notion of what makes a person to the hideous devastation forced on the world.
Let me ask you a question, if I may, do you think for a moment there could be a balance to life?
If the answer is at least a 'maybe' then do you think it is mankind that lives it?
Supposing your answer here is again, at least a 'maybe' then is it possible that all of this is internal?
Personal?
What does it take, if anything, to allow mankind to drop the fictions long enough to get even a glimpse of this reality?
Is it even possible?
I ask a lot of questions, but apparently they need to be presented as hammers, or explosives for people to notice them.
Mike, see if our cells are cocreating fiction for our identity:
“ You Are a Story Cells Tell Themselves
How biology shapes selfhood as a story
DIDIER HOPE
APR 06, 2025
Our sense of being a unified, coherent self, the feeling of "I" may be one of the most compelling and persistent illusions we experience.
Recent advances in neuroscience, cellular biology, and philosophy suggest something remarkable: what we experience as a continuous, commanding consciousness might instead be a narrative construction a story that trillions of cells collaboratively generate to coordinate their activities.
This post explores how our perception of selfhood emerges from biological processes, examining the scientific evidence that challenges traditional notions of unified identity and proposes a new framework for understanding consciousness as a collaborative narrative rather than a central command center.
The Cellular Foundations of Perception and Response
At the most fundamental level, even single-celled organisms demonstrate surprising capabilities for sensing and responding to their environment, the basic building blocks of what eventually becomes consciousness in complex organisms.
Research from the University of California, San Francisco revealed that simple yeast cells possess sensory mechanisms that can be manipulated through carefully engineered illusions, causing them to misperceive their environment and ultimately self-destruct.
"The ability to perceive and respond to the environment is a basic attribute of all living organisms, from the greatest to the smallest,"
noted Wendell Lim, senior author of this study. "And so is the susceptibility to misperception. It doesn't matter if the illusion is based on molecular sensors within a single cell or neurons in the brain". This finding suggests that the capacity for environmental interpretation, and misinterpretation is fundamental to life itself.
At the cellular level, identity emerges through gene expression patterns that instruct "a neuron to be a neuron, and a white cell to be a white cell". These molecular processes enable cells to distinguish themselves from others, a primitive form of self/non-self recognition. Andrew Chess of the Whitehead Institute and MIT studied how neuron cells distinguish themselves from one another, finding that different cells in the brain make different types of Dscam protein, giving each cell a distinct molecular signature that functions as a kind of cellular identity marker.
The Fragmented Self: Neuroscientific Challenges to Unity
The notion of a unified, commanding self faces significant challenges from neuroscience. Studies on patients with severed corpus callosum (split-brain patients) conducted by Michael Gazzaniga demonstrate that each hemisphere can exercise will independently. In these experiments, when the word "WALK" was flashed to only the right hemisphere, patients would stand up and walk out of the room. When asked why they did so, they would confabulate reasons like "To get a Coke" rather than acknowledging the actual prompt.
Even more striking, when shown different images in each visual field (connecting to different hemispheres), patients would correctly identify both with their respective hands but then create a narrative to explain their seemingly contradictory choices.
For example, when pointing to both a chicken and a snow shovel, one patient explained,
"That's easy. The shovel is for cleaning up the chicken".
This suggests that our sense of unified decision-making may be an illusion, a post-hoc narrative constructed to explain behaviors initiated by different parts of the brain.
As clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks explains, "We have this deep intuition that there is a core... But neuroscience shows that there is no center in that brain where things do all come together". This absence of a central command headquarters challenges our intuitive sense of having a singular, unified self directing our actions.
Narrative Identity: How Stories Create Selves
The narrative view of identity proposes that who we are is fundamentally constructed through the stories we tell about ourselves. According to this perspective, "individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self that provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life". This narrative integrates our past experiences, present perceptions, and anticipated futures into a coherent whole.
The pattern-theory of self (PTS) advanced by Shaun Gallagher suggests that the self emerges from a cluster of interacting dimensions, with the narrative dimension playing a special role that "cuts across the other dimensions". Through our narratives, we engage in self-definition, integrate disparate experiences, make them intelligible, and ascribe personal meaning to them. These narratives aren't merely descriptive they're constitutive, actively shaping our sense of who we are.
Importantly, this narrative construction isn't confined to conscious self-reflection. Cognitive science suggests that narrative organization is a fundamental way our brains process information, with special "narrative modules" potentially creating autobiographical coherence automatically. As philosopher Katsunori Miyahara argues, "narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice" that emerges through our physical interactions with the world.
“The ecological self is deeply rooted in the materiality of our planet—its biodiversity, continents, and waters” Arne Naess / Stephan Harding
…The Self as Emergent Coordination
If we consider the trillions of cells that comprise a human body, each with its own patterns of activity and response, a compelling question emerges: how do these disparate entities coordinate to produce coherent behavior?
One answer might be that the narrative of selfhood serves as a coordination mechanism, a shared fiction that enables diverse biological systems to collaborate toward common goals.
Research into the emergence of information processing in biological systems suggests that even at the cellular level, primitive forms of information storage and processing may exist. As organisms become more complex, these capacities might evolve into more sophisticated forms of coordination through narrative structures.
From this perspective, consciousness isn't a commander issuing orders but rather an emergent property of cellular collaboration, a story that cells collectively generate and respond to. This story-making process isn't deliberate in the conventional sense but emerges from the interaction of countless biological processes, each responding to its local environment while contributing to collective behavior.
Illusions as Adaptive Tools
Rather than dismissing our sense of self as "merely" an illusion, we might recognize it as an adaptive tool, a useful fiction that enables complex coordination. As Daniel Lemire notes,
"Narratives are hacks to help us cope with the world".
We construct simplified stories to make sense of overwhelmingly complex phenomena, attributing outcomes to individual actors rather than understanding the intricate systems involved.
These narrative simplifications aren't necessarily defects but adaptations that make the world comprehensible and actionable. In a similar way, the narrative of selfhood might be an evolutionary adaptation that enables the effective coordination of trillions of cells without requiring conscious awareness of all the processes involved.
Collective narratives also function beyond the individual level, shaping group behavior by incorporating values and beliefs about social reality. These shared stories provide blueprints for collective norms, influencing both cooperation and conflict between groups. This suggests that narrative construction operates at multiple biological levels, from cellular coordination to social organization.
Implications for Identity and Agency
Viewing the self as a narrative construction of cellular collaboration has profound implications for how we understand identity, agency, and our relationship with larger ecological systems.
If our sense of unified selfhood is a useful fiction rather than an objective reality, personal identity becomes more fluid and constructed than traditionally conceived. This aligns with research showing that "making a 'self' is an active, ongoing process" rather than the discovery of a pre-existing essence. Our identities are continuously being written and revised through our interactions with the world.
Regarding agency, this perspective doesn't necessarily diminish our sense of choice but contextualizes it within biological and narrative frameworks. Our decisions emerge from complex interactions between cellular processes, environmental influences, and narrative structures. Agency might be understood not as command from a central self but as the emergent capacity of a biological system to respond coherently to its environment through narrative integration.
“Life is fundamentally one… The development of life on earth is an integrated process” Arne Naess
Finally, this view encourages us to recognize our embeddedness in larger ecological narratives. If our sense of self emerges from cellular collaboration, then we might similarly understand our relationship with other organisms and ecosystems as collaborative narratives operating at different scales. This could foster a more integrated understanding of human identity within biological systems rather than separate from them.
The narrative illusion of selfhood represents not a deception but a remarkable biological achievement, a coordination mechanism enabling trillions of cells to function as a coherent whole. By understanding consciousness as a story that cells tell themselves, we gain insight into both our biological nature and our narrative construction of reality.
This perspective invites us to hold our sense of unified selfhood more lightly, recognizing it as a useful but constructed narrative rather than an unchangeable essence. It suggests that identity is neither entirely fictional nor objectively fixed but emerges through the continuous interaction of biological processes and narrative integration.
The story of who we are continues to be written at every level of our being, from cellular responses to conscious self-reflection, creating the remarkable phenomenon we experience as selfhood.”
Nature,
Do you think for a moment that such a linear, rational description has the slightest hope of describing reality?
Do we, as mankind, honestly believe that the foundation of existence can be grasped as a thought?
Can we imagine that the same people who mangle animals in experiments can fling open the doors to beautiful possibilities?
I used to think, and I used to believe that all the people are somehow more right and true than anything I might live, but then I began to notice something.
I started to realize that success was going along according to the message.
So I reported on my own, and it has caused several to run away screaming.
This then supposedly represents the pinnacle of evolution?
I wonder.
The understanding of Dr Reich and Mr Lucas are transformative in the extreme. I place my own vision into this context, and it expands. So, here in this piece are so many questions that are open ended.
I ask about The Flow.
I ask about poison.
I ask about damage.
The images presented are genuine. When one is presented with experiences, one can stuff them into fictional boxes. One can unsubscribe from them. One can work to understand them as the totality with which they are presented.
Does mankind actually create reality, or does mankind give fiction a power and an ability to override any natural way of perceiving?
I wonder.
I do know that thought does not have near the power granted to it. An ability to create a linear narrative, a rational image does not mean for one moment it is anything more than a fiction.
....also, the stock 'psychic stability' account has 'intuitive' weight, and default degree of potential truth, yet often remains little more than psych narrative and doesn't hold up well beneath light of many 'stabilising story's' emerging as explicitly destabilising elements, or at least in contexts of radical destabilzation that point, janus like, potentially both directions at once. Cursory review of psych report lit confirms this at least beyond doubt, and anything less ambiguous is, well, narrative preference.
I tend to the explanation of the bottom line to experience of any kind is the feature/condition/whatever of awareness.
Can awareness be seen as a nascent form of consciousness?
Does consciousness itself really mean an individual form of awareness, a unique but limited point of view?
I would like to think so, at least at times.
Regardless, awareness is not effected by thought or what is placed upon it. Unlike narratives awareness has no requirement of explanation whatsoever. In fact, there is really nothing that can be said about it at all, because once we start talking and thinking about it, we aren't talking about it at all, but on the experience or the qualities of that which participates in it.
Not the Awareness.
What is really cool to me is how much this acts just like The Way. The Flow. There is no defining it, no line of little boxes to put it in. At least, I've never found any.
So is this mysterious Way, this Tao, something that is participated with in accordance with what we name 'awareness?'
On a deep level this feels congruent.
So perhaps as a concept, awareness isn't even enough to really begin to include the scope, the sheer breadth of this living experience.
That's okay, in fact I find it awesome, because as Lao Tse wrote all those thousands of year, as soon as one starts talking about the Tao, one is no longer participating in the Tao.
I get this, and I luv it.
Always interesting, but regularly ends with reflection on potential appropriation use-value of various ultima nth high falutin theologies/ metaphysics as bi-polar bargaining stage negotiation of vastly overlooked middle ground.
Which is why The Flow has to be experienced, and connot be talked about.
Secretly, tho, we all luv to talk about it.
Love the Tao ☯️❕
To me the WAY is motion.
And no word can define the Tao.
Awareness is presumably non judgmental.
But I wonder 💭 if it feels or has senses?
I don’t think it would feel if it is completely without preference.
Awareness watches but doesn’t participate, I assume?
The Tao is The Flow. You can feel it flowing. You can feel the motion, but as soon as you start to think about it, the connection vanishes and one moves into a linear subject-object space.
I've been taken to the woodshed more than once over this, so I want to point out that rational subject-object linear space is very useful for doing lots of things. I have never claimed it isn't useful, and I'm not doing that now.
If you stay in this space, however, you will never know The Flow.
Dr. Reich said that Orgone was sentient in its pure state, and I have to agree that we aren't simply talking about batteries and stored chemical interactions that result in electrical discharge.
Thus the awareness, the flow certainly has its own will, and as I tried to describe in the vision of the tiny beings that sing inside, the entire cosmos and ourselves is the result of them.
If you consider this as a possibility, I believe it may help with your question; Incarnation, this entire manifestation is a living, breathing act of this flow. Therefore nothing here is a simulation, everything works according to sophisticated lattices of depth and dimension, weaving into and out of time and existence.
The weave is awareness, and all this means and more.
A few, very simple thoughts on this. Firstly, neuroscience cannot get to 'the very deepest levels' of anything. Poetry is nice, and persuasive in its way, but that aside, NS admits this. In terms of relatively crude chemical processes even, it's been stuck somewhere around the medula oblongata (??) a while now. Secondly, none of this is revising anything essential in 'tradition' - unless by 'tradition' we mean post-enlightment western 'rationality'. It's actually pretty much on trad point, only somewhere around half-way. Lastly, the fact that 'we' 'create narratives' is obvious to point of utter banality. Sorry...but just. Then there is the sticky psych-business-as-usual issue that the fact of people hallucinating ladybugs, unreality of ladybugs does not make. As cellular reality has its own 'narratives' - just as any common cold does. We also might ask what is meant by 'we', when this is precisely what is negated, and how 'our' 'narrative constucting' tendency appears most explicit where 'depersonalisation' is found. I'm not suggesting that offers any easy answer, but it is a rather suggestive elephant, and worth considering I think.
I have very real reservations concerning the sciences, and their claims, not to mention their goals and their behavior.
Perhaps if we had more poets, dealing with profundities rather than paradigms of control and torture we would have a far better world to live in.