Escape Velocity

While reading Meaning in Absurdity (Kastrup, 2012), I was struck by various images. Let me say first that the book was a short and powerful overture into what a world may look like without aristotelian logic.

• A world without the law of bivalence, without blacks or whites but rather consisting of comparisons between things lighter and darker and all of the grayness that exists between.
• Where trues must be proven true demonstrably and not merely by negating falsities: there would be no inferencing and instead an utter directness to knowledge by way of experience.

That worlds can be made, because all is mind and intrinsically creative. In the large sense that minds can imagine any world and make it real (real in so far as the imagined thing affects the mind). In the small sense that we have individuated minds with a seeming finite reach.

But what of the images mentioned? How severely constructed and constrained is the world modern society lives in, that we in aggregate create and conform to? Is there a hierarchy of minds doing the design and construction? Is it a deliberated congregation of instrumenting turtles all the way down and up? How necessarily life unfolds its morphogenesises, various ways of life, seeming persistent procedures for co-inhabitance. How we cannot escape these forks, nor would we want to, what we can do is navigate more forks.

I cannot live without that which I am born into, yet I must give it up… this cannot be all that there is.

Dean Radin’s advice for young persons wanting to study parapsychology is to establish yourself in a conventional field, attaining tenure, or better yet establishing stable financial means and good repute. That’s the first step, to play the game we didn’t know we signed up for, were born into. Graduating from this is one of a few preconditions. It’s required that you are not ultimately beholden to a company, or shareholders (i.e. rather they must not be beholden to outside egoic interests, instead dancing and negotiating with them and playing many hands at many tables). This does not mean absolute, libertarian freedom: what is a life without measures of duty and accountability? This also necessitates shedding the often burdening aspects of fame and politic. The most free of these folk are unseen, and there are likely a non-trivial number of these.

So we want to achieve escape velocity, because we are born into some definite, bounded thing and being bounded while having hints of a larger realm produces a kind of desire that is more than mere curiosity. Into society, law, government; all the productive norms we learn and progressively take as rule when unexamined. We are given technical infrastructure and social ones too like family, friends, peers, various supporters (mentors, counselors, teachers, patrons). We can live happy, satisfied lives if we abide by these rules. Common criminals abide the rules by reacting against them (instead of obviating any concept of rules or authority completely, wholly, utterly) and falling into some cycle or label of “criminal”. Steady, predictable, controllable lives…

Till’ one encounters the strange, the anomalous, the out of character, AND chooses to examine it and is puzzled why others don’t pay any attention to it. Now you have a problem. Something doesn’t fit into your idea of the world. It doesn’t fit into any worldview of any person that you know. Here comes the paradigm shift, the potential for takeoff: Choose whether to pursue the anomaly (try and resolve it) or absolve yourself of it (ignore it, forget it). If you choose to resolve, then you have achieved liftoff and there’s no turning back, you’ve given existence to it. If you absolve, it would be as if it never existed.

A quote from a movie I’d recently seen, Fatima, 2020, preceding end credits:

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.

– credited to Einstein though surely this sentiment has expressed before

I was impacted by how much faith the people in the film of that time had. Despite their suffering, perhaps because of it. Without suffering of that kind and magnitude we are never exhausted enough to surrender to what is. Who am I? Who are we modern people? What is life, this universe?

This comes at a point in my life where I encounter increasing synchronicities and moving dreams.