Interdivinity

This is something I wrote last summer, somewhat under the influence of Philip K. Dick.

Interdivinity

§ 1: It is infinite. It is real.

§2: It (the whole, the superorganism, the bioverse) is God.

§3: One cannot explain what it is by means of a neat numbered series of simple propositions.

§4: Some things cannot be proved. This doesn't mean they are not true.

§5: Can I “prove” that I would drown if I were to attach concrete blocks of a certain weight (say 50kg) to my feet with chains and allow myself to sink into deep water when no-one was there to intervene​? “Proving” this hypothesis would be unhelpful.

§6: “Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for – to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.” (Aldous Huxley)

§7: Spiders' webs are not perfect fly-traps. If they were, all the flies in an area would be caught and the spiders, after an initial glut, would die out. Human symbol-systems are not perfect maps of reality. Like the webs, they work just about well enough – they make human life possible, but they are not the truth. To know the truth would be like the spider trapping all the flies. Impossible, but also too much and self-destructive. If you see God, you die.

§8: “Absolute reality is chaos and anarchy, from our relative human standpoint; and our poets are our ultimate corps of defence.” John Fowles

§9: “A map can never be completely accurate, otherwise it would be the same as the ground it covers.” (Joseph O'Connor).

§10: If you tried to make this type of map, what would you make it out of? Where would you put it? How would you represent yourself, the map-maker, within it? How would you represent the map itself? With another infinite map? Oh dear!

§11: If you prefer to think of it as in some way separate from God (as a creation), then perhaps you see it it as God's mind-map. But it is an infinite web. A map which is identical with the territory (which is confusing – see §10). I don't find this dualism helps me, but it is one way to trap flies and will work fine for lots of people.

§12: “The human brain works best with information presented not in the form of isolated data bits but in patterns of meaningful connection, in a community of data, as it were.” (Parker J. Palmer)

§13: “[...] the growth of learning [is] the growth of a flexible network of ideas and knowledge – the cognitive structure. It suggests that when something new is learned, the idea links into the network wherever the learner considers that it fits and this might be in more than one place. Fitting new ideas into the cognitive structure and thereby making greater sense of the meaning is the process of coming to know something.” (Jennifer Moon)

§14: “The fundamental nature of reality is relationships, not things.” (Peter Senge)

§15: “Looking deeper I see the interconnectedness of all things.” (Buddha).

§16: Since it is infinite: we find it tricky to see the interconnectedness of all things. Perhaps it is sufficient to see the interconnectedness of a significant number of things and to try to accept this (not just intellectually, but with the whole of awareness).

§17: The human brain, learning, the universe, DNA, life, reality, God, it – these things are similar (in the mathematical sense: think similar triangles).

§18: “David Bohm has suggested that physical reality, much like the human genome, is made up of an invisible web of information, an incredibly complex community of coded messages, a holistic underlying implicate order whose information unfolds into the explicate order of particular fields and particles. One analogy ... is a holographic photograph, of which every part has three-dimensional information about the whole object photographed. If you cut the hologram into small pieces, you can unfold the whole image by illuminating any piece of it with laser light.” (Parker J. Palmer)

§19: “Fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information.” (Philip K. Dick)

§20: It is not merely “information”; love is mixed into every part of it.

§21: Holographic love in To the Lighthouse: “What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?” (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Whatever piece of it you look at closely enough reveals itself to be “Hers indisputably”.

§22: You illuminate a hologram with laser light to see the whole in the fragment. If you look at it in ordinary light, the fragment will just look like a damaged part of something. You feel it might once have been part of a beautiful image, but now it just looks like rubbish.

§23: It is only visible as it is when looked at illuminated by love. Illuminated by other types of light, it looks the broken, damaged remains of something that was not a very good idea in the first place.

Solitary Vice

I haven't been on this blog for a seriously long time. I have done some writing and some reading since I last posted. Actually, make that a lot of reading and a little writing.
Anyway ... I have been reading a really good book called "The Solitary Vice" by Mikita Brottman (I'll post more about this later). I've also been reading quite a bit of Nicholson Baker recently. I re-read "The Fermata" (which is excellent). I restarted and finished "The Mezzanine" which is really good, but not quite so much fun (that was why I gave up last time, I suppose). And I have just read "Double Fold" - his book about the destruction of books in libraries as a result of programs of microfilming etc. For me, that's quite a "spree". I normally like to read a bit more chaotically than that. Well, maybe it isn't chaotic. In fact I have a bit of a theory. I call it "Reading Trajectories", although (now I think about it again) I should perhaps have called it "reading webs". Here it is anyway (it was part of a document I wrote at work (a school) about learning).

4. Making Connections – Reading (Learning?) Trajectories

Being able to make links between different areas of knowledge or expertise is an essential aspect of learning. For me this manifests itself mainly through the patterns I see (or deliberately create) in my reading. There is often a link between the book I am currently reading and something I have previously read. This “trajectory” also extends beyond the current book to something I will read in the future. On the simplest level I may be reading a book by an author I’ve read before and whose other books I intend to read. Such simple “trajectories” also include reading within a particular genre or subject area. But the patterns we create in our reading can be more complex and interesting.

For example: I recently read the travel book Chasing Che (Patrick Symmes). In this book he visits Pumalin Park – a wilderness reserve set up by a radical environmentalist. This fired my interest and I am now reading Deep Ecology (Bill Devall and George Sessions); this was a book that inspired the founder of Pumalin Park (I found this out on the Pumalin website). In the course of reading about ecology I heard about a novel A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (I’ve read one of his before) which is about an aging radical environmentalist. The web of interconnections goes further. Deep Ecology mentions the poems of Robinson Jeffers, someone I already liked; reading the book has led me to read more of his work. My interest in radical groups has lead me to find out about Earth First! and to get a journal called Do or Die! which features articles about EF! and other groups. I also want to read some of the writings of Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring was very influential in the early days of the environmental movement. All of this also reminded me of some of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially “Binsey Poplars”, which (perhaps surprisingly) has much in common with the perspective of Earth First!ers. This strand in my learning was greatly encouraged by my visit to The Eden Project in the summer. It’s linked in my mind with other important (for me) cultural objects such as the film Silent Running and the song “Woodstock”.

Clearly, the connections ramify on and on.

I think that reading the Brottman book has just "reminded" me that I do write about reading quite often. For instance, some of the other posts here are relevant (Reader's Block, Book Crossing, Unputdownable, Writers, Preface and Prefaces).

Well, it feels good to have written something on here again. Maybe I will try to add some more "content".