As I’ve been spending my days on my driving adventures like a green minecraft villager, I have been captivated by clouds. I make an effort to go early so I am out of the city by sunrise. It has come to amaze me that the most incredible natural wonder, one that puts even the grand canyon to shame, you can just walk outside every morning and see. And every morning it’s different! Every morning a new, breathtaking painting made of light. If you can get your eyes and your brain to really LOOK, to be present with what is in front of you and not just the idea “oh its the sky, its some clouds” you start to really feel how massive these things are, you can feel how incredibly vast and empty the space around them is. Even more so than any giant natural wonder I’ve been to, I feel viscerally how I am this tiny ant crawling around in this tiny little spot on this big rock. How limited, how fleeting I am. I look up and say “….what the fuck is going on? Why is it like this? The actual real reality…is this?” As I was having that usual morning existential crashout today, I heard in my mind “Ok, they had me until space is fake. I know space is real. That’s where God lives.” The glib sarcasm now rang with fateful irony.
Here is another drawing from an adventure, although this is from a photo I found on google – I just happened to be chilling at a picnic table in the arboretum. I want to do more visual research for my comic, and fortunately I live in the perfect place to do that. The photo was from tombstone, and hopefully I can go this weekend.
I’ve been reading a book on Buddhism -. I recently decided that if philosophy- particularly writing about it – is going to be a hobby, I need to be reading a lot more. Two of my biggest bugbears are intellectual laziness, and hypocrisy. I would be a hypocrite to keep yapping on this blog without listening to the collective wisdom of thousands of years of the 0.001% smartest humans to exist, when I cringe at the spiritual/motivational speaker type guys in youtube and tiktok. They wear the aesthetics of philosophy more than they use it effectively.
These – well, these are reflections that came directly from my reading. It’s still yapping, but it’s also how I process new philosophical ideas.
Imagine the universe is a tapestry, one of those huge intricate chinese ones. You are a small collection of threads that make up a tiny figure – but where do “you” begin and end? Your silhouette is implied by the way the thread is woven under and over, an illusion of form, but the threads you physically consist of stretch far beyond that, some to the edge of the tapestry itself. You begin to see the way in which you are both individuated and one – the psychological concept of self, created by the mind, stemming from the meaning making and storytelling humans have always done. You can see the part you play in this complex scene, in Shakespeare’s metaphor, “all the world’s a stage.” but that is a social and psychological construction. Look at the atoms “you” are made of. Where do they begin and end? When you breath in, when does that oxygen become part of you, and not just inside you? When the cells of your skin start to die and sluff off, when are they no longer a part of that organ? If these points sound pendantic, you are right, but it an important and telling way. Establishing the specific physical boundary of body does not matter, exactly because its role in our self concept is primarily symbolic. Just like in the tapestry, there is a physical makeup we can point to but the actual boundary is conceptual.
Something interesting to consider – the atheists/materialists should probably be the biggest champions of the empty self. We know our cells replace every 7 years – that includes also your brain cells. Your entire mind is only a tiny maelstrom of neurochemicals and electric impulses. If we are only material, where is the “self”, that allegedly persistent entity? It can’t be our body, or our stream of consciousness – thoughts and feelings come and go, and emergent patterns that would hint at “personality” or “proclivity” are post hoc. That’s not even considering how those things change dramatically as you age, so what are we clinging to, that ACTUALLY exists?
I would really challenge the materialist to define the self within their framework, without trying to hide what is functionally the concept of the “soul” as “consciousness” – they are not the same. Materially speaking, trying to pin down a self is like saying the bunny you see in the cloud is intrinsic to that cloud. Asscribing meaning to that shape is subjective, and it’s gone in an instant anyway. Just like our life, i suppose.
>>robyns_ramblings 