thenatureofmind

Beneath Cold Mountain

By Michael Hannon

For Joe Stroud

Sixty percent of the universe’s energy is missing.
Science can’t find it. The creek roars all night.

Yesterday, Coyote lay dead on the roadside,
Her corpse silvering in the overcast.
But you and I both know Coyote’s an Immortal,
And waits for us at the foot of Cold Mountain.

In the high country that we love, trails are steep.
We climb each mile, breath by breath,
And at the threshold of pain, bliss overtakes us.

This life on earth, who can say what it is?
On cold Mountain, Coyote crosses the summit snow
And leaves no trace.

The Mechanics of Mind - II

To understand how we understand the world it is necessary to look deeper into the process of perception. If we create a model whereby the world of objects is cognized, we must postulate something which cognizes (re-cognizes) objects. This is what we call the subject. It is the subject which observes, and the objects which are observed. Since I am what is observing it then follows that I am the subject. But what happens when I stand in front of a mirror and recognize what I see as myself? How can I be both the subject and the object? Could it be that what I "identify" with is not actually what I am? Or if I am both subject and object, am I all the objects I observe? In the book "The Tenth Man" (See Non-Fiction sidebar) author Wei Wu Wei says this:

What-we-are cannot be comprehended because there cannot be any comprehender apart from what-we-are to comprehend what-we-are. If a comprehender could comprehend itself there would be a subject comprehender and it's object comprehended, and the comprehending subject would again become an object, the object of a comprehender. A perpetual regression is then reached, as always.

Must not what-we-are, then be that perpetual regression, the perpetual regression of subject becoming the object of a subject ad infinitum? Dialectically, dualistically, phenomenally, it must surely be so, for phenomenon is the appearance of noumenon which thereby itself becomes a conceptual appearance, or phenomenon, of noumenon, ad infinitum. Zenith has a Nadir, which must have a Zenith, and so with all opposites and all complementaries for ever and ever.

The point of all this is that if we are ever going to be able to see the patterns that have created the "world as it is", we need to challenge our very mechanism of perception and our assumptions about what we observe including our assumptions about ourselves as the observers. One of my favorite analogies is that we are like someone who "knows" how to drive and who gets in the car, adjusts the seat, puts his hands on the rear view mirror and drives off down the road. Sooner or later he comes to a curve in the road and smacks into the guard rail. He then gets up, dusts himself off, maybe tells himself how tough life is, gets back in the car, puts his hands on the rear view mirror and continues driving down the road, until he comes to the next curve and repeats the process. So this is the point of this blog, to explore how we can get our hands on the wheel so that we can deal with the curves a little more skillfully and hopefully we can begin to address the fact that as a species, we are approaching a large curve in the road with sheer drops on either side and our hands are on the rear view mirror.

View With A Grain of Sand

by Wislawa Szymborska

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand,
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it,
It doesn't feel itself seen or touched,
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and it's shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes,
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

The Mechanics of Mind - I

How do we know what we know and what relation does what we know have to external reality?

We live in a world of objects. If we examine the visual sensory apparatus, we find that light strikes objects in the external world and the reflected light enters our eyes through the cornea and is focused on the retina. The retina consists of specialized nerve endings called rods and cones. When struck by light, the rods and cones fire, sending a nerve impulse along a strand of the optic nerve which ends up in the cerebral cortex. The optic nerve consists of millions of strands of nerve fibers and from the perspective of the brain, it receives a high volume of what would look to be a random series of nerve firings across a vast array of nerve fibers. It is the job of the cerebral cortex to sort this apparently random data out and make sense of it.

How does this happen? As far as I have been able to determine, it is through a rather elaborate hierarchy of patterns stored in the cerebral cortex. When a pattern matches the data, the process we call recognition occurs, the data makes sense. Everything that we recognize in the external world goes through this process. I won't go into how the brain "boots up", how it develops the patterns, but that process and the understanding of it is the essense of learning. Not only is everything we know in the world a product of this process, but even our very perception of space and time and our ability to navagate through 3 dimensional space and organize our thinking in a temporal context are a result of organizing data based on the matching of pre-existing patterns with the data, yielding recognition.

This may all seem to be rather straight forward, but we have to also take into account that this thing that we usually refer to as "myself" also appears in the world and also must itself be represented by a hierarchy of patterns built up over the course of a lifetime. In fact it can be demonstrated that without a pattern that creates a basic division of all patterns into 2 distinct divisions: self and other, the functioning of all other patterns will not yield functional recognition. Self awareness is an early and significant event in child development.

The thing that must be grasped here is that we "assume" that the world is an objective reality, ie. if the tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, the tree still falls non-the-less. The problem with this assumption is that it is just that, an assumption. The independent existence of the so called external world, apart from the mind which perceives it cannot be demonstrated. Why? Simply because any experiment designed to prove the independent existence of the external world is dependent on the mind and it's process of pattern matching. Because of this there can be no certain way to determine what in the recognized object has been contributed by the data and what has been contributed by the patterns.

What we do to get around this problem is to set up a system of agreement which allocates "reality" to what we can agree on. Does the Earth go around the Sun? Or does the Sun go around the Earth? To most people the answer is obvious, but it is the very obviousness of the answer that reveals the bias in our thinking. To the people who lived before Galileo, the answer was also obvious, so obvious in fact that they were willing to kill people for suggesting otherwise. But is our perception of the solar system and 3 dimensional space the end of understanding and growth in understanding? One day we will look back at the 20th/21st century understanding of how space is structured, with planets revolving around Suns and laugh at our failure to perceive the most obvious. Remember that the new understanding is always a simplification. Our models become more and more complex over time until a new one is created that eliminates the complexities through a new and more deep understanding. There is no end to this process. There is no place we can stand and say: "This is it, no more change is possible."

And the human mind is an integral part of the process because it is the reality, consensual and otherwise that arises out of the functioning of the physical brain. Mind and it's perception of reality is a non physical construct that exists in a totally separate domain from the physical world but the two mutually influence each other creating civilization as we know it. If we would change the world, we need to start at home, working on the model. We need some "bunker busters" to soften up our understanding of what is.

The Daily News

I look at the news and wonder what could the protagonists be thinking. Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Sadam Hussein. Are they just caught up in a conceptual universe that they confuse with the real one and by that confusion forget that they have a choice? Are they like most of the earth's inhabitants, just robots programmed to act according to pre-programmed cerebral constructs that dictate actions within a narrowly prescribed set of choices?

What is the program?

Who is the programmer?

How did it get this way?

What do you do when you wake up?