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Brian Wachter
Nov 6, 2019, 1:54:35 PM11/6/19
to Metaphysical Speculations
There is so much brooding and killing of God and wrong-headed abstraction in philosophy, even at its deepest level, ontology. Now a cool alpine breeze is blowing!
Idealism seems like the last piece of the puzzle to me. It's helping me reintegrate fractured psychic parts. It solves many problems in classical thinking. It may even free us from the tyranny of life's biggest bummer; the notion we all end in silence and absence, stripped of our most purposeful experience: experience itself.
Of course, now that I've read about the partitioning of consciousness into alters, I want to find a way to break through the final barrier and experience M@L. But maybe I already did 35 years ago.
As a teen, I had a genius for a best friend. Everything from his IQ score to his broad and deep imagination made me feel my friend was indeed special. We loved to discuss ontological factors, like general relativity. One story in particular, as addressed by Carl Sagan in his masterpiece "Cosmos," held our flighty attention for months. Black holes sounded incredible, but it was one layer deeper that we found our best thought fodder.
The singularity.
Even the laws of nature bow down at the throne of infinite compression, that wild mystery behind the event horizon, the astronomical singularity. Cosmologists lacking in breadth of attention couldn't conceive of an explanation for this trickster. Hawking himself said Cthulhu was just as likely as anything else to emerge from a "naked" singularity--one exposed somehow by the lack of a Schwarzschild radius.
We were deep in conversation one night and the singularity was our obsession. What if we are on the inside of a singularity in this universe? Supposing we are, were is the center of a contraption that of itself is a center?
Even the laws of nature bow down at the throne of infinite compression, that wild mystery behind the event horizon, the astronomical singularity. Cosmologists lacking in breadth of attention couldn't conceive of an explanation for this trickster. Hawking himself said Cthulhu was just as likely as anything else to emerge from a "naked" singularity--one exposed somehow by the lack of a Schwarzschild radius.
We were deep in conversation one night and the singularity was our obsession. What if we are on the inside of a singularity in this universe? Supposing we are, were is the center of a contraption that of itself is a center?
An idea came to me. A model. What if space were a set of concentric spheres, each infinitely thin and contacting its two neighbors, regressing to the singularity and expanding ad infinitum?
At that moment it came to me. It being the flashing nature of the cosmos. My friend experienced it as well. It, that is. What was It? The phrase "It goes back on itself" occurred to me. Later: "All men can know." There followed days of incomprehensible conversation, ripples of the revelation. I went to the library to try to figure out if anything like this had ever happened to anyone else. Basically, I found the human story begins and ends here, for souls like Siddhartha Gautama.
Weeks passed, and I still hadn't succeeded in passing my knowledge to anyone. My high school teachers were useless, largely struck dumb by the questions I asked. I took refuge among my friends, who at least sympathized by assuring me what I had found had value, even if I could not trade on that value.
For BK, consciousness is the most abundant feature of reality; for me, it seems the most rare.
At that moment it came to me. It being the flashing nature of the cosmos. My friend experienced it as well. It, that is. What was It? The phrase "It goes back on itself" occurred to me. Later: "All men can know." There followed days of incomprehensible conversation, ripples of the revelation. I went to the library to try to figure out if anything like this had ever happened to anyone else. Basically, I found the human story begins and ends here, for souls like Siddhartha Gautama.
Weeks passed, and I still hadn't succeeded in passing my knowledge to anyone. My high school teachers were useless, largely struck dumb by the questions I asked. I took refuge among my friends, who at least sympathized by assuring me what I had found had value, even if I could not trade on that value.
For BK, consciousness is the most abundant feature of reality; for me, it seems the most rare.
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