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~inquiry

Okay. It seems we're agreeing about what's seemingly happening, but not about some of the words that might best describe it.

One says "It's *this*!" (where 'this' is a set of one or more words). Another says, "No, it's *that*!" (where 'that' is a different set of one or more words), when (to me) the less confusing way to proceed is to perpetually remind ourselves of what you said here:

Ultimately none of the abstractions we hold in
our head about things that we perceive as
reality are real, if all that is real is the
atomic interactions between them, but I'm
suspecting even those atomic interactions are
not real, indeed they are less real as they
are abstractions of our minds, which are
themselves just emergent properties of neural
synapses, which are just an idea that we
abstract in our brains and....


	proceeds to eat his own tail*

by saying, instead, "It's best modeled/represented by *this*!" or "No, it's best modeled/represented by *that*!", because then we're acknowledging that we're working with

re-presentations/models.

Instead, we say "it's", i.e. "it *IS*", which gives the impression we're working with the actual referents, i.e. the alleged "real thing". But mind can't have/hold an "real thing". Shit, it can't even but have/hold/grasp *itself*.

So, oh yeah, the "*proceeds to eat his own tail*", the infinite recursion of symbols when you want to get down to what might be called the "bare metal" of "reality" using a tool that can't jump over its own re-presentational knees, as it were....

There's a certain "shut up and just be" to the stuff I've come to cherish. Any/all attempts to describe lead to becoming mesmerized-unto-deluded by the proverbial cave wall shadows also known as symbols/models/re-presentations taken to be the "bare metal".

(I'm vaguely remembering reading someone in the (now) distant past who emphasized the importance of letting go of the word 'is' as much as possible as a means of escaping the afore-alluded-to illusion, but I can't remember who it was.)

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~detritus wrote (thread):

There's a certain "shut up and just be" to the stuff I've come to cherish.

Yeah this is more or less the ideal solution. And yet I am tangled in the discoursive interpretation of the world. At every step, though, I am reminded of the limited value of this practice, and yet, I have to keep myself entertained.

Especially in the current dominating narrative, which is exclusively rationalist, it is hard to keep still among all the conflicting theorizations of what reality is supposed to be, and the value of anything that is not hard materialistic science, which will always, in regards to practical considerations and also philosophical ponderings, rear it's head and put into question one's own interpretation of the world. Is there a god, or in indeed money THE god?

I am aware that I a eventually going to die without having grasped the truth, at least not by rationalizing means. But I like to juggle symbols about, and in such juggling one is buffetted by systems of symbols vying for one's attention. I can't commit to one and only one, yet I cannot be open to everything lest I run the risk of not profundizing at all. There is value in yielding a tool and learning to use it to the best possible means, which then means learning the philosophy behind it, and being able to hold it against the criticism of the western mind.

I hope the day finds you well, ~bartender, a tall espresso and whatever inq's having.