Echoes, or How to Cultivate A Free Mind

"Men do not mirror themselves in running water--they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things." ~Chuang Tzu.

It's a strange world we live in. The more time I spend thinking about these questions, these things that I fill this blog with musings about, the less I know. Every idea has its flaw or failure. Which, in a world that turns more towards fundamentalism and failure every day, just goes to show the amount of thinking most people do, the scale to which our world is dominated by ideas.

Thoughts echo. As I hike in the backlands this becomes quite clear. Out there things begin to quiet down, since nature doesn't speak with language, which thoughts require. Out on a trail for weeks or even months, you begin to really realize this. But, say while hiking I listen to my mp3 player for an hour, for motivation or entertainment; after hearing the songs, I will have them bouncing around my head for hours, sometimes days.  So one must wonder what the constant bombardment of television, radio (talk and music), newspapers, advertising, school, and preachers have on the mind. Even normal socialization has its impact. When do any of us ever have a chance to truly think our own thoughts, free of influence, free of echoes?

Of course, this echoing keeps us in touch. If a person spent decades alone only to later return to society, he'd likely be so out of touch as to be considered insane (or enlightened; same thing as far as the dominant culture is concerned). We trade ideas, realities actually, with this mutual exchange of mental echoes. We keep similar thoughts bouncing around in one another's heads, so we maintain contact with a "common" reality. They call this consensus reality, and yeah, it's not all bad; humans are a social species, and this is necessary. But all things in balance, right?

It's easy to forget this truth, about the echoes. We are too immersed in them to notice. You get home from a whole day at school or work and flip on the TV, or surf the internet, or read a book, or go to church, constantly bombarded with other people's beliefs, some scripted or manufactured reality imposed from without. Programming. Dogma. Education. Indoctrination. Conformity. You never give yourself a break, never get to think your own thoughts, to have time enough away from the media blitz to really learn what it is you truly believe.

I get out to Nature in large part to let the echoes fade. It's not so much that I go out there for answers; I've tried that road, and the truth is, I no longer believe there are any answers to the questions we ask. Not the big questions, about the meaning of life, God, what we're supposed to be doing. The question "why" is a constant agony, a cruel joke. Even the smaller, more personal questions often seem unanswerable. No, in nature there are no answers, per se, but there is clarity. As the babbling of culture stills, as one's own mind quiets down, I recieve the best result that I can hope for. I subsume into my immediate experience; my former troubled thoughts quiet amid the truth of the world around me.

When I get away from the greater culture, away from its whispering, letting it bleed out of me as I walk in the wilds, I find myself thinking about the things around me, wondering about them; like why there's just that one strip of pines running up the canyon wall that is otherwise mostly scrub vegetation, why there and not anywhere else? Sometimes its just running commentary, like normal, but based on the real surroundings and events, not mental fictions; maybe musing about my weariness, the heat, or wondering when my group will stop to eat. Sometimes I get philosophical, and though I know I carry culture within me, the influence of language and years of immersion in our modern world, I feel that without any immediate or recent influence, only the more strongly held beliefs and ideas bubble up. Well, maybe that's not true, who knows. But with all day on my hands, I can spend time with them, examine them, follow the thread of their logic out, see if I really agree.

Now, I want to say that there's no reason we have to live this way, that we don't have to take a month off in the mountains to be free of the bullshit; but I'm not sure I can. Sadly, taking an hour or two a day isn't enough, the echoes take too long to fade. It's a start, and there is a benefit even with that, but nothing like a real vacation from it all. Like, I think it's interesting, that the less you read, the greater an impact a book has on you. That's my hypothesis, anyway. But it makes intuitive sense, because you are giving your mind time to process it, rather than jumping right into another book. If the echoes are like ripples, you aren't throwing pebbles, shovelful after shovelful, into the pool, but letting the ripples of that one pebble roll out and have their clear effect.

The best we can do, while living in the system, is to tune out as much as we can. Throw out your television. That is job one-- the television is becoming our government, and that is unacceptable. Then, read less. Turn off the radio. Avoid advertising, that is, real-life psychological warfare, at all costs. Increase the time each day spent without cultural input: whether in meditation, writing, running, playing with your kids or your dog, cooking, getting rid of clutter, working out, home improvement, inventing things, painting, gardening, making crafts for fun or for sale, or any of a hundred other things you could name.

Ideas are great, but often over-indulged in. So although one might say that meditation or quiet time is the key, and I do agree that it's useful and recommended, even just woodcarving or something might work. You have to be there with the wood, not off in la-la land thinking about the B.S. you watched on TV earlier, or the guy babbling on the radio you have on in the background. Otherwise, through lack of attention, you're going to fuck it all up. You might notice my list didn't really involve social activities. That was on purpose: we need to disconnect a bit. People are culture carriers, and the point here is to get to know ourselves. But since you are a culture carrier too, I don't know that this will work without extended time away.

Maybe I should have just posted the Chuang Tzu quote, rather than making all these ripples.

(This post is first in a series of three, Click Here for the second post)

Operating System

Cultures act like operating systems. A baby is born ready to have one "programmed" to his mind, through assimilation. But it leaves an individual with a certain way of percieving the world, perhaps unalterable. Perception of colors is not constant across cultures, as far as how we divide up the color spectrum. And more deeply still, the world to a medieval individuual would have literally looked and felt completely different. Theirs was a spirit centered world, it was at base a spiritual place. For us, it is material (no matter what religion we may profess). Who knows what differences there are between that subjective experience and ours? It is impossible to know or even understand. We are trapped in our cultural framework.

Perhaps going crazy is like shedding the culture, but it seems that insanity is more about having a culture of one. You're still trapped within a framework, however skewed it is from "normal." Perhaps enlightenment is the true shedding. I can't speak on that personally, but it seems like a possibility. Maybe it's not possible to do. Without an operating system, maybe nothing makes any sense; probably we would create our own if not exposed to a culture, raised by wolves or what have you.

But even so, why must we be tied to it? My main issue, as I spoke about previously with regard to "seeing the gorilla" is that it seems we percieve things in such a narrow way. We are trained to focus on certain things, and taught to ignore others. Perhaps this explains the paranormal; it's just stuff we're ignoring in our constructs and is thus unexplainable.

I'm interested in removing the filter. I assume this is what's meant my mind expansion. To use the equivalent of "splatter vision" used in tracking, where you integrate peripheral vision into sight, seeing the whole field of vision rather than just the focal center. I heard Don Juan (through the writings of Carlos Castenada) thought that this is actually the only route to higher or unified consciousness (I don't remember his term for it). Don't know about that, but it makes sense in a way. Isn't meditation about taking the focus off the thoughts and being aware of the whole experience? Isn't that the same sort of thing as splatter vision?

The really interesting thing to me is just that: the whole experience. Of course, we are limited by our bodies, by our senses; to truly experience what is real in totality is probably beyond us, while we live. The human eye can only see certain wavelengths, for example. Like culture itself, we choose some things, and thus cannot include others.

But to consider what the world looks like in every wavelength all at once... Reality must "look" far different from our experience of it. To think of it is enough to blow your mind.

It's Possible

I once read somewhere that it's possible the human brain is now about as complex as it can get before it becomes too complex and thus becomes unstable. I have to wonder if perhaps it already is unstable. The way we behave is certainly out of balance with nature; we're burning down our own home, and laughing. So maybe the entire species is already insane.

It’s kind of funny to think about.

Insanity

Here is a whole forest of trees before me,
rhythmically rocking back and forth
like retards and lunatics
while the mosses lay draped,
catatonic, at their feet.

This rain is endless ignorance falling
dumb from an empty-headed sky,
babbling nonsense ideas into the mind
of the brook, a stream of drool
from the slack mouth of the clouds.

Meanwhile the rocks, morons all,
stare blankly out at me from lichen-crusted
beds they haven't moved from in years, as if asking:
"Well, what were YOU going to do?"