clawing its way to the surface

[hydrokid]

Reading The Tao of Physics I'm pulled away wondering if our discontent with shared reality is the reason so many are trapped into a dreamy existence, benign to the world's crumbling. Or am I the one crumbling inside? Sometimes I wonder how so many can be blind to what is happening around us, we are creating this. Through our choice's and

Comments

[spongo]

Thank you, Andrew, for a wealth of food for thought in today's entry.

My first comment is that you refer repeatedly to "we" and "our" but I would suggest that if you are going to bring matters down to the quantum level you should probably just stick with "I" and "my". You can not be held responsible for the blindness around you, but may yourself make the changes necessary in your own life and in your own thoughts and behavior and in your own interactions to be that butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing storms in South America (or however that goes).

At the end of the day, even if we are lying in bed with our lover, we are alone in this world, trapped within the restrictions of our individual mental capacities, the only escape from our inner voice being the wide open expanse of the dreamstate. I, too, worry about society as a whole and the entropical downward spiral of destruction upon which so many seem bent. But there is so much room for improvement with just me, the individual, the one person in my life upon whom I might truly be able to have an effect.

Perhaps one can enter Divine Darkness metaphorically, understanding or even embracing all the darkness that surrounds us and consuming it until all that remains is light. We have the power to choose how we perceive the world; we can put on our shit-colored glasses or we strain our eyes and challenge our mental capacities by seeking out single pixels of hope in the vast sea of all that is negative and depressing about our existence.

You talk about positive and negative truths as if they are mirror reflections of one another, but I would propose that they coexist within almost everything we examine (or fail to examine). Returning to Capra, which I'll admit I have not read, at the atomic level we speak in terms of positive and negative acting upon each other to produce atomic activity - electrons whirring about while protons stand their ground. In quantum theory we recognize the paradox of particles and waves and we accept Schroedinger's conclusions. The Tao does not pit positive against negative; it explains how positive and negative co-exist in the world and act upon each other to produce the whole:

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

Yesterday we engaged in a discussion about so-called bisexuality. From a Taoist perspective, I would suggest that we are all bisexuals in that once you have defined one side of the coin (homosexuality) you have implied the other (heterosexuality), making up the whole.

You suggest that you do not have the ability to see the flip side of darkness without outside help. In this we agree. Every day we are offered help in our journey through interaction with those around us and with our environment. We must attune ourselves to the signs that will help guide us to the place we want to be.

We are still the ones in charge of our existence and ultimately our destiny - we choose between the co-existing positive and negative.

Finally, I wholeheartedly endorse your sentiment that there is more to life than personal enjoyment. In Spanish, enjoyment is "diversión", which if we did not know better we would think meant "diversion" or something that sets us off the track of where we are supposed to be.

[hydrokid]

When mentioning the two sides of one truth, which if you take my pixels example, could be seen as a multiple number of truths in any given situation but they are constantly pitted together creating an image of dual existence. What I was trying to convey was my desire to reach that 'whole picture' without constantly seeing the pixels. If you see one positive you should at the same moment see the negative or to see white to black, or dark to light. Its a constant theme with our lack of knowledge that we dualize to explain the forces around us. Yet, the more 'Truth' we discover the picture becomes unimaginably larger and more chaotic, so I fear that most people turn a blind eye to the downward spiral and choose instead a dreamy existence. They choose not to understand. In a way that is a sort of wisdom I guess because through ignorance the individual is free to give themselves away to flights of fancy or imagined dramas repeatedly until they are so finely integrated they could never imagine the downward spiral.

You're right. I shouldn't mention 'they' or 'us' but when thinking about a larger connectivity I'm forced to include everyone, because what wrongs or rights we put upon others effects us all eventually.

From a Taoist perspective the mere thought of sexuality is pitting forces of desires against one another, turning into dramas and fodder for the mind. So I wouldn't go as far to include sexuality in there.