The first time we
went cloud jumping
the visionary mountain goat grieved
over my butterflies
But any time we wrote a fluid road we
became one
And every time we mouthed a stony mountain we
rejoiced again
And again
And again
People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy--at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker. (134)
-- Daniel H. Pink
A Whole New Mind
Pink has, here, hit upon the crux of metaphor as a wellspring of creativity -- the ability to "understand one thing in terms of something else" (139). Note the authors we admire in this blog:
It is always the metaphor maker who shows us a new reality -- an "imaginative rationality" (139) -- whether it's Pink Floyd "Learning to Fly" or a tone poem such as Brian Eno's "Stars."
Pink quotes Twyla Tharp, who "encourages people to boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because 'in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ'" (139).
More importantly, metaphor is the basis of empathy, and, just as it allows us to understand others in terms of ourselves, it becomes the very foundation of consciousness, for "the more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves" (140).
Q: What is I?
A: A metaphor. The question itself is metaphorical.
But the creative I is something more...
The creative I
is a metaphor maker.
Well, I'm not sure we needed a study from Johns Hopkins to show that peyote encourages a mystic experience; nevertheless, this series by Barbara Bradley Hagerty was a thought-provoking listen this week: The God Chemical: Brain Chemistry And Mysticism.
Wu Li
As patterns of organic energy
we think we move
Wave functions interacting
may be closer to the truth
Dancing with the shadows
on the wall of the cave
You get used to being excited
by another wave
But wave functions today
interact less lastingly
The fourth dimension is dynamic
and so are we
So many opportunities
for us to explore
You left me outside the domain
when you found a new door
Wu Li
The ripples just crossed my mind again
I remember being in love
My God, how we rippled the universe
forever somewhere in love
When once two wave functions have met
in harmonic convergence
They set up ripples that describe
that cosmic event
Throughout the universe our love
is transmitted
As the fourth dimension echoes
forever unlimited
Wu Li
The ripples just crossed my mind again
I remember being in love
My God, how we rippled the universe
forever somewhere in love
Now and then the wave function
that is me
Finds itself at a junction in
fourth dimensionality
An echoing valley
in the landscape of time
Where I'm swept by ripples of passion
that you and I defined
Wu Li
The ripples just crossed my mind again
I remember being in love
My God, how we rippled the universe
forever somewhere in love
I'm a dualist -- can't help it, always have been -- no matter how eloquently Hofstadter tells me that I am a strange loop. And I just don't buy the bit about reincarnation. I've studied reincarnation from every angle, and it has simply never made sense to me.
Until now, that is.
I recently opened David Darling's 1996 book titled Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation prepared to defeat any and all of his arguments in support of reincarnation, but then he goes and blindsides me with this:
We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (35-36)
This makes perfect sense from a Campbellian perspective, and from there Darling continues to chip away at every wall of incredulity. He goes on to show how the brain is a memory device, nothing more, and certainly not the source of consciousness as Hofstadter would contend. It is, in fact, a filter that limits our awareness of the singular consciousness that is the universe at large. Moreover, the brain seems to have a built-in storyteller that puts everything (i.e., the insignificant amount of data actually processed and stored by the brain) into a "single coherent narrative." With a nod to Hua-Yen Buddhism and Indra's Net of Gems, Darling advances into a discussion of Zen and quantum mechanics to show how upon death we will each undergo secular reincarnation into a new and previously unknown example of fragmented consciousness, each with a new story to tell.
If all the world's a stage, then the universe must be a multiplex theatre.
Maybe God's just a film buff.
