From: Omega (omega@pacific.net)
Date: Thu Jan 30 1997 - 18:00:41 MST
Eric Watt Forste wrote:
> Lately, in the last year or two, I have been practicing the trick
> of shifting internal perspective in order to be able better to
> understand whatever words I happen to be reading or listening to
> at that moment. I have found that this trick, when worked at
> deliberately, seems to rather dramatically increase my learning
> rate.
>
> Anyway, one of the things that happened to me as a result of this
> practice is that where I used to find people who talked about God
> incomprehensible 90% of the time, now I only find them incomprehensible
> 10% of the time (the low rate is because I successfully avoid
> communicative contact with the most obnoxious of the God-talkers).
This subject of adjusting comprehensibility by shifting internal
perspective precisely describes the kind of phenomena that would be
expected from a cognitive process that operates by shifting through
Fourier spaces in search of localized representations as I described
in my response to Lyle last night. I find it an amazing synchroni-
city that you would post something now that exemplifies this so well.
Check out my post if you haven't yet!
> And my previous (limited) understanding of some of
> the stuff emanating from Taoism and Zen Buddhism fits in pretty
> well with my more recent understanding of traditional Western
> mysticism. I suppose that mysticism could be defined as "the wisdom
> that you have to figure out for yourself"
Perhaps the one thing we most have to teach ourselves is the
meta-memetic skill of how to shift through Fourier spaces in
search of the comprehensibility needed for any given moment.
> Of course, anti-God-talk such as Nietzsche's THE ANTICHRIST still
> makes just as much sense to me as it used to also. I guess I'm
> advancing *from* my philosophical commitments, as Bartley might
> say. The less I am seduced away from the-reality-that's-in-front-of-my-nose
> by teasing, tempting abstractions, the better my life seems to get.
> I think abstractions make good tools but poor masters.
That opposites like this can both be comprehensible is a no-brainer
for a brain that operates by shifting though Fourier spaces. What
is intuitively obvious in one space, would in a sufficiently dif-
ferent space not simply be wrong, but complete nonsense. But by
doing this in a general way, we none the less have at least some
ability to bounce back and forth between these spaces.
-- In the Ecstatic Service of Life -- Omega
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:06 MST