What makes you, you? Is it how you think of yourself, how others think of you, or something else entirely?

DOES A WATERFALL KNOW IT IS A WATERFALL?

DOES A WATERFALL KNOW IT IS A WATERFALL?

[quote=jbark]DOES A WATERFALL KNOW IT IS A WATERFALL?

Of course not! "Waterfall" is a name man made with the use of his conscious/linguistic mind. In nature, nothing has a name (nor is nature conscious to even be aware of its own existence). Man gives things names, and then orders them into classes and categories. Identity (or the idea of the self) is a concept man, himself, created. IMO, identity is merely the illusion of language, which makes us think we are separate from everything else around us.

Who are you?

JBark, nice answer, but there is a hidden plurality in what you said but its actually just a byproduct of our language. You notice how by even mentioning 'I' in that sentence it immediately makes an unnecessary distinction from the experience itself. In your statement, there is still an 'I' that is having an experience, thus a dualism. This is hardwired into the very way we write and speak and adds so much confusion to trying to convey this concept to the lay person.

Terence McKenna used to talk a lot about language and at first I didn't really understand what the big deal about it was. Then I sort of got it. Notice how you can't even phrase a grammatically correct sentence without using such pronouns? It's like a trick hidden in our very language that promotes a seperatist view of the world. We can only evolve as fast as our language evolves (Terence quote), and with our language being entrenched in nouns and verbs referring to a subject interacting with an object, it becomes nearly impossible to even speak on this concept and be understood.

I believe that's a really big reason why it's so hard to understand, and why those in antiquity chose to convey the concept with riddles and proverbs. You notice how there are these buddhist sayings like 'anyone who says they are enlightened is not enlightened'. It's paradoxical, but only when you try to talk about it. It's impossible to say your enlightened because being enlightened means you know there is no I to be enlightened! It's all in the language.

Nature isn't conscious? Nature isn't aware of its own existence? Think about this one a bit harder as you are claiming that you are neither conscious nor aware of your own existence!

Even if you are speaking of a 'nature' disconnected from man, you still cannot make this assertion with any validity as you cannot possibly know the degree to which nature is/is not conscious.

SUDDENLY A FLASH. A revelation :

The 2 dimensional primary coloured cartoon visions of DMT and now mushrooms, the word as signifiers, « Friday, Marshmallow, Spaghetti, Lego, Ketchup, Saturday » and even letters themselves - children’s visions, childish words. Even the struggling with the phonetics of these words (as in this report) is consistent with a child making aural connections between words in an endeavour to understand their pronunciation. Perhaps the substances were stripping us down, bringing us the route to the root and the root of the route…

Rooty Route Root, Routey tout TOUTE! (in french, the path (route) to all (toute))!

Perhaps we are reliving the terror and ecstasy of infancy, tapping into the prelingual, prerational mind mass, back at the moment where we learned our first words, and made visual sense of our surroundings and started understanding the divine geometry that surrounds : up, down, forward back – colour, shape, texture - the construction of reality, through words, of all our sensory input – the moment where our minds slide from the memory of the primordial soup through Reptilia and Hominoidea to supersede instinct with words and symbols that compartmentalize our environment, and become us. WE ARE WORDS. I believe Mckenna said that, copping it from the new testament :

« In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.». JOHN 1 :1

« Au commencement était le Verbe et le Verbe était tourné vers Dieu,
et le Verbe était Dieu. » JEAN 1 :1

(some french translations use « Parole » (word), while others use « verbe » : verb or action. God is the word, but the word in action – in TIME.

(here there should be Hebrew text that I am unable to paste...see attached image) GENESIS 1 :1

(a word-for-word translation might be "in-beginning created God."

We are language, the building blocks of consciousness, of the Id, of the ego, of the superego, of I – OF EVERYTHING. Except darkness. Darkness, or non-being, « comprehended it not ».

Here’s a hypothesis :

When we consume these substances in quantity, it divides our brains bicamerally, disabling most of the higher functions of the cerebral cortex and separating them from the functioning glands of the the endocrine system : the pituitary (regulating homeostasis), the hypothalamus (synthesizing and secreting neurohormones, it controls body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and circadian cycles) and the thalamus (its function includes relaying sensation, spatial sense and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, along with the regulation of consciousness, sleep and alertness) – and yes, the pineal gland (that creates melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns). While retaining some higher cognitive faculties, we are working largely from the reptilian consciousness AND the prelingual, presymbol infant mind.

AND IT FEELS DIVINE.

From the perspective of the remnants of the adult mind, we see the construction, the artifice, the « building blocks» as I refer to them, and we ask the question WHO BUILT THIS and by process of elimination, in the absence of anything or anyone else, we assume that WE must have built it ourselves. Built our Self : the machine of self that self transforms. From the perspective of the beginning, the root of consciousness, it appears, by default, that we are the maker, the creator, the one and only god. This sense of divinity is derived, perhaps, from the bicameral division of the mind into a consciousness that processes and one that communicates.

A window to the childmind or a doorway to god?

Christopher Dewdney is a Canadian poet who wrote an essay called « the house of the living language » that I read in university but have been unable to subsequently locate. I will recount how I recollect it, however flawed that recollection be :

In his early twenties Christopher Dewdney was a left wing hippy type who got into a rather serious VW bus accident with his soulmate, a woman who was quite seriously injured as a result. It was discovered that while she had suffered relatively minimal brain damage for the head trauma she endured, her language center was nevertheless somehow wiped completely clean. All memories and knowledge and emotions entirely intact, just no linguistic way to express them or to understand anyone else – she was an adult who no longer understood language! (variations of this phenomena sometimes occur after severe strokes).

During her convalescence, Christopher Dewdney, little injured in the accident, stayed at her bedside and began reteaching her the english language; progress was slow and often frustrating, but they eventually made some headway and she began slowly to regain her capacity for understanding language and using it to communicate. But a strange change had taken hold of her that first manifested in small things : before the accident, she had loved chocolate ice cream, but now, vanilla was her favourite flavour. Christopher began noticing dozens of these little changes, that slowly added up to larger ones : as time went on, she fell out of love with her soul-mate, returned to school to study law, and if I remember correctly, went on to lead the defense counsel of a prominent right wing politician. A total about face : from lovestruck hippy to hardnose conservative lawyer!

Christopher Dewdney, quite shell-shocked I imagine, had a theory to explain this radical change in her. When her language center was wiped clean he believed that, essentially, so was she! She became a blank slate and the order in which she relearnt words and associated different symbols with objects and phrases not only changed minor characteristics about her, but rather changed who she was fundamentally, reconstructing her character from the bottom up! SHE WAS LANGUAGE. The building blocks of HER were WORDS.

She had been unmade and then made anew. The flesh remained, but the spirit altered.

So : We are language. God is language. Language is a group of symbols. We are symbols employing symbols to create and understand reality, to comprehend God, to behold ourselves.

BUT :

The how, the who - the WHY? God needed to feel imperfection, so he created. He created language, with all its failings, which in turn created him. He created duality, a binary system, a code of opposing forces through which we understand our world : hotcold, blackwhite, lovehate, lostfound, youme. In a world of infinite notches between extremes, we grasp at words to condense reality into comprehensible packets, symbols taking the place of the infinite (a symbol itself) in order to understand our environment : 1 & 0, binary, duality, mind/body. Absence, presence. The body is 1, the mind 0. The code is inescapable, for it is US.

« Information is difference that makes a difference », Gregory Bateson. WE ARE INFORMATION.

Paraphrasing and building on R.A. Wilson : Negative entropy is information – given that entropy is the measure of the inertness, lack of coherence or « deadness » of a system, negative entropy is the measure of the « liveliness », coherence or informational content of a system. (Prometheus Rising, p.112)

SO THEN :

The sum total of an infinite negative entropic system is god, is reality, is the universe; and the primary binary (oxymoron intended!) nature of that universe is the struggle, the conflict between entropy and negative entropy – life/death, being/not being, time/stasis.

Given the binary nature of the universe, is it surprising that at the root of it all is paradox? For is paradox not the irreconcilable co-existence of opposites? 1,0, off, on, live, die.

I am codified. I am a number. I am pairs. And much more - I am pair ‘o docks : one dock to land and another to take flight.

I AM : 100100011101010000100010010100010010010…

The body is 1, the mind 0. A PAIR of DOCKS.

In the beginning there was 0. Then 1 was born into the world : 1n the end, there was the w0rd. And we saw that

1t was g00d.