On Love

When I admit that I don't believe in god, or fate, or souls, people often ask me if I believe in "true love." It seems like a jump, but I can see where it comes from.

The part of the phrase that bothers me is the "true" part. Tolkein wrote, in a letter:

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

Sometimes people freak out and say "you're not a romantic, then."

If romanticism is defined by the insistence that there is one person out there who I can love for the rest of my life, then I am most expressly not a romantic. However, I don't believe that's what romanticism is, nor do I believe that love is about finding someone and being together forever.

Some people insist that love is instant, that when it comes it is like a bolt of lightening, and it strikes you and you are changed forever.

To me, love is like a flower. You plant it with someone that you care about, someone that you like and think is interesting, then you cultivate it, through experiences and understandings and discoveries about one another. Love is not something we receive, it is something we build through compassion and mutual affection.

It's Valentine's Day, which is an opportunity to cultivate love, if you have it, or simply enjoy the prospect (like I do). Enjoy the day.

Rediscovering this Project

I loved working on this, and since I resurrected the book that bore, initially at least, the same name, I'm going to start this back up again.

If you want to follow the day to day stuff, RUFreeYet is always there.

For the long stuff, the stuff I love and care about deeply, this is where it's at.

The Un-Wisdom of Hindsight

In the first chapter of Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale," he talks about the unwisdom of hindsight, the mistake that we can make by looking backwards at the evolution of species.

Dawkins is one of my favorite evolutionary scientists, partly because he's a good writer, but mostly because he makes it easy for me, a highschool student hanging around a 3.0 gpa (and a humanities person), to understand.

To paraphrase what Dawkins writes, when we look backwards it's easy to make the mistake that we are the final step, that we are the ultimate and the finale.

Dawkins wants, above all else, to make clear that we, the human species homo sapiens sapiens, are not the final step in the evolution of species. As we find out every day, we aren't the ultimate answer to everything (life's more fun not living in Pleasantville anyway).

When I write about the individual evolution (how the course of events throughout our lives impacts who we are) it's easy to spend most of my time looking backwards. The past offers the most concrete examples, because I can point to things that happened to me or people I know or things I've read and say "Hey, that is the cause of this, which caused this" and then explain the inevitable domino effect that leads up to the Now.

It is important to remember, though, that everything that has happened to us is not definite, is not final. Who we are is not the final answer. A species, like an individual, evolves for a long time, constantly changing through the generations until it dies. We live like that moment to moment.

The unwisdom of hindsight is something that is important, because it's not something that we can allow ourselves to get tied up in. It's really easy to trip over things, and it's much easier and when we spend our time looking backwards. Reflection is good, it's healthy. It helps us to glean the significance of some moments. Like anything, though, it's best in small quantities, because there are times when we need to look forward, so that we can plan ahead, and there are times we need to look at our own feet, so we don't trip.

Sometimes, we can learn as much from looking forward as we can from looking back.

Changes

Every once and a while I’ll go off into the realm of explaining something like chance to try and get a point across or to illustrate something (like Predestination or Social Energy), but I want people to understand that isn’t the be all and the end all.

I’m really trying to write about the Individual Evolution, Darwin’s principles of change applied to us as individuals living our lives every day.

Each person (in fact, I would go so far as to say every living thing) goes through changes over the course of its natural life. All Darwin was saying was that species change over time, that was his original idea and I don’t think that anyone can find a scientific basis for disputing it (at least without being mocked in the scientific community).

All I’m trying to say is that people aren’t static, they change over the course of their lives (I don’t think there’s any dispute there), both physically and their mental capacities. When I was starting out, the Individual Evolution was just that idea, and I was trying to explore that idea and exactly what it told us about who we, as people, are and where we are going. I thought that might be helpful.

What I came to, and what I am continuing to find more and more true each day, is that we, as people, are defined every moment of our lives. There is a Buddhist philosophy that “I was not the same person I was a year ago” and all that I have done is shrunken the time intervals. After all, while the change from who I was then to who I am now may be gradual, my dynamics are constantly changing, and so I am not the exact same person I was a moment ago. Even in the amount of time it has taken me to type the last letter and the period in this sentence, I will be becoming a different person.

Most of my dynamics as a person will remain the same, but this is just Darwin’s natural selection in my life as an individual. My whole being won’t completely change in an instant. It’s pretty rare that a person is redefined in a heartbeat.

Think of time like a river. A river doesn’t cut a canyon in a moment, it starts as a stream, but over time it completely changes the landscape, it completely redefines the space around it. Think of that slowly forming canyon like a habit or a personality trait. Something, some event, can habit that changes the flow of that water and changes that habit or trait. (monotony strengthens these habits and traits) That is our mutation, if monotony sinks back in afterwards we will become more and more rooted in that person that we became, and as time passes the stream flows deeper and becomes much harder to move.

We are that landscape, with our characteristics constantly deepening, occasionally being shifted by cataclysm. Every moment that the river flows over us our personality traits become a little bit more defined and we change, whether it’s for the better I don’t think we can ever really know. There are certainly positives and negatives to every situation.

In any circumstance, we become who we are over time, constantly moving towards who we will be when we die.

Ideas and Where They Come From

Ideas all come from some place. They are effects of events that have happened in our lives. That is one of the fundamental principles that I'm trying to explain.

Thich Nhat Hahn writes in "Being Peace" about how things are made up of non-things, that is to say that each tree is made up of bark, sap and leaves (superficially, not even beginning to dive into the molecular complications of something like that).

Ideas come from things that are not, at least initially, even parts of the idea (just like the way trees draw in carbon from the air). These things start as experiences that are eventually expressed through "I," the individual.

When you think something, or say something or write something down, you might not always think about where the ideas come from. I definitely don't think actively about everything that leads me to come to conclusions. That's difficult and takes alot of time, and by the time I've done it, I might have forgotten what I was going to say or write in the first place. I just want to recognize that things come from places besides me first, that I am not really creating anything, just changing it and linking it together, synthesizing it, in a sense.

Think about it like this: How do you get 7?

3 + 4 = 7

7 is made up of 3 and 4, which, as Thich Nhat Hahn said, are non-7 elements, but these things start to get really complicated when you think that 7 isn't just limited to 3 and 4.

2 + 5 = 7

1 + 6 = 7

Okay, but what about when we don't just think about it in terms of synthesizing 2 experiences?

1 + 2 + 3 +1 = 7

2 + 2 + 2 + 1 = 7

3 + 3 + 1 = 7

What if we don't just limit ourselves by thinking about it in terms of addition?

2 x 3 + 1 = 7

4 x 2 - 1 = 7

49 / 7 = 7

24 / 6 + 3 = 7

There are an infinite number of ways to get to 7, because there are an infinite number of places to start and there are a great deal of operations that we can use to change those numbers to get them to 7.

Like I said, it's pretty easy for me to forget what an idea was once I start considering where it came from.

What if, though, we think of ourselves like an idea?

I have said before that we are evolving beings, constantly changing as a result of our moment to moment experiments. What I mean is that where we started is undefinable now (because that first figure existed long before we were born), and operations continue to change it, so, like an idea, we are pushed through a series of operations to change who we are.

7 is a relatively simple idea, but as an individual it seems ridiculous to use something as simple as 7 as a metaphor for who we are, right?

Even a 5 or 6 digit number like 90,790 (my birthday, just as an example) seems like an indequate example. It seems like it would have to be something like pi to 50 places. That's fine, we are complex organisms and to use a base 10 system to explain our existence is probably inadequate anyway.

That seemed like a tangent to me, but I hope it was helpful anyway. I just wanted to offer you chance to see how our ideas (as simple as 7 and as complicated as an emotion like anger or disdain or pleasure) come from our experiences, but I think it's important that we come from those experiences too, that we are a product of things that happen to us and our experiences are an expression of that.

Hope that was helpful for getting a little handle on the idea I've been throwing around (for lack of a more wild verb) in the last few posts).

Defining I

It seems strange to a lot of people the way that I define "I." I, as far as I'm concerned, is short for Individual or, more shortly, the individual that is me, the person that I am.

I guess that to me "I" is a simple concept, because it is a part of me, it is me. A lot of people find it very difficult to define exactly what it means to call myself "I" or to define the profound meaning of a phrase like "I am."

The simplest way that I define "I" as the individual is based on an idea that was instilled in my as a little boy.

When I was younger than I am (I hesitate to say "young" because words like that are so relative I would like to relate them to something) I told that the individual is a sum, the individual is constructed out of "stuff."

My 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Melton, would kill me if she saw me use that word, but because the essence of "stuff-ness" (a term I used to use in my philosophy class) was so difficult for me to explain I would limit myself by speaking blandly about it.

Now that I know what that "stuff" is, I think it's really important for us to recognize. As human beings, we are defined scientifically as a floating pack of neurons and electrons, buzzing around inside of a skull, but what we really are, beyond the simple physical scientific explanation is "I."

The creation of "I" started at the beginning of the universe, because the earliest events caused the effects which would become the causes which would become the effects which would become the causes (and so on, and so on, and so on) until we reach the present day. This tangled web of cause and effect is what leads us to the Now.

However, it is my understanding that everything from the beginning had an impact on us, because it led up to the events that led our parents together, but it also led our grandparents together and our great grandparents together (and so on, and so on, and so on). These events are what resulted in the creation of this physical definition of the I, to the scientific definition of the "stuff-ness" that makes us up.

I think, however, that to limit who we are (to limit our definition of ourselves, as "I") to a strictly physical and neurological definition is both ridiculous, because it gives us no real insight into the nature of social application and applicable theories in regard to the human condition, and unfulfilling, for the same reason.

When I consider what it is to be "me", what it is to be "I" it makes the most sense to say that I am what I am, as a physical being with neurological bits and pieces buzzing around inside of a skull, but even that definition is the result of a series of events that has led up to my existence.

What it means to define myself as "I" is to recognize that I am the result of thousands of millions of trillions (and so on and so on) of cause and effect relationships that stretch back all throughout history.

My connection to yesterday is that, though I have managed to create the present state (the "I" that exists in the Now), I am still a product of everything that I was a product of yesterday, only now I have built even further on top of that. I have constructed new pieces of the definition of "I," a definition that is constantly evolving, changing and requiring redefinition.

I am everything that has led me to come to the conclusion that I have needed to define myself as "I". I am everything that has ever happened that has led me to the present moment. I am an etymological symbol residing in the Now that can be unwoven and traced back through generations of cause and effect relations to lead to the Absolute Beginning of time.

That, perhaps no quite so simply, is the definition of "I."

The Individual Evolution

The individual evolution is part of my application of cause and effect. In honesty, it is the overarching theme in everything that I intend to write in the blog, because it is something that I have always asked myself about.

I always wondered what makes an individual, what makes me different from you, but, at the same time, what makes us the same. What is the combining thread, and what differentiates the two of us.

The individual evolution is simple a connection to Darwin's metaphor, his understanding of the species that inhabit our planet as ever-changing. Evolution, definitively, is constant change. It is the idea that the universe never stops changing, that species never stop changing. What I simply mean to say, in calling it "the Individual Evolution" is that we are constantly changing.

There is a Buddhist idea that, simply put, states that I am not the same person from one moment to the next, that I am constantly a different person, even though I inhabit the same physical being over the course of a human lifetime.

I know that I am different from one moment to the next, because I know that I grow gradually, I know that, in my own hindsight, I am a different kind of creature, with different intention, different motivations and different ideas, than I was when I was younger. I know that, in time, my intentions will change, and so will my motivations and my ideas. I also know that these things happen from moment to moment, gradually.

I know that because the hairs on my face grow slowly, and I never feel them growing because they are always growing, and I cannot differentiate between when they are and are not growing, because the latter never happens.

It seems strange, but I know that I cannot explain what changing feels like, because I have nothing to compare it to. Just like I have no idea how to explain what it, paradigmatically, feels like to be alive, because I have nothing to compare it to. I can say how being alive in this moment is different from being alive in moments previous, but I do not know what is paradigmatic about them all.

Before I really started thinking about it, I just thought about this Buddhist understanding as an understanding, something that couldn't be explained, but simply was. I later came to the reasoning above as the best means of explanation.

The question, though, is what changes me. What are the causes that effect the changes in who I am. My answer was specific and bland. Everything. Everything that I go through and experience in my life changes me in some way, whether that is because it leads me into the next moment or because it is a memory that I will carry with me forever. Every experience I has changes my life and who I am, whether I remember ir, whether I think about it's specificities, or not.

I will, hopefully, be able to help you understand why every detail in every moment of your life effects you, and how everything that you do affects the world at large. But for now I simply wanted to give you a glimpse into what the individual evolution is, what it means and what it does.