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April 19, 2010

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I am reminded of a 1957 B movie called The Incredible Shrinking Man. As I recall, in the end he shrank (is that a word?) to nothingness. Your post makes me want to watch the movie again. Here's the link to IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050539/

... and I found this on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7iqJo2-6M8

I often wonder if each grain of sand on a beach realizes it is but one grain or simply considers itself part of a whole with no thought of individual identity.

(To those readers who might suggest this is a silly thing to ponder because sand has no consciousness, I ask: How do you know? Grains of sand may think AND say the same thing about humans.)

I like the last bit of the entry, enlightenment in a nutshell. Even though it's an appearance, it's sure fun!

Brian - you, and all of your blog readers, have heard this before, multiple times and even to the point of boredom:

When neuroscientists probe into the brain, the reason they cannot find anything is because there isn't anything there to find. There can be little doubt that human awareness is generally felt to be approximately centered in between, and in back of, the eyes. What is starkly obvious, when you open up a skull, is that there is a lot of convoluted, folded up, specialized matter that comprises a discrete mass which is identified as a brain.

What knows this? Another brain looking at the opened up skull? Perhaps, but since there is nothing inside any skull except the brain, there remains the question of how any brain knows anything, and what is it that it knows?

My own brain has settled (so to speak) for the notion that there is nothing to realize. I have capitulated to what is obvious and undeniable. There is no separate entity that stands apart from what is called awareness.

It's just plain old Reality.

The Iceland volcano is something to put us into perspective. Lately the earth has had a lot of those reminders of how little control we have and how small we are in comparison to earth's power.

Willie, nicely said. All we are is reality. Reality R Us. We just happen to be a bit of reality that can imagine it is something other than everything else. Douglas Hofstadter calls us a "strange loop." That's for sure:
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2007/04/youre_a_strange.html

Rain, so true. In the Earth's history there have been numerous mass extinctions caused by tremendous natural changes. We happen to live in a quiet time, geologically and climatologically. But that won't last -- in part, likely, because we humans are now able to produce our own changes, altering Earth's usual feedback systems.

More strange loopiness.

",..............which would endure for eternity after my physical body/mind died."

it is this persistent hope that fuels all the major religions, and even many of the more refined metaphysical dalliances.

We have a gun to our head. Nobody know when it will go off. It is impossible to imagine ourselves NOT existing.
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Interesting too, this thing called memory.

If one has a spiritual experience, via meditation...how is one to know it happened unless one remembers it? One must review it to talk about it. One is held to time because memory is obligated to it. Without memory we are helpless. And happened where? I saw inside. The assumption is that it happened somewhere, in some context -- that is the assumption of space.

In the physical world when we do something we have the verification that comes through others....we build a wagon --others use it and see it. We have a spiritual experience, but it is real only in so much as we remember it, like a dream. Where is memory located? Is memory located, stored, in some astral realm or in the neurons which wink out when the body dies? Absolutely everything here in this blog depends on memory, otherwise the body is detained in a nursing home, the *me* a mass of tissue that no longer functions properly. And it can't remember all the totally cool shit it use to think about.

Getting smaller : for a long period of time I was a comma, now without the tail I am a full(?) stop.

But when you're with a friend, you're a colon:

If he or she has more selfness than you, make that a semicolon;

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