Fairfax (Supplemental 2)

Tom and I met up yesterday about 6PM and headed over to the Asian food market. After exploring the exotic fruits and Koren marked boxes of god knows what, two large mackerels were purchased and fried up with tiger shrimp by us later on. Over a drink and coffee, we discussed the ideas most common to both our intellectual thought trains: the eccentricity of human communication and its relation to the idea of a non-dualist consciousness. The two themes overlap in the sense that both are related to the concept of meaning. In human communication, the core purpose of, the merits of, and the pitfalls of that activity are meaning.

The conveying of a concept, concrete or abstract, is an overarching theme in society even more so than unquantifiable emotional connections or expressions because even those activities require the exchange of information to signal your intentions, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to another person. The other person by definition may well have a different set of those things, necessitating the exchange in the first place. But it seems to me that the entire discussion of of effective and truthful communication between people becomes a unique nut to crack at when faced with the non-dualist outlook of a non-dual existence. It seems almost immediately a worthwhile consideration. If it is supposed that all matter, energy, space, time, consciousness, and experience are qualitatively of One Essence (call it God, the Flowing Tao, The Ephemeral Energy, the Pervasive Uncertianty, the realm of Plato's forms, the Higgs Field for all I care - YHWH has no vowels), then it calls into question the idea that any one person is a separate consciously perceiving entity from anyone else.

Oh shit, I'm sorry. Did I just divide your mind by zero? Well, just reason it out for a moment. You could easily cry foul the entire idea as solipsist, but that would really only apply if the end result or logical reduction is some absurdity like "the entire universe is in my head /a figment of my ego's imagination, and this is the nature of reality". For all practical purposes, it clearly is not. But absurd solipsism is a different thing altogether than the statement "My perception could be the result of my Brain-in-a-Vat (TM)", with the input into that vat being provided by the Greater Oneness of which I and everything else is a part, and the signal becomes distorted when my ego projects vast amounts of emotionally and mentally ignorant bullshit into the program. But the kicker then is that my ego is not my true self, but is instead the part of the Vat Signal that I falsely think is me. Sort of like someone playing World of Warcraft and thinking that the Level 60 night elf that represents them is the real them.

As such, the next step is to consider that the ego is not real and neither is anyone else's (at least in the psychological context, if you're uncomfortable with the more literal consequences of my Matrix analogy, it still holds). Ergo to say: my true self is a purely consciousness/spirit based entity that is not just made of the material world in the dualist sense, nor is it only just an emergent property of the neurons in my brain, in the monist sense. But rather that my true self is more than anything a part of a greater element, a little piece of the Tao that is self aware, the same Tao that the systems of the tangibly physical are made of. By necessity it is in a different form than that scientifically quantifiable and touchable "stuff"; The true self, the consciousness or spirit, is the purest example of a non-dual essence because ultimately the term holds no philosophical acknowledgment of separation.

So, if we take this line of reasoning for the moment as a working model, then what of communication? What makes this a special case? It should become apparent almost immediately - If nothing is fundamentally of a different physical or philosophical substance than anything else; if all distinctions are illusory and are virtual distinctions; if "I" don't exist and neither do "You" (as the use of those pronouns would de facto invoke the inferance of dualist seperation); then all communication between people is in a sense always and only focused between diffrent aspcets a single subject: The Holistic Source from which all else derives. When "I" communicate with "You" It is no different then when "I" talk to "Myself" or "I" talk to "the wall" or "I" make a "spiritual divination" by interpreting a pile of sticks.

The eccentricity of communication in a non-dualistic framework is that reality (or at least the four-space in which humans normally reside) exists so that God can talk to himself, by personifying himself in a massive relative illusion and using its different manifestiations as observational agents, including you and me and everything else.

I for one can say my life has gone better and been more full since I started letting this Ineffable Higher Power into my daily perception, but that's just me. Though, I guess "me" is a misnomer. Now I've certainly divided your mind by zero. See you on the dark side of the moon.

[Life is a waterfall
we're one in the river
and one again after the fall -
swimming through the void
we hear the word
we lose ourselves
but we find it all]