Towards a New Synthesis

week 9

My E-Prime Day

 

Standard English:

Today I had to cut class to catch up with my assigned homework.

English Prime:

The choice that I made today was to arrive late to class because I was behind on homework that I should have completed at another time other than when class was in session.

 

In language as in law (including the laws of science) nothing is absolute and just about every statement can be expanded on for the purposes of making the statement more clear, or perhaps, more confusing depending on what your intentions are.

Can I synthesize East and West?

 

It is my belief that the East and West has to be synthesized and that this will happen if it hasn’t already been happening for millennia.  The East learns from the West and the West learns from the East.  Since it is innate in our nature to want to create more things, ideas, etc.  When we run out of new materials with which to create from, we pause for a moment and observe what else has been created which is surrounding us constantly, waiting for a new idea to come.  In this way we are always borrowing from what has already been created to make a new creation (we hope).  Even though there are definite distinctions between the sciences and philosophies of the East and West I don’t think it is so important to differentiate between the two because ultimately the approaches came from the same place and ultimately are traveling towards an end point which will also be the same.  The two are intimately connected like Yin and Yang and perhaps the difference of approaches is the thing that keeps the balance of all things in harmony.  

The Classics

Week 8

Newton’s 3 laws and me

Independent of Space and Time, which is not absolute, Newton’s 3 laws:

1. momentum = mass x velocity
2. force = mass x acceleration
3. mass1 x velocity1 = mass2 x mass2

are inescapable realities.  I keep traveling in one direction until a force is applied to change the state of my motion.  I move at the rate of whatever force is applied onto me (pressure).  And my energy is constantly met by the energy of the things that surround me, sometime slamming us together, sometimes repelling us apart.

Our “Energy Efficient” culture

Our cultures use of energy has become centralized, organized, hyper controlled, and thus it is not efficient at all.  We use this term “energy efficiency” to make ourselves feel better about our dependency on the vital resources that we cannot seem to stop using.  I think an energy efficient culture is a culture that uses what is available to them naturally, the flows of water, the blow of the wind, the solar rays of the sun, the calories of our bodies as we ride our bicycles to our destinations.  When all people are dependent on a small handful of resource options, they are headed in a dangerous direction.  The more we move towards only using energies that are truly sustainable the better off we will be because  “Everything that exists, according to Albert Einstein, is some form of energy, although there are many different types.  Whatever energy is, we can’t seem to make any more of it or get rid of it, it can change to a different form, but the amount of it can’t change.” And what the wasted energy from our current modes of energy use changes into is heat that is overheating the planet, which will be the cause of our demise if we don’t get off our energetic addictions to oil and natural gas…

Descartes has a lot to answer for!

Yes, HE does!

The world is not a rational and mechanistic universe, it is not ordered by rigid laws of cause and effect, and we are not separate from nature, not even slightly above it.  I don’t know where we would be without Descartes, but I sure don’t appreciate all of the straight lines, box like architecture, and reductionistic thinking.  My experience of taking things apart is that they just don’t work as well as they did before I messed with them in the first place.  I wonder what my childhood would have been like if the current trend in our culture wasn’t obsessed with trying to take everything apart and instead it was about learning to observe and respect the ways of nature without thinking we had to do anything to change the course that things were already on. 

Week 6 - Vibrations

Are all vibrations “good”?

People have a tendency to refer to the Tao and other religions when things become difficult in their lives, by saying things like “all things happen for a reason” or “all things are created in the light and love of god”.  In this way I have to say that all vibrations are “good” because in this way of thinking all things are “good”. Referring to some of the articles that we read in week six, though, I see that sometimes vibrations can become problematic.  For example, the resonances reacting in catstrophic ways like in the cases of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Mac Carther Maze collapsing.  Also, I think we have all had experiences where someone we come into contact with has “vibes” that disturb the vibration we carry on our own.  These examples could be described as “bad” but on a deeper level, isn’t there a reason why we are being presented with a different vibration or frequency?  Perhaps “bad” is just a word we use to describe something different that we are afraid of because we haven’t yet learned how to integrate it, and thus it is really holding the potential to be “good” because it offers us a chance to grow and change (or rebuild a bridge or freeway!).

Resonance in my world

Sometimes I wish these questions were asking me about the life I wish I were experiencing instead of the one that I really am.  I would love to talk about the resonance I experience when I am living a peaceful harmonious existence.  Living in the city does not really lend itself to a frequency of peaceful harmonious resonance, for example, the house I just signed a one year lease for is less than 100 yards away from three different freeway over-crossings.  The overwhelming resonance is a minor shaking of the house with a major background of white noise.  It’s okay because I am studying something I really love and I just pretend that the cars in the background are waves at the beach and then it can be kind of meditative. 

Connections I can make between Energy and Qi?

Qi and energy are the same thing.  Qi moves in waves like water.  It is somewhat unquantifiable.  But in terms of relativity you can measure if there is too much or not enough in relation to the other forms of matter.  Qi and energy are the names we give to the “powers” that make movement.  Qi is a term that describes the potential energy contained in any living being.  Thus in their actions and functions they are so similar that I feel comfortable calling them the same.