Monday, July 02, 2012

Motion-Picture Identity by Louis Evan Palmer


Continuity out of Points, Motion out of Snapshots

Nagarjuna famously said that everything is derived from mutual dependence. In trying to understand this statement, we can look at the "outputs" that define a person to us yet are, when we look at them, mere wisps. Words that issue from someone either spoken or written - which constitute the person to us, at the time, and we can record their words to give them more seeming weight and reality; but, in the end, they are disassociated fragments. The person, the entity, continues separately from the words that issue forth. The words may, or may not, mean anything to us; even if we understand them, they may be of little import to us. In all cases, they are not the "person" - they come from the person, they represent the person or their state of mind and feeling at the time, yet they have become "separate".

What we look at shares this disconnectedness. Our mind threads the stills we see into a moving reality. It eliminates the hole where our optic nerve disrupts the visual field. It reflects its training - training that we spent years learning when we were infants and young children and we could devote undivided attention to these things. Now, we don't know what we learned then and what determines what we see as our we see our expectations as much as what actually registers on our field of vision.

If we move towards our awareness itself and our sense of identity, we might find that it too is stitched together from singularities. We might find that like a motion picture, we create a fabric out of separate instances and that our memory and identity fade when the light of our awareness isn't shining on them. Is it that then that is the foundation? The abiding awareness that we notice from time to time but which weaves the world we know around us. Is it that awareness that strings together the innumerable vignettes that roll around us and in us? And, is there a larger world or beingness in which our consciousness swims?

Zeno of Elea delved into this arena with his pardoxes of plurality, motion and change See "Zeno's Paradoxes" edited by Wesley C. Salmon.

Can it be that when we scratch the surface, even a little, we strike a mystery? No matter where we look or when.


Motion-Pictyre Identity, Louis Evan Palmer, The Way It Can Be, http://twicb.blogspot.com
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Support his art, ideas and worldview, Order books by Louis Evan Palmer: the novel "Oaklane Woods"; short stories "Tales Told to a Tree"; poems "40 Poem Fragments". Order via Kindle link at right of screen

 Copyright 2012 Louis Evan Palmer He lives in Ontario Canada. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications.

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