A long time ago, someone I respected — who had more experience — hinted to me about the Other Side.
“You know, it’s like Nietzsche talks about, or Buddha,” he said. “You realize enough about how everything works, and you’re seeing the world from a different angle. Everything changes.”
To a young person this makes no sense. The world is… the world. It’s the same physical stuff. How can there be another side, without getting into crazy Gandalf wizardry?
The answer is that as Nietzsche said, there are no facts, only interpretations. The lattice of coincidence that brings together the different objects and events in our lives is an interpretation.
In an even simpler sense, to a snail life is entirely self-reflexive. Sometimes the world moves, when the snail moves. Things appear in front of it and it reacts. Choice? Sort of.
The degree of interpretation used determines what choices we can make, and what consequences we can wring out of those choices. It determines the meaning available to us.
It also guides our knowledge of how to act. The Other Side could be seen as a knowledge of patterns and their effects in cause/effect relationships. When you recognize a pattern, you can make it work like magic by manipulating its internal structure.
Take for example a wing. It changes the internal structure of the flow of air by making air rushing under the wing move more slowly than air rushing over it, thus producing lift.
The Other Side is a series of knowledge points like this. When the veil of social interaction, personal judgment, dollar value, popularity, novelty and bodily pleasure drama is lifted, a new world awaits.
It opens new possibilities for us to see in the familiar objects of life itself, like learning a new chord shape re-animates the twelve notes in new ways. Like a dance it adds a new dimension through patterns to an otherwise material, mundane event.
At some point, it even leads beyond what we think we know as certain and obvious. We discover that there is more to the world we can ascertain, much like returning ripples in a pool hint at where its boundaries are — or are not.
Enumerating the parts of this view would do nothing because one of its first tenets is that you must be ready, receptive and aware of what you’re about to receive when knowledge is transferred. Otherwise knowledge is just words, without the lattice of interactivity and emergent meaning that animates them.
People who have seen the Other Side tend to have a few things in common. They are less concerned about the things that 99% of the people spend 99% of their time on, but are very concerned about often-overlooked things.
They spent less time with facts and figures, and more time talking about patterns and making analogies. They do not operating backward, where they find an object and invent a story for it, but forward, where they find a story in the interaction of objects that suggests an order.
To those who have not crossed over, what visitors from the Other Side talk about seems like the rambling nonsense of an insane person. This is why it is the Other Side — to the rest of us it is incomprehensible, until we make ourselves ready to see it.
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Good words
If there are no facts, only interpretations, then are there still correct and useful vs. incorrect and stupid interpretations?
Are the consequences just interpretations too? Scary.
David R. Hawkins, whose books I’ve studied, says people are not inherently able to discern truth from falsehood. Our minds can lead us anywhere we wish to take them, and believe it too.
I like how you point out that when we learn the patterns, or the chords, we can discover new expressions and depths that we couldn’t have imagined on our own. Our minds could never come up with the wonders that are there but we’re too busy interpreting in our own dull ways.
What are wonders but temporary aesthetics?
Blind, deaf and dumb seems more appealing than watching an ‘intelligent’ species crimple itself.
Not man-made ‘wonders’.
Real ones.
Nice typo :)
“An emotional crimple” !!!
Love it.
“What are wonders but temporary aesthetics?”
The pure love you get for your children kind of stays with you even as they grow up and add on layers of good and bad.
The love you search for in your soul when the fake love runs out.
Music. Color.
Yeah, like Crow says.
Got to separate the fine from the gross, the real from the temporal.
It’s an interesting series of questions. One way to view it is that some interpretations are more useful, being both close to reality and suggestive of a way to apply that knowledge, than others, but that this knowledge can only be used by those with the congenital intelligence and learning to accept it.
This thing you refer to as ‘knowledge’ may not be that at all, at least not in the way people generally understand it. More of a panoramic view, maybe. Hard to have things like opinions about other things, when those things are so clearly seen. Hence the misleadingly simplistic phrase: “it is what it is”.
And as for somehow ‘using’ this ‘knowledge’…
It tends to use you, more than you it.
The word ‘use’, too, may mean something rather different from the usually accepted definition.
Some of the things talked over here lately remind me of this fellow’s essays:
http://svayambhava.blogspot.com/2011/06/sense-of-speech.html
It’s a pity they didn’t translate his policy article about the semantic triangle… Could’ve been of use to you and the right in general…
Of course, we have only interpretations of consequences. These interpretations depend on who is interpreting, where, and when.
For example, a person who came late for boarding Titanic, had two different interpretations of this icident just after missing the liner and couple of days later. Which interpretation was closer to reality, and how we know when exactly we should start considering the consequence of something?
Interpretations are interpretations.
They are not the consequences themselves.
Either you are able to see reality, or you must interpret it.
Being in touch with reality means there is no interpretation taking place.
Your eyes see what is there, while your brain records it.
Assigning meaning to it is interpretation.
“The volcano next door is erupting.”
Vs:
“Eek! The volcano is erupting! Run for your life!”
Perhaps the volcano is an inch high. Do you need to run?
If it is any bigger, there would be no point.
Your brain finds a closest stored pattern, rather than recording what you see. You are not a simple recorder, not a machine.
And even a chip MP3 recorder doesn’t record the sound: it replaces the waveform with the patterns.
The stored patterns are interpretations. Your very ability of making distinctions among visible objects are defined by your genetics, culture, environment, etc. – all that have created these stored patterns.
This is exactly the point I wish to make…
I have often observed how humans approximate input to be ‘like’ something else, and then equate this with that.
I do not do this, in fact I never have. In later years, though, I have become far more aware that I do not do this thing that others do.
Everything I become aware of has its own unique place. It stays as it is, without modification. It is whatever it is. I do not change it to make it more palatable, comfortable, safe, or orderly. I do not compare it to other things that may be ‘like’ it, because really, almost nothing is much like anything else.
I recognize individual wasps, for example. Each one is a wasp, but I only call them that to describe them to others.
Each wasp is unique, and so is everything else.
Herd animals don’t understand the concept. They find safety in being as much like the others as possible.
I am so not a herd animal I have difficulty even self-identifying as a human :)
Cool.