Voyager

“More than 15 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory, an 8-track tape recorder, and code written in FORTRAN. It’s controlled using 50-year-old blueprints and takes 22 hours to receive a single command.”
~ Lisam Maia, NASA Explores The Universe (social media group)

Nowadays, phones and laptops with less than 4GB of memory cannot adequately handle their bloated operating systems and apps, and become almost completely useless without a constant WiFi signal or cellular data, unless you use them like an “old school” word processor or an electronic version of sticky notes.

Voyager 1 exited our solar system on 1977 technology with the power of a calculator or pocket watch, now having traveled 15.5 billion miles from Earth, at a speed of 38,027 mph, and still managing to communicate with us, without WiFi, cellular data, Bluetooth, and massive amounts of memory.

Relatively speaking, very little is required to launch a rocket towards eternity. Most likely, Voyager will continue its journey long after the earth, as we now know it, meets its end.

Timeless

“We cannot apply our notion of time to the unconscious. Our consciousness can conceive of things only in temporal succession, our time is, therefore, essentially linked to the chronological sequence. In the unconscious this is different, because there everything lies together.”
~Carl Jung

Facebook meme:
“Sorry I just saw your text from last night,
Are you guys still at restaurant?”
~ Thomas Lélu, Lacan Circle of Australia

I chuckled upon my first reading of this meme, my initial reaction being that the text writer was still waking up and had not yet recovered a sense of time—past versus present. You know, that foggy haze we sometimes wake up with, being confused as to where we are and what time it is.

However, just maybe this fictional text message is more complex than meets the eye, suggesting the way we sometimes hold on to images, thoughts and memories that continue to affect us, as if they are timeless and continue to exist or haunt us in the present, like an echo of something that seems as real today as it was yesterday. Dreams often operate on this level, combining images of the past and present from different places; the dream depicting them as occurring at the same time and in the same space.

Some psychologists and physicists believe that everything is happening in the here and now, and it is only our minds that divide them into past, present, future, and separate spaces.

Are time and space convenient illusions? What about cause and effect? Try to imagine a lifetime of relationships, people, things, places, events and situations existing together in the here and now; no need to separate any of it into past, present, future, spatial distances, or causes and effects. Impossible?

Nothingness

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
~ Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

The concept of NOTHINGNESS is extremely difficult to imagine or wrap ideas around.

How could there be NOTHING, not even the void of space, since a void could not exist if there were nothingness? What would nothingness be like if we could perceive it through vision, hearing, smell, touch?

Whenever I attempt to imagine nothingness, I think of a darkness that is darker than darkest black I’ve ever seen; no light or sound whatsoever, nowhere to move to or towards, like being buried alive six feet under or death itself. Yet, how could there be colors and darkness if there were nothing or nothingness? How can nothingness be described, explained or written about, if never experienced or observed? Even more imponderable, is the idea that “SOMETHING” could come into existence from this nothingness.

Note: I’m using NOTHING and NOTHINGNESS interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference. NOTHING refers to the absence of specific things, whereas NOTHINGNESS refers to a state of non-existence, non-being; an existential, all-encompassing void.

Continue reading “Nothingness” →

Thoughts on projection

“Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.”
~ Jacque Fresco

Many psychologists believe in a specific end goal to therapy, which is to consciously take back ownership of all that we’ve been projecting into the world and onto others—referred to as individuation in Jungian theory. Yet, I wonder what would happen to humanity if we projected nothing outside of ourselves, re-internalizing (introjecting) all of the feelings, motives, imaginings, and conflicts formerly experienced as occurring outside of us or between us and others. Would this in effect nullify the need for an outside world of things, people, events, and situations? Would we still perceive an outside world at all, or exist entirely within ourselves? Is the outside world merely one big projection or imagining of all that stirs within us? I cannot definitely answer these questions, simply because I don’t know the answers—nobody does.

There is an ongoing debate going on, as to whether an objective, relatively unchanging reality exists—regardless of whether or not we observe it—or if so called reality shapeshifts to fit our expectations and projections. Some quantum physicists have concluded that reality exists one way when not observing it, and another way when we observe it, the exact form depending upon the inclinations of the observer. In layman’s terms, what we see is what we expect to see.

Continue reading “Thoughts on projection” →

The danger of labels

It is modern habit to create labels for everything and then continuously sub-divide them into even smaller labels, treating them like real things with real lines of demarcation. However, the more narrow the label, the more the truth is squeezed out of it. The medical and psychiatric fields employ this approach to such a high degree, that they lose touch with the humanity and wider truths of a person’s suffering and ailments.