Mindless Dissection Vol. II

She woke up to the ugly fight between seagulls at 5 in the morning. In the ambiguous place between sleep and awareness, she found herself thinking about meaning and meaninglessness. Everything was obvious for a fleeting moment. "We don't create meaning, we only contract meaninglessness," she said to herself, simultaneously wondering what that meant. For example, this ugly, noisy fight between seagulls, she thought, it only has a meaning for me and obviously for them since we both are limited in our perception of the world at that moment, we both are focused on the fight while there are many other things there in the world.

She tried to remember what was so obvious in that ambiguous moment. She recalled an image, it was an image of a pinball machine... The ball hitting the edges, changing its direction every time... The limits of the machine... That was what created the game itself. "So," she forced herself to think, "if there were no edges of the machine, the ball would be lost in one direction, in only one motion. That would be the real limitation, for the ball and for us as players. The game, the meaning is only possible through the multiplicity of the motions of the ball. The game has to have a structure and this is what makes the meaning. And the same applies from the perspective of the ball, I guess. It, now, thanks to the game, has more than one motion to enjoy, more than one direction to go. The ball would enjoy this as well, right?" She couldn't be sure.

Then, she remembered something else while trying to make sense of this dreamy revelation (yes, it felt like a revelation when it happened, but now she was hesitating, what if it was only a beautiful but empty sentence...). In The Penultimate Truth by PKD, there was this machinery like a giant computer which recorded every book or source a person has ever read or watched. You would go there, insert a kind of identification card, it would make some incomprehensible calculations with its giant brain, and propose you what to read or watch next. In the story, it said to the guy "OK, now don't panic," and proposed the guy the very first source he ever used. This had a terrible effect on him, but she thought there was something to enjoy there. Of course, he thought, "if I have to go back to the beginning, then everything was in vain." She, on the contrary, was enthusiastic. At first, she didn't understand why of course. She always had to think about these kinds of things... She was feeling something but didn't know why she felt that way, and she was trying to make sense of it. "Make sense, yes. Sense is something you have to make. You have to know the structure. Here, the computer's proposal is about structure as well. Proposing the guy to return to the very first source could be a beautiful thing in terms of structure since it implies his - current - structure is completed, and since it is a machine, it doesn't really know how to jump from one structure to the other. So, it refers him back to the first source. If only he could understand it like this... it doesn't mean that he understood nothing all his life but, on the contrary, that he completed his job as himself, now is the time to jump and build another structure. It's ultimately about freedom."

Now, everything seemed more coherent to her. The seagulls, that phrase, the pinball machine, and the referral to the first source... everything was about some limitation, thus, some structure. So, there lied freedom and creativity, in the determination of limits. "Leibniz!" she said out loud to herself, "I should have known. The architect of creativity... now I get it. I think..."

Mindful Dissection Vol. I

Everything was actually very simple: people were taking their wants and calling it "fulfilling their needs." But I needed to make a distinction here, as I always need to make distinctions. Why? To understand, to categorize, to make my mind about it... I think I see myself bigger than I am. I think I can control everything if only I understood what's really going on... I think the universe is rational, then... Hmm, I don't like this kind of thinking, so I have to take myself out of that plane by putting it in a different way. For example; I actually believe in Logos as the ancient Greeks did (it's not human rationality, so it's OK now, eh?)
Why do I need to convince myself, to believe that I am not doing something wrong? What is right and wrong here? The socially established way is obviously wrong, I don't think I need to justify that with evidence...
I care about ideas, I think they hold the truth to right and wrong. They make us live, and they make us die. If we have the wrong idea about ourselves, we would certainly die or at least get sick. It's like believing you are a fish while you are actually a cat. You would try to dive in the waters just to find yourself drowned in the next few minutes. And painfully too. "Why me?" you would be saying in the last minutes of your life, "why me?" Rebelling against something you don't understand.
So, it seems that I believe that there are kinds of people as there are species of animals. once again, this is a limited thought. So, I save myself by saying, "Maybe even as much as there are individual human beings..." I don't want to generalize, but I do it nevertheless. "Maybe I should change the meaning of 'kinds'," I say to myself, by making it something as individual as it can get. Differentiating all the thin lines along the way...
Returning to the previous point, it seems that I believe living is right and dying is wrong... Why is that? Maybe some other people would consider dying right and living wrong. Don't they have such a right? Well, no. Because they can only have such ideas while living, and that's kind of hypocrite of them, using the advantages of life to defend death. That seems like the most limited thinking a human being can produce since death is the most limited thing one can think of. It is shutting you off basically. You become fixed, stiff like a rock. Well, there are few limited things when you are as stiff as a rock. Nobody really sees you, gets affected by you. Even mountains depending on the existence of rocks don't care about you. One more or one less rock, they would still exist since they depend on the quantity of the rocks, not the quality.
So, limited affecting capacity is wrong while you can have more of it while you live. Am I contradicting myself here when I say "more" affecting capacity is better than "less?" Am I falling to the same trap of the importance of quantity?
I like to say no but this "want," I am not able to justify, not right now at least since I am confused.
To be continued... when I am able to forget more of what I learned...