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Ideas of OrderIn these aphorisms, notes and essays on order and meaning the poet David Lindley explores why the quest for definitive statement and certainty is at odds with openness to experience. He believes that, rather than trying to pin down any particular ‘truth’, we should ask why we ask questions about the nature of reality and what will actually suffice as an answer. In a post-Darwinian world, what does a reductionist view of mind mean for the values the mind alone creates? From this notebook of reflections on being and knowing there emerges an outline of the principle of aesthetic sufficiency as the final criterion of mental judgment. ‘The soul is now lost from the science of matter and the science of mind. Yet it hovers around, as ethereal as it always has been, waiting to be reintegrated into our theories, not as a matter of fact but as a question of what non-material significance can be abstracted from our material being.’ Published by Verborum Editions To order a printed copy, contact your usual book store The Inessential Mind'I know nothing directly of how I came to be here. I can only begin, each day, from the singular point of the awareness of my own being.' 'Knowledge is added on. It does not appear to be fundamental to the working of anything that works. All of life's abundance and variety and swarming complexity contrives to exist and persist without the supportive armature of thought. Just because I am aware of that complexity and puzzled by it, it does not follow that the architecture of my thinking brain exists so that I may tax myself with these questions. Despite the illusion of illumination, I may be just as much trapped in my limited nature as the spider is in hers, both of us spinning out our not so different practice of deceit without either of us knowing why.' 'The only trustworthy response to life is perpetual astonishment. To remain unsurprised by this unexpected and unjustified sudden descent from nowhere into a state of conscious being in which nothingness has shrivelled to a mere dependency of our imagination - to be without astonishment at this turn of fate is to plunge into the ocean of consciousness as though it were the infinite everything of the universe and not just something in a small corner of it where the mind sits like a sea anemone sifting saltwater ripples in a rock pool. But when one is suddenly caught by this surprise, when one literally becomes an astonished man, it is impossible simply to plunge into life, to swim in it unselfconsciously like a flounder, as though there were no other possible medium in which life can be conducted, no possibility of coming up for air.' from The Inessential Mind, a work in progress, to be published by Verborum Editions. Mind Matters: A brief outline'There are several big questions about the nature of the universe that we now believe we can answer, more or less, or at least we can see how we might get there, that we might find an answer at some point in the future. That is, we don't think the big questions are unanswerable, we just believe we need more data and more time. Some of those big questions are, for example, how the universe began - in the big bang. What the universe was like just a nanosecond after the big bang. How matter formed in the universe, how solar systems - the stars and their planets - became scattered across space. How life could have formed from the interaction of a few basic chemical ingredients. How life evolved along Darwinian evolutionary principles, and what the nature of consciousness is and how it works and creates pictures inside our heads about how other things work, like little marionette theatres. 'But among all the big questions we can start to answer there is one big question that remains, and always will remain unanswered. And that’s the question why things are the way they are and not some other way, why something and not nothing makes up the actuality of the universe and why, when matter and life itself formed into some semblance of initial order, it didn't just fall apart again and go off drifting back into emptiness through all eternity. No matter how you approach this question, at some point you have to accept that some things are given, or at least this one big thing is given, and we have to start with that when we start thinking about anything at all...' Download the full text of the talk. |
from Nature doesn't give you the taste for perfection - you can’t conceive of it as any better or any worse. We will never be able to rest. The present is continuous. Thinking and reasoning make two. Emotion is not added, neither is it imitated. It is the seed, the work of art is the flowering. In art nothing happens unless it extends the truth. I do not do what I want, I do what I can. Let us be satisfied with the thought, without trying to convince. |
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