Nature of reality - Part II: Nothing

 Well sorry for the long wait. Finally I decided to suck it up and finish this. It’s not that I did not want to, but merely that my mind wanders and I find it difficult to keep it in one place for a long time.

Today I shall follow my post on Infinity, and explore a similar yet very different creature, nothing. Most people would imagine that the concept of nothing is not that new, in fact even to me it seems rather ridiculous that the number 0, was not something people used until the Indians thought it up. However much like infinity, there is a vast difference between 0 the number and the philosophical concept of nothingness. If we were to truly understand reality, I think this is a very important concept, so here is shall explore it.

Nature of reality - Part I: The Infinite

For a while now the concept of infinity has been bothering me. Not because I have encountered it in my studies and unable to get rid of it, as is sometimes the case with physicist/meta-physicists (c.f. the history of Quantum Electro Dynamics for example). But, rather, specifically because others have, and decided to circumvent the issue. In this first in a series post, I shall try to explore the nature of that which is seldom explored out of fear and uneasiness...

My lessons in sanskrit, and Google IME

For those of you who are not yet aware, I am slowly learning sanskrit. The reason for the speed (or lack of speed as it were) is due to the fact that, I suck at learning languages the school way. Give me a bunch of TV shows and music in that language, and I will learn naturally. Kinda hard to do for a dead language though... :(
well there is good news though....

Profiles and Appearences

In proposing his transcendental idealism philosophy Immanuel Kant, had come to face with a small little realisation: Our minds do not in fact simply present us with what it receives through the senses, but rather places it in a neat framework so we better understand. Many philosophers before and after Kant have agreed with this, perhaps our mind is ill equipped to deal with reality without this framework, perhaps we can never see reality without this censor in the way, some still believe that with reason and thought we can however, experience reality for what it is, and see beyond the frameworks of our minds.

The truth of the matter is, anyone who has thought about this even a little bit will start to realise that our minds DO tend to put things into a framework, the most obvious one is categories. Leibniz and Kant themselves dealt with this, and so did many others, "categories". It simplifies things, and helps us go about our daily routine without so much as an extra thought for the discrepancies in these categories. We all do it; "all chinese are bad drivers", "all fat people are unhealthy", I've even heard "all teenagers do drugs" and "all boys are sex addicts". The greatest minds of our age have struggled with the fact that all our minds tends to work categorically, divide things into generic categories and deal with the categories, whenever there are large number of things to deal with.

The little robot that could.....

So i recently got into the android craze, google fanboy that i am. Got an HTC Hero. LOVE IT. So far. SenseUI is just beautiful. I only wish that they would come up with 2.1 fast… DAMN YOU HTC. That being said I now have more online presence. Follow me on twitter @TjPhysicist… . Or just click on the "About me" page, for a link to my google profile/Google Buzz.

Keep you posted more about Android as the days go by.

A little story

In the tradition of all the eastern philosophers and guru's, here is a nice story to explain the concept of God, and reality.

A little cell was floating by on a river. It was very young, and like anything that is young, it was full of wonder. Now this wonder caused it to explore the entire place and it found there were things just like it in shape and manner, it called treated them as fellow travellers. There were also things that were greater than it, and it recognised the greatness and worshiped and idolised it, like all other little cells, it wished to be bigger and greater, but it also feared those who were greater and thus worshiped it. These it called God.

It felt after a while a presence, in the universe, a sort of uniting force, an intelligence of a sort, that makes everything the way it is, and makes things run, this force is what caused its friend to die, it is what caused him to become alive.

Suddenly the whole universe shook, as if protesting to protect its very existance...and then nothing.

A fish is eaten...

Pagan-Dao-ist--->Shamanic Daoism.

This is just a matter of clarification. I have recently found that "Daoism" can mean a host of different things. Like any religion it is not just singular, you christians should know that most of all.
And one form can be VERY different from the other. SO I got to thinking, if i go to japan and tell that I am a Daoist, I am going to be SEVERELY misunderstood. And a LOT of people from the west misunderstand Daoism as well. Well, as luck has it, there is a kind of Daoism which is not misunderstood. Daoism as it was practised before Lao Tzu, before the western civilisation, before china was even one country.

Pagan-Dao

This is what I officially call my path, it's just sounds kind of sing-song like (at least I think so). I recently read "Dao Te Ching", and also some other articles about Daoist philosophy from Taoism.net. Just search it on google there are lots of free texts hosted on the internet. Anyways, a LOT of what it said in there made sense to me. A whole bunch of the conclusions arrived at in the texts I had arrived at by myself. Of course I have a Pagan twist to it, since I AM mainly a pagan, or at least consider myself to be. The "common inteligence" or whatever it is, that I mentioned in the previous post (see below) is in simple terms the concept of the Eternal Dao, of course like all Dao Sages say, one cannot put the Dao into words, to truly understand it must be experienced. .But otherwise, it fits quite well, I have apparently been following Dao for so long, I did not even realise it. Well, it's just nice to know that there are names for my own personal philosophy in life, names are not that important I realise, but having a name means that people recognise it, and most of all that, someone else at some point of time has ALSO arrived at the same philosophical conclusions about life as I have. YAY!!!

sorry for the absence. and what i have been upto so long.

Well i have not been posting for long. Who cares, i'm the only person who seems to read these anyways. Well, My spiritual journey has finally come to an end. I FINALLY have a name for all my philosophical, and spiritual beliefs. Paganism. Well, since its such a broad and often misunderstood term here is what i believe:

To be or not to be, a leftie? (yes that IS poetic, thank you!)

So,
I recently learned (actually i knew for a while, but now i do for certian), that i am a born leftie, i.e. i am one of the very few individuals who are left handed. Sadly enough, i was forced to switch at an early age. I now am finding a SURPRISINGLY many ppl with said problem. A lot of them experaincing a lot of cunfusion due to the fact that their naturally preferred side is not their dominant (stronger) one.

well there are very few sites out there though, telling ppl wat to do under situations such as these, so if any of u readers are in this situation, tell me what do you think? should i go back to leftie? Has anybody out there actually sucesfully gone back, if so do the problems such as "cross-dominance" and right-left confusion (i have that A LOT), go away once your naturaly prefered hand is dominant, after over 10-15 years or so?