Monday, August 07, 2006

Not An Entirely Coherent Post
Well, we just watched “What the bleep do we know?!” It was a film about science and spirituality and the mind and self consciousness. At one point a man was talking about consciousness and he said that, to put it simply, consciousness is awareness of self, for an example he talked about how when a person looks in the mirror he knows that they are looking at themselves but that made me think of a child who first looks in a mirror. The child has to make various movements in testing the mirror, trying to figure out what it is they are looking at. They don't know that they’re looking at themselves. Does that mean that consciousness isn’t a physical acknowledgement or awareness of a sort, but simply a mental state of knowing?

It also talked about how we perceive things. I forget how they put it but it was like we see things how we choose to. The main character saw herself as fat and she hated churches and men and marriage because of the unfortunate events that happened in her life concerning those issues. Throughout the movie a quote kept creeping up in her mind, “If thought can change water imagine how thought can change us.” By the end of the film she realized that her thoughts were making her see herself as fat and she was allowing herself to be angry all the time. She was able to come to love herself. It was beautiful. It was just really interesting because it goes back to my ideas that we can basically brainwash ourselves. I once trained myself into believing that orange juice woke me up in the morning – as caffeine would. It also goes along with my ideas on romanticizing things. I am a major supporter or romanticizing things and that’s partially because I think in doing that we can make ourselves happy. I had this idea of taking things that annoy us and somehow altering them in our minds to being something that we love. Like, when people do stupid things on the road they anger us to no visible end; if we could somehow alter the situation into something that didn’t make us so mad then we could be content with what had happened. So I came up with this thing: when someone does something stupid on the road I would give them a reason for it – he’s speeding because his wife is having a baby or they’re not driving well because there’s a family emergency that they have to get to.

The movie also talked about new things: like new dimensions. The guy said something like how you can’t learn of new things if you don't embrace these new things as a possibility. It reminded me of God because the 3D character saw the 2D world in full but the 2D characters were flat (they only saw things on the surface). So like, why do we presume to know anything? God, I believe, is multidimensional and the film gave me the imagery to understand more fully the thing that people always say: that God can see the full picture and we cant. I know that as I write this I’m not making full thoughts and I hope that when I read this in a few weeks I will understand the potential of these thoughts.

Having just watched “Good Will Hunting” and “Finding Forrester” which are about unexpected geniuses and then watching this… It’s just like... THOUGHT. As time progresses so does the thoughts of humanity. Someone I know once said that we all go through the same patterns of thought at the same times because somehow society goes throughout things together. That has to be true to some degree because why else would new fashions appeal to people on such a wide scale at all times? And why does society go through phases of what names are popular for that decade? In the 20’s names like Gertrude were popular but now those feel like “old lady names” and I’m sure that fifty years from now names like Emily will feel like “old lady names.” I think that one day, when we reach a point of too much knowledge – the point where we can’t function because you know too much and you don't know what truth is. You don’t know reality anymore – you are so out of touch with what you once knew as truth that you can trust anything. You cant trust that when you get out of bed there will be a floor to step on. Anyway, I just think that when we reach that point of knowledge and when we learn how to access more of our brain, that’s when God will come back.

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