“The ghost in the Machine”

A body and a mind? Two entireties? Or equally, a body and a spirit? No amount of dissection will reveal the beating of a heart separated from that organ, nor the flight of a bird separated from its wings, nor the song separated from the thrush. The one is an object, the other its performance. You can have the dancer without the dance, but not the dance without a dancer, or a singer without the song, but not the song without a singer. Minds, spirits, souls, consciousness, et al – these are all but performances. The confusion of entireties with performances, whilst understandable, is an ontological error - a case of cloudy and somewhat wistful thinking.
 

And the mind? It is a performance, or more exactly, an orchestra of performances, an entire suite of symphonies, an immense repertoire.

When the dancer dies we may say "their spirit has left", but in truth there was nothing that left, only a performance that ended.  

What are we?

What are we but a bag of skin and bone burning with the fire of life for a while as it passes its way through us from the beginning of time to who knows where.

Layers

We build our lives out of layer after layer of meaning, each piled chaotically one on top of the other, each weaving in and out of the rest, each binding us into place, each binding us into believing that those meanings are what we are, that those meanings are the sum and total of us - but they are not. They are only some of the possibilities of what we could be. They are only some of the paths we could walk. Even if we walked every pathway, even if we realised every possibility, they are still not what we are but only what we do, or could do, and, at the last, what we have done.

Snowflakes and rainbows

Snowflakes are important because they are, each and every one, the result of a causal process, and are, each and every one, different. You can predict exactly when snow will form, but it is impossible to predict the shape of any one snowflake. Understand this and you understand the interplay between strictly deterministic causality and chaos theory. The fine grained variability that limits what can be predicted. The fine balance between order and disorder as each flows into the other. It is the fundamental entropic flow of all existence.

And rainbow - well, they are curved because light travels in straight lines. There, in front of our eyes, the visible evidence of quantum theory - the paradox of light being both a wave and a particle. Which, of cause, results in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - that if you know the speed of a particle, you must be uncertain about its position, or if you know the position you must be uncertain about its speed - you cannot know both about the one and the same particle.

Now throw in Godel's incompleteness theorem - not even numbers work, they are not provably consistent - and Turing's halting problem - that you cannot know if a program will stop or not in advance of running it; and the result -

now why should I do the thinking for you?

Embrace the uncertainty, love the chaos, wonder at the creativity that results.

Which way?

The realisation that there is no internal world, only the external world internalised.
The realisation that there is no external world, only the internal world externalised.
Both are truths,
Both are untruths.

Descartes's "cogito" sees the world from the inside looking out and attempts to construct the outside from within.
Zen's "one-hand" sees the world pouring in from the outside and collapsing the self.

Reckless abandon

If we understand anything at all about the process of creation it is its reckless abandon, it joy, its uninhibited playfulness. It froths with excitement and possibility. It has no purpose, just a mad explosive force. It does not know what comes next because it hasn't got there yet and will not know until after.

Words fall like raindrops

Words fall like raindrops on the surface of a pool, each making their disturbance for a while, making patterns of ripples that soon die away; patterns that are soon replaced by other patterns and overlaid by yet more, each supper-imposing, each cancelling out what was there before, each building in apparent complexity - but none of them , not one, is the pool.

Stop the words falling and, as it calms, the depths of the pool begin to be seen.

words

Word, constructs, ideas, ways of seeing, explanations, concepts, theories, discourses, scripts - piles and piles of words on words; each their own patterns weaving and painting; each persuasive to a point; each drawing you in to believe that they have caught some essence of reality; each valid within their own framework - like the patterns of a tapestry when on the loom: but the pictures that is trapped in there is no more the reality than than a child's drawing of the sun is the sun.

What use? Sometimes, like a workman's tools, they do a job, tightening this, loosening that, helping to unblock a blockage, mending a break: but if life is flowing freely, then they are of little use.

Good to fix things, but best seen through as a tissue: the word ''sugar'' will sweeten no tea, the word "fire" will burn no wood.

Distrusting words

You are right to distrust words, the warp and weft of their connotations are too persuasive.
Our minds flow along those far too easily, far too much without challenge, like a stream following a water course.

Take no thought

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof.

I was stuck much by this as I sat in the silence last Sunday, it seemed to speak so clearly to my current situation, for I have been much vexed by fears of the future and what might become of me; but uncertainty must be embraced as part of so many lives in these times, and compared to the uncertainties of earlier so much less reasonably so - earlier times of war, times of famine and times of plague. We here in the West have been blessed with almost a lifetime without these. We have come to expect peace and prosperity as being the norm. Yet every time has its uncertainty, even the most stable, for every apparently stable time has within it the potential to collapse into chaos and disorder, which in turn will see a new stability arise from it, but it may be a long time before that emergence is seen, and there may be much suffering before it is achieved.

Joy

Joy lurks hidden in shadow waiting to pounce unexpectedly upon you; frantically you search for her, but the more you seek the less she can be seen, the more allusive she becomes.
Abandoning your quest, she sneaks up on tiptoe and wraps you in the folds of her embrace, the warmth of her soft skin pulsing life into you. She whispers "now" and you are soul lost on the breath of her words, unaware that there is a you any more.