How can you believe that all things are one,1 but also that there is a purpose which shapes reality into significance by the preservation of persistent patterns? Because those are just different ideas about the same thing. How can you believe that there is only one real thing, yet we each construct our own understanding of reality? Experience! How do you make choices without belief in a comprehensible objective truth?2 Analyze for principles. Look for prototypes.3 Break down emergent complexities.4 How can you find your way without an authority? Follow your intuition and have faith in your experience.5 Find the way of the pattern as empirically observed, tested and revisited, understood and confirmed. Remember that both the everything and all the different things are true in their way. Balancing mystery and reason, this is the only way to come to peace.6 Things only have meaning when they have difference. The heart of love and romance: only in the other can we truly find ourselves. If a figure has no background, no other, it is an indistinguishable part of the whole.7 Without our perceiving it,8 measuring it, naming it, the thing is unknown, so it remains everything, meaningless.9 But we apprehend things, and so they must have distinct meaning. Everything exists as one,10 but only makes sense when we accept difference.11
1 “The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking.” - The Nature of Conciousness, Alan Watts
2 The Correspondence Theory argues that “truth” is whatever corresponds to reality. An idea which corresponds with reality is true while an idea which does not correspond with reality is false.
3Principles of Categorization, Eleanor Rosch
4 An emergent property of a complex system is one which arises unpredictably from the combination of simpler parts.
5“It is through science we prove, but through intuition we discover.” - Science and Method, Henri Poincaré
6 “Life cannot submit itself to reason, because the purpose of life is living and not understanding.” - The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno
7 Monism is the view that the variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality, or substance.
8The term qualia defines the intrinsic subjective characteristics of sensed experience: the actual sensation of pain, the ineffable experience of seeing red, the feeling of the smell of roses.
9 “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ / says the Teacher. / ‘Utterly meaningless! / Everything is meaningless.’” - Ecclesiastes 1:2
10 If existing is itself a quality, then every thing that is, shares some common being.
11 “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.” - Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
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