Handiwork

The mind is the organ of perception of the pattern. A fold in the meaning of all things,¹ the way fractals² form the same shape at different resolutions. Consciousness built on the experience of your ancestors, in genetic and memetic³ waves of cause and effect culminating in now. This universe among those that could be, sensed and built and built again with every thought. You, the observer and your imagination working to build and maintain all we know and understand.⁴ From the constants that stabilize physics, to the mutations of sexual reproduction, from solitary cognition⁵ to complex culture, our evolution⁶ is in response to the stimulus of the pattern communicating in every media of meaning.⁷ The pattern building us in its way. And we alter the pattern in return. We create and give birth, and delight in doing it.⁸ The vast beauty of our ideas gives us joy. The work of our hands gives us relief. Escape found in altering our impermanent,⁹ but persistent, existence. Unity through the shared experience of emotions; connection from recognizing¹⁰ the narratives we know so well. Peace and provation found in the aesthetic patterns of tone and shape, word and movement.¹¹ This making of patterns, above all, is our purpose. The way out of our isolation and the way into ourselves.

1 “For to be aware and to be are the same.” - The Way of Truth, Parmenides 2 Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, Benoît Mandelbrot 3 The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins 4 “…experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.” - Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers 5 Cognition is work. Neurological energy applied to make metaphors and operate on symbols. 6 The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin 7 The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan 8 “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 9 Anitya (impermanence) is a Buddhist concept that says all things are in a constant state of flux. No thing ultimately ceases to exist; only the appearance of a thing ceases as it changes form. 10 Recognition is exactly what it is called: thinking the same thing again. 11 “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.” - Dialogs, Alfred North Whitehead

2, 4.11, 4.13, 5.3, 5.11, 6.19, 6.23, 7.x.y.5, 7.x.y.19

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Handiwork

Our reality is our handiwork.