On Shards and Gems

 Day 3

Everything here was written in October-November, 2022. There are 52 posts total, one for each day I wrote.

With is is as a principle, let us look around and see what we find. We are concerned here not with beginnings, but with the present. That is, we are not starting at is is and building up the world from there, for then that shall just be a world of chaos entire. Rather, we shall observe what lies around us and see what we shall see, think what we shall think.

Now, in my hand I hold a piece of grass. Let us contemplate it. We look at it and see it for a moment. Descartes looks at it and thinks; doubts its existence, and comes up with reasons for doubting its existence. We look at it an do not doubt that it is real. Yet, there is something very interesting about this piece of grass. As we hold it in our hand we can turn it around, and reveal a side of it that we did not see before. We can also both see and feel it. There seem to be many ways of coming at it, of observing it and thinking about it. That is, there are different sensations, but also different directions of the mind that effect how it appears to us. Yet, all these are connected. So what we have as we hold the piece of grass in our hand is a single 'version' of it immediately apparent to us. Call this a single shard of the piece of grass. When we contemplate the piece of grass or engage with it, then we are aware of a more complicated piece of grass, one that we can observe from and think of in many ways. Call this a gem of grass.

How else can we think of a piece of grass? Physical sensations to be sure, but doesn't a piece of grass mean more to me than that? It has color, it feels soft, it smells nice, it reminds me of laying in grassy fields, I can use it like a miniature sword, and so on. We have been calling it a piece of grass, but doesn't that name alone carry information? It suggests that the grass is a larger part of a whole. We may as well call it a blade of grass. Doesn't that imply shape however? Even more, to understand what a blade of grass is, do we also need to understand what a blade is? A blade to me first appears to be a sword, yet upon thinking for a second a blade can also be for a knife, or for a saw, the edge of a piece of paper, or even cutting words. In fact, as I contemplate this single piece of grass I find that there are many other ideas linked to it. I don't even need to contemplate the entire gem, for I can just look at a single shard and let my mind wonder. Indeed, it might be advisable to think that there are no limits to these connections, for if I contemplate blade from grass, then paper from blade, then writing from paper, then a specific letter I wrote from that, and then a book from that, and so on and on, then I shall find that through contemplation of a shard I will probably be able to reach out and touch all that I can think of. The entire world is contained within a shard.

Doesn't this seem impossible though? If the entire world is contained within a shard, and shards make up gems, and individual things are gems, then I'm saying that everything contains everything. This isn't exactly my bit though; I am saying that everything is connected through me. We shall consider what 'I' am in the next piece. For now, I want to move on to the review of other things.

Most of what I have mentioned so far is some sort of physical object, such as grass or a letter. Yet, consider the idea of a letter – it can be a letter as in a piece of paper with writing on it that conveys a message, or it can be a letter in an alphabet, such as 'B' or 'K'. We said earlier that a letter is a gem. So, the gem of letter contains both the physical letter and a more abstract letter. Isn't this though what we said earlier, that a gem is simply the combination of many shards, many ways of looking? Yet we can also consider a physical letter by itself, or an abstract letter by itself. We can think of particular letters or of letters in general. We can even use letters in place of numbers at times, or we could be convinced that certain letters were evil. In short, the limits of what we can assign to the gem of 'letter' are limited only by our imagination. We imagine these gems.

Yet, this seems also to be somewhat wrong. Sure we can imagine gems in whatever way we wish, but isn't it also true that all these shards mean something? If we imagine a gem of letter only to refer to shards which are about various sorts of physical letters, then doesn't that mean that we have loose shards floating around? We have pieces of the world that are not connected. This is called having pieces of the world that we do not understand. When we do not understand something, then we do not know how it fits. We can fit the loose shard to something else, for example letters that are abstract parts of an alphabet. We can call these 'chocles', and think of them as somewhat separate, or we can think of them as 'letters', and, by virtue of having a name, think of them as linked to the earlier gem of physical letters. Its a bit of a strange visual, shaped like a barbel, but a single gem nonetheless, though one that only appears linked from certain angles. Imagine looking at a barbel from the end onward, doesn't it just appear to be a single ball? It is only when you change your position relative to it,physically, visually, or mentally, that you realize it has a barbell shape.

This idea of connecting gems only from certain angles suggests that we can do this with more gems. But isn't this very similar to what we said earlier, that everything is connected? Or at leas that everything can be connected. So, what we really have is a web of gems, a whole gathering. It is a gathering of all that is. We can call this gathering the world. It is the world we live it, the world as we experience it, where all that is is seen as somehow being. It remains to speak somewhat of being.

When I say that all that is is somehow being, what can this result in? Remember how we said that the world is all that is, well, doesn't all that is contain some very interesting things? It's not all physical objects; it also feelings, family connections, colors, giving directions in a city to a stranger, a lamp that supposed to imitate sunlight, the ideas of matter and energy, and the concept of time, among many other things. Is there anything that makes the concept of time, for example, different from a physical rock? For my part, I do not think so. Time is a gem that is connected to everything, a s part of the world that potentially contains all of the world within it, and something that I recognize and think of through its connections with other parts of the world. I feel it pass, I think of it when I see it, I forget it at time, it appears to disappear and reappear, speed up and speed down, when I am not looking. I can say the same of a rock, if a rock is a gem. We might think that there are various nets within our world of gems, various pieces of it that are more heavily connected to each other. Gem-nets where energy, where change, is more readily passed along. Nets such as language, or body, or family, or love and hate. Yet, these nets are never alone. These nets are never all that is, but rather are simply elaborate connections.

I speak of change and energy passing along nets of gems, and what does this suggest? To me, it suggests that we need to have a plan for motion of gems. That is, gems do not stay the same. My idea of my brother changes over time, just as my awareness of time does. How important hate is to me, or what kinds of language I use, differs in different places. The world never stays the same. There is always the old idea that perhaps the world was just created five minutes ago and all our memories are fake, but what of it? That still implies change, and fake memories aren't any less existent than real memories. Remember, is is, without getting into what it is quite yet. The answer to Sisyphus's boat is that it appears to be the same boat from a certain point of view, and that it appears to not be the same point from a different point of view. Rather it 'really is' the same boat or not isn't something that we can answer until we have a concept of truth, and questions, and many other things besides, and what they are in the world.

This so far is a bit of an elaboration of the concept of e=mc2. That is, that matter and energy are both sides of the same coin, not separate and distinct from one another. That is, what 'stuff' is, isn't really matter or energy, but rather just the 'stuff of being', the stuff of change. After all, nothing stays the same. If there was something that did stay the same, then that would be fine, for it would then be part of the world, and unchanging part, but the world itself would still change around it. That is, the world would change, so if a thing is in the world and is a shard in the world, then since that shard connects to everything, then that shard would change as everything changed, so even if the unchanging thing didn't change, that doesn't mean that a gem of it in the world wouldn't change. The world is at a different level, or conceptually at a different level, than that of 'reality', or what reality potentially is.

I spoke earlier about the feeling that what something is, doesn't feel quite arbitrary. Sure, we can imagine unicorns and unicorn shaped pencils that may or may not be observed in a physical sense, and these unicorns exists as ideas exist. Yet, we seem to be inundated with things all the time that we cannot predict, that we do not think we made up, that have a force that we do not control. Rather, they seem to be some sort of 'real' thing, that is not imaginary. Sure, sometimes we can determine how we interpret these things, as in deciding if snow is uplifting or depressing, but other times we seemingly can't do as much, as when a baseball hitting our face hurts us, or we can't get the correct answer to a math problem. We seem to run into a wall. Its not the limits of the imagination, for we can imagine that the answer is different. It isn't the limits of language, for we can say that the answer is different. It isn't the limits of belief, for we can believe that the answer is different. Rather, if we contemplate the answer to one of these issues , if we try to understand it and fit it into the world, then we find that there is an issue somewhere. We can't seem to get all the pieces to match up. There seems to be a mismatch, either a paradox or a loose piece that stubbornly resits all our powers. We have these bits of reality that cause hurdles for us. We have something that we cannot crush, that we can only bend so far, that says something like 'I am', and is thus defying. In other words, we are not quite gods of our own space. What we experience are the limits of the world.