via Gigi Powers

I read this Packy McCormack post about the meaning of life this morning. Overall found it (at least the free first half) lacking in any moral compass. “Your job is to experience life, to become fully yourself…” has no sense of suffering, compassion or benefiting others. He says the Buddhists agree with him on his point but he clearly has no idea about Buddhism.

There were a couple things embedded in the post that I found really interesting:

• Alfred North Whitehead sounds worth investigating further… His later metaphysical work might be interesting.
• This book by William Egginton called *The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality* Packy summarizes:

To observe anything, you need distinctions — between here and there, before and after, this and that. Without those gaps, there’s nothing to observe. A timeless, spaceless, perfect unity would be unobservable. Perfection can’t know itself. Only finite, imperfect conditions make experience possible.

• The Jungian concept of Individuation: “Individuation, or the process of taking the hidden parts of your personality, your talents, your repressed emotions, your Shadow, and bringing them into the light of consciousness. By becoming fully and uniquely you, you are saved from living a fake life.” This is a good thing to understand given how deep into the Shadow work some people are.

• “The privilege of a lifetime,” Joseph Campbell said, “is being who you are.” and the end of one of his poems quoted in the post: “The goal is to live / with godlike composure / on the full rush of energy, / like Dionysus riding the leopard, / without being torn to pieces. Which of course reminded me of Dorje Trollo riding the pregnant tigress Yeshe Tsogyal.

  Dionysus(/daɪ.əˈnaɪ.səs/ ⓘ; Ancient Greek: ΔιόνυσοςDiónysos) is the god of wine-making, orchards, fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre… His wine, music, and ecstatic dance were considered to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful.

Sounds a little bit like Crazy Wisdom… oh my goodness there’s so much on that Dionysus wikipedia page I could spend hours on it. Just the evocation of The Mysteries could take me days to dive into.

But the biggest thing I wanted to pull out of that post is:

• “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory and the originator of the word ‘bit,’ proved mathematically that information is surprise…. Forty years later, John Wheeler, the physicist, re-enchanted Shannon’s concept of the bit when he proposed the now-famous “It from Bit” at a conference in Tokyo. In Wheeler’s Participatory Universe, the universe doesn’t exist until it’s observed by a conscious mind. Matter (It) emerges from information (bit).

This of course jibes with the Buddhist idea that we create reality, that internal and external are the same and in fact, there is no “internal” or “external” as separate things.

From that Wheeler paper:

No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than… the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer… the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.”

In my words… the foundation of the universe is the resolving of a quantum super-position (The cat is neither alive nor dead until observed) into a yes/no result. Without that observation, there’s no universe.

So before we figured out that the earth went around the sun, did it not? I think the point is, it didn’t matter… the reality of the solar system was in a quantum super-position. The earth neither did or did not go around the sun. We had stories to explain reality, but we hadn’t clearly observed reality (through math, experiments, telescopes and eventually rockets).

So are flat-earther people… what? They live in a different reality.

Actually it’s more grounded than that. We each live in our own version of reality. We each believe various individual things. We each have our individual stories. There are some physical (and quantum) truths that govern the universe we live in. If we know them, believe in them, we can do things that we couldn’t otherwise. Flat earthers couldn’t make a satellite.