What would you say best symbolizes modern thinking?
Nature itself favours circles, cells, DNA helix patterns, which looked at from the top down would look like a wheel. What about a grid?
We think like our maps? Indexes. We want to partition, quantify and monetize everything.
We think square in a round world? Exactly.
We work desperately to connect points. Indeed, because we believe that by themselves they are separate, broken, and we have to “fix” them. Why would we believe that?
I remember Alan Watts describing our ‘spot light’ perception vs a flood light. Which is in part the product of training. The blind confidence in it certainly is.
I’d say it’s because we can see, we are out of sync with the rest of creation.
Trying to rediscover the circle?
I mean to offer a model of how and why we believe we are out of sync with nature and the reality around us.
Now visualize your sense of self at the centre of a big mandala. Surrounding that central circle, let’s call it the observer. You have all the circles that constitute our beliefs. As long as the integrity of those circles remains intact, we would feel if not well and happy, then at least that everything is “okay.” We need our beliefs. Our mind naturally functions in a language of belief.
New neuroscience research supports the notion that memories, as we commonly think of them, are a by-product of an entirely different process than reason as we know it. At the core of the brains function, along the regions of the sensory motor strip and related structures, the cells don’t seem to fire to direct experience and concrete details as much as they respond to concepts. That primitive part of our brain doesn’t have an understanding of all the men and women we deal with in a day. Instead, it understands the concepts of man and woman, and then the identifying elements are tacked on to tell us that this woman is our mother or that man is our husband.
Another line of research discovered that the pattern of our neurons firing is like the search pattern of bees in the fields around their hive, which is itself circular.
What this all means, to get back to our earlier model, is as long as the flow of our thought remains smooth from one belief to another around that central observer self, we instinctively conclude that everything is all right. This is why your minds natural wandering behaviour can go on for so long, until it’s interrupted of course.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~