Sunday mornings for me of late have become a sort of sedentary stay in bed and generate AI art for a while type affair. Are we allowed to call it art? Dunno.
I have been thinking much lately, not least because I’ve been researching it, the lost ancient knowledge, or rather, what we can discern of it from the scraps of evidence that survived the passage of time thus far.
I wondered what the AI might tell me about the various ages of the zodiac. Aquarius is in ascendance, and the transition is often met with new dawns born of painful endings.
So what does Age of Aquarius mean to the AI?
It’s all a bit psychedelic and blended with Eastern mysticism. Hardly surprising.
Age of Taurus?
Age of Taurus, the Bull, from 4300 bce to 2150 bce, is a much different affair. It was the dawn of the iron age, and growth of civilization, and cows.
The Age of Pieces?
Pieces, the current astrological period began in year 1, and will run to 2150, at which point something cataclysmic may or may not happen. Curious imagery, looks like a video game. The age of Christianity and fish, not really getting that from the AI.
Next I tried Virgo, my own sign.
The Age of Virgo is duller than I imagined. It ran from 13000 to 10750 bce, the Younger Dryas period, the time as the great floods that reshaped the geography and climate across the planet. Maybe this is more representative of the next Age of Virgo in around 12772 AD.
Out of interest, I wondered what AI might know of the Younger Dryas period and it gave me scenes of melting ice, which is accurate I think.
And with the addition of the word ‘catacylism’ we get more end of the world stuff.
These don’t tell me anything, the AI doesn’t know anything that we don’t already know, but it’s a fun way to spend a Sunday morning in bed, coffee to hand.
AI is everywhere already, and it’s only going to get everywhere else. I can’t even sit in bed on a morning with a mug of hot coffee, scrolling through my Facebook feed, without seeing more ads for AI.
Create high quality content in seconds. Sounds like a bucket of awesomeness doesn’t it. Here I am, struggling to manage just one post a month, as I try to balance my time across work and watching telly and all the other drudges that take priority. Why bother collecting thoughts, doing research, selecting images and wot not before writing it down, editing, and, with no shortage of trepidation, hitting the publish button.
Not anymore says the AI people. With just a few clicks and a couple of key strokes, I can spam the entire internet with self referencing auto drivel.
I don’t know if I can challenge the “high quality” claim at half seven in the morning, but what is clear is the value destruction this will cause.
Anything that can be created in seconds by anyone anywhere cannot be said to have value. Value is derived from scarcity, everyone knows that.
So where does that leave bloggers? Dunno really.
I will continue to write the occasional post here and there, but I suppose the odds of being found and read will be even worse once the click bait factories deploy AI content on mass to the masses.
I picture an internet dominated by content produced whimsically and ephemerally, tailored to the user’s recent activity. Whole websites, like TV tropes for example, that took years to build with hundreds of contributors, will be created on the spot, and coloured to fit the views and biases of the individual in the interest of keeping them engaged long enough to register as an impression to an advertiser.
We won’t be able to trust a single thing we see on the internet. Photo and video and voice evidence will mean nothing. A few words uttered and you’ll have video evidence of anything you like.
The standard of the images above is low, and on closer inspection, they don’t withstand any scrutiny. The eyes are particularly creepy. It will be easy to fool some, perhaps many for a while, but I think this is a huge shift in our civilisation. This is perhaps the beginning, ironicaly, of an information dark age.
Before the invention of photography and audio recordings, if something happened, we had to go on the word of those who witnessed it. I can see us returning to that state of being. Anything on the internet will be, to all intents and purposes, unreliable, unverifiable.
What we see and hear from the internet will bear even less semblance to what we see in the world beyond our window. Everyone will have to engage in their actual communities in order to survive, or at the very least, maintain the social order.
Am I catastrophising? I don’t think I am. I think we’re about to enter a very turbulent era in human history. The reality of AI is changing our relationship with everything.
I have a love of food, for example.
With AI I can enjoy endless images of food, food porn, and not a single chef need lift a finger. Shame they can’t be eaten.
These cakes and roast aren’t real, but they look good enough for a blog to be skimmed through, and it took next to zero effort to create them.
I could be a travel blogger if I wanted, and have the AI write up convincing articles and journals of exciting exotic places that only exist in ram.
The early days of the internet were great for exchanging ideas and finding like minded groups to talk about anything and everything. There were always trolls, and you couldn’t always trust that the truth was being told. But it was more or less a certainty that you were interacting with another human, or possibly a cat. We don’t have that certainty anymore. Conversations with AI can be utterly convincing. Imagine a forum where there are hundreds of Bots chatting among themselves.
The very idea of a website is under threat. Anyone looking to buy a fishing rod might stumble across a well established forum with decades of threads and posts and helpful members happy to direct the new member to a certain rod. A well established forum with decades of threads and helpful members that only exists for the duration of the transaction.
Does a website exist if no one is looking at it? The internet will become a probability wave.
Deep.
AI, I’m told has already encroached on the world of adult content creators. I don’t like to judge, but it’s probably not a bad thing if the demand for live acts of depravity drops out. How this plays out is anyone’s guess though.
I mean, here I am, typing my own words for an article I could have generated in seconds, and no one would have known. But that’s not the point. I would know, and as AI becomes increasingly dominant, demand for actual words written by actual people, in my view, will only increase. Real experience and real accounts of real experience will become cherished.
I’m not one of those king Canute luddites resistant to change. I have nothing to gain from shunning AI art. It’s given me the opportunity to illustrate my words without resorting to effort, and paying an artist.
Does it really matter that these images are AI generated? I’m only using them to brighten up the page anyway. I’d be a fool not to, wouldn’t I?
The long and short of it is. AI is going to be disruptive. Blogs like this, will become unique and authentic voices amidst the plethora of valueless content, and I have some faith that readers will know the difference, but the only way they will be certain is to see with their own eyes. If we have something to say, we’re all going to have to get used to speaking in public. The written word will count for little, and this complication will, ironicaly herald in a new simpler time.
It’s over two months now since I learned of the passing of a childhood friend, and although he would probably call me a daft bastard for this I felt I should pay some tribute, in some small way.
We are at an age where a new technology has come along. AI is making headlines as it infiltrates our daily lives. It is, apparently, writing successful job applications and essays. It threatens to flood the blognet with regurgitated drivel, so naturally I’m curious.
I have, admittedly, wasted an hour or two exploring the free image generators with mixed results. The AI generated images aren’t displeasing, but they also aren’t anything either. They are a curiosity, and have some illustrative utility, but there’s no value in anything that can be generated in a second on a whim.
An AI TramAn AI Signal BoxAI answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
But I wanted to see if there was much to the hype. Could it be a shortcut for my own endeavours? Word on the street is that Self Publishers are flooding Amazon with AI generated novels. How can that be good?
A test was necessary. On my massive to-do list is a reflective history of my home village. I have collected hundreds of accounts and memories from social media, news clippings, old photos, and read several books written about the place. There is still more to do, I might never finish it, but this is more about the journey I suppose, and I’m enjoying it so far.
AI Thurnscoe
But anyway. Could AI clip a few years off of my local history writing journey? I decided to ask it a whimsical essay question.
The Question
Write an essay explaining the socio economic situation in Thurnscoe South Yorkshire, describing its history, people, industry, culture, and future prospects.
The Answer
Thurnscoe South Yorkshire is a deprived inner city area in the metropolitan county of South Yorkshire, England. It is located approx 12 miles north of Sheffield and comprises the following wards: Burton, Clay Cross, East Pinder, Heppelthorpe, Jarrow, Mexborough, newington, and thurnscoe. The 2001 census recorded the population of Thurnscoe as 9,507, a decrease of 2.1% from the 10,047 recorded in 1991.
The socio-economic condition of Thurnscoe is reflective of the UK as a whole. Poverty, lack of opportunities and poor housing are common features. Thurnscoe has seen little recent job or economic growth, and its industry is aging and in decline. There is a high level of social deprivation.
Nevertheless there are also some positive features. The community is fiercely proud of its history and there is a strong sense of community spirit. The people are friendly and hospitable, and there is a lot of involvement in voluntary and community activities. The sense of humour is often unforced and the local pubs and clubs are lively and lively places.
Thurnscoe is unlikely to experience any dramatic socio-economic changes in the near future, but its prospects are difficult to predict.
What is an Essay?
An essay is a composition of prose that addresses a particular question or topic. It can be long or shorter, formal or informal, comprehensive or specific, and it typically explores one or more ideas in depth.
Judgement
As starting points go, this is pretty poor. It takes some stratosphericly high data and waffles a bit. This isn’t even GCSE geography level; just to be certain I also asked the AI what an essay was, I would have expected a few thousand words, but no, essays can be short form now, bit convenient. The claim that students, or job applicants, could use this tool as some shortcut to advantage doesn’t hold water. I would need to tweek and customise and furnish it with actual facts and research, in that the ChatGPT interface has nothing on the good old fashioned keyboard.
And perhaps more importantly, you can’t eat AI dessert. Just saying.
Friday 24th February. The return trip from the office, now much less frequent thanks to home working, and I somehow managed to miss the train.
I didn’t miss the train from Baker Street, that wound its way, bouncingly, beneath the streets of London, and never failing to induce a Gerry Rafferty ear worm for at least a couple of stops.
I didn’t miss the train from Euston. I arrived there with ample time to join the hundreds of others craning their necks at the departure board, waiting for the platform number to be announced, before their dash to grab a seat. I definitely didn’t miss the chaos of conflicting commuter stampedes, as the passengers for the Birmingham train, the Manchester train, and Glasgow, all tried to pass through each other, as luggage laden ghosts, and failed.
No. I didn’t miss the 18:30 with its charming passengers. Like the guy that chose to sit with me just long enough to munch through a smelly toasted cheese sandwich, a packet of cheese and onion crisps, demolish a bottle of coke, before moving up the train to another seat, leaving me with the discarded wrappers. Or the delightful extended family of Cumbrians that didn’t think to reserve seats together, and didn’t let the separation of seats hinder their conversations. No, I didn’t miss hearing about how bored they were on their trip back to Carlisle, or how much charge each of them had remaining on their phones.
Nor did I miss my onward connection, there was time enough for a beer or two before I boarded the 21:31 to Skipton, with its loud group of drunks heading back to their homes in the Yorkshire Dales.
The train I missed wasn’t taking me home to my beloved family after a hard day’s grind, it was something altogether more elating, brief as it was.
At Lancaster station there is a pub called the Lock and Tithe, and it’s placement so perfectly aligned with my travel arrangements and proclivities that it’s not unreasonable to suspect divine intervention.
I left my train from London and made a bee line to the bar, ordered a pint of Blonde and a packet of crisps, and seated myself outside. The usual hustle had died down and my previous train had departed onward to Glasgow, but I noticed the platform remained busy. People with cameras were in particular abundance.
“She’s just passed Hest Bank” I heard someone say, and I put it all together. A train of interest was on its way. A train that happened to be the Flying Scotsman, a steam locomotive known throughout the world, and one I have taken the time the view across the country.
This was good news of course. I would delight in the passing of any steam engine, rare things as they are, but as excitement grew, and the spectators readied their cameras, I was gripped, irrationally, by FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out. I readied my camera phone and rose from the bench.
She whistled as she approached the station, and I tracked her through my screen, snapping as she went.
Flying Scotsman
That was the best image I captured, and reviewing the blurred JPGs on my phone screen I realised I had squandered something special. In those minutes respite between obnoxious fellow passengers, the universe had conspired to reward me with a brief spectacle of sound and fire and smoke and joy. And I spent that moment looking at the tiny screen on my phone.
I had missed the train.
I will take this lesson for what it is, a reminder that I, and everyone else for that matter, should do their best to live in the now. Now is all there is and where it’s at. There is nothing on the screen that can convey the anticipation of the people on the platform that had gathered for the event, the thrill of the whistle and the clank of pistons. The feel of the warm air on your face and in your hair, displaced by the mass of speeding steel, and the lingering aroma of coal smoke and oil.
The next time fate brings me to such moments, I will be there to live them, and my camera/phone, can stay in my pocket where it belongs.
A Facebook meme. I am spending way too much time on Facebook. How much is too much? Some. Some time is too much many might say. But anyway. A meme cropped up.
A struggle indeed
The image of an old cassette with its tape all mangled and caught up in the tape head mechanism. Yup. How awful that was.
I remember one Christmas, probably 1988, I received a Walkman type device with headphones, and, among other things, Kylie Minogue’s first album, on cassette. That Christmas night I dutifully went to bed when I was told. With the lights out, and me all snug beneath my duvet, I put on the headphones and pressed play. I didn’t even hear the first song in full. “I should be so luc…”
The tape player mangled my brand new Kylie album. And that wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the last. But what could be done? My room was full of cassettes. I had them for music, I had them for computer games, I even had audio books and a beginner’s course in French.
CDs changed that, but they changed a lot more than the mangling of tape and the bother of rewinding. They brought the repeat function, the skip function, and the program function, and that was no bad thing.
I didn’t give it a moment’s thought at the time. I didn’t have to listen to songs I didn’t like, and I could listen to my favourites on repeat, in superior sound quality, and no risk of damage or even wear.
Then came MP3. It became possible to rip your songs from your CDs and play any song at random. Out of the hundreds of songs I’d collected over the years I only ever listened to a handful.
And then streaming came along and you could listen to any song you liked, whenever. Virtually any song ever recorded was now at your finger tips. I occasionally listen to a song or two, maybe every other month, if I feel like it.
Now, this train of thought keeps me going back to a quote from Star Trek:
We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.
Star Trek: Insurrection; Sojef to Picard
In star trek, a group of people on some distant world had opted not to use their technological prowess because it lessened them, diminished them. I can see how that might work. But I’m not about to start listening to music on cassette again because streaming is too easy. That would be like cooking on an open fire in a wood because a kitchen is too convenient. But isn’t that what camping is?
Who needs a kitchen
When I was a teen I caught the bus every day to college. The journey was an hour. In the morning I would listen to Alan Parsons Project’s album Pyramid, on the return journey I would flip the tape and listen to I Robot. Thirty years later, every note in every song connects me immediately to a specific point on the bus route. Conversely, on the rare occasion that retread those ways, I automatically think of the song. Such is the power of the music, and it’s not just the song, it’s the emotions, the fond memories that it evokes. I doubt I’d have that if I’d had an unlimited playlist, or even a skip button. But that’s not all we’ve lost.
It’s not a major thing by any means. I don’t think the youth of today would believe they were missing out on anything. They’ve got their own music, and their own struggles. But this meme came up while I was pondering the nature of bliss. This is a philosophy blog afterall, and I was looking for a way to articulate this theme, that we cannot know bliss unless we know strife.
If a song is just a voice command away, it must surely have less value than a song that is recorded from the radio using a separate audio recorder to radio, speaker to microphone, in a noisy house with annoying siblings. And when the device can destroy your efforts. The song, listening to the song, enjoying the song, is the reward for the effort of simply hearing the song.
It’s a small thing, listening to a song, but it’s also a win. It’s a small win, but it’s an achievement none the less, and the way our brains are wired to give us little chemical rewards, dopamine I believe, when a plan comes together, missing those little wins must surely have some cumulative effect.
I’m not passing judgement on people’s lives, lifestyles, or life choices. We are where we are and what is is what is. A lot of the effort has been removed from our lives and yet we are in the midst of mental health crisis. I think there is a connection and that the struggle was confined to audio tape.
Thanks to Facebook I am exposed to a lot of unhappy people posting about poverty and misery, and sharing memes of their hopes that a communist revolution will resolve all of their problems. They haven’t thought it through. But I also know that there is genuine hardship out there, and that not everyone has an easy ride.
But take food as an example. If you want a pizza you can buy a basic one for 99p from the store. Or you can buy a premium one with stuff crust and generous toppings for £5. Or you can pay about £8 and have one freshly made for you and brought to your home with just a few commands on a smart phone app. I would argue though, that takeaway pizza for £8, though it might have better toppings and higher quality ingredients, it doesn’t have the value of the 99p pizza to the person with only £1.02p in their pocket that has a mile to walk to the store and a mile to walk back, and barely has the funds to cook it. Value comes from the struggle, and the struggle brings reward.
But back to the pizza. You want pizza, you can have pizza, very conveniently and tasty too. Then you have the extra time available because the pizza takes no more effort than sliding into a hot oven and sliding out when it’s done. There’s even a machine to wash the plate for you. Effortless and unrewarding.
Imagine that pizza if there was no supermarket and there was no takeaway. Just a butcher, a green grocer, and general store to buy flour and yeast, meat and veg, and oil, and spices, and if those shops were separated by some notable walking distance, and some produce were in short supply. One might be tempted to not bother with pizza at all, too much effort, have a sandwich instead. The pizza has become unobtainable to some extent and it’s value has increased. It has ceased to be the easy option, it is no longer junk food, it has become an endeavour.
Endeavours involve struggle that leads to reward. This is a tough problem though, and it affects all of us, unless we have a calling to pursue. You might think that making the pizza from scratch might resolve the issue, and although making a pizza from scratch might taste nicer than the store bought variety, the reward isn’t there because the struggle isn’t real. You choose to make pizza the hard way, with readily available ingredients from the supermarket. There might be some reward the first time you make it, that’s the learning reward, but it’s not a struggle, it’s a choice, an indulgence.
Boxes
More and more of our life is being prepackaged for our convenience. More and more of our jobs are becoming automated. About ten years ago, maybe more, probably more to be honest, I wrote a short story about a shop that had no staff and no check out. You just walked in, took what you needed, and walked out. The shop would know who you are, what you took, and charge your account for it. Those shops exist now. I thought it was a moment of genius foresight and never expected them to become a reality in my lifetime, I never suspected that they were already in development as I wrote my story.
Where does this leave us, as a people? The meaningful work done for us. What then? It’s been suggested that we’ll all need some kind of basic income, but what do we do with that? When our most basic needs are met and our whims catered to. What then?
Maybe Star Trek has the answers.
Food cubes or Katarian Eggs, I’ll pass
Star Trek is that bizarre utopian future where everything is taken care of, but they’re on a star ship exploring the universe, so not the same as our situation. I think if I was on a star ship I too wouldn’t be bothered by the coloured food cubes, they’re in space, meeting aliens. There are exceptions though. Commander Riker sees the failings of the replicated food and he tries to cook eggs, but he’s not very good at it.
This is all a long winded way of saying something isn’t right. The youth of today won’t know our struggles, but they have their own. The world is changing. We’re on the cusp of super conductors, cold fusion, quantum computers, abiogenesis, and who knows what else. The world is changing so quickly, but if we don’t find some way to restore purpose to everyone’s life, the struggle of a mangled tape will be a luxury beyond the imaginations of our future generations.
It may be a fad, it may be the algorithms, it may be my settings, I don’t know. But articles about AI are filling my news feeds at the moment, and truth be told, I’m not reading them.
Last night I found myself with the big TV to myself and an unexpected bottle of red I found next to the Christmas decorations that still need putting away. Naturally I embraced this metime to watch three old transport documentaries from the sixties – who wouldn’t?
I won’t labour the details but there was a programme about the newly built and most advanced automated marshalling yard in the world, Tinsley. It closed in 1998.
There was another one about the last day of Trams in Sheffield. The rails were ripped from Sheffield’s roads in 1960, and put back in again in 1993.
The last one was a BBC documentary called Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding. It was a look at the railways and railwaymen in 1969 and spoke to drivers and crew. Some lamented the passing of the steam engine, others espoused the modern electric locomotives. The electric locomotives, and the line they operated are both long gone. The trains went to scrap, the trackbed grassed over.
But what am I talking about trains for? I like trains. Also. It’s change and it’s impermanence. AI, or creative AI is going to ruffle a lot of feathers, and the world will adjust and move on. Banning AI at university because of the potential for cheating would be like banning the library because of its potential for cheating. AI gives students unlimited and context driven information in a form that their assessments require. It’s the assessments that must change, and will change, and as with everything else, it’s the early adopters, the innovative, that will reap the rewards that this new technology offers.
It was a warm spring day in the eighties that I discovered the piece of art that is Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky. I remember it particularly well because my aunty had come round to cut my hair and I ended up missing a good chunk of the movie, but what I remembered of it stuck with me for about twenty years or so until I found the DVD.
Laputa, Castle in the Sky is an animated movie based loosely on one of the bonkers communities encountered in Jonathan Swift’s classic Gulliver’s Travels. In it, the eponymous Gulliver encounters a madcap people inhabiting a floating castle, directing it with the magnetism of core load stone.
Cloud castles do hold a certain fascination in our civilisation, and they crop up time and time again in both our folk lore, and modern intellectual properties, from Star Trek to Star Wars and everything in between, there are cloud castles or cloud cities.
Cloud Cities
But fascinating as floating castles are, that isn’t the true appeal of the movie. The location of the story isn’t specified, there is no indication of when this takes place but it feels like the early twentieth century in Europe. Steam power and flat caps, but this isn’t a historical piece. There is powered flight beyond what we have, massive airships and insect inspired winged single seat craft.
When and where this is, we do not know, but there seems to have been a great destructive war and the people that are left are just getting on with it. The backdrop is that of post industrial decline. Crumbling brick buildings, factories, furnaces, mines. It’s a nostalgic post golden-age golden age. That’s the only way I can describe it.
The lives of the characters we meet look tough. What they have is old and broken, they mend and make do, and they work hard to survive in a harsh barren mountainous area. But they laugh and they smile and make the best of it. Except of course for the antagonists. There are forces in this world, above the lower orders, with agendas and schemes that intersect with the sleepy mountain town when a stranger falls out of the sky, and when outsiders arrive in the town to find her, the residents are not to be pushed around.
It’s a golden age of freedom and innocence, of kinship, community, and honest work, but all around there are clues to a golden age of abundance that has since been lost, the mythical floating island, and their terrible weapons of war, the mysterious giant robots that are dotted around the countryside, rusting, overgrown, returning to the Earth.
There is something both alluring and distantly familiar about the world presented here. I’m reminded of the eighties, when the mines closed, and the steel works, and the factories were left to decay and collapse, the dismantled railways overgrown, like the giant robots, and left to return to nature.
There is something unsettling about living in this age of uncertain abundance. That saying, “easy come easy go”, it is usually said so casually by some vagabond or scrounger type character, but it’s actually a warning. That which we gain with ease, we can lose with ease. I can’t deny the convenience of being able to go to the supermarket and buying an oven ready chicken, but I’m entirely reliant on others, a chain of others, to ensure that there is a chicken there for me to buy. That situation seems way more precarious than the self reliance of a small community living atop a literal precipice. The image of self reliance against adversity is as compelling as it is romantic.
I can’t help but feel that there is a message in this movie, that we have perhaps missed something. A great civilisation of massive power and achievements has crumbled away, and no one remembers it, no one mourns it or even speaks its name, and no one seems the worse for it. That is not to say I’d like to see a collapse of our civilisation, by any means, but a bit more self reliance would do us all the world of good, but I worry we’ve lost the capacity for that. Can’t exactly keep chickens in a one bedroom flat, but I suppose that’s what is romantic about it, it’s unrealistic.
I can’t end this post without mentioning the trains though. There is a wonderful steam railway running through the mountains, carrying coals and wares, and of course the military for its unknown manoeuvres. I can’t help but notice the similarity of the locomotive number 7, to another number 7. Someone once said that there is no such thing as a coincidence, only the illusion of coincidence.
It’s not an easy question to answer. I thought I knew what I wanted. I mean, something like that should be autonomic really, shouldn’t it? I mean, the heart wants what the heart wants does it not?
When I was a child I wanted an Advanced Passenger Train for my model railway. I wanted all of the Transformers and Gobots. I wanted lots of chocolate. I wanted to play video games, make video games even. I wanted to climb tall trees and explore derelict buildings.
As I got older I wanted beer, and women, and more beer. Usual stuff really. I wanted a career, a home, a family, a wife, a car, and maybe a little bit more beer.
As you get older, I suppose that question gets more difficult to answer. At first I thought that it was depression. Then I thought it was a midlife crisis and all I needed to do was buy a sports car. And then I thought it was depression again, so I turned to Google for the answer.
“Why don’t I know what I want?” I keyed into the search box. I reasoned someone somewhere was bound to have figured it out. The first result that caught my eye was a video by a chap called Alan Watts. I didn’t know the name but I recognised the voice immediately from the Cunard cruise ship advert that is doing the rounds at the moment.
I listened to the mesmerising voice of this English philosopher as he got straight to the point. What I heard was an eye opener, though it’s probably common sense to the more enlightened among us, my mind was blown.
When we don’t know what we want we have reached a state of desirelessness. He explains, more eloquently than I could dream, that there are three stages of not knowing. At the start, we don’t know because we haven’t thought about it. Then there’s the stage where were asked, pressed, on the matter, you want this and that, right? And we might say yes, to begin with. But then we realise that no, that’s not what we want at all. Maybe those things will be satisfying for a while, and that we wouldn’t turn our noses up at them, but really, they’re not what we want.
There are two reasons, he explains, why we don’t know what we want. The first one is that we already have it. The second is that we don’t know ourselves.
The question “who are you?” is the same as “What do you want?” I always thought of them as being diametric opposites, but that’s because I was for many years obsessed with Babylon 5.
We cannot know ourselves, if I’m understanding this correctly, because the Godhead cannot be the object of its own knowledge. It is a mystery.
I don’t know, uttered in the infinite interior of the spirit is the same as I Love, I let go, I don’t try to force or control. It’s the same thing as humility.
Upanishad said, if you think you understand Brahman, you do not understand and have yet to be instructed further. If you think that you do not know Brahman, then you truly understand, for the Brahman is unknown to those who know it and known to those who know it not.
Alan Watts
These are powerful evocative words and gave me much to think about.
He goes on to explain that when we give up control we have access to power that we can be trusted with and are one with the divine, but when we try to control our situation, we lose that energy because we are defending ourselves against that which we cannot defend.
We have to give it away and trust the universe because there is nothing to hold on to anyway. Everything is falling apart. We are going to die and leave not a rack behind. What we truly want is kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of impermanence.
He goes on to quote Shakespeare, a few lines I was familiar with from Star Trek VI, but had never grasped the significance.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1
Everything I recall ever wanting was for a future fulfilled, or a past revisited. But there is no past and there is no future. There is no time. There is only now. The infinite and eternal now. It is always now. Sufficient to the day is the worry of it. They should teach this stuff at school.
"Time is a tool you can hang on the wall, you can wear it on your wrist.
The past is far behind us, the future doesn't exist."
My youngest son spoke those timely words, seemingly out of nowhere, after a long car journey on which I’d considered the matter of time and the eternal now. It’s from a YouTube channel called Don’t Hug Me I’m scared. Deep stuff.
I am a long way from satori, but I did have to laugh on that journey as I mulled over and over the unknowableness of the Brahman. If to know it is to not not know it, and to not know it, is to truly know it, then doesn’t knowing that I don’t know it mean that I do know it, except that I can’t because knowing that I know it because I don’t know it means that I can’t know it because I know that I don’t know it.
Bonkers. All of it.
I still don’t know what I truly want, but I do now know that I don’t know what I want.
Duggan's Dig 