Remembering who we are

I have been planning to describe my view on humans and the physical world for quite some time. Though I may have done so for several times in the past, I do think that now things are much clearer.

I've always been thinking about soul, body, emotion, feelings, thoughts in a certain way. As opposed to what was propragated by Descartes, I actually do think soul and body are not the opposite of each other. Yet it was not clear to me what the connection between the two actually were.

Yesterday I had a 5 hour conversation with my friend. We were talking about topipcs of which some have always been appealing to me. Topics like connection, love, friendship, emotion, intensity. He put his thoughts in a physics-way perspective. And today it struck me.

Remembering who we are

Though this may sound very very abstract to some, I actually do believe that there is a collective wholeness somewhere. However, somewhere would be the wrong discription, because it is a charateristic of matter: matter needs space in order to exists. I do not believe that this collective wholeness is bound by space nor time. This collective wholeness, I will call the Self from now on.

We are in this physical world and we are subjected to its laws. Its laws are everything that we can see, touch, feel, hear, do, think etc. And the fact that I am using these words are also the laws: Laws of expression and representation.

The question that has been bugging me for quite some time is: why do we have fantasy? Why does imagination exist? We do not feel the urge to answer this question, because in the physical world it has no real relevance. We are being indoctrinated to deal only with the things in the physical world. I am calling this indoctrinated, but i will come back to this later on. However, we cannot help to feel attracted to expressions (movies, books, theater, art, music) in the physical laws. We cannot explain it, only that there is something inside us that says: WOW. In my perspective, it is not that expression on itself that we appreciate, that appeals to us. It is the expresssion in the law, the mean of the physical world that makes us remember what we used to be: The Self.

According to Berstein and his theory on movement organisation, children do not just learn to control their movements, but also to make themselves as efficient as possible by exploiting their biodynamics. Furthermore, according to ecological psychology, the world has meaning and people need to use that information to function within it. In short: we are subjected by the physical laws and we must learn to function within it.

It is my hypothesis that the Self is for some causality split when built into the human body when conceiving has begun. My feelings on this hypothesis are strenghtened by the fact that we as human beings have the need to feel connected with someone else or a group.

This Self is unbound, has infinite degrees of freedom and contains everything. When split, a small essence is forced into the body. And though we have discarded through experiments that there is no such thing has Deux ex Machina, I actually do believe this to be the case; yet not as trying to be described by precious authors.

Why do children have a big imagination? Because they still remember what it is like to be part of the Self. However, just as children learn to move within the physical laws, so does the partial Self. We forget. We grow up and are more subjected by the physical laws until they become inherent to what we think we are.

So in short, I am telling that we come from a spaceless and timeless collective anti-matter, are put into the physical world and its constraints and forget that we ever were a collective Self. Does that strike you?

The human body is extraordinarily capable of adapting. We learn, we adapt. A very large part of who you are now, is not the same as it was 10 years ago. And after 10 years you might say: if you told me I would end up like this, I would have never believed you. At the same time, you could say that you can't remember that you were the way you apparently were when someone tells you a story about your past. In conclusion: we forget, we mix up. In this way, I believe the same happens to our Self. We forget.

But we still remember, some to a larger extent than others. And when we remember, we connect to the Self. This is what happens when we are in a state of intense happiness that cannot be described with words. When we hear a piece of music, when we see a movie, when we look at a piece of art, when we look at a sundown, when we look at our partner. We remember.

Unfortunately, the physical laws do not allow us to remember for a long time. There are constraints that prevent us from doing so. In neuromuscular models, stability of a joint is possible through three subsystems. These subsystems control the system with state variables. In the case of the spine, there are 6 state variables for each degree of freedom (3 for angular position and 3 for angular velocity). Having 6 state variables, the complexity of a movement is accurately described and approached. When fatigue sets in, the spine stiffens in order to prevent injury, thus reducing the numer of degrees of freedom and state variables. This makes the system easier to handle, with the downside that complex movements are now downgraded to less complex movements.

Remembering who we are is being able to be the full complexity that the Self is. But being this complexity allows for fatigue to set in, caused by the physical laws. This fatigue puts other physical constraints into motion, reducing the complexity that we are in order to make it easier to handle and to prevent injury that is expressed in the physical world.

This whole concept of remembering is what makes me explain a lot of things that I see before me in the physical world. It explains why some movies that are about total bull shit in a physical-law sense still are able to move me. It explains why people have imagination and fantasy. It gives right to existence in the physical law without having to describe it according to its conditions. It explains why there are talented children who are able to do so many complex things that normally a grown up could only do: because the Self remembers better and is less subjected to the physical laws. It explains what love is and why being in love doesn't last long. It explains why we are unable to approach or describe something so beautiful without degrading it or losing the essence. It explains why we have the need to connect, it explains why some do not have that need: they do not connect with or remember the Self and are totally subjected to the physical laws.

Being subjected to physical laws in order to / and function with it in the physical law is not something I see as inferior. I do believe that it is not our goal in life to commit to these laws. We have to remember who we are. When we dream of vacation or dream of a specific lover, we are not necessarily being unrealistic. We are just putting an unconscious effort to connect with the Self within the laws of the physical world. We know what vacation is like, we know what a lover is like. And it is more realistic because the physical world and its laws make it so. But there is more than the physical laws. Dreaming about vacation is not even a particle of the anti-matter like Self. It's only out of reach because we have learned to function according to the physical laws.

This is a short article I wrote and something I would like to end my blog entree with. I feel there are so much answers in this concept, even though the laws prevent me from investigating. I just know that these answers exist because I feel it. Sometimes I am delighted to remember.

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I love talking about connection, friendship, love, desire and the norms that are being upheld. It has come to mind that there is nothing as more true as connection. It is formless, a phenomenon. How we choose to treat it in this world, is something that is ours, personal and context dependent. The only problem may be that we may not have the connective / emotional means or laws in this physical world (yet) to be able to model it in such a way that it can be applied in a more generalized sense. Connection goes beyond any physical equation. We may treat it, using the laws we have now, but I feel these laws do not catch the whole concept of connection. Maybe outside this Earthly physical world, there are laws that apply to true connectivity in which we do not need to give connection shape and existence in this world through overappreciated underdeveloped means.
For a few days I have been wondering why something as fantasy, imagination exists. Why do we like stories, movies, books that are not related to our own lives and perhaps never will? Why is there a core inside us that is sparked, whether felt more intense and is more present in some individuals than others? No scientific or physical law will ever be able to describe it. It's like living in a car, never been able to go outside and still trying to describe what rain is.
Laws we apply here are always bound by other laws we will never understand. When we, as primates, turn on a television and it has no image and only noise, we may conclude that the noise is caused by the tv. More specifically, turning on the tv, the switch, results in noise. It makes sense, because it's reliable (in a scientific sense): turning it on and of always results in the same outcome: noise. Therefore, we conclude that noise is being caused by the tv. And it may be valid if we do not know that the tv can produce real images. So this conclusion is valid and reliable. But does it make sense? No it doesn't. We know damn well that television can produce real images, if the signal to the tv is there. Why do we know this? Because it is something made by man and we understand its dynamics.
Connection is something inherent to the existence of souls. It cannot be approached through mechanical, neurological, physiological, molecular models without losing the very essence of it. It angers me that we HAVE to deal with in such a way that it makes sense in our world. It should always make sense but it cannot. We need laws that go beyond our thinking capabilities forged in this materialistic world. There has to be something more than this. I just don't know what that may be. But I refuse to look the other way and treat it without the respect that this beautiful formless phenomenon deserves.