Beauty, freedom, order, life, cold, subjective, specific, feline, large, easy, fair, evil and all categories and attributes; without a mind to hold these concepts, they can not exist. There are minds, however, and many hold these categories.
While we may use categories and attributes to describe things that exist outside of us, the attributes are not inherent in the things we describe. Instead, we are describing a reaction that our mind has to a movement in energy-- our mind also being a movement in energy. The reaction is real, there is beauty in the world, but it is not outside of the category "ourselves".
There appears to be beauty in objects because our mind overlays concepts on the picture that the same mind paints from sensory input. What appears beautiful to some subjects may appear disgusting to others. Some women find large muscles attractive on men, while others are disgusted by them. Large muscles are neither attractive nor disgusting ultimately, but they are both disgusting and attractive simultaneously from the relative perspective.
In this way, all opinions are simultaneously correct and incorrect.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Energy Moving
Everything we can observe is simply energy moving. Even things that may appear to be static from our relative standpoint are constantly changing and moving at the smallest scales. A rock may sit outside of your window for your entire life, seemingly permanent and at rest. However, if you were to look at the rock with the most sensitive veiwing device, you would see that it is teeming with movement as electrons circle their nuclei. Also, if you were able to watch the rock at a much longer time scale than a human lifetime, you would see it melted away by the forces of wind and rain, like an ice cube sitting next to a fire.
But once the rock has completely eroded, what has gone? The rock was, after all, energy, and the energy still exists-- energy cannot be destroyed. Even the molecules that comprised the rock's mineral content still exist. Only the shape of the rock, which was really a movement all along, has ended. What makes the movement "a rock slowly eroding" distinct from the movement "minerals in the soil"? At what point does one phenomenon begin and the other end? Are they both different stages of one phenomenon? As we can tell by the uninterrupted continuum of events, the distinction exists only as a concept, while the energy simply moves, indifferent to our labels and categories.
If we decided to categorize only the minerals in the rock, and never created a category for the aggregate (i.e.rock), we would look at the rock as simply a clump of minerals. Viewing the rock's erosion from this standpoint, we would simply say that the molecules moved from a clump to the soil. But since we've created the concept "rock" the movement is now a destruction. If "energy" were the most specific category we ever used, the concept "destruction" would never come up.
But once the rock has completely eroded, what has gone? The rock was, after all, energy, and the energy still exists-- energy cannot be destroyed. Even the molecules that comprised the rock's mineral content still exist. Only the shape of the rock, which was really a movement all along, has ended. What makes the movement "a rock slowly eroding" distinct from the movement "minerals in the soil"? At what point does one phenomenon begin and the other end? Are they both different stages of one phenomenon? As we can tell by the uninterrupted continuum of events, the distinction exists only as a concept, while the energy simply moves, indifferent to our labels and categories.
If we decided to categorize only the minerals in the rock, and never created a category for the aggregate (i.e.rock), we would look at the rock as simply a clump of minerals. Viewing the rock's erosion from this standpoint, we would simply say that the molecules moved from a clump to the soil. But since we've created the concept "rock" the movement is now a destruction. If "energy" were the most specific category we ever used, the concept "destruction" would never come up.
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