control: is it denial or delusion?

I'm not sure if I've "come out and said it" but I just wanted to pass on something which to me has gone beyond "knowledge" and into the fully grokked ... that is that control over things is an illusion or a delusion (depending on how you view yourself).

Sure, we know how to control our bodies with our will, but once it gets past simple things, the lines blur and the illusion breaks down. Even with our own bodies (which we think we control) there are processes which we do not. Mostly we attempt to have some sort of control over our bodies, which we often call social graces, and we don't fart, piss or shit in places which social thinking tells us not to (and indeed good hygienic practice too). Of course this can only be controlled for so long (and many a joke had about that topic).

But after then its all pretty much down to chance or luck; not our planning.

You could (for instance) be walking across the road on the phone planning that big thing to be hit suddenly by a car that you walked out in front of ...

If you survive (and depending on your injuries) you may come to the realisation that you were not actually in control of the things which matter in your life. By your inattention you had abdicated the control over them.

Sometimes however we never actually had control. For instance my friends death from cancer when I was 20, my own heart condition, my wifes sudden death from a brain tumor, all these things are clear reminders that I'm a wanderer on this earth not anyone in charge of my destiny.

This is not to say don't try to plan and don't try to organise, but it is to say that you need to keep in mind that it just may not happen the way you planned.

The important thing is to not get angry or develop anxiety over  these things because your control was just an illusion anyway.

To me getting emotional over what you had no control over is just evidence that you are in denial about this, or deluded about what power you really have. Probably the more angry you get the more you are deep in denial or delusion.

Life can be enjoyed (of course sometimes its not fun at all ... ), but don't stake your life (and your plans in life) on the delusional idea that "you're in control" ... well ... it never leads to happiness.

Happiness is a state of being which we can actually have control over. We can choose to not be effected by something in a bad way if we wish to.

So having introduced Stoic philosophy here let me leave you with some advice from one of the greats, Marcus Aurelius

I don't know what you think about god (or if you like me are atheist) but from a human spiritual perspective I think Carl Jung nailed god pretty well when he wrote:

He also said this:

"We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche."

So not only must we see and understand the difference between what we can control and what we can not; we must also become in touch with the part of ourselves which is the unconscious.

If you feel like prayer to God I recommend this also old advice/prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I wish you peace

all quiet here

It would seem to have been quiet here on my blog lately. Its not that I've forgotten or even that I've not had anything to say. Its more that the things I have to express have perhaps been all said here and I can see also from the activity some of my older works are providing useful reference / reading for others.

Its been three years since I buried Anita (anniversary just passed) and as one could expect there has been a lot on my mind, especially with respect to my relationship with her.

obvious paradoxes

She is with me every day, yet not here at all. I am finding that I am gradually developing the strength to carry her memory while not being overwhelmed by its 'weight' (and by the weight of her absence). My desire to learn to carry that and to train myself in carrying that has brought with it an awareness that (unlike physical training) I do not know how to train myself effectively. So I'm sort of like a kid in a gym playing with the machines and bars but not knowing how to do it - not having anyone to show me how.

I guess that I am accepting my load of doing things in the physical world (which I have been ignoring) but only in so far as it facilitates me getting away.

I feel a strong wish to be wandering, which I realise that I have done many times in the past. Japan, India, Korea, Finland ... each time brought with it changes. Sometimes it facilitated finding myself, sometimes it was just distraction.

I tire of being lonely but I do not (curiously) waver in my love for Anita. This makes it clear to me that for me to ever have any other relationships that person will need to be as aware, developed and patient as I am. So probably there can no further relationships in my life. Its not that such a person will not exist, but that I meet them at the time that they are ready to be met is so improbable that I'd call it as I just did.

Lets see where the road goes.

There remains much to do here, but then Finland first then probably to Ireland.

basking in the sun (as seen from different planets)

This image below was published by a fellow called Burton MacKenzie. He made this image and posted it onto his page in 2009 (http://www.burtonmackenzie.com/2009/02/sun-as-seen-from.html) however that server seems gone now, so only references are found today. So in a nod to his work I thought I'd publish it here.

So assuming that you know the size of the sun looking out the window, then it'll look bigger on Venus, huge on Mercury and by the time its out to Neptune it's but a bright star.

The New Horizons page reports:

The latest spectra from New Horizons Ralph instrument reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences from place to place across the frozen surface of Pluto. "We just learned that in the north polar cap, methane ice is diluted in a thick, transparent slab of nitrogen ice resulting in strong absorption of infrared light, said New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. In one of the visually dark equatorial patches, the methane ice has shallower infrared absorptions indicative of a very different texture. "The spectrum appears as if the ice is less diluted in nitrogen," Grundy speculated or that it has a different texture in that area."

As Nitrogen melts at about -210°C it means that the surface there will be bloody cold.

So the sun which heats our world nicely (thank you very much) is shedding so little heat out there that as its size suggests, its not giving much more radiation than a star. Who knows, maybe Jupiter gives is something too...

reading into things

Sometimes in life little things happen to make one wonder if some sort of message is being sent. One of the things that Atheists like to point out is that the human mind is designed to see patterns where there may be none.

Of course there may be a pattern and what is dismissed by one is observed by another.

When I was in Alberta some years ago I was struck by the way people love to stack rocks on the shore. As it happens I never saw anyone stacking the rocks, but noone had to tell me that this was done by a person

It was obvious to me that this was not a natural formation. Yet to many animals who walked amid it I would doubt that they'd give it a second thought.

People have in the past recognized enough patterns to take us from whacking things with rocks to being able to deftly control electrons and make entirely new molecules.

Recently other creations of ours (machine learning) have begun to see patterns which have been ignored or missed by humans (in this case pathologists) for some time. These new observers (the AI machines) have seen things we missed or dismissed. This TED talk is an excellent example of this.

In this pathology case, the computer system actually discovered that the cells around the cancer are as important as the cancer cells themselves in making a diagnosis. This is the opposite of what pathologists had been taught for decades.

So when you feel something may be a message to you from your loved ones who are not in this universe anymore, perhaps it is something from them. Perhaps they did not alter the environment, perhaps tfhey are only able to touch at your mind to get you to observe something differently and see something in a new way. Perhaps they are more impartial but who knows?

The computers saw the same histology slides as people and recognised some new patterns, yet we don't call them crazy.

Perhaps there is no way to externally validate the feelings I've had and the small things which have come to my attention.

Perhaps they are just errant observations ... but if seeing them helps me to adjust to life with out Anita by my side then its only a good thing ...

I hope some good comes in your world too