In Motion — Current
A fluid motion in a definite direction, especially through a surrounding body of fluid in which there is less movement
We all see the world as a collection of solid objects independent of each other and relying on external impulses to set them in motion. I would like you to set aside that view for the duration of this lecture, and imagine existence as a self-activating fluid.
Underneath the surface of this endless sea that is reality, a sea with deep, perpetually troubled waters, there are currents and eddies and vortexes.
They manifest in every one of its components, there are currents in social mores, which we call zeitgeist, there are currents in thought, which we call schools, there are currents in spiritual life, which we call religions.
Under normal circumstances we accept these currents without thinking, just as we don’t wonder why blood is running through our veins, but once they draw our attention, they become impossible to ignore, so much that they can be distracting.
Beware of getting so mesmerized by the wake of your ship that you are running it on ground!
What do currents do? They coalesce like elements in a way that makes them reinforce each other, in a way that makes them run faster than the surrounding elements, those that do not share their qualities.
Examples — musical styles, fashion trends, teaching precepts, beliefs about the world, standards of beauty, the constant reshuffling of the importance of specific abilities, society mores, the experience of time.
For instance, you may be too young to know this for yourself, but as you grow older, time feels different, you look back at decades as if they were a blink, your whole mind stretches out like taffy, to accommodate the bulk of experiences you piled up as you went through life.
Different ages are undercurrents in the river of time, running parallel but at different speeds and picking up the pace as they advance down the stream.
Everybody can relate to this phenomenon, it’s an internally driven understanding, but what people rarely think about is that time itself is an artificial construct, based on our perception of change, and that the variability in speed they experience is actually real when examined in this context.
Currents are important for two reasons: they can speed up your progress if they jibe with your purpose and they can waste enormous amounts of your time and energy if you get caught in them against your will and can’t escape them. They are to existence like rip currents are to the ocean; know where they are and do not succumb to the vanity you are strong enough to defy them.
The underlying motions of reality engender sweeping changes, swift bursts of progress and devastating wars, the architecture of reason and intractable chaos, and you can’t wade your way through the world without acknowledging their presence.
Much like real currents, these subtle shifts inside existence have places where they slow down and places where they go through rapids, they have thicknesses and densities, straights and dams.
Beneath its surface, reality is very uneven, a truth that hits the scholarly world again and again, and when it does it always challenges reason and throws a spoke into the wheels of science just when people thought they had their concepts figured out, clear and beautiful, and perfectly aligned.
There are also places in existence we can’t fathom, like the darkest trenches of the deep, because our human limitations don’t allow us to survive their extreme conditions and their confines are so devoid of signal that our senses become useless when immersed in their substance.
In these places you encounter undercurrents of existence so bizarre we should label them, like unfinished maps, with ‘here be dragons’, to give the valiant wanderer fair warning they are about to venture into treacherous deeps.
So, what can we do with currents? Ride them, if favorable.
We build society on the recognition of common traits and instinctively favor being alike over being different.
Being aware of the direction and interaction of currents has intrinsic value, you get a better picture of situations and understand why things are a certain way when all the signs point in a different direction.
Reading currents is a navigational tool. It doesn’t force your life into a course; it informs it, so it understands the influences pertinent to the path it charted for itself. Unfortunately, the information you gleam from them sometimes shows you’re at a disadvantage, but you are always better off knowing the truth.
[During the last few months we faced many challenges which significantly slowed down the progress in the study of these manuscripts.
We almost shut down the project twice for lack of interest from the scientific community, and constant turnover inside the research team has made it nearly impossible to formulate a cohesive approach.
Furthermore, the library has suffered from a reduction in funding, which put the strain on its remaining staff and limited the time they had available to answer our questions.
An auspicious series of independent events, fueled by community outreach, allowed us to continue our progress towards our goal, although at a much slower pace.
We would like to take this opportunity to express gratitude for this public effort, without which we would have undoubtedly abandoned our work.]
Questions about currents.
Can I elaborate on the unknown deeps, the reality trenches?
Let’s say you are in a field of poppies, all more or less the same, but no two exactly alike, and that from this field of poppies you can pick only one. Imagine that once you picked that poppy, all the others instantaneously disappear. While you are still stretching out your hand to pick the poppy, all the other flowers are still there, and you can see them, and if something allowed you to immortalize them, to provide proof they existed, you could use that instrument to keep an image of the field, for yourself and to show other people. As you reach out and snap your chosen poppy from its stem, the other flowers disappear. Here comes the ghastly detail. Not only do they disappear in the present, but they would have never been there at any point in time.
Safe in your knowledge of the poppy field, you try to show the image you saved, but your image only shows one poppy, the one you chose. Tell everybody that there was a whole field of them only a moment ago, and you forfeit your sanity. Many a person ended their life mad because they insisted on espousing a personal truth like that. For that is what this is. A personal truth. An undercurrent of your own perception in the wider stream of a much larger reality. What was it that happened? Were your senses so deceived that they imagined poppies where there were none? Was reality shifted on you, like theaters change decors in the middle of the play? Could you be sure of anything you see going further?
What is the answer to this? That’s precisely the point of the example. I don’t suppose we can think of this situation in terms of answers, because it is not a reality that would yield them. You committed that image to memory, because you have experienced it, no matter what your sight tells you now, and even if you want to cast this experience aside, so it doesn’t cloud your perfect model of the world, you can’t unknow things. Why would you still have the memory of an event that otherwise disappeared from existence in all directions of time might be the more poignant question.
Just as it is with everything, these trenches get charted slowly over time, only to reveal the existence of even deeper ones. Reality is trenches all the way down.
[We tried but could not ignore the fact that the paragraph above contains blatant references to quantum wave functions.
The probability of it being a coincidence bends even the most skeptic interpretation of empirical facts. We will not try to find an explanation for this here, and we will just admit that we don’t know.]
What about the thicknesses and densities?
Have you ever been engaged in a familiar activity, with a very comfortable time frame, only to find every second of it pure agony when you’re expecting a meaningful life event?
It is the increase in the density of that time that bears on you like a mountain of bricks.
Other examples would be the lengthening of your way home when you are tired, your heightened interest in health as you grow older, the value of a piece of bread when you are hungry.
There are other, more subtle examples. For instance, the dips in your attention span when listening to a speaker. The main points of the presentation reach your mind, but in uneven ways, with some being remembered word for word, while others get skimmed over, like fuzzy connectors between clear clumps of thought. This is an example of how the current of attention has variable thickness.
[These manuscripts provided us with the unanticipated opportunity to get a glimpse into the ancient art of papermaking, as the medium is paper, and not parchment, which would have been a much more natural choice for the historical period.
Upon analyzing a sample we established the paper was made primarily of rags, mulberry bark and sandalwood, and pressed by hand, a technique that made the paper thickness uneven; in very thin places it becomes translucent.
The pulp was never bleached, imparting a deep ivory color on the paper and the scent of sandalwood is still noticeable, even after all this time.
This document is sealed with a rose, just like the others, and the author placed the symbol in a location where the paper is so thick it gives the wet seal a three dimensional quality, making it look like an embossing.]
Can I give you an example of how you can get distracted by the current of an event instead of navigating it.
This happens to artists more than they would like to admit. The spirit of their time, which has its own principles, shapes their inspiration.
These principles are universal and they resonate in similar ways in the minds of other artists too, and those artists eventually find each other and form a current, a style. These principles generate their own forms, which are unique and become associated with the style. After a while the group expects these forms to be present in all the artwork of the style, whether they fit or not.
How do you get out of a zeitgeist rip current?
With great difficulty. Once you’re caught in a larger stream of thought, you have two obstacles to overcome: the power of the trend itself and the struggle of your own mind, which was at some point invested in it and which will fight to resist you. Usually it takes a life-changing event to throw you out of your groove, and if that life-changing event didn’t happen naturally, the very struggle to free yourself will generate it.
You are asking why you shouldn’t stay inside the current if sliding out of it is so adverse to your well-being? This is a lesson in critical thinking and why you have to formulate your questions carefully. You asked how, not why.
There are no reasons for you to do or not do something, other than those of your own making.
[We estimate that the second part of the text predates the writing above by at least ten years. The calligraphy looks strained, but correct, denoting a hand still struggling with cursive writing.]
How do currents start?
Most of the time they are self-generating, born of the resonance of an idea in so many minds. What makes an idea contagious like that? I don’t know, but I suspect it has something to do with basic human yearnings and fears, especially those that remain unexpressed.
Some currents are perpetual, and their beginnings run too far back into the past to matter anymore.
The consistent flow of compassion is an excellent example of that.
Its guiding principles permeated every society, every time and every moral code, and its stream has run through humanity for so long nobody can pinpoint its beginning.
An example of an eddy?
An eddy keeps an idea brewing until its message becomes simple enough to spread out into the world.
An eddy doesn’t have clarity or orientation, it is a cluster of muddled directions and thoughts which find each other instinctively without even knowing why.
Eddies are pools of potential, a few yield greatness, most don’t.
Ideas and trends get tested inside them, the coherent ones get fueled and reinforced by their random inputs and the inconsistent ones get destroyed.
You want an example where reality challenges its own laws?
What is matter made of?
There are many things we know without a doubt that we can’t quantify and demonstrate, and yet we all accept them as true and have a common frame of reference for them so every person understands them the same way. Things like love, enjoyment, and insight require no explanation, even though they have no substance; they populate the space between us; they animate our lives in ways that our senses can’t detect and our reason can’t explain. Does that make them not real? If you describe as real only the things that have substance, the things we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell, then thought isn’t real, memories aren’t real, and a conversation ceases to exist the moment its last sound stopped reverberating. I would go even further to say that there may be material things out there that our limited senses can not measure, and which hide from our perception. Those too would not be real in this context.
If we accept that the mental constructs of our minds are also real, then why would a thought be more valid than a dream? Why would knowing something be real and believing something not real? If you think it, it is real. It is a thought inside your head. A thought is real. Whether it will, or can manifest in the world of matter is just a matter of time, probability and degree. And if it does, keep in mind we don’t really know what matter was made of in the first place.
