Continuous realization of the matrix
There's no such thing as a house
There’s no such thing as a house. There’s a structure, a concept that inspired the creation of that structure and generates a standing wave pattern about that structure, and a maintenance schedule.
Every time we look at the house, we activate the standing wave pattern. But without that witness, what is that house? It is matter. The cycle it belongs to is the cycle of the earth, where things emerge from the dirt and return to it. Up and down, like slow waves.
When we look at a decaying house, we create a story about decay and neglect, about forgotten intentions, about lost warmth, about emptiness. When we look away, that story vanishes.
When we look at a living house, or live in a living house, we see things that should be a certain way. A roof that needs replacing. Ducts that need cleaning. Pipes that need to not leak. Doors and windows that need to be closed and resealed occasionally because there are rooms that need to not accrue moisture because they are spaces that need to be free of mold and have controlled temperature. All of this vision comes from the standing wave generated by our attention. In our vision, in our sight, in our inspired opinion, the house should align with the vision. It should snap to the grid. This is, of course, our vision, and not intrinsic to the material. What’s intrinsic to the material is to sag back into the earth. So to keep the material snapping to the grid, we busily do a set of creative activities that we call “maintenance.” But let’s be clear. We are maintaining alignment to an external vision imposed upon a timeline. Nothing material is being maintained.
What is Theseus’s ship? It’s an idea about a certain arrangement of material. It is a matrix imposed from a human perspective into three-dimensional space, and the active manipulation of material to align with that matrix, which is in its first, shorter phase called “creation,” and its second, longer phase called “maintenance.” It is the same ship because the material is aligning with the same vision. When the vision leaves, then the ship-ness leaves the material and the phase called “dissolution” sets in.
I think about this all the time. This notion revolves in my head and continually astonishes me, like a giant sculpture of a whale hung too low in a room. It is fundamentally unusual to me, foreign, external, unnatural. In my head, forms are formless and timeless, spring into existence when imagined and disappear otherwise, collect no dust, experience no decay.
When I imagine my life, it’s full of colorful, interesting things.
When I labor to undertake the business of aligning this vision with my reality, I fill up my living room with stuff. This is the “creation” phase.
The maintenance phase astounds me, revolves slowly over my head like a large suspended whale. It’s the same whale. My vision didn’t include active maintenance of all this stuff, which I now have to avoid calling “crap.” It didn’t include dusting.
Over time, I developed a spiritual system in which the idea of motion through time was central. Several things in this system are called “the ship.”
The body
The day itself, twenty-four-hours
The home
The possessions
I think that’s it.
The home is a ship from which we navigate our journey through time. There are certain bottlenecks. The day is a bottleneck. The maintenance requirements of our visions are bottlenecks.
I’m writing this post in response to another post that said something like Minimalism is anti-God because God creates maximimistly. I don’t disagree that maximalism is divine and minimalism is something else, but maximalism is not for everybody even though everybody has the same creative spark as God. God doesn’t have the same bottlenecks as we do. God doesn’t have to run a physical ship.
Maximalism requires a lot. It either requires a lot of maintenance, or it requires a huge sacrifice in quality of life and vigor.
I have a lot of maximalism in my inner vision. I have come around to sorting it with the same type of inner vision as the fantasies about being in The World’s Best Rock Band, etc., that often come from not knowing exactly what we want. In the absence of clarity, we don’t really know how to get what we want, so we expand our inner vision out to include “more” until it encompasses the entire world and it’s enough. If we want our music or whatever talent it is to be understood and received, if we want inspiring creative adventures and appropriate acclaim, but we don’t really know how that’s going to work, we will want to be famous to the whole world. And if we want our lives to reflect how much we love the beauty and excitement of the entire world, but we haven’t aligned the activity of our daily life to integrate with that larger picture as a biological-spiritual part of the Living Ecology, then we’re going to want that entire ecology in our living room.
Balance balance balance.
Those are my thoughts this afternoon when I got through some tasks that have been oppressing me for weeks.