784
89.3 Substance and the Insubstantiality Hypothesis
The proportion of meaning to no meaning—substance to insubstantiality—underscores the futility of assigning significance to anything. Meaning, identity, significance—these are each hypothetical summations that remain unresolved until the
myriad equations tempted toward closure find their Being in the proverbial random
acts of kindness. We are left with the truly existential consciousness, whose natural
history, as we have endeavored to illustrate, is ecologically resonant, but without
consistent characteristics that would resonate and give us the coordinates needed to
engender the pre-genesis of a theorem that can be tested in the real world.
Ultimately, it comes down to hunches; the grand unified theory of a suspicion
which holds that all consciousness is subsumed by a veritable dust storm of alternative beings. Hence, the silly nineteenth-century assertion that “Man, the animal, in
fact, has worked his way to the headship of the sentient world, and has become the
superb animal which he is, in virtue of his success in the struggle for existence”
6
.
And this, in spite of Thomas Huxley’s (1825–1895) claim elsewhere “that the structural intervals between the various existing modifications of organic beings may be
diminished, or even obliterated, if we take into account the long and varied succession of animals and plants which have preceded these now living…”
7
.
If, even to the degree of an angstrom or nanosecond, pellucidity is seen to emanate its own red-shift, some vaguest of obtuse demonstrations of incremental change
in the universe we perceive, and within the body of Self, then consciousness, dimly
conscious of itself, might shift with the shooting stars, exciting a kind of riot that
makes for poetry consistent with compassion. Change at even the most indivisible
level informs a new category of experience altogether; gradations divined by other
gradations. The ripple in the pond effect. But can the ripple ever seize upon the
holistic concept/imagery of the pond through which its energy is transmigrated? Do
echoes comprehend their source?
An entire sensate classification system of individuals knows gradation as a primacy forever on the verge of feeling about something, someone greater than oneself.
Imagine, then, the exponential sensations circling around the surface of the Sun, or
across the fabulist death of consciousness, a concept that is incapable of nullifying
itself and therefore depends upon the fiction of a concept. By these miniature Big
Bangs the mind stands ready and attuned. A mentality of its essence evaporates into a
monumental truth, equivalent to a non-material evanescent impermanence that is
beautiful and telling. Such is Nature. We cannot know her because knowledge destroys
even the most remote idea, its idealized object. Such is her fragility. Warm palms and
vanishing vanishing snowflakes: amid a Cosmos of at least 93 billion light years.
Strange attractors, non-periodic, phase-spaced, as they are characterized by
mathematicians, repelled at last on the very threshold of contact
8
. Any equation is
6 Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution And Ethics And Other Essays, D. Appleton and Company,
New York, 1898, p.51.
7 Thomas H. Huxley, Man’s Place In Nature And Other Anthropological Essays, D. Appleton and
Company, New York, 1898, p. 157.
8 See “Chaos & Fractals,” by Larry Bradley, 2010, https://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/attrac89 The Cycle of Alterities
89.3 Substance and the Insubstantiality Hypothesis
The proportion of meaning to no meaning—substance to insubstantiality—underscores the futility of assigning significance to anything. Meaning, identity, significance—these are each hypothetical summations that remain unresolved until the
myriad equations tempted toward closure find their Being in the proverbial random
acts of kindness. We are left with the truly existential consciousness, whose natural
history, as we have endeavored to illustrate, is ecologically resonant, but without
consistent characteristics that would resonate and give us the coordinates needed to
engender the pre-genesis of a theorem that can be tested in the real world.
Ultimately, it comes down to hunches; the grand unified theory of a suspicion
which holds that all consciousness is subsumed by a veritable dust storm of alternative beings. Hence, the silly nineteenth-century assertion that “Man, the animal, in
fact, has worked his way to the headship of the sentient world, and has become the
superb animal which he is, in virtue of his success in the struggle for existence”
6
.
And this, in spite of Thomas Huxley’s (1825–1895) claim elsewhere “that the structural intervals between the various existing modifications of organic beings may be
diminished, or even obliterated, if we take into account the long and varied succession of animals and plants which have preceded these now living…”
7
.
If, even to the degree of an angstrom or nanosecond, pellucidity is seen to emanate its own red-shift, some vaguest of obtuse demonstrations of incremental change
in the universe we perceive, and within the body of Self, then consciousness, dimly
conscious of itself, might shift with the shooting stars, exciting a kind of riot that
makes for poetry consistent with compassion. Change at even the most indivisible
level informs a new category of experience altogether; gradations divined by other
gradations. The ripple in the pond effect. But can the ripple ever seize upon the
holistic concept/imagery of the pond through which its energy is transmigrated? Do
echoes comprehend their source?
An entire sensate classification system of individuals knows gradation as a primacy forever on the verge of feeling about something, someone greater than oneself.
Imagine, then, the exponential sensations circling around the surface of the Sun, or
across the fabulist death of consciousness, a concept that is incapable of nullifying
itself and therefore depends upon the fiction of a concept. By these miniature Big
Bangs the mind stands ready and attuned. A mentality of its essence evaporates into a
monumental truth, equivalent to a non-material evanescent impermanence that is
beautiful and telling. Such is Nature. We cannot know her because knowledge destroys
even the most remote idea, its idealized object. Such is her fragility. Warm palms and
vanishing vanishing snowflakes: amid a Cosmos of at least 93 billion light years.
Strange attractors, non-periodic, phase-spaced, as they are characterized by
mathematicians, repelled at last on the very threshold of contact
8
. Any equation is
6 Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution And Ethics And Other Essays, D. Appleton and Company,
New York, 1898, p.51.
7 Thomas H. Huxley, Man’s Place In Nature And Other Anthropological Essays, D. Appleton and
Company, New York, 1898, p. 157.
8 See “Chaos & Fractals,” by Larry Bradley, 2010, https://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/attrac89 The Cycle of Alterities