Sharing inspiration

It’s been a while since  I last blogged about what I’d been reading online. This morning however I woke up not knowing what to blog about (if anybody has ideas, I’d love to hear them) and my twitter friends had some great articles. So I thought I’d just share those.

A person known online as @ggw_bach (with an appropriate Bach logo) writes about the intersection of spirituality in music, generally. Today he stepped outside that box to write about self-identity. His post serves as a useful reminder of how we evolve as people. How different we are today from yesterday. He puts up the view, however, that there is something constant in each of us regardless. ‘A consciousness, a knowing, a perceiver‘ he says. Do you all agree? I’m not sure I do. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It sure feels like there’s a constant, but is that perhaps an illusion?

One of my squidoo friends, who writes as Ayngel Overson AKA Boshemia AKA @EchoCrush, ponders judgements. How accepting are we each of differences? Do we put standards on everything, or just note happily that people differ? She saw a judgmental old lady be unhappy and a judged happy couple be well… happy. I ponder about that: Does judgement make us unhappy? Or is perhaps the judgement a symptom of the unhappiness? Judging people certainly doesn’t make us happier, nor does it make it easier to deal with people.

In a nice twist on quantum entanglements, researchers have found that words are entangled in our brains too. Once you hear that you go, well DUH. Apple goes with pie, like apple pie. Associations like that are a common thing, especially perhaps for someone like me who writes almost daily. What’s new about the insight is that it’s probably one of the reasons we often don’t need many words to understand other people: we share a world of associations. [I’m sure I made a bad impression on colleges the other day when I was too tired to realize what the abbreviation IE6 – pronounced in Dutch – meant. Whether I normally just think about the browser in English is unclear in hindsight. But it does highlight that normally, when we’re not too tired, words flash up a world of understanding. In this case about the annoyances associated with trying to make websites look good in different versions of Internet Explorer.]

Back to the article on entangled words: it stays remarkably neutral on the question whether the entanglement between words in our brains has anything to do with quantum mechanics. Seems to me it’s likely that quantum mechanics is not necessary to explain it. It’s just a similar concept – that influence can happen over a distance. In this case: conceptual distances. After all: apples are totally different things from pies.

By the way, this signals the end of my Friday Blavatsky series. My goal was to get the Blavatsky Collected Writings indexed by google, and whether it’s because of my blogging or not – google has all the pages in there indexed now. This means that if you want to search through the complete text of her articles, my search page will do the trick. Just add the word Blavatsky if you want to limit the search to just material by HPB (though why would you?).