Navigational Map Part 1

Laying Down a Prelude

                  

Intentions

This quest to explore existence is really a quest to explore the capacities of human beings, for the nature of consciousness seems to make it impossible to know "what exists" in any objective manner. The methodologies for investigating what the fuck it’s all about typically fill in the spaces between the two extremes of left-brain rationalist and right-brain transrationalist. It seems each is true within certain limits and that a mediating approach tampering both extremes with a bit of middle-path humility might be ideal in attaining the shared goal of creating navigational maps of existence. A high quality map would not only provide the explorer with coordinates, but would also provide reasons for exploring; in this manner, it resembles an actional narrative, an alive and evolving story.
    

This story is done by brained-beings, by humans gifted with a 3-pound universe of perplexing neural architecture tucked behind the contours of our skulls --- for FREE! It’s through this organ paraphrasing reality-experiences for us (absorbing information streams, condensing them, and projecting it outwards) that coherent stories can materialize from the jumbled-chaos of living.
 

This seems to be its purpose. For the duration of our life, this gift works to integrate the lateral and everflowing streams of ambiguity and potential meaning into a story that can guide one’s life. 

 

Methods 

Around the time of the Symbolic Revolution of 50,000 BCE, the desire to create these stories crops up, as evidenced by early cave art and the development of language. Nowadays language has become like a built in sense --- whether through interpersonal speech or internal monologues, most of life’s phenomenon’s become transduced and re-presented as linguistic symbols. 

The linguistic symbols form the medium by which these stories are communicated. By coordinating the movements of the brain-mouth-lung system so as to modulate nearby sound waves, geometric patterns of air can travel through space to land inside the spiral-shaped ear of a listener. This is spoken language. By manipulating the brain-eye-hand system, strange typographical carvings can be made on certain surfaces (paper, walls, screens etc.) that can travel through space to land inside the eye. This is written language.

Both aspects require a not-fully-understood system of brain processes to produce this property called “meaning” that is such a vital aspect to these stories. Meaning is what provides our existential nutrition. 

All of our searching, it seems, is driven by, to quote T.S. Eiliot, our desire “to arrive at where we are, and know if for the first time”. We want to relate our existence to the small microcosmic domain and the large macrocosmic domain to arrive at a comprehensive view, then we will truly know where we are and see it for the first time.