Maybe you can't do what I can

I've been thinking about spiritual teachers and their ilk. Gurus and all that. Particularly the notion that some people are "ordained by heaven to lead others into the light.

That's a view that I've always written off as a load of hooey. I've always assumed that we all have the necessary faculties to attain our own personal enlightenment. But it just now stuck me that I'm completely unsure of what my basis for this belief is. If I accept the science behind our current understanding of the brain then it may well follow that certain brain injuries must prevent people from having certain experiences and if that's the case then presumably there are people out there who are spiritually "Unfit for purpose". Which is troubling to me.

I always have a hard time deciding how to follow my path. The How of something is a left brain activity as I understand it while the Why emanates from the right brain.

Guess I have some sort of emotional blockage interfearing* with my intuitive sense.

Presumably, because we can't understand our intuitive process, the goal of the spiritual path must be one of tuning one's intuition to reality as opposed to fantasy. Is story telling merely the act of tuning ones intuition to fantasy? Or is it the exploration of possibilities? How do we experience reality?

Meditation right, Zen and all that. Hmm, back to zen again. Still haven't found anything better.

Ho hum....

*deliberate misspelling.

I just saw the "screen refresh rate" for my mind!

I just saw the "screen refresh rate" for my mind!

While sitting in the shadow of an electrical pylon I decided to see if I could observe the earths rotation in the movement of the shadow.

I looked down the length of the shadow at a prominent stick and watched for the movement of the shadow.

What I was suprised to see was that the shadow would remain still for a period of time and then "jump" to the next position. It was like a very subtle strobeoscopic effect.

I believe what I was seeing was the perception lag created by my brain attempting to "predict the future".

If you're unfamiliar with this, here's how it works: Because our brains operate slower than the speed of light, our ability to track moving objects is dependent on our brains showing us the world 1/10th of a second ahead of the most recent light information to enter our eyes. If this were not the case, and we saw an "un-edited" view of the world it would be impossible for us to interact with anything that wasn't moving very slowly because when we tried to take hold of it it would no longer be where we were looking.

The thing is, as I understand it, our brains don't come pre-loaded with vision software, but rather we build up the software as we grow and learn to interact with our environment. Because I don't spend much time sitting still and watching shadows move I believe that the model my brain has to handle movement isn't yet fine tuned enough to handle very slow moving objects. the distance the shadow taveled in 1/10th of a second was below my threshold of observation so my brain updated my view of the world without any change in the shadows position. This presumably repeated until the difference in position was large enough for my brain to register at which point the shadow appeared to "jump" to a new position.

My plan is now to spend more time observing shadows moving in sunlight to see whether I can decrease the threshold of my perception to the point that the shadow moves smoothly and continuously. After that, perhaps I'll try to watch brambles grow.

I'm quite pleased with the name of this blog. It's about an image that came to mind in my kenjutsu class a while ago when I was trying to figure out how to rise from Seiza without getting in my own way. A lot of our movments in the style I study are based around letting gravity move us rather than using our muscles. We move by releasing our muscles rather than by contracting them and alowing ourselves to "fall" into a new shape and position.

Trying to aply this same feeling to rising of the ground, I had the mental image of gravity being reversed and of falling skyward. It probably doesn't make much sense but it has alowed me, in small steps to be more relaxed in my movments and it's a very pleasant image.

This Blogs a little bit like that. I generally don't write much because I have a hard time getting out of my own way, so this is an attemt to let my mind fall out of my head and into the sky if you will.

Lyssa and I spent the 4th at Mt. Rainier. Looking at the photos we took, I was pleased to se that we don't look like tourists. Our clothes were just too strange.

It's something I really like about dressing in a very peculiar manner, one never takes a boring photo. Most of the time, if you're looking through someones pics on facebook or whathaveyou, pictures of "that time we went and did that thing" they look so lifeless. Thety certainly don't capture the experience you were having at the time. At least when you're the really strange person there's the promise of a story there