My Spanish friend’s four year old son STILL can’t say “Sorry” – That’s poor for four..!
Did you make that up yourself? It’s so funny!
No, it’s somebody else’s joke, borrowed from a comedy set somewhere, and in turn made up by a native English speaker who saw the play on words…
What exactly IS Original Thought?
Certainly not this essay, although I’d like to pass it off as such.
How do my essays come about?
We’d have to start with a series of inspiring English teachers, backed by many great and not so great authors. We’d also have to give credit to an intellectual family, who held reading and writing in high stead and would frequently talk about Jean Paul Satre, Anthony Trollope or A.N. Wilson over the dinner table.
The ideas themselves are harvested from all over.
A Youtube Short adds an idea and an Instagram Reel showes another dimension to that idea.
These things seem to have some Zeitgeist driving them along, no doubt an algorithm somewhere has seen my interests and starts pushing similar themes my way.
These stories bubble up in my head, I’ll bore my partner or friends with these snippets, and try them out in different ways, in different settings to see the reactions and test their voracity.
Slowly, a common theme starts to emerge, and a collection of ideas coalesces into something like this.
Is that original thought? I don’t think so, all I’ve really done is set a few ideas beside each-other and strung them together with a few awkward words.
My lunch with a new friend today, spurred on a new/old thought.
It went something like this…
“Is what we are discussing (about human nature) a new idea, of just something fished out of the waste disposal and recycled ?”
There always seems to be something new to discuss, but as soon as we turn it over, it seems that it was probably, on some scale, to have been the truth for Humans since time began..
Again and again, we looped round this..
“But we are suffering from MORE mental health problems these days”
“Maybe we just have more names for them, but is the anxiety any different from somebody waiting for the Black Death to come knocking?”
So we turned over the Human Condition, again and again, from angle after angle.
And so too with my essays.
I work with lots of One to One students, and over the years see the same patterns and stories emerging. It’s not that they are not important, they are astonishingly so, and in each case finely tuned in different ways, but the basics are so often the same.
I see that Deepak Chopra has launched a new book Quantum Body. I haven’t even given it a fleeting glance, but judging by a recent interview, he’s come round to an idea that’s been building in the health sector for quite a few years now that all illness is Inflammation.
Inflammation, whether it be in the arteries or joint, the brain or ankles, signifies that something is going wrong. We know from the earliest of ages, that a slight elevation of our temperature shows that the body is processing something.
I’m sure that Deepak will go into the subject in great depth, and I’m certain that he’ll address the question, “what is generating this inflammation – is it Physical, Emotional or some sort of Spiritual crisis?” – I feel sure it’s a fascinating read, and it’ll be well researched.
There’s my point again.
He will have drawn together the finest research work, and an array of experts to comment.
From this he’ll present his own conclusions.
Can you ever come to your own conclusions in a case like this, or are we always standing on the shoulders of giants? Has every one of our teacher and professors arrived at “their” conclusions based on the information garnered by years of study at the side of other great minds?HasHas
Lunchtime’s discussion turned to Artificial Intelligence.
My learned friend suggested that a time will come when all human thought expressed to date will have been absorbed by a few AI programmes.
We were turning over the idea that maybe all the thinking that has ever been done, will no longer need to be repeated.
This suggested to me that an end to using our brains might be on the horizon.
If you have made your living from peddling information, as I have to a certain extent, then that might seem a bit worrying.
We put such a high premium on “Information”
From the earliest of ages we are “educated” i.e. pumped full of useless information. (When was the last time you used a quadratic equation to solve something!?)
We look up (generally) to our teachers, and to the Professors who sit above them.
We judge a person by the school they went to, the implication being that the better the school. The higher the quality of the information you receive. (However, I know plenty of people who went to “great” schools and turned out not to be the sharpest knife in the draw…!)
Almost everywhere in the world, education is highly prized.
The odd thing is that as soon as we leave the official education system, we start to discover that it wasn’t really fit for purpose, and didn’t actually train us for dealing with real life at all.
Never mind, as long as it looks good on the CV. (The same CV that nobody ever reads, and if they do, they should never believe!) … and as long as Industry get’s their obedient Drones..
In Zhineng Qigong, we practice exercises often, it’s a really good idea to stretch and move your body. The second great aspect of Dr Pang’s teachings are the inbuilt ideas of finding a way to quieten your mind. Dr Pang is ultimately pointing the way in the direction of Enlightenment, a path that he seemes to have taken for himself.
How would you describe the state of enlightenment?
The gentle foothills of enlightenment seem to suggest the surpassing of the patterning that makes you think and feel like a separate individual.
It always seemed to me that leaving all the fun of this hectic crazy life behind would be a terrible place to go to, but having (ironically) read and researched much about this journey, I see that people who start to go beyond their personal identities don’t experience what lies beyond as a loss of any sort. To be more precise it would seem to be a sensation of being at ONE with everything around you, no longer being at odds with life.
It feels like you are finally swimming WITH the flow of the river, and not battling up stream.
I’ll not bore you with my experiences of Oneness again, I’ve written about them before, but safe to say, the fleeting glimpses of connection and oneness, are enough to keep one going.
Is this the shift that Humanity needs then?
Maybe this is the opportunity for AI to take over the wrangling and reasoning that we have all worn our brains out with.
Are we finally being offered the free time and the opportunity to switch off our minds, and allow ourselves to rest quietly in a “No Mind” meditation state?
This is where the True healing begins.
My friend suggested that we all have a “Dark Side” that needs “clearing”. I’m not so sure, I think we will always be a mixture to some degree of Yin and Yang, light and dark.
I don’t think that aspect of us matters, because the path to enlightenment takes us beyond that place, or above that layer of self.
The pit might well be full of snakes, but if you manage to stay well away from it, then there’s no problem!
We know that Maslow’s hierarchy could easily be met for everybody on this earth, with ease.
Everybody could have food, water, shelter and safety.
What keeps us away from that? It seems to be an inbuilt need to move forward.
Certainly “Time” is our enemy in this, we feel the sands of time trickling away, and our Ego (the other enemy within) feels the need to “leave our mark” on the world – from our most basic desire to paint on a cave wall, or carve our initials into a tree-trunk, all the way to deciding to invade Poland… Everybody feels this driver inside, pushing us forward.
Greed seems to be growing, selfishness is on the rise, narcissism is reaching pandemic proportions in some areas; all stories of our twisted Ego’s, whipped along by time.
Perhaps there’s a new dawn for humankind.
Perhaps there will be an opportunity for us “to check our egos at the door” and step into beautiful communal natural spaces with curated Fire and Water features, where we can return to the quiet, and spend more time in our natural Meditative states: Competition ends, co-operation begins, and with a simple empty mind, we heal as a race.
Let AI do the heavy lifting, let it blow it’s mind solving uninteresting problems, whilst we as a whole race “level up” and change our nature and with it the existence of our species.
Perhaps this is where other iterations of humankind have gone over the 200,000 years of our existence? Perhaps the Maya quietly uploaded themselves to the cloud and ducked out of hundreds of years of Spanish repression! Perhaps the Mayan Calander was designed for them by their AI machines, which helped them to deftly more into another dimension to avoid the horrible people who were to arrive in the Americas in the coming years!
I’m not sure I’ve ever had an original thought; I owe it all to my education, upbringing, my nationality, my family, my colleagues and friends.
I regularly overwork my brain, now it’s time for some quiet.
Is AI the Death of Original thought – I’m not sure there ever was such a thing, so how could it die!?
Hun Yuan Ling Tong!
(Occasionally I translate this as “Universal Qi flows clearly in me”… or maybe better in this case, “Qi Consciousness creates miracles”…)
Love, love, love…
Jeremy