The Wave

In a wave in the ocean, that water does not move along. Successive sections of the water just move up and down.

Some buddhists practice a meditation where you become aware of how thoughts arise out of nothing and pass away, continually. This is to start the experience of how what we call reality arises and passes away continually from the ocean of being behind that outer reality illusion.

So as the wave peak pops above a certain level, that is our reality illusion arising. The water molecules of the prior position are not related to those of the current or future positions. All of the ones at the current position are related to each other much more strongly than to those 'before' or 'after'.

This is a challenge for causality. It is a challenge for discussions on free will and determinism.

But what if you were in that water on something buoyant. You would just bob up and then down as the wave 'passed'. So let's say you started your floatation device travelling to keep at the weak of teh wave. The molecules of water 'ahead' are there before they rise under you. So that is pre-determined.

But you can place yourself 'here' on the wave, or 'there, or more to the left, and so on.

That would mean that both free will and determinism are operating in the same scenario.

But a more interesting consequence of the whole of existence passing away and arising constantly is that in this moment, everything is related. All parts of that arising form one complete coherent group.

I heard that Idries Shah once won the spanish lottery. He described it as easy. Oh, yeah, they said. Yeah. And the next week he took a ticket and won again.

My friend and I were talking about all sorts of things in the sportsbar. We had been talking navy and seafaring stuff because he had been in the merchant navy and was reminiscing a bit.

At a brief pause in the conversation, we looked at the TAB screens. We both spotted 'Mister Hornblower' in the list. He took a $4 each-way bet. He collected $192.

If you can be in this moment, then your are in touch with all that is also in the same moment.

(The Idries Shah story is unverified. Never bet more than you can afford to lose.)

Anecdotal Evidence

To a friend: You and I were discussing many things in the Wellington Chinese restaurant as I sipped on a Tsing-Tao waiting for my take-away. And yes, you did indeed anticipate everything I was going to say. And yes indeed to you it would have been anecdotal.

But I now realise what was irking me about that classification. I had, as the General Semanticists would say, confused orders of abstraction.

I have heard that in some Buddhist sects, acolytes are encouraged to say either ‘I know ...” or “I have heard ...”. Let me call the passing on of something that I know directly from my experience a 0-order anecdote. It is not anecdotal to me but it will be to you. And let me call something I have heard about or read about a n-order anecdote. That would be anecdotal to both of us. It was this 0-orderness that made it uncomfortable for me to accept your “anecdotal” tag.

So you may well have heard the things I was going to say before from others. But in my case they would have been 0-order. I suspect that where you had heard those same things before from others they were often if not always n-order. Or perhaps I am taking bets on myself.

Either way, it is the difference between being told a current situational joke face-to-face by Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard and being told a joke by a bloke in a pub who heard it from a mate who got it from a stand-up routine. It is still funny if you have not heard it before. But the one is 0-order and the other is n-order and they are different.

Here is a 0-order joke: A Palestinian, an Arab and an Israeli walked into the pub. They looked at each other and said “We must be in the wrong joke”. 0-order albeit derivative.

So thank you, my friend, for helping me to sort this out.

And, perhaps you might like to consider whether there is a different “weight” you can apply to what people say, depending on the order of the anecdotal offering. Just ask them if it is anecdotal to them.

And perhaps I can be a bit more rigorous in saying “I know that ...” and “I have heard/read that ...” as appropriate, providing I am not cut off before speaking.

I think that I could rarely be / in a talk as helpful as with Tree. (Apologies to Joyce Kilmer).