Writing about things ...

... changes my awareness of them.

Reading about things, also changes my awareness of them.

Talking about things and hearing others talk about them, changes my awareness of them.

... it changes my perceived reality.

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Seth says

Percepts & perception depend upon the functioning of your sense organs. If you are color blind then you will only see grey or whatever passes for that effect on your senses. It does not, however change what the colors are. If you are distracted & focused on other things your perceiving may be distorted but what is there doesn't change except what you are calling your reality.

Seth says

seth 2013-09-30 07:58:07 16788

ME 2013-09-29 10:10:21 16788

pretty much mostly true sentences .... err, not about this topic.

knowing i am going to write about something does change my awareness of it. writing about something helps to constructs my meta-world about that thing. it does change my awareness of the thing. and there is a feed back loop in that the writing of a thing changes my awareness of the thing which changes again my reality of the thing itself ... especially if the thing is something that i myself do.

you may, or may not, have noticed this about yourself ... maybe it is a phenomena that just is not over there ... maybe you don't write the same way as i do ... i do not know.

and, incidentally color perception is actually quite a peculiar thing when it comes to human perception. there has been volumes written about it in the philosophy of AI and a recent podcast at NPR's radio lab. there is no such thing as color in the physical world ... it is totaly a construction of our perceptual channels ... and as those channels have changed historically, so have the "colors" themselves. quite a nasty little example you, perhaps unintentionally chose, there ... eh?

Well, most people can't tell the difference between their percepts & what they grok them into their reality as. True, though I did watch the Sci channel stuff on colors etc. (about a month ago) & some of the optical illusions which can be illustrated. Such singularities are fascinating, but the whole reason that language works is that the vast majority of people agree on what their perceptions reveal when considering the same objects like an orange or a turd.

Seth says

seth 2013-09-30 08:17:08 16788

incidentally filming or recording an event will dramatically change the event ... that would seem to be quite an uncontroversial statement ... why would one suppose that writing about it would not change it as well?

Filming something may change an event if somebody takes offense & shoots you. Otherwise you are involved ontologically in creating a visual record of the past rather than being in what is present at the time it occurs. Same goes for writing except you can't film thoughts yet.

Seth says

ME 2013-09-29 10:10:21 16788

Seth says

ME 2013-10-01 10:10:41 16788

ME 2013-09-30 09:05:44 16788

One of the arts that is real-time perception is music. It is always played while you are perceiving it; even if as a recording. Most of the other arts are not so & we look/?? at the end result of the artist.

Yeah - this was an example of experiencing something without meta.

... in the present!

Seth says

it is interesting to note that this item is not about 16786. Thinking in language and talking and writing about things in public actually can amplify our awareness of them. A thing that is made public is quite different than a thing that remains private. But meta-awareness almost is the basis of complex modern life. But then too, these reflections can be a source of distraction ... i take that as the thrust of 16786 ... there we contemplate the zen meditative state of unified unconflicted action.

Both the public awareness required by language, and deed unsullied by incessant questioning, can be positive aspects of our lives. For me there is no conflict there.

Seth says

seth 2013-10-03 08:40:55 16788

ME 2013-10-01 11:09:38 16788

seth 2013-10-01 11:07:17 16788

ME 2013-10-01 10:24:08 16788

It IS easier to keep something external which maintains a train-of-thought rather than rely on the busy mess in the mind to do such like meditation or contemplating awareness.

quite so

.

yes, marks and physical effects in the world, are just about the only way i know to "maintain a train of thought". remember the experiments where minds degenerated when left in an immersion chamber ?

I did that once & I wouldn't say that anything degenerated. It was more like a good rest or sleep.

well i've never done it myself ... but it seems to me that if the mind looses the bindings between its representations and yet continues to spin, the spinning will end up being less and less effective in reflecting the world. i suppose one could judge those irrelivant to the world spinnings as some excellent good rest and sleep ... yet sleep is the least of that which has been reported by those other than you.

Yep, spinning minds are not likely to do more than degenerate. You need a bit of meditation to learn how to tame some of the shit in there. The chambers were pretty good for that.

Seth says

by way of proof of the central thesis of this item i offer the following:

every time my laptop warns me that it running out of juice i am quite more self aware of my reaction to the event.
during my morning ceremony i sometimes now voice impressions to mark as if he was watching.

now dare me to write here about something else and see if it will or will not change those events.

Seth says

seth 2013-10-03 11:36:51 16788

ME 2013-10-03 11:09:56 16788

We need a thing like FaceBook has to hide & quit following an item.

there is of course an effective procedure that you can use to deescalate your awareness of an item.

responding to it.

Since that method works so very well ... and since you are smart enough to know it ... me thinks you are actually hiding a lie in your comment.

& you're still stuck

Seth says

source: mark responds to the above
Confusion? Your laptop has anchored you (see NLP).
It is normal to imagine some abstraction for your audience as you write - I am guessing you are probably the only one going to read this - so you are IT.

If you actually do detect some confusion here, then it would help me if you could tell me where it is !

Certainly i have a relationship with my laptop ... i even name her ... her name is Ariel. Perhaps you are judging that relationship ... but that judgement has nothing to do with my topic here.

the warning message that pops up when Ariel is running low causes me to act. I have had a habit of supplying her power, just as soon as i conveniently can when the warning pops with its characteristic sound. indeed, i have allowed myself to become conditioned.

But now, when the warning appears and sounds, i am also reminded to become hyper aware of what i think about it. It hasn't yet changed what i do, but it has changed my experience of what i do. That is my only observation here. And it is true.

What is the big IT to which you refer?

Seth says

source: My suggestion would to make this item private then nothing will be off topic except YOU! & you won't have to second guess or pretend not to understand - it will be all self-contained!

...

indeed.

A bit of context perchance might be in order here. There do appear to be two worlds here. The world of existence and being (we could symbolized it here as "

") ... and a world about that world in which we think, talk, and write about

... (we could symbolize that meta-world as

).

The question i raise here is what is the causal relationship between them?

We probably can now write some true sentences ...

is aware of

is contained in

. (not just a little bit controversial)

reflects

changes

.

Have i here also pointed out that ...

changes

? Now that observation it is not at all surprising, nor should it be contraversial, but that does not alter its (supposed) truth.

Seth says

tracking an awareness ...

source: above i said

the warning message that pops up when Ariel is running low causes me to act. I have had a habit of supplying her power, just as soon as i conveniently can when the warning pops with its characteristic sound. indeed, i have allowed myself to become conditioned.

But now [because i wrote about it here] , when the warning appears and sounds, i am also reminded to become hyper aware of what i think about it. It hasn't yet changed what i do, but it has changed my experience of what i do. That is my only observation here. And it is true.

... this effect, as one could predict, diminishes with repetition. now it is nothing more than a memory that pops up whenever the warning goes off ... which, err, just happened.

the same is happening with my morning ceremony. now when i do my morning breakfast ceremony i am somewhat aware of my writing about it and what i might say in the future should some interesting edge emerge.

Writing about things ...

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