So, I was having a discussion yesterday with my fiancée to illustrate the following: I began by telling her that when I smoke herb, my subconsciousness runs the show. It takes over and my ego takes a break from reacting to "stimuli" in my reality. The subconscious is another part of me, yes, but it is still "me". She said, "Isn't that creating a duality between ego and subconscious?" I said it was at first, but quickly I noticed that was not the case. The ego and subconscious are two aspects of one thing. They exist by virtue of the contextual unity (continuum) I refer to as myself. She asked me what I meant by that. I said, well, think of the notion of adjectives and nouns. We think of nouns and adjectives as being certain groupings of English words. It's not a duality, because there are plenty of other groupings (labels) for English words. What would be duality, I explained, would be nouns vs. non-nouns. But what's the point here? I was trying to indicate that regardless of whether or not a word is classified as a noun or an adjective, it is to be used to communicate in the implicit context of English. Okay, but then I took it a step further, just to highlight the vitality of the all-pervasive unity required to base any "observation" or "analysis" on. In Uzbek, nouns and adjectives are not two different categories. In fact, there is no distinction between the two English groupings and their respective conceptions. I can give you an English example to illustrate this: That car is a beautiful red. Okay, so is "red" in this sentence an adjective or a noun? The point I'm trying to make is that any noun you use is referring to a "thing" of some sort. Well, things don't exist in a vacuum. Even a vacuum doesn't exist in a vacuum, motherfucker. Things require a unitary context; or else they are nonsensical. For example, The green car is red. Which aspect of reality are we talking about here: the green the car exemplifies or the red the car exemplifies? This is in contradistinction with everything we understand color as an aspect to refer to. How can it be both at once? Therefore, we realize such a car is unreal. Even nonsensical is an aspect of reality. The car sitting in front of you may be a noun in your brain's wiring, but think again: this reality wouldn't be real without that exact car (with all of ITS ASPECTS) right there. In short, stop living in the boxes... for your own sake at least. The Unity is impossible to deny. Things are aspects of this Unity. Even reality and non-reality are things.
Well put doc. A pipe cannot be a pipe without the weed to smoke is essentially what your saying, and all that wouldn't be shit without you to smoke it, so in a sense its all really one "thing" from the pipe to the weed to you, one action or happening and a happening is a thing. So our whole life can be looked at as one thing, but why stop there... I guess a video by Alan Watts would be good here. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhQc4gdKKm8"]YouTube - Alan Watts on Time 1 of 3[/ame] Edit: After posting this and rereading it along with my signature and thinking about Alan's metaphor of the whirlpool in a river, I related my life to the whirlpool and found it to me a good mental image of an epiphany I keep close to heart, see if you can catch it.