The phrase may lack all currency in the West, but all Muslims know it well. It is a quote from the Koran (QAF 50:16) and says: “We created man. We know the promptings of his soul, and are closer to him than the vein of his neck.” Interesting image. Closer than his physical life, you might say. The phrase came back as I was contemplating the great divide of invisibility between our dimension and the next one over. But what possible proof is there for that, the existence of the next one over? And then came the answer provided by my memory: “It’s closer to you than your jugular vein”—in which process, of course, what I meant was my own mind, my consciousness, not God, as the Koran has it, although I don’t dispute that either.
It is rather curious, when you think about it, that the proof of our transcending status, above the physical—however vital a physical it is—is the utterly ordinary, common, daily, indeed moment-to-moment fact of self-awareness. It isn’t sharply, clearly visible to us, this radical difference, because we are so intimately identified with our bodies—and a vast radiation of other structures that maintain them—that we do not realize that mind is impossible to build up from the same elements that form the jugular. Conventional wisdom asserts the opposite. Hence to really pin down the facts requires labor. If conventional wisdom had it right, however, Apple would by now have brought us Eve-pad. And looking at her screen some gloomy morning, she would say soothingly, but with an edge of challenge: “We’ve had a bad night—have we?”
Hmmm... I don't quite get the Eve-pad... How does conventional wisdom lead to Eve-pad? I'm lost?
ReplyDeleteMeaning simply a genuinely conscious computer. And what with Apple in the picture, Eve is a kind of pun. I might add that "pads" are the new computers, these days, having evolved from "pads" where you simply "crash" for the night...
DeleteThis has nothing to do with the above post but I thought you'd be interested to know that the French have added the word SERENDIPITE to the dictionary. Definition:Capacity or art of making a discovery, especially a scientific discovery, by chance (Petit Larousse Illustré). Capacity of making, through research, an unexpected discovery and of knowing how to cease the import of the discovery (Petit Robert).
ReplyDeleteAlso, the French medical establishment now officially recognizes the power of hypnosis (basically relaxation technics) as an effective anesthetic method. They operate regularly on patients (often children) anesthisized only by hypnosis! Interesting, no?
Very interesting. I know you'll make a face, knowing them from the inside, as it were, but I claim that the French are always on the leading edge of the new. It is time to extend science a little, and it please me that someone is making baby steps.
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