I took a look at fractals, a way back...

... doesn't seem to be very promising, although I wonder if we "see" fractal-like images before falling asleep and somehow end-up hallucinating as a result; I seem to be able to lucidly dream to some extent (are some people lucid all the way through? seems hard to tell -- how do you know you are not dreaming that you are lucidly dreaming?)

Delia

P.S. this Claude guy was a trip... (did confirm some thing I noticed and seems odd to me: having a dream that uses information from a prior dream, sometimes a very old dream)

P.P.S. I also read a bit about hallucinations in schizophrenia (interesting that one school of thought holds that there is nothing "wrong" with these people... in a medical sense... (just a different kind of "normal") D.

I need to get out of the funk with this...

... but I just don't know which way to go; G.'s been asking me to "dump Archy McNally" (and his ilk) and read some Dostoevsky instead (I didn't quite like his writing in the past, seemed like a boring guy that rambled on and on... and never quite got to the point, I just I never really stuck around for the ending...)

Delia

P.S. So I guess I'm going to give the guy chance , G. says it all comes together at the end -- we'll see... D.

are we in a self created bubble?

do we have any idea of what's really going on?

Delia

P.S. are things like truth and reality -- human concepts -- really "real"?

the great puzzle or the great absurd?

I often get the impression that it's really a game... a puzzle of some sort that we all get a chance to figure out -- that the pieces are all there, we just need to figure out how to make them work...

we have decent control over a lot of things in our environment... so is it just a matter of time and persistence? Is one of us or more likely humankind collectively going to solve it in the end? or are we going to run out of time? is there a clock ticking away? and what does it all matter? so what if we figure it out? so what if we live forever? ultimately... it all seems absurd anyways...

is it all just a bizarre dream?

Delia

fast forwarding

it's hard not to think that if we could fast forward long enough nothing would really matter... (no matter what you do, you'd still be dead in the long run...and not just you, everything gets erased and becomes irrelevant)

Delia

P.S. unless we (humans) pull something extremely unusual...

Unitarian church (gave it a try...)

I really didn't feel like going but G.'s been after me to give it a try (he's got this idea that because they use symbols from different religions they must be an open minded bunch -- the kind of non-dogmatic people that can have real conversations on religion and the like).

Delia

P.S. it was mostly boring although I had to excuse myself at one point and rushed out of the room so I would not have to explode in laughter right in the middle of the "fellowship" (they were singing Kumbaya and praying for the gas prices to come down...) D.

sustainable hedonism

this is what people appear to seek in this life (or any other future life); it's just that they have or believe to have different pleasures (e.g. a religious person derives or believes the religious path will bring her/him most pleasure in the long run) D.