Monday 28 July 2003

Pic of the day: Picture from the anime "Saint beast". Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the Beast of the Apocalypse. It is about angels with animal empathy.

Newness, oldness

There is a tiny joke, about the advertising business who decided that too many ads used the word "new". So they looked for ... a new.

I doubt they found anything better. Newness is the spice of life. More exactly, it causes an "orientation reaction", a spike in awareness. This is coded into the very neurons of our brain. For instance, you may have spent some time in a room with a strong smell, for instance from a detergent used recently. After a while you cannot sense it at all. But if you leave the room and come back, the smell is still strong. You just did not notice it. In fact, you could not have noticed it if you tried, because the neurons had stopped signaling.

If you look straight at something that does not move, you still move your own eyes. It is possible to stop these eye movements, and with training you can do that yourself. A good start is to stop blinking. It will probably take some training. I have done it. Once you are comfortable with not blinking for a long while (when you set your mind to it, not all day and night!) you can start to focus, to look without moving your eyes around. If you do this and look at something, it will disappear. I kid you not. You can look at the picture of a face for instance and just like smell, the sight will disappear. The face will be gone. This will usually be enough to make you react and move your eyes, and then it all comes back. But if you hold out a little longer, you may see weird things. Like suddenly the eyes of that face hang alone there, while the rest of the face is still invisible. With other objects, you may see other things. Usually simple things like angles or basic shapes, fade in and fade out. It is really trippy. And yes, I believe this is what people do when they scry in a crystal ball or a bowl or water or some such.

Just like our senses can be numbed at the basic level, so we can gradually lose reaction to more complex patterns. I know I have told before, but I have fads when I latch on to a piece of music and play it over and over and over. The first times it just gets better and better, but then it begins to fade. Eventually the music itself fades from my awareness, although the emotions it created may last longer. If I return to it after a few days, it is still kinda faded, although it has regained some of its power. The longer I wait, the more of its taste comes back. But other things like situations also play a role.

It is the same with computer games. I get bored of them after a while, but then I just play another that I got bored of long ago. I am not easily bored, really, as you may see from the rather small number of computer games that come again and again in my screenshots and game journals. But I could not spend all my time playing just one game. I need some "crop rotation".

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[Edit: I wrote some sage words about marriage and the marital arts here. That's what happens when you don't finishe writing till 1AM. I might as well try to teach English to those who live in England; I've never been there either. But my conclusion still holds, at least.]

Life is a process of gradual fading, from the newness of the newborn to the grayness of the old. And here I am, ready to report on it, until I too fade and am no more. Keep staring at this space.