click the picture, to enlarge …
Not unlike many, I like the above picture.
I recognize the shape: it’s a leaf,
It’s a bit out of the ordinary: it’s red, not green
I like the details: there is a pattern,
It’s slightly fuzzy, leaving space for imagination.
Beauty seems to work like this, isn’t it?
Recognizing something and seeing it organized in a special way …
So I am satisfied and have enough … what do I do?
I like encounters with others and being amazed by the world I live in.
So what if I am the last person on earth and encounters becomes less human …
Well, beauty and being amazed stem from recognizing something new in something familiar,
like a macro shot of a flower, a surprisingly simple formula behind a complex system, ..
I’ll do my time discovering beauty and perhaps befriend some vegetables …
But what if I am dropped
in a world beyond recognition,
without known patterns,
without recognizable patterns,
or without any patterns at all …
Then my mind would become entirely useless, isn’t it?
You can conceptualize chaos, but that doesn’t help you …
Now, go beyond this chaos …
(in fact you go beyond beyond-mind)
Then what would you do or be?
Pictures by bvdb (whoisbert) march 2014 @botanical gardens Leuven(b) – Canon Ixus HS230 – IMG_6929
who is bert 
What a beautiful say to look at the world and analyze things. Nature is incredible.
thank you 🙂
Often feel this way upon getting up every morning. Seriously, many times I think the world is two decades ahead of me and on the other hand, perhaps the world is at disadvantage not having the benefit of my unique place in time and that of my entire generation.
I totally understand
What about psychosis and severe autism? The mind is not recognising patterns in the same way as a neurologically typical person in such cases (from what I understand anyway).
… your comment popped in and out of my mind these past 2 days. …
yes, if we can imagine how it would feel to have no recognizable patterns at all, we might be more, a lot more empathic towards a broad spectrum of people suffering from ‘chaos’, nomatter its origin.
Empathy can become compassion.
I think I would hope that, even with the beyond chaos in my mind and then beyond that, I could still recognize the God in it all and see that I was, in the end, still a part of it.
Scott
Thank you, Scott, for your courage to answer what can probably not be answered. A Wittgensteinian conundrum. But a very valuable anwser you gave.
And I should not comment on it — but let me try to give you some insights in the loops in my brain:
During chaos mind would be useless — it would probably first get crazy, … perhaps in a later phase resign and serve as the memory of order, love and pain 🙂
Heart would probably see and feel God — the real one, and not anything that mind ever conceptualized. Then, the word recognition probably belongs to mind, and mind could for ever try to conceptualize the wonderful ever changing feeling of god through the heart … something it is probably doing now (without a supposed chaos) too …
… perhaps … 🙂 … with a big smile!
Love the image!
Thank you, Bela!
Wish it weren’t so true but, love the last line! Thx Bert.
… when mind is stripped, our essence, consciousness and being, will probably take over …
I’m still pondering. A fine post Bert.
Thank you, Elena … me too … I think the question is rhetorical in more than one way.
…in trouble. Adrift. If we managed to survive, whatever it was, violent, peaceful, silent, noisy, unknown, boring beyond belief with repetition (all things we already KNOW), after a while we would become someone, something else. The thing is WE ARE OUR MINDS. That’s who and what we are. Our physical bodies are simply there to house and move our minds from one place to another. The only way to turn off our minds, while we are in a physical body, is to die. That’s why they call it “brain dead.” We cannot function without our minds…it’s what we are. We cannot adapt if we cannot think. People who have damaged brains are given drugs or kept in hospitals/institutions because they cannot interact with the things around them. Even when our brains are “okay,” we kill and destroy everything, including each other. So, I’m thinking (pun intended) that a situation like the one you suggest, wouldn’t be a good thing for a human. Our survival depends on thinking. That’s really all we have to work with, after all, our minds. That’s assuming, of course that weren’t killed or that we didn’t die of boredom before we could figure things out. There’s also a strong possibility that WE would change THAT place…maybe even destroy it, because that’s what we’re good at. It’s a tough question. We can’t even imagine what it’s like inside a black hole because time and space are reversed. We can’t even think about the fact that the universe NEVER ENDS, has no edges. We are quite limited, actually, and we are tied to this place. There is no real way we can imagine being someplace where absolutely nothing is familiar. That is impossible. Completely impossible, because anything we would imagine or think about would come from our own minds and all the things we already know.
Yes, … closely follow your reasoning. thx for taking the mental challenge.
Mind cannot survive if it cannot conceptualize. In fact, a lot of torture techniques consist in leaving the victim in total unpredictability.
Staying within the mind would lead to a self constructed world. A metaphysics based on a forgotten past that will never repeat itself closely enough to be usefull.
But perhaps, we could enter the silence of the mind, and accept whatever comes, at least theoretically, (mind will always be present when being human) and only something like perception and consciousness, and perhaps something from the heart would be able to cope with the ever changing patternless world …
…
Our present world is also always changing, but even when speeding it up, a lot of patterns continue to be present: like the effect of gravity on the celestial objects, the thing we conceptualize as time will still be there …
I’m not out of this thought experiment, and I’m quite sure that thought itself will never get out of it 🙂 since it can only work building on a framework of semi-fixed patterns.
Without unrecognizable patterns….then you would adapt to your environment a little bit at a time each day, and your mind will still be full with so many new joys! I love the message here Bert, no matter the situation if we are open to change we will adapt will including to chaos…we learn and we grow! Thanks for sharing my brother!
very grateful for your comment-answer. “without recognizable patterns” … if you are able to adapt, you must at least slowly impose perhaps unexisting patterns to try to make sense of it all — imho 🙂 but I don’t know — perhaps the heart will come forward and adapt …
Hi Wendell. Sound thinking offered.