Wednesday, December 28, 2005

One way that I'm not too smart is that I think inanimate objects are inanimate.

Some of the wisest people I've known in my life know that that isn't true.

They know that everything is alive. Different objects bring different styles to being alive, but alive they all are.

I'm very open to knowing this but I don't. One way that believing this is true without having any internal experience of it being true has affected me is a wonder about bus seat repitition.

When I ride on the same bus system and the same lines for years, as I have my whole adult life, how often am I actually sitting on the very same physical seat? If I knew, maybe I could say hi to the seat. I don't think there's anyway to know. I don't even know what the odds are at all. I don't have any idea if Muni runs the same cars on the same lines or if they are all switched around all the time.

When objects, like bus seats, are mass produced I tend to forget that each one is its own unique self. Hi, there, bus seat, this bus seat, with your own atoms and molecules and history is not really something I know how to say. I try now and then. It is a large and interesting world, though the powers that be often act like they know the crowd easier to control is the individuals in the crowd are routinely rather deadened to their surroundings.

There's a book about part of the idea that object=living object. It's called "Panpsychism in the West," and it is about the idea that everything, every single thing, has consciousness. It's from MIT Press--is that a cool source or what? I saw an ad for it in "The Times Literary Supplement." I know that such books from such sources are often hyper-dry to show they aren't flakey. I'm glad to know it's out there.