Adam Blatner

There’s everything we think is material, and then there’s the mind-field, which is inestimably vaster. It involves the (many?) dimensions of consciousness, including our own levels and probably fuzzing into hyper-consciousness. It probably fuzzes into hypo-consciousness, the qualities of mind of a leaf or a cell or a virus or maybe even a grain of sand or an atom.

But even at our own species level, the mind-field is far “bigger” than all that is. It includes not just what we think or feel, but also what we intuit might be: all that this or that could signify, be a symbol for or of. It’s all the ways it might have been, could yet be. All the things that went before, that preceded this, the memories and traditions, some stories of which have been lost in the mists of times past.

It’s all that might have been, or maybe could be if they could amplify this, make it work in space,  or a hundred times larger, or a thousand times smaller. It’s good they have this because of what it would have been like if they didn’t have it.

Things aren’t just what they are—they also hint at many different sets of what they aren’t. Things they are sort of like, but still different in certain ways, able to do things the things couldn’t do. They point to what they’ve replaced—they much better than—though in some ways what they replaced also had certain charms.

All the alternatives, precursors, envisioned possibilities—they are there, along with wild juxtapositions that open up yet more: Jokes, paradoxes, foolish applications, gold plated and expensive, trashy and cheap, literary devices and magic tricks. Theories of how they work and the theories that these theories made obsolete. Ways they might work in different ways if they were mixed with other things—but nobody has thought of that, yet.

Point being, the mind field is far greater than the category of actual realities. It’s full of the if-onlys and what-ifs. Fun, once you get used to the overwhelming-ness of it all.  But the goal is not to grab on, the goal is to flow along with.

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