The Starling
"I can't get out, I can't get out", says the caged starling in Lawrence Sterne's book A Sentimental Journey, famously referenced by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park. In the original book, even the repeat pattern of the phrase is just something that the starling has learned, because it has been taught to say it. And all efforts to free the bird always fail for one reason or another.
"I can't get out, I can't get out". Even the phrase is a recurrence, a repeat pattern.
Repeat patterns are everywhere. We are surrounded by repeat patterns, we live in a world of repeat patterns, and we have been taught to repeat what we have learned and to trust repeat patterns and to repeat messages through the human network in that way. With the online world, we now live in a world that is flooded, saturated, with disembodied repetition.
And we expect people to behave in a way that they have behaved before. We don't like the unpredictable in people. Everyone likes to think they know who someone else is and what they are like, if it is someone they supposedly "know". Everyone likes to think they have a good idea of how someone else's mind works when they don't even know how their own mind works.
We are embedded in repeat patterns so much that we don't even notice. We just take the repeat pattern of the sunrise and sunset, the night follows day follows night follows day, for granted. Without ever questioning why it is the way it is. Sure, the scientists question the way it is, and they have their answers for it, but they never question why it is the way it is experientially. Because science does not understand consciousness as such. It doesn't understand conscious experience of being.
It cannot understand it because it is based on symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence that evolves out of nature's repeat patterns and cycles.
The hands or digits of the clock just go round in circles, following the same repeat patterns, again and again. Everyone sees it, everyone lives by it, but no one considers the significance of it.
You get up in the morning, you do your activities consisting of all the things that you do during the day, and then you go to sleep again. And then you get up the next morning and start all over again. But it's normal, because everyone's doing it, and what everyone does is normal. If there is redundancy in it, it is what everyone takes for granted as what life is.
Of course the repeat patterns are constantly evolving, but nevertheless, what everyone does is a repeat pattern, from this person, to that person, to the next person to the next, and on and on, the patterns repeat. The repeat patterns are in the very fabric of human experience. So many of them, there are, that are all different, woven together, in different ways, in different layers, that it doesn't seem like it. It seems like something other than repeat patterns.
If there is an answer to something and the answer appears everywhere, that's a repeat pattern called redundancy. If people everywhere know the same person, that's a redundancy. A redundancy of people who know that person. There's no such thing as a celebrity without redundancy of audience. There's no such thing as a leader or a dictator, without redundancy of followers or subjects.
And the more abundant redundancy is, the more reliably you'll find the same story everywhere. And then the more you'll trust it, and believe it's true. The more people agree on something, the more people you could knock out of that group or crowd or population without it making any difference. That's the nature of redundancy. But you can also have one redundancy versus another. And that's where the diversity, the tension, and then the conflict comes in.
Redundancy is everything when it comes to making something seem objectively true. It's everything when it comes to establishing a shared world. A world of people and names that everyone knows, a world of stuff that's happening, that everyone knows about. A world of products that you need everyone to use in order to maximise profit. Redundancy is what it is all about. News isn't classed as newsworthy or worth having unless it is spreadable. And it has to be spread into redundant knowing.
The starling in the story was once free. And we can be sure that it only became caged in the first place because of its own natural habits, its own mode of survival, which also being less than perfect allowed it to be captured. All survival success is less than perfect. Because in the end, everything dies. Even stars. We are all in this position, because nothing exists, except what has survived. Including every one of us. What exists, is what survives. And in nature, what survives is always based on repetition and redundancy. That makes it reliable, predictable, successful, stable. But it doesn't make it perfect. It's actually a kind of trap. It's a very deep principle in nature that is not yet properly understood. But it's an important principle to understand because it means that everything that survives is already effectively trapped in a system based on repetition and redundancy. The principles of repetition and redundancy are how nature makes the objective world to begin with.
As far as the system is concerned, it doesn't matter if the bird never escapes from the cage. The bird will die in the end, anyway. The bird is redundant. And it won't be the first time a bird was put in a cage. That too, is a repeat pattern. There is nothing in redundancy or repetition that brings freedom. It might bring survival, but not freedom. Follow the crowd, and you are part of that redundancy. You can keep repeating the same pattern, and that will provide stability, but it won't bring freedom. Keep saying "I can't get out, I can't get out", and it doesn't make any difference. There's nothing wrong with the redundancy and repetition. The world is built from it. But it won't bring freedom.
Freedom doesn't come from being part of a redundancy, or the sense of security that might bring. It doesn't come from repetition, collecting stories from the redundancy, and passing them on. It comes from a much deeper understanding than that. Understanding that even what seems to be freedom in a world made from repetition and redundancy, is to be trapped.
Really, behind all the participating in repetition and the following of redundancy in looking for answers from the redundancy of those who claim to have them, everyone is free already. Free from uncertainty, free from having to look for answers. The cage door was open all the time, inviting us to become authentic and original beyond the cage of our symbolic intelligence.
"I can't get out, I can't get out". Even the phrase is a recurrence, a repeat pattern.
Repeat patterns are everywhere. We are surrounded by repeat patterns, we live in a world of repeat patterns, and we have been taught to repeat what we have learned and to trust repeat patterns and to repeat messages through the human network in that way. With the online world, we now live in a world that is flooded, saturated, with disembodied repetition.
And we expect people to behave in a way that they have behaved before. We don't like the unpredictable in people. Everyone likes to think they know who someone else is and what they are like, if it is someone they supposedly "know". Everyone likes to think they have a good idea of how someone else's mind works when they don't even know how their own mind works.
We are embedded in repeat patterns so much that we don't even notice. We just take the repeat pattern of the sunrise and sunset, the night follows day follows night follows day, for granted. Without ever questioning why it is the way it is. Sure, the scientists question the way it is, and they have their answers for it, but they never question why it is the way it is experientially. Because science does not understand consciousness as such. It doesn't understand conscious experience of being.
It cannot understand it because it is based on symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence that evolves out of nature's repeat patterns and cycles.
The hands or digits of the clock just go round in circles, following the same repeat patterns, again and again. Everyone sees it, everyone lives by it, but no one considers the significance of it.
You get up in the morning, you do your activities consisting of all the things that you do during the day, and then you go to sleep again. And then you get up the next morning and start all over again. But it's normal, because everyone's doing it, and what everyone does is normal. If there is redundancy in it, it is what everyone takes for granted as what life is.
Of course the repeat patterns are constantly evolving, but nevertheless, what everyone does is a repeat pattern, from this person, to that person, to the next person to the next, and on and on, the patterns repeat. The repeat patterns are in the very fabric of human experience. So many of them, there are, that are all different, woven together, in different ways, in different layers, that it doesn't seem like it. It seems like something other than repeat patterns.
If there is an answer to something and the answer appears everywhere, that's a repeat pattern called redundancy. If people everywhere know the same person, that's a redundancy. A redundancy of people who know that person. There's no such thing as a celebrity without redundancy of audience. There's no such thing as a leader or a dictator, without redundancy of followers or subjects.
And the more abundant redundancy is, the more reliably you'll find the same story everywhere. And then the more you'll trust it, and believe it's true. The more people agree on something, the more people you could knock out of that group or crowd or population without it making any difference. That's the nature of redundancy. But you can also have one redundancy versus another. And that's where the diversity, the tension, and then the conflict comes in.
Redundancy is everything when it comes to making something seem objectively true. It's everything when it comes to establishing a shared world. A world of people and names that everyone knows, a world of stuff that's happening, that everyone knows about. A world of products that you need everyone to use in order to maximise profit. Redundancy is what it is all about. News isn't classed as newsworthy or worth having unless it is spreadable. And it has to be spread into redundant knowing.
The starling in the story was once free. And we can be sure that it only became caged in the first place because of its own natural habits, its own mode of survival, which also being less than perfect allowed it to be captured. All survival success is less than perfect. Because in the end, everything dies. Even stars. We are all in this position, because nothing exists, except what has survived. Including every one of us. What exists, is what survives. And in nature, what survives is always based on repetition and redundancy. That makes it reliable, predictable, successful, stable. But it doesn't make it perfect. It's actually a kind of trap. It's a very deep principle in nature that is not yet properly understood. But it's an important principle to understand because it means that everything that survives is already effectively trapped in a system based on repetition and redundancy. The principles of repetition and redundancy are how nature makes the objective world to begin with.
As far as the system is concerned, it doesn't matter if the bird never escapes from the cage. The bird will die in the end, anyway. The bird is redundant. And it won't be the first time a bird was put in a cage. That too, is a repeat pattern. There is nothing in redundancy or repetition that brings freedom. It might bring survival, but not freedom. Follow the crowd, and you are part of that redundancy. You can keep repeating the same pattern, and that will provide stability, but it won't bring freedom. Keep saying "I can't get out, I can't get out", and it doesn't make any difference. There's nothing wrong with the redundancy and repetition. The world is built from it. But it won't bring freedom.
Freedom doesn't come from being part of a redundancy, or the sense of security that might bring. It doesn't come from repetition, collecting stories from the redundancy, and passing them on. It comes from a much deeper understanding than that. Understanding that even what seems to be freedom in a world made from repetition and redundancy, is to be trapped.
Really, behind all the participating in repetition and the following of redundancy in looking for answers from the redundancy of those who claim to have them, everyone is free already. Free from uncertainty, free from having to look for answers. The cage door was open all the time, inviting us to become authentic and original beyond the cage of our symbolic intelligence.