Words, History, and Being the Fabric of Reality

This comes from a chat.

one time I was with my friend at a restaurant hangin’ and drinking tea

and I asked about the different names for ways that words mimic each other

like right and rite (same pronunciation, spelled differently, different meanings), (human) right and (left and) right (same pronunciation, same spelling, different meanings)

then you have certain words where the meaning changes based on how you pronounce them

like affect (change something) and affect (how someone is feeling)

or where it’s spelled the same and pronounced the same but has different meanings

in the sense where a noun is verbed

like an effect happens

and you can effect that effect

(cause it to happen)

anyway so she breaks it down and reads off the different technical names for these

and suddenly I was picturing the evolutionary histories of all these words and concepts throughout all of time

and I was imagining people in togas speaking Latin just fine

and how we are speaking bits and pieces of Latin right now, just fine

it was kind of humbling

but also awesome

because you could see the history of it all

how it’s all connected, with reasons abounding

and it reminds me too of a friend who said that she thought about all her ancestors that led up to her

all their actual life stories

the things they did, the environments that lived in, the people they loved

and how it’s all one big causal web that led to now with nothing more important than anything else, for an ant is gravitationally affecting you just as a supermassive black hole is

the division of important / less-important is scientifically useful but not actually true

like dividing one organ from another, or one species from another

it can be useful to do, but it’s also useful to realize such lines are ultimately arbitrary according to the physics and math

and the reason that’s helpful to know is because it gives you humility when you sense disagreement with someone

because you can see both positions are true, depending on how you look at it

which is an interesting point wrt (with regard to) history, because honestly it probably makes more sense to think about all the commoners as the agents of change, but from this side of the equation it’s much easier to simply study the kings and rulers rather than really close your eyes and imagine the infinitely diverse lives of the common people

but one single person can change the tide of an entire war

one single commoner

like the old parable of the horse and war

for want of a nail the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider, the battle, the war

all for want of a nail

it’s all perspective

which took me a long time to learn, because I thought moral systems existed which were Truth

rather than something you have faith in because you believe it leads to the best outcome

but the mathematician Gödel showed in 1931 that even mathematics ultimately rests upon unprovable assumptions, i.e., faith

so that’s the beauty of history, perhaps; it gives us both humility in the face of an enormous world, and also the understanding that one person’s actions ripple out and affect everything

which when you take on board puts you on a firmer emotional ground. at least it did for me.

because the human you sometimes perceive yourself to be is realized to not be important nor unimportant, simply embedded in the fabric of reality like everything else

and then what really gave me peace was realizing that if the human is embedded in the fabric of reality, and true separation doesn’t exist in the fabric, then what you _really_ are is the entire fabric, _all_ of nature

which historically eastern cultures talk about a lot

but which the western philosophical traditions completely diverge from, in an unscientific and unhealthy way, I would argue

so when you’re imagining ancient cultures

ancient commoners

imagine not just their life, but their life leading up to your current subjective experience

perhaps that will give you more peace.

If you’re a playwright you could write about the Wright brothers and how they were right about their theories of aviation, and when a pilot would go up and down, left and right–sometimes having to right his course if the winds got too strong–when the air traffic control said to land right there and he did successfully land people would say, “right on!” because he had gone through a rite of passage, and probably both the Left Wing and the Right Wing would say it’s not morally right to restrict the human right to travel through the air. So definitions aren’t really “right” or “wrong”; they’re more helpful or less helpful.


I don’t believe it’s right to restrict the right to go right, right, or Right.