Feb 7, 2009

Quotidian Symbols Attack The Yawning Mind



Across from Extra Foods (my current place of employment) sits a Starbucks. I go to this Starbucks for my morning fix and little repose. While sitting by the window I can see two signs in my peripheral vision: a stop sign and a pedestrian crossing sign. Logic dictates that the motor vehicles yield to the pedestrians. The vehicles should obey the concise injunction to STOP. But if one were to create a pictorial narrative out of the signs, if one were to read the symbols like ideograms, the two signs actually tell the pedestrian to STOP. Does this mean the motor vehicle shouldn't STOP if the sign is actually intended for the pedestrian? What we have here is a literal crossroads where symbols could possibly be relativized. This means the world isn't as concrete as we think it is. It is actually more like a pliant holographic goop that contains myriad perspectives.

The mind, on a daily basis, is inundated with symbols and signs from a world up to its knees in information. Our intellects take these signs and symbols and turn them into cognitive infrastructures, tenements, and landscapes. These cognitive structures in turn become populated with perspectives, wishes, yearnings, ideas, intimations, constructs, and even jetsam and flotsam which is meaningless. Out of these things arises the need to create for creativity's sake. This is a sacred process of recycling and reinventing all the information of the universe, which has indeed existed since the dawn of cosmic being. This is why it is important to understand the world and learn from it. After all, all the stop signs and pedestrian signs are here to teach us just like anything else.

There can be no legitimate separation between the sacred and the profane, for both are branching out on the universal tree.

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