Creativity: Individual vs Group

I have tried to show in the last post how the behaviour of a group of individuals can be very different from the behaviour of an individual.

The simple search for food becomes a problem when the group has grown so big that there is starvation at the margin, which then gives the core individuals greater fear of an impending resource scarcity that they begin to accumulate for future consumption which, in a monetised economy, becomes a folly as, instead of accumulation food sources, they accumulate tokens (otherwise called money). Of course, that folly is the result of the evolution of society - the matrix that smart people create for themselves by making use of the trusting ordinary public and in the end get caught in it themselves - where happiness has become from the consumption of food to the consumption of other unnecessaries. The growth of society then becomes dependent on the production of the unnecessaries whose depend is based not on real needs (if I don't it I will die, literally) but on bank credit and what the neighbours have. The layers of the delusion multiply. The limit to that expansion of unnecessaries is the limit of credit expansion, defined when loans default at a rate that the interest margin can cover which is very little especially in a period of near-zero interest rate. The matrix gets into a ponzi-type scheme when more new money is printed to fund old money at a rate which is in excess of the rate of expansion in activities related even to the production of the unnecessaries which may be at a rate of expansion which is unable to absorb new entrants into the labour force.

In a more equitable world, the objective is to create a society where every individual is remunerated at roughly the same rate of pay, and this is found to be a society made up of professionals - where everybody comes up with their own schedules of fees. That schedule is the rate of exchange of different services. For a more egalitarian society, there probably should be an abolition of the discrimination certain types of professions such as toilet cleaning or housekeeping or blog posting. In which case, if everybody is equally good and equally demanded, then with everybody getting the same income, it is unlikely that anybody will be able to afford to pay any other person to do a part of his or her chores without being severely handicapped financially - but then, in that world, there will be no need for that service provider to offer his or her services to his or her neigbour because he or she is not in financial want. In a truly egalitarian world where everybody gets the same income, earned or otherwise, there is no incentive to do anything for others, each will do his or her own chore, and each will eat his or her food in silence alone.

The great interaction in society, and why society evolves in the first place, is inequality - which in economics is called disequilibrium - which in physics is called the potential difference or polarity - where the attempt to achieve an impossible equilibrium (of silence and non-activity) results in incessant activity. In economics, that restless activity is called the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. In modern society, the objective of politicians is to try to increase the rate of incessant activity among the people in order to keep them occupied (for if they are idle, they will march down the streets for change which is always possible), and this is done by creating a greater disequilibrium. The tradition method of creating economic disturbances is to get the minds of individuals to come out of the tranquility of the meditation and god-aligned frame into one of great dissatisfaction so that the intensive activity of the mind leads one to come up with all sorts of weird ideas and this din is the mind is celebrated in modern society as the way to prosperity.

As in nature where the group exists to protect the individuals in the group, in human society the social fabrication through its customs and culture seek to protect the individuals by seeking their conformity. In successful societies, conformity to the social convention is paramount but that success may not be growth of happiness but the continued existence of the old group. In newer societies formed from the dishevel of modern times, usually because of war but sometimes because of famine, the coming together of peoples from different cultures sets a renaissance in the creativity of human existence where the multiple disequilibrium points allow for a great multitude of cross traffic of ideas of how to live and what to do in life, if that traffic is not stopped by bigots who police the thought process of the people. Inevitably, the first and second generations may be still want to cling to their old comfort but we can expect, if left to their own, the young will think anew their taught way of life, and forge new identities with their school friends and neighbours. With it, new levels of existence - which may be away from mechanisation and the modern sciences of despoiling the environment, but the sharing of new understanding of their heritages.

Humans, Environment & Investment

I have taken several minute steps in the last few posts to put humans in proper context, and to show how the many invisible layers have been built up over the millennia as the human specie struggle for survival in this world.

I must say what a woeful lot we humans are! It is the madness of crowds, the whole colossal folk dashing here and there migrating and spread like cancer in search of its own preservation but only find itself painted in the corner. That paint is the deforested environment which becomes uninhabitable to all but sand and a few lizards.

The race out of the garden of eden into the big wide and wild world has set the rate of growth of the human population against (a) the rate of growth of agricultural output and (b) the rate of decline of the forest and wild life. Thomas Malthus was right. The size of human population on earth will be limited by agricultural output ultimately. That limit may be a long stretch away. In the meantime, there is a dynamic interaction between the two: population surge following new discovery of food production which encourages the population to overshoot food supply, adjusted by hunger and disease and famine.

Probably with such a history embedded in our genes, we find ourselves unwittingly living in perpetual fear of inadequate food. This great search for certainty in an uncertain world creates the world and society as we know it to be today. The incessant urge to save and investment in the future that is already here.

In the world of goods, to save is to set aside some portion of the current output for future consumption such as by salting or sugaring or fermentation. That preserved food can actually be eaten tomorrow when it become rainy. There is no waste. When there is overproduction in the current period, and when the preserved food is in huge surplus, the most logical response is to take a break from work, do some maintenance work, and spend the leisure drinking and dancing and telling stories - activities which are collectively called "culture." There is a constant adjustment between output and consumption and saving and investment.

If food is taken out of the forest, the most logical step is to protect and preserve the forest so that it can continue to sustain the community. But we know that a finite forest can only support a finite community because hunger and war break out. At this limit, Malthus is spot on. This means that, at the limit, there is so much preservation of the forest can do for humans. In the meantime, any limit that is felt is determined by technology and human knowledge of how to extract more from less. This can be seen as a fact, and we simply just have to accept it. But even so, the community must protect the food source from selfish greedy individuals who may have no qualms about destroy the food source thinking that he or she can stored it off somewhere purely for his or her own consumption. In nature, any other method of storage apart from leaving nature alone is foolhardy.

This problem of the short-seeing long-sighted selfish person is compounded in a world of tokens (paper or commodity money) where its special quality of not decaying physically (because it's a computer number or a piece of metal) may create the illusion that accumulation of pile of metal or paper or a larger number on a computer is the way to go into the future for generations. All things lie in the present, this accumulation of uneatable assets is being balanced against the liability of persistent destruction of the environment (by chopping down trees or digging up stuff or polluting). This is being gleefully done today by warlords with the collusion of multinational firms and global finance.

At the same time, the overproduction of goods (unsold inventory) or services (unemployed workers) is being happily ignored and misinterpreted - with the later overproduction (unemployment) probably from good agriculture or bad education is being used as a basis for further overproduction (of goods) which floods the world both in terms of huge quantity, low price and bad quality. And central banks continue to churn out the tokens.

In this world of mindless pursuit of economic growth, we are drowned in a sea of useless constructs. The rich becomes very rich and the poor becomes very poor, all within the economic system that we have immersed ourselves. We have to get out.

Creating The Economy & Money

I think we have now come to a stage where things may be a bit more familiar to the reader - in that we shall be dealing with issues that are a bit more mundane.

We have now gotten out of ether and universal consciousness and into the world of form, of individual physical entities. As an individual born with a stomach and a sexual reproductive organ, our true calling is to each and to procreate. The sex part is quite intuitive and I shall not be dealing too with that because it has been very well treated by the arts. I shall instead delve into the eating part.

Stage 1. Humans and Environment

In my version of the art of war - of war between humans and non-humans - a person stands alone in this world and ask: What is my next step?

In my little garden of eden, the next human step is to stretch out the hand and it shall be provided by the fruit of the nearest tree for sustenance. But even in paradise, there is need for knowledge, for some have eaten the fruit and lived, and some have eaten the fruit and died. Distinction comes into being - between the fruit that gives life (edible fruit) and the fruit that takes away life (poison). Which this distinction, one can be creative in the identification of food. The community that succeeds in finding the best way to classify food and poison becomes the most thriving one.

At this stage, it is still possible for humans to stay put in the original state and stand naked with outstretched arms and be provided.

Stage 2. Population Growth and Food

Stage 2 is when the population grows and there is pressure on the supply of food. There will come a time when what nature provides in the vicinity is insufficient for the growing population, and the only concern of the human race is food. This is as if the human race has been cast out of the garden of eden. Food is no more a sure thing for the existing population. The option is to fight for the existing supply of food (those who fail die), or to migrate out of the community into the big wide world and hope for the best, or to be find ways of increasing the food supply from the same existing immediate environment. By the way, all these three options call for some degree of creativity - to think out of the box, meaning to think differently from the traditional way of looking at things, as well as doing things and handling things.

Creativity in fighting for food requires the acquisition of power, the art of war and the organisation of slave labour.

Creativity in out migration requires the construction of the means of transportation, communication, organisation of autonomous societies, the saving of scarce resources, the investment in useful knowledge and contraption, the art of living with different cultures.

Creativity in the production of food in existing environment involves conservation of the productivity of the environment, the consumption at necessary levels, the preservation of surplus food for the uncertain future supply or increase in members of the community.

Stage 3. Social Organisation

In moving out of the garden of eden, there is a need for organisation - which in the primary stage will involve sacrifice by members of the cooperative to do committee work and in the secondary stage a group of professional organisers who are paid out of the communual output for them to tell the community what is the best way to organise themselves.

This organisation leads into the problems of how to get that portion of the output to be paid to the non-production team. One method is to fixed the portion in quantity terms, another is to pay according to tokens the quantity of which may be fixed or not, and the number of tokens may or may not match the quantity of output available for exchange. All these issues lead to the problem of the economy concerning production, distribution, consumption and the supply of the money stock and the demand for money, as well as price of output and the interest on money should lending and borrowing be allowed. The very simple problem of organisation of human society in as non-violent way as possible leads to arms-length and informal dealing that are signaled by price (or the number of tokens).

It can be seen that the economic system can be corrupted by the pursuit of the acquisition of tokens as an end in itself (thinking that these are valuable) and if not realising that valuable necessarily means hard-to-get, some token control authority may try to ingratiate himself or herself to the political masters in the guise of trying to smooth the production of output without being blamed for any hardship that must arise with any attempt at adjustment (i.e., getting some people to work or work hard or work harder) and end up printing more tokens and distributing them to the political masters (quantitative easing) so that the political masters may suffer no inconveniences while the general public may have their consumption curtailed as a result of inflation.

Coming Into Being: Reinventing The Self & The World

Reality is immense. Reality exists with or without us.

This is the utter truth which wise men through the ages have been trying to say to human beings of all ages. This reality is the perennial background of the story of mankind.

Against this ultimate reality is the narrow perception of the world according to individual human beings.

We come into being the moment we gain consciousness.

This is regardless of the view of other people of us. They may have seen us toddling around at infancy but we may remember nothing. We remember from a certain age and it is that certain age that we have our consciousness - and memory.

As we grow older, wisdom comes as layers and layers of consciousness - our realisation of the different aspects and degree of the perennial reality.

But there is a difference between the moment of consciousness/memory and the moment of our realisation of the different aspects and layers of reality.

From birth, we are conditioned by our caretakers to survive as a member of a social unit and as a specie. It is only when we come into realisation that we are each an individual that we come into our own individual being. Instead of being a pre-programmed robot, we try to re-programme individual ourselves. It is that tweaking of our in-built programme that we come into our own being, in the way of imagine ourselves to be.

As a result, we also reinvent our own world. The larger reality exist by itself irrespective of us, but the way we see the world and the way we interact with the world is defined hopefully by ourselves, but most of time by the society in which we find ourselves in.

If we disagree with our pre-conditioning, then we have know how we want to re-condition ourselves by the principles by which we want to live and by the habits which we want to cultivate. This is where all the talk about the examined life and the cultivated or cultured man/woman comes in.

In redefining our individual selves, we are in fact putting our selves together to make ourselves an individual whole. This recreation of self is necessarily ego-centric. But the existence of self does imply that one will be selfish although one is likely to be. The existence of the ego does not mean that one has to be egotistical. The sharing of self with other selves is not selfish, although it may be seen as egotistical but it is really up to the individual to know and deal with it personally and privately.

Once the self is sorted out, the rest of the job of living is simply to survive bodily with the least psychological stress. This is contentment and happiness. The self is settled and one can sit quietly and permanently like a stone, without a care in the world and most likely without a thought of any kind.

But the moment a thought enters the mind, mental activity takes place - which is likely to be concerned with the external physical world, and with the inconveniences and aesthetics of the body and with the problems of the cohesion of societies. This is where the inventions of the mundane world come in.

Being Creative, Being There

It has taken me quite a bit of time to put my thoughts on this one together, because it is an extremely difficult area to treat. What do we mean to be creative?

I hold reality to be infinite, and hence incomprehensible to mankind - man or women of any kind - given the finiteness of our senses. We have difficulty already with what we can see - this is why the early Europeans made such a big deal about their "discovery" of the "new" world. The world is always there, but their discovery belated (and some would wish never). We have already made some discovery peering into the dark skies or deep into inner spaces. Some may even have claimed perception of another world, in another mind or mind-frame. So, in this sense, creating is nothing but the "discovery" of that which is already there in the first place but which our senses have not been able to reach before (to paraphrase an old beer advertisement). So, in this sense, being creative is to be there first, and return to tell the tale. (Unable to return and tell a good story sends one to the madhouse.)

Being creative, therefore, means to have seen another world or another aspect of the world and to be able to describe the "new" world in such a way that human beings can find applications to remove yet another level of uncertainty of life on earth.

For creativity, therefore, I give high marks for the "creation of the world" stories which are probably reflective of the height of human imagination, reflecting the most intense of human anguish. The myths, the religious as well as the so-called scientific, the latter being extremely hard to provide the evidence as well, or to prove or to show concrete results. All "creation" stories and theories are based on faith, religious or scientific.

The importance of stories or theories is that they provide a tentative basis for explaining why certain things happen in a certain way or not in a certain way. They help us to understand ourselves and the world around us, and life as we know it to be.

I am sure all of us are brought up on one set of stories, and by the time we die, we would probably have created our own little stories or amendments to the traditional stories for retelling to our grandchildren (by then, our children would have their own competing stories to tell). Traditions (folk, religious or historical) can have a significant influence on creativity by weighing it down, but for the imaginative, it may provide a fallback for some ways to take flights of fancy.

There are but three ways of trying to be creative. The first is to see a table with an optimal number of four legs, figure whether it can stand on three (which we know it can) or two (which we do not know). The second is to see a table and a chair and try to figure out whether there is a furniture that lies between a table and a chair (you figure it out). The third way is to "dream of things that are not and ask why not?" as per George Bernard Shaw. The third way of course is open-ended, as varied and as far as the mind can go.

If mind is the constraint, then how do we think when we want to get creative? (I believe we are back to square one as far as this post is concerned.)

There is an infinite number of layers of existence right before our eyes, our noses, our ears, our fingers, our being.

I am sure many of us have experienced all kinds of weird stuff in our dreams, and are unable to explain, recall or use, so we simply dismiss them.

It is unfortunate that the stuff which we all acknowledge to be creative are only those stuff which strikes a cord in the heart of every person (and hence comes down as stories or myths) or which could be made into useful products (and hence comes down as stories or urban legends). The genius is the person whom we salute as whom we are not.

If therefore we were to put aside the commercial aspect of life, then I would there to venture that most of us are creative in our way of living, venturing into all avenues which we are not able or unwilling to disclose to the rest of the world, our own secretive world of great intimate knowledge and great intimate feelings and emotions as we explore our own little world to our own little self. This must have been how all the great religious ones felt when they felt inspired by the divine and expressed those emotions in terms which the ordinary people even today tend to hold to ridicule.

The way to be creative therefore is to unrestrained which means also not to seek public approval which means also to be an introvert. So, by definition, the creative world is understated. The only lament that economic and industrial leaders have over creativity is over commercialisable creativity - this lament is more a reflection of greed rather than of conceit.

Be there, and there will be creativity.

Nothing, Something: The Beginning of Creativity

We have now come to a stage - a state - which, to me, is probably the most exciting. This is the state of no-mind, no-nothing, the void. While it may be natural to think that after death - after the end of something - there is nothing - or could there is anything - what, to me is quite interesting and exciting is that it could be the beginning of something - which I am always inclined to think - that it could be something new.

When something disappears, it disappears from sight or any one of the senses that perceives the thing or phenomenon. It depends on our ability to see or to sense.

If we were to try to understand how things come into existence in this world, it is our own sense of perception, our own sense of detection, and, I would add, the strength of our memory to retain what we have perceived or how we perceive. I am always conscious that there are many things that are happening right in front of me but, if I do not see them, they do not exist for me. Even if I am absolutely mindful, there is still my sphere of perception at any moment and the level at which I am perceiving. There is also the rate or pace of perception - how fast I can perceive at any one time. And I have come to realise that what we perceive, in the end, depends on our mental preparedness to perceive or observe, the sharpness of our focus and the power of our concentration. Or, are we simply just "absorbing" everything into ourselves, as most of us are apt to say?

Against a blank canvass, what comes out or what comes into our minds?

I am keenly interested in this because I try to indulge in this phenomenon called creativity. People are now no more interested in "thinking" - they want thinking "outside the box." They are no more interested in creativity - they want a "new paradigm."

So, how do we go about it? It goes right back to the point I have touched on before in one of my earlier posts about how we think. If I may reposition the sequence of thinking here, we start with (1) Wonder at the world: how to understand the wonders of the world and how to explain them. Myths and stories are then created. This may be considered primitive because it is probably the oldest form of knowledge, but I won't sniff at it because, if we are to wonder at the universe and the immense greatness of the skies as the Hubble Telescope can should us and the immense intensity of the inner world that the electronic microscope can show us, we continue to be dabbling with myths and stories insofar as trying to articulate our understanding or realisation of nature to the person next to us. The String Theory or the Big Bang Theory, for example. Or, what Stephen Hawking is trying to articulate about his perception of nature. They may put old myths to the world, but they themselves may just be new myths. (2) The most arrogant are probably what I would call the "hard" scientists - the "natural" scientists - those who work with data about the natural world. Those data are "hard" only insofar as they are filtered by their measuring instruments. Sure, at that level of observation or abstraction, they can put together what they think is a coherent sequence of cause-and-effect which they called "theory." But, at a deeper or greater level (which nobody knows yet), they could be entirely mistaken - as history has shown. Of course, in the land of the blind, the one-eye jack is the king - which goes to show the importance of knowledge - to know what other people know; or the importance of wisdom - to know what you do not know, and to know what others do not know as well. (3) It is the dissatisfaction with the narrowness of logical thinking that Edward de Bono comes up with what he called Lateral Thinking as a juxtaposition to logic - to show that there is a way out of this quagmire and into the land of the free and easy by having the confidence to link what appears at first to be unconnected entities and with effort to throw away the prejudice and try to look at the essence of each individual entities and find a connection at the core or centre. (4) The No-Mind stuff then takes the mental exercise one step further into the void and see if anything would come of it, not without trying, but without the mistake of putting the hackneyed foremost in one's mind all the time and thereby blocking any new insights that may arise automatically in one's mind with the natural passage of time without any distraction from the mundane world where every little bits and pieces or elements of life may turn into a potentially disruptive spoiler of one's effort to see a new perspective or a new image of the ordinary. Remember, in absolute reality, nothing changes and everything is unchanging, by definition. It is only our mind that changes.

In my mind, it is not easy to be creative, if we want to be strict about creativity. It is easy to do the same old stuff a bit differently. It is easy to do a slight change by modification or repackaging or rebranding - it is still the same old stuff. It is very difficult and challenging to come up with something that is entirely different, for it must satisfy a new thereto untapped demand or desire or fancy of human beings. To be "out of the box", one probably has to be out of the normal ordinary mind which means that one can seek no approval from anyone, not even oneself, if you have not probably understood yourself. This is why many of us buy into new products because you say "This is exactly what I want or what I have always wanted but could not find until now."

It is my guiding principle, when I am trying to be creative, is to use myself as a benchmark as a test as to what is really needed, for if I can satisfy myself, I am sure there will be another who also needs it. I read that Stephen King wrote the horror thrillers because he likes horror thrillers and could find no good horror thrillers for his enjoyment. While market research may be great, but I think there is no greater source of truth or inspiration than the depth of one's own being.

Therefore, when I contemplate death in my earlier posts, I wasn't just thinking about the end of a life or the end of an object, but also the end of a time, the end of an era, the end of an idea, the end of a phenomenon, the end of an economy, the end of a business cycle.

In our current attempt to transform the economy, are we really in the state of a new beginning with new thinking and new ideas and new paradigms or are we still stuck in the same old rut in the same old tattered mat with the same voices crying for the same old milk while the poor maid is trying to pacify those voices by promising that many nice things are coming their way or are surely coming their way? As you can tell from my postings on those topics, I do not think that we have done more than just shuffling feet to make some noise.

I am more concerned with individuals - which means individual readers of this blog and this post - and to be helpful by providing some pointers as to how to get each one of ourselves going and moving ahead, despite the rough terrain that each and everyone of us have to traverse on our own.

I am convinced that the world does not need geniuses. The world has always been run by normal people with average skills and average exertion. But the world does need one and, if lucky, two geniuses to get it going. In the current era, we have seen the wonders done to the world by the many geniuses of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, etc., who I reckon are all babies of the Hippy era. So has the current crop of babies, big and small, lived beyond the comfort of their finger-activated otherwise stationary world in front of flickering lights training their little minds to a narrow group of mental signaling traffic. Would the best that they can think of be within that lighted box, or will it be something that is earth shattering?

So, at the point of the void after death is the point of the void of a new beginning. This is the point of the greatest source of creativity, and the degree of the greatness of the creativity will be defined by the degree of the blankness and the degree of the absence of memory of the past but with the greatest attention to what is right in front of our noses.

Existence After Death, and Before

I am trying to avoid the standard term - Life After Death, or Afterlife - principally because I belief that, after death, life as we know it does not or will not exist.

Life as we know it is life with the physical form for people - and even that I do not think human beings have not even accepted life in all human forms to the same.

So, I think the best that we can try to discuss is existence after death.

Wisdom dictates that we do not discuss what we do not know.

Siddhartha kept what his disciples have called the "Noble Silence" - he just won't not talk about it.

Confucius scolded his students: "You don't even what life is all about, you want to talk about life after death!"

From the scientific point of view, or rather to come to grips with possibilities in the scientific terms that we now understand: Life as we know it is life in dimensions we know - basically sensory dimensions. The blind has one dimension less. The blind and deaf has two dimensions less. The blind and deaf and dumb as three dimensions less. The blind and deaf and dumb and no-touch as four dimensions less. And so on. But there is life as we know it.

Once we die, logic tells us that there could be other dimensions - which are totally different from the dimensions that we do know. Now, this is purely speculative and we really do not know what that "existence" is even if we encounter it.

If that is the case, then we really do not care.

What do we really care in this existence?

I think there are two basic concerns in this existence - this bodily existence, and hence the concerns only deal with the survival of the physical form: nutrients to sustain the body and sex for the continued survival of the genetic proteins.

It is quite interesting to realise that life as we know it knows that each particular bodily or physical form will not survive forever (and this realisation should really knock out lot of nonsense from the activities of some human beings as they waste a huge chunk of their lives trying to prolong their lives).

At the end of the day, it is the prolonging of the survival of genetic proteins that is of interest to life-form in general. While human beings would worry about the future of the human race, in such concerns as over the environment as we know it, it probably should be realised by individual members of the human race that the human race may probably be just a blip in the long history of the existence and survival of life-form.

I have this little theory that as life-form is dwindling in the variety of its manifestations as well as its sizes. I can imagine a time when there is literally an infinite variety of life-forms, from the very big to the minuscule, and that somehow the environment has turned hostile for some or most of them, and the present environment is only good for human beings and some other life-forms. No doubt, the environment will continue to change (I won't say evolve because I do not think the changes are always marginal nor smooth) and human beings will surely disappear from this earth and this world, and all the worldly concerns we have now will also disappear and there will peace on this earth and in their world without the clamour and shenanigans of human critters. (I would like to read the stories told by germs, bacteria and parasites about how they through centuries or millennia have destroyed the evil giants called human beings - which just kept reappearing until some asteroids or other destroyed them for good.)

So, if we are just proteins and other fatty acids and molecules - just as the television or the radio or the handphone or the computer or the internet - then really the existence as we know it is nothing but an illusion caused by the accidental combination of sub-particles which happen to auto-animate and giving the impression to human beings that human beings are really alive - in the way human beings understand life to be. (I can imagine the mountains laughing at the silly human beings, and while having a smoke unwittingly created a volcanic eruption which killed some human beings nearby.)

Our problem is that we choose to see the things we want to see, within the small confines of our narrow perception, and think that the views and realisation - and illumination and enlightenment - that we have derived and obtained for ourselves are such big deals - when they really are not. They do not matter, to us nor to others.

When everything is deconstructed down to their basic components, we are nothing but little bits and pieces that come into shape - and dare I say being - as a result of movement, a shake, a vibration which gives rise to energy - which is a tautology as energy is anything that can cause a movement.

The biggest puzzle for the human mind is how that movement comes about. Who made that first move? Or should it be, how did (does?) that first movement come about?

Some sacred texts say it was a breath. Or it could easily be the release of gas.

Things come into being when conditions are right. But all kinds of things come into all kinds of being as all kinds of conditions exist.

Whether the conditions that come together are the conditions that we want is quite another matter. It is as if we have a say or control. We could be beyond our depth.

My final thought is this: As we do not know where we came from when we were born, we would not know where we would go when we die.

The truth may be that we neither came nor go.

We flicker - and we are lost to the flame.