Antoun,

Narrative in the sense of rising and falling, like waves.

"Begin" is a temporal issue. You begin at birth and end at death. Your life goes from being in the future to being in the past. Yet life is constantly moving onto future generations and shedding old ones, past to future. The process goes to the future, as the patterns generated go to the past. As consciousness goes to the future, while the patterns, thoughts rise and all, future to past.

So what is the universe? Is it a generative process, or is it the patterns being generated? Or both? Yin and yang.

I think there are a lot of issues out there, that amount to versions of whether the cosmos is geocentric, heliocentric, or something larger. We get too wrapped up in what we tell each other to really think it all through, then spiral into these rabbit holes. Tribes are like herds of herbivores, or schools of fish, or flocks of birds, or hives of bees.

Is there some larger sentience? What if we are cells in some larger organism or process?

One way to think about it is to ask if the puppet pulls back on the strings, giving focus and meaning to the puppeteer?

Maybe it might have some larger purpose, but we are the tools it is currently using. The hammer doesn't understand houses, but it is part of what sets the boundaries of how they can be constructed. Everything between the absolute and the infinite is relational. We are part of those feedback loops and the better we can sense how they work, the more we are in tune with them. It's like riding a horse. When you are holding it, it can see you and is something distinct, but when you are in the saddle, it is focused on what is in front of it and is just carrying you. That you might steer it is just part of the process.

It's like my point about boredom, which is a function of my personal clock running faster than the environmental clocks, so I have to figure a way to slow my own clock, or find a position where the clocks around me are running at the same rate. The more in tune, the better I get at sorting what I'm experiencing. Though given the rate the world is moving, mostly I'm the turtle.

The bull is power. The matador is art.

Ps,

I've decided the real problem in the world isn't the Jews, it's the Eastern Europeans. From the neo cons and Zionists, to the pogroms, Nazis and all the other intractable ethnic clashes, it seems some Eastern European group is having a tantrum. Maybe being stuck between the Germans and the Russians/Slavs.

The Jews across the Middle East and Northern Africa got screwed over in the blowback from the creation of Israel.

The problem now for Israel is, you live by the gun....