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Mastery in a field creates a feeling of respect even in another field because it signals the same depth of consciousness even though the contents may wildly differ. E.g. a general could make a good CEO.

Yet no matter how big they get, they're always smaller than infinity. Just like no matter how large of a thing you paint, it will always be just the foreground on an infinite background. An island of white in an endless black.

Consciousness is infinite because any thought must occur INSIDE consciousness. Whatever thought appears, must then be smaller than consciousness. However, consciousness will only ever be this bubble of light in the darkness.

This is why the white and black are both infinite yet finite. The white can be infinitely large without limits. The black will effortlessly contain white no matter how large it gets. They're perfectly 'balanced' in power.

In this model, white is "all conscious thoughts" while black is "god as infinite reality". "god" as defined is "everything that has not emerged into consciousness yet."

This is why we have a drive to be unique. Why we don't want to be clones of other people. Why we don't even like seeing ourselves on TV or hearing our own voices. We're repeating consciousness, something that the universe has already "thought" before.

As a term, you can choose to believe or not believe in "god". Do you believe in the infinity of things that haven't yet occurred in consciousness?

Believing in "God" basically means to believe in newness. To not believe in god means that at a subconsciousness level you feel your life (and thus your world) to be a repeat cycle pattern.

Or it could mean that you feel you have understood and mastered everything worth knowing about the world. Understanding the god concept helps you avoid this pit of arrogance.

The first trap is much more sneaky than the arrogance trap. The first trap is about life as groundhog day. A looped pattern or simulation. It's the source of depression. It's the feeling: "Nothing new will ever happen within this consciousness"

What defends against depression is ignorance. As you live, you learn as you go. A flood of cheap knowledge via the internet increases depression because suddenly this event becomes the same old "memorize a fact" event repeating itself infinitely.

By becoming too common, your brain chunks these patterns for efficiency. Learning new facts no longer a source of newness because it's just one more drop in the bucket.

When knowledge was rare, learning something new basically gave you a WHOLE NEW WORLD VIEW. It wasn't an additional piece of art to add to a gallery. It was looking at the art and being so moved that you CHANGE WHO YOU ARE.

definition of Art: That which changes you. (psychedelics, skydiving, being moved by a banksy piece, etc..) Art is always the pointer and not the value. The painting of a flower is never the flower itself. You see the beauty of "artist admiring flower", not the flowers itself.

What artists do is they expand consciousness. They make us think we didn't know we could think. Things that maybe we were too scared to dig too deeply into.

People literally used to have to wait for their families to die to experience this type of grief. Now you can just watch a good sad movie really intently and you can experience a similar grief. Good art makes us FEEL.

When a feeling you didn't even know you could feel comes into being it's like something is created from nothing. A wondrous miracle. The act of creation.

When you feel stale, like your life is just a bunch of the same feelings being combined in the same patterns there are some escape routes...

The route of the artist expands this realm of feelings, constantly seeking new feelings.

The route of the technologist realizes that there are infinite patterns. With merely 2 feelings, you can have 1s and 0s and create literally a virtual world by carving rocks into computers.

What's interesting is how they interplay with each other. The artists is constantly COMBINING the existing to create the new. The technologist avoids the new and so creates new emotions.

These 2 processes or intricately linked with the greatest power a human has. Naming. By naming a specific pattern you can train yourself to see and feel an entirely new pattern even though it was based on old patterns.

"Fire" for example is 4 letters you've seen before f, i, r, e but the word itself invokes an entirely new feeling than the feeling you have towards letters of the alphabet.

If I make up a word like "Kasitooey" i'm invoking a feeling in you. What makes this type of nonsense feeling unique is that I can't control the effects. Where as if I said "fire", I could predict what would emerge in your mind.

Art balance at the tip of this recognition. Something like "FlameyoIcicle". I use the 'flame' word embedded to anchor, and then add something else that adds wonder. "How can ice and fire combine?"

There's a quote from David F Wallace on how we all worship. I think what that means here is that we all believe in newness to our lives. Getting that promotion, having a family, going to six flags, etc... We have faith in newness.

Do you believe in newness or do you not? The cynical nihilist who says "What does it matter, we're all gonna die." does not.

Even if you intellectually understand the infinity of consciousness you may still feel trapped because you may believe that those higher states of consciousness require more skills than you have.

You theoretically know that every scribble you draw on a piece of paper is unique new information but it just doesn't FEEL like invigorating newness. Your scribble is undisciplined and untrained and unskilled.

By not allowing new feelings to come into existence, you deny yourself the ability to change. Often this is due to a desire to repeat consistent performance due to trying to perfect something like grades.