notes-life-peaceQuiteAloneness

There is a value to:

A lot of this value lies in certain states of consciousness/qualia/percepts/thoughts/feelings which are hard to think/perceive except in an environment of peace and quiet and aloneness, and which are more likely to occur in an environment of nature. Unfortunately these qualia/thoughts/perceptions/feelings are (a) hard to capture in memory; since this is hard to believe, i'll repeat myself: you can later remember the fact that you were having this sort of experience, but you can't remember the important parts of what it felt like, (b) hard to capture in writing or art or other media, possibly due to their abstract nature (by 'abstract' i here only mean distant from immediate sensory percepts such as pictures or sounds; i do not mean abstract in the sense of 'formal' like mathematics, nor do i mean 'concerned with the generalization of specifics into concepts'), (c) self-impeding, in that if you try to enter this sort of mental state, you often cannot achieve it (my theory is that (1) being in a goal-directed state makes this sort of thing less likely to happen, and trying to make it happen is pursuing a goal, and (2) the partial memories of previous states of this sort get in the way, since you can't capture the important parts of the experience in memory, so your previous 'memories' of such states are actually just unimportant details and verbalizations that distract you). Part of the nature of these thoughts is an appreciation for the abstract timbre or texture of life and of elements of your life, such as your life history, patterns of your behavior, relationships, places. These thoughts seem/feel to be very important, and are often what is meant when people speak of 'moments'. In fact it is my personal belief that much of the 'meaning of life' lies in moments like these.

For me, these things tend to occur around sunrise (when other people are asleep and it is quiet), late at night, or in the middle of the day when i am walking alone in the park.

It is not impossible for these things to occur without the presence of peace, quiet, aloneness, or nature (especially aloneness; small groups of people can sometimes perceive these together, which is a great thing; it seems to get geometrically less likely with group size). People sometimes perceive these things while 'in the middle' of life, rather than when 'looking in on life from the outside' in a contemplative mood. But peace, quiet, aloneness, and nature seem to lend themselves to contemplative moods that make these qualia/thoughts more probable.

One reason is that these thoughts seem to be be big, low-frequency, slow, 'big picture' thoughts. The mind cannot produce them if it is in a fast-thinking mood. Another reason is that, although these thoughts, once had, seem important, they often do not seem urgent, and so perhaps our mind sensibly does not produce these thoughts when there is a feeling that there are other things that urgently need to be done. Perhaps potential social interactions with others demand readiness and the potential to quickly switch into a fast-thinking state; this may be why aloneness is important. I'm not exactly sure why quietness is important, but it may have to do with the abstractness of these thoughts; it seems like concrete sensations attract the attention much more powerfully than these sorts of things, so concrete sensations such as sounds 'outcompete' these sort of percepts for our attention.

These sorts of thoughts are probably one reason why people recommend contemplation and meditation as 'spiritual' things, but i don't know if they are the main reason for that or not.

This is part of why people lament civilization as a corrupting force; the more 'civilized' we are, the more we: