A naive draft of a long held belief.

Shape - Collisions - Environment

A shape decides how a form moves through its environment. Like a rock tumbling down a hill or a thrown paper airplane. Its surface, or lack thereof, dictates its path through its environment and its inevitable, continuous collisions.

A shape cannot change by itself. It must be changed by something externally. We, as shapes, cannot morph, grow, shrink, move or unmove ourselves, only when an outside force is acted upon us does our state transform.

Every collision a shape experiences is an inflection point. Not just in itself but also its environment. A two way change. Shapes necessarily alter their environment; a path carved, obstacles knocked, and objects reshuffled.

Our consciousness doesn’t change our shape - it IS our resulting shape. To other shapes we are their environment and they the shape. To us they are the environment and we are the shape. Any attempt from a shape to perceive itself is just the environment mimicking the shape, an imperfect reflection at best.

Are there good collisions and bad collisions? A collision that changes the shape and it’s environment in a way that the shape can have another bounce that will lead to another that will lead to another ad infinitum is a benefit of both the shape and the environment.

Once you have a shape that finds a rhythm towards collisions within its environment you arguably have life.

But what of perception, morals, purpose? All of these are shapes within themselves, becoming part of our shape when taken on from the environment. They also will die if not collided against and change when collided.

If a shape comes to absolute rest and will cease to collide again we have created void, a place absent of collisions. Death. It is no longer shape, no longer environment, nothing.

We often study, practice, or simulate collisions so that in life when we truly collide we have trust that that our shape will allow us to bounce in a direction in which we can reliably bounce again.

If this text was apart of the readers environment, they would just bounce off it. Which direction they go would be decided by the unique angle between shape and the environment.

What, then, of free will? We are not self-sufficient entities making choices from outside relation. Without having the surface of free-will we would have not had the collisions we have had. Try to truly believe you cannot act on your own free-will and you will not succeed, because if by some miracle you do you will also at that very moment cease to exist.

The environment and shape exist only at point of collision. The collision is a proof of existence. That through point from one to another being consciousness.

The moment between collisions are not nothing. They moments of suspense, potential - a superposition that only the shape itself can understand. To its environment those moments are merely a justification for its next collision. They are the moments between moments. The calculation between the numbers. To the environment a shape might as well teleport within time and space, between one collision and the next. To the shape this is its being, it finding its resolve.

The white on a page in a novel, the silence between drum hits, the gaps between frames in a roll of film. The shape of our lives are the snapshots, compressed into stories used to make sense of the previous collision and seemingly predict the next.

We are not thinking; we are remembering. Loops of memories passing through our brain that can only be disrupted by chaos in our perception. Rubbing our fingers on the shape of our memories and feeling the indentation of our environment. A meta-experience of a past collision.

The more we embrace the gaps between collision, the more we can hope to find peace, to gain hope that our shape will allow for yet another collision; but in doing this, we create more collisions.

Not only are we all products of our environment. The environment is EQUALLY as much a product of us. We are only aware of ourselves because of the us-shaped dents we have left in our environment and the environment-shaped dents left in us. Proof of it and proof of us.