Author: Lauri

  • Echo guides you home

    People are looking for a home in experience – or rather an experience that feels like a home. When they are at home, they are not out there, separated from their origin. They have returned to something that allows them to be at ease. (By “home” I mean an existential home, not the actual home, or a nostalgic childhood home, of individuals.)

    A religious experience can be described as a homecoming, a return, a definitive answer to the fundamental ubitas, a recurring and insisting “where am I?”. When one returns home, one does not need to leave anymore. The existential location has been defined not in contrast to the surroundings, or by geographic coordinates, but by experience itself. It is an affirming answer to the question: “Do you know where you are?”

    The irony of “looking for one’s true self” is that people look inward when they should be looking out in the universe. Only by witnessing their own existence through their own being can they actually recognize that they exist in the world, as a mind and a body.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self.

    “It’s all in your mind”, is an explanation often given by New-Age folks, Neo-Platonists, or Cyber-Gnostic Matrix fans. These ideas can be either dismissed as individualist solipsism (“all of this exist in MY mind”), or more rarely understood as a limitation set by a mind that is dampening its resonating potential with complicated and overlapping feedback loops that cancel out their own resonance; in much simpler words: we can potentially find everything by tracing back our mind, but too many conceptual explanations obscure the direct experience.

    Finding a home in one’s own experience is allowing the self to merge together with the resonance of the world. In this experience the individual disappears and becomes one with the phenomenal world. This experience may be considered ‘religious’ because it transcends all ready-made concepts, and without an ego in the way, the experience might evoke a sensation of ‘being in God’ or ‘being the ultimate truth’ — although verbalising or defining the experience conceptually will inevitably push it further back from the unhinged openness it requires.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self. Follow the echo, and keep your mind quiet.

  • My definition of Echo

    Wikipedia defines echo like this:

    In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound.

    Wikipedia

    In common use of the word, this definition works well. But today, while writing my thesis on échosophy, I reached for a more phenomenological definition. This is what I came up with:

    An echo is the observation of a sensation returning in time and space.

    The definition consists of a couple of elements that I felt were necessary. First, echo needs an observing subject. Second, an echo is not necessarily tied to sound, but can relate to any sensation. One can, for example, listen to one’s emotions, or physical vibrations that are outside the scope of normal aural hearing. Third, the experience consists of a returning, which implies that the subsequent appearance of the sensation is perceived as the same as the first one (even if altered). And finally, this experience is tied to both space and time.

    I’m still exploring other forms of this definition. For example, following Jean-Lucy Nancy’s terms, the definition could take this form:

    An echo is the observation of a resonance returning in time and space.

    Even though my thesis is based on Nancy’s philosophy of listening, I feel a tiny hesitation to embrace his term of resonance in my definition of echo. Maybe I don’t fully understand the full depth of resonance as Nancy means it, or maybe I’m drawn more towards sensing. But I do like this formulation, too.

    Nancy also talks about sense, but I’m writing in Finnish, and don’t like to make the poetic dimension any more complicated than it already is, so I’m leaving that topic for others to ponder on.

    (And while we are on the topic of language, I’m writing this blog in English because I believe that figuring these topics out in a foreign language will force myself towards a more clear understanding of these topics.)

  • Re: What Is an Echo?

    What is an echo?

    A shift in time, a disintegrating waveform record of time and space, a return of an old friend.

    What is an echo?

    An observation of recurrence, an inner reflection of the world out there, an outer and inner resonance.

    What is an echo?

    A constant rise and fading of the sonorous, an observer relating to the where-and-when, an arriving and a leaving of a lingering question in the ear of someone who listens deeply:

    what is an echo?