My happy ex-fish Bob never developed pond smarts.
I blame myself; while other aqua-garden stewards were schooling their fish in the art of stealth and avoidance,
I treated him like a happy farm pet.
Introduce predatory persistence and skill of the highest order to the equation. Death from above...
And now Bob, raised from a pup in our pond, Original Bob, tenure of more than a decade on this earth, dispatched but not engulfed (for lack of sufficient pharyngeal diameter). Dropped unseen by the piscivore into a thicket and found six days hence. More than a fish. A symbol, a shared experience, a touchstone of calm and fluid serenity in a stressful world. Now he feeds the microbes.
© Pseudocognitive
The deep mind underlies the superficial mind. Much as the stones on the bottom of a clear, swiftly flowing stream are blurred by the rushing water above, the deep mind can be detected, but not directly experienced except by tactile sensation. It forms the substrate over which the everyday mind blithely and blindly courses. When the irregularities of younger, less polished rocks–perhaps recently kicked into the stream by a startled deer or careless hiker–produce increased friction with the water, creating a minute disturbance of flow almost too small to detect and perhaps bloodying the plantar surface of your wading feet, you take more notice, but the visual input is no more clear than before. Mind you, the water is extremely clean, but the current obscures detail.
Imagine now that you could halt the downstream flow, just for a second or two. What would you see? That’s the deep mind. You can find it by carefully moderating your relentless speed-surfing of neural circuits. Slow, or even stop the current, and pluck one smooth stone from the bottom.
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Note: None of this applies to Petaluma.
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I wrote a paper with that title, but that was over three decades ago on an old Smith Corona electric typewriter.
I could hardly be expected to hold on to that damned thing for all these years. Have some trout. It's what's for dinner.
