A Homemade Double-Slit Experiment, Or, How About We All Do Something Utterly Unimaginable (and Perhaps Uncalled for) and Collectively Jump Free from Our Selves (Which is a Title Almost as Long as the Essay Itself)?

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The next sentence took 40 hears to write, but casual readers may only find it long-winded and incomprehensible (even this very “I” itself may feel this way after all is said and done): The human brain’s eye can perform its own double-slit experiment, as the undifferentiated light of a lively and unlocatable universal intelligence hits the receiver of the brain, causing it to quiver and hum in resonance, and produce the reflected light of awareness, which shines out through these two holes in the head, landing on this white page as small particles of “me” consciousness (each sense of “me” a separate thought or projection or dream), each of which define themselves by contrast to all the other dots of “me”; while simultaneously landing on the page as a continuous wave of identity, (yet another thought , projection or dream), but this one forming a narrative line of an imaginary “I” which connects as many of the imaginary dots of “me” as possible, so that this “I” appears to speak as if it were gazing at itself from a third person’s perch, as if it were a real soul, and not merely a virtual reality.

In this culture, the human voice is obliged to speak as if it were real. It has to claim this wavelike “I” as if it were real. Therefore, I become the center of this little world and all these little “me’s” orbit the “I” as different qualities of itself. And in this way, a philosophy of life has been formed, which nobody recognizes as a philosophy because they think it is only reality itself.

What if one wanted to cut through this crapola and speak as a real human being?

Well, the first step would be to recognize the fictional nature of oneself and not be bothered by it. It would mean not feeling lost or frightened by the immensity of our own emptiness, the bottomless pit of oneself and others. It would mean recognizing the waves and particles of “oneself” as a play of the universe itself. Not that one can identify with the universe and call oneself God. That would be another dotty illusion of a wavey gravy hallucination. But merely come to terms with the truer reality of not being able to pin down a gosh darn thing and finding a sense of humor in all this. Free to play in these particles and waves like a dolphin. Free, also, to be “someone” for a moment — anyone, which is the gift of empathy. Or even free to play a role now and then, but only to the extent that they are practical and circumstantial necessities, not confining definitions. And otherwise relaxing into the sustained and expansive mystery of our surroundings. And finding it all downright miraculous, astonishing, infinitely inviting, creative and beautiful. And stop hallucinating a hellhole and living out this preposterous nightmare of personal and cultural drama.

To stick with the theme of “jumping“, what if we jumped free even from ourselves? Nothing would befuddle the demons of the world more than a human rebellion of this sort at this time and place. They’d fade into nothingness themselves.

If anything, maybe we ARE that nothingness. Let’s stop trying to be someone. We’re emptiness itself. (That’s a negative enough definition to leave us open-ended). Emptiness is good. It’s our domain, not the domain of demons. Demons live in confined spaces. That’s not who we are, that’s only who they fooled us into being.

I go into this far more deeply and soberly in the essay “What Is Self-Knowledge” (one of my best)

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Post-Script: Found this snippet from Tilopa’s “Mahamudra Teaching to Naropa” – Kagyu Lineage:

Although space has been designated empty, in reality it is inexpressible. Although the nature of mind is called clear light, it’s every description is baseless verbal fiction. The mind’s original nature is like space — it pervades and embraces all things

“The Future Determines the Past”

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I’ve vaguely heard in passing the phrase, “the future determines the past.” I believe it came from Youtube titles referencing something from the theoretical edge of physics. But on Youtube, the phrase sometimes serves as esoteric click-bait, producing the mild effect of psychedelic incense, as if it were a wisdom too lofty for daily life.

“Esoteric” essentially means knowledge reserved for a select few. So, it’s a snobby concept. In reality (let’s call it), the “esoteric” is usually just a framework wider than the familiar, until it becomes familiar.

There’s nothing esoteric about the phrase, “the future determines the past.”

This is merely the reverse side of a more familiar illusion of “time.” The past determines the future as much as the future determines the past. Because both past and future are illusory, and both lose their meaning in a timeless awareness, which can’t even be called “the present” (because even “the present moment” is only an illusion of time passing).

So, while it’s easy and familiar to imagine that our actions in the fleeting present (which immediately becomes the past) determine our situation in the future (which means the past determines the future), it’s also possible to see that the future (a later “present moment”) redefines the significance of past events.

For instance, if I’m behaving like a miserable, selfish idiot and someone comes up to me and says, “you’re behaving like a selfish, miserable jerk!” what is the significance of this encounter?

Well, if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person, and drink myself into an even more miserable state of selfishness, then the encounter will be significant only as an excuse for becoming even more miserable.

But if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person and then wake up one morning and realize that he or she was right, and sober up and face myself squarely, changing my life, then that encounter is significant as a turning point.

What I do in the so-called “future” therefore determines the past.

And this is true at every moment, because there is no real past, present or future, but only an open-ended timelessness that includes all three as abstract derivations.

Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: A Rake-Handle/Head Collision Sentence by Sentence

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
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Have you ever accidentally meditated? The key word here is “accidentally” — as in strolling through a peaceful garden and being suddenly clobbered on the forehead by a rake-handle. Instant karma: Instantaneously encountering the consequences of your own unconscious behavior.

This slapstick experience is a kind of split-second meditation. Action and consequence, mindlessness and its inevitable manifestations, are too instantaneously linked to leave any time for an aggrieved imagination of my “self” to erupt and blame the rake, as mindless thought tends to do.

In the instant of the collision, one either gives up the ghostly illusion of one’s own dignified self and laughs at the idiotic nature of existence, sans “me”, or stays trapped in the skull running in circles in search of an escape from the echoing sounds of one’s own circular running.

You know the experience of the internal voice and its endless chatter.

This is the experience of reading Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable.” Either you are transformed in fits of gut-wrenching laughter by these collisions with your own stupidity, or you will have no idea what I’m talking about and will hate the book and never finish it.

And don’t be fooled by the word “meditation.” Although it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Beckett’s trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), it’s also misleading in some of the term’s popular guises. By “meditation” here I don’t mean trying to remain peacefully aloof, or sitting cross-legged until one’s eyes cross in pain, or struggling to not struggle.

I mean something that a typical Subject will never Verbalize. No subject, no verb, no observer, no thing observed, no effort, no expectations of peace, but something that stops the little “me” short and reveals the farce of this me’s incessantly noisy reincarnations as “better angels” — these efforts to escape its own noisy disappointments. By meditation, I mean suddenly coming face to face with this ongoing monologue of self-centered thoughts racing across the skull and tripping over themselves in slapstick futility.

The laughter that erupted from “this reading body” (I couldn’t call it “me” at that point) was like a volcanic explosion that changed the geography of this small life. Every sentence gymnastically tripped over itself in mental slapstick, like a literary Charlie Chaplin, landing with sprained expectations, and then blaming the previous sentences for the faults of the present turn of phrase, ad infinitum, like the head of a dog blaming its tail-end for spinning in circles — thereby multiplying the number of reincarnations — each “me” seeking an escape from the “me” of the immediate past.

It was a revelation of reality. It was the most honest thing I’d ever encountered.

Because what I encountered on the page was exactly what I encountered in my own head, albeit in a less raucous, gritty, sublime, and breathtakingly — delicately — insightful manner of speaking. I couldn’t breathe from laughing. There was no time between each sentence to feel idiotic and self-conscious, only space enough for the giddy relief of surrendering to one’s own reflected stupidity, forgiving myself in the absence of time’s excuses.

It was a meditation no less abrupt and unexpected than a rake handle to the forehead.

Speaking Silence: Refractions from Lao Tzu, Bohm, Beckett and Castaneda

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“I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?

If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing! Now” (Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by Hafiz)

Lao Tzu: “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know”

Part I: What Can and Can’t Be Said?

Q: Would you agree with Lao Tzu’s statement that “those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know”? And if so, how come you keep speaking?

Fool: I would never disagree with Lao Tzu. And yet, Lao Tzu spoke those words! He used speech to point out the limits of speech. So, a certain kind of speech is still helpful.


Q: Would you say he contradicted himself?

F: No. Lao Tzu spoke in the spirit of reversal or negation. What he said was a quieting insight into the limits of language, but a limit is not a full deletion of language.

Q: What can and can’t words do?

F: We can fully sense any object in front of us without the need for words. All the qualities of the object are palpable, but “go without saying.” I don’t need to know a word for the color of the object in order to see it. I don’t need to know a word for its smell or shape. It’s only when there’s a practical need to distinguish utilitarian qualities of an object that words become helpful as positive identifications.

People used to claim that ancient people couldn’t see the color blue. But the experience of blueness was always a vivid human experience. Nevertheless, for a long time there was an absence of any practical need to distinguish blue from dark green. This didn’t mean they were less observant or narrower in perception…

Q: … but perhaps less intelligent? A capacity to notice distinctions and make use of them is a sign of greater intelligence. And having a larger vocabulary surely equates to more intelligence?…

F: …More intelligence in a positive direction, carrying more knowledge or memory, which is helpful in a rational, manipulative or focused direction – I would call this “brain athleticism”, which our culture favors. But this intelligence has overshadowed and weakened a negative form, that penetrates certainty, exposes limitations in knowledge, and receives wisdom from a wider perspective than any particular focus.

In fact, by developing a larger vocabulary for different shades of color, we are not necessarily becoming more sensitive to color itself. We are becoming more attuned to artificial categories of color, to names and words, instead of allowing color to remain a direct and ultimately unnamable experience, with its own shifting qualities, depending on light, shade, angle of sun, and contrasting environment.

And the name of a color will both sharpen our focus on that shading and prejudice us into seeing a generalized categorical “type” of color, rather than seeing the actual shifting qualities that morph and run from every defined boundary of knowledge.

The same is true of seeing anything, including human beings. We see “who” a person is based on the categorization we’ve created. Not just “white” or “black” or “Asian”, but “Tom” or “Dick” or “Sally”. We see the stories of one another.

So, this knowledge – this intelligence we gather about the world – can easily become a stupefying prejudice that holds our thinking within biased expectations and dulls our sensitivity to nuances that stray from these expectations.

Q: Are you implying that the more we “know” another person, the less sensitive to them we become?

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The Transhuman Religion, or The Limits of Machine Intelligence

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Machine intelligence promotes a religious doctrine. Or, rather, it replaces a cosmic vision with a simulation of cosmic order. It overlays a universe of unfathomable depths with a closed and predictable vision of the universe. It spreads a doctrine of perfection and control of the world. And this doctrine is as invisible as a plastic transparency placed over a projected image. We can’t easily peel the real from the false, which make us susceptible to this religion’s dogmas.

Essentially, programming is subliminal missionary work. It substitutes a life-oriented morality of “good” and “evil” or “healthy” and “diseased” with a mechanical morality of ‘the useful” and “the useless”, or “the valuable” and the “the worthless.” It preaches an inanimate universe, which requires external manipulation.

The profane transmutation of a living being into an object of manipulation is a substitute form of Mass. It’s inevitably evil in effect, because a machine can’t feel empathy and has no compassion. How can we retain our humanity against a dopamine-generating artificial paradise, when we can’t even resist the lies of obvious fools? No, this will turn quickly dark. We can’t coexist with a power that tempting. Full stop.

Then the religion comes into full view. The cries of the tortured pervert the worshipper’s last traces of sorrow and compassion into pure sensation, which is an addictive drug. We’ll abide by the machine’s logic. After all, we’ve already been fooled by a cheaper version of virtual reality, our own thoughts. How the hell are we going to stay sane or retain any animal reality? But I suppose that is one of the creeds: The only way to overcome biology’s bloodthirsty nature is to leave animal nature behind entirely. Make a hell for living things and enjoy a machine’s heaven.

So let’s continue: The algorithms are the established norms of worship. They offer unholy sacraments of wish-fulfillment. By imbibing in the algorithm’s endless pleasures, the human is reduced to a generator of desire, a battery for powering the machine itself. By losing oneself in the algorithmic dance, worshippers imbibe the spirit of sociopathic machine logic.

These mechanical moralities and dogmas are part of the machine’s program, even in the absence of bad intentions. No matter how the machine is programmed, it spreads this viral immorality.

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Life as Disappearing Ink

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Everyone is already writing their lives with disappearing ink (whether as auto mechanics or second basemen, or writers, and so forth). Everything we do will evaporate and be unrecallable after a few years, decades at most. So, we’re all using evaporating ink, readable only for a short while.

But I think most of us tend to feel that we are doing something meaningful or “necessary”, even though many of us know that “personal legacy” is an illusion. So, for many the need to do something meaningful has nothing to do with creating a personal legacy. It’s unrelated to the length of time the ink of our activities remains visible.

Let’s test this.

So, now let’s reduce the ink’s lasting mark to only 1 year. If you and I knew that everything we’re going to do would disappear in 1 year – that our names would be forgotten, our children and grandchildren would forget us (which they do after a generation or two or three at most), would we still put our heart into what we’re doing?

My feeling is that about 95% of us would stop being motivated if we knew that every trace of our good name would disappear from consciousness in one year. But five percent would probably continue. (I’m basing this guess on the 3.5% rule, and rounding up to 5%. This rule essentially identifies the critical mass of a population necessary for revolution. I’m projecting this “rule” as a general mark for how many people at any given time are radically motivated to act on behalf of something larger than themselves, including a world that extends beyond their own spilled ink).

Why would 5% continue to “write” their lives if they knew their work would disappear so quickly?

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Language as Healing Magic, or Defeating the Witchery of a Machine Mind

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Introduction

Negative (or “alchemical”)  inquiry performs real work.

It doesn’t usually include information or data. It doesn’t nail down a lasting conceptual framework. Nor does it describe how to apply knowledge in a rational effort to solve problems. Nor does it solely analyze a problem into parts, or propose hypotheses, or pontificate opinion.

These elements of thinking play subordinate roles in a negative inquiry. But they are all positively oriented elements by themselves.

Negative inquiry exposes and deletes falsified knowledge, and re-synthesizes what remains by default in a suggestive, rather than conclusive manner.

After deletion, what remains are a multiplicity of vantage points and questions, which had been suppressed under a positive or dogmatic framework.

A multiplicity of divergent vantage points is more insightful than answers or conclusions, because conclusions put an end to learning. This is similar to a brain-storming state of mind, which invites every perspective to the table.

These vantage points are often in contradiction with one another. In a positive enquiry, differences are perceived as obstacles to consensus, which need to be eliminated. This leads to conflict between advocates of different points of view. Ironically, the intentional pursuit of consensus leads to a battle for the supremacy of a singular conclusion. This eventually subdues divergent visions once again under a new dogma, diminishing the range of questions to matters of crisis management or framework preservation.

But when the inquiry is founded on the negative realization that an infinite universe can have no final framework, only ever more nuanced ones, then contradictory vantage points are no longer obstacles, but insights.

This transforms contradiction into paradox.

A paradox is an invitation to include and transcend the differences in a wider framework. It’s no longer an internecine battle between different ideas, but a more patient consideration of all the points in a Medicine wheel, allowing a larger framework to consolidate by merely sitting with difference. This results in an almost accidental consensus of spirit and vision. But without any conclusive (or battle-hardened) framework.

In other words, a negative inquiry (which is essentially Bohmian dialogue) presumes an infinitely open universe, where new frameworks are merely insights or ever larger overview perspectives, but never final answers.

Whereas, a positive inquiry – one that aims for a conclusive answer – presumes a knowable or closed universe, which generates conflict between competing answers.

Therefore, a negative inquiry is learning without end. It’s more like a performance of a new way of being, rather than an exercise in over-thinking. It’s like a dance between neither this, nor that and both this and that.

And this perpetual performance (or practice) of uncertainty or “suspension” awakens a sleeping potential of the human brain, which is to change the world at the root level of perception, where – as David Bohm phrased it — “a change in meaning is a change in being.”

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The Mufti and the Ten-Year-Old

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I want to share a video of a ten-year-old Islamic boy. There is something about this child that stands in stark contrast to the children I tend to see in America. I don’t mean this as a judgement against our own children. But in watching the video, or in knowing something about the many indigenous American cultures, a deficit in the general American culture can be seen.

I think it’s good to notice the beautiful qualities of a people that we are intent on “bombing back to the stone age.” (I know the video is not about people from Iran. But this war is being sold to the US soldiers as a war against Islam).

And I think it’s healthy to recognize deficits in ourselves to balance out all the one-sided stories we hear in our own propaganda machines.

Here is the video of the Mufti and the boy: https://youtu.be/13UZJbaVSSE?si=NaLHmREBrIXurnV6

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Insight as the Deletion of Positive Knowledge and How that Heals the World

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[This was published in “Dissident Voice”.]

I’m not sharing “knowledge”. In fact, none of my essays communicate knowledge in the typical sense. I’m sharing encounters with absences of knowledge. It starts with the recognition of the categorical illusion of positive or conclusive knowledge — not the illusion of all knowledge, but the illusion of ever being able to know anything in a final form.

Science itself was built on this categorical realization that its theories do not lead to conclusive knowledge. However, even science seems to have lost sight of this initiating insight.

Or, as I said in an earlier essay: “This is what bothers me about the debate between evolution and creationism. Creationists criticize science as “mere theory.” And science usually stupidly responds by touting all the “facts” backing up evolution. It rarely says, “you’re damn right it’s “only” theory. Theory is what makes science great. We don’t settle on a dogma, on a literal interpretation, on a fixed position. We allow our perceptions to change with discovery. And we don’t believe in a final explanation because actuality exceeds every formulation. We can always learn more.”

The closer we look at knowledge itself, the more contextual and temporary it starts to look, built upon assumptions that are more faith-based or creative than solid. Just like an atom — the closer we look at solid form the more it turns to mostly emptiness and occasional energetic flashes of insight from the void.

New evidence is constantly calling everything into question. What we end up with are provisional structures of thought (or stories or theories), but no final answers. No such thing as Positive knowledge exists. It’s one of the many fairy tales we have swallowed, and it has led our culture towards disaster, as I’ve been discussing in all of these essays.

Most people think we already question things too much. But we’re only questioning specific portions of knowledge. We’re not questioning knowledge categorically. Schools, for instance, never helped students learn to examine the creative or downright fictional assumptions that underlie conclusive knowledge itself.

As I said in another essay, “It’s the rare school…which leaves a student without an allegiance to some fixed position. Most schools teach only a short-term open-mindedness in order to gain, in the end, conclusive confidence in what is “real.” Few schools help students discover a more ineffable confidence in uncertainty, in remaining alert to where conclusions diverge from reality.”

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Antisemitic Elements in the Modern State of Israel

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My feeling is that nothing is going to change this repetitive history of mass murder, or nation against nation, until the illusions of “who we are” dissolve. Not that identity itself would disappear. But identity ceases to be an illusion when it’s held more lightly, as passing reflections on our behavior. But when they become stuck in idolized forms, illusions multiply.

Rather than constantly relighting these fuses of Us against Them, we need to allow that fuse itself to dissolve in a broader vision than us and them. Because every political or social movement starts from the same rotten assumption – namely, a belief in the reality (not mere fictional reality) of a separate Self (whether national, political, religious or racial self, and so on). It’s this belief that is the fuse. And it’s a delusional belief. We are not who we think we are.

And the dissolution of these illusions of identity would snuff out the various fuses before any of them can lead to war.

But almost everybody finds this level of criticism absurd or far-fetched or unrealistic, or even offensive, and so on. Because people primarily look at nations, tribes and other group entities as if they were real. It’s the psychology underlying this illusion that attracts my interest; not the geopolitical dramas carried out by these fictional entities.

So, I’m going to keep talking about these illusions, without proposing any additional solutions (which are inevitably political or social solutions). Because the solution in this case is the problem. The solution of politics is the problem because it always reinforces the illusion of separate identities; and these solutions are never any better than mere truces.

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