My First Commandment [here] is “write to live, don’t live to write.”
This is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.
We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.
Education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst teaches us who we are.
Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our poisoned way of living so that disease was less common?
I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.
I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form. But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality. Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.
The “small” self (or “me” sensation) is an estimation of how “I” look in someone else’s eyes. Other people serve mainly as mirrors for perceiving this self. This self can’t exist if it’s not imagined from the perspective of an Other.
The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.
In focusing too much on trying to unfold a new identity, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom.
Where I expect to find a real character within (or within another person), I find only a stream of language describing one.
We’d like the other people in our social web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves. Our own entangled stability depends on it.
This sense of “self” is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy.
Everywhere in this culture, the small Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.
A “soul” was not originally conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything but its own imagination.
This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is.
The entrapment implied in “the past constantly determining the future” is broken by realizing that the so-called future (this new Now) can even more freely and open-endedly determine (or utterly abolish) the past and all its pains and sorrows.
Take war, for instance (please). It’s nothing but a delusional chain of cause and effect (aggression and counter-aggression), each claiming the other started the chain.
But a chain of events has no real beginning or end, because it starts and stops in the present imagination. We can always imagine a new cause. But what we haven’t tried to do very often is stop re-imagining an outdated and deadly past. That’s because we’re afraid of the quiet absence of our dramas (and our Selves) more than war and misery itself.
In other words, a chain of events is based on the belief that the past causes the future — some ill deed by another person or group “forces us” to act in retaliation. And this retaliatory act justifies the righteousness and vengefulness of the ones retaliated upon, and vice-versa, ad infinitum. Therefore, we chain ourselves to the past and then measure our progress by how much effort we put into pulling on the chain.
But if we understand that “the future determines the past”, then we see that what we do now (in the so-called “present”) forms the chain (or breaks the chain). The past has nothing to do with it, because the past and future don’t really exist except in our imagination of them in the “present”. So, every retaliation is in fact the originating aggression.
And if we wanted to break the chain of aggression, we can only do it now, by refusing to do the bidding of the past and walking away from the chains of aggression. But we don’t want to change the past, because it preserves the mirror enemy which gives us our illusion of identity. So “the future determines the past” is a very under-used human potential for immediate and drastic change.
And this applies even to the smaller, mind-forged chains of our personal history and self-images. Whatever we did in the past that makes us feel compelled or trapped into being a certain kind of person or perceiving ourselves as a victim or noble sufferer, or wretch, or mundane same old, same old, it is the past that is “causing” us to be this way. And at every single mundane moment of the day and night, we pick up those chains from the past and reattach them to ourselves and then yank in misery.
We want to believe that only the past can determine the future, because it gives us an excuse to wallow in a familiar old Self and keep the empty spaciousness of life itself — the infinite freedom — as far away as possible.
All of it is a dream world reasserting itself over and over again without cause, because it’s all happening Now.
The solution to human misery has always been close at hand. But we reject it simply because the past is a comforting illusion to those who are afraid of the emptiness and silence and peace of not being anybody in particular — losing all that history of misery we’ve come to cherish. This rejection of that loss is suicide, but it’s not polite to mention reality among fellow sleepwalkers. They toss and turn violently in their sleep whenever you mention it.
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
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.
O Partha (Arjuna), happy are the Kshatriyas who gain such a battle that comes of its own accord, opening for them the doors to heaven.) — Chapter 2, Verse 32, Bhagavad Gita
He slept poorly and awoke early in anticipation of the mission that night. Then he threw up several times. It was a familiar dread, pre-jump jitters. Not just performance anxiety, or the fear of death, nor the heavy regret of knowing he placed himself in this extreme, and insane predicament voluntarily, nor the envy he feels at breakfast, seeing the carefree jocularity of the ground crew, and the meteorologists, who would never directly enter battle, let alone fly to the roof of the atmosphere itself, and leap into almost pure, frozen space, a half-assed astronaut, a momentary falling spacewalker, until the double-bag static line finishes unfolding, and holds him in a tug-of-war between the canopy pulling up, and the heavy load of his equipment, pulling down.
And then of course, what follows.
But something else was weighing him down now, and had been for quite some time, slowing his every step, as if he were sinking in sand. And it was preventing the boost of adrenaline he’d soon need.
A few hours prior to rigging up, he was hanging out with his “stick” (his paratrooper team) and they were ribbing each other and shooting the shit. Their last moments of relaxation.
But he could never banter very well. He sat on the floor with his back against a door-jam, enjoying the mild grinding pain of the spine against the edge of the jam.
This was his first serious combat jump, a HAHO deep into enemy territory to take out a relay post, and then bushwack back to safe ground, in what’s called an overland exfiltration. In about an hour, they’d start the elaborate procedures and checks and rechecks that took up the better part of 3 hours, prior and during the flight, which was going to be a long one.
Then they’d ride the canopy for a long way this time, about 30 miles, to a drop zone (DZ) in a narrow clearing in the fairly dense coastal forests and then make their way to their objective.
For Walter Cybulski, exceptional poet and humorist bar none
[The Introduction will make this story a little clearer, maybe]
His Father’s Circus
As a very young boy, his father ran a gas station. He was a mechanic and always carried a gigantic wrench, that was nearly 3 feet long and twice as heavy.
And when he wasn’t working on cars or trucks or busses or tanks, he would swing his wrench, and throw it high in the air and catch it, like a heavy metal drum major. And people would drive long distances just to have him fill up their tanks with gas, so they could watch him perform. And he would do somersaults out to the tanks and backflips all the way back to his office. And when he wasn’t working on cars or tanks or trucks, and the lines at the gas tanks had thinned, he’d finally close shop for the day and wander into the bar across the street and ham it up with his friends.
And the small boy would tag along, at first attached to his mother’s bosom, then to her hand, and finally alone, behind his dad, just large enough to be hoisted on the bar stool by a rough hand, and then given a little boost, and finally able to climb the bar stool by himself and drink coca-cola dribbled over huge tankards of ice, chewing the ice, absent-mindedly, while his father laughed and whistled and wagered fortunes on how many pushups he could do in an hour, or whether he could withstand a sledge hammer to his stomach.
Once, a dancing bear happened to be in the bar, and challenged his father to an arm-wrestling match, and the bear won two out of three, but never came back to challenge anyone again.
When the boy was 8 years old, he quit school to become a soda jerk, and got a job next door to his father’s garage. And over the years, as the garage business grew, all the other businesses in town grew by proximity, and profits skyrocketed all around. You could hear the sonic boom for miles.
“Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. … The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales…” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Literature”, page 2)
First, this is a strange story. It combines tall tale, fairy tale, absurdly narrow-lensed realism, realism itself, surrealism and mysticism (in that order).
Hitching a ride to this story would mean climbing aboard a vehicle with a real Mack Truck cab, 18 oversized cartoon tires and a trailer made of wispy dreams. It might not engender confidence in the driver of this tale.
So, here’s some help in finding an order behind the chaos.
One of the more simplistic questions this story asks is: “What would happen if a paratrooper became “enlightened” (let’s call it that) while falling into a war zone?”
But more completely, it’s the story of a person’s life told in vignettes, and short stories that “jump” from one stage to another, from childhood to deathbed. And each vignette is composed in a style characteristic of the character’s point of view at that moment.
So, for instance, the first one’s in the style of a tall tale, for the boy saw his father as a kind of Giant, as many kids tend to do.
The details of these tellings are nevertheless significant. The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.
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.
“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’tBe 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?
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.
