• As the environmental situation shifts, the skills and intelligence we need also shift, forcing us to lose capacities in one direction while developing them in another. So, every new skill reaches a point of diminishing returns. Every medicine becomes a poison. *

• There is no evolution without death. For those who change, the old form dies. *

• Evolution isn’t impressed by big brains, if those brains aren’t capable of changing direction (which requires death). *

• We like to think that we’re the ultimate generalists, able to adapt to any environment because of our technological gifts. But specialization is a sneaky tendency. The technologies that helped us become generalists reach a point of diminishing returns and begin to narrow our attention spans with too much passive absorption, and by corralling our intelligence (our awareness and behavior) along the predictable ruts of algorithms. *

• Our genetics are recapitulated holograms of the primordial soup, which can germinate in any form when the immaterial lightning of insight alchemically strikes the fertile ground of matter. *

• Every shift in shape from Tetrapod to whale could be described as earthly insights, leaps in orders of being.*

• From a communal point of view, evolution is not competitive or comparative, but measured by whether the whole (or holon) is thriving or declining. *

• We don’t see the relevance of earth and other species anymore, except as playthings or scenic backdrops to our diversions. We’ve become the only relevant thing, which is a loneliness that never existed in previous cultures. A meaninglessness too, because we have divorced ourselves from the undiscovered portions of who we are, which are rooted in the mystery of our surroundings. We slide along the empirical surface of the world, blind to the immaterial forces, which give shape to that empirical world. *

• Machine intelligence has funneled too much of our creative energy towards the development of a technological potential, while reducing our capacity to probe a fuller range of human potentials. *

• Technological development as an end in itself (beyond any immediate need) becomes a form of human parasitism. *

• The narrowness of this technological intention is lost on us, because the narrow focus has its own limited form of infinity. We can become infinitely lost in the small silos of ourselves. *

• A wider frame puts the narrower in its place, and being “put in our place” is part of maturation. It means growing into a relationship with the other elements of the environment so that all boats are raised, not just one at the expense of another (which is eventually at our own expense too). *

• “Being put in our place” could also be described as “being welcomed home.” Belonging to something larger than us. Finding our place in the choir, our meaning. We call this “being put in our place” when we look at this maturation as a defeat, as a loss of grandeur. We look at this maturation as “returning home at last” when this grandiosity dies. *

• The narrow focus isn’t defined by size alone. Narrowness inhabits any form of the singular Self, including the singular nation or singular species. It’s the oppositional quality of the focus that defines the narrow vision.*

• A narrow focus isn’t a problem by itself. Sometimes we need to see things in narrow and even oppositional terms. But it’s the domination of this focus to the exclusion of a wider context that indicates what we’ve lost and why we’re on the edge of suicide.*

• Our imagination seems to have shrunk to only two possibilities — the right clamoring for stricter, even more dictatorial controls (in the name of freedom, of all ironies, the freedom to do the selfish thing and remain childishly disconnected from the communal dimension), while the Left is clamoring for more paternalistic controls, which also keeps us perpetually infantilized, with the teleological fallacy that we need to be controlled for our own pathetic good. *

• In this culture, which reputedly celebrates the Self, we willingly give up our autonomy and freedom to join an army or become an employee. This self-deletion is not humility. We merely merge with the larger Ego of the authorities who “lead” us. So, we avoid being humbled by transferring our identity to that larger Ego. But this requires surrendering our own autonomy and freedom and becoming pawns. *

• Our vision still remains narrow, even if we “lose ourselves” momentarily in the larger Ego of the group. This group identity still can’t see the needs of the earth, or of humanity, or of life itself as superseding the bounded interests of an oppositional identity. *

• Boundaries are not limits. The phrase “we need boundaries” is a confused expression of a need to discover limits. Boundaries exclude and preserve a narrow point of view. Limits are humbling accommodations of something larger. *

• Machine intelligence, after all, is only a narrow spectrum of the genius of life itself. And when we get too enthused by these clever derivations, they become demiurges in the nasty Gnostic sense. *

• We can’t picture, grasp or describe a cosmic perspective. It becomes a matter of faith. But there is blind faith in ideas, conclusions, and dogmas. And there is a kind of “activated” faith that is creedless, that is “proven” by default, by running into our own limits and realizing that there is always something larger and more profound in the world. We don’t know what it is, but there is a kind of clear-minded faith that develops in what exceeds us. *

• If we don’t activate this reverent state of weak-kneed awe before the ever-bountiful, but unknowable cosmic dimension, then we coil reductively towards the narrow and static construct, and die by asphyxiation in a joyless world. *

• Whatever rabbits of understanding we draw from the infinite hat of the cosmic dimension, they are derived forms (fictional forms) of understanding that will always leave open-ended questions that beg for more and far more radical forms. *

• We threw out the baby with the bathwater when we rejected a cosmic vision. We threw out a sense of reality that exceeds language and thought. And without the cosmic, there is no perspective wide enough to bridge social divisions. We should have done what older cultures did, throwing out linguistic certainty in order to enter into a different form of “knowing”, which is to simply Be a part of the whole of life. *

• Refusing to see the world honestly is the quickest way to be killed. *

• The moment we have the urge to change ourselves, something already changed. And this urge arose in us spontaneously, without knowing how, without making a decision – the decision is the result of change, not the cause. *

• The Ego can only transform into less of a confusing trouble-maker when it’s no longer perceived as a shameful thing. *

• I’m my own deceitful politician scapegoating my own depressed populace of thoughts, a politician who pretends to represent his own inner “silent majority” (the better angels). The righteous voice I use to condemn my own selfish indulgences is held as the next great leader of the body’s inner “politic”, the voice of law and order. And by identifying with this scolding voice, I cease identifying with the depressed image of the selfish idiot I was a moment ago and slide over to become one of the Good Guys. And this allows the Self to feel Great Again. The public world not only shapes the private; but more importantly, the private world sustains the public. *

• In the alchemical moment we don’t decide what to do anymore. Every new angle we obtain alters our course. Instantaneously. *

• We understand what it means to say that a flute isn’t intelligent by itself. But I’m suggesting that the brain doesn’t produce intelligence by itself either. *

• There is no sign of intelligence in the algorithms of personal interest that keep the brain firing in restless circles from morning to night. *

• How can the brain be equated with intelligence if the brain’s activities are stuck in habitual grooves heading towards war, self-deception and earthly destruction? What is intelligent about a brain so clever that it imagines living on a dead planet, rather than restoring vitality to the very planet, which is its own body? *

• I feel most alive when rote knowledge no longer works. (IMM)

• This primordial energy of being blows through these holes in the human skull, and it’s this alchemical merger of an immaterial current and a material construct already imbued with a potential to resonate and transfigure this current into an idiosyncratic tune, which is the human voice, the wolf’s howl, the bear’s moan. *

• Intelligence is whatever it is that can listen to all this sound and fury, these fusions and confusions, and somehow learn to adjust this instrument’s orientation, to make glad tunes that magnify the symphonies of nature. *

• I can’t remain too long in any consistent first person, otherwise you’ll end up believing that I’m really me, and then I’ll be pinned inanimately to the page and unable to shape-shift as any living creature must if it hopes to avoid the tarpits. *

• I’m not even a living thing so much as a material swelling of words, thoughts, ideas, pictures, emotions, the chaotic surface waves left by the spirit of life as it hovered over the keyboard for a moment before passing on to better things. *

• To speak of “myself” I must speak of another, I must hold this conception at arm’s length and analyze it, so that “I” am always an outsider, never the real deal. *

• This failure to find “me” is a discovery of reality itself. I am learning that reality is larger than identity, which unchains the dogmatic First Person. *

• I’m the detritus of memory, a junk-encrusted tumbleweed of ideas of myself, a messy and clanging assemblage of cans and can’t-do’s, recoils, crossed-wires and lost marbles. This would explain why I’m such a noisy sonofabitch. *

• I can’t generate a motive by an act of will. And this fact alone indicates that the act of “choosing” is not free. *

• I can’t freely choose to want something I don’t already want. *

• We can’t choose to have insights. My stupidity exposes itself when I’m receptive. That’s all an insight really is, receptivity to stupidity. But receptivity is also not an action I can choose. It’s a fundamental change in attitude that has already occurred out of nowhere, as an insight of its own. *

• We can’t choose what exceeds our comprehension.*

• The oblivion at the core of sleep isn’t the oblivion of lifelessness, nor is it a rejection of earthly existence, but a reunion with the primordial egg of undeceived Being at the heart of earthly life. *

• Every night we get the chance to recapitulate the origins of the world and awaken with a Big and creative Bang, *

• Creative storytelling is inseparable from the collection of facts. *

• Nothing seems quite so conclusive when we realize how many fictional assumptions underly our conclusions about reality. *

• We think it’s odd that a mouse would be forced to run towards predators, doing the bidding of a fungal parasite, but what are we doing when we run towards guns and shoot people dead with whom we’ve never had an argument? Aren’t we also zombies of a sort when we do the bidding of unstoppable “earworms” of nationalistic fervor or ideas of honor and duty, which makes us blind and insensitive to our own bloody hypocrisies? *

• Ideas themselves are not fully alive. They require a host to carry out their life cycle and pass their prejudices and implicit assumptions on to the next generation. *

• We don’t ask the Big Questions; they interrogate us. We’re not leading the charge here; we’re being pushed to wonder by a perpetual collapse of what we thought was real. *

• The dichotomy between materiality and immateriality could be regarded as a shadow twin. They can’t remain opposed to one another but need to be alchemically re-united. *

• A metaphoric perspective is a way of seeing through the filter of thought and not getting stuck in that filter. Whereas, claiming that everything IS metaphoric is mental materialism. It’s an argument that gets stuck in its own filter. *

• The assertion that everything is metaphoric isn’t metaphoric itself. *

• Claiming that actuality IS metaphor (or mind) establishes only the material idea of metaphor (the content), but it prevents the function of the metaphor. It creates a dichotomy between thought and thing, construct and being. *

• If we answer a question like, ‘What Is Real?’, the cosmic dimension closes; the wave function collapses to a mapped location, which is not the cosmic territory itself. *

• There’s no dichotomy between form and formlessness. Without limited lifespans, eternity wouldn’t know herself. *

• We can’t speed up our growth. But we can surrender our resistance. It won’t speed anything up, but the brakes will be removed. *

• Maybe the clock is only a map of a timeless territory. *

• Everywhere I look, I see only the limitations of human perception, not the limitations of reality itself. *

• Our desire to escape the anxieties of time leads us unwittingly towards an inanimate repetition of a deathless world; a perfectly circular and repetitive mechanism; an escape from the spiral of renewal, which requires dying to the past and future. *

• In one light, death may define time itself, by articulating a lifespan. But in another light, death extinguishes the shadows of past and future in a renewal that is timeless. *

• If differences land like contradictions, we get stuck in arguments. But if the differences are intriguing, then they become paradoxes that lure us into wider vantage points, where both views make sense in their own contexts. *

• Mountain climbers pin themselves to cliffs in order to shut down the past and future, widening the moment by way of a state of emergency. *

• An emergency forces a confrontation with necessity, which can’t even suffer the small delay of being named, “the present.” Here there is no time for the idea of time. Hanging in suspension, the “future”, the “past” and the “present” all become equally fictitious. *

• The absence of time is an absence of anything that delays what is happening. Here we’re not getting dragged into the constant dramas of the panicking voice, impatient to escape the moment. *

• There’s an immediacy of intelligence that can move past the old sticking points without the need for words. And this immediacy is faster than light, which slows the clock in the same way Einstein suggested. *

• Every point on the clock is a turning point. *

• The great genius of the clock lies in its practical reduction of the world into numerical segmentations. Had we but played with this metaphor as a known fiction, it would have served us now and then, and not driven us like slaves. *

• Why are we escaping the unmolested moment by retreating into a vacuous fiction of time? How did the absence of distraction end up feeling like a danger? *

• Maybe a sixth dimension of time emerges in knowing how to die. It appears when we extend our recognition of time’s fictional nature to include me; this self that insists even now that it’s not a fiction. *

• What we lose is a Self that is stranded in time. In its place, there appears a connectivity to the larger world that is paradoxically denser than matter itself. Look, all of history is condensed into our atoms, bones and brains. And uncountable stars gave their lives to make this carbon or this one unnamable moment. *

• Nothing is waiting for us in some finished form, as the “long-termists” proclaim. This future is fuzzy, and requires the lightning strikes of unprecedented insight to mutate this present form into something we can’t entirely anticipate. *

• Despite the earth’s demotion from the center of the galaxy, the “I” still clings to its own centrality. *

• The self always wants to name the timeless source. It wants to transfer its identity to this greater centrality, and thereby continue its illusion of evolution. *

• Science informs us that the stars are no more real than home movies; merely re-runs of the deep past. And a similar delay occurs in our perceptions of one another. There’s a material speed limit. Our brains can only process the biased past tense of one another. There is despair in such single-minded knowledge; our age seems oppressed by it; aware only of this isolation in time and space. We’ve been reduced to single points of data; food for prowling algorithms. *

• These scientific measurements of our separation in time and space are valid. But they are only the reflections of a single pane of the prism of time; an insightful fiction that has become a single-minded illusion of “the whole truth.” *

• Will a cynical despair automatically reject the possibility of a society that knows how to live without conflict? Does our cynicism betray a fear of losing an illusion of identity tied to historical dramas? *

• We can’t fight or flee our way past these endless anxieties of time. We can’t “get there” from here. The here has to change. *

• Timelessness is the ending of an escape from escape itself. This alone breaks the link in time’s chains. *

• All we are doing in dying is letting an inanimate shell of thought fall away, which we had mistaken for the mystery of ourselves. *

• We need a creedless faith in what exceeds our comprehension.

• There’s no difference between failure and revelation. Insight is always the revelation of failure. What we call “failure” is merely a revelation obscured by shame and self-defensiveness. *

• These dichotomies aren’t divisions in reality. They work seamlessly together in a whole, and don’t require identification as distinct forms unless there is imbalance. Then these hidden imbalances need to be identified and healed into a whole again. That’s why calling attention to racism is not “being racist”, but taking the first step towards healing.
  
  
• To adapt ourselves to an insane world, we hide our own deceptive behavior. The identity we obtain by doing this is utterly falsified, but we can’t admit this falsification without exposing the whole structure to which we’ve tied ourselves.
  
  
• Hell is a voluntary surrender facility for the fatally indifferent.
  
  
• It’s not that hell actually lasts forever. It’s the immediate thought that you’re trapped into remaining in this cornucopia of trivia simply because you’re too indifferent to EVER leave, which is hell.
  
  
• The culture is undergoing a derealization crisis, which is closely related to the threats from AI and virtual reality — “deep fakes”, fake news, and the general post-modern loss of any solid narrative ground to experience. With AI now in its logarithmic growth phase (a trajectory along an infinite limit that fools people into seeing a Singularity) we are reaching a point where the world as a whole will encounter the horror of not knowing if anything is real. Already, the panic is evident in the desperation of floundering souls grabbing the illusions of a life preserver in the form of fascist morons.

——-
a few passages from the stories:

Coils and Spirals

• To think that we finally emerged from all those torturous centuries harnessed to the work ethic, only to end up in a torturous Siesta without end, racked to our couches, with our feet hoisted on worn cushions, and with splayed arms reaching for the bottle and the joint.
  
  
• I always wondered where our center of town was supposed to be. Lacking that center of gravity the bond holding us in this communal pattern started breaking, dislodging the ones among us who had no ties to family and friends, squeezing them out of our compressed quarters, and flinging them beyond the city walls, like excrement.
  
  
• There weren’t enough victims. More and more of our neighbors became perpetrators to save their own skin.
  

The Oven Mitt

• There were these huge turbines. A thick rod stuck out over the river. Attached to the rod was a large paddle wheel, which was being turned by the madly flowing river, generating green energy for an industrial grade torture apparatus housed in a nearby building (and from which we could hear screams, some joyful, some agonized; as Beckett notes, always in perfect balance).
  
  
• He reached out slowly, and awkwardly, and very gently, lovingly, touched the spot on the back of our necks where the bullets would enter.
  
  
• And he kept pleading for us to understand that he was helpless in not being able to break his allegiance to the rules, including the one specifying the immediate execution of any or all persons, including persons of any color, hue, cultural proclivity or any of the 32 genders recognized by the International Body of Body Typing. These rules, he explained, are what give society its structure, its protection from moral decay and loss of meaning.
  
  
• But we still tried to convince him to break this execution rule, just this once, and then he could kill everybody else, if he really wanted to, but it’s still not a nice thing to do, we added, nodding.
  
  
• “This is what makes me genuinely sad. I’m very sad to kill you precisely because I realize in doing this I find enjoyment. Do you see my predicament, and why I ask for your mercy? In other words, I’m feeling guilty.”
    I wanted to run to his aid, but the oven mitt stopped me.
  
  
• He looked at his watch. “It’s not that I want you to die,” he said. “But I can’t help wanting the rules to stay in place. They hold the line. That’s why I seem gleeful. It’s nothing personal.”
  
  
• The culture is rotten, we’re going extinct, and the sink is backed up. I feel guilty about standing here waiting for the dreaded thing to finally happen, which we all seem to know is going to happen, but which we don’t seem to do anything about, just like the Germans who weren’t Nazis, but who didn’t really want to admit what was happening either, because it would take a readiness to die right this instant, and God damn it, I’m not!
  
  
• “So, I’ve devoted myself to this cause. I speak to schools and rotary clubs urging them to not give up on feeling guilty. I want that to be the thing people remember me for, not running away from the things we do. Facing these things squarely, and this requires humility. I think it’s the right thing to do. We owe it to you, our victims. Never forgetting will ensure the repetition of suffering, which is how we pay for our crimes.”
  
  
• We felt reluctant to say anything to undermine the righteous enthusiasm this man showed. We wanted to preserve him from the ultimate shock of disappointment, when people would stop feeling guilty, and stop believing in the necessity of a just revenge. If we were not executed it would be like depriving him of the one solace he finds in these circumstances, the opportunity to bear the burden of guilt for a whole society. And we’re just two people. We can’t expect society to bend itself out of all proportion just for us.
  
  
• “Every once in a while the scales seem to fall from my eyes, and I behold the depth of my former ignorance and shudder like Ozymandias might have shuddered if he read Shelly. And I try to distract myself by noting how humble this makes me. But then I’m immediately proud of my humility, which ruins it.”
  
  
• Throughout his life, my uncle’s gaseous mind had leaked most of its elements into the space between him and other things. And only the nominal gravity of a single remaining fear kept a cloudy semblance of a consolidated consciousness intact, allowing him to eat and breathe enough to retain the official designation, “among the living.”

• I thought of Dostoevsky and the boxer Golovkin. I saw them fighting each other in a ring, the writer pummeling the great slugger, until suddenly, a single powerful straight right by Golovkin laid him out cold, and Dostoevsky saw death arrive, and wished he could write about it.

A Fly Fable

• Eugene drifted away and banged a little here and there, but mostly for show. And then he crawled around the perimeter of the upper left pane inspecting the caulk. “Guys,” he said. “This window looks pretty firm, I don’t think it’s gonna budge.”

     “There he goes! The great prophet of doom!” Bixby yelled.

•     “Youngsters like you,” the old timer said, pointing a wing at Eugene. “You waste your heads thinking up all this nonsense when you could be out there banging it!”

     “Now, now, Watson, don’t get riled.”

     “I’m old now, but 20 minutes ago I’d have been on him like flypaper!”
     “I know, but we can’t live in the past,” his guide said, trying to steer him away.

• And suddenly Eugene was alone in a world that could be described as a paradise or a hell, depending on whether it was seen through a glass darkly, brightly or not at all. But Eugene saw a tree, and the tree was beautiful.
  
  
• “…this isn’t Utopia, this is Paradise! Paradise demands a sacrifice of everything. Paradise is dangerous, because the stakes are real. There’s no paradise without knowing you’re going to die. That’s what makes it precious and profound!”

   And just then a dragonfly caught him in its jaws and flew off.

   “Ahhh”, he screamed as he faded from sight.

    “Wow,” Leslie said. “I thought dragonflies were only legends.

Beam Me Up Scotty:

• My classmates and I were like newly hatched chicks looking up in wonder at the wide world of decapitating machinery encircling the farm factory grounds. We gazed in witless marvel at the blackboard with its false advertising of goofy drawings in colored chalk. Then we reached out tremblingly to touch our first desks and chairs, to which we would shortly be tied for several decades. Oh, what a wonder they seemed, just for an instant. Our own desks, although they’d soon be defaced with the deranged scrawls of castaways.