Once again, I allowed an essay to be posted that absolutely sucked eggs. I think the impatience of a world in collapse is making me even more jittery and impatient than usual. Below is more like what I intended to say. And it really needs to be read in conjunction with “What Is Self-Knowledge?” and some of the other “key essays” in order to be clearly understood. But thank you for you patience and I might even continue to edit this over the next few weeks. But I impatiently wish to erase the taste left by the last version of this thing. So, once again, I’m rushing this a little. So be it. I’m not going to fight my own stupidity. It has to wear itself out.

This essay is a little wild and weird and that serves a purpose. It emerges from my own personal rebellion, so I don’t mind the spirit of chaos that this may present.

And 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.”

Insights are treated like disruptions that need to be accommodated in a new answer. As if someday we’ll have perfect knowledge of enough little pieces of the universe to weave together a “total picture” of reality. And that assumption underlying our approach to life and learning is not much different than a religious fundamentalist’s insistence on “God’s Truth.”

Yes, insights are disruptions. But they aren’t necessarily “asking” to be placed in a new and improved conclusion (which puts an end to learning until the next disruptive insight, which is a herky-jerky way of seeing the world.

So, at present, we tend to see through our certainties only in flashes. At irregular intervals, holes in the fabric (in the yarns) are pierced here and there by these insights. And we seem compelled at present to re-connect these holes (or dots) in our theories, in order to restore confidence in the fabrications and blanket assumptions to which we still cling for security.

And by now, the yarns that filter perception are patchwork quilt. Now all the patches – all the efforts to hide anomalies and contradictions as a way of extending the life of a yarn – are disintegrating faster than they can be repaired.

For many, this can induce panic at the loss of certainty, and the exposure of an emptiness behind most forms of identity. This panic tends to make people too intent on restoring the illusory “greatness” of the old fabric in some regressive revolution. That’s why some don’t want to teach our children the full and honest history, because it would undermine the illusion they’re trying to preserve.

And all the various top-down proposals for controlling life are doing the same basic thing. Maybe the new answer is socialism (my preference, given the alternatives), or religion, or communism or fascism or a new capitalism, or a panopticonic AI state run by a self-described elite hiding in some redwood groves in northern California. They’re all driven by the assumption that we need an Answer to life.

In every case, we’re still sticking to the maps, as though certainty was a necessity, when it’s not even a possibility. Or, as if moments of uncertainty (or wondering and learning) were only holes that needed to be filled as quickly and tightly as possible.

And when this certainty-seeking obsession begins to realize its own futility, that’s when the panic starts. There is no more yarn left.

But maybe panic isn’t necessary. Maybe the categorical insight into the limitations of Knowledge itself is no more confusing than what a caterpillar experiences as its cocoon deteriorates. But we’re like caterpillars who keep re-building the disintegrating cocoon of Thought (of rational planning and top-down control) that has (arguably) served us so well in our development till now, keeping us trapped in a reductive phase of development.

We seek insights in science and politics and everything imaginable as if they could provide salvation from what we think of as the chaos of uncertainty. That’s because an insight tends to be associated with a “new idea” (a new fabrication) in the popular imagination. But an insight is mainly an erasure. It’s the negative force that removes a beam from the eyes, and which gives space in which new ideas can form. But the primary force of an insight is the deletion of a false assumption; not the impatient postulation of a new idea or answer.

And our culture has never had a sufficient insight into the fabric of thought itself; only (as I said) into particular forms of that fabric.

So, what is an insight if it isn’t used to fill every hole with a new idea?

It’s a widening of the channels of perception. Insight awakens new frequencies of awareness and exposes us to new streams of information.

For instance, insights into the Epstein shitshow have made us more attuned to what is Not true in society; to all the lies they tell us. This insight (this absence of trust), for instance, allows us to see the marketing con games behind all the patriotic noise of war and competition. We see the lie behind all the Great Men of History, all the supremacies of nations, tribes, races and religions. This deletion of old certainties is the insight.

And a more intense form of this insight can also show us how we’ve been conned into believing that human beings are naturally inclined to fight and dominate one another. It’s a self-fulfilling propaganda, but insight into the limitations of our self-knowledge suggests that we actually have no discernable nature beyond plasticity and a natural inclination to learn. Our “nature” is only dependent on how dogmatically or creatively and fluidly we imagine the world.

Science itself is a way of imagining a solely material universe, which is helpful as a yarn for getting material things accomplished, but reductive as a religion of its own. What we believe too strongly becomes our reality, but that’s not human nature; that’s a story going rogue.

Our reductive vision of human nature is the result of centuries of propaganda. Look, I’m not much into laying ALL the blame on the Bilderbergers or Epsteins, because that gives these pricks more credit than they deserve. But working as an employee promoting a deceptive corporate PR campaign or working for a lying politician or a one-sided news outlet with an axe to grind has made us easy targets for the Epsteins of the world. And they can manipulate this ignorance until we’re too busy Us’ing and Them’ing ourselves to death to notice that they’re robbing us all blind, creating Armageddon because they’re bored and generally behaving behind closed doors like depraved, ego-maniacal shitheads.

Insight strips us of our allegiance to authority and dogma. Now are able to notice that anyone who thinks of themselves as a “leader” is already corrupt and stunted in their approach to life. Because nobody can be our boss. They can put us in handcuffs and stick us in gulags, or implant chips that control the 1’s and 0’s of our mindless thinking. But they can’t reach our unfathomable reality. And if we realize that, we’re always free, even if they kill us. All they get then is an uncooperative corpse who will do no work for them. Have fun with it, they won’t find us there. Even a bullet misses the mark.

That insight alone generates a sovereignty, whereby nobody is our leader, our superior or our toady. We have no interest in controlling others when we see this. We have more than enough to deal with in simply being an individual, let alone taking on the gargantuan task of controlling someone else. Besides, control is boring, because the more we try to control material reality (including the materiality of another person or country), the emptier everything becomes. The person is unreachable. All they control is the shell. And the controllers end up controlled by their own fearful compulsions for dominance. And they become hollowed out, mechanical automatons like Trump himself.

It’s this insightful erasure of “trust” in leaders (this loss of gullibility in ourselves) that releases the caged spirit. This insight doesn’t take brains. It takes Integrity. It’s not a bright new idea. It’s not proposing an alternative. It’s deleting these traps of gullibility within us. It’s refusing self-deception.

Without our participatory gullibility, the old world falls apart, and we catch the pieces as best we can and rebuild a new world with more sincerity. We can’t organize this beforehand without chaining ourselves once again to a plan or ideal (which is another form of external authority). We just have to let the thing fall apart and trust cage-free insight and human imagination.

And the manner of this world’s falling will teach us by default how to live better, and how to organize our lives, like a community in the aftermath of a storm, with people pitching in where their unique skills are needed.

That’s how a new world would be born. It requires this neutral, non-aggressive, rebellious spirit of almost naive sincerity, which has a moral compass that refuses to bend in the face of depraved hierarchy.

We won’t be conquering these Epstein bullies. They will merely become irrelevant, which is hell is for them. And we’ll just refuse to be slaves to these corrupt assholes anymore. That would be a real revolution.

Or, perhaps they might try to enslave our bodies. Our white ancestors tried that with Africans and some Native Americans. But the disgusting history of slavery proved the opposite, because black people and indigenous people remain human beings, while the slave owners and their modern-day wannabes became pieces of shit. That’s how it works every time.

In fact, we don’t need anything from “them”, even if they currently hold the lures and handcuffs that chain us. We only need food, water, medicine and a community that likes to dance and sing and make their own fun. This is the insight. Most of the shit we think we need (which lines their pockets) is being revealed as worthless luxury distractions from reality.

We don’t even need phones and computers. We don’t need almost anything in Walmart. We don’t need to visit exotic locations. We don’t need the military. There is no security found in organizations that are constantly threatening to bomb the smithereens out of all of us. The list of what we think we need but don’t is long, and the abandonment of these false necessities would free up resources that could be used to serve a rejuvenated life on earth (not just for humans).

Call this being a Luddite, call it naive, but this is only practical realism. Everything beyond real necessities are luxuries. We could throw these bloated bloodsucking ticks off us in a moment if we stopped wanting so many things, and stopped participating in their orchestrated, and intentionally distracting dramas. Don’t fly your fighter jet if the cause is immoral. Be what you claim to be — a brave and independent person. Quit the army if necessary. Don’t give your lives to these pederasts.

Every insight is a deletion of an assumption of necessity.

And if we’re no longer seeking a deceptive necessity or an illusion of positive knowledge, then we don’t get fooled. Then thought can be woven into yarns that are more lightly held — playfully and provisionally used as helpful refractions of reality (not reality itself).

Then we don’t get stuck permanently under one blanket assumption or another. And we can shift our assumptions as needed to see other frequencies of reality. (Although some stories might remain coherent for a long time. But still, they’ll never be more than shifting designs of doorways into something always more lively and real than what we currently assume).

Like Humpty Dumpty said: “The question is, who is to be Master, that’s all.”

And then our fleeting stories, assumptions, metaphors, myths, analogies and plans allow us to remain coherent with more comprehensive spectrums of reality, hitherto blocked from perception by our blind convictions. Maybe a capacity to heal others becomes possible, don’t be such a propaganda-limited cynic. It’s a real potential that some have discovered. Or, maybe a gift of telepathy; or maybe the simple perception that love and kindness alone will heal the stream of consciousness from all its downstream brutalities, just like the acid-testers of the ’60s hallucinated. We don’t know what powers we hold, because we’re stuck in tiny streams of information, clinging to certainties.

Pain, sorrow, death and tigers with tooth and claw will still make this life very interesting. Death will never be conquered. All the fantastic challenges of living remain. But that’s not brutality. Brutality is imbalanced, corrupt and self-deceptive suffering, not mere pain.

And this change happens without any added technology. Just the dormant wings of the brain unfolding to its real potential, beyond tool-making.